I didn't even know there was an award for "Best Fat Actor"

"Osborne unveils £140bn scheme to kick-start bank bonus season"

From The Telegraph:

George Osborne unveiled a £140 billion emergency scheme to try to avoid a second year of low bonuses in the City of London.

The Bank of England is to offer money to high-street banks to also try and prop up houses prices. Loans are currently being rationed for many families as the bankers have either lost all the money or just taken it all, the Chancellor announced. It comes after sharp rises in the costs of mortgages and other loans in recent months as banks struggle to raise money now that nobody trusts them any more.

Sir Mervyn King, the Bank of England Governor, said that the “corrupt governments in the industrialised world have thrown everything bar the kitchen sink” at the global meltdown in financial services sector salaries but that even “bolder action” was now required.

In the annual Mansion House speech in the City, the Chancellor said he was no longer prepared to “stand on the sidelines” and that the radical new “bank bonus funding scheme” will be launched within weeks.

"We are not powerless in the face of the euro-zone debt storm which they caused," Mr Osborne said. "We can deploy new firepower to defend the most important parts of our economy - banking and house prices - from the crisis on their doorstep. Funding for lending to the banker's family aspiring to own an even larger mansion and the business that wants to expand its directors' pension scheme The Government - with the help of the Bank of England – will not stand on the sidelines and do nothing as the storm gathers."

Olympic Relay delayed while Torch attends Leveson Inquiry

"Westlife declared bankrupt"

From the BBC:

Westlife have been declared musically bankrupt in the UK.

The Irish band sold millions of records but fans suffered enormous financial losses as the CDs contained not a single note worth listening to. In a statement, the 32-year-old lead singer Shane Life said he had "worked long and hard" to try and come up with something original for over a decade and was devastated that fans have finally come to this conclusion.

The pop group filed for moral and intellectual bankruptcy in the UK which has a less onerous bankruptcy regime than the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. In the UK the period of artistic bankruptcy typically lasts for the rest of an artist's life but in the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan it is punishable by death or more commonly 12 years in prison.

Mr Life also owns a second hand record shop with his brother Finbarr. It was established in 2004 and had been involved in accumulating 44 million discarded Westlife CDs, which have since remained in a warehouse in Counties Leitrim and Sligo in the west of Ireland. Last month, the company was placed in receivership.

The band also suffered a legal set-back when their appeal against refusal of their application for copyright in "stepping down off barstools shortly before the truck driver's gear change" was rejected.

Home-Owner-Ists scale new heights of vindictiveness and hypocrisy.

From The Metro:

‘Privileged’ residents on salaries of between £60,000 and £100,000 will be targeted as housing minister Grant Shapps reforms the ‘lazy’ attitude on social housing.

He said: "For far too long, millions of people on waiting lists have watched helplessly as high-earning social tenants continue to occupy homes designed to help the most vulnerable. These high-income tenants are not only blocking homes that could benefit those in greater housing need, they’re also relying on poorer taxpayers to subsidise their lifestyle."

The average subsidy for such tenants is worth £3,600 a year, the Department of Communities and Local Government says. Mr Shapps added: "If they want to continue using this precious national resource, they will pay for the privilege."

Is this the best they've got?

From a recent City AM:

The UK should not leave the EU – the single market has greatly strengthened the British economy. To continue trading so much with the rest of Europe, the UK would still have to follow the rules set to regulate the single market. But from outside the EU, we would have no influence over what rules are set. Much better to be in the club and able to shape their design.(1)

The EU also plays an important role over energy and climate policy, both linked to future economic growth. Europe needs a modernised and extended electricity grid, including a North Sea grid. Building this would enable the UK to harness enormous quantities of offshore wind power, thus increasing UK energy security as the oil and gas runs out.(2) It would be possible if the UK leaves the EU, but easier and more efficient if we remain a member.(3)
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Oops, I pressed send too early (I meant to save as draft and finish off once at work). My point was, surely, there must be some advantages to being in the EU which everybody accepts (yes there are: but no clues), not flim-flam like this? Or at least they could stick to the Big Fat Lie that "Three million UK jobs depend on us being in the EU" which isn't true either, but a lot of people seem to believe it.

1) James James had already covered this in the comments by the time I got back.

2) I think we've seen through all this wind nonsense by now, and it's the EU demanding that the UK shuts down its perfectly servicable coal-fired power stations. So energy supply is a bit of a worry. But there are two forces which will hopefully sort all this out.

a) Governments know that they have to make sure that "the lights stay on" and that petrol is always available on the forecourts, because if they don't or it isn't, they'll become very unpopular very quickly (even if there is little they can do about it).

b) Markets. There is a fantastic network of infrastructure spanning the globe, there are oil and gas pipelines linking Russia and Norway (not EU members) with most of Europe; they're laying electricity cables across the North Sea; we buy liquified natural gas from Qatar; the Iranians are quite happy to sell us oil (even though they are not in the EU and their openly stated wish is to attack the West, I wonder what they'll do for customers then?). And these are just a few things off the top of my head, there's plenty more where that came from, fracking near Blackpool, oil rigs in the North Sea, the list goes on.

3) Exactly, that's one heck of an admission. Maybe there is a teeny, tiny slight advantage to EU member states if they can all gang up against e.g. Russia, Middle East and negotiate one big contract, but there are equal and opposite disadvantages (if it were in the UK's interests to buy oil from Iran, despite EU embargo, for example) that these can be ignored on both sides.

Flights from Heathrow to China etc.

1. Let's take the facts as stated in a recent Evening Standard article as given:

- London's four main airports are running at capacity.
- London businesses want there to be more direct flights from London to the BRIC countries, Brazil, India, China etc.
- People who live near the airports don't want any more flights or runways because of the noise.
- Expanding airport capacity is not only politically difficult but also very expensive and takes years to sort out.

2. What you also have to know is that inbound tourism is hugely important to the London economy, foreign visitors spend £13.6 billion a year in London; and that London airports employ 100,000 people directly and handle about a million aircraft movements a year.

3. What would be nice to know is quite how airline landing slots are allocated, it appears to be a bizarre mixture of old international treaties which nobody dares break; what the government of the day thinks; all sorts of back room deals between airlines, airport operators, regulators, local councils, EU subsidies; and the grey market in slots. But we'll never find out, so we'll have to assume that the system is half-way rational.

4. Heathrow is mainly international stuff, it handles 2.7 million passengers a year to/from the USA and 1.9 million to/from Dubai. But there are plenty of local flights as well (i.e. where a journey by train would be a reasonable alternative): 1.2 million to/from Manchester and Newcastle. And there are also 2.7 million to/from Amsterdam and Paris, not only are those journeys do-able by train but I believe that a lot of those people then take connecting flights to elsewhere.

5. Again, AFAIAA, the reason why people go via Amsterdam or Paris is because of the stupid Air Passenger Duty - you pay a much smaller amount to fly there than you would if you flew direct (there's little or no APD on the main onward flight). Which is a wildly inefficient use of people's time (queuing up twice over) and airline fuel (aeroplanes are quite efficient when they are whizzing along, what wastes fuel is landing and taking off). And it means that those airports earn money which we could be earning instead.

6. So how about we just accept that the total number of aircraft movements is fixed and a given and that air travel does place a burden on others? Aircraft noise is annoying, but whether an aircraft flies over your house on a short haul to Leeds-Bradford airport or to Hong Kong doesn't make any difference.

7. So it strikes me, all they have to do is reduce the number of short haul flights and use those slots for long haul to the BRIC countries instead. Instead of flying people to Amsterdam or Paris who then get on another aeroplane to elsewhere, we can send them straight where they want to go. And instead of ferrying people to and from the rest of England, we can use those slots for taking people on long haul flights etc.

UPDATE: Jorge in the comments points out that a passenger only gets the APD saving if he books two entirely separate flights, e.g. one from London to Paris and then another from Paris to [end destination]. If you book "[End destination] via Paris" then you pay full APD. I would have hoped that was clear anyway.

8. As mentioned, nobody really knows how the airlines end up with the slots they end up with, but the best thing the government could do in the short term is to replace the counter-productive Air Passenger Duty (revenues £3 billion a year) with a flat rate duty of £3,000 per plane per landing/take-off (or whatever is needed to make the figures balance, or maybe £5,000 for Heathrow and £500 for Leeds-Bradford). That would give the airlines every incentive to shift from short to long haul, take away a bit of business from the Dutch and the French, make internal flights more expensive (thus encouraging people to use rail or road) and make international flights cheaper.

9. Pretty much a win-win, in other words.

10. It's a bit like Land Value Tax for the airspace. It makes the airlines pay for the external cost (the noise pollution); it means less fuel per passenger-mile on average; it brings business to the UK; and it's a levy on the monopoly value of the slots - the highest price ever paid for the best slots was $52 million each, i.e. the value of the right to land and take off once, on one day a year, for the foreseeable is £90,000 (and that's the net value after deducting the Air Passenger Duty, which can be over £10,000 per plane if you're going far enough), which amortised over ten years is £9,000 per flight, so a £5,000 per flight duty wouldn't even make a dent in that.

UPDATE: Jorge points out another advantage, it's better use of a slot if a large aeroplane takes hundreds of people a long way instead of a small aeroplane etc. Yes, from the point view of the slot owner (the airline) obviously, but I believe that by and large large aeroplanes make more noise than small ones, so the argument that the per-plane duty is a charge for the noise pollution would be weakened.

"Saab sold to Chinese-Swedish investment group"

From the BBC:

Bankrupt carmaker Saab has been sold to a Chinese-Swedish investment group which aims to turn the company into a maker of electronic calculators.

Saab's administrator said the buyer was National Electric Products Sweden (Nevs). No sale price was given. Saab went bankrupt in December, two years after former owner J Sainsbury plc sold it to Dutch footwear group Spyker.

Health Scare Story Du Jour: EPIC FAIL

From The Scotsman:

Diesel exhaust causes cancer, the World Health Organisation has said, in a ruling that makes the fumes as important a threat as...

OMG! Tell me doctor, how dangerous is it? Is it like being bitten by a rabid dog? Polio? Scarlet fever? AIDS? Being a guinea pig in an atom bomb test? How much longer have we got? Do we have time to even write a will?

... second-hand smoke.

Righty-ho.

Genius lone blogger proved right after nine years...

Bob E spotted this at the BBC:

The London Olympics is set to come in under its £9.3bn budget with £476m of the contingency funding left, according to new government figures.

Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt said it was "fantastic news" that the games would be on time and under budget. Ministers expect to be able to return the remaining money to the Treasury.

The £9.3bn budget, which included a £2bn contingency, was set in 2007 and was almost four times the estimated cost at the time London bid in 2005.

So it's not £476 million under budget, it's about £6.5 billion over budget, and how can they "return the remaining money" you can't give back what was never yours to begin with, but details, details. Just to remind myself what the original forecasts were, I did a Google search for pre-July 2005 results, and stumbled across this at www.liebreich.com, from early 2003:

The figure of £1.8 billion we were given by the bid committee for the direct costs of a London 2012 Olympic Games is patently nonsense. It was produced by Ove Arup, engineering consultants who won awards for their Sydney 2000 buildings. It excludes enormous items, such as the cost of accelerating infrastructure spending, the cost of security outside Olympic stadia, immigration, customs, social services and other local costs.

For a nightmare vision of what London 2012 might end up costing, look no further than Athens. The absolute minimum cost of Athens 2004 is £6.5 billion, all but £1.1 billion of which will be public money. Published estimates have ranged as high as £9.4 billion. In order to arrive at an accurate figure, add up the following...

So we could have just taken the Athens figure, knocked off half because our officials are not quite as corrupt as theirs and then doubled it again because everything in London is twice as expensive, and hey presto, there's your actual budget.