Labour Hypocrisy

Labour's hypocrisy in choosing Hester's bonus and its condemnation as the subject of one of the Opposition Parliamentary debates is quite staggering. After all it was a Labour government which wrongly bailed out RBS and which settled the terms of Hester's contract. Miliband was a member of that government. His hypocrisy will rebound on him. It is also breathtaking that Miliband should have the gall to say that Cameron has sold us down the river on the fiscal union treaty. Much to my surprise and delight Cameron did not sign up to the treaty yesterday. From all the reports I read yesterday I thought he was going to cave in completely like Blair and Brown. Cameron has in effect though said that the eurozone countries can use the EU institutions to run the treaty process. Not to do so would look mean spirited. Generosity on that could be used as a bargaining chip on something else and one hopes that the government will have the guts to use it at an appropriate time and will not be pusillanimous about taking complaints to the ECJ if the eurozone countries abuse the latitude we've given them. Not that a complaint to the ECJ is likely to prevail, hell bent as it is on turning all EU members into one state by any means possible. Frankly if Miliband wants to have any authority on issues relating to either the EU or banking he needs to apologise profusely for not holding a referendum for the last treaty we signed up to and for having put this country into the truly dreadful economic mess we're in.  

Appeasement

It is deeply disappointing that Cameron is meekly going to accept the fiscal union treaty he refused to sign up to in December. On each occasion a situation like this arises our Government, to the fury of the majority of us, caves in. Is there some secret treaty that requires us to give in or is it our europhile civil servants that do the damage? Why won't anyone stand up for us and our way of life and democracy? We know the LibDems and Labour won't do so. Churchill we need you at this hour to combat the disease of appeasement. We do not want to be run by Germans who frankly have milked the so called periphery by selling hardware to them at deep discounted prices. In my book this is dumping and each time I see a German car it makes me sick to my stomach. Since the vast majority of cars on the roads these days are German I am sick to my stomach most of the time. Even my children have German cars. German selfishness is as appalling as the stupidity of the rest of us in letting them get away with this unfair competition which of course is directly the result of the euro. We must ensure that the euro sinks without trace for our own benefit and that of the so called periphery. To allow the euro to continue will inevitably lead to Spain and Portugal and perhaps other eurozone countries suffering civil unrest which must be much worse than what will happen with the collapse of the euro. Boris Johnson raises this question here. Of course another reason why the Germans and French are so keen on the euro being saved is because their banks have so many bad investments in dodgy sovereign debt which they are covering up. This is a scandal and I do not know why we don't exploit this to our own advantage. No doubt it would upset Mr Clegg if we were to do so but so what whilst he is looking at annihilation at the polls if an early general election were to be called. The last thing he wants is an election. If Cameron is serious about our position in Europe he must use Clegg's fear of losing the election to Britain's advantage. A small opportunity to repatriate some police and justice EU laws will arise in 2014. Open Europe have an interesting report on this that they have released today. After the climbdown on the veto I won't hold my breath that Cameron will do the right thing in 2014.    

Bonuses

Should Stephen Hester have his bonus or not? He was given a contract which entitles him to one and this contract is still seemingly in force. He is therefore entitled to one and the one he has been given only becomes cashable in 2014 and, being in the form of shares, the amount he can cash it in for will depend on the value of the shares at that time. Will he have to pay tax on the value of the shares at the time he receives the right to the shares or when he cashes them in? This could make a big difference to him. I have to say I have some sympathy for him. He was not responsible for the RBS disaster but has taken on a job for which he receives nothing but brickbats at what I am told is a salary that is less than anyone else would do the job for and certainly less than he would be paid if he were to leave for another post. Its competitors seem to think that RBS will have to revert to a commercial bank as it has no future competing with the likes of Barclays. The reason given to me for this view is that Sir Fred rashly gave all his officers above a certain pay grade final salary pension entitlements making it economically advantageous for these officers to remain in situ thus causing what I understand is called bed blocking. The effect of bed blocking will ensure that no bright and ambitious youngsters are going to even attempt to push their way through to  a position in the bank that they would otherwise have aspired to. They will go to work for banks where there is a more fluid career path. When I started off as a solicitor all those years ago a bonus was a rare and uncertain thing. You had to do something exceptional to get other than a tenner at Christmas and the firm you worked for had to have had a good year as well. Bonuses have now become something else entirely. They are more like deferred salary payments and certainly the employment contracts of investment bankers I occasionally advised on made it very clear that a bonus was always going to be paid - they only uncertainty was the amount although often a minimum amount was stipulated. Charles Moore in the Telegraph today has a good piece on Hester's bonus and the Coalition's honour here.

Sarko Needs Higher Platforms

Not content with getting us to subsidise their grossly inefficient farmers (thanks Ted Heath), the French now want us to subsidise their old age pensioners so that they can reduce their pension age to 60. The pension subsidy of course will come from the tax they want to impose on financial transactions which naturally hits us hard as 80% of the revenue raised in this way will come from the City. These are a couple of points from the manifesto of Francois Hollande, the socialist candidate for the French Presidency. I thought Sarkozy was bad enough but Francois Hollande, who also according to his manifesto, wants French farmers to be subsidised to an even greater degree, is even worse. This is simply madness and if anyone had any doubts about the need to leave the EU Hollande's proposals should persuade them that now is the moment to go. Archbishop Cranmer has another good reason for leaving the EU here. Hollande has stated that if elected President of France (at the moment he is way ahead in the opinion polls) he will want to re-negotiate the fiscal treaty that is due to be signed next Monday. He's not so keen on austerity and says the treaty should be more about growth and employment and changing the role of the ECB. He is going to have his work cut out trying to make Mrs Merkel change her mind and agree with him. It will be fascinating to watch the tussle from the side lines. If Hollande does win the election two things will happen (1) frog bashing will be back in fashion and (2) the euro will implode even more quickly than otherwise. This will not surprise the British of whom a majority, according to a poll, believe the euro will cease to exist, with one third thinking this will happen within a year and with two thirds thinking this will happen within five years. Having heard economist Gabriel Sterne of Exotix (specialists in illiquid bonds and loans) and formerly of the Bank of England and of the IMF on Jeff Randall Live last night my bet is that the euro will implode in a great mess this year.

Jagger and the Tories

Did Mick Jagger do the right thing by attending Boris Johnson's event yesterday rather than Cameron's? Is the Prime Minister underrated? Cameron certainly comes across as someone who deals in understatements which one assumes is deliberate and done in order to change people's opinions about the Tories being the nasty party. I think the understatement is now overdone and that he should become a little more passionate and prepared to go into greater detail about what he wants to achieve. The Tories are the party of low taxes and Osborne should take up Clegg's call for speeding up the process of increasing the personal allowance to £10,000. Clegg's statement that hedge fund managers paid less on their shares (by which he means dividends?) and on capital gains than a secretary on her income should be dismissed as the complete nonsense it is. Janet Daley has a good blog about this here. It is essential that there is a bit of passion at the top about the Union, Taxes, Welfare and long needed Reforms. The last thing we need is a technocratic government which it seems to me that coalitions often become because  coalition parties pull their punches in order to help their government survive. Nothing wrong with that so long as each of the parties remains true to itself. A show of some passion by Cameron on the issues he feels strongly about will help to improve the public's view of politicians so despoiled by the last Labour government. Peter Oborne has a very interesting and thoughtful article about the degeneration of public morals here.

Go for Growth

Ken Livingstone said apparently that the fare reductions he would put into effect if he is elected London Mayor would be paid out of the £729 million surplus lying around in the London coffers. Such surplus does not exist according to Fact Check and that if he were to cut fares the reduction would cost £1.12 billion so that he would have to make cuts elsewhere to pay for lower fares. Sounds to me like typical Labour economics all over again. Tory economics may not be that great but they are nonetheless significantly better than Labour's. What should the Tories be doing to bring down both the deficit and the debt burden? Lower regulation and taxes are seen as essential by some think tanks in order to kick start the economy. Others would add that we cease quantitative easing and begin to raise interest rates so that saving becomes more attractive again. If the government were to lift the regulation burden on small and medium size businesses in a meaningful manner e.g. by scrapping employment, planning and health and safety laws,  freeing employers from acting as unpaid collectors of taxes and having to file annual returns and accounts at Companies House, a good start would be made. The government should also carry out real cuts rather than cuts to future increases and stick to its guns on reforms including those to the NHS. The government should also stop saying we want the euro to succeed. It won't and it would be much better to say so and to tell the eurotrash elite to sort out its orderly dismantlement with all possible speed.

Explosions

Lord Irvine, Blair's first Lord Chancellor and author of the Human Rights Act 1998, has said that some of our most senior judges have misinterpreted the Act and that all that must be taken into account in deciding a Human Rights case is the view of the Strasbourg Court. He goes on to say that having considered the view of the Strasbourg Court UK judges may make their own decision on the case before them. Will the Strasbourg Court though accept a UK court's decision on appeal if it does not coincide with the views of the European court? I doubt it and so it seems that if we want to run our own affairs in the way we have for centuries we must repeal Lord Irvine's Act. It was clearly an otiose Act anyway enacted with the sole purpose of making Blair and his government look good and what has the result been? Disaster - unless, of course, you think it is right and proper that we should have to allow the radical cleric Abu Qatada to remain here amongst us. This obligation imposed on us of accommodating the extremists amongst us will in the end result in a change to the law. Tolerant we may be but there is a limit. There is a limit too to the public's tolerance of welfare benefits being paid to the likes of Firuta Vasile who the welfare appeal tribunal decided that by selling the Big Issue she was self employed and thus entitled to benefits of £28,147.60 a year. This after having lived here for all of about four years. Why did she come here? This is yet another example of the crass stupidity of the EU. There will have been no proper vote on whether or not to agree to this kind of charitable donation. Who makes these rules and why do we agree to them or allow them to be imposed on us? We cannot go on like this. Unless our politicians do something about these types of cases there will be a quite understandable explosion.