Fun Online Polls: Airport expansion and elections

The results to last week's Fun Online Poll (thank you everybody who took part) are as follows:

At which airport would it be best to build additional runways?

Thames estuary (new airport) - 40%
Luton - 29%
Stansted - 13%
Heathrow - 10%
Gatwick - 8%

So there we go, despite me putting forward the arguments for Luton (good traffic links north and south, by road or rail, far enough away from big towns not to bother people but near enough for people to able to commute there etc), the people have spoken and Thames estuary it is.

I'd be interested to know what the arguments for starting from scratch with the Thames estuary are.
--------------------------
And lo to this week's Fun Online Poll.

There are plenty of statistics on how many people voted for which party and thus how many don't vote, and reasonable estimates of swings from one party to another.

Because I'm now in the business, I'd be interested to know "How do you make up your mind how to vote at elections?"

Vote [sic] here or use the widget in the sidebar.

Fun Online Polls: QE and airport expansion

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

Would it make any big difference if the UK gilts held by the Bank of England were cancelled?

No (the correct answer) - 53 votes
Yes (the wrong answer) - 23 votes

So well done, seventy per cent of you. The other thirty per cent ought to stop reading and believing what other people think and read up on some basic bookkeeping.

If you want to understand any productive business (cars, films, dentistry, plumbing, whatever) then there are thousands of things you need to know about or have experience in, and I doubt that anybody knows everything about any of them. Banking, on the other hand, is a pure paper exercise, you start with blank pieces of paper and write numbers on them. You are allowed to write as many positive numbers as you like, provided somewhere is prepared to accept the corresponding negative, and provided you are prepared to accept your original bit of paper going round in a circle and ending up as a negative number on the other side of your balance sheet.

Money is not a thing in itself, it is a unit of measurement, and without there being somebody somewhere who wants to borrow money* (i.e. is prepared to be in debt) then 'money' cannot come into existence. If you take all the financial assets (including the cash in your pocket) and all the financial liabilities, it always nets off to precisely nothing.

* Even in a system where the only legal tender is gold coins, 'money' cannot exist until somebody wants to borrow a gold coin and somebody else is prepared to lend him it. In that split second, a new financial asset and a new financial liability have been created out of nowhere (the number of actual gold coins in existence stays exactly the same).
-------------------------
Yesterday, James Higham asked which would be the best place to build new runways in the south east of England (assuming that this is necessary or desirable, let's skip that debate).

So that's this week's Fun Online Poll.

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

OMG is it that time of the year already?

29 June 2010:

Ryanair cuts flights in row over tourist tax. Budget airline Ryanair is to slash its flights by almost a fifth. It will carry two million fewer passengers this winter. The cutbacks include a 17 per cent reduction in services at Stansted airport, where the Irish no-frills carrier will be handling 1.5 million fewer passengers than last winter.

Ryanair will also cut winter flights at most of its other UK bases, except Edinburgh and Leeds Bradford. Ryanair chief executive Michael O'Leary cited the “damaging” Air Passenger Duty airport departure tax as a reason for the reduction...

21 July 2009:

Budget airline Ryanair has announced a reduction in its services at Stansted Airport, blaming higher charges. Ryanair will reduce the number of aircraft it runs at the airport by 40% in its winter schedule, and will cut the number of flights by 30%, it said...

The company said that Stansted was one of its most expensive bases, and added that an increase in air passenger duty tax was also a factor in its decision. The airline operated 40 aircraft from Stansted in the summer, but said this would fall to 24 this winter.

July 17 2008:

Ryanair, the cut-price Irish airline, today announced it will withdraw nearly a third of its aircraft from London's Stansted airport and suspend operations at seven other European airports because of higher fuel costs and airport fees. Michael O'Leary, chief executive at Ryanair, said his airline would operate 28 aircraft out of Stansted, down from 40.

It is the second straight year that Ryanair has reduced its activities at Stansted for its October to March winter period...

Yup. That's easily fixed.

As I said after the Kingsnorth Six were acquitted:

A little tip for E.On: in future don't press criminal charges in cases like this. Take a straightforward civil case, in which case there are no criminal penalties, you just put in a claim for the costs of cleaning off graffiti and loss of earnings from having to shut down operations for a couple of days etc.

I was thus delighted to read this in The London Paper:

CLIMATE change protesters face being sued for more than £2m after admitting bringing chaos to Stansted Airport. Twenty-two demonstrators from the group Plane Stupid have been sentenced after pleading guilty to aggravated trespass in a demonstration on 8 December.

The protest, to highlight the impact of aviation on the environment, closed the airport for five hours and caused the cancellation of 57 Ryanair flights that were due to carry nearly 7,000 passengers. A further 52,000 passengers had their travel plans disrupted as later flights were also delayed.

Ryanair suffered £ 2m in costs and airport owner BAA is considering whether to claim back the losses by launching a civil action . Eighteen protesters have been ordered to complete community service orders of between 50 and 90 hours. Two have been given fines of £ 130 and £ 160, one was given a referral order, and another was handed a conditional discharge.

As ever, the criminal penalties were derisory, but in this case, that's not the point. Let's assume that the judge who hears the civil action lives in the real world (unlikely, but bear with me) and actually awards BAA £2 million damages plus costs. Great, there were about 50 protestors in total, so that's £40,000 each, which they probably won't be able to pay so either they'll go bankrupt (result!) or these Greenie organisations will have a whip round and pick up the tab (which is far more likely).

Then next time they try it, BAA will up the ante, on the basis that the 59,000 passengers ought to be compensated as well let's say £100 each for a wasted day, loss of holiday etc, that adds a princely £5.9 million to the claim. If the respondents wail and moan and claim they can't afford it (notwithstanding that this is not a mitigating factor), the claimants will just point out that the Greenies will do a whip round for them. So that's an award of £7.9 million plus 50% mark up for the shyster lawyers.

So the Greenies have a another whip round and some other bunch of cranks does it again. At the next civil action, BAA then demands exemplary damages on top, call it £10 million plus legal fees, the Greenie organisations have another whip round...

And so on, until an ever smaller number of Greenies gets sick and tired of stumping up ever larger amounts of cash for these protestors and one day a bunch of them really are made bankrupt.

All right, unlikely but possible.

"Ryanair withdraws 30% of planes from Stansted"

Obviously those slots at Stansted can't be worth very much, otherwise Ryanair would be doing a BMI.

This is chucklesome: Last month, Mr O'Leary [Ryanair boss] said that high oil prices would drive “crappy competitors” out of the airline business.

And why are the slots at STN (which is a super little airport, acres of marble and glass) worth so much less than at LHR or LGW? The answer is, there's no direct train from London or Stratford to STN, you have to take a coach (cheap but stressful) or a taxi (expensive).