Badgers & Farmers

What is it about badgers and farmers? Seriously, there are Hutus and Tutsis with less bad blood between them than our stripey, burrowing quadrupeds and our subsidy-chasing, Barbour-wearing bipeds. You have to wonder if there is some ghastly, traumatic incident behind the farmers' union's obsession with killing badgers - a long buried memory where the a young boy was repeatedly gang-tupped by boar badgers, a boy who grew up to become President of the NFU.

There really is no rational explanation for Caroline Spelman's decision to allow two test culls of badgers with the hope of limiting bovine TB, other than a desire to 'do something'. She might as well authorise beating squirrels to death with hammers in the hope that it might prevent another foot and mouth outbreak. Or why not electrocute a swan, see if that helps prevent bird flu. My only guess is that Spelman is trying to draw attention away from her 'let's sell off all those useless forests to the highest bidder' plan last year, by coming up with even more stupid and bovine concepts.

Cull me if you think you're hard enough!

The science, if you can call it that, goes like this. Badgers have TB, cows get TB, therefore the badgers give the cows TB, so if we kill all badgers, the cows won't have TB. Except they've tried this in Ireland to no great effect;  even the best case scenario suggest badger culls would only reduce bovine TB by 15%.

You might remember during the bird flu epidemic, swans and other wild birds were blamed for the contagion's spread. Then of course, it turned the real cuprit was dodgy practises in the intensive farming and meat processing trades. Psyschologists called this phenomenon projection, where you absolve your own feelings of guilt and shame by identifying those faults in others.

Ask yourself a simple question: which is more likely to be cause of chronic disease in British cattle? Is it badgers roaming in a small area or driving cows all over the UK for sale and then slaughter? Or indeed ask the broader question, is it in fact modern, intensive farming that causes disease in the first place?

The farmers could vaccinate their herds against TB, but it's expensive so they won't. Better to get the government to pay for a badger cull or as Bernard Matthews did, when you start an epidemic, get the taxpayer to pay the bill for damages.

The healthy countryside 

Peter Kendall, the President of the NFU, said it the pilot culls were  the first step towards 'a healthy countryside.' No, the first step would be the tackle the diseased modern farming methods. Indeed, we should not be taking lectures on health from an industry that fed ground-up pigs to chickens, fed infected blood to cows and has been responsible for three massive disease outbreaks in the last 30 years.

If the logic of the badger cull is that we should remove threats to British industry by whatever means necessary, the NFU ought to be in the crosshairs. No badger ever cost the nation billions through its own greed and foolishness.

Royal Wind

It's a balmy November, as warm in London as a blazing Scottish summer i.e. not hot enough to require shorts or to break sweat, but unusually mild for the time of year.  The freak weather has triggered ducks to breed and Prince Philip to spout off about onshore wind turbines, calling them 'completely useless' and 'an absolute disgrace'. Another hilarious gaffe by our royal Alf Garnett; worth a chuckle but nought else.

Except that instead of simply adding to the Prince's wiki quotes, his outburst triggered no less than two articles in The Daily Telegraph and one in The Daily Mail, praising the Prince Consort for having the bravery to take on the 'warmist' lobby. A  'warmist' in the eyes of deniers of climate change is virtually every scientist on the planet, who agree that humanity is causing the planet to warm by doubling the atmospheric concentrations of C02.

Phil the Greek didn't present any information to support his claims, just simply a strongly held view that wind turbines were a bad thing. But that didn't stop three journalists in two days using it as an excuse to trot out a series of bizarre rants about how the evil BBC-socialist-green conspiracy is planning to turn the whole of Britain into a giant lesbian, vegetarian commune powered by wind-farms. If you think I'm exaggerating just read Melanie Philips' recent barrage of nonsense - a densely woven tapestry of ignorance, misinformation and misanthropy. On second thoughts, don't; life is too short.

The even weirder aspect of climate change is as the evidence grows stronger and more conclusive, the denial movement gains ground. So they leap on a Prince's statements as 'proof', but they don't actually say what it proves, other than the evil lefties are out to get you. That's the best advocate they could manage by the way: an elderly Royal. He joins an elite society of denialists: Christopher Booker, who also likes to claim that white asbestos is harmless, Lord Monckton, who apparently has a cure for AIDS, James Delingpole who writes every month on climate change but 'doesn't have the time to read the scientific papers' and Martin Durkin, a film-maker who prompted 178 respected scientists to complain to Ofcom over his C4 documentary on global warming, resulting in an upheld complaint - his second on the same issue.

The Prince and these related articles presented  no expert opinions, no data, no peer-reviewed paper, just a rage against wind machines. Since neither The Prince of Gaffes nor the three hacks bothered to understand the science, here's a short precis, which you can check in one millisecond on Google. Turbines on average generate 25% of their potential power per annum, as the wind is some times too weak or too strong. But if they are not being used or when they are operating, no C02 is added to the atmosphere. They are a carbon-neutral source of power, rather than a fuel. Renewables work only as a mix with fossil fuels and nuclear. Currently, they depend on subsidy to be economic, in part because fossil fuels unlike nuclear power does not carry any tax to cover their environmental impact. So when you burn coal, you are fucking future generations, except they pay for it, not you. Conventional power stations e.g. coal, gas or nuclear operate at best at 50 to 60% of capacity. Moreover, they coal plants and gas plants burn fuel which in turn adds to the CO2 load, whether the electricity grids needs the power or not.  No jokes there, just facts, which don't generate neat headlines for reactionary newspapers determined to rubbish green power and spread lies about climate science.

To recap, a wealthy white man who owns vast areas of Britain and never has to work for a living, thinks wind turbines are a bit of an eyesore and ruin his views from his country estates. Without spelling it out, he is 90 years old, so even if there were catastrophic climate change in the next century, I'm betting Prince Philip won't be around to witness it.

Old people say stupid, embarrassing things all the time; the trick is not to go around repeating them in public.

History Lessons

Whenever there's a looming crisis or a war, politicians and commentators are keen to say they have learned the lessons of history, like schoolchildren being checked on their homework assignments. With the Euro about as stable as an overloaded Filipino ferry with a drunk captain in a typhoon, it is vital we are told, that politicians do not repeat the mistakes of the past. They certainly seem to have taken that message to heart, by making a completely new series of errors and blunders that will keep at least one sector of the economy booming: books on financial collapses. Robert Peston, Michael Lewis and Gillian Tett can rest easy, that follow-up title is pretty much going to write itself.

Tasty, but not worth the grief

But the real problem with learning the lessons of history is that you have to agree what that lesson is supposed to be. Sometimes, there is a relatively straightforward principle from the past that everyone can agree on such as: 'Do not invade Afghanistan'. But even that simple mantra is not quite correct. Invading Afghanistan is the easy part; the difficult part is trying to govern a group of armed, religious maniacs  who hold grudges for centuries. A more helpful motto for any outside force might be: 'Invade Afghanistan; leave Afghanistan quickly. Yes, it's got stunning scenery, the food is simply delicious but you could say the same about Turkey, which has a much better developed tourist infrastructure. Besides, you read The Kite Runner, what more do you want? '.

When anyone talks about learning from the past, they are really telling you how they think the world should be. Facts and figures are surprisingly plastic; they mould themselves well to any point of view. In the current Euro meltdown, the Germans political class is obsessed by the spectre of hyperinflation, which they think led to the rise of Hitler, which means they fervently opposed to any monetising of the Euro area debt.

Deja vu?

Unfortunately, as is so often the case, the Germans are brilliant when it comes to car-making, machine tools and suburban trams but hopeless when it comes to politics or indeed learning anything useful from their own history, unless forced to do so at the point of a gun by total defeat and military occupation.  The Nazi party vote only skyrocketed in 1931, during the Great Depression, where the German Chancellor along with many other leaders turned a recession into a depression by forcing through harsh austerity measures during a slowdown. Unemployment soared, production crashed, all to defend sound money. Does that sound familiar?

The other lesson that the German government seems singly unwilling to learn is that the rest of Europe does not appreciate being bossed around by sanctimonious Teutons, indeed we fought several wars on this very point. They  still do not fundamentally accept that the rest of the world is not the same as the good Burgers of Frankfurt or Munich and no matter how many Italian or Greek governments are deposed, they are not going to suddenly turn German.

But let's make this a constructive post as dear readers there are perhaps a handful of lessons from history that we  probably all agree on:

1. Beware of anyone trying to teach you the lessons of history, especially if they have a beard, e.g. Karl Marx.

2. Do not invade Afghanistan (see 2nd para).

3. Beware of Greeks bearing government bonds.

4. The Germans like telling people what to do; the British hate being told what to do. This never ends well. (See WW1 and WW2 for reference).

Offshore Madness

The 31st of October 2011 is the deadline for submitting your personal tax return on paper, which in the digital age seems rather quaint, a relic of a bygone age where people use fountain pens to write cheques,  denominated in guineas, for life's essentials such as top hats, shooting sticks and steamer trunks (whatever they were).

Nostalgia aside, no one from any era is a fan of paying tax, unless you do in fact work for HM Revenue and Customs when paying tax is more akin to the staff of John Lewis shopping at John Lewis - you genuinely are keeping yourself in a job. Although I suspect tax inspectors do not get a staff discount on their income tax. If they did, they might be more inclined to pick up the phone. That's directed to the Chapel Wharf Area Tax Office, you know who you are.  When I owed you money, I received menacing letters warning that you were going to repossess my left kidney (my favourite one, since you ask) and sell my wife to a sex trafficker. (Strictly speaking the letters they sent me did not actually threaten organ loss or spousal slavery; but they were curt and I know how to read between the lines). Of course when the debt is the other way round mysteriously enough the income tax refund gets stuck, as if the funds were somehow an overweight feline that had outgrown its catflap.

There is, however, one species of cat that has no problems wiggling out of tight spots.  It's a fat one, who receives a special  tax discount not available to the the little people (as the rest of humanity, tall or short, shall now be known). What's more, this type of moggy is well-greased by Her Majesty's servants. You guessed correctly, fat cats are back in the news again: in this case Goldman Sachs for a backroom deal  with the Revenue that avoided a £10 million liability.

Interesting the contrast between the small trader whose VAT receipts are late: he gets the knock and his property seized. But the likes of Goldman have a cozy arrangement that would do an African kleptocracy proud. For those of you that missed this latest banking wheeze, they had set up a Virgin Islands subsidiary to pay bonuses to its UK employees and after a chat with Dave Hartnett, the UK's most senior tax collector, were let off the money they owed. He did a similar deal with Vodafone, who by some accounts owed the Exchequer £6 billion and paid only £1.2 billion.

Scroungers in suits

Judging by the standards of the 25% of FTSE 100 companies who were named and shamed in the Action Aid report this month, the use of offshore companies located in tax havens to avoid UK taxes is widespread. Two prime offenders are Lloyd and RBS; yes state-owned banks have scores of offshore vehicles designed to avoid UK tax. It is beyond parody, beyond politics, beyond belief.

Brand Values 

In a sense, the rampant tax evasion and freeloading by high net worth individuals and corporations, with the supine assistance of accountants and lawyers who betray their own professional codes, would somehow be more acceptable if it were done brazenly, as a colossal 'Fuck You' to civil society. I guess it might not sit so well with their brand values. You would have to ask Barclays, Vodafone and BP what those values are exactly, if they do not include being a decent corporate citizen and paying your dues.

Yet those involved must have some twinge of conscience because they have to couch their immoral behaviour in the veneer of respectability,  so this is not  rampant tax evasion, parasitism and freeloading of the type if displayed by a member of the underclass would provoke The Daily Mail to new heights of indignation.  No, it is tax competition: a form of free enterprise and a bulwark to socialism.

The concept of tax competition

There is little point dealing with the substance of their arguments as there is none. Tax competition means every country must join in a race to the bottom, where you'll find Afghanistan, the country with one of the lowest tax takes in the world. Reform must take place within the context of people and corporations paying tax; evasion by offshore havens undermines the basic contract that a citizen and corporation makes with the state: live here, trade here, pay tax. Those hedge funds based in the Cayman Islands should actually live in the Cayman islands, the Tesco stores located in the UK owned by a Lichtenstein holding company should be relocated there, breeze block by breeze block if necessary.

Growing deficits in developed economies have coincided with an explosion in tax avoidance via offshore activities, with lost revenue accounting for over half the deficit by some calculations. Crack down on benefit scroungers and welfarism if you want, but how else would you describe an individual or multinational who derives all the benefits of UK civil society but avoids paying their dues?

Tax havens should be shut down by old fashioned gunboat diplomacy, using a boat with guns on it. Even though the British navy has been reduced to a canal barge with canon of Napoleonic vintage and a couple of blokes in outboards with cricket bats, they could still handle these offshore jurisdictions. Seriously, what exactly could Jersey do if we decided to send over some marines and forcibly open its books?  Likewise, the French should storm Monte Carlo, the Spanish march into Andorra, if the Germans can't quite bring themselves to invade Lichtenstein, subcontract the job to the Poles if you to get the job done properly.

The law needs to change: if it looks like duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck. If it looks like tax evasion, then the burden of proof should be reversed so that companies must prove that setting up numerous shell companies in tropical islands that are notorious for laundering drug money is in  fact a legitimate way to structure a business. Likewise, lawyers and accountants who help offshore tax evasion should be held accountable, with criminal charges if appropriate. If a little person dodges his tax, they can face prison, why should it be any different because miscreant is better dressed?

Let's call time on this offshore party at our collective expense.

Oversize Me

England's Olympic Squad

Britain is officially great, not economically or militarily, but when it comes to waist size we are in the first rank of flab. According to a recent survey, sixty percent of the UK's population are overweight; the other forty percent tried to eat the census taker...with chips and a  bottle of Lambrini.

Never fear though, Andrew Lansley, the health minister, is here to the rescue, proposing that we count the calories and display them in fast food restaurants. Unlike his Great Leap Forward for the health service, focusing our growing guts makes some sense. Although we may live as long as our grandparents, we will be doing so unable to leave the house without a flatbed truck and winch, reminiscing about the time we could see our feet without a remote camera.

Except we know lecturing people won't work. When a cigarette company marketed a brand called 'Death' with a skull and crossbones on the front, their  sales soared; the pack of 200 was even coffin-shaped. Back in the days when Tower Records existed, 'Death' had a display in their Piccadilly branch with skeletons and gravestones. I bought a pack at once and smoked it like cancer was just a star sign.

At American state fairs, stands advertise their high calorie wares such as deep fried butter with a picture of   paddles they use to shock a stopped heart; the public loves it. Humans seem to be hard wired to crave sugar and fat, a relic of our wandering days on the savannah. Unfortunately, what makes sense for hunter-gatherers who rarely if ever encounter sugar or fats is a bad strategy for desk-bound office potatoes whose sole exercise is moving a computer mouse or other mono-hand pursuits. Maybe if you did have to dodge marauding lions on the way to KFC you would burn up the calories, but all it would take is one fatal mauling and the scheme would have to be abandoned. Health and safety gone mad.

There are, however, other ways to fight the obesity crisis that don't involve releasing large carnivores into urban areas or lecturing people like naughty children. Try limiting the number of fast food outlets in the high street. Insist that every outlet be located at the top of a steep hill or fitted with running machines at the entrance, like that Ok Go video except with annoyed customers.

Install this in front of every junk food restaurant.

Do not, repeat do not get the likes of Cadbury's to sponsor some retarded idea of exchanging chocolate bars for sporting equipment, making the direct association in children's minds of junk food with athletics. Oh hang on, that's exactly what the Blair government did.  Learn the lesson of that mistake and do not what ever you do make official sponsors of the 2012 Olympics the likes of Coke or build the largest ever McDonald's in the world at the Stratford site. Oh hang on...

The same government and local authorities lecturing us on calories are busy turning every high street in Britain into one uninterrupted branch of Subway-KFC-Pizza Hut-McDonalds-Burger King-Greggs-Chicken Cottage -Kombo Feeding Warehouse. It's not the calories that need counting. After all, how many branches of Subway does the world need? The answer is any number less than one in case you're interested.

Now, where's that takeaway?

Stimulating Packages

Occasionally you hear a politician say something so breathtakingly stupid and contradictory it makes you want to hurl something across the room in a howl of desperate rage.  This morning as I listened to the Today programme, I  wanted to take my  i-pod and DAB combo radio, get a taxi to Broadcasting House and fling the black cube at George Osborne. Obviously common sense intervened before the armed police did and I calculated by the time the cab had negotiated rush hour traffic, George would probably be heading back to Number 11.  There's always a chance he'll repeat the idiocy this evening, but then I will be watching on TV and getting a large flatscreen off the wall mounting is simply too much like hard work.

In amongst all the talk of 'packages', 'stimulus' and 'growth spurts', which turns out to be much less fun than you think, was a discussion of Wonderboy George's magic fix for the British economy which as you may have noticed is about as lively as the parrot in the Python sketch. It is an ex-economy. His claim was that freezing council tax would help boost the economy, some £800 million in all, found apparently down the back of the Treasury sofa along with Domino's pizza menu, a leaky biro and an old remote control. But in the same interview, he asserted we must also cut the deficit which would not harm growth prospects, whilst planning to cut corporation tax further. Observe the strange logic here: cutting £40 billion of deficit spending from the government will have no effect on the economy, but £800 million will.  This is not a cake-having and eating scenario, this is having the cake, taking a photo of it, eating the cake, then printing ten colour copies of the cake and trying to pass them off as actual cakes to other people.

Asking for trouble 

Moreover no one has satisfactorily explained how cutting corporation tax is going to have any effect on the collapse in domestic demand and  vast debt burden. Judging by the FTSE 100 companies' behaviour, their principal aim at the moment seems to be shovelling as much cash into their senior executives' pockets, regardless of performance. In a period of deep recession and share price collapse, executive pay rose 32%, which means as a multiple of average earnings it's trebled in ten years. By all means cut corporation tax, but it's a bit like giving Pete Doherty a big bag of crack to look after, you have only yourself to blame.

This is not to say that the Labour party has anything remotely useful to offer in the current situation. Their economic cure all is that no one in the public sector should ever lose their job ever, even if a broken shop dummy would have better productivity.  I am probably making their programme sound more coherent than it actually is. As for the Liberals, they claim a mansion tax is the answer, but as we aren't living in a real life version of Downton Abbey, the lack of actual mansions in the UK seems to undermine their case.

A wise investment 

The Bank of England is about to start another round of quantitive easing, which is money-printing by another name; it is often described as the equivalent of helicopter dropping money onto the economy. Except you never hear anyone suggest doing exactly that: putting money directly in people's hands. I think it is because deep down politicians and economists feel that, for example, granting every single British taxpayer a sizeable cash credit that had to be used in three months would somehow be...cheating. Pouring billions into bankrupt banks, buying your own debt, all of this is acceptable policy. But the final logical step which would immediately kick start demand, the genuine money drop, is off limits. Perhaps there remains some deep seated mistrust about what we would do with the money: some people would no doubt spend it on frivolities like shoes or hats or perhaps just one very expensive hat. The rest of us would spend some, possibly on a wider range of goods and services than millinery, and save the remainder.  The net effect would be to boost domestic demand and help recapitalise the banks.

£200 billion of quantitive easing and the dead-parrot economy is only just about staying upright because someone nailed it to its perch.  Or you could have credited every single taxpayer with £7,692. Who would you trust with the money: yourself or those financial masters of disaster?

Dear Mr Osborne, I'd fire up the chopper if I were you.


(For more stats and numbers see this interesting article: Who eat all the QE pies?)

Euro Trash

The past few weeks have not been happy ones for that rare creature in the UK, the Europhile, a breed that will soon be put on the endangered species list alongside the corncrake and the greater horseshoe bat. If not endangered, anyone expressing pro-European sentiments in most pubs in England will definitely be a threatened species; indeed the Europhile may need police protection like that other type of 'phile' who is not allowed near schools.  In Scotland, Wales and any part of Britain where more people work for the state than private business, together with selected enclaves of London where the doors are all the same shadow of Farrow and Ball (mouse back) and everyone reads The New Statesman,  there are a few pro-Europeans left; but otherwise support for the European Union has collapsed to an all time low. How is it is that the Euro dream has turned to trash?

The Europhile - a rare species

Born of the very reasonable desire to stop Germany trampling over national sovereignty and insisting that everywhere be run like the Reich, the European Project seems to have come full circle to a point where Germany ignores national parliaments and keeps telling everyone what to do, in this instance imposing self-defeating austerity measures.  The Euro, the currency union without a state, has proved to be a catastrophic mistake on a par with the Captain of the Titanic's decision to steer his ship right next to the iceberg to restock his ice-bucket: it's just not worth the grief. Instead of promoting prosperity , shackling the turbo-charged Teutons to the work-allergic Greeks has created an infernal wealth destruction machine about as sensible as burning €100 notes for fuel. Mind you, if the crisis continues much longer, any Euro notes issued in Athens will be being going up in flames.

Back when the Euro was created, some of us, including yours truly, knew it was a stupid idea to pretend that the Portugese or Greek economy should have the same currency and interest rates as Germany. I arrived at this brilliant insight by not being a massively overpaid bond trader and taking a package deal to Crete. My conclusion was that Greece was a lovely place to take a holiday, but given that its citizens struggled to run a pedalo business on a crowded beach in high season and the country had a political class which made FIFA officials seem models of probity, it was not the wisest call to lend them billions. Or if you did, make sure you charged a sufficient premium for the risk or NBAARGCF rate (not being an anally retentive German control freak). Naturally, those clever bankers and bond traders decided to buy Greek debt at only a small fraction above German bonds. Yes, the more stories you hear like that, the more you feel a Lenin-style banking reform is in order: shoot a few 'pour encourager les autres'.

Unfortunately executing bankers, no matter how much fun it might be (especially if broadcast live as Who Wants to Shoot a Millionaire?) is illegal and against the European Convention on Human Rights. Those bloody Europeans again!  There is, however, much more to the Euro crisis than just money. It is really about who we want in charge and no one, not even the pro-Europeans, voted for the current situation where the European Central Bank is committing vast sums of money on behalf of member states whilst being accountable to no one.

The Hellenic Handshake 

The Greek government has taken huge loans at absurdly low rates, with no prospect of paying back the money, yet its people cannot chose the rational course of default and exiting the Euro. The Germans, were it not for war guilt, would have called time on this madness long ago; they too did not vote to work and save so that the Greek elite pay no tax and its civil servants retire at 55. Regardless if they get all the sun loungers in the Med, another €8 billon bailout is a bridge too far.

UBS has just published a report claiming the break up of the Euro would cost both Germany and Greece 40% of their GDP in the first year and 15% each subsequent year. This is the same bank whose trader just lost them €2billion in unauthorised deals, was fined $780 millon for helping US citizens avoid tax and lost the most of any Euro bank in the subprime debacle, a cool £14.4 billion to be precise. Maybe we can do without this kind of expert advice? The truth is that many countries including Iceland, Argentina, Mexico and Russia have bounced back after default and devaluation. It's the dirty secret that must not get out, sometimes not paying back what you owe works out fine.

Bizarrely even anti-Europeans are now suggesting the only way to save the Euro is full political union, which is an extreme version of the sunk money fallacy. A good example of this faulty logic is paying for expensive theatre tickets and sitting to the end of the show even though you hate it, because...well you want to get your money's worth. This seems to me explain why many of the audience remain to the bitter end of Lloyd-Webber's musical atrocities (and if even they wanted to leave, the coach won't be setting off to Birmingham until 10.30 p.m. anyway).

The truth is the money lent to Greece is gone, as is a percentage of the money lent to Ireland, Spain and Portugal, so why not accept it and move on? With capital controls and tight regulation of the financial markets, breaking up the Euro may end up saving us a fortune.  And forgetting the numbers for a moment, none of us voted for Angela Merkel, not even a majority of the German electorate. We're Brits, let's stick to our own home grown bunch of useless politicians.