Betrayal
David Horowitz emails me from his Desk:
America's most staunch ally in the war on terror is in great danger.
Bloody hell! There's nothing about it on the BBC. In fact the BBC is still working, so I assume there's been no attack yet. But what can he mean? Are their French ships in the channel? Argentinians on the Shetlands?
Our ally is Israel, and it has been in great danger since it was founded sixty years ago
Oh.
Labels: War
The "Coping Classes"
Good lord, households on £88,000 a year are now the "professional poor". Here's an article that surpasses even the whinging of
Nick Cohen or the entitlement culture of
Nigel Farndale. It might be a bit tongue-in-cheek, it's hard to say.
"The Coping Classes"Of course the premise the entire article is based on, that
According to research by the price comparison website uSwitch, disposable incomes have plunged to their lowest levels for a decade, thanks to a 42 per cent rise in the cost of essential household goods.
is utter hogwash, as even someone with the
slightest awareness of economic and price trends would know.
Let's just recap just some of the errors she makes
* The survey she refers to does not show disposable incnome is at its lowest level for a decade. In fact the survey (which is not reliable) shows household income has risen by nearly 50% in that decade.
* What it purports to show that the % of income that is left over after bills is at its lowest for a decade. It doesn't reall do this either, given its definition of bills is selective, and in some cases misleading (internet services?)
* She forgets that expenditure on many items has risen enormously as the costs have decreased. For example, she notes that "we're dolefully flying with Ryanair rather than BA", rather forgetting that people 20 years ago didn't fly with BA on weekend jaunts to New York or Madrid - they didn't fly at all. She seems to have been on holiday in the last three years to a small village in Spain, a five star hotel in Puglia, similar in Bahamas and Mauritius.
* House prices - these are always a cost in these whinges, until they are falling, when they are an indictment of the government.
And so on, but I can't go on.
Labels: house prices, Nick Cohen, Whinging
Matthew Elliot will say anything
Matthew Elliott, chief executive of the TaxPayers’ Alliance,
said: “Taxpayers will be sickened that ordinary families are struggling to pay their taxes so money can be spent on monsters like Maxine Carr.
“It is time we got our priorities right – punishing the innocent with high taxes while subsidising criminals is very twisted logic.”
Via
Obsolete.
Labels: blogs, Pressure Groups
Northern Rock
George Osborne lays out the alternative options:
"Then we could have some kind of Bank of England reconstruction or we could have some private sale options which until yesterday we were told were available," the Tory shadow chancellor said.
Labels: Economcs, Osborne
Ken Livingstone
Nick Cohen
here says why Livingstone must be defeated (I believe he is going to vote for Boris Johnson, but it is not clear from this piece). Cohen's main devastating charge (he starts and ends with it) is not that Livingstone wants to tax couples on £100k a year more, but that he gave the eulogy at someone called Gerry Healey's funeral (Oliver Kamm, who I don't think will be voting in the election, has some more
here].
There's something a bit puzzling however. Gerry Healey died in 1989, his funeral was in 1990. Presumably it was a public event - certainly Livingstone owns up to having gone - and as one that apparently was one of the most important events in the history of the British left (more important than even the Euston Declaration, maybe). Yet curiously Nick Cohen was an enthusiastic supporter of Ken Livingstone in 1999, ten years later, urging him to stand as independent (against the official Labour candidate, Dobbo, for whom I voted) and put his faith in democracy. A journalist as well connected and intelligent as Nick Cohen must have known about that eulogy (and the GLC) then when he was urging him to stand.
The other thing that confused me was that Oliver says of Livingstone's Fair Fares policy that "it was a straight subsidy to tourists". I was unaware of this - I thought Londoners also could take advantage of the lower-cost fares.
Labels: Nick Cohen
DUNCAN HUNTER IS OUT OF REPUBLICAN RACE
More soon.
Labels: Who?
Housing survey
This
article is by no means the worst culprit - the headline is to some degree sustainable - but the statement:
House prices across the UK tumbled in December at the fastest pace in more than 15 years
I don't think is. The survey reports that the number of surveyors reporting falls is larger than the number of surveyors reporting increases by the largest margin ever. It is possible that the falls they are reporting are very small. In fact given the evidence of the other housing surveys, that must be the case.
Labels: economics, house prices
Shocker - UK booted out economic freedom club
So says
Ambrose Evans Pritchard. Taking these kind of surveys seriously is pretty silly - they are incredibly sensitive to small changes in subjective criteria, and their record for predicting economic success is small (for example see here on a
competitiveness survey).
Also what AEP doesn't tell his readers is that this is the UK's third highest score since 1997, beaten only by the 2006 and 2007 survey. We're doing much 'better' than in the late 1990s, and early 2000s, not that I believe you can draw anything like that conclusion from it.
Labels: economics
People 'fleeing' London
Has been in thew news recently, for reasons stretching from the rat-race to crime to immigrants. This Jan Moir
article rather stretches it to the limit.
Last year, nearly a quarter of a million decent, law-abiding citizens packed their bags and left the capital for good, seeking what they hope will be a better life elsewhere...While their fairytale, roses-around-the-door belief in the safety of the countryside and the romantic ideal of a thatched cottage for two is touching, it does point to an underlying urban unease.
Er, how does she know they are decent, law-abiding folk who want fairytale, roses-around-the-door places in the countryside?
I've read the same Population Trends as she has (although it should be pointed out that I can't see 2007 figures, which she seems to have access to), and it says nothing about that at all. Might not a reasonable number of the 246,700 (3.3%) of people who left London in 2006 be indecent, or law-unabiding, or even not after a roses-around-the-door countryside idyll? It's hardly unknown for criminals to leave inner London for the surrounding counties, after all.
In any case, it's not much of a new thing. Indeed twenty years previous, in 1986,a not that dissimilar 232,400 people (3.4%) left London for other parts of the nation. It's true that the net position, ie outflows less inflows, of Britons to other parts of the country was a negative 78,800 in 2006, the biggest net outflow since 2005, which itself was the biggest net outflow since 2004, which in turn was the biggest since 2003. Which was a big year.
From the data its almost impossible to see why there has been this small increase. The age profile is much as you would expect - those in their mid-30s with children. The data doesn't tell us where they went to, but if we compare last year with 1981, which saw only a small 32,000 net outflows, the main difference nationwide appears to be that the North, Scotland and Northern Ireland have stopped seeing people leave, presumably on grounds of a better economic situation.
Trevor Phillips' concept of 'white flight' is also hard to confirm. I don't doubt that for some people this is a factor - and hardly a new one. Also the boroughs with the largest outflow tend to be those in East and South East London that have the highest proportion of non-white immigrants, although given over 50% of the immigrants come from mainly white Eastern Europe it is difficult to separate populations and immigrants. Furthermore if there is such a link (either with immigrants per se or non-white ones specificially), then simple economics, that it is inevitable that many immigrants will live in those boroughs and hence its previous inhabitants will choose to sell up and move to 'better' (but proportionately less expensive) regions of the capital, or to cheaper places outside London, would explain much of the movement. Unfortunately the data doesn't - except perhaps to newspaper columinists - tell us specifically where the migrants came from or to where they went.
I don't know also whether London life is deterioating. House prices - a measure of the market's worth of living in London, rather than anecdotal evidence from journalists or bureaucrats - suggest it is much more desirable than 10 years ago. The city as a whole - in my opinion - looks a lot smarter now than at anytime previously. Transport on the whole is easier, although obviously for drivers more expensive. Crime figures are mixed.
Labels: London
Blair to be paid $5m a year
Robert Peston
claims the £500,000 figure was about five times out. $5m is a lot of money (even Nick Cohen would probably concede it was 'middle class') but sounds more reasonable than £500,000, which I can't imagine Blair would have been chuffed at.
Labels: economics, Income
Burrell to take Diana secrets to the grave
This
must anger people who have bought the numerous books he's written. Clearly wasn't even trying.
Labels: Diana, Royals
Currency speculation and Britain's economy
The pound has slipped to around $1.95, which makes my long-running and modest currency speculation firmly in profit (I think mine averages about $2.04).
The pound's fall has been more pronounced against the euro, where a pound now buys only 1.32 euros, its lowest since the single currency's launch in 1999 [1]. Whilst the euro is probably overvalued at these rates worldwide there seems little reason to believe it is going to fall against the pound over the next year. This has prompted a lot of bizarre comments about GDP - last week we had the
news (now not true) that the UK had overtaken the US in GDP per capita, and now we have the news that the UK has
slipped below France in total GDP. The explanation in both cases is the exchange rate, when converted into PPP it is not true in both cases [2] [3]
[1] Around the time the euro notes and coins were introduced the pound traded at around 1.62. This also happens to be the number of km in a mile, and thus a few simple remembered conversions - 50 to 80, 66 to 100 - were useful. When a bit later the pound had fallen to 1.4 I remember driving in France and converting km to miles at that rate too, and was surprised to arrive earlier than expected.
[2] There are reasons to believe that Eurozone GDP might be understated. Tim Worstall has shown that there is more unrecorded domestic work in many of those countries than the US, and the UK probably leans to the US model.
[3] When comparing GDP of nations in power terms then market exchange rates are probably better than PPP. However while I think criticism of PPP on the grounds that it is difficult to compare consumption habits across countries is valid, it is also difficult to compare consumption habits across time, and yet there is a reasonable consensus that someone who earned £10,000 in 1970 had a higher income than someone who earns £10,000 today [not totally as some things were clearly worse in 1970].
Labels: currency speculation, economics, pound
What I read over Christmas
Rather mixed bag.
The Railway Man, by Eric Lomax: Quite a famous book, I believe, and the local library had it on sale for 10p. I would certainly recommend this - an emotional account of a British soldier who found himself captured the collapse of the Britisih Empire in fortress Singapore. Lomax then was transferred among various Japanese POW camps and tortured nearly to death, and his subsequent (much later) courageous meeting with and forgiveness of the Japanese soldier who witnessed first hand his torture.
The Decline and Fall of the British Empire - 1781 to 1997, by Piers Brendon - A staggering readable and enjoyable book on the pretty shoddy and unpleasant affair that was the British Empire. It contains some lovely descriptions of Imperial decline, e.g. this on Singapore: "Singapore was a place of 'high living and low thinking', where the idea of rationing was to serve game on meatless days. It was a 'cloud-cuckoo' island where it seemed perfectly natural for a women to refuse war work because she had entered a tennis tournament...The Prime Minister [Churchill] urged Percival to mobilise its population and fight to the finish. But, as Yamashita prepared his final assault, the island remained in state of fantasy and apathy. Cinemas were crowded, bands played on club lawns and dancing continued at Raffles Hotel. Censors forbid the word 'siege'. When a colonel arrived at the Base Ordnance Depot to collect barbed wire he found it had shut for a half-holiday. When a major tried to turn the Singapore Gold Club into a strong point its secretary said that a special committee meeting would have to be convened".
London Orbital, by Iain Sinclair: From the library. Something to do with the M25 but I haven't the foggiest what. Gave up half way.
Time to Declare, by David Owen: I was ill, OK? No, it's not OK, I realise that, but actually I quite enjoyed this book which I found on my bookshelf and presumably bought at some point. Much like Carol Gould's writings you can read easily between the lines as to what was really happening. When you think 'that's a bit unreasonable behaviour' in a book that presumably gives his good side you know he must have been quite prickly. Amusing cameos by Polly Toynbee and Daniel Finkelstiein.
Is it just me or is everything shit? by Steve Lowe and Alan Mcarthur: From the library this one, which is the perfect place from which to get it, as you'll not read it twice. Actually quite amusing though.
The Anatomy of Power, by James Margach: A friend gave me this as a Christmas present and it's fantastic. Written by a political journalist in 1979, the same year that he died, this gives his view of what it takes to be PM based on his observations of PM he knew during his career. This starts with Lloyd George, and ends with Thatch, so that's quite a lot. Particularly good on just how ill many PM were when in office.
The Queen - a biography, by Ben Pimlott: It was always thought a bit strange that
Pimlott, a left-wing historian who died in 2004, would write a biography of the Queen. It's not a bad effort, with the emphasis as you might expect on her political role. Unfortunately the conclusion is broadly that she hasn't got much of one, so the book doesn't really ever get going.
The World in 2008, by the Economist Group: This annual publication gets worse every year. I think that's partly because the internet has rather rendered it less than useless, and also the handicap that they set themselves by trying to forecast 2008 events from mid-2007. I was mildly surprised to see that the deadlines allowed reference to the subprime crisis. Oh, and I've just found you can read it on the internet.
Labels: Reading
"It just felt right"
"I've always been a Diana fan, but last year I woke up one day and decided to paint her name on my forehead - it just felt right," he says.
Check out the
picture. It doesn't seem right to me.
Labels: Diana
No Turkey at Tesco
Carol Gould heads to Tesco, Little Venice, where they apparently weren't stocking turkey for Christmas 2007.
The sales help told me they were not stocking turkey at all this year. Incredulous, I asked him if people were driving him mad with requests for turkey and other Christmas foods. He said I was the first person to ask for turkey that whole day. His arrogance and total disdain for this holiday made my blood boil.
You can imagine the conclusion, but here it is anyway:
If this is how multiculturalism is bringing about social cohesion then the entire enterprise is a failure and a disgrace.
Anyway Tesco, Little Venice, unless she has dramatic area inflation, is the one on Clifton Road (nr an organic butchers, which I assume was closed on that day). I know it quite well, it is not a hotbed of multiculturalism.
Labels: Carol Gould
You read it here first
Some economic thinktank has woken up to the old news that measured in a common currency using the market's exchange rate UK GDP per head is higher than US GDP per head. It's reported (correctly)
here and (incorrectly) in the Observer, which I can't find the link for now. Update: Oh dear the Telegraph's is the
worst of them all.
The figures are not wrong, I've been banging on about this myself for a long time (see links below), and there are reasons to prefer either PPP or market exchange rates, but you need to be careful not to assert things about 'living standards' if you are using market exchanges rates, as they definitely don't describe that for countries that have not too dissimilar spending habits.
http://fistfulofeuros.net/afoe/political-issues/its-expensive-but-were-rich
http://www.matthewturner.co.uk/Blog/2007/07/british-higher-dollar-income-per-head.html
http://www.matthewturner.co.uk/Blog/2007/07/it-keeps-rising.html
http://www.matthewturner.co.uk/Blog/2007/11/getting-richer.html
It won't last, as I've been banging on about for almost as long. Larry Elliot
sets out a case for a weaker pound.
Labels: Dollar, economics
Henry Jackson and the Japanese
Larry in the comments to
this post asks if I got a reply from the H'S'JS on the issue of whether their claim that Scoop ever regretted his support for the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII has any foundation. The answer is I didn't.
The statement I link to in
the post still remains.
However I note in the 'About Henry Jackson'
section it does not mention he regretted it and there is a bit of an html link (which doesn't work) that opens the possibilty that there has been an edit. I can't remember what it used to say, or whether it has been changed at all, however.
Labels: Henry Jackson Society
One for the punditocracy
Given their usual practice of repeating old politicians I'm surprised I haven't seen this, vis-a-vis Gordon Brown. Asquith in his memorial address for Campbell-Bannerman:
"There have been men who, in the cruel phrase of the ancient historian, were universally judged to be fit for the highest place only until they attained and held it"
He went on to say that Campbell-Bannerman, naturally, was the opposite, whose 'fitness' was 'never adequately understood' until he was PM. I should add I don't necessarily hold this position with respect to Brown, depending on your perspective.
Labels: Quotes
Top 10 technology trends of 2008
according to the BBC include people having rather scary head transplants.
Labels: Technology, Web
