Jobs! Jobs!

It's 10.30 pm on Monday 16 February and I have just been watching the Dispatches programme on Channel 4 in which Digby Jones investigated the growing problem of unemployment. Standing now at 1.97 million, the numbers out of work is likely to exceed 3 million this year. The method of counting the unemployed has been changed so much in the past that there is little room left for government massaging the figures downwards yet again. It is a depressing picture. Not just the obvious despair of those who had lost their jobs and who were being offered little prospect of any other job. One government minister, at least, thinks that we have already the worst financial conditions for a century. On the Dispatches programme of course, the small number of individuals that the programme focused on to present their picture could be unrepresentative of the overall situation. But I suspect that they were reasonably typical. The things that stood out were :

[a] The pitiful allowances paid to the unemployed - the Job Seekers

[b] The inability of the Job Centres to even cope with the numbers and fill in the forms, let alone actually find jobs.

[c] The modest levels of pay that all but one of the individuals enjoyed when in work - no £100,000 + salaries here.

[d] The efforts that the individuals were putting into trying to find a job - any job.

[e] The yawning gap between the public statements of government ministers and the reality. How can we pour vast sums into ruinously incompetent banks but not give any help to efficient and effective companies to preserved the integrity of their workforces for the future. Why can't we come up with a support structure in which the employee takes a wage cut, the employer pays him for working fewer hours and the government tops up the pay packet so that overall the employee gets 75% pay [say] but keeps his job?

On top of all this, we have the almost total lack of any government commitment for a real future. If we survive this depression, we can no longer have uncontrolled, unregulated banks and an economy based on gambling and debt. We have to make things which the world wants to buy. That means that, somehow or other, we have to re-build the manufacturing base that has been steadily destroyed since the Old Bat [Thatcher] started the rot.

I would like to be optimistic but we need competent leaders with vision. Where are they?

Olympian Bills

The building of the Great White Elephant on Hackney Marshes is proceeding apace with minimal attention to the global credit crunch. Indeed, never has the atmosphere of unreality seemed quite so dense around this mad project. From the start, I have been opposed to the idea of Britain even bothering to bid for the Olympics, let alone becoming successful and thus being committed to one gigantic waste of money. The whole project is surrounded by the most comprehensive programme of spin that we have ever been subjected to. The current expected cost is said to be £9.5 billion. This number excludes all kinds of things like security, transport improvements, etc - and God knows what else. Even so, the spinners will struggle to avoid us coming to realise that the actual cost will be nearer £20 billion. And then there is all the nonsense about Olympic Heritage. After the fortnight of Olympic endeavour, all being well, we will spend a few millions looking after unused stadiums for a year or two and then, like everybody else, we will start the work of demolition. The whole project is one of insanity. And, in order to get to this position, we - and other cities - go through a process of wining and dining, pimping and prostitution at a cost of £35m each in order to be given permission to chuck £10 billion or £20 billion at 2 weeks of minority sports.

Meanwhile, Canada is becoming worried about the cost of the Winter Olympics in 2010. Does Vancouver want them anymore? Canada has only just finished paying for the Olympics in Montreal in 1976 and now they look like being saddled with another long and crippling bill. It is very educational to look at the saga of the Olympic Stadium [Stade Olympique] in Montreal [picture on the left]. The original estimate for building this was $134 million. By the time it was opened for the Olympic Games in 1976, it had cost $265 million and was only half finished. In May of 1976, the Quebec government introduced a new tobacco tax to help pay for the stadium. It took another ten years before the roof was finally installed but there have been numerous problems with operating the roof; it is an all weather stadium with a roof that doesn't work too well in wind and rain. It has broken many times and collapsed completely on one occasion. The complex structure of the tower has caused many problems, has been partially destroyed by fire and rebuilt and taken years to finish; chunks have broken off at times and fallen onto the field during a football game. Officially Montreal finished paying for the stadium in November 2006 by which time the total cost for building, re-building, maintenance and repairs was $1.6 billion or 12 x the original estimate. It is not used much and is universally considered a white elephant. Let the London Olympic Delivery Authority be warned.

When will somebody get to draw up some realistic costs for staging these ridiculous games at the bidding stage and thus prevent any other country from embarking on the projects? Either hold the Olympics in Australia for ever - where they have plenty of room, good weather and an existing set of facilities - or abandon them for good.

Grassing Up The Cornflakes

How do they make breakfast cereals? These products seem to be unique in the world's basket of foodstuffs in that they bear no resemblance to any natural products. A chicken in a supermarket looks like a chicken; a tomato looks like a tomato; and so on. But a breakfast cereal? The main ingredients are, apparently, milled corn, sugar, malt flavouring and "high fructose corn syrup", ie more sugar. In the world of bodybuilders who have to care about nutrition, it has to be said, that cornflakes are not rated very highly - even to the point where it has been suggested, facetiously, that there is more nutrition in the cardboard box in which the cornflakes are supplied than in the cornflakes themselves. These comments may be not entirely fair. Cornflakes has almost entered the language as a generic term to describe all breakfast cereals; and cornflakes to most of us means Kellogs. Cornflakes have been around for more than one hundred years, since they were invented by the Kellog brothers "in their quest for healthy foods."

Kellogs as a company are known world-wide and what would be more natural for such a prominent American company than to promote the healthy image of cornflakes by printing pictures of an American Olympic champion all over their cornflake boxes [as well as the similar frosted flakes boxes]? Who could be more suitable than Michael Phelps, the slightly geeky looking swimmer who captured a fantastic 8 gold medals in the Beijing Olympics last summer? No doubt they agreed to pay Mr Phelps quite well for the use of his image - and good luck to him. All was fine and dandy until last week, when, a photograph appeared that seemed to show the swimmer smoking a bong. He subsequently admitted smoking marijuana and instantly Kellogs cancelled his contract with a company spokesman saying that Michael Phelps's behaviour was "not consistent with the image of Kellogs." Oh, come on. He was smoking a bit of grass, something that millions of others around the world were doing on that very same day in November 2008. This is a recreational drug, not a performance enhancing drug and a 23 year old, quite rich American was reported for smoking it at a party. Shock! Horror! To suggest that this damages the image of Kellogs is pure ........ hog-wash. But this nonsense does not end with the cancellation of the Kellogs contract and Phelps's humiliating apology. It is suggested that this minor misdemeanour will destroy the whole of his potentially $100,000,000.earning power because no public company will want to touch this tarnished man. Michael Phelps has my total sympathy and I hope that he can achieve everything that he deserves from his fantastic athletic endeavours. We are here witnessing corporate humbug and hypocrisy on the grand scale. Everybody wants to get in on the act of condemning the man for his horrendous transgression. Do they get cash back or just brownie points for their self-righteous outbursts? Are the people who tell us that Michael Phelps's career is in ruins such fine, pure, up-standing and free of all sin individuals that they can clamber onto their collective soap boxes, halos aglow and proclaim this rubbish? All this is an age when financial wizards around the world can bugger up the whole of the world economic structure, without, apparently, even giving up their bonuses.

If all this rubbish were not bad enough the anti-doping in sport quangos - anxious not to miss a chance for a bit more pontification - are suggesting that they will make an example of Phelps to send a message to all other world-class athletes who need to be shown who is boss. God! This world is run by madmen and sanctimonious prats.

Good luck Mr Phelps. May you get things sorted and don't dare light up an old-fashioned fag or the anti-smoking lobby will be after you as well. From now on, I will not be buying any cornflakes - but, then, I wasn't buying any before, either.

The President of Europe

I was about to write about my car but I got a bit of a rush of blood about Tony Blair. This obnoxious man is in the news again because he has [a] been discussing with President Obama the matter of God and his place in the life of Tony Blair and [b] his wish to be the first president of all Europe - a sort of latter day Holy Roman Emperor. Blair has few redeeming qualities. Without doubt, to my mind, he is the worst prime minister in my life time. There are some who believe that he and Bush should be charged with war crimes for what they have done in Iraq and in particular their by-passing the Geneva Convention in order to allow prisoners to be tortured. Blair is a man who makes me ashamed of being British - almost ashamed of being a human-being. Even when the man speaks with sincerity, he still sounds like a liar. At best his ever-so-humble, arrogant, self-righteous, patronising and slightly slippery delivery always puts me in mind of Uriah Heap in David Copperfield. Am I insulting Blair with my bigotry? I don't think so. The catalogue of his 10 years in office is one of maladministration, of destruction of our liberties, of government waste, of destruction of democracy, of cow-tailing to George Bush, of hypocrisy and incompetence.

If Blair becomes president of Europe, we must be allowed his promised vote on the European Constitution - or Lisbon Treaty as it is now known - so that we can vote ourselves out of this Tower of Babel.

Sir Humphrey Would Be Proud

Today we have been treated to the spectacle of four bankers - two each from RBS and HBOS - sitting before the Treasury Select Committee of the House of Commons trying to explain why their banks had lost so much money that they had gone bust and the extent of their combined incompetence had wrecked the economy. They are sorry, they say, as they pocket their still enormous salaries. For years, financial wizards have justified their gargantuan salaries and bonuses on the grounds that they were creators of great wealth. The trouble is that the good times were no better than a few good nights on a roulette wheel; the collapse shows that in the end it is only the casino that will win. And surely, no banker will think of his bank as no better than a casino? It was wealth created like the tricks of real wizards and conjurers; it was all smoke and mirrors - mere fantasy.

The financial industry still does not seem to appreciate the levels of anger in the general population, These people have lined their nests with great wads of banknotes for many years; they have been paid sums which no other profession could approach and yet when the whole pile of cards collapses it is the little people that will have to bale them out - and still they want their bonuses. The government is to investigate the banks and to consider the matter of bonuses. In an appointment of which Sir Humphrey Appleby would have totally approved, the government has selected someone who is "sound". A man who will know what is required; who will know what conclusions need to be drawn; who will take his time reporting; and who, finally, will recommend that hardly anything be changed. Is Sir David Walker likely to take a rigorous approach to his remit? Highly doubtful. He is there to engineer a paint job. To apply a coat of whitewash.

I want to see someone appointed who is not of "The City", is not a member of the financial establishment and will recommend a system of proper regulation of all parts of the system. They can have their investment banks and their hedge funds and the rest, but these must be separate from proper banks. As someone said recently - we need to have old-fashioned banks - boring institutions, where the managers borrow at 3%, lend at 5%, then go down the golf club. That is a business model that we can all understand.

The reason why these great disasters occur is that no one truly questions anything as long as the money continues to roll in. It was like that when Nick Leeson wrecked Barings Bank. Many people saw what he was doing but he made money and boosted the profits - and, presumably, the bonuses - until things went wrong and he panicked and he took bigger risks until the whole structure collapsed in ruins. Then, suddenly, no one knew.

There are many disasters in history where at the subsequent inquests the men in charge have apologized and said that they never knew. All of the men at the top of these banks knew and, for the most part, they gave the instructions. If what they have done is not criminal negligence, it should be.

Who will rid us of these profligate gamblers and spenders.

A Decent Pension

For some time it has been suggested that the State Pension paid in the UK has been in decline but no figures have been produced - until now. In January of this year a book was published by the Actuarial Profession. Entitled "100 Years of State Pension" it tells us that the State Pension introduced on January 1st 1909 was set at 10/- [50p] per week, equivalent to 25% of the national average wage at that time. Now one hundred years later it is 17% of national average wage. Surely this must be a great triumph of social policy and government management for the whole of a century. Admittedly, the pension is now paid when we reach the age of 65 instead of 70 but it is a crashing indictment of every government since WWII that we have gone backwards. Especially, it is an indictment of the last 11 years of a Labour government. Mrs Thatcher started the rot by linking the pension to the RPI instead of average wages a sleight of hand that guaranteed that the value of pensions as a percentage of average wage would for ever go downwards. We would expect that of the Tories and particularly Tories lead by the old bat Margaret Thatcher. But Labour has had time to change things and has chosen to do nothing. In fact the record of this Labour government on all matters of pensions has been abysmal. Gordon Brown has robbed private pension funds of £5 billion per year since he became chancellor in 1997; he has made no efforts to improve the State Pension beyond offering more means tested benefits - confident in the knowledge that applying is so complicated that at least half of those entitled will not get anything. Every year there is a feeling that he dislikes having to increase the pension at all. It has been calculated that if all the means testing were abandoned and the money spent directly on pensions the basic pension could immediately increase by £20 per week. Are government ministers concerned at all? Of course not, because all of them will get state guaranteed pensions, inflation proof and at levels that the rest of us can only dream about. Are they concerned that our State Pension is much the worst of any large country in the EU. The EU average is about 50% of average wage in each country.

There are frequent suggestions that we cannot afford to pay a decent State Pension. People are living longer and there will be fewer young people to keep the system afloat. How can anyone suggest this when we have financed a massive increase in payments to long-term unemployed since 2000; when all governments have consistently refused to address the massive cost of the pension scheme for public sector workers - a cost that is already heading for the stratosphere and made worse by the annual increase of 70,000 in the numbers employed in quangoes, in diversity co-ordination departments and in general paper shifting? I think we can assume that No.1 priority is to make sure that their pensions are OK and later look to see if there is anything they can consider doing for the rest of us. Surely not a high priority.

Lloyd George, thou shouldst be living at this hour.

Taking A Driving Test

I see that the BBC has found a woman in South Korea who has taken her written driving test 771 times. Surely this is a record. The 68 year old, who surely is not cut out to be a driver has achieved this staggering total in a mere 4 years — she is taking tests on average every 3 or 4 days. She needs a 60% mark to pass and so far she consistently got 30% to 50%. Showing great fortitude and confidence if only a limited grasp of reality, she remains undaunted and intends to try again. If by some strange and unexplained quirk of fate she manages to pass, then she can move on to the difficult bit of actually driving a car. This is, clearly, going to be her life's work. I can but wish Mrs Cha the very best of luck and advise the city fathers in Jeonju to be sure to inform the populace if and when Mrs Cha actually takes to the road.

Eric's mum says that she too had to take her test many times and that any suggestion that more than one of her driving examiners suffered nervous breakdowns was mere speculation and exaggeration. I asked Eric what he thought of his mum's driving but apparently he has never been with her in the same car. Eric's dad has always seemed remote - mainly because he is in a nursing home in Morecambe.

Want To Run Stoke?

Today I read that the City of Stoke-on-Trent is looking for a new Chief Executive to head the team of bureaucrats that run the place. This "challenging role" apparently requires someone with "a healthy sense of perspective." Such a healthy sense of perspective, in fact, that they are prepared to pay £195,000 per annum for the right man or woman to fill this post - which is about £50,000 more than they paid the previous holder of this office. Why has it gone up so much? Why in the name of God, can they even be allowed to offer a salary which is £10,000 more than that paid to the Prime Minister? It seems that even this nonsensical salary is by no means the highest in the land. That honour goes to the London Borough of Newham who pay £240,000 - or, at least, that's what everyone believes. I suppose it is possible that it may be even higher in the mad-cap world in which we live in these days.

Is Stoke a difficult place to run? Is it in a particular mess? The Job advert tells all applicants that they will have to "turn us around"? What can they mean?

An Egalitarian Society

For hundreds - even thousands - of years the lot of the working classes in the western world was one of survival and nothing more. They lived in poor conditions, short of food, laboured long hours and lived short lives. Always there were the very rich who lived in comfort in grand houses and with armies of domestic servants to look to their every whim. Nothing changed very much until the coming of the Industrial Revolution. Technology and mass production improved the lot of everyone but after the struggles of the Victorian era it was the working classes that gained the most. We still have many old world rich people but the lives of the working classes in the western world are not, generally, ones of deprivation. There is very little variation in life expectancy between rich and poor

But have the efforts of the masters of high finance in the banks and hedge funds actually been working to reverse the progress of the last 150 years and create a new class of super-wealthy supported on the backs of ordinary people? It certainly seems that way Are we prepared to let them carry on collecting vast pay packets while the rest of us just stump up the cash when things go wrong?

I am going to think a bit more about this and see what Eric's mum thinks.

How Much Is A Financier Worth?

Stephen Green, the Chairman of HSBC - one of the less indebted banks in the UK - has said, while attending the Davos get-together of senior politicians and financiers , that bonuses in the financial sector are a reasonable part of pay packages. So far OK. What the inhabitants of the real world object to, Mr Green, is the sheer magnitude of remuneration packages paid to all employees . Last year you were paid, apparently, £4,000,000, which, I believe is a ridiculous amount and so are the pay packages of almost everyone in this fantasy world of high finance. I have already commented on the pay outs at Merrill Lynch. It seems that no matter how great the disasters engineered by these financial wizards they still believe they should be paid 10x national average wages. The Prime Minister is paid £187,000 per annum. Sure he has free use of 10 Downing Street and Chequers but these are his places of work and he can be chucked out at a moments notice. He has expenses in addition, of course, but the present PM is extremely frugal in this respect. Why should an average employee in an investment bank be paid, on average, twice as much as the PM? It's crackers and some time something has to be done to stop this uncontrolled greed paid for by us.