We Are All In This Together

Hardly a day goes by without my realising yet again just how badly and continuously incompetent the management of this country has been. I was a supporter of the new coalition government and saw the coming together of Liberal Democrats and Tories as a new opportunity for the country to progress but they are already losing their way. The most depressing thing is a refusal to face up to facts. If they will not acknowledge the existence of a real problem their chances of solving it are close to zero - unless you are an ardent believer in the ultimate success via the laws of chance and good luck. Then there are the slight of hand gestures. For example: we have the worst state pensions in the whole of Europe - except, apparently, for Latvia and Malta - yet David Cameron announced that the state pension annual escalation calculator would now be based on the CPI rather than the RPI - although he failed to mention that the CPI is generally lower than the RPI. In practice pensioners are affected by inflation at a level even higher than the RPI - so the new system will mean that pensions will be down-rated in value even faster than before. Is there any intention to make a step change to bring us into line with other big countries in Europe? I think not. Our low pensions will continue. Not satisfied with a level of pension payment that has been allowed to become pathetically low, they will seek to make it even worse. Add to that the fact that employer's private pension provisions will now be based on defined contributions rather than defined benefits - in other words, the employers will set up a pension fund with trustees and managers who may be completely incompetent but you, dear pensioner, will reap the benefits of their incompetence and get what you are given when you retire - and for the rest of your life. Nothing is guaranteed. The investment bankers will do OK, of course. But the investment bankers do OK all the time. As our government prints money to stimulate the economy, the bankers take it and use it carry on paying themselves monster bonuses. Payments which are necessary in recognition of the supposed brilliance of their understanding of gambling with other people's money. Gambling which brought the world's finance snear to total collapse.

Government ministers waffle on about the importance of manufacturing while failing to note that we haven't got very much. Mrs Thatcher saw to that disaster. We make no ships, no railway equipment - and this is the country that invented railways and supplied them to the world. We pay buckets of money in tax but services just cost more and more to provide less and less, while the numbers of inhabitors of non-jobs increases year after year. Cut local government spending and they shut the libraries and schools, fail to mend the roads, fail to empty the dustbins, fail to clean the streets; yet they can move plenty of paper, spend money on ever more sophisticated speed cameras - not for road safety reason, but to increase money supply - increase the speed of paper shifting, concentrate resources on the criminal and undeserving, reinforce political correctness and retain all diversity coordinators.

The government tells us we are all in this together. The bankers carry on being paid millions and the Chancellor of the Exchequer contacts us, while on a skiing holiday, from the veranda of a £1.7 million chalet in the Swiss Alps owned by a friendly multi-millionaire hedge fund manager. Yes, I think some of us are rather further in this than others.

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A Very Shady Deal?

Frequently, politicians wonder why they are dislike so much and often despised. And then more reports come along that make it blindingly obvious why it is so. The last 24 hours have given us plenty to be going on with.

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Let's start close to home with the saga of BSkyB and News Corporation. The latter with James Murdoch as Chief Executive in Europe, son of big boss Rupert Murdoch, wants to buy the 61% of shares in BSkyB that it does not already own. This is hardly likely to be in the national interest since it will give Murdoch control of a vast swathe on the British media via TV and newspapers and will establish an organisation three times the size of the BBC. Almost everyone else in broadcasting and the newspaper industries is opposed to such a take-over. The regulator Ofcom has expressed severe reservations and has said, quite clearly, in their report published today that the merger should be refereed to the Competition Commission. It is three weeks after the report was available to the Culture Secretary, Jeremy Hunt. The minister has told us that News Corporation have been given six months to address concerns expressed by Ofcom in the report. He is, he told us, mindful to refer the report to the Competition Commission, since it is the view of Ofcom that the merger is not in the public interest. Has he any choice? Is it conceivable that he could get away with not referring it. If the answer is "Yes" then what is the point of Ofcom? But we now have the extraordinary situation that - following secret meetings between the minister and the Murdochs - News Corporation is being given time to cobble together some deal that will let everybody off the hook and the merger can go ahead without the approval of teh Competition Commission or - more likely - the referral will be accompanied with some spin to explain why it is now OK. The picture would not look quite so bad were it not for the fact that Mr Hunt is a known enthusiastic supporter of Murdoch and his businesses. Why, I have no idea. Perhaps it is just that he is an old Thatcherite Tory who hates the BBC - he wants to abolish the BBC Trust and trim the Corporation's wings - and he will sleep with any devil who is not a public service broadcaster. Is he one of those who believe that privatisation of everything must be better? But even worse is the cosy relationship between the Murdochs and David Cameron. He has visited James Murdoch in the Caribbean - having been transported there on a Murdoch aeroplane - and he has had dinner with senior executives of News Corporation - privately, not with civil servants present - just days after he took away responsibility for the merger from the Business Secretary, Vince Cable, after he had been recorded voicing his antipathy to Murdoch.. And, it seems, Rupert Murdoch has access to Downing Street via the back entrance. What is there to hide? We like to think that our politics are not corrupt but happenings like this suggest, very strongly, that we are deluded. Rupert Murdoch manages everything for the benefit of himself and his companies and, like all rich people, he can never be rich enough. But all the maneuverings and the clandestine dealings can only make people very sure that blocking this deal must be the right thing to do. But I have little confidence in the government on this. They will wriggle and wriggle in order to allow their cronies to be rewarded.

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Pay Your Taxes, Lads

In these times it often seems that the differences in earnings between the richest and the poorest in society is greater than it has ever been. It is certainly true on an international basis. Sure, in the past there were some exceedingly wealthy individuals and some exceedingly poor. The difference now is that there are more who are wealthy and more who are very poor. Like so many, I have complained about the obscene amounts of money that investment bankers and their like pay themselves, but compared with Premier League footballers, even bankers seem poor. Apparently, HMR&C have decided it's time to target the underpayment of tax by these very much over-paid sportsmen. No doubt some footballers move money overseas just like banks and bankers but the scheme that HMR&C doesn't like is the one involving image rights. Great chunks of money are paid to footballers - and others, I suppose - for their image rights and it is normal for players to sign two contracts with their clubs; one for their hire and one for image rights. The image rights are paid into a separate limited company and companies, of course, pay only 28% corporation tax as apposed to the 50% payable by an individual as income tax. If one of the footballers finds himself stuck for cash, he can top up his playing salary by taking out a loan from the company and pay just 2% in tax on a loan which is considered a benefit in kind. In the last two years Wayne Rooney, for example, has taken £1.6 million as loans to help keep his head above water. I can understand now that if his finances were so stretched that he needed an extra £1.6 million to keep the wolf from the door, he really did need to get Manchester United to increase his total pay beyond £200,000 per week.

As is stated so often, the rich only pay taxes voluntarily; the rest of us pay taxes, whatever. We are even asked to pay in advance if HMR&C thinks we may perhaps earn more than they can get their hands on immediately. They are, after all, as money grabbers for the government, very desperate for cash. I hope they manage to extract more from the footballers, who should be paying most of their tax at 50%.

Talking of the very wealthy, what is Culture Secretary, Jeremy Hunt doing about Murdoch's News International's attempt to take over total control of BSkyB? For more than 3 weeks now he has had the Ofcom report which, quite unequivocally made the recommendation that the proposed merger should be put before the Competition Commission. There would seem to be no reason why that could not have been done immediately the minister received the report. It is suggested that at this time Mr Hunt - who is a well-known appreciator of the wondrous merits of the Murdoch clan - is in discussions with News International - ie Rupert Murdoch - about ways and means of avoiding the referral. If he thinks he can get away with this he is deluded to the point of being crackers. The responsibility on this matter was taken away from Vince Cable because he had stated publicly his opposition to this deal, even before the Ofcom report was received. We now have a Culture Secretary who is known to be very pro-Murdoch and in no way will those opposed to the take-over of BSkyB allow him to do some underhand deal with a man much disliked by many in the UK. Mr Murdoch in charge of a broadcasting empire three times the size of the BBC is not something to be encouraged.

It's another grey old day and in Australia, the England cricket team have lost the third One Day International in a row to Australia. Bad News. England bowling was not up to much with Anderson, Broad and Bresnan missing and some of the batting was a bit dodgy; plus they let Hussey make a lot of runs again.

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Births and Deaths on January 19th

Today I noted that 19th January would have been the 172nd birthday of the great French post-impressionist painter Paul Cezanne. I have always been a lover of his pictures and for a while had a couple of prints hanging on the wall. Surely, he was the greatest of still life painters. Why did I note his birthday? I didn't really; it was information offered by Google.

Another great man who would have had a birthday today was Henry Bessemer, born in 1813 and destined via his converter to record his name in the catalogue of great Victorian engineers and to establish an effective and efficient way of making steel. His converters were in use for well over 100 years and greatly aided the Industrial Revolution. The process that he developed into an industrial technique works by blowing air through molten pig iron to remove impurities. Elements such as silicon and manganese are removed as oxidised solids in a slag, while carbon is removed as carbon dioxide gas. It is removal of the carbon particularly that gives steel its ductile properties and increases strength and durability compared with the brittle cast irons. In my youth I used to be able to watch the bright flashes of burning gases emitted from the Bessemer converters at the British Steel plants in Irlaam. I watched from Atherton across the flat expanses of Chat Moss from 10 miles away. But, of course, all that is gone now and all that can be seen are lines of street lights on major roads.

I can also record that on January 19th 1547, Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey met his end. He was the eldest son of Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of Norfolk. Henry was quite a colourful character and, in spite of his Roman Catholicism, he was a generally loyal supporter of the Tudor monarchy of Henry VIII. The trouble was that being loyal to a Tudor king who behaved as Henry VIII did, was a complicated business when the king married and married again so many times with this, that or the other family in or out of favour. When Jane Seymour was queen, the Seymour family was in the ascendancy and they plotted outrageously against the Catholic Howards. The Earl of Surrey was imprisoned for a time but soon released. Later he was imprisoned again for his part in "a drunken riot" in the City of London, which resulted in "severe damage to property" - ie broken windows. He served Henry well in France and was considered an effective soldier. However, as Henry VIII's health was failing in 1546, the earl suggested that his father the Duke of Norfolk should act as Protector for the young [11 years old] and sickly Edward VI. This did not go down well at all with the Seymours - Edward VI was the son of Jane Seymour - and when they established their right to control and protect the king, they accused the Howards of treason. No real evidence was produced but the Duke of Norfolk was imprisoned and the 29 year old earl was taken to Tower Hill and executed. The Duke of Norfolk was released from prison when Edward VI died and he was succeeded as 4th Duke in 1553 by the eldest son of the Earl of Surrey. The plotting which was an essential feature of the Tudors continued apace during the reign of Queen Mary and within a couple of years, several members of the now out of favour Seymours had also been decapitated on Tower Hill. I am sure it all added to the efficient management of the government of England.

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Inflation High: Interest rates Low

Today we got the monthly inflation figures. As I expected - but, apparently, "many economists" did not - the inflation rate has risen again. The CPI - which is the figure preferred by governments because it is the lowest number - has risen to an annual 3.7%. The index that more nearly reflects the reality, the RPI, is back up at 4.8%. Sooner or later, they warn us, interest rates will have to increase. Interest rates should increase now. The base rate has stood at 0.5% - effectively zero - for 13 months now and has contributed greatly to devaluing the currency. Further the Bank of England has poured £200,000,000,000 of newly printed money into the economy - mainly to help out with bank bonuses and the like - and this also has devalued the currency. The 25% drop in the value of sterling has shoved up the cost of imports and more and more we import food and manufactured goods. A low value currency is supposed to help exports and exports of manufactured goods have risen - but not that much. Last month we managed a record deficit on the balance of trade of nearly £9,000,000,000 - in one month! It's a staggering figure and just a small [small?] indicator of the economic mess that this country is in. When the much derided John Major left office in 1997, the balance of payments deficit was running at about £12 billion per year - not per month. That was bad enough and had been negative from soon after Margaret Thatcher became PM and basically kicked manufacturing into the long grass as nothing more than old fashioned tin bashing and the like. The trade deficit growing and growing is a national scandal ignored by government, who [which] for the most part understands sod all about science, engineering, technology and manufacturing - and nobody understands finance and economics. The low currency does not boost our exports because we have got nothing to sell. I know this is an exaggeration but it is not far off true. All our heavy engineering has gone, abandoned to countries in the far east. But not entirely. How come that a tiny country like Finland carries on building mobile phones and big ships, when, apparently, we can't make a light bulb or build a rowing boat. Does no one in government every get concerned about the mess created by themselves and their predecessors - of whatever party?

Next month the inflation figures will probably be even worse, boosted by the rise in VAT and by still rising commodity prices. Oil is now trading at $100 per barrel and that is not into the figures yet. The government and the Bank of England feel, clearly, that they can do what governments always do, inflate us out of debt. The trouble is they never do it completely and the residual debt has built up and up. The last government indulged in profligacy on a scale un-paralleled in our history - except in times of major wars - and via their spending through PFI and all kinds of madcap initiatives - massive increases in spending on the NHS and schools - they have built a government debt of almost unimaginable magnitude.

But while inflation goes up and stays up, savers like me, get interest on our savings of next to nothing. Some saving accounts are now so generous that a capital of £1,000 will produce interest of just 50p in a year. Based on the RPI, that same £1,000 will have devalued by £4.80 in the same period. It helps people with mortgages buying over-priced houses but savers out-number borrowers by 7:1 - although not in money value terms.

What should government do? Face reality. Put interest rates up, build more houses, direct investment towards manufacturing, scrap Trident, buy British wherever possible and cut spending on paper shifting and politically correct bureaucracy - we have suffered an orgy of that over the last 10 or 15 years.

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Death of Nat Lofthouse

It's a dull, somewhat windy, grey day and with a hanging threat of some rain. It's not a good day in other ways either. I picked up the news from the BBC web page that Bolton Wanderers stalwart Nat Lofthouse had died at the age of 85. I had not heard much about him recently but I thought that he was still in good health. He died in a nursing home. He appeared occasionally on football programmes and sometimes he was seen in the crowd at a Bolton Wanderers match. He was the hero of the Bolton team in the years when i went to watch them in the 50s. He joined Bolton from school and the coal mines in 1946 and played until the early 60s. He scored 234 goals for Bolton and another 30 or so for England. Many tributes have rolled in already for a great player and a lovely man. He never played for any team other than Bolton Wanderers and he served them after his playing days as a manager, scout, director and solid supporter through thick and thin.
Lofthouse played in the Bolton vs Blackpool FA Cup Final of 1953 when Blackpool won 4 -3 after extra time, Stan Mortensen scored a hat-trick and Stanley Matthews got his one and only cup winner's medal. Lofthouse won his cup winner's medal in 1958 when Bolton defeated Manchester United by 2 - 0. This was a win - Bolton's only FA Cup win since WWII - overshadowed by the Munich plane crash 3 months earlier when Manchester United had lost so many of their best players. Neither team could be blamed for that but it was a dark shadow nevertheless.

I expect that Nat Lofthouse will get something akin to a state funeral in Bolton and, for a player who did not earn the buckets of cash available to today's footballers, who can deny him that.

Today was not such a good day either for the England Cricket team. They lost a 50 over match in Melbourne by six wickets. In fact Australia scored the 295 runs needed to win with five balls to spare, thanks mainly to a stupendous 161 from Shane Watson. "One of the all-time great one day innings," according to Andrew Strauss. England gave away a few soft wickets and their bowling was not what it should have been. Bowling full tosses to Watson in the final over was an easy way of letting him finish it with a six. Well done the Aussies.
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Cops On The Job

Every day that goes by brings more evidence that the world is going mad and spending by public bodies is out of control. This latest story - please, someone tell me that it is nor true and that it is an April Fool story made up early by some loony in a local newspaper office! - concerns one of those blocks that makes up the foundation of modern day policing. I mean, of course.the police helicopters. This particular whirlybird was buzzing around over Yorkshire, thermal imaging camera at the ready, eager to discover crimes as they were taking place. Flying over a council estate, the sensitive instrumentation picked up heat rising from a detached garage in an area known to be occasionally populated by criminals. The message was give that they had discovered a possible cannabis factory. The logic that lead them to this conclusion is about equal to that of any householder who hears a bang out in the street and immediately assumes that a nuclear reactor has exploded. The cops turned out in force with cars, vans and trucks to make an immediate raid on the said garage. The local residents were much amazed to see the cops smashing to bits a small garage in which lived two guinea pigs. The small harmless animals were the pets of a twelve year old boy who had, thoughtfully, provided them with a small electric heater to keep them warm in the cold weather. Of cannabis there was not the least sign. How much this massive police exercise cost is anybody's guess but flying helicopters about is not cheap and the costs rise alarmingly whenever they embark on this kind of crime detection.

Mind how you go as Richard Littlejohn advises us in The Daily Mail.

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The Last Pre-Fab

I read today that Lewisham Council in London is about to demolish what are thought to be the last pre-fabs in England. These little prefabricated homes were erected, mainly around London, after World War II to provide some quick housing to replace all those houses bombed and destroyed in the blitz. They were quite small and, as I recollect, they were made mainly of asbestos and wood. It is remarkable that they have lasted so long and even more surprising that so many people seem to have liked living in them. Although I say that most were around London, they did go up in the North as well. there were a few in the town where I grew up - Atherton - but I only remember a dozen or so on one estate. The ones there disappeared years ago.

I suppose some can look back on them with nostalgia and they did serve a purpose but they were at bottom, rather grotty.

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Labour Win In Oldham?

As we all expected, Labour won the Oldham East & Saddleworth by-election with a majority of 3,500 over the Lib-Dem. The turn-out was 48%, which is not bad for a by-election on a very cold and wet day in January. With the reduced poll, the Lib-Dem share actually increased slightly. It was the Tories who were the big losers. So, what can we conclude from all of this. The logical thing to conclude is, don't draw any conclusions at all. By-elections are opportunities for the disgruntled to express their dissatisfaction about something or other - and that was surely true here. There were the normal dissatisfactions with government policies on this, that or the other; primarily, at this moment, the row over university tuition fees. Then, it was important to the Lib-Dem leader that his party was not seen to be humiliated. For the health of the coalition government, that was important also for PM, David Cameron. Therefore, it was logical for the Tories to soft pedal in their campaigning. But Cameron could not say this and so became the first PM for many a year to go out campaigning in a by-election and knocking on doors. So the right wing of the Tory Party couldn't say that he hadn't tried. Anyway, most local Tories got the message and tactically voted for the Lib-Dems to try to keep out Labour. Are you still following? On top of all this was the reason why we were having a by-election in the first place. Phil Woolas, [picture above] a popular local MP, was barred from office by an election court after the Lib-Dems had protested about things he had said in his election literature about their General Election candidate - stuff, which they claimed was untrue. It seemed pretty mild stuff to me and if every politician that said something untrue during an election campaign was to be brought before an electoral court, we would be very short of MPs. So the electorate in Oldham East & Saddleworth would have been much peeved about being forced to turn out again on a wet January night in order to vote again to elect an MP to replace the one they were perfectly happy with in the first place. For those with good memories and/or a knowledge of history, there are many records of the electorate taking a rich vengenace on those who try to manipulate them. Politician's beware.

So, that's why, I don't think you should draw any conclusions at all from this by-election. At least that's the conclusion that I have reached. And I hope you feel suitably informed.

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King Coal

I was immensely critical of the government of Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s when she set out to screw the mineworkers and, in particular, the leader of the Mineworkers Union, Arthur Scargill. She wasn't going to be dictated to by the miners as her predecessor, Ted Heath had been. She was determined to shut the mines and let more and more electricity be generated using the all singing, dancing, modern natural gas. She was completely wrong about that just as she was completely wrong about so many other things. This country had - probably, still has - about 400 years supply of coal buried beneath the ground all over the UK. Now we have wasted all our North Sea gas on easy power generation, we have to import from Norway, Russia and so on. That is bad for security and bad for our balance of payments. Current thinking is that we should put much effort into green energy. Trouble is that it does not work all that well. We have found during the recent cold spell our wind farm generators produced almost no electricity because as is often the case in periods of very cold weather, there is no wind. The other daft idea is solar energy. Works fine in Florida and California but not in cloud covered, rainy England. I said 25 years ago that we would have to re-open the coal mines eventually. Now others are saying the same thing.

Money Week tell us that coal is the fuel of the future. Coal is responsible for generating most of the electricity in the world and the proportion is likely to increase. At present we generate about 40% of our electricity using coal - which we now import from Poland, the USA and, apparently, Australia - it is, of course, utter madness. How good for the environment is it to transport dirty, old coal from Australia in order to burn it to generate electricity in England, a country with lots of coal buried under the ground next door to the power stations? But sooner or later, someone will face up to telling us that Thatcher was wrong and that the coal mines must be re-opened. How much will that cost? Unsurprisingly, many pragmatists have come to the conclusion that high energy coal, available in all kinds of stable countries like Australia and the USA is a better bet than oil from the bottom of the sea or from one of the basket case countries of the Middle East or Asia.

You know it makes sense.

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All Is Well At Bloomfield Road

Yesterday, I attempted to complain to my MP, Henry Smith, about bank remuneration packages and bonuses and asked that he bring all pressure to bear on the coalition government to stand by the statements they made in opposition. He replied quite quickly but did no more than send me a bit of spin from Tory Central Office. So I complained again. I await his reply. All the senior members of this coalition government, from the PM down, have made statements about the unacceptable bonuses and pay of bankers. But in office, they have backed away, further and further from doing anything about it. So the conditions for another bank collapse remain and these arrogant, thick-skinned, over-paid robber barons carry on as before paying themselves ten time as much as the rest of the country - indeed, ten times as much as the rest of the world. I expect that Mr Smith will again give me a standard reply and that is what really upsets me. Everyone in the country is furious about the banks and, in particular, the pay of investment bankers. Yet, not only is the government doing nothing about pay and regulation, they have become apologists for the banks. One problem that niggles at the back of my mind is that yet again the rich who always run the country - including Cameron, Osborne, Clegg, et al - are protecting their own. Each of those leaders is worth a few million and they are not suffering too much as the rest of us pay to bail out the banks.

One bright spot yesterday was that Blackpool FC defeated Liverpool for the second time this season - something that they have not done since 1946. Liverpool are now operating under the management of Kenny Dalglish - he has been in charge for 5 days - and he has lost his first two games. Kenny thinks that they lack self-belief. Perhaps they are not paid enough? An extra £50,000 each week for every player could give their self-belief a real boost. After all, if there is anyone daft enough to pay them a lot of extra money they must be much better than they seem to be. Rather like the American critic who suggested, mysteriously, that Richard Wagner's music was much better than it sounded. Blackpool are now 9th in the table with a game in hand. Did anyone - was there ever anyone so optimistic - who would have suggested at the start of the season that such a thing could happen? Good luck to Ian Holloway and the lads at Bloomfield Road. As a manager he has been so successful that he has a good chance of keeping his job, at least until the end of the season - and there are not many Premier League managers who can say that!!!!

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Fireworks at Broadfield Stadium

I don't go to football matches anymore. In fact, I haven't been on a football ground for nearly 50 years. The last time I went it was to watch Leeds United at Elland Road. But I still watch football on TV - at least some of the time. I always watch the FA Cup highlights and, like everyone, I like most to watch the giant killer draws. Lowly clubs that go up against the big guns of the Premier League and the Championship - and win. Last Saturday we saw Division 2 Stevenage defeat Newcastle United by 3 - 1. This looks impressive and it was. Stevenage trounced Newcastle and fully deserved their win. Now they go on to play Reading in the next round and must fancy their chances.

Closer to home, last night Crawley Town played Derby County at Broadfield Stadium in the FA Cup 3rd Round and won 2 - 1. Crawley are 2nd in the Blue square Premier League and are looking for promotion this year. Derby are sitting comfortably in the middle of the N Power Championship and should have beaten Crawley fairly easily. But, like so often in these type matches, it is easy to slip up. The lower ranked club has nothing to lose and a successful cup run can help the finances of the club no end. The reports and statistics suggest that Crawley were the better team and did deserve to win - especially when Derby failed to score from a penalty, given by referee Hayward for a fairly innocuous challenge by Crawley's Dutch goalkeeper Kuipers on Derby striker Chris Porter. With only 4,500 in the crowd - near to the stadium's maximum - it does not seem that many Derby supporters bothered to make the journey to Sussex. Perhaps they took the win for granted. Would more support have helped? Well, it couldn't have made things worse. There will be much celebration in Crawley after this result and the passive supporters may start to show more interest in the club. Crawley Town must be favourites to beat Torquay in the next round.

Crawley Town is run very prudently these days after twice going bust with previous owners and the day-to-day prudence and tight control of the money supply seems to be bringing them success. But we know that even at Premiership level, buckets on money does not always spell success. However, the management at Crawley Town have told us that the FA Cup run has, so far, netted Crawley an extra £500,000, which at their level, is a considerable fortune. The players will be wanting ten grand a week wages next. Anyway, good luck to the team in their FA Cup endeavours.

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Politics In The Pennine Foothills

Next Thursday, our wonderful coalition government will experience its first electoral test at the Oldham and Saddleworth by-election. This election has been precipitated, you may recall, by the sacking of the previous MP Phil Woolas, who, allegedly, made untrue statements in his General Election leaflets about his Lib Dem opponent. It all seemed pretty mild stuff to me and hardly damning. At the General Election Woolas won by 135 votes over the Lib Dem candidate. The Lib Dems then objected and an electoral court found against the MP, banning him from parliament for 3 years. Thus, a bye-election was precipitated. Why did the Lib Dems take this course? Phil Woolas was a popular local MP and any attempt to replace him via an action of the London based political establishment was bound to be a hazardous endeavour. Polls in Oldham indicate that any candidate wearing a Labour rosette will romp home on Thursday with more votes than the Lib Dems and Tories combined. The only slight fly in the ointment is the presence of the Labour leader in the constituency. Ed Miliband has the charisma of a shopping trolley combined with a London-centric outlook and a lack of any radical policies to distance him and his party from the chaos, profligacy and incompetence of the Blair/Brown years. He will do best for Labour if he disappears and allows Lib Dems and Tories to lose by themselves.

I tend to feel pro the coalition government and David Cameron is doing better than I expected - of a rich Old Etonian. But there are a lot of things not right - and I am not just thinking of student tuition fees - a fall-out from Labour incompetence which brings millionaire students in £2,500 suits out rioting on the streets complaining about their inability to pay the fees. I am concerned that the government is not getting to grips with the debts. Local government - as well as government service providers - are telling us all the things that they cannot afford now while keeping armies of bureaucrats shifting paper about and indulging in orgies of political correctness. This is well illustrated by recent nonsense about the non-emptying of dustbins - or more correctly in these days, of emptying wheelie bins and collecting black domestic rubbish bags. This is a priority service and must be maintained come ice, snow, hell or high water - it was alwys possible in the olden days! Some towns have not had the bins emptied for 4 weeks. In Birmingham they had the nonsense of bins on one side of a road [in Solihull] emptied every week and bins on the other side [in Birmingham] untouched for a month. The roads are not mended; education is a mess; pensions have to be sorted; above all the government has not even begun to tackle the obscene pay of the bankers. The NHS wastes buckets of money - again, it's the bureaucracy. I will ignore other nonsense for the time being - like the housing minister's suggestion that he is going to stabilise house prices. How? He has got a good sound bite but nothing will happen because any action will be resisted by the bankers and the Tory faithful. They shot down Vince Cable's mansion tax fast enough and they will do the same to any process that could eliminate house price escalations.

Back in Oldham the Lib Dems and the Tories have a struggle and I think that not even Ed Miliband will be enough to lose it for Labour's Debbie Abrahams. Nick Clegg's path in government is going to get a whole lot harder.

Peter McHugh, reporting for Channel 4 News reminded us that all by-election results are protest votes. The first problem in Oldham & Saddleworth is that you have to work out what is the protest, who are the protesters and what are they protesting about? The next problem is that there is no one answer to any of these questions.

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It's Bonus Time Again

It's that time of the year again. I mean the time when banks and other financial institutions pay out their staff bonuses. On TV at lunch time today, Prime Minister, David Cameron said that banks should "exercise restraint" and show social responsibility in the handing out of bonuses. Fat chance there is of that happening. We know already that they will pay out buckets of money as usual. Figures were announced today by Goldman Sachs - an organisation as likely to exercise restraint as I am likely to land on the planet Jupiter. The miserly sum of $13,000,000,000 has been allocated to fund the total remuneration packages this year for their staff [world-wide] of 35,400. This gives us the princely sum of $367,000 each - on average. Obviously the Masters of the Universe will get much above the average and the tea lady may have to get by on $50,000 but overall they will be paid, on average, ten times as much as the average wage earner in the USA or Britain. I am sure they are worth it. At least, they are worth this much just as any other investment banker or financial whizz kid is worth this much. Governments will issue forth exhortations, but when will they do something. It has to be a co-ordinated attack throughout the world to stop them paying themselves these obscene sums. One thing which is absolutely essential is - as the governor of the Bank of England has said - to separate investment banking and allied jiggery-pockery from normal clearing banks. Then if the investment banks go bust, we can let them. One problem is that bankers have glorious lobbying organisation and always stop governments interfering with their freedom to do as they dam well please.

Soon other banks will tell us how much is being spent on bonuses. But will they please stop talking about bonuses as if they were rewards for spectacular performances. Bonuses are part of the wage structures and get paid to everyone who bothers to turn up in the mornings. Because so many outsiders have been moaning about bonuses some institutions have acknowledged the truth and have deliberately doubled salaries and abolished the word "bonus".

During the next few weeks we can expect many politicians complaining about the bonuses, as they will next year and the year after if nothing gets done.

Don't hold your breath!
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It's No Yoke!

This week-end has seen yet another shock-horror health story caused by contaminated eggs. These highly nutritious globes seem to get into trouble on a regular basis. Was it not the suggestion, some years ago, that almost all eggs were contaminated with salmonella that resulted in the then Health Minster, Edwina Currie, having to resign? This time the problem is seen as dioxins. These are very nasty chemicals present in small quantities almost everywhere but which should be kept out of the food chain. Dioxins are produced mainly from combustion processes and are poly-cyclic compounds made up of carbon/oxygen rings generally with chlorinated aromatic hydro-carbons attached. More and more research indicates that these are nasty compounds capable of causing cancer - most compounds with aromatic benzine rings in them will do this. It is thought also that they can cause diabetes skin diseases and reduce sperm counts. Their worst characteristic is that the compounds can accumulate in animal tissues - particularly in fat layers - and remain there for many years.

So, how did we get dioxins in eggs, specifically? The problem is associated with a range of processed foods - mainly sponge cakes and biscuits - sold by all the major supermarkets in this country. The manufacturers were Kensey Foods in Launceston, Cornwall and Memory Lane Cakes in Cardiff. Both make own brand products for Tesco, Sainsbury's et al. They have all made their products using liquid eggs supplied to them pasteurised by a company in Holland. They got the eggs from Germany where they had been produced from hens fed with foodstuff from North Germany - Schleswig-Holstein. Apart from the tortured route followed by the contaminant, why do we have to buy Germano-Dutch eggs from hens in South Germany. Can't we produce liquid eggs in the UK - preferably somewhere in the West Country so that they don't have to be carted half-way across Europe just to make sponge cakes. Although at this stage no one seems to know how much dioxin was in the liquid eggs, "an expert" was prepared to say that the amount did not constitute a risk to human health. Nevertheless, the supermarkets have withdrawn all the contaminated products from sale - at least those that have not already been purchased, taken home and eaten.

This saga has the ring of Bernard Matthews and the contaminated turkey meat from somewhere in Europe. Why does the Food Standards Agency let this sort of thing happen? We may need to import some food stuffs but surely we can produce enough poultry in the UK?

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Howzat?

Well, I am back in Crawley after my Christmas & New Year in the North of England. I think this was the first time that I had spent new Year in the North since I started working in 1963. As long as I had a job as well as the gym, no matter what, I had to be ready to work on New Year's Day.

Today is a good day - in the way that Sellar & Yeatman defined all things as good or bad in "1066 And All That" - comprising 105 good things, 5 bad kings and 2 genuine dates. The only genuine dates that anyone could remember - based on research conducted at an Eton & Harrow match - and you couldn't have anywhere more representative than that - were 1066 and 55 BC. My own research would suggest that 55 BC is falling out of memory - it is a long time ago, after all - and only 1066 and William the Conqueror survive. But, perhaps, 2011 will become a memorable date? Because today, the 7th January 2011, the England cricket team trounced Australia in Australia. You may think trounced is too strong a word but it is not. This Australian team lost comprehensively. They won in Perth but otherwise they were beaten in all departments by a united England team that was in another class. Four times England made over 500 runs in an innings and in Sidney they scored 644 to record the highest ever England total against Australia - exceeding, even, the 635 achieved in the timeless test 1928/29. In Sidney, three of the last five wickets accumulated over 100 runs - another record for any test match. The third highest England total against Australia was the 620 for 5 declared in Adelaide. Alistair Cook scored more runs in 7 innings that any man except Don Bradman and with an average on 127 again he exceeded every batsman except Bradman. He spent over 36 hours at the crease, which was a record for any batsman from any country in any 5 match test series. The England score of 517 for 1 declared in Brisbane was another record. And so it goes on. This series has turned over the record books and none of it to the advantage of Australia. England win the series 3 to 1 with one match drawn and each of those wins was achieved with a margin of an innings and plenty of runs. Everyone in the England camp must be very satisfied with they way that they have performed. They will enjoy their triumph and will be welcomed to 10 Downing Street when they return but there will be no bus tour - and that must be good.

I suppose that I ought to order a very big well-cooked plate of humble pie. I thought, after Perth, that this test series was going to be a close fought struggle in the last two tests. I had history on my side. England have a long established propensity for batting collapses and this appeared to be the case in Perth. But I was wrong. They batted like never before in both Melbourne and Sidney. But the end for Australia must have been set when they were all out in the First Innings of the 4th Test for 98 - their lowest total ever in an Ashes Test in Australia. England did trounce Australia and both teams got exactly what they deserved. I hope that I will be wrong again in the future when I appear sceptical of the prospects of English [or British] teams and individuals in international competitions.

So, you can see that today really is a good day.

And Good Day to you, mate

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