Masters Of Self-Interest

Like the man said, always ask who benefits... it probably won't be you

Today the TPA publishes the Trade Union Rich List. The list makes facinating reading:

• 38 Trade Union General Secretaries and Chief Executives received remuneration of over £100,000 in 2008-09.
• Numero Uno is Gordon Taylor, head of the professional footballers union, who got a total £856k. (he's presumably being rewarded for achieving what all union leaders seek to achieve - getting their members mega-pay for pants performance - and see Jeff Randall's excellent plan for a vanity tax on England's... er... "footballers" ).
• Many of the big public sector union bosses - the ones who will soon be leading strikes against pay freezes and pension reforms - are paid well over £100k, far more than most of their members, eg:

These people are masters of self-interest. A self-interest that rests on promoting a state of conflict between their members and the employers - something we'll be painfully reminded of over the next few years (eg Mr Crow's call this week for a "wave of strikes").

Now, we have no problem with self-interest. Indeed, we applaud it. We reckon it's been one of the key drivers of human progress throughout the ages.

But where we do have a problem is when self-interest gets dressed up as something else. Such as those old favourites "the national interest", "the public good", and "fairness for all".

Right now, we're getting rather a lot of that. As we face up to our decade of spending cuts, it's coming from all the various industries that are currently being propped up by tax-funded subsidies.

Needless to say, the Arts industry is centre stage. They reckon cuts will be disastrous to the national interest, and may mean the end of James Bond as we know it. As we've blogged many times, the £600m we give them through the Arts Council every year, plus the dosh channelled into the arts via the £3.5bn pa BBC, plus the subsidies to the film producers, are all prime candidates for the chop. There is zip overall economic benefit (eg see this blog), and it is outrageous that poor taxpayers are forced to subsidise middle class rentiers like Mr and Mrs T when they toddle off to the RSC or the Chichester Festival.

Then there's the tax-funded science research industry.  They've been squealing to Newsnight about how cuts to their budgets would be disastrous because their work is essential to our future prosperity. Oh yeah? Like how? As it happens, Tyler once took part in an international research study seeking to quantify the economic return to basic scientific research funded by taxpayers. After about 2 years, many weighty papers, and research meetings right across Europe, we could find no serious evidence of any return whatsoever. Yes, scientific knowledge definitely drives technological progress, but we British taxpayers would be better off if we cut British science subsidies and simply coat-tailed on the yanks (which to be frank, we've been doing anyway for the last 50+ years).

Then there's the Foreign Office, whose alumni are currently touring TV studios to warn of the dire consequences if we cut their budgets. Apparently, cuts will mean we will no longer be able to "punch above our weight". Sorry? Did I miss something? Falklands aside - a war launched against Foreign Office advice - post-Suez, when exactly did we ever manage to punch above our weight? Where's the benefit to taxpayers?

There are a host of others, too tedious to recount, but you'll see them popping up over the next few months to explain why cuts to their budgets will be disastrous for you.

As always, you need to treat all such claims with extreme suspicion. Identify the self-interest of those who are making the claims. And demand clear hard evidence of the benefit to you.

In our cash-strapped world, where your taxes have already been increased, arm-waving on Newsnight is no longer enough. The burden of proof is now on those who want continued public funding. It's back where it always should have been.

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www.gudanggrosiran.com Categories: cuts, humbugs, unions

The Unspeakable In Pursuit Of The Class Struggle

All history is the history of the class struggle - the political class struggling to oppress the people

The cynicism is breathtaking. Lord "we're intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich" Mendacity now says:

“If you look at Bob Diamond, who took £63 million in pay — that to me is the unacceptable face of banking. He hasn’t earned that money, he’s taken £63 million not by building business or adding value or creating long-term economic strength, he has done so by deal-making and shuffling paper around.”

Needless to say, the £63m figure is untrue. But more fundamentally, it is chokingly obvious why Mandy has come out with the communist manifesto this morning. It's because the latest public school educated NuLab Tristram he's forced down the throats of a local Labour Party up North has proved a Tristram too far. There is open rebellion, with the chairman of the local party pledging to stand against Trist in the election. Worryingly, it's a rebellion that could spread.

So Mand has a bash at the bankers: "there you are, you simple  plebs up North, I believe in the class struggle too - trust me - I'm right there on the barricades with you".

Yeah, right.

Almost as cynical as Bliar buying the support of his left-wing MPs for his illegal war with a ban on fox-hunting.

Bankers are of course fair game. Cam and Dave have happily laid into them, St Vince has made banker bashing his stock-in-trade, and bankers are the villains of virtually everything that appears on the BBC.

And of course, the bankers have not behaved well. They have happily gorged themselves during the emergency support operations over the last 18 months, despite the fact that taxpayers are screaming in pain all around (although we should note that Bob Diamond is actually one of the bank bosses who has waived his personal bonus this year).

But we do need a sense of perspective here. Banking and its offshoots have been by far and away Britain's most successful industry over the last two decades. As last week's Treasury Select Committee Report reminded us:

"More than one million people work in the industry, each contributing to GDP more than double the average for all employees. The industry accounts for around 8 per cent of UK output and contributes 14 per cent of tax revenues."

Yes, true, the financial crash has exposed taxpayers to a big loss. But even that loss - estimated at $200bn by the IMF - isn't that big when set against these gains. In sterling terms a loss of £130bn should be viewed against tax revenues from the financial sector which reached £67bn pa before the crisis broke (see here).

And oddly enough the guys that work in this industry don't altogether like being bashed. As BOM's correspondent on the Wharf so elegantly put it in a recent email:

"Fecking Peston was always a communist as far as I'm concerned. As is the sainted Martin Wolf. They all agree with Adair Turner that bankers are "Socially Useless". Let's see how fecking far they get without them then."

Which is why, along with his neighbours, said Wharfman is currently reviewing his wider options.

Interestingly, the Treasury Select Committee asked Turner to explain on what basis he could possibly judge banking to be "socially useless". He replied:

"to determine in concrete terms what is valuable or not is incredibly difficult, but at least if you are aware that the financial system is capable of generating activity that does not have value added for the economy... you are on your guard... It does not provide you with a nice, easy rubric to determine what is and what is not socially useless... but it means we are not open to the alternative argument that everything that exists must exist."

Er... well... thank you for that my Lord. Most helpful. Some bankers' activities may not add value to the economy, but we have no practical means of working out which.

Brilliant.

Almost as brilliant as My Lord Mandy.

PS As we've noted before, Tyler has developed an unhealthy addiction to podcast lectures delivered by left-wing academics. He's currently listening to another lecture course from Berkeley, this time on European history given by Prof Margaret Lavinia Anderson (see here - available free from iTunes U). It's excellent - wide ranging, well informed, and entertaining. And it's really stimulating to hear a serious account of history recounted from the left's perspective. The latest lecture was on Capitalism and its Critics, focusing on early socialists like Robert Owen. Anderson naturally presents the man as a hero, standing up for oppressed working people against the evil capitalists of Coketown's industrial revolution. But in doing so, she also mentions a couple of things that have been showstoppers with socialism ever since. First, its grotesque inefficiency and vulnerability toproducer capture and outright fraud - as happened when the naive Owen got defrauded out of his fortune while trying to establish his grandiose model town of New Harmony. And second, its inevitable progression to Stalinism - Owen believed children should be removed from their parents to be educated in state boarding schools, where young minds could be shaped in the paths of righteousness. We've since had plenty of opportunities to see how that one works out.

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www.gudanggrosiran.com Categories: bankers, humbugs, socialism

The Working Class Can Kiss My Rail Pass

TPA factcheck catches out union fatcat

It's scarcely believable. After everything we learned and did in the 70s and 80s, the bolshie trade union boss has come back to wreck our economy all over again. 13 years of Labour misrule and he's back on the picket line, as destructive as ever.

And what prize humbugs these people are. Bob Crow - head of the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers - telling us with a straight face that the first national rail strike in 18 years is all about passenger safety. Tony Woodley - semi-head of the hilariously misnamed Unite union - telling us the BA strike is down to management's fanatical mission to destroy the union. Mark Serwotka - head of the Public and Commercial Services Union - telling us that a public sector pay freeze is impossible because his members can only just exist on their current diet of peanuts (for the real facts see here).

But at least today the TPA's Matt Sinclair landed one on Dave Prentis, fatcat head of Unison, another union that will soon be bringing our public services to a halt.

As it shows in the vid, although Prentis reckons his members have to subsist on peanuts, he himself was paid £127 grand in 2008-09 (salary and benefits).

And just so you know next time they're on the telly, here's what those other jokers got:

• Bob Crow - £105 grand
• Tony Woodley - £72 grand
• Mark Serwotka - £111 grand

And you can peruse the full list of what other union bosses get here (Appendix 5).

Personally, I don't care what unions pay their bosses, but (a) I don't want to fund it - as Labour has forced me to do - and (b) I don't want to hear maxi-wedged humbugs lecturing me about why I should pay higher train fares/air fares/taxes to support their members - mainly so that they themselves can keep their own cushtie jobs.

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www.gudanggrosiran.com Categories: humbugs, strikes, unions

The Joke Is On You

A life of privilege 

In case you've never heard of him, comedian Marcus Brigstocke is yet another privileged public schoolboy* employed by the BBC. His routine comprises slagging off capitalism and the Evil Tories.

Among his other BBC jobs, he has a regular slot on R4's Now Show, a weekly 30 mins of "comedy sketches and satirical comments". And this week, after wittily describing John Redwood as a "glassy-eyed replicant MP",  he spent most of his slot having a go at the TaxPayers' Alliance (you can listen again here - 11 mins 50 secs in - HTP Bill Quango).

We needn't spend time quoting him, but essentially he says the TPA are evil anti-social racist pigs (complete with grunts and trotters).

Which is fine. Absolutely what guilt-ridden rich boy lefty comedians ought to be saying. And doubtless there's a market for it.

But please don't ask me to pay for it. I don't find Brigstocke remotely funny, and I wouldn't dream of paying to see him.

Unfortunately, the tax-funded BBC doesn't give me a choice. It forces me to pay the telly tax, and then uses a chunk of it to employ this dire big government "comedian". Not only that, but it also gives him a national platform to hector and insult the growing number of us who are sick of being ripped off to pay for things we just don't want. Like Brigstocke.

It's a joke all right. But not a very funny one.

We've said it before, and we'll say it again - roll on privatisation.

*Footnote: Brigstocke comes from the leafy glades of Guildford, just down the road from the Major. Born with a large silver object inserted into one or other of his orifices, he was educated at Westbourne House School (fees £12870 pa), King's Bruton (fees £24,711 pa - pic above), and Bristol University (notorious for its high public school count and its close career links to the BBC). And why is that relevant? Because Brigstocke had the privileges of wealth handed to him on a plate, yet now makes his living by decrying those who seek to create wealth for themselves. It sticks in my craw.

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www.gudanggrosiran.com Categories: BBC, humbugs

With Great Love And Respect

We'll pass an Act - problem solved

Queen's fairytale day again. And the centrepiece this year is reportedly a Fiscal Responsibility Act, which will impose a legal requirement on government to cut the budget deficit.

So what happens if they don't? Personal fines for backsliding spending ministers? Jail for the Chancellor?

Yes, you guessed it - there are no legal sanctions at all. This shocking bunch of busted shysters reckons we'll believe yet another promise to go straight simply because they've framed it as a law (cf their laws to outlaw child poverty, reverse global warming, ensure universal happiness, etc etc).

What a joke. As BOM's old friend the Prof says:

“Fiscal responsibility acts are instruments of the fiscally irresponsible to con the public.”

The Director of the Institute of Fiscal Studies says:

“It is not obvious why anybody should be more persuaded by this than they ended up being impressed by the Code for Fiscal Stability which was enshrined in statute with much fanfare in 1998.”

When Evan Davis tackled Mandy about this on BBC Today, the old queen was so empty handed he was even driven to a "with great love and respect". All he could offer was a ludicrous claim that, although the intellectual elite might not be impressed - because, you see, they've got their own anti-Labour agenda - the Act was necessary to reassure the public. Apparently we peasants are so dumb we will still believe a Labour promise if it's dressed up as an Act of Parliament.

Look, we strongly favour explicit fiscal rules. The evidence from around the world suggests that governments are much more likely to maintain fiscal discipline if they announce upfront the quantified rules under which they will manage expenditure, taxation, and borrowing (the IMF is about to publish a new research paper on worldwide experience, which we will read and blog).

But to be credible the rules have to be in the hands of a government that demonstrates it will stick to them. And this government long ago demonstrated precisely the opposite.

Labour now has zero credibility. It is morally and intellectually bankrupt, and no amount of new Fiscal Responsibility Acts will change that.

We desperately need a fresh start under a new government with a clean new set of explicit fiscal rules. Yes, they will have to earn their credibility, particularly after Brown's abysmal performance. But credibility cannot be earned simply by passing another Act.

PS The Major wants to know if he's still in the real world, or whether he slipped away peacefully during the night. According to him, the BBC has just appointed Gordon the Gopher as its head of compliance on £110k a year. So the man that used to make a living by pushing his hand up Gordon's bottom is now in charge of taste, decency and balance at our state broadcaster. Come to that, Tyler is beginning to doubt his own presence among us. How do you tell if you exist, again?

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www.gudanggrosiran.com Categories: fiscal policy, humbugs

Grandstand Governance

You're paying for this

Does anything useful ever come out of these global grandstanding opportunities?

This week's G20fest was billed as the moment when "world leaders" would agree a new governance regime for the international financial system. This was the moment when the banks would be brought to heel, and when the big surplus nations (especially the Chinese, but also the Germans and the Japanese) would be bound into a new economic settlement in which they would spend and import more.

In practice of course, we'll get none of the above. Instead, we're going to get an agreement to have even more G20fests. Whoopeee!

The real purpose of these meetings has been highlighted all too clearly by the horrifically embarrassing sight of our unloved dead duck Prime Minister* scurrying round the UN kitchens trying to pin down St Obama for a photo-op.

As is painfully obvious, one year on from the Great Crisis, our rulers have made virtually no progress on sorting out the issues that gave rise to that crisis.

There is no agreement with the surplus nations on how they will do their bit by correcting the imbalances in their own economies. And there is no agreement on how we can protect ourselves from a future global banking collapse.

Indeed, on the latter point, as City veteran Terry Smith reminded us on BBC R4 Today this morning, our rulers are refusing even to discuss the giant elephant rampaging around their gilded conference halls.

The pachyderm in question? As we've blogged many times (eg here), we need a new Glass-Steagall to separate high street banking from investment (aka casino) banking. We can no longer afford to have the two activities co-existing in the same megabanks.

Because although we all learned from the Great Depression in the 30s that taxpayers have to guarantee high street deposits, we most certainly do not need to guarantee banks' casino activities. And it was our implicit guarantee of those activities that allowed the players to access the cheap funding, that inflated the huge bubble, that finally popped last year.

Sure, in theory we might be able to keep ourselves safe through better smarter bank regulation, rather than resorting to the crude blunderbuss of Glass-Steagall. But in practice, we just ain't that smart.

Among other things (as the now reviled Alan Greenspan always said), no regulator or central banker has ever come up with a way of definitively identifying a bubble before it pops. And even if they did, politicos riding the wave of an economic boom would never sign up for sticking in a pre-emptive pin.

And in the real world, those superbright all-seeing regulators of myth and legend don't actually exist. Indeed, our own bumbling regulators couldn't even control the relatively simple activities of the Crock.

No, to make ourselves secure, we need to split retail banking from investment banking. Just like it always used to be.

And we need to do it on an international basis, because otherwise the megabanks will simply migrate to the countries where they are not required to split.

So why hasn't the G20 tackled the elephant?

Well, because for one thing the megabanks don't want them too. And for another, the politicos are desperate to avoid anything that might smother the recovery, and breaking up the banks would inevitably restrain the future growth of credit.

Which is a problem.

Because taking a view slightly longer than the next election, a return to easy credit is the one thing we do not need. And unless we take the necessary action now - while minds are still concentrated by the crash - the will to act will simply evaporate (if it hasn't already done so).

Might we expect more from Cam and Os? Sadly not. They have already indicated they have no plans for a Glass-Steagall.

So unless St Vince somehow finds his way to the controls, it looks like taxpayers are skewered on the banking hook for the forseeable future.

Gaaaaaaaaah.

*Footnote We've already blogged the BBC's mini-series the Love of Money, but last night's nearly made me swallow my false teeth. Entitled Back from the brink (click on link to watch again), it painted Brown as the saviour of the global banking system. No really. It reckoned the man who spent this week trying to get his snap taken with Obama, came up with the genius solution, which was for taxpayers to inject capital into the banks rather than simply buying/guaranteeing their toxic assets. Apparently nobody else apart from Brown and that Shitty woman had thought of that. Maybe the BBC overlooked the fact that within days of Lehman's collapse - and weeks before Brown's emergency purchase of all those bank shares - the idea of government equity injections was being openly discussed all over the place, including the FT, and even our own humble blog here. Surely even the BBC can't rewrite history this soon after the event?

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www.gudanggrosiran.com Categories: bank bailouts, central banks, humbugs

Stopped Clocks

Bob Beckman (pic) was an entertainer in the retail financial markets. He was superb. So superb that he made a fortune from writing investment books, columns, and a subscription newsletter. He even had a regular show on LBC radio.

Bob specialised in wild-eyed prophesies of financial doom. For example, in 1983 he came out with an apocalyptic tome entitled The Downwave: Surviving the Second Great Depression. Which, among other things, said “By 1987 there will be no real residential housing market in Britain for the owner occupier. Some houses will be unsaleable at any price.”

Pretty scary stuff. Except of course anyone who'd followed his advice and sold up would have missed out on one of the biggest house price booms ever.

No matter, because the book sold 500,000 copies, and helped keep Mr B in the glitzy lifesyle to which he'd become accustomed.

But the thing about Bob was that every few years - like say in 1987 -the financial markets would take a tumble, and suddenly it would seem his scary armageddon views had been born out. At which point he'd pop up on the telly and all over the press, telling us that he'd been right all along, and that those complacent establishment guys who'd laughed at him had been plumb wrong, and that this proved he was much smarter than any of them. Everyone would nod gravely, and beg him to tell us just how much more monstrously awful things were going to get over coming years.

Except of course, they never did. After every terminal crisis, the world showed an irritating ability to pick itself up, dust itself off, and start all over again.

Bob? He went right on calling the Second Great Depression, as if nothing had changed.

You will immediately recognise stopped clock syndrome: even a stopped Beckman is right twice a day (although confusingly, a clock that runs backwards is right four times a day).

Which brings us to Professor David Blanchflower.

As regular BOM readers will know, Blanchflower is the leftwing Professor of Happiness Economics chosen by Gordon Brown to sit on the Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee (MPC). He was on the Committee from 2006 to 2008.

He now writes an economics column for struggling Labour organ the New Statesman, and he's been busy bigging up his own Beckman-style prescience in calling - yes - the Second Great Depression.

He reckons he was the only member of the MPC who saw the crash coming, and the only one who had the guts to stand up to the iron fist of Governor King. The other committee members were too dim and/or too timid to challenge the complacent nonsense coming from Bank officials.

Evidence?

He points out that he was the first member of the MPC to vote for an interest rate cut, way back in October 2007. And in September 2008, just days before the Lehman collapse, he alone voted for a cut. What could be clearer? The crash happened. He was proved right, and those other idiots were proved 100% wrong.

Reading the MPC minutes, we can certainly see that he was always the one arguing for lower interest rates, sometimes literally in a minority of one. But given that the Bank is charged with hitting a 2% inflation target, and given that for most of 2008, inflation was well above that target, you have to ask why? What was going on in his head?

The fact is that Blanchflower only ever voted for one interest rate increase in his entire tenure on the MPC. And that was in spite of the fact that his first year coincided with the final mad inflation of our gigantic financial bubble during 2006-07.

There's a good case for saying the Bank was far too lax during that period, and higher rates then would have better contained the bubble and saved a lot of pain now. But at least Blanchflower's fellow committee members did push through an increase of 1.25% between August 2006 and July 2007, whereas he mainly sat on his hands - even voting for a cut at one point (March 2007).

In reality, Blanchflower is another stopped clock. Like the left in general, he believes that a Second Great Depression is never far away, and that all that stands between us and a return to mass unemployment is government intervention. Fundamentally, markets are not to be trusted. As for inflation, he believes that saving jobs should always take priority over saving the value of our money (Zim and Weimar apart, obviously).

Which explains his scare mongering about possible spending cuts:

"If spending cuts are made too early and the monetary and fiscal stimuli are withdrawn, unemployment could easily reach four million. If ... there are substantial cuts in public spending in 2010, as proposed by some in the Conservative Party, five million unemployed or more is not inconceivable. Crime will inevitably rise and there will be widespread social unrest if this happens...

Mr Osborne, I really don't know which economists are advising you on this brilliant strategy to increase unemployment, but feel free to give me a call. Unemployment makes voters unhappy."

Ah yes, happiness, happiness... the greatest gift that I possess.

So do you reckon George should give him a ring?

Hmm. How would Blanch tackle the ticklish issue of funding our ballooning deficit? He is silent, but his attitude to interest rates and inflation while on the MPC probably gives us a clue.

He's also silent on the question of how we're going to put our economy back together again. It's all very well borrowing to prop up employment, but at some stage we have to earn our way back to sustainable prosperity. Given that we've lost 4-6% of our GDP pretty well permanently.

Unless, of course, George secretly plans to construct a Bennite fortress Britain.

Either way, when it comes to entertainment, I'm afraid Blanchflower is not exactly in Mr B's league - check out this NS vid (total views so far... 33):

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www.gudanggrosiran.com Categories: cuts, happiness, humbugs, inflation

So What Would They Cut?

They cannot be serious

The Labour movement is founded on the belief that, whatever the fiscal weather, government spending more of your money is always A Good Thing.

We can see that very clearly in some of Labour's knee-jerk responses to yesterday's TPA/IOD paper on cutting public expenditure.

Take top Labour journo Kevin Maguire. He says he'd only support two of the 34 proposed cuts - "abolishing ID cards and grounding [the] Eurofighter".

Fine. But those two account for just £0.8bn of the total £50bn proposed. So how would he make up the other £49.2bn? What else would he cut?

Or would he increase our taxes to fill the gap?

Needless to say, he doesn't tell us. Instead, pausing only to dismiss the TPA as foam flecked and the IOD as frothing (this is top flight journalism), he links through to Straw Jnr's blog Left Foot Forward, where Maguire reckons we can find a "useful deconstruction of the cuts".

So what does Mr Straw have to say?

It turns out his useful deconstruction only extends to five out of the 34 proposals, so he may have overlooked the other 29. No matter, he's probably got a lot of more important things on his mind, and here's what he says on the five he does deconstruct:

• Two year public sector pay freeze, saving £12.4bn pa - Straw says "the cut would impact the quarter of public sector levels working in poverty wages". We say OK, so the public sector is a rubbish employer... but how does that deconstruct the TPA's proposal exactly? Maybe Straw thinks the TPA/IOD should have recommended moving more public employees into the private sector. He also quotes an old pre-crash IFS report pointing out that a public sector pay squeeze "is likely to lead to recruitment and retention difficulties and/or reductions in the quality of staff willing to work in the public sector". We say hmm... wonder what the IFS think about that in our jobless joyless post-crash world.
• Cut non-frontline staff in schools and hospitals by 10%, saving £2.2bn pa - Straw says "these figures fail to take into account any of the efficiency savings already announced by the Government". We say he's talking about the utterly discredited Gershon "efficiency" programme - the one that actually only delivered a quarter of the savings claimed by Labour (see many previous posts eg here).
• Cut 10% from the budgets of non-ministerial departments, saving £1.7bn pa - Straw says "[cutting] the Crown Prosecution Service and the Serious Fraud Office... could mean 10 per cent fewer serious crimes ever coming to justice". We say er, yes, it could mean that. But since the CPS is one of the most ineffective quangos known to man (see this blog), and since the SFO has a bungling record as long as your arm, we don't think we need lose any sleep.
• Abolish Sure Start, saving £1.5bn pa - Straw says Sure Start works and should be kept. We say Sure Start has been a dismal failure in reaching the bottom tier children it was aimed at, as even Blair finally admitted (see previous posts eg here).
• Abolish Educational Maintenance Allowances, saving £0.5bn pa - Straw says it's increased education participation rates. We say it's been a hugely expensive fiasco (see this post).

And beyond all that, the question for Straw is the same - if you don't like the TPA's cuts, what are you going to cut instead?

Or are you going to increase our taxes still further?

But hey, let's not be too hard on Straw. He's young and has seen little of the world outside student and Labour politics.

Unlike the Labour movement, he may yet grow out of it.

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www.gudanggrosiran.com Categories: cuts, humbugs

The Wrong Man

Very confusing - these rich boys all look the same

No time for a proper blog today on account of helping one of the Junior Tylers make his new home approximately habitable. But as we lifted unsavoury carpets and shuttled rubbish to the dump, we listened to the BBC's adulatory obits for Ted Kennedy. And I suddenly realised I've lived most of my life under a terrible delusion.

You see, I'd always believed Ted Kennedy was that womanising drunk who killed a young female assistant in an obscene crash-and-run accident back in the 70s. The populist chancer who supported the IRA against us, and who shafted his own party's incumbent President in the 1980 election. The guy who shamelessly traded on his family name and connections but who would never have been elected President in a million years.

But it seems I must have had the wrong man.

According to the BBC, Ted Kennedy was one of America's foremost leaders of the last century, whose death is an incalculable loss to western civilisation. A man who virtually single-handedly gave us peace in Ireland. A colossus who would have made a President equally as good as... well, St Obama.

I'm deeply ashamed I could ever have thought otherwise.

PS For an unglossed account of the real Ted Kennedy see Andrew Roberts here.

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www.gudanggrosiran.com Categories: BBC, humbugs

Legacy Of Ruin

Things can only get better

Sources close to My Lord Mandy have told BOM that the government will shortly introduce measures to make Britain's boardrooms more equal.

When selecting directors in future, FTSE 100 companies will have to give preference to candidates who are qualification-poor.

An official at the Department of Bollocks told BOM "His Magnificence is determined to help people who have been denied the educational and work advantages enjoyed by traditional main board directors."

The official added: "Just because someone has suffered from going to a pisspoor state education factory and has subsequently proved to be unemployable does not mean he - or she - should be denied a board position. In selecting their directors, companies must not discriminate against those whose underachieving backgrounds and lack of qualifications might in the past have precluded admission to the board room."

*****

Having destroyed educational excellence in our state schools, Labour is well on the way to doing the same to our universities.

Last week we learned that the percentage of students getting firsts has virtually doubled under Labour - despite the fact that student numbers are up by a staggering 30%.

And now Mandy has apparently decided that university applicants from poor families should be given a two-grade "head start" to help them secure a place. A two grade head start for students who may very well then stuggle with their uni course... unless that too is dumbed down.

Out here in the real world, most of us can see that we've already got far more university graduates with dubious degrees than we can ever use. When last sighted - before the slump - unemployment among new grads was 8.2% and rising fast. And if you add in all the grads employed in non-graduate type jobs, the true figure is much higher.

As we've blogged many times (eg here), Labour's 50% uni participation target is absolutely bonkers. It is entirely arbitrary, and far higher than the 34.8% OECD average: when last sighted, the US was on 33.6% and Japan on 36.1%, both behind us on 39.3% (graduation rates - see here).

And it's not cheap. On top of the c£15bn pa direct cost to taxpayers for the courses, we are also losing all the output from these students. And that's both while they're at uni, and while they're tooling around for a year or two afterwards reconciling themselves to the awful truth that a degree from a UK uni is no longer a meal ticket.

Gah!

The real screaming priority is obvious to everyone out here. It's not more uni places for underperforming students. It's to improve the lamentable standards in our state schools.

Gove had better deliver on those school vouchers, that's all. Because the Major's starting to get very agitated.

PS Yes, we realise this may all be another wind-up from the Master of wind-ups. But the damage Labour has inflicted on our education system is all too real.

As you may know, His Magnificence himself was educated at a state grammar school in a leafy North London glade. But shortly after he left, the school was forced to go comprehensive, and as a 1200 pupil state education factory, it now struggles to produce good A Level results, scoring well below the national averages. Maybe HM might reflect on that as he's oiling his pecs out there in the sun.

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www.gudanggrosiran.com Categories: humbugs, universities

An Expensive Shot In The Foot

"I am pleased the Court has recognized the work of the Commission" - John Wadham, Group Legal Director at the Equality and Human Rights Commission

In case you missed it, a tax-funded quango has just succeeded in further undermining the fighting capacity of our armed forces.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission has spent an undisclosed, but doubtless considerable, sum of our money pursuing the sad case of Pte Jason Smith, who died of heatstroke while serving with the Territorial Army in Iraq in 2003. Largely as a result of the Commission's efforts, the Court of Appeal has ruled that the Human Rights Act, and in particular, the "right to life", applies to British soldiers on active service.

So how's that going to work exactly? How are our army commanders going to discharge that obligation while still beating our enemies?

As we've blogged many times, it is absolutely right that our frontline troops should have the very best kit and support we can buy for them. And it is disgraceful that they are still forced to cope with death-trap kit like the so-called snatch Land Rovers* and those decrepit Nimrods.

But that is a political issue - we should make our politicos do much better than they have over the last decade.

It is not a matter for the crackpot Human Rights Law: the very last thing we want is to place yet another burden on our frontline commanders.

We blogged the superquango Equality and Human Rights Commission several times while it was being set up in 2007 (eg here and here). It costs us £70m pa, and it's headed by long-time Labour insider Trevor Phillips (on £110 grand pa). And its finances are so questionable the National Audit Office has reportedly refused to sign off its first annual accounts.

Another £70m contribution to George's spending cuts?

You bet.


Meanwhile... mid-life Mr Phillips himself is mainly focused on his new life with his new partner:

*Footnote - Tyler recently dined with another patriotic Major of his acquaintance. This one is very familiar with Land Rovers, having used them both on operations (if I told you I'd have to kill you), and to scout his considerable acreage in East Anglia. But he recently drove a Toyota Land Cruiser, and was absolutely amazed at how much better it is. Now he's switched, and even though he knows his military-family-back-to-Waterloo father will be spinning in his grave, he will never go back. Another fine old British tradition bites the dust... until, that is, you remember that the original Land Rover was actually no more than a Jeep rip-off.

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www.gudanggrosiran.com Categories: defence, humbugs, quangos