Meanwhile, on Planet Zog...

From The Evening Standard:

A resident of “Billionaires’ Row” today said it is “great” that a third of all properties in the area lie empty because it gives locals peace and quiet. Pablo Teixeira, 35, is one of a dwindling number of full-time residents on The Bishops Avenue in Hampstead, north London…

Mr Teixeira, 35, who lives in an £8 million, 12-bedroom house that his parents in Brazil bought five years ago, said his neighbours pay enough tax to do as they wish with their properties.

He said: “If they buy the property they can do what they like with it. It is up to them. It isn’t a scam, they are not taking anything from anybody. They pay a lot of tax to afford a property here. Council tax is extremely expensive. I understand the curiosity but people shouldn’t be poking their noses in it.”

"Queen to make state visit to France"

From the BBC:

The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh are to make a three-day state visit to France this summer, Buckingham Palace has said.

The Queen is expected to arrive in France on 5 June and spend the following day cringeing while her husband puts his foot in it in Normandy for the 70th anniversary of the D-Day landings. The Prince will then travel on to cause more mirth and mayhem in Paris, with The Queen trying to keep a straight face.

The Queen, whose husband last offended the French on a state visit in April 2004, was invited by France's president Francois Hollande. In a short statement, the palace said:

"The Duke of Edinburgh, accompanied by The Queen, will put a few noses out of joint on a state visit to France from 5 to 7 June.

"Her Majesty and His Royal Highness are visiting at the invitation of the President of France, President Hollande, who does not seem to realise what he has let himself in for.

"On 6 June the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh will attend events in Normandy to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Normandy landings.

"Being entirely fair here, the old boy does have a bit of class and style about him, and whatever he blurts out will be a damn' sight more subtle than a certain former Prime Minister who was booed by veterans for referring to 'Omaha Beach' as 'Obama Beach'.

"On 6 and 7 June His Royal Highness will cause bafflement and awkwardness at state visit events in Paris and round off the festivities by chatting to President Hollande about The Queen's fondness for corgi dogs before enquiring politely about the Presidential Rottweiler."

"Drug demons win battle against Oscar-winning actor after fighting him half of his life"

From The Mirror:

Tenacious Class A drug heroin finally won its battle against Oscar-winning actor Philip Seymour Hoffman after fighting him for more than half of his life.

The century old morphine substitute won its final victory at the weekend, leaving the 46-year-old star dead in his New York apartment. The highly addictive substance had to first overcome his treatment for heroin use and dependency to pills.

Sources close to the illegal opiate said the 'demon drug' had long been struggling to overcome the actor's attempts to stay clean.

But last year it was reported that the popular sedative had managed to pull him back "off the wagon" 23 years after he first quit booze and drugs, having feared that it would fail to kill him.

"Lloyds Banking Group to offer free sex-change operations to male managers"

From City AM:

Lloyds: 40pc of our top managers will be women in 2020

Antonio Horta Osorio will commit to ensuring 40 per cent of senior staff are female by 2020.

Currently 28 per cent of the bank’s 5,000 senior staff are female, equating to 1,400 employees. The increase to 40 per cent will take that up to 2,000, an increase of 600.

The pledge covers several bands of seniority, and the bank wants at least 25 per cent of managers at each of those levels to be female, ensuring widespread coverage from the target.

At the moment 60 per cent of the bank’s overall workforce is female. The chief executive of the state-backed bank will also undergo the procedute and will henceforth be known as 'Antonia'.

Floods

From the Independent

Britain may have to choose whether it wants to save "town or country" from future flooding because it is too costly to defend both, the chairman of the Environment Agency said.

Lord Smith said "difficult choices" would have to be made over what to protect because "there is no bottomless purse" to pay for defences.

His warning comes as it emerged victims of the flooding are having to pay up to 41p a minute to call a government helpline for advice.

From John Redwood's Diary

The staff costs of the Agency rose by £30m or 8% compared to the previous year, reaching a total of £395.3 million. The Agency employed 12,252 people including  temps and contractor personnel.  Pension contributions cost £56 m , with a loss on the fund recognised that year in the accounts bringing the total pension cost to £197.4 million.  The total cost of pensions was almost as high as the capital works, where they spent £219million during the year.

Within the capital works just £20.3 million was spent on improving or maintaining culverts and channels to ensure free flow of water. That is a mere 1.7% of their total budget, or 3.4% of their staff and pension costs. A further £69.6m was spent on improving embankments.

Fun Online Polls: High house prices or high wages & smoking in cars

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

For a given size of an economy, which would you choose:

High house prices, low wages - 4%
High wages, low house prices - 96%

There was an impressive (by this blog's standards) turnout of 576 votes, achieved by linking to the poll in several places.

The result is pretty conclusive, and this shall henceforth be my new campaign slogan.

If people are interested in how this would be achieved, we can steer the conversation round to how things used to be in the good old days (hefty Domestic Rates keeping prices down) and see how it goes.
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THis week, smoking in a car with a child present.

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

Creative Destruction

From the Guardian

There's a fear that Cash's is about to join such names as Woolworths and Blockbuster on the great commercial scrapheap of the recession years. Cash's, that is, as in the humble nametape – as sewn for generations by loving mothers, and even occasionally loving fathers, into the clothes that their children take to school and will otherwise reliably lose, thus causing households to ring with the anguished cry "But this jumper is Veronica's!"

The company has not been the only maker of nametapes, yet somehow Cash and nametapes go together like Sloan and liniment or Robinson and barley water. But the triumph of the marker pen has made nametapes look like a 19th-century technology.

So why "fear"? We've decided that we like marker pens better than name tapes, and the suppliers of name tapes go to the wall. I sympathise with the plight of the employees, but what are we going to do? Keep them employed making tape that no-one wants? (actually, we prefer name tapes in our house, but we're not sustaining them).

People often write about companies hit by recession, but in a lot of cases, the recession was just the thing that tipped them over. Blockbuster was always going to go to the wall because streaming rentals are just more sensible than people driving to a store to collect and return movies. As a frequent customer years ago, I don't miss it.

The Home-Owner-Ists' favourite kind of tax...

… is what, exactly?


IF you are hard-right, authoritarian and/or Faux Libertarian, you believe
a) that income from 'land' ranks equally with income from 'capital/labour', so you oppose taxes any of these,
b) that all citizens benefit equally from the way that society is organised
So you think the only valid form of taxation is a Poll Tax.

IF you are a socialist and/or anti-capitalist, you want taxes on income/wealth, whether earned or unearned.

IF you are free market liberal, you prefer LVT, which has the advantages of both Poll Tax and Income Tax but without the disadvantages of either.

Remember that LVTers come under fire from both sides:
- the Red Wing of the Home-Owner-Ist movement say that LVT would be a shift away from their favourite tax (Income Tax) and towards Poll Tax; and
- the Blue Wing of the Home-Owner-Ist movement say that LVT would be a shift away from their favourite tax (Poll Tax) and towards Income Tax.

Thus making it impossible to argue with them as they will contradict themselves once or twice a sentence, for example saying they hate Council Tax and would replace it with either a Local Income Tax or with a Poll Tax but for Heaven's sake, not with LVT.

As a matter of fact, we have a fairly socialist tax system (most taxes are directly on income) with a few Poll Taxes thrown in out of spite. But given the Home-Owner-Ists' aversion to LVT, which way do they swing: towards Poll Tax or towards Income Tax? That gives you a clue as to which wing you are dealing with and how inherently contradictory the whole philosophy is.

(Remember that welfare payments and the state pension, are the opposite of a Poll Tax, so if you support a Poll Tax, you must oppose the state pension).

Top blogging this week

There are weeks when other people save you the bother of posting it yourself.

On subsidies to the energy industry...

1. Nick Drew points out that your enemy's enemy is sometimes your friend.

On the whole 'ban smoking in cars' hysteria.

2. Bill Quango MP saves the best until the end of this.

3. Chris Snowdon is one of the go-to blogs for this sort of thing, but he ended up being beaten hands down by JohnB in the comments. JohnB merely forgot to point out that Britain's boozers, once sparsely visited places at best because the smoke drove all right-thinking people away are now teeming with life and flourishing hubs of the community.

4. Dick Puddlecote, the other go-to, veers close to forgetting what 'public health' actually means (but redeems himself in the comments).

On the weather

5. Daily Mash state the bleedin' obvious.

I'm sure there were others, but I wasn't keeping a list.

Great Daily Mail headlines of the week

EXCLUSIVE - 'He didn't want to cause us anymore shame': Father reveals it was family babysitter who molested Senate aide who killed himself after child porn bust and blamed abusive past in haunting suicide note

Good work!

It's missing an allusion to drugs and there's no mention of what his house would sell for, but hey.