What Do Saudi Arabia, Russia and the Vatican City Have In Common?
According to tonight’s Evening Standard, they’ve all had diplomats arrested for drink driving in the last three years in London by the Met. Saudi Arabia had four, so I suppose it’s now alright for expats to drink in that country! In that time, 59 diplomats or their family members were alleged to have committed various offences, including fraud, robbery, rape and other sexual offences. One from Oman, even made a bomb threat.
But of course none were punished, as they all claimed diplomatic immunity.
Isn’t it about time, this arcane law was scrapped.
A Cable Thief Finally Wins a Darwin Award
After several attempts recently, like this one and these on the Central line in London, someone has finally won a Darwin Award in Leeds.
I know it’s sad when someone dies, but it does appear that in this case the electricity company involved has done a lot to make the site safe.
The Unbelievable Case of the Hacking of Milly Dowler’s Phone!
I wrote a few months ago about how easy it is to hack many mobile phones. Basically, if your pin is still set to the factory default, the averagely competent ten year old can read your messages and do other things with it.
You could make out a case for some phones to be hacked, especially if a compromising or criminal scandal that has ramifications for us all is ongoing.
but no-one, and especially the editor of a newspaper or the child’d parents could sanction the hacking of the phone of an young girl, as appears to have happened in the Milly Dowler case.
Obviously, to hack a phone you need its number and the problem here is that I suspect that the average child has given their mobile number to dozens of friends and some have even posted it on-line.
But at least, it should be possible to find out the numbers of those, who called Milly’s number and when they did it. It should also be possible to find the number of the perpetrator of this horrendous act. But I suspect that the hacker would have used an untraceable number, from perhaps a pay-as-you-go phone that they bought for cash in a no-questions-asked shop.
There is only one sentence for newspapers that do this sort of thing, if it is fact proved that they did. And that is that they have to suspend publication for an appropriate time.
If you read the headlines of today’s papers, the tabloids mention nothing about the Milly Dowler case. In my view, this indicates that they all know a lot more about phone hacking than they care to disclose.
“Banking Will Be The Mining Industry of the Nineties”
My old friend and bank manager, David, said that quote about 1995 or so. At the time he had just been promoted to Business Banking Director of Lloyds Bank. One day, I’ll tell everybody about the rest of that lunch, but I suspect that some of the guilty are still involved in banking.
What I would say, and I know others will agree, although one has now joined David as one of the Devil’s right hand men, is that there never ever was another bank manager who was as good as David, when it came to guiding and nurturing companies from inception to stardom. In some ways though, he was a rogue. But he was always a rogue on the side of the angels.
He had seen banks at all levels and knew that they were massively overstaffed and that the only way in his view they could survive and prosper was by cutting out the deadwood. He told me that what had happened to the miners would happen again to workers in the banking industry.
And then yesterday, Lloyds announced a lot of job losses.
So David was eventually right, but he had seen the writing on the wall all those years ago.
House Fires Are a Problem of the Young Affluent
This may seem strange, as headlines often say fires are caused by stupid smokers and others, but this report on the BBC, says those that cause accidental domestic fires are often young, have a degree and a good job, and may well have just been down the pub.
Does Ed Milliband Want To Be Labour Leader?
Ed Milliband is one of these people, who are very anonymous. Take most senior politicians and you have an image of them in your mind. If you look at Labour politicians of the last few years, there were a few characters, whether you liked their policies or not.
Surely though Ed Milliband must be one of the most unrecognisable Labour politicians of recent years as he just looks like so many of the others.
So why is this a problem?
If say I see someone on the television news saying something that I might find interesting, I like to know who’s speaking. With Ed Milliband, unless there’s a caption under the screen, I have difficulty recognising him.
And it’s not just Labour politicians, it’s a good percentage of all of them. I suspect that the selection process is so tight these days, that people like Kenneth Clarke, Boris Johnson, John Prescott and many others would not be selected. If you look at the women politicians, the ones that stand out have their little quirks. Just like my neighbour many years ago, Gwyneth Dunwoody.
To illustrate my point, there’s a government minister on the box at the moment, and I’ve no idea who he is.
I would think that Ed Milliband could rectify this anonymity problem, but he diesn’t seem to be trying hard.
So why did I give this post the title I did?
It would appear that he is not backing the strikes today. Is this because he is trying to be sensible or because he doesn’t want the job. The BBC puts their view here.
If he isn’t backing the strikes, his stance is surely a very simple way to alienate a large proportion of his supposedly core support.
You might ask what my view is on the strikes. I’m usually against strikes as in most cases the fact that a strike is called is a failure of company and employees to see the sensible solution. I’m not going to name them as I don’t want to shilt them, but there are lots of good companies and organisations, where there has never been a sniff of a strike.
With pensions, there was bound to be a problem, as the numbers just don’t add up. And they haven’t for years! So the blame for this problem is all of those politicians of the last fifty years or so, who put their head in the sand and hoped that some new disease would start to kill people at 65.
Farewell Cheque Guarantee Cards
I moved my account to Nationwide, when Barclays took over the Woolwich some years ago. I never ever used the cheque guarantee card that I received.
So I don’t think I’ll miss the fact that they’ve been abolished.
Will anyone?
AXA Takes The Moral Route
AXA has announced that it has decided not accept referral fees from personal injury lawyers.
This good stance may cost them a few millions, but how much extra business will this moral stance gain the company? After all, companies in retail like John Lewis, IKEA and Dixons in my experience lately, have used similar approaches. So why shouldn’t an insurance company attempt to make money by doing the right thing?
Let’s hope other companies do similar things! After all people have limited amounts of disposable income these days, so are they more likely to do businss with a company with a good ethical stance.
Would Any Sane Person Buy Into the Greek Privatisation?
Let’s say you are the CEO of a utility company, which has a good record of managing water supply in say, Britain, France or Germany.
If you were asked to participate in the buy-out of a Greek water company would you be interested? Given the feeling in Greece and the attitudes of the workers to the proposed privatisations to help bail the country out, I think you would probably say no, as you value your health and you don’t want to be fired by the shareholders of your company.
I suspect very few companies will actually get involved in providing the finance, unless the prices are so low. But then if that is the case, Greece will not be able to meet its debts.
So are we back to square one with the Greeks?
No! Square zero maybe or even square minus one!
On the other hand consultancy about the privatisations might be a nice wheeze! But who will pay you, if no-one will provide the finance.
This Must Not Happen Again!
On paper and in the news this trial for environmental crime looks like a good result for the Environment Agency.
But should they have acted a lot earlier to put this criminal, who used threats and intimidation to make money by dumping toxic waste in the countryside, out of business.
Who too, is going to pay for the clean-up of the site?
The Anonymous Widower 