"India launches British taxpayers' money to Mars"

From the BBC:

India has successfully launched £1 billion of British taxpayer's money towards the Red Planet - with the aim of becoming the fourth space agency to use UK funding to reach Mars.

The Mars Orbiter Mission took off at 09:08 GMT from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre on the country's east coast.

The head of India's space agency told the BBC the mission would demonstrate the technological capability to spend aid payments from Great Britain on reaching Mars orbit and to carry out experiments to test the limits of the former colonial master's patience.

The spacecraft is set to burn UK taxpayers' money for 300 days, reaching Mars orbit in 2014.

Fun Online Polls: Bongo Bongo Land & The worst kind of monger

The responses to last week's Fun Online Poll were as follows:

Godfrey Bloom, aid payments, Bongo Bongo Land, Ferraris etc
Fair play, he was only saying what any sane person thinks - 87%
The man is a hideous unreconstructed racist, just like the whole of UKIP - 3%
Other, please specify. 10%

So now we know. FWIW, I was in the majority on this one.
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In a film I watched at the weekend, a radio DJ/presenter asked, "What's the worst kind of monger? Fish, iron, rumour or war?”

That's this week's poll. Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

Fun Online Polls: Lord Voldemort's Horcruxes & Bongo Bongo Land

The responses to last week's Fun Online Poll were as follows:

Which were the coolest/scariest of Lord Voldemort's horcruxes? Multiple votes allowed.

I have no idea what you are talking about - 58 votes
Harry Potter himself - 9 votes
Tom Riddle's diary - 8 votes
Professor Quirrel - 4 votes
Nagini the snake - 4 votes
Salazar Slytherin's locket - 3 votes
Marvolo Gaunt's ring - 1 vote
Helga Hufflepuff's cup - 1 vote
Rowena Ravenclaw's diadem - 0 votes

Thanks to the 81 people who took part, the 23 people who did know what I was talking about cast on average 1.3 votes each. I chose the locket and the ring myself, the others were neither cool nor scary. Nagini the snake? Pah! Nevile "cardigans are a sign of leadership" Longbottom chopped its head off and it died. Big deal. Not much more to say.
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And lo, to Godfrey Bloom's comments about sending aid to Bongo Bongo Land so that their dictators can buy Ferraris, flats in Paris and Ray-Ban sunglasses*, which provoked one interesting response by Justine Greening in today's Evening Standard:

Cabinet minister Justine Greening today hit back at critics of Britain’s aid spending, accusing some of them of wanting the country to “shut up shop”.

The Overseas Aid Secretary launched a staunch defence of UK aid projects including to Nigeria which has its own space programme and to Somalia where some supplies were recently seized or destroyed by terrorists.

Monkey says what?

Anyway, cut to the chase (hideous Americanism but fun to say), that's the topic of this week's Fun Online Poll.

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

* I take his point about Ferraris and flats in Paris, but Ray-Ban sunglasses retail for under £200 a pop, that's tuppence ha'penny compared to some expense claims submitted by our MPs, or indeed by MEPs like Mr Bloom.

Hardly surprising

From The Daily Mail:

Half a billion pounds of European taxpayers' money donated to Egypt to fight corruption has disappeared, according to a report by EU auditors.

The European Court of Auditors (ECA), which audits the accounts of EU institutions, found the money had 'failed to tackle' key human rights issues in the country. The Luxembourg based group also found the aid had not helped to improve the rights of women and minorities or fight corruption.

It looked at the past five years of EU aid to Egypt, which amounted to more than €1 billion.

The report paid particularly close attention to the 60 per cent of EU aid to Egypt - worth £500 million over five years - which is handed over to support its state budget. The auditors found that there was no trace of how that money had been spent.

Of course, what the ECA doesn't appear to be asking is whether the EU officials concerned actually wired the money to the Egyptian government in the first place or whether they just got their opposite numbers in Egypt to sign a receipt and then split the winnings between themselves.

Fun Online Polls: Motorways, tax havens and Third World Poverty

The responses to last week's (second) Fun Online Poll were as follows:

Which lane(s) do you normally use on a three-lane motorway?

Slow lane - 3%
Slow lane and middle lane for overtaking lorries - 33%
Middle lane as far as possible - 7%
Mainly middle lane and sometimes fast lane - 26%
Fast lane all the way if possible - 4%
Fast lane with tailgating and angry flashing - 13%
Other, please specify - 14%

IF, for simplicity, I assume that
- people in the second category use the slow lane two-thirds of the time and the middle lane one-third of the time;
- people in the fourth category use the middle lane two-thirds of the time and the fast lane one-third of the time; and
- people in the "other" category are in each lane one-third of the time,
THEN we end up with the following distribution

Slow lane - 30%.
Middle lane - 40%
Fast lane - 30%

Which looks close to the optimum use of motorways - more or less the same number of vehicles in each lane - assuming that lorries, people towing caravans, and pensioners in their MX5s in the slow lane need a bit more space in front and behind for braking, so there ought to be slightly fewer vehicles in the slow lane anyway.

Well done us. Do we really need regulations telling us which lane to use, or shall we just keep muddling along get the optimum usage by constant trial and error and changing lanes where necessary?
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This week's Fun Online Poll is based on the myth that we can end world hunger by shutting down tax havens.

The article on the background got a bit lengthy so I posted it here.

Vote here or use the widget in the side bar.

Economic myths: Closing tax havens could end world hunger

The headlines all seem to screaming "We can end world hunger if we can just shut down tax havens".

Superficially, you might think this is just the old wishful thinking that if Western countries could collect more tax they'd have more money to send to the Third World as aid, which is of course nonsense and the myth I set out to debunk. The point is that

a) Third World aid payments are ultimately futile, "trade not aid" is my motto, and

b) It's not Western countries who allow "money" (which at this level of debate is an abstract concept anyway) to be shifted out of Third World countries into tax havens, it is the totally corrupt or incompetent governments of those Third World countries themselves who allow it.

Most of these countries - unless they are Islamic hell holes for whom there is no hope anyway, and good riddance - could sort themselves out in no time by simply reneging on debts owed to Western banks; stopping importing expensive Western weapons; and starting to collect taxes from land and resource rents instead of trying to copy the supposedly sophisticated Western system of taxing accounting incomes and profits (which is itself a smokescreen).

Problem is, aside from a short article in today's Metro which I can't track down anyway, people appear to be moving on from The Myth to the actual solutions. I hoped that at least I'd catch out The Guardian, but even they are more nuanced about it:

The If campaign, a coalition of 200 charities campaigning against world poverty, welcomed the Caymans statement. "This is the first hole in the wall of secrecy surrounding Britain's overseas territories.

"David Cameron now has a real opportunity to show that all the UK's tax havens – both overseas territories and crown dependencies – can reform and help end the scandal of tax-dodging. We need quick action to deliver a deal at next week's G8 to ensure poor countries can collect the billions in missing tax that would help them end hunger."

Ah well, let's try leftie Labour MP Lucy Powell

We also need to address the structural causes of poverty and hunger if we are to achieve radical change.

The OECD estimates that developing countries lose three times more to tax havens than they receive in aid each year. That is why we need to end tax secrecy so that companies can be held to account and corruption can be rooted out. Developing countries will never be able to lift themselves out of poverty if they cannot collect taxes to fund their own services.

So even she is sort of stumbling towards the underlying problem.

The FT is of course even more even-handed than that:

It has been billed by the British government as “a turning point” in the battle against tax evasion and avoidance. When world leaders gather in Northern Ireland next week, they will set out to end tax havens and stem the illicit flow of funds out of some of the world’s poorest countries...

A long-running drive to inject transparency into the extractive industries is set to receive fresh impetus at the G8. There has been growing unease about corruption and secret deals between companies and governments of developing countries robbing their public of the benefits of their natural resources.

Rules requiring companies to disclose what they pay and governments what they receive are based on the premise that if the money is openly tracked, it is harder to steal.

But they start with the assumption that the "flow of funds etc" is illicit in the first place - it probably is - but surely it's up to the governments of the countries out of which wealth is flowing to a) stop f-ing pocketing half of it for themselves, b) decide what is illict and what isn't, and c) police and prevent/collect tax from those flows?

As long as Western governments - themselves massively corrupt - just do a fig leaf operation whereby they confiscate some of those flows after the event and then send a tiny part back to the self-same corrupt Third World governments, that achieves precisely nothing.

"South Africa's direct aid from UK to end"

From the BBC:

International Development Secretary Justine Greening is to announce that the UK will stop giving direct aid to South Africa in 2015.

The UK government's aid programme to South Africa is currently worth £19 million a year. This funding has focused on reducing the mortality rate among women giving birth, as well as supporting businesses. The UK's relationship with South Africa should now be based on trade and not development, Ms Greening will say.

"Let's get real here. They've a population of 50 million so our £19 million a year is less than one penny per person per week. 'Reducing child mortality'? Who are we kidding. They've got nearly a million births every year, even if they spent the whole of our £19 million on that, it's still only £20 per baby," Ms Greening will continue.

"And if they want £19 million a year off us, they could try sending us a couple of hundred thousand tons of coal every year or something.

"OK, maybe not coal because those buggers in the EU won't let us burn that any more. Does anybody know how many oranges we can get for £19 million a year?" she will ask the conference of African ministers and business leaders in London on Tuesday, while staring wildly around the room. "Oh come on, somebody must know.."

Copper makes good point: shock

On Channel 4 News last night there was a head-to-head between Paul McKeever, chairman of the policemen's 'trade union' and some smart alec from Policy Exchange.

Mr K made the point that the police budget was the last place the government should be looking to make cuts. He pointed out, see also report in The Telegraph, that our budget for foreign aid is set to rise to about £12 billion a year, all of which is wasted and no business of the government anyway, and the police budget is set to be cut to about £12 billion a year (see page 2 of this), so whatever niggles we might have with policing - and we have many - it is incredibly good value for money and one of the core and irreducible functions of the state. Our net contributions to the EU are also something in the order of £12 billion a year as it happens.

Policy wonk chatted merrily about the Winsor Report, whatever that is, and his best shot was to point out that £1 in £7 of the police budget was spent on police pensions.

So what?

If you have a budget of £12 billion, and three-quarters is spent on wages, you can either pay it all out as current salaries without a service pension, or you can pay lower current salaries to serving police officers but promise (and pay) them a pension as well, as a kind of deferred pay. While police pensions, at about 50% of average salary after thirty years service, seem incredibly generous, that is balanced out by the fact that starting salaries are pretty low.

Quite what people's time preferences are, we do not know, but it is likely that it is as broad as long - if the police pensions were stopped for new recruits, then as like as not, they'd demand higher current salaries instead, so it would all even out.

Britain hits its third world aid targets...

... which appear to be somewhere in the Indian Ocean.

"Corruption risk from foreign aid target, say Lords"

The House of Lords' economic affairs committe dares to utter in public what everybody else has known for a long time:

DRIVING up the government’s foreign aid budget risks stoking corruption in poor countries, an influential House of Lords committee has found.

The department for international development (DfID) must "do more to tackle corruption" that stems from British aid, the Lords’ economic affairs committee will argue today. "DfID detected only £1.2m of fraud in its £7.7bn budget in the year to March 2011," the report says, slamming the figure as "paltry and implausibly low".

The report added that the UK’s "arbitrary” target of committing 0.7 per cent of GDP to aid – which it plans to embed in law – would “wrongly prioritise the amount spent rather than results achieved".

Just last week the Independent Commission for Aid Impact gave DfID’s programme in Afghanistan an “amber-red” mark, signalling that it is “not performing well” and needs “significant improvements”. The US government has cut aid payments to Afghanistan after allegations that western funds are being smuggled out of the country in suitcases stuffed with cash.

The Lords committee argued that humanitarian aid, which receives under 10 per cent of the aid budget, should be maintained.

Triodos Bank

Now, I am sure that Triodos Bank are very worthy and upright people, but just look at this taken from their website...

"The social businesses we finance work to improve and enrich the lives of millions of people; tackling inequality and injustice. And developing strong communities in the process. Triodos Bank's customers include microfinance banks in developing countries, innovative fair trade enterprises and social housing providers.

That is deeply annoying on so many levels.

1. "the social buinesses..." More bloody weasel words. All businesses are social you witless numpties.

2. "...Tackling inequality and injustice... So not making a profit then? So just why are you 'in business'? Aren't you really in welfarism?

3. "...fair trade... Just don't me started on this trade destroying protectionist mercantilist claptrap...(No wonder the EU apparatchiks love it).

...and there's much much more of this touchy feely guff all over their website. Why oh why don't they get it? The key civilising force for mankind is trade. Preferebaly free trade. You don't shoot your customers.

Grump grump grump.

One for Umbongo

From the FT:

Should David Cameron, prime minister, execute another of his elegant U-turns – this time on the large sums going to poor countries riddled with corruption? Certainly pressure for him to think again about foreign aid is growing. The latest blast comes from Sir Edward Clay, our former high commissioner to Kenya. In a powerful paper for the House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee, Sir Edward says corruption is endemic among many countries receiving UK aid yet checks on the way that our money is spent are thoroughly inadequate.

Sir Edward, who appeared before the committee on Tuesday, is highly critical of the government’s target of giving 0.7 per cent of gross national product in aid. He says it is damaging, it ties the government’s hands and it removes “from taxpayers the right to make a judgment” on the stewardship of aid. The target, which has not yet been enacted into law, is worth £9.1bn a year – “more than we spend on policing, more than on the Olympics...  more than the UN spends on global peacekeeping”..

Bribery Act 2010

From the BBC:

Legislation aimed at making it easier to prosecute companies who make corrupt payments abroad has come into force.

The Bribery Act overhauls existing laws dating back to 1889 and creates offences that carry prison terms of up to 10 years and unlimited fines. It makes it illegal to offer or receive bribes and to fail to prevent bribery.

Both British and foreign companies are covered, provided they have some operations in the UK. The act also applies to individuals. The government says the act will cement the UK's position as a global leader in the fight against business corruption.

Ho hum.

Clearly, we ought to make bribery and corruption illegal within the UK, it doesn’t take a forensic accounting degree to know that we are the ones being robbed (i.e. if civil servants enter into contracts on unfavourable terms for the taxpayer), although the UK government is pretty much world champion at this - if politiicians were held up to the same standards, they'd all be behind bars.

As to abroad, it's difficult to approve of bribery, but 'everybody else does it' so if a UK business doesn't get the contract, then somebody else will. Although it's a negative sum game, it's a bit like piracy, which was good for the UK for the simple reason that we were better at it than everybody else.

But think about it - if you are trying to bribe an official, where is it going to be easier - in a democratic country which is financed by taxes, or in a despotic country that is kept afloat with aid payments? The latter, surely, and didn't our government recently boast about how much aid it wants us to pay, waffling on about soft power and all that?

To cut a long story short, the quickest way to reduce bribery and corruption would be to reduce government spending and especially aid spending.

The Most Generous Prime Minister Ever!

Roman Catholic cardinal makes good point: shock

From the BBC:

A Roman Catholic cardinal has accused the UK government of operating an "anti-Christian foreign policy".

Cardinal Keith O'Brien has attacked plans to increase aid to Pakistan to more than £445m, without any commitment to religious freedom for Christians. Speaking in Glasgow, Cardinal O'Brien called on Foreign Secretary William Hague to seek human rights guarantees...

The cardinal's call came as a report by Vatican-approved agency Aid to the Church in Need suggested 75% of religious persecution around the world is directed against Christians, affecting 100 million people.

Hard to disagree with any of that.

Reader's Letter Of The Day

From The Metro:

I'm sorry, but George Osborne did have a choice over whether to raise VAT (Metro, Fri). He opted to so in order to raise £13 billion - the same amount of taxpayers' money he is giving away in foreign aid.

Then there are the billions squandered in fighting an unwinnable war in Afghanistan and the hundreds of billions* we fritter away each year to our unelected rules in Brussels.

This bitter winder, 20,000 to 30,000 senior citizens are expected to die of cold-related illnesses. In far too many cases their choice is heating or eating.

This government, and the Labour one before it, had a choice too - look after our own people first. It's a choice they have all ignored. Shame on them.

Fred Bell, Greater Manchester.

* Cash payments directly to the EU are 'only' about £15 billion a year; the real cost is the £50 billion-plus a year it costs us to comply with all the regulations and the Green tomfoolery, but hey.

Why relief efforts in Haiti are failing so badly

From Money Week:

Why isn't rebuilding taking place?

Lack of money, incompetent governance, and the sheer quantity of rubble are all factors... Put simply, it is hard to be sure who owns what. So the motivation to rebuild is – for the time being – minimal. Most of those living in tents did not own their homes; they were renting.

But even those who did own property are unlikely to have proof. Only about 5% of Haiti's land is accounted for in public records – and the building that housed title deeds was flattened in the earthquake. Long before the quake, land ownership was hugely contentious in Haiti, where land is concentrated in the hands of a few big landowners, known as grandons (or grands-hommes, big men).

Moreover, there is no proper land-registry system. Land titles pass informally from one generation to the next, largely because titling costs several thousand dollars and public officials are generally held to be corrupt.

What has been the result?

According to the UN, the "prevalence of the informal land tenure as well as contradictory laws and weak institutions of enforcement" mean "land tenure security is not established". That has been made worse by the chaos of a city in ruins: with around a quarter of a million people dead, the inheritance and sale of land is subject to even greater uncertainty. For example, is the property owner known to be dead and/or does he have any living heirs?

Moreover, insecure land and property rights have not only undermined reconstruction, but are stifling the chances of an economic recovery. Many small businesses struggle to get loans because the owners cannot prove they own property, and foreign investors – and donors – are discouraged from investing in the country.

The reality on the ground

Corail-Cesselesse is a Westminster-sized area of disused sugarcane land between the sea and the barren mountains about 15km to the north of Port-au-Prince – real estate that has been earmarked for a major new post-earthquake city. The government wants to build 300,000 new homes here – transitional shelters at first; later expanding into permanent homes. But the area is subject to all the land issues that plague the whole reconstruction effort, and no progress is being made.

Multiple families claim ownership of almost every scrap of land. Homeless people 'squatting' the land in makeshift homes are locked in constant battle with hired thugs working for big landowners, and the government lacks the power to negotiate compulsory purchase orders at reasonable prices.
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As I always like to say...

1.'Land ownership' and 'the state' are synonymous. You cannot have one without the other. There appears to be no particular government in Haiti, the place is run by [thousands of] different relief agencies, who are doing a pretty bad job of it because the 'land owners' (who have contributed nothing to the relief efforts) are trying to enforce any claims they might have had against the old government, which has ceased to exist, against the new government (the relief agencies), who are stupidly trying to respect them.

2. As a general rule, when faced with any economic or social problem, the first question is "Would Land Value Tax sort this out? And if so, why?" In this case, it's pretty clear. You can't have LVT without land registration, but with LVT, nobody would claim more land than he can put to good use (for living, farming or business). Right now, the rental value of land in Haiti would appear to be very, very low, so by the same token, LVT receipts would be very, very low. The relief agencies could simply give each family $10 and let them get bidding.

3. If there are 'competing claims' all with equal validity, let's say, then whoever sets the tax rate can bump it up auction-fashion until only one party is left in the bidding. There's no need for a particular compensation scheme - whatever the revenues are can be put to good use building homes and factories and infrastructure, once the economy has got going again, the surplus LVT goes in a pot and gets dished out as a Citizen's Dividend.

4. The new government can announce in advance where the roads, sewage works, schools, housing etc is going, and so they will be able to tell quite quickly which of these projects 'add value', because the amount of LVT that people are prepared to pay for a plot in those areas will be correspondingly higher.

More Free Trade Fun

Tacked on at the end of an article about the EU meddling in France's policy on deporting Roma in the Evening Standard:

Foreign ministers will consider a proposal for EU members to waive tariffs on Pakistan textiles to help the country recover from its devastating floods. The move could be worth £250 million to Pakistan.

Right. So the $124 million that the UK has been sending as 'aid' to Pakistan on average every year was sort of to compensate them for the damage done to Pakistani cotton producers by the tariffs imposed by the EU?

What these governments need is a proper bookkeeper to sort out all this to-ing and fro-ing so that only one net sum of money changes hands in one direction, whereby £nil in either direction is probably a fair guesstimate.

"UN Secretary General urges world to speed up aid to Pakistan"

Reports the BBC.

The poor chap seems to be getting confused - most people in most countries have already sent what they think is approrpriate, which, in most cases, is nothing, and the Pakistanis received that within minutes of their town-planning failures becoming evident.

I thought everybody knew this?

From The BBC:

Millions of dollars earmarked for victims of the Ethiopian famine of 1984-85 went on buying weapons, the BBC has learned. An investigation found claims that a rebel movement in Ethiopia diverted the aid to fund its attempt to overthrow the government of the time. Rebel soldiers said they posed as merchants as "a trick for the NGOs"...

I don't mean Ethiopia specifically, I mean as a general rule, you can safely assume that a lot of aid is not spent as intended. Whether the aid agencies siphon it off, or it is stolen, or spent on weapons or the dictator's new palace, or ends up in Switzerland is a different discussion.