Beckham to the Rescue
The English World Cup Bid is in trouble. Just too many egos and too many faceless bureaucrats.
So today, David Beckham has been pressing flesh and smoothing up to those that make the decisions in FIFA.
He’s a star.
Lowering the Drink Drive Limit
The government has asked a legal expert to examine whether the drink drive limit should be lowered.
I’m not bothered for myself, as I usually only drink a reasonable amount each night in the privacy of my own home. Strangely, over the past few months, when I have gone out for a drink, it’s usually been for a meal as well and the amount I’ve drunk has been usually in the order of a glass of wine. Or I’ve been on a bicycle or driven by one of my children, none of whom drink alcohol.
But I am bothered for the pubs I visit locally. Will they still survive if patrons don’t drink? I suspect that as we never see a policeman in this part of Suffolk, that no-one would get caught unless they crashed.
But the whole episode shows the stupidity of Prudence and his government. He would never get the law on the statute book before the next election, so he would surely lose enough votes in the run-up to make it absolutely sure that Labour was voted out by a landslide.
The other parties must be laughing their heads off.
But anyway it’s all right for our national politicians. They live a lot of the time in London with tubes, buses and taxis. Many of them too have chauffeurs.
If like me you live in deepest Suffolk, we have no buses and tubes, and taxis to get home will often cost more than a meal for one with wine.
Tiger Woods and Jesper Parnevik
Golf is a very boring pastime. It is not a sport and shouldn’t be in the Olympics. But occasionally it gets livened up by the odd scandal or spat. Tiger Woods has done something, but if most of us had done it, we would not make headlines even in the East Anglian Daily Times. He should be left alone to sort his problems out.
Then Jesper Parnevik puts the boot in, suggesting that Tiger’s wife should have used a bigger club.
Just imagine them being the last pair in an important tournament. Or playing each other as the last single in a very tight Ryder Cup.
Golf just got a whole lot more interesting!
Someone is Using the Cambridge Busway
Busway stories seem to be like buses; you wait ages for one and then another comes straight after it.
So here’s one about free runners using the busway.
Social Networking is Good for Your Writing
A study has shown that children who use technology write better.
Children who blog, text or use social networking websites have better writing skills than those who do not, according to the National Literacy Trust.
I’ve always thought this and it’s nice to be proved right.
At school my English was atrocious and I just about scraped through my O-Level. I struggled along until I met a guy called Stephen Allender, who worked for a company called OTMA. In one course he straightened my writing out.
Looking back, I can see that what I lacked was rules, fluidity and practice. He told me to write in the first person, gave me a set of rules and this then enabled me to get the fluidity. I was also working for ICI and had to write lots of notes and letters, so that gave the practice.
Social networking, such as FaceBook, Bebo and MySpace, are the ideal places to get the practice you need. Often it is easy because you may be sending a message to someone you don’t know, so there is a low embarrassment factor.
Sadly no-one has been able to do anything for my handwriting.
Cambridge Busway Builders Take a Break
It’s late and now it’s going to be two weeks later as now the builders of the Cambridge Busway are taking a two week break over Christmas!
Felixstowe Ferry
Although I wasn’t exactly in love with Felixstowe, where I spent some of my childhood, I did like Felixstowe Ferry. Not that I sailed or swam, but it was just such a lovely place for a walk.
I walked there yesterday in the rain, as I’d made a visit to the dentist.
Little has changed, except that there is now a prominent fish shop. But the cafe, the shacks, the boat-yard, the sailing club, the two pubs and the Martello towers were all here when I walked and cycled there in the 1960s.
Non-Joined Up Thinking
On Saturday, I’m playing real tennis at Oxford University. As I want to go shopping in London afterwards, I intend to drive to Blackhorse Road and then get the train.
Type Blackhorse Horse and Oxford into the usually excellent National Rail web site and you get wonderfully tortuous routes from Blackhorse Road to Paddington. One takes the Victoria line to Finsbury Park and then says you should get the main line from Finsbury Park to Kings Cross.
Wouldn’t it be easier to just stay on the tube?
Remember that to calculate tube journey times, you count the stations and multiply by two. Then add in five for each interchange and that gives you the answer in minutes.
So Blackhorse Road to Paddington should take twenty-six minutes for the thirteen stations and another five for the exchange at Oxford Circus. I think that the exchange at Oxford Circus, is just a fifty metre walk through an overbridge, as the Bakerloo and Victoria lines are paired in that station.
The RBS Dilemma
The Royal Bank of Scotland is now 70% owned by the taxpayer. Note the word taxpayer and that means you and me. Well, I suppose it might not mean you, as you might be in New York, New South Wales, New Zealand or New Caledonia.
But the dilemma will hit us all in the next few years as we struggle to get the economy under control.
In the red corner you have the public and the government, who for all sorts of reasons find million pound bonuses obscene. And in the blue corner you have the Banks, who say that they need to pay these bonuses to attract the best talent, so that they make higher profits in complex and difficult to understand markets.
This excellent article in The Times sums it all up well. The government wants to veto the bonuses and if they do, then the board of RBS will resign.
The Treasury signalled last night that it was prepared to veto a £1.5 billion bonus pool at Royal Bank of Scotland in a move that could trigger the resignation of the bank’s board.
RBS directors have been advised by the bank’s lawyers to resign if a Treasury bonus veto means they are unable to run the bank commercially and in the best interests of all shareholders.
People close to the Treasury signalled last night that Alistair Darling would throw out any bonus plan at RBS that was much higher than last year’s £1 billion. “We would not expect to see any significant increases in bonus payments. I think most people would see 50 per cent as a major increase,” one Treasury insider said.
RBS is expected to make £6 billion in profits this year from investment banking, implying a bonus pool 50 per cent higher than last year.
Is this blackmail? Yes! But is it sound business? Yes!
It’s actually more complex than you think.
Take total tax. Corporation tax on companies is lower than that for individuals. So am I right in thinking that high bonuses might actually return more money to the government? But that is a practical not an emotional response.
How true is RBS’s assertion that they need to pay the bonuses to get the right people to manage their investments? In my business life, I have often found that you have a lot more talent in a company than you think you have, but those in charge like to keep the minions down, as they see them as a threat. So perhaps, a little bit of intelligent management might improve matters. I don’t know! But I have worked with people at the highest level in a clearing bank and know that there is a lot of nonsense there. I suspect there still is!
Now let’s suppose that to get round the bonuses, RBS got some other company to manage their investments. I don’t know whether this is possible, but I suspect that it would probably cost them an arm and a leg to make the same six billion pounds. Probably one and a half billions of arms and legs. And most of that would probably never see a British tax authority again, so we, the tax payers, would lose.
So it’s difficult!
What we actually need is a change of culture.
Banks, no matter what we think, are a short-term business. For instance, a main board director of a major clearing bank, once told me that a third of their profits came from overnight money and the interest on money that had not been cleared. That’s why banks don’t transfer money instantly!
So how can we make things better?
Economists have talked of a transaction tax on banks, to move them away from short-term thinking, but that would only move the business to somewhere that doesn’t charge. So as with anything we need global standards and a level playing field.
So it will be a difficult and long uphill struggle to make the banks appear ethical in everybody’s eyes.
For my personal banking, I don’t use a bank, but a building society through the Internet and Zopa, the peer-to-peer lender. The former transfers my money efficiently and manages my credit cards. And the latter pays me around five percent on savings, with the ability to withdraw the money gradually if I need it. To get the same rate with a bank, I’d have to lock the money in for ever.
This is a model that many others will follow, leaving the global fruit machine to the so-called professionals. Unfortunately, banks will probably do their utmost to strangle innovative competitors like Zopa.
So we must educate everybody in the Internet and personal finance, so that they can make reasonable decisions for themselves. Many web sites do this very successfully.
But to return to the original dilemma.
Should the government limit bonuses for banks in which we have the major shareholding?
In my view they should not!
Why?
It will heap more bad publicity on the banks and hopefully push most of us to look for better and more ethical ways of handling our money.
The Anonymous Widower 