Who’s To Blame for the Eurocrisis?
I just found this rather deep and thorough approach on the BBC.
To summarise, it says that because France and Germany cooked the books, with Gordon Brown’s help, to get round the Maastrict rules, that it is now acceptable for anybody to overspend.
More on Stehen Hester and That Bonus
He is a rich man in his own right. If I was him, I’d tell the stupid politicians I didn’t want the bonus, resign and tell them, where to put their job. I would know that I’d done a good job and could take my pick of a lot of well-paid jobs out there.
If that happened, it would cost all the UK Taxpayers even more and who would most politicians blame. David Cameron and the Tory members of this current government, who have nothing to do with this mess. RBS was such a state in 2010, that it should have been liquidated. But Gordon Brown needed the votes! Especially in Scotland!
Hester’s Bonus
A lot of people are outraged about the size of Stephen Hester’s bonus at the Royal Bank of United Kingdom Taxpayers. I’m not because although he got £963,000 it’s all in shares, which means it’s in his interest to raise the share price as much as possible by running the bank to the best of his ability. After all, there are still quite a few small shareholders in the bank and they would be glad to see their worthless investment be worth something. And of course, there’s the big shareholding in the hands of UK Taxpayers. So if Hester looks after himself with these shares, we’ll all benefit.
But if he fails, we’ll have a worthless bank on our hands, which will probably be closed with the loss of many jobs.
I actually think that it should have been liquidated, but that would have been a disaster for all the small shareholders out there. Gordon Brown couldn’t afford all those lost votes in Scotland. Or in England too!
RBS Charges 2190% for Unauthorised Overdraft
The Sunday Times is reporting that RBS, or as I think it should be called, the Royal Bank of UK Taxpayers, is charging this rate for an unauthorised overdraft.
So the message is don’t go overdrawn if you bank with this wunch of bankers. But as a taxpayer, surely it is not a bad thing if a few idiots do, as they will help to make the bank profitable, so we can pass it on to another set of mugs.
On the other hand, we could bleed it dry, so it didn’t make any profits and then it might go bankrupt after which the liquidator could have their share and then pass two-fifths of five-eighths of fuck all to the government. After all Gordon Brown got us into this position by saving the bank in the first place, so that Scotland might vote for him. It was a good idea, as it looks like more voters north of the border preferred the SNP to Nulabor.
As an aside why is it always two-fifths of five-eighths of fuck all? A quarter would be simpler.
Our New Aircraft Carriers Won’t Have Any Aircraft!
The Sunday Times today says that the two follies of Gordon Brown’s tenure as Prime Minister won’t have any aircraft, as the new F35C, that have been chosen by the Coalition, can’t land on a carrier. There’s more about the F35C’s problems here. To be fair to the Coalition, they had little choice but to go for the C variant, after the B variant, which had a limited vertical take-off and landing capability, was not performing well in test flying.
Perhaps though we’ll come up with a better solution, given that the British public won’t support another Iraq or Afghanistan. We’ve also proven that for operations near home, such as Libya, that we don’t need carrier-based aircraft. In addition, we’ve also proven that attack helicopters can work very well off ships like HMS Ocean. Perhaps we need another ship like this one, which was built at a small fraction of the propsed cost of one of the new aircrsft csrriers.
RBS Is In A Downward Spiral
This morning RBS has announced another 3,500 job losses on top of 2,000 announced, just a few months ago.
I’ve always felt that RBS should have been allowed to go bust. I think now, that some of the employees who are still left, wish it had happened, as at least they’d now know where they stand. I suspect too, if they’d been put out of work at the time, they might have been able to have rebuilt their lives and careers since.
Now they are just in an awful state of limbo.
The country might be in a better state too, if the money used to prop up RBS had been used for more important purposes.
But saving RBS was just a bribe to Scotland, by Britain’s worst-ever Prime Minister, Gordon Brown. As he got voted out in 2010, it didn’t even work!
Blair’s Tax Bill
It would appear that he’s paying his share according to this article in the Daily Mail.
But then he’s only living by the Socialist mantra.
Do as I say, not as I do!
I also wonder what Brown’s tax bill is like?
After all Britain’s most accident prone double-act since Laurel and Hardy got us into this economic mess and made sure that they created enough friends to see themselves right.
Perhaps we need a law that all members and former members of Parliament must publish accounts that the man on the Dalston Omnibus could understand.
David Would Not Be Amused
My friend, David, finished his career as the Business banking Director of Lloyds Bank.
He was a proper banker, although he was a bit of a rogue. But one on the side of the bank and his clients!
So when I read in the Telegraph, about the dreadful mess Lloyds is now in, after the takeover of HBOS, I wonder what he would have thought of the fiasco.
I know some of the things he did to sort out serious problems and I know he would not have been amused. I suspect that Prudence would not be on his Christmas card list.
Anthony S. Holmes
I have received lots of spam from this guy. All of it was stopped by my ClamWin spam filter and ended up in the Junk Mail folder. But then it was so obviously spam, even a four-year-old could identify it as such.
There was a link to the BBC’s web page. It is from 2006 and talks about a Treasury plan to raid dormant bank accounts, which seems to have died with Gordon Brown’s government.
This was the main part of the message.
Good afternoon to you,
I am sorry for bothering you this early day, but bear it mind that you can never regret this day as I have an interesting profitable business offer for you to participate and share money with me.
Please read more on the under stated link
The English isn’t good too. I like the bit about good afternoon and then apologising for being early in the day.
This man won’t get very far in his career as a spammer. I can’t even work out how they get your money.
Gordon Brown and the Gurkhas
During the Second World War, the husband of one of my father’s employees, had been fighting the Germans in the Western Desert. One of his duties at one time, was to liaise with the Gurkhas and he had many tales of their bravery, which I heard in the 1950s.
So I have a lot of respect for those from other countries, like Fijians and Zimbabweans who have taken the King’s or Queen’s shilling.
I don’t know who put the thought in my mind, but I’ve generally felt that to recruit soldiers from abroad has been one way to get the costs down.
So when the campaign started to give former Gurkha soldiers the right to settle here, I was generally in favour, although I had a few reservations about how it would be implemented fairly. Gordon Brown had no choice but to give in to the demands, as this report from the Guardian shows.
I don’t blame him for doing it, but he didn’t fund the consequences of his decision. He was very weak and didn’t think things through properly. In other words, he showed his true colours and probably hastened the end of his tenure at Number 10.
So now we have reports from Aldershot, about hardship and resentment from the local inhabitants. It led to a very heated debate on Radio 5 this morning.
All of this could have been avoided by Gordon Brown calculating what the cost of his actions would be. But then we all know to our cost that arithmetic wasn’t his strong suit.
The Anonymous Widower 