This hardly makes sense

From the BBC:

Thousands of current and former Tesco workers have won a legal argument in their fight for equal pay. The European Court of Justice has ruled that an EU law could be relied on in making equal pay claims against their employer.

Tesco workers, mostly women, have argued that they failed to receive equal pay for work of equal value with colleagues in its distribution centres who are mostly men. They said this breached EU and UK laws.

1. Why is EU law relevant? It could only be relevant for pay periods up to 31 January 2020, and I'm not sure whether courts would ever retrospectively give people pay rises.

2. A sane and rational person would assume that distribution centre workers get paid a bit more (it appears to be average £13/hour rather than average £10/hour for shop workers) because the work is physically or mentally harder; requires more specialised skill and experience; involves less flexible shifts, more early/late shifts and night shifts; involves a longer commute etc.

3. Clearly, if Tesco paid male shop workers more than female shop workers (or male distribution centre workers more than female distribution centre workers), this would be wrong, that does not appear to be the case. Similarly, if Tesco had a blanket policy of not employing women in their distribution centres, that would also be wrong, but again, that does not appear to be the case.

4. What if Tesco employed a similar mix of men and women in both shops and in distribution centres? Would anybody be able to allege indirect discrimination then? Methinks not.

Tesco, the UK's biggest retailer, and law firm Leigh Day, acting on behalf of the workers, sought clarification from the Court of Justice of the European Union. They asked the court to rule on a specific aspect of European law... Under EU law, a worker can be compared with somebody working in a different establishment if a "single source" has the power to correct the difference in pay...

Kiran Dauka, a partner in the employment team at Leigh Day, said: "This judgement reinforces the Supreme Court's ruling that the roles of shop floor workers can be compared to those of their colleagues in distribution centres for the purposes of equal pay."

5. That sounds like a stupid interpretation of a stupid rule to me.

Pam Jenkins, who works at Tesco, said: "To get a judgement confirming shop floor workers can use an easier legal test to compare their jobs to male colleagues in distribution is uplifting. I've always been proud to work at Tesco, but knowing that male colleagues working in distribution centres are being paid more is demoralising. I'm hopeful that Tesco will recognise the contribution shop floor workers make to the business and reflect that in our pay."

6. Be careful what you wish for - the most likely outcome here is that Tesco will employ even fewer people to work on the tills and have more of the self-checkouts. I personally much prefer being served by a human being, but at my local Tesco, they only staff about three out of about ten tills, so the queues are awful and I grudgingly use the self-checkouts (knowing that however indirectly, I am putting some poor sod out of work).

The legal test for comparability is only the first of three stages within Asda's overall pay claim, which is expected to take several years to conclude. Leigh Day is also handing similar equal pay claims against Sainsbury's, Tesco, Morrisons and Co-op, which are not as far advanced.

7. This bit makes sense, the whole thing is a wild goose chase and a gravy train for the lawyers. Judges are always happy to drag things out on their behalf, in case they ever want to go back into practrice.

M&S are being a bit pathetic, if you ask me.

From the BBC:

Marks & Spencer has begun legal action against Aldi, arguing the supermarket's Cuthbert the Caterpillar cake infringes its Colin the Caterpillar trademark. M&S argues that their similarity leads consumers to believe they are of the same standard and "rides on the coat-tails" of M&S's reputation.

It lodged an intellectual property claim with the High Court this week. M&S wants Aldi to remove the product from sale and agree not to sell anything similar in the future. The retailer has three trademarks relating to Colin, which it believes means Colin has acquired and retains an enhanced distinctive character and reputation.

The product was launched around 30 years ago. Colin's appearance has been substantially unchanged since around 2004, except for adaptations for events such as Halloween and Christmas, and related products such as Connie the Caterpillar.

A spokesman said: "Because we know the M&S brand is special to our customers and they expect only the very best from us, love and care goes into every M&S product on our shelves.

US court passes comedy sentence

From City AM:

British trader Navinder Sarao who was responsible for the so-called flash crash in 2010 has been sentenced to one year home incarceration. Sarao was arrested in 2015 and pleaded guilty to illegally manipulating the stock markets.

The sentence, which was handed down by a Chicago court yesterday, was thrown into doubt after lawyers said it would be unenforceable (1) outside the US, according to The Guardian.

Following recess, Judge Virginia Kendall of the northern district of Illinois, was satisfied Sarao would only be allowed to leave the house in a handful of circumstances (2). 

1. Of course it is not enforceable if Mr S is outside the UK.

2. I got the impression that Mr S is a computer geek who is perfectly happy staying at his parents' house 24/7, he now has a good excuse when his Mum tells me to go outside and get some fresh air or meet a nice girl. He probably punched the air and shouted "Yes!". Unless Judge Kendall ruled that his Mum can decide what those circumstances are?

3. Mr S was entirely innocent anyway, so this is a neat way of letting him off the hook.

No pun intended?

From the BBC:

Mrs Cilliers, a highly-experienced parachuting instructor, suffered near-fatal injuries when both her main and reserve parachutes failed in a jump at the Army Parachute Association... Her husband, who was an experienced parachute packer, [had] tampered with equipment he knew his wife was going to use.

Her survival was described as a "near-miracle". It was put down to the soft soil of the ploughed field where she landed.

Mr Justice Sweeney said Mrs Cilliers, although recovered physically, had sustained serious and long-lasting psychological damage.

"This was wicked offending of extreme gravity", he told Cilliers.

Outbreak of common sense in Islington

Opinions are divided on the topic of 'affordable housing' quotas*, and I am pretty indifferent either way, but rules are rules.

The scam in question goes like this, based on a real life example that Peter S helped me piece together:

1. Developer bought some land in London pre-2008. He planned to build 100 units, 30 affordable units were to be sold at break even and he hoped to make £100,000 profit (i.e. selling price minus construction costs but ignoring the land price) on each of the other seventy unaffordable units = £7 million profit. The amount he paid for the land was a large chunk of this £7 million, call it £5 million, leaving £2 million normal builder's profit.

2. In 2009, selling prices had fallen. The developer managed to get the affordable quota reduced to zero by submitting a new viability assessment...

3. The developer's logic was this: the profit per unaffordable unit has fallen from £100,000 to £70,000, so to make my normal builder's profit and recover the £5 million I paid for the land, I have to be allowed to sell all 100 units for the new (lower) unaffordable price.

4. The council gave in, scrapped the affordable quota and told him to get on with it.

5. The developer cheerfully did nothing for a few years until prices had recovered back to pre-2008 levels. So the potential profit was now 100 units x £100,000 = £10 million; £3 million more than he had originally hoped for.

6. The council did not re-impose the affordable quota, even though logic says they should have done.

7. That developer then sold the land to another developer for nearly £3 million more than he had paid for it pre-2008 (to reflect the additional £3 million profit which the next developer can make).

8. Clearly, if the council now tries to re-impose the affordable quota, the second developer can submit his own viability assessment, and say that if he is not allowed to sell all 100 units for the unaffordable price, he will be pushed into losses, bearing in mind the £8 million he paid for the land.

9. As we can see, viability assessments and the price paid for land are a circular argument.

The Planning Inspectorate has finally decided that overpaying for land (or falling prices) are simply not an excuse to wriggle out of the affordable quotas any more.

Islington’s housing boss Cllr Diarmaid Ward said the decision would help stop developers “manipulating” the viability process.

He said: “Islington, like all boroughs in London, faces a significant shortage of affordable homes. A viability process in planning that allows developers to rely on a flawed approach to market value that delivers little or no affordable housing makes this problem worse, and means developers are not making a fair contribution to the community.

“The decision sends a strong signal that developers need to take into account planning policy requirements when bidding for land, and that they cannot overbid and seek to recover this money later through lower levels of affordable housing.”
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* On a very small scale, I don't think it has much impact and normal supply-demand rules apply, whereby selling prices are dictated by the incomes of potential purchasers. A developer would normally sell all finished units for the same price - based on the average incomes of all purchasers (price differentiation is nigh impossible).

If some units have to be sold for a lower price (and a much lower profit), then that takes the lower-earners out of the market. The average income of the remaining purchasers is therefore higher, so the unaffordable units can be sold for a higher price and the overall average selling price is not wildly different.

It is however a beggar-my-neighbour situation. An individual developer is always better off he can wangle a lower affordable quota that other developers in the same geographical area. Taking all developers in that area together, it doesn't make much difference.

Fun Online Polls: A house price crash; Charlie Gard

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

How would you feel if house prices fell by a third?

Pleased for the many "priced out" who can now afford to buy their own home - 88%
Angry that my "wealth" has been diminished - 12%

A good turnout with 97 votes, thanks to the other 8 people who retweeted and the 2 who posted on FB.

I was with the majority on this. Top comment:

The Cowboy Online: Another vote for 'Pleased'; it wouldn't be great for me personally, I would be stuck with negative equity, but I wouldn't lose my home and it would mean others would be able to get one.

Negative equity is a bugger for those owner-occupiers stuck with it, but if the house price fall were expected to be permanent or long term, it only seems fair to write down mortgages to the new lower selling prices. It was the banks who pushed up house prices and mortgage to silly levels and they ought to take the losses on the chin. BTL landlords can whistle for it though, they're supposed to be in it for the long term, and if they can't sell, so what?

The Homeys always use "the danger of nequity" as an argument against anything that would push house prices down. What it boils down to is bank propaganda: we'd rather keep creating mortgages of £200,000 each than have to write down some of our mortgage book and only be able to create mortgages of £150,000. Future buyers are being sacrificed, ostensibly in order to protect some recent purchasers, but actually to protect the banks.
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This whole Charlie Gard story is none of my business and as politicians like to say, "I can't comment on individual cases", but isn't that the whole point? This sort of thing is not the job of government-appointed arbitrators; and if politicians aren't prepared to face up to the individual consequences of laws they impose, isn't that copping out? That said, the NHS has to operate some sort of cost-benefit analysis, and if the NHS decides not to fund his further treatment, I've no problems with that.

So that's this week's Online Poll (no Fun, this week).

"If it were up to you, would you allow Charlie Gard's parents to take him to the USA for treatment?"

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

Fun Online Polls: Refuelling Russian warships & That Article 50 judgment.

The results to last week-and-a-half's Fun Online Poll were as follows:

Would it particularly bother you if Spain allowed a Russian warship to refuel in a Spanish-controlled port?

Yes - 7%
No - 89%
Other, please specify - 4%

Good, it appears that I'm with the majority on that one.

Top comment:

SlightlyChilly: War Back in the GODs there was a face off between two Superpowers. Nowadays, arguing about who should refuel a museum piece rustbucket from an economically irrelevant backwater is a transparent nonsense.
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And on to that Court decision on whether the govt can trigger Article 50 without a vote in the House of Commons or a new Act of Parliament, about which millions of words have been written, mainly by non-experts which includes me so I wont bother adding to it. I did one or two units of constitutional law on my law degree and AFAICS they just make it up as they go along.

What is interesting is that the decision itself appears to be unclear what the government is now supposed to do.

Let's see if we can guess what will happen next…

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

"It was a waste of the taxpayers money from the start"

... says the man who won an appeal against a £75 littering penalty which ended up costing the taxpayer £8,000.

Whether the penalty was just or not (£75 seems a bit excessive in the circumstances as reported), if he cared about taxpayers' money then he would just have paid it.

Completely inconsistent rulings on Christians and homophobes.

Case 1, bakery found to have broken anti-discrimination laws by refusing to bake a gay wedding cake.

Case 2, employee sacked for homophobic remarks wins unfair dismissal case.

IMHO both were 'wrongly' decided. If a business refuses to provide certain goods or services, so be it, the consumer can go elsewhere. And if an employee makes life unpleasant for other employees (which I don't think she did, she just spouted normal Bible stuff), then the employer should be able to sack him or her.

But put the two cases together into the following scenario, and what do you get..?

An open-minded bakery company, as a matter of company policy, is quite happy to make gay cakes. But when a gay man goes to order one, a homophobic employee flatly refuses to make it.

Can the employee be sacked? Case 2 tells us no, provided he can persuade the Employment Tribunal that he acted that way because of 'religious belief' rather just being a bigot.

But can the jilted customer then sue the bakery for discrimination? Case 1 says yes, but if there were any consistency, then the answer would be no.

Or to sum up, if it's your own business, you are bound by anti-discrimination laws, but employees can do what they like.

"Gordon Ramsay ordered to pay £1.6m after losing legal battle over pub rent"

From The Evening bloody Standard:

Celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay suffered a courtroom nightmare today after a judge ruled he must personally pay the £640,000 rent on a London pub arranged by his father-in-law allegedly using a ghost writer machine.

Ramsay is personally liable for the whole fucking bill because of a deal signed when that twat Christopher Hutcheson ran the millionaire chef’s business empire into the sodding ground.

Staff poaching and anti-competitive practices: The bizarre inconsistencies of the US legal system

From CNN, April 2014:

The lawsuit, filed in 2011, accused tech companies of agreeing not to recruit employees from one another as a way to keep wages down, a scheme allegedly hatched by deceased former Apple CEO Steve Jobs...

The lawsuit was originally filed against seven companies. Lucasfilm and Pixar, both owned now by Disney, agreed last year to pay $9 million to settle their portion of the case, while Intuit agreed to pay $11 million.

Separately, Adobe, Apple, Google, Intel, Intuit and Pixar agreed in 2010 to settle a similar Justice Department lawsuit over what regulators said were anti-competitive hiring practices.

The companies had been accused of violating antitrust law by agreeing not to poach each other's employees but did not admit wrongdoing in the settlement.

Fair enough, you might think. This boosts wages at the expense of corporate profits.

But how does that tie in with this apparently equal and opposite decision:

From City AM, January 2015:

One of business’s longest running disputes over staff poaching finally ended yesterday after British inter-dealer broker Tullett Prebon came out on top in its bitter five-year legal battle with US rival BGC Partners.

Shares in the UK broker jumped eight per cent following news that the New York-based broker will pay Tullett $100m (£66m) to settle a litigation suit in the New Jersey Superior Court.

The case concerned BGC’s alleged pinching of more than 80 brokers from Tullett’s US affiliates in 2009, which the UK firm claimed cost it $387m in market value...

The deal also includes a clause that prevents either party from hiring the other’s desk heads and senior management for a year.

This clearly boosts corporate profits at the expense of wages.

Rent seeking

From The Law Society Gazette:

The lord chancellor is to be represented at tomorrow’s appeal challenging a Crown court judge’s decision to throw out a major fraud trial for want of defence counsel, the Gazette has learned.

At the last minute, Chris Grayling has sought, and been granted, leave to be represented as an interested party in R v Crawley and Others, a case arising out of the Operation Cotton investigation.

He will be represented by joint head of chambers at Blackstone Chambers Anthony Peto QC and Peter Woodall, who joined the Public Defender Service last month from Carmelite Chambers.

At Southwark Crown Court earlier this month, His Honour Judge Anthony Leonard stayed the prosecution against five defendants in relation to an alleged £4.5m land banking fraud. The five defendants were represented pro bono by the prime minister’s brother Alex Cameron QC, head of chambers at 3 Raymond Buildings.

Following the refusal by barristers to accept the most serious criminal cases after the government cut fees by 30% (barristers claim the sum is 44%), no advocates could be found to take the case.

Reminding us yet again that the UK's so-called 'justice' or 'legal' system is a complete and utter joke, and has got very little to do with 'justice;' or 'laws'.

For the self-selecting and largely 'upper class' people who are supposed to be running it, it is just an excuse to hand each other large piles of taxpayers' money. And dress up in silly outfits just to see if they can get away with it.

Barristers also boast about being like taxi drivers, just so that you can't say you weren't warned.

"Kirkwood pack members admit dog fighting charges"

From the BBC:

Three members of an east Belfast dog pack have admitted animal cruelty offences described by the police and USPCA as among the most serious they have seen.

Buster, a bull terrier, and his sons Corky and Wizard, all from Island Street, admitted attacking cats and other animals in their neighbourhood.

They also pleaded guilty to causing unnecessary suffering to four puppies. Jasper, an English Mastiff from McAllister Court, pleaded guilty to similar charges.

The investigation into the pack's activities began more than two years ago when video footage was recovered from a mobile phone. One clip showed dogs attacking a badger. In another, the same dogs set on a cat that they had trapped in a cage, tearing it to pieces.

A police officer welcomed the animals' guilty pleas and said pets and wildlife should contact them if they had suspicions about such activity.

The judge's order that the four dogs be put down has been suspended pending an appeal to the European Court of Animal Rights.

Well, he clearly wasn't an "eye-witness" then, was he?

Acid attack: Eyewitness heard 'screaming for help'

"Bull attack: Farmer charged over walker's death"

From the BBC:

A farmer has been charged with gross negligence manslaughter over the death of a walker who was killed by a bull.

Roger Freeman died while walking with his wife through Underhill Farm at Stanford-on-Soar in Nottinghamshire, close to the Leicestershire border.

Paul Waterfall has been bailed to appear at Nottingham Magistrates' Court on 21 August. The Crown Prosecution Service said he was responsible for the farm at the time of the attack in November 2010.

Woah! What sort of fresh madness is this?

Cattle are dangerous, end of, always have been, always will be. Farmers get killed and injured, so do people walking their dogs. That is in the nature of things. That is why cattle are kept in fields and behind gates and fences.

Conversely, I am delighted to see that dog owners will be made criminally liable for the acts of their pets , something I myself suggested a while back.

"Topshop set for £3m windfall after it wins High Court battle with singer Rihanna for using its logo on a T-shirt"

From The Daily Mail

* Retailer said it could harm reputation with customers who assume it is 'approved'
* Rihanna said she had bought licence for image - downloaded from the Internet
* Singer told court Topshop's team requested clothes after writ was issued
* High Court judge Justice Birss found in the retailer's favour today
* Rihanna says she intends to appeal and finds ruling 'perplexing'

Clothing giant Topshop today won a High Court fight with pop superstar Rihanna for wearing an T-shirt with their logo on it in a case that could be worth £3million.

The store claimed the ‘unendorsed’ T-shirt with a photograph of one of their stores with the logo clearly visible may have damaged their image because customers could have thought it was genuine merchandise.
Arcadia Group Brands Ltd, who sued under the trading name Topshop, claimed they are is entitled to damages from the Barbadian star, whose real name is Robyn Rihanna Fenty, over the unauthorised use of the image.

Rihanna disputed their claim but Judge Mr Justice Birss ruled in their favour today after a hearing in London, but will decide on damages at a later date.

"Yet the really interesting thing about the tulip boom is that it did not end in universal disaster..

From Andrew Marr's A History Of The World (not the best book ever but well worth £4 if you can plough through it quickly enough so as not to get confused by the fine detail):

... or even in the widespread bankruptcy of Dutch speculators. The Estates General which ran the republic refused to take special measures, and passed the problem back to the civic authorities.

Many towns, in their turn, refused to process or hear any court actions involving the tulip trade, carrying on as if none of it had really happened and allowing the paper losses and the paper gains to wipe each other out.

If the dreams of sudden enrichment were snatched away, so were the nightmares of destitution.

This concept is of much wider application of course and I have alluded to it often enough.

"Euphemism named as new Lord Chief Justice"

According to the BBC, some knob has been promoted to something or other.

What a prick.

That whole "curbing legal aid" thing

There are some useful stat's on who shares the £2 billion spent on legal aid in today's Daily Mail.

According to the legal profession - and some of the people whose representation was paid for by Legal Aid - Legal Aid is vital because it helps people achieve "justice". But then they would say that, wouldn't they?


Now, the whole legal system in this country only has tangentially to do with some notions of "fairness" or "justice". In practice it is there to protect the wealthy and to provide lawyers with a ready source of income - there's no point being a tip top commercial lawyer drafting business contracts if there is no court system to enforce it. By analogy, if there were no organised football league, you wouldn't be able to earn money by playing football.

It is, for example, perfectly easy to imagine a system where there are no commercial courts to enforce business contracts. Businesses would either behave fairly to their employees and customers and compensate them where appropriate in order to preserve their goodwill and reputation or they would go out of business fairly quickly.

Apparently, it is not the done thing in Japan for large companies to sue each other for breach of contract (and apparently they don't even bother having detailed contracts in the first place), either they settle out of court or the injured party just refuses to deal with the other party ever again. Word soon gets around who's dealing honourably and who isn't.

And the whole criminal justice thing is a bit of a joke as punishments seem to be inversely proportional to the severity of the crime committed and all this Human Rights malarkey has gone way too far.

So the legal profession as a whole is one massive great rent-seeking enterprise, and the £2 billion Legal Aid they receive is just another subsidy on top. To ensure that outsiders don't grab a slice, entry to the profession is of course strictly regulated and restricted and there is a heck of a lot of nepotism.

As readers ought to be aware by now, I'm against all rent-seeking and subsidy payments and I'm also against taxes on output, employment and earned income, but a tax on rental income (like the bulk of the income of the legal profession) merely serves to claw back some of those subsidies.

So here's a bright idea - the total turnover/gross income of legal services is said to be £26.8 billion a year, so if the lawyers decide that £2 billion or £3 billion should be spent on Legal Aid each year, we could fund that with a flat tax of about ten per cent on their gross income and the problem sorts itself out. There's no reason we can't fund the entire court system with such a tax, to be honest, it's like making footballers pay for the upkeep of the football grounds out of their own wages (which ultimately they do).

They have gone completely and utterly mad

1. Deciding to send arms to Syrian "rebels".

Unless the aim is purely to get as much money out of them and to ensure that as many Arabs and other Islamists kill each other as possible, in which case we should be selling arms to Assad as well, maybe even deliver them some non-launchable nuclear bombs?

2. This whole "revolving door" thing

I suppose they can't stop him from going to work for an accountancy firm; the point is he was already behaving suspiciously while he still worked for HM Revenue & Customs. This move to Deloittes sort of confirms most of those suspicions.

3. Privatising the courts service.

Yes, you read that correctly:

Plans for £1 billion-a-year savings have been drawn up, including selling off the court service and control of the court buildings and taking 20,000 staff off the public payroll.

Private companies would then be free to charge larger fees from commercial litigants and attract investors. However, the position of judges or magistrates would not be affected.

To ensure the judiciary’s continuing independence, Justice Secretary Chris Grayling is considering a Royal Charter, similar to the proposed regulation of the Press.

4. Yet more throwing good money after bad:

Public money set to be used to cover shortfall in private-finance projects. Promised £3bn to invest in infrastructure and stimulate economy may all be used to plug gap in overhauled PFI scheme.

The creatures outside looked from Gordon Brown to George Osborne, and from Gordon Osborne to George Brown, and from Gorde Obrown to Georgon Osboom; but already it was impossible to say which was which.