TRUST IN ME, JUST IN ME .......

I was listening to "The News Quiz" on Radio 4 a night or so ago, and the excellent Jeremy Hardy said something which answered a little issue which had been niggling me on and off.

A couple of posts ago, I scribbled down a few Home Thoughts from Abroad about the adequacy or inadequacy of our Prime Minister. The unsaid thing for the Labour Party today is that – if not him, then who?

Enter Stage Left, the Boy Milibrand. In an attempt to out-youth Dave, they’ve come up with somebody who to me seems still to be in the throes of early puberty. How can someone like that possibly have the experience to lead this (or any other) country forward. Now I know that this could sound like a build-up for someone like John McCain, or even, Heaven Help me, Gordon Brown. But you do want somebody whose bike has had the stabilisers removed for more than a few months when he takes office.*

But Milibrand looks so – well, what is it he looks like? That’s what’s been bugging me for a while. He reminds me of someone/thing. I mean, just look at the two pictures which the newspapers took to their hearts last week. The first has Gordo and YerBoy glad-handing each other, which at least makes it more difficult for each of them to launch a pre-emptive stab in the back on each other.

ONE DAY MY SON, ALL THIS WILL BE YOURS

And the second, well it’s a newspaperman’s dream, to be trotted out in perpetuity and ad infinitum. Jeremy Hardy brought it all into focus for me when he said that Milibrand had clearly forgotten one of the main rules of Politics - If you look like a monkey, never get photographed with a banana in your hand.

DAVID MILIBRAND WITH HIS BREAKFAST

All together now - A One, A Two, A One, Two, Three, Four –

Now I'm the king of the swingers
Oh, the jungle VIP
I've reached the top and had to stop
And that's what botherin' me
I wanna be a man, mancub
And stroll right into town
And be just like the other men
I'm tired of monkeyin' around!

I’m solid gone!

*Memo to self – check whether Pitt could ride a bike.

Tags:

louis prima,
milibrand,
gordon brown,
banana

IF THE ANSWER'S "42", WHAT'S THE QUESTION?

I haven’t written much about the political goings on in this country of ours for some time – it’s just too depressing. But today, Our Glorious Leader is forcing Parliament to vote on a plan which allows the police to hold terror suspects for 42 days, rather than the current level of 28. You can argue until the cows come home about which branch of maths leads Those in Charge to decide on the number 42 – my own theory is that Gordon has read one too many Douglas Adams books.

But that’s completely beside the point.

The issue is whether we need an extension to what is already a draconian power available to this Government. We have existed since time immemorial as a nation on the basis that we all, as individuals, enjoy as much freedom as possible. Now, people will argue that that statement is the moral equivalent to the perceived length of a short piece of string – it means different things to different people. But, if you want to see what it actually means in real life, there are enough countries around the world where you can see what the alternatives are, and where most of us would very much NOT like to live. And I for one simply don’t want it here.

Sitting listening to the birds singing away this morning in sunny Shropshire, it seems so clear that the case for such an arbitrary extension is simply not there – it’s just someone’s whim. Someone whose political life is currently in freefall. Having published the draft legislation he finds himself faced with a backlash from all sides in Parliament, so what do we see? The gradual watering down of a proposed piece of legislation, with sops of modifications, obfuscations, ifs and buts, which all but destroy the principle he was setting out to achieve in the first place.

We get David Blunkett, whose stint as Home Secretary shone out as a textbook study in bullying incompetence, writing in “The Times” yesterday to support his boss, and justify the magic number of 42. His reason to increase the current position by 50% is that “in three cases, we have come close to needing every one of the 28 days currently permitted for pre-charge detention….. “. What kind of logic is that? It’s spin gone mad.

As one short letter in today’s newspaper replies, what Blunkett really meant was “.. a) in no case have the police needed to hold a suspect for the full 28 days; b) in only 3 cases did they come close to 28 days; c) in all other cases they needed nowhere near 28 days.”. If that’s the basis on which our fundamental individual rights get irrevocably removed, then it’s not just the State of Denmark where there’s something wrong.

We have here a government hell bent on removing another of our rights, based on a totally flawed logic, cravenly seeking political support by then watering the principle down just far enough to get a majority of 1, and then using second rate ex-politicians to try and justify the unjustifiable.

This “Try this for size, and if you don’t like it, I’ll change it” government style is quite odious. If they have principles, then let them fight for them. That’s what Government is about. It’s not meant to be liked. My dictionary defines it as “to rule with authority”, not “What do you think of this idea?”

We’ve seen it with the "10p in the Pound" Tax change recently, where, just because a piece of (one assumes) well thought out legislation did not find favour with the electorate just as it was about to be introduced, they borrowed another £2.7 Billion to get round it and dig themselves out of a totally self created political hole. To Hell with the Economy, it's my seat in Parliament that's really important.

I’m not sure you can have a moral cess-pit, but if you can, I know where to find one.

Tags:

politics,gordon brown,42 days

SORRY SEEMS TO BE THE HARDEST WORD

A small item from today’s “Times” newspaper, found lurking in the “This Week on the Web” column put together by Rhys Blakely.

Pause for a slight smile, but then the whole sorry episode is a perfect definition of “Schadenfreude”, and that in itself always leaves you with a slight smile, even though it may be tinged with a touch of guilt. The unalloyed pleasure at watching that nice Mr Darling squirming as he tries to explain what’s gone on, is only surpassed by the joy at watching the excruciating contortions formed by Gordon Brown’s mouth as he vainly attempts the word “Sorry” for the first time in his life. Do we all realise who had the responsibility for HMRC for 10 years before he became Prime Minister? Just checking.

If, however, you want to put a real grin on your face, you should read a comment on a blog by a friend of mine, who for security reasons and avoidance of harassment from the Provisional Wing of the Government Audit Office, can only be identified by the codename X. If you look at his blog, which can be found on http://www.chris-linfoot.net/ (Don’t tell him, Pike), trawl back to 21st November – “Seen on e-bay, and a Government Warning”, and Enjoy.

He gets it in one.

Tags:

alistair darling,
hmrc,
gordon brown

THERE'S ALWAYS A MEMO

Many years ago, when I was Finance Director of a large UK Manufacturing Company, we set up a course for all the Directors and Senior Managers to understand the issues surrounding “Crisis Management”. The scenario started with a hypothetical incident in the Plant where, say, an employee had been killed following a fire, and the newspapers ring up, get through to you, and ask for your views on the issue.

To give the day some teeth, two reporters from the “Sun” were there, as well as a young(ish) BBC reporter named John Humphrys who was ensconced in a makeshift, but very realistic TV Studio, to conduct mock interviews with us all to make us understand what such an environment would be like if it actually happened.

Two messages came out of the day. Firstly, John Humphrys showed extremely lucidly how he could either interview you very genially about the issue, or, like a surgeon with a very sharp scalpel, dismember you within minutes, with your sweating face oozing culpability onto the TV screens of millions. He said, rather disarmingly, that he, and only he, made the decision as to which of the two alternative forms of interview took place.

Gulp.

The other points were made by the two “Sun” reporters. They said that the newspaper is always going to print a story, whatever you say to them. So “No Comment” has no meaning or effect on them. And also that, in every crisis, “There is always a Memo”. The memo written by the dissenter in the organisation, either protecting his back, or fighting for what he felt to be right, against a management who, he felt, was about to make the wrong decision. And this memo, ALWAYS comes out sooner or later. It is a matter of WHEN rather than IF.

Gulp again!

That was fifteen or so years ago. So fast forward to today, and Gordon Brown.

The issue of Pensions, and the way the Brown and his Treasury cohorts have almost single-handedly destroyed the Pension position for many people in this country has been a festering sore for ten years now. Those involved in Pensions have been saying for all that time that Brown’s “Dawn Raid” would have far-reaching effects on people’s pensions, and this view has slowly come to pass in a quite ghastly way.

Without going into the Whys and the Wherefores, because that has been well documented in the newspapers, the political issue here is that many millions of people, at a time in their lives when it is too late for them to make any form of financial recovery, have seen large tracts of their pension funds simply disappear.

Calculating these numbers is not easy, but something between £75 Billion and £100 billion has been wiped off their assets. Just take a second for that number to sink in.

Brown and his team of Ed Balls and Geoffrey Robinson seem to have deliberately set about extracting money from the system as soon as New Labour came to power. It would seem they simply ignored the advice of the Whitehall mandarins who advised them that the results would be a “big hole” in pension finances, that, as a result, employers would have to shell out much higher contributions which would probably cause the closure of many “final salary” schemes, local government schemes would need additional contributions (and just work out how much of your Council Tax bill is going onto that one), and there would be a sizeable negative impact on the Stock market, as well as “a reduction in pension benefits for the lower paid”.

Unremitting negative advice, which Brown and his men have been saying for many years did not exist.

So, back to the “Sun” Reporters. “There’s always a memo” was their soundbite, and, under the guise of the Freedom of Information Act, the “Times” asked two years ago for access to the relevant papers. You don’t actually need to understand the details of the issue here, you simply need to see the extent to which the Treasury politicians have been fighting since “The Times” asked their questions to know where the truth probably lies. They knew that “The memo” existed, and the last thing they wanted was its publication.

And in a rather schadenfreunde-ish timing, the delay in responding meant that the answer was finally released at a time when Brown is slap bang in the middle of building his case for Prime Ministership, and trying to make us all believ in his skills of prudency and honesty. Even releasing the documents entirely without fanfare, on a Friday afternoon just before Easter, with an Iranian Hostage crisis blowing loudly in the media, and when our man is off in Afghanistan, is a very amateur attempt at “burying bad news”, which once again has done Our Glorious Leader-to-be no favours at all.

He does seem to love creating taxes for the future, which, if they were chickens, would only come home to roost when his PM days would be over, and the strangely large guaranteed pension which he, personally, would get is in payment. Don’t try finding this in his last budget speech, because it’s not there, but he has increased the liabilities of Public Sector pensions by around £60 billion this year, and he has added a further £24 Billion of Private Finance Initiative commitments. I will go to my grave not understanding how this particular Government borrowing does not get classified as Government Borrowing. But he seems to be a man who can sell a Tax Rise as a Tax Cut, and an increase in borrowing as a reduction, in a way which would draw admiration from David Blaine.

So now we have a man whose veneer of respectable trustworthiness is at last starting to take too many hits, just at the time when he needs to be standing on the top of the Moral high Ground, if he wants to allay the accusations of “Stalinism” and bullying that he is increasingly being tainted with. Charles Clarke must be loving all this.

But if you stand back from it all, and ask yourself about the man’s credentials, you may still get a very different view on what his real agenda is. Positioned by those around him, rather coyly, as the “Son of the Manse”, he was a precociously clever child who left home to go to Edinburgh University at the age of 16, where he studied History and wrote his Doctoral Dissertation on “Labour's struggle to establish itself as the alternative to the Conservatives”. He went on to be Student Rector, and Editor of “The Red Paper on Scotland” (just check that one out), following that by a biography of James Maxton. Maxton was a founder member of the Independent Labour Party, a very Left wing organisation, with Maxton campaigning against Britian’s involvement in the First World War, organising Shipyard strikes, being found guilty and imprisoned for Sedition, and writing two book The Life of Lenin (1932) and If I Were Dictator (1935) before he died in 1946.

This man was seemingly one of Brown’s heros, and to my simple mind, I don’t think people, including New Labour Chancellors change their spots much as they age. In spite of what the Jesuits say, I think the late teens and twenties are the most formative years of most people’s lives, and the attitudes and beliefs they have then do not change much as they age. So you decide how you would categorise someone with a CV like that.

Clearly, I am not his greatest fan. I have no idea what his policies on Home Affairs, Foreign Affairs, Education, Transport, Law and Order and the rest are, because he never seems to have shared them with us.

The transition from Chief Financial Officer to Chief Executive in a Company is fraught with danger, and few make the jump well. So why is it any different with Gordon Brown. The only thing he has done in his Ministerial life is to be Tax Gatherer in Chief in the Treasury. So, without being able to do anything about it, we’re all about to get saddled with a very dark horse with no breadth of experience for PM.

The hairs on the back of my neck, which I listen to more than any politician in this Government, tell me he is not a man to be trusted, whose motives are not in the interests of the vast majority of people in this country. The issue is whether he is found out before he becomes PM or after. Let’s hope it’s before, and let’s hope that the rather well timed revelation of “There’s always a Memo” is the thing which crystallizes his downfall.

Well done “The Times”, and what odds will you give that the Freedom of Information Act dies a very early death if Brown gets into Number 10.

Tags:

gordon brown,
pensions

NHS PENSIONS - A PRESENT FOR OUR CHILDREN

I wrote a short piece the other day about the way that numbers are presented affects the way we perceive them. This was prompted by an almost throwaway article in the paper noting how the NHS Pension Scheme liabilities had increased by some £37 Billion over the last year to a new total of £165 Billion, presented in a way which made the difference look like “rounding”.

The more you ponder on this, the more you get worried by it. The presentation is one thing, but the staggering size of the amount of money involved is a much more serious issue. I know enough about the maths of how Pension Schemes work to know that I don’t know enough about it. When their clients so demand, the actuaries who do these calculations can call on almost David Blaine-like powers involving lots of smoke and quite a few mirrors to make numbers “sit up and beg” for them.

They use a discount rate which reduces future pension costs back to present day figures to calculate today’s liabilities. One of the changes the actuaries apparently used in increasing the NHS Pension scheme liabilities for 2005-6, was to reduce the Discount rate from 3.5% the previous year, to 2.8% for this year. Just changing that percentage by that seemingly little amount can have staggering effects on the amount of money they say is needed today. The only problem with bringing it down to 2.8%, is that for most sponsored schemes in the private sector, that percentage would typically be 2.0%. If you factor that number into the maths, the liabilities would grow, according to Watson Wyatt, a very respected firm of pensions experts, by a further £28 Billion to £193 Billion.

There are a myriad of other factors which must be fed into the maths, all of which can change the final number dramatically. Try Life Expectancy for instance, which is changing at a rate none of us, including actuaries, can predict. It seems to have increased over the last couple of decades at a faster rate than we ever imagined, partly due, you may note rather elegantly, to the efforts of some of the people in the NHS Pension Scheme.

Simple maths says to us that, if a scheme supports 1.26 million members, and it has a total liability of £165 Billion, then each member’s “pot” is around £140,000, which is supposed to last around 25 years – the predicted lifespan of someone who is 60 when they start to take their pension. That’s around £6,000 per year on average. If they get the average age of mortality wrong by just one year, and that’s actually very easily possible, then the calculation is wrong by nearly £1 Billion. It's actgually impossible to calculate what the true liabilities of such a scheme are, but you can guarantee that, whatever number you choose to think of, the final one will be higher!

All these figures seem horribly large, and almost beyond comprehension. The really worrying thing is that the NHS scheme is UNFUNDED – meaning that the Government has put nothing, absolutely nothing away anywhere to pay for it. Unlike all Private Pension scheme, there are no Assets anywhere which have been "ring-fenced" to pay these enormous sums. They have made this colossal commitment to 1,260,000 people, and the only way it gets paid is if you and I pay taxes to support it, for as long as we live.

And that is only one scheme, albeit the biggest, which is handled by the Government in this way. If you take all the state schemes where the taxpayer has been forced, through payment of taxes in the future, to underwrite these schemes, the total amount we will have to pay is around One Trillion Pounds. That’s only three little words, but numerically it looks like £1,000,000,000,000, or a tad more than the whole of this country’s Gross National Product for a year – just get your head around that if you can.

It does rather make the efforts by Gordon Brown to diminish the pension of anyone in the Private sector look very, very sordid and very, very unfair.

Tags:

pensions,
nhs,
gordon brown