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?
Zopa Abandons Listings
Basically, Zopa had two different forms of lending; markets and listings.
Markets work by lenders getting together to fund loans to borrowers. All is done automatically by the computers and risk assessors in the middle.
Listings are best defined like this.
In a nutshell, they work just like an online auction, except that the ‘price’ comes down instead of going up.
Once a listing becomes 100% funded, you’ll see that the overall interest rate will begin to fall as lenders compete with each other to be included in the loan.
I never used them. And as they weren’t as popular as markets and were quite expensive to administer, Zopa have now dropped them.
A Bendy Bus Takes Early Retirement
The bendy buses on route 73 are going in September, but this one couldn’t wait to retire.
Luckily no-one was hurt and I don’t think anybody except fare dodgers will miss it!
What’s Gone Wrong With Murray?
He won the quarter-final at Wimbledon without any pain.
For us that is, not him!
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.
Raining Cats, Dogs and Hippotami
Returning from the London Wetland Centre, the rain was some of the worst I’ve seen for some time. I thought I was lucky, as I was on a brand-new Dennis bus on route 30. But the rain was so heavy, that the roof sprung a leak!
At least though my hay fever seems a bit better.
Stewed! For Lunch
For lunch today, I had a Chorizo, Chickpea and Pork Stew from a company called Stewed! in one of my old haunts, Wood Green. They don’t give an address, but it looks like it’s somewhere behind the old Haringey Town Hall and also the Barclays Bank, where my father used to have an account. He once told me that he was also involved in the training of a race horse somewhere in that area. Rumour has it, he was warned off for painting on the blaze of the horse with Meltonian. But then racing at Alexandra Palace was very dodgy between the wars.
The Stewed! was very good with some large pieces of sausage and meat and I’ll certainly buy some more. It was labelled gluten-free and now a couple of hours later, I’ve no reason to doubt their assertions on the packet.
I also liked the cooking method, which for someone with a slightly gammy left hand was easy, as the lid was simple to remove.
So good luck to them!
I bought mine from Waitrose, but I think Sainsburys stock them.
Pictures of the London Wetland Centre
I took quite a few pictures and some are shown here.
Note the Nene or Hawaiian Goose, which is the state bird of Hawaii. It is the world’s rarest goose and was once down to about twenty individuals. But these were collected by Sir Peter Scott at WWT Slimbridge and now there is a healthy population that has been reintroduced to its original home.
Sir Peter was the son of the famous Antartic explorer, but in my view was the much greater person, as he excelled in so many different fields. Everyone should read more about this remarkable man. Start at Wikipedia.
Remember though that people of my age are biased about Sir Peter and Sir David Attenborough, as they were the people who did more to shape intelligent television about the planet and its wildlife in the 1950s than anybody else. People forget that there was only one channel and when the BBC started a second one to compete with ITV, Sir David was one of its first controllers.
The Anonymous Widower 