Good-bye Crawley

I have posted nothing on here for the last 4 months.  I have been totally pre-occupied with moving house.  This is an activity that I would not recommend to anyone.  It is stressful and expensive.  It is not my intention to move ever again except if I am carted away to a care home — not an enticing prospect.  I have lived in Crawley in West Sussex for 48 years and in the same house for 35 years.  When I first went to the town in 1964, it was an exciting place to be.  Many people were appreciative life in one of the new towns built to rehouse Londoners who had been bombed out in WWII or had lived through the Depression in ungodly slums.  Many mistakes were made in planning the new towns but there were still many things they got right.  The towns were run by the Commission for the New Towns — a benevolent dictatorship that generally did a good job until they were abolished by the Iron Lady.  I went to Crawley to work for what was then The APV Co Ltd. — a family business that had grown into a fair-sized international organisation as engineers for the Dairy, Brewing and Process Industries.  When I started working I had nowhere to live and for a few week I stayed in the staff club, Jordans, an 18th century converted barn and house that was Grade II listed and had very low ceilings - picture above.  Then I moved into lodgings in the box room of a 1950s semi.  Then I had a bed-sit in a large detached house near the gold club.  My landlady was a lovely woman who lived alone except for one or two lodgers who boosted her income a bit and provided some company .  She was in her mid-seventies then and must now have been long dead. 

The Commission for the New Towns had a policy of allowing "key" workers to jump the housing queue and after a year or two I was able to get a single bedroom maisonette and I lived there until I bought my house in 1977.  Now I have left there and moved back to my home county of Lancashire in a house about 2.5 miles from where I was born.  I will tell you about the move in my next blog.

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Touring On Drugs

Yesterday, the organizers of the Tour de France brought everyone together in Paris to launch the programme leading to the competition for the 100th Tour in 2013.  For the first time in many a year it will be run entirely in France, beginning in Corsica.  It is October 2012 and still the Lance Armstrong saga continues.  Every day there is some new piece of nonsense as the cant and hypocrisy proceeds unabated.  Now the UCI has officially stripped Lance Armstrong of his seven Tour de France wins and, presumably, they will strip him of every other race win as well.  Floyd Landis has been stripped of his win in 2006 — he did fail drugs tests.  On Monday, Pat McQuaid, the President of UCI called Tyler Hamilton and Floyd Landis "scumbags" for testifying against Lance Armstrong to the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA),  Tyler Hamilton has demanded that McQuaid resigns; a call echoed by Greg LeMond, now the only American who is still in possession of wins in the Tour de France.  But McQuaid has a point.  Lance Armstrong is being made No.1 scapegoat for all drug users in the Tour de France and other cycling events.  Slowly, everyone seems to be coming round to the realization that when Armstrong was winning, there were very few bike riders in long distance road racing who were not using drugs.  They cannot all argue that Armstrong bullied them into using drugs.  Floyd Landis got caught and after protesting his innocence for years finally admitted to drug use and joined the army of testifiers against Armstrong.  Tyler Hamilton was a rider for whom I used to have quite a lot of respect after he got on his bike after a crash on day one in the Tour de France and rode for three weeks all the way back to Paris with a broken collar bone — coming 4th overall in the race.   Now he has testified against his team-mate, Armstrong, and written a book about his experiences as a drug user; a book, which will put him in a good light, will bring him lots of money and, with his testimony gets him off the hook with USADA. It is not a record of high minded disinterested moral principles.There are one or two honourable men who have defended Lance Armstrong.  First among these is Alberto Contador.  Contador rode alongside Armstrong in the Astana Team in 2009, when he [Contador] won the race.  Armstrong had, said Contador, left a lasting legacy in the sport and he criticized the USADA report which relied entirely on testimonies from other riders, anxious to get themselves off the hook.  "Right now people are talking about Lance but there has not been any new test evidence or anything", Contador added.  Condemnation of Armstrong "is based exclusively on witness statements that could have been made in 2005.""What I do know is that if cycling is popular in the USA, it's thanks to him.  If they know over there what the Tour is, it's thanks to him.  If there are top-level teams and races in his country, it's thanks to him."Contador won the Tour de France in 2007 and 2009 but had his 2010 victory struck from the record books after testing positive for a tiny amount of clenbuterol — an amount so tiny that it would not have improved the performance of a gnat.Now various people are demanding that Armstrong pays back his prize-money and various sponsors are demanding their money back.  On the basis that all publicity is good publicity, on what basis do these sponsors think the money should be returned?  Before the great drugs scandal at the Tour de France in 1998, I had never heard of Festina.  And I believe that all the sponsors will have got value from Armstrong.Yesterday, in The Times, Matthew Syed — Sports Feature Writer of the Year — suggested that, if Lance Armstrong was being asked to pay his money back, then so should a lot of other riders.  He particularly drew attention to David Millar — who has become surrounded by his own cloud of self-generated self-righteousness, in campaigning against drugs.   When he was first accused of drug use, he, like all drug users, protested his innocence with great rigour.  When his defence became unsustainable, Millar wrote a best-selling book about his experiences with drug use — and obviously made money out of it.  In 2003, before he started using EPO, he was earning about £250,000 per year.  On EPO, his earnings went up to £650,000 per year — plus more endorsements, etc.
Bike riders used and probably still do use drugs.  I do not think any the less of them for that and neither, I suspect, does Joe Public.  Recent interviews with the man in the street have indicated that most people have assumed for years that bike riders used drugs.  So what?  Bodybuilders use drugs.  Nobody who gets to the point of stepping on stage in a bodybuilding contest has got there without drugs.   Why?  Because [a] to be a muscular freak is impossible without drugs and [b] all bodybuilders want to be the best that they can possibly be.  And so, I would argue, do bike riders.  They want to be the best in a sport which makes extraordinary demands on the human body.  If all riders are using drugs, who is cheating?  The only thing that matters is that riders do not damage their health.  No one rides the Tour de France for health reasons.  For the most part using drugs does not make the risks of health damage very much higher.  Were it not for the anti-drugs industry, it would be much easier to ensure that no drug use was detrimental to health.
Lance Armstrong was the best for seven years in a row in an era when everybody was using drugs.  No furore about his use of drugs will change that. 
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Lance Armstrong Was A Great Bike Racer

I feel rather sorry for Lance Armstrong.  That puts me into a minority group right away.  There was a time, not that many years ago, when men who rode bikes for sport were almost unknown off the European continent.  But not any more.  Britain has moved to the forefront of bike racing on road and track.  We now have a group of men and women who are among the best in the world and at the Olympics in Beijing and London we dominated the racing in the velodrome.  Also, bike riding has been on the rise in both North America and in South America.  And there are many top-rated riders from Australia — the 2011 Tour de France was won by Cadel Evans.  But today no other rider has quite the world-wide profile of Lance Armstrong — a man who recovered from testicular cancer and went on to win the Tour de France seven times between 1999 and 2005.  The problem is the revelations concerning his use of performance enhancing drugs.

I have little time for the anti-drugs establishment.  They are concerned not so much with eliminating PE drugs from sport so much as organizing yet more conferences in Geneva, Monte Carlo, Rio de Janeiro and Sidney — among other cities — in order to discuss the matter yet again.  You will note that they avoid places like Rotherham and Scunthorpe — places that  lack the sea or lake-side luxury of the listed cities.  For years, Lance Armstrong has been insisting that he never used PE drugs and he sticks to that line today.  Officially he never failed a drugs test although it is now being suggested that he did and the result was hushed up by somebody of other.  Nevertheless, it is still the case that he has no record of a failed drugs test against his name.  He has been found guilty of PE drug use by USADA as a result of a collection of sworn statements made by at least ten other bike riders who had been in Armstrong's various teams at the same time and tell us that they saw Armstrong both using PE drugs and handing them out to other riders.  All of them have admitted that they also used the drugs over many years but are speaking out now in return for immunity from any further sanctions.

I have always thought that Armstrong used drugs, just as I think lots of other riders used drugs,  When the Festina scandal broke in 1998 and the team lead by Richard Virenque was forced to withdraw from the Tour de France, there was much unrest in the peleton as French police carried out searches in hotel rooms and in team cars and buses.  Lots of stuff was rapidly dumped and poured down the toilet because Festina had been caught doing something that most other teams were doing as well.  No rider who did not use drugs stood any chance of winning anything in the Tour de France.  Armstrong was just one of many.  He got his first win in 1999 as the recovered cancer patient.  Now USADA have taken away his seven wins because he cheated.  Can they do this?  They did not award him the yellow jerseys anyway.  If he is no longer considered a winner over the seven years, who did win?  And was he 100% clean?   There is no answer to that question.  Is the Tour de France and other cycling races now completely drug free?  I doubt it.  

Today, it has been announced that the Dutch bank, Rabobank is to withdraw its sponsorship of a team in the Tour, telling us that "We are no longer convinced that the international professional world of cycling can make this a clean and fair sport," said Rabobank's Bert Bruggink.  He may be right in one sense; that drug use will continue.  Ten years ago when it was very probable that every team was using something, they were on a level playing field.  I am sorry that Rabobank have withdrawn — it may be a good time to cut back on sponsorship expenditure anyway.  There have been drug issues in the past in the Rabobank team without the bank getting too upset about it.  Before the 1998 Tour, I had never heard of Festina; now I know exactly what they are and what they do.  Is it still not true that all publicity is good publicity?

So Armstrong was just one of many, many riders who used drugs.  He may have been aggressive in encouraging other riders to do the same thing but I do not accept the line that they were pure and clean bike riders until they were forced into the dark arts by Armstrong.  If they didn't like it, they could have gone to another team.  But they knew full well that other teams were filled with drug users and Armstrong's teams were the ones that were doing the winning.

Maybe bike riding is cleaner now — drugwise — than it was but in an era of widespread PE drug use, Armstrong was the best rider in the world.   To single him out like this is OTT and achieves very little.  Interestingly, Richard Virenque — many times King of the Mountains — who admitted his drug use during a trial in France in 2000 is still regarded as a hero in his own country and he is still a commentator on bike racing on French TV and radio.  Perhaps the same will eventually happen to Armstrong.  Bike riders are still the most fantastic athletes on the planet, with or without drugs.  Lance Armstrong will still be remembered as a great bike rider long after all the officials of WADA and USADA have been forgotten.

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Experience Counts

I have posted nothing for six weeks.  I can say that I have been busy — which is partly true — but more than anything I have felt overwhelmed by the chaos.  Most of what goes on around us cannot be made up.  The world's economy is in a mess and primarily it is in a mess because of the EU.  The EU is governed by politicians of little ability.  They are all children of the system.  They discussed politics at university; they became political assistants to other politicians; they became representatives in parliament; and finally, they became ministers, rambling around the world meeting other politicians.  Consequently every daft idea dreamed up in every capital in the world becomes the next government policy that will, somehow, be the answer to all our problems.  It never is, of course.  Politicians rarely learn from their mistakes; our burden these days is that many are incapable of learning from their mistakes.  
Around the world, governments are printing money in order, they say, to stimulate the economy.  In fact, it does no such thing; it puts more money into the hands of the bankers who were responsible for much of the mess in the first place.  Printing money is wrong.  It devalues the currency.  If our currencies were supported by a gold standard, they would not be able to get away with printing money.  In Europe, the euro is doomed.  The right thing to do is to get rid of it; not to insist on more economic integration.  The EU is one of those organisations that, if it did not exist, we would not need to invent it.  It spent Eu126,000,000,000 in 2011 and, in spite of the economic mess they have presided over and which we have to live with, they are already angling for a substantial increase in their budget.  Of the Eu126 billion, Britain contributes Eu12.9 billion.  Were it not for our rebate, this figure would be Eu3 billion higher and second only to Germany.  In the last eighteen months, there has been meeting after meeting after meeting in this or that city to discuss the next application of sticking plaster to hold the euro together. It may be that they can carry on doing this for years, while the rest of teh world picks itself up and carries on without the EU.  The politicians and ex-politicians in Europe like the euro and the idea of economic integration.  It gives them lots of opportunities for jollies and they can govern for the most part without the interference of the electorates.
At present Britain is governed by a collection of rich, posh boys, none of whom has had any proper job, nor even any previous ministerial experience.  When did we last have a government where no senior minister had previously held a job in government?  We will exclude Kenneth Clarke.  He enjoys his politics and he has had many cabinet jobs — and he was a reasonably successful chancellor of the exchequer — because he now has no more than a watching brief. Britain should remain in the EU — on balance — but only if they get rid of the euro and get back to a trading union of independent states.  We do not need a single currency.  It is in no one's interest to continue — not even Germany.  Greece should be allowed to go her own sweet way and a devalued drachma.  And if Greece, also Spain and Italy.  In no country in Western Europe is there any longer any enthusiasm for the EU.  The new members from the east have a different viewpoint.  They see the EU as a protection against intrusion by Russia.  This is a justified and reasonable attitude but it does not need a common currency.
It has been suggested that the British government can escape its problems by allowing the Bank of England to continue printing money to buy government debt, which never gets paid back.  This scheme lies on the road to madness.  This is the thinking of the Weimar Republic, destruction of the currency and hyper-inflation.  This way madness lies but will anyone realize it?
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Reshuffle

I have been silent for a couple of months but now I am stimulate to say at least something about Cameron's government reshuffle announced today. I started with a great deal of enthusiasm for this coalition government — 2 years ago — but I am much unimpressed by this reshuffle. The lummox and plonker Jeremy Hunt has been put in charge of the NHS!!!!! Are you serious Mr Cameron. There is no bigger and more useless nonentity in this government than J Hunt Esq. He was in deep trouble in the Dept of Culture because of his close friendship with the Murdoch organisation and any normal person would have got rid of him then. But "Call me Dave" kept him then — perhaps because to sack him would have brought the house tumbling down on Dave himself. Now Hunt is promoted. I am sure that he will mess this up as well and slowly we will learn what Tory baggage he carries around in this job.

I hope Ken Clarke will be allowed to do something to help George Osborne who is all at sea in a rowing boat without a paddle. I am sure he hasn't got a clue what to do next. There was something in the accusation that was made recently that David Cameron and George Osborne are like a couple of rich boys on work experience. And Ken Clarke has more experience than all the members of this government put together. He is liked in the country and he was a rather successful Chancellor of the Exchequer.

We are going to have to keep our fingers crossed. If it all goes belly up we will be asked to fall back on Miliband!!! Aaaaagggh.

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Good-Bye Bob

So, Bob Diamond is gone. No period of notice, no delays. Nothing. I suppose they will have a team working out how many millions he should get in severance pay. Now Barclays have to find a new Chief Executive as well as a new Chairman. That will not be an easy task. The departing Chairman, Marcus Agius has agreed to stay on until a new CEO has been appointed. In principle, the new CEO — be it man or woman — probably needs to be a banker but which banker will take on the job, which banker can we say is untainted by the activities of his/her own bank to date and what sort of remuneration package will he or she want. One will hope that the new CEO is not an investment banker. Also, surely this is a moment when we should take a step down the road to paying bankers proper salaries, incapable of being shuffled away through a tax haven and at proper levels — with minimal or no bonuses attached. If the Governor of the Bank of England is worth only £300,000 per annum and the PM Less than £400,000 [including the £57,000 forgone by the current incumbent plus an allowance for perks of the job], why does any banker think he is worth the £20,950,000 paid to Bob Diamond last year? But they do. No matter how bad the slime floating the surface, no matter what damage they do to the world's economies, no matter how much money they need from tax-payers and customers to keep their banks afloat, no matter how incompetent they are shown to be, they still believe that they have levels of expertise that demand absurd levels of remuneration.

But the job at Barclays is a poisoned chalice. The new CEO will be in the limelight from day one. We still do not know all the facts about the rate fixing and its consequences. Is it still happening? How much is going to have to be paid in compensation? The new CEO will have to tell us what is to be done to stop all this chaos of casino banking, fixing Libor rates etc. The government has to help out on this one by introducing legislation to ensure some of the manipulation will become impossible. Also, there is the matter of separating High Street banking from investment banking — and doing it now, not in eight year's time. Will Hutton — who knows much more about these matters than I do — was arguing in The Observer on Sunday that the trillions of dollars tied up in derivative products, that are used to make buckets of money for investment bankers, serve no real practical purpose. This must become especially true if the calculations are based on the Libor rates, which most of the gamblers know is a fiction. I say a fiction because it seems now that almost every bank contributing numbers to Thomson Reuters were lying, either to boost the rate higher or to keep it lower — and also to let everyone think that a particular institution was finding it easier to borrow money than was actually the case. Yet it is these derivative products that can collapse and bring a bank to the edge of the abyss — and in some cases take them over the edge.

Appointing a new CEO at .Barclays will not be easy but the new Chairman should be someone above all suspicion — and not a banker. The Archbishop of Canterbury, perhaps?

I remember the name of the Barclays Chairman as being not quite Marcus Aurelius. Marcus Aurelius was the last of the Five Good Emperors of Rome and ruled from 161 AD to 180 AD. He is remembered now mainly for his Meditations — a collection of his thoughts directed to himself. This is a long work in many volumes but one or two quite Biblical proposals seem quite suitable for the Chairman of a bank to observe :

"When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. They are like this because they can't tell good from evil."

"In the end, what would you gain from everlasting remembrance? Absolutely nothing. So what is left worth living for? This alone: justice in thought, goodness in action, speech that cannot deceive, and a disposition glad of whatever comes, welcoming it as necessary, as familiar, as flowing from the same source and fountain as yourself."

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Is It Time To Say Good-Bye?

Thursday of this week was probably the hottest day this year so far — getting up towards 85ºF in Horsham in the mid-afternoon. But it was a hot day in ways that had nothing to do with the weather. The Bankers are in trouble again. And leading the trouble is our old friend — "time to move on" — Bob Diamond at Barclays. Only about 2 weeks ago I had a moan about the ridiculous salary that Bob Diamond pays himself but now a new scandal emerges. It seems that traders in Barclays — as well as other banks — were systematically lying about the interest rates they were paying to borrow money in order to [1] manipulate the Libor rate and [2] make lots of money for themselves. Libor — the London Inter-Bank Offer Rate is a a lending rate that is published each day and it is an average figure that has been compiled from data fed to Thomson Reuters. The data from each bank should be the actual rate that they are having to pay to borrow money on that day. It is now clear that over several years before the great crash — and after — Barclays traders manipulated the rate by lying — either to put more money in their own pockets or to hide money problems in the bank. These operations in massaging the interest rate involved Barclays traders and their mates in other banks. This happened in the Barclays Capital wing of their operations and at the time the man in charge of that operation was Bob Diamond — now CEO. The bank has been fined £291,000,000 by the regulatory authorities in the USA and in the UK. Not a huge sum for a bank the size of Barclays and the money will come from the pockets of their customers. Mr Diamond said that these lapses were down to the actions of one or two traders who were no longer with the bank. "I am sorry," he said, "that some people acted in a manner not consistent with our culture and values." I cannot agree. They acted completely in a manner consistent with their culture and values. Refusing to resign, Bob Diamond has said that he will give up one of his bonuses for this year. "What does this mean?" I hear your cry. I have no idea. It is something of a mystery trying to establish exactly how much Mr Diamond is paid and how it is calculated. Does his fore-going of the bonus mean that he will collect it later when things have quietened down a bit? Will he have to try to get by on only £10 million or so? After all his 2011 package amounted to nearly £21 million.

Barclays have now been fined and censured several times; they have directors under investigation for fraud in Italy; they pay their senior officers — including various investment bankers/traders ludicrous sums of money; they avoid tax; their shareholders get screwed over and over again while the bankers take away their pay in wheel-barrows. Yesterday, Barclays shares dropped by 16% — ie from next to nothing to a whole lot less.

This massaging of the Libor rate does involve other banks and more sludge will come to the surface in coming months. This scandal damages the reputation of the City of London and action needs to be taken to prosecute — if possible — making it absolutely clear that these actions will not be tolerated. It is even suggested that it is still going on! Banks have to be regulated. They cannot be allowed to carry on operating like vast casinos using our money to place bets to make buckets of money for themselves or, if it all goes belly up, we the tax-payers will bail them out.

Irrespective of whatever else floats to the surface, Bob Diamond cannot be allowed to carry on as though nothing has happened. What has been happening at Barclays is that all the wrong-doing, greed, incompetence and gambling that took place in the period before the Crash is now being exposed. Shareholders and the public in general are demanding action. Everybody is struggling to sort out the mess. The government, commerce, industry, everyone needs more cash to try to balance the books, yet the only group not have to shoulder any of the burden has been the bankers; one of the groups most responsible. Still, they carry on telling us about their expertise, their importance to the economy and why they should be paid such huge sums. Yet, every day we see only just how inadequate and incompetent they really are. The very people at the centre of the financial mess carry on regardless.

What next?

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The Falkland Islands Are British

Yesterday, in a wreath laying ceremony, the Falkland Islanders remembered the day 30 years ago when the forces of Argentina surrendered to the British forces and the islands were returned to the British. The wreath laying ceremony involved some of the veterans who fought on the islands all those years ago. Yesterday's weather was typical Falklands — cold and windy with wet snow coming down horizontally. Not many people live on this group of very isolated, wind-swept islands in the South Atlantic. Argentina has been claiming rights to Los Malvinas for donkey's years and they provide an easy diversion for governments in Buenos Aries when things are not going right — which seems to be most of the time. The islanders have stated over and over again that they wish to remain British and we should defend their right to their self-determination without flinching. The islanders have now announced their intention of holding a referendum to ask the inhabitants what they want — presumably the question will be the simple one "Do you wish to remain British? Yes or No!" Yesterday the President of Argentina, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, went to the United Nations to demand that Britain negotiate with her country about sovereignty over the islands. This piece of theatre was backed by advertising in British newspapers in which they repeated their claims about the Falklands on the grounds of decolonization. An anachronism, she said.

The islands may have been visited by Patagonian Indians many years ago — perhaps over 500 — but evidence suggests that the islands were first discovered and marked on maps by the Portuguese in the 16th century. In 1592, John Davis an English explorer arrived there when his battered ship, Desire, was carried there by wind and seas. For a time the islands were known as "Davis Land". The English visited again in 1594 and in 1600 it was the turn of the Dutch. Then the islands were visited by Captain John Strong in 1690 and he named the channel between the two main islands after the 5th Viscount Falkland, Commissioner of the Admiralty and later First Lord of the Admiralty, who had financed the expedition.

In the 18th and early 19th centuries various naval ships and explorers visited the islands and claimed them on behalf of France or Spain or Britain but in 1811 Spain packed up and left leaving the islands again almost if not totally uninhabited. The islands were then used mainly by British and American whalers and at times up to one thousand sailors were "living" on the islands. The Falklands were occupied by Americans, British, Spanish and Argentinian Spanish for the next 20 years — including an attempt by Argentina to establish a penal colony on the islands. Then in 1833 Captain James Onslow arrived with a request that the flag of the United Provinces of the River Plat be removed and the British flag be raised. Although the Spanish commander wanted to resist he did not do so because a large proportion of his crew were British mercenaries who were disinclined to fight against the British navy. Since that time the islands have been British and most — if not all — the inhabitants are settlers from Great Britain.

I was slightly surprised to read that Argentina also claims sovereignty over South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands. At their nearest point, the Falkland Islands are about 300 miles off the coast of Argentina. South Georgia is about 1200 miles away and the South Sandwich Islands are even further, about 2000 miles away. The capital of the Falkland Islands, Stanley — and where almost everyone lives is on the eastern island and is over 400 miles from Argentina. To claim sovereignty over islands that are so remote from the mainland is absurd. Of course, Argentina thinks there will be mineral wealth — particularly oil — under or near these islands and thus there is money to be made — perhaps. For Argentina to go rabbiting on about de-colonization seems to me to be an extreme example of the pot calling the kettle black — or worse. The people who now inhabit and govern Argentina are of Spanish descent because Argentina was a Spanish colony. The native Indians have little say in government and in my experience when I visited that country, the natives were treated quite badly. That is many years ago and things may be better now. But nevertheless the primary population are descended from colonists and I suppose that any referendum would confirm that the people wished to remain a Spanish speaking independent country. If the inhabitants of the Falklands wish to remain British, that should be respected and we should not under any circumstances even begin negotiations with Argentina because that implies that they have a case. And, I believe that they do not!

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What Is A Diamond Worth?

I still don't know how much Bob Diamond at Barclays Bank is paid. It is a fascinating subject since the question and its answer is symptomatic of all our questions about bankers' pay. A report on the Citywire Money page today tells us that in 2011 about 25% of the CEOs in FTSE100 companies enjoyed remuneration increases of an average of 41%. This seems spectacularly good, when most of these companies performed rather poorly and, of course, we are all in this together. Bob Diamond was at the top of the list with what was described as a "total realisable remuneration" of £20,971.000 — which seems not too bad in these straightened times. But the total, apparently, does not include “deferred bonuses awarded in the year and the expected value of share options and other share plan awards in the year, but includes instead the amounts realised from LTIPs and deferred share schemes that vest in the year, plus gains on options exercised in the year. These amounts realised are from awards made in earlier years.”

So, is there more to come or next year will he only get £15 million? And, does this total include any amounts paid to clear personal tax liabilities in the USA? And how much will he have tucked away in share options for when he leaves? Assuming that Mr Diamond pays tax on all of this income — which is almost certainly untrue — then George Osborne's reduction in the top rate of tax from 50p to 45p will reduce his tax burden by £1,041,050. I know dear Bob — like the rest of us — was struggling to make ends meet and was anxious to move on from all the discussion about bankers' pay, but this is ridiculous. Is it any wonder that the coalition government is falling out of favour when nonsense like this is allowed to happen. Barclays Bank is a big company but its performance has been terrible. Its shares are worth little more than than they were donkeys years ago and are at only about 25% of their pre-crash values. Dividends are no good either. There are no very good reasons at all for investing in Barclays and I suspect that many leave their money there in the hope that one day the shares will recover their value. In the meantime Bob Diamond carries on paying himself buckets of money for his expertise. I suppose he must argue that if he were not so absolutely brilliant the company would be in an even worse mess. They could be in a Spanish mess.

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The Resurrection of Coal

We have a government at present that cannot take decisions. There is nothing odd about this; most of our governments cannot take decisions — and even if they do, they are probably wrong. This may be a cynical outlook coming from someone who does not have to make the decisions. Can I ask a question? What are we going to do to provide us with electricity in a few year's time? We have been humming and hawing about nuclear power for years. The last government and the present have sort of taken a decision to get EDF energy to build some nuclear power stations with German assistance but the contractors are slowly pulling out. The truth is that no one wants to build nuclear power stations any more. And they are quite right. I have been opposed to the building of more such stations for years. Why? Because they are unsafe and present us with a gigantic problem when they need to be shut down and demolished. It is an extreme form of the Titanic problem. This ship was unsinkable but it sank on its maiden voyage. The chances of a nuclear disaster are very small but that disaster could still occur within the next 28 hours. The possibility is small — but not nil — but the consequences are horrendous. That is not a scenario acceptable in any risk assessment.

It is claimed that nuclear power stations give no effluents, are clean and efficient. They are none of these. The first fundamental problem is — what happens if anything goes wrong? No longer can it be argued that nothing will go wrong or that new nuclear power stations will be safer. We need to remember Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima. All of these were grade one disasters that needed massive evacuation of very large areas of surrounding land, towns and cities. After Fukushima it was thought at one stage that the whole of Tokyo may have had to be emptied. It was not, of course, but primarily this was due to the efforts of workers in the power station who allowed themselves to be subjected to horrendous levels of radiation in order to do the work necessary to subdue the reactors. The situation there is still not 100% safe and the reality is that the most contaminated areas will not be usable for a few thousand years. Chernobyl was even worse. Already many men who worked to contain that disaster are dead; Many more will die prematurely and like Hiroshima the knock-on effects of radiation will be felt in the community for years to come. If a conventional power station suffered a major catastrophic failure, emergency services and teams of engineers could get to work cleaning up the mess immediately and within a relatively short time the power station could be back in operation. There would be no nuclear fall-out to deal with; no land contaminated for a thousand years, etc.

Nuclear power stations present a frightening risk of terrorist actions and this introduces another inestimable factor — which would not apply to a conventional system.

But, even assuming all these matters could be overcome, there remains the matter of disposing of the waste. At present it is stored and so it will be for years to come until we can load it onto a rocket and fire it into the sun.

I read an article today which told me that last year coal was the energy source that provided for 30% of the world's energy — up from 25% just a few years ago. And last month Japan shut down the last operating nuclear power station. The government wants these stations to re-start but since Fukushima, every time a nuclear power station is shut down there has been substantial local resistance to it ever being re-started. This is not likely to change. Th beans and sandals brigade will oppose electricity generation with coal but they will oppose everything except — perhaps — windmills.

This country has problems with energy supplies as a direct result of continuously incompetent governments. We had about 400 years supply of coal buried under the British Isles. How much of that coal is now recoverable, I do not know. We mine very little of it because in the 1980s we had a prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, who shut the coal mines because she was determined to quash the coal miner's union headed by Arthur Scargill. She decided that we could generate electricity by burning natural gas. That was another disastrous decision. It is great to generate electricity using this premium fuel but it wasted a precious resource. We are now in the incredible position of generating about 35% of our electricity with coal and that coal is imported from the USA and Poland. Our own resource of North Sea gas is now almost all gone and we import gas from Norway, Russia and the Middle East. Sooner or later we will have to re-open the coal mines just as we are now having to try to resurrect our manufacturing industries — also chucked down the drain by various governments — with one notable exception. When Rolls Royce got into deep trouble in the 1970s, a Tory prime minister, Ted Heath, nationalized the company and kept it afloat until it could be re-privatized to look after itself again. It is now a thriving business and one of the most successful in Britain. When Mrs Thatcher was destroying our coal industry, we should have been spending money on research to be leaders in all modern methods of burning coal and dealing with carbon dioxide emissions. But we did not and we are not and, yet again, we will come to regret it.

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