Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. Adapted for our troubled times

Our 6-cartoon Christmas Special. Starring Cameron, Clegg, Thatcher, Osborne, and Duncan Smith, with cameos by the Great British Public...

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One in three businesses is losing money

Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg needs all the good news he can get. But maybe not from Cameron...

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Tories propose you give up your Employment Rights in exchange for a bunch of shares - a repeat of the Manhattan Scam?

Apart from doing that Bullingdon thing the Chancellor George Osborne also studied Modern History at Oxford University. Some may be surprised to learn that "Modern" history starts from the 16^th Century straight after the Middle Ages. One of the lessons Osborne would have learned from this period is how the island of Manhattan in New York was given up by its Native American Indian inhabitants for a handful of glass beads. Clearly an example of how one party misled the other on two things:

a)     the relative values of a handful of glass beads and Manhattan, and

b)     the implications of "give up"

George is trying the same trick with your Employment Rights. He proposes that you surrender your right to claim unfair dismissal in exchange for shares in your employer worth between £2,000 and £50,000. This is in spite of the fact that Britons are already the third most easily sacked people in the developed world. 

Presumably the idea is that you too can get richer from your own sacking by the boost to your employer’s share price and the dividends that come from getting rid of you. Making getting fired worthwhile!

As you will appreciate, this is closely modelled on the Manhattan Island scam. So we provide you with some basic facts to avoid any confusion on

a)     the relative value of a handful of shares and your employment rights, and

b)     the implications of “give up”

In March 2012, the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development published a report titled “Counting the cost of the jobs recession”. The report provides stark figures on the effect on the economy of unemployment.  

The report's figures on the continuing lost GDP, e.g. 9.1% lost in 2011 alone, throws a light on the fact that although the banks may claim to have stopped stabbing us in the back (though we doubt this), and claim to be reforming (we doubt this too), it is clear that we are still bleeding. It also provides other grim facts for the sacked:

• The number of people working part-time because they can’t find a full-time job doubled from 0.67 million to 1.34 million between spring 2008 and the end of 2011.
• Two-thirds of people who are made redundant and who then return to work are paid less in their new job. On average, the pay penalty is 28%.

An earlier CIPD report, from January 2009, “A False Economy? The cost to employers of redundancy”, found that in terms of the amount of redundancy money paid:

• The average redundancy payment is found to be £10,575, though a quarter of employers pay less than £5,000. The average payment ranges from £7,629 in the voluntary/not-for-profit sector to £8,891 in the private sector and £17, 926 in the public sector.

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Key political fibs, and some tips on how to refute them

Money has been devalued. I do not refer to inflation here. Money has been devalued because people don't value the things they can get too easily. 

The people who control our economy - the top politicians and businessmen - have served themselves extremely generously over the last few decades, and now for them money is commonplace. Because it is of little value they carelessly give it to some (themselves and their associates) and thoughtlessly take it away from others (the rest of us Britons). They do this with no more concern than casting a shadow.

People with vast amounts of money think people with merely lots of money are poor. In a campaign speech Mitt Romney, an American presidential candidate, said he thought the average American earned a quarter of a million dollars. Presumably he regards $250,000 a year as a very modest amount. Thus he and his ilk blindfold themselves to the consequences of their actions with the assumption that the poor only have lots of money, rather than pots of it, allowing their consciences to let them rip off an extra few hundred pounds with an increase in ticket prices and utility bills. And rip off another extra few hundred pounds with freezes in pay and cuts in benefits and pensions. Money isn’t important, they tell themselves, therefore it isn’t important if I help myself to some more of it.

http://g-mond.parisschoolofeconomics.eu/topincomes/#Database:

But just as people don’t value the things they have in plenty, they do value what they have little of. For 90% of Britons, whose income has stagnated in real terms for decades, money does have value. And when it goes, it hurts.

Britain is going through some painful changes. One of which is a public intolerance of lying and cheating. Vilification is everywhere: bankers (for a compendium of dodgy activities that have come to be known generically as ‘banking’); media moguls (phone hacking, bribing officials, etc.); suppliers ripping off the government (MOD paying £22 for 65p lightbulb, etc.); insurers (inflating repair costs to hike premiums, etc.); MPs (fiddling expenses; lying about anything including swearing at cops; providing commercial favours; complicity in kidnapping and rendition, etc.). Pity the banker/MP/mogul who now find themselves in deep doo-doo for doing precisely the same thing they were openly doing when they were fêted as ‘leading citizens’. Pity? Perhaps not.

Bankers have been manipulating LIBOR for years, an open secret that was shouted across trading floors with bankers offering one another a choice of rates like sweets from a tin of Quality Street. Strawberry Delight or Orange Crunch, up a little or down a lot? Fabulous profits tumbled in from the Payment Protection Insurance scam, insider trading, grotesque charges on pensions and investments. All these scams were hardly a secret to an insider or an insider’s friends or his friends’ friends, their spouses, paramours and personal trainers. The perpetrators of these scams were not just quietly indulged, but were proudly trumpeted as the jewels in the British industrial crown. To keep them, we are told, we must pay them generously and regulate them pusillanimously.

Unimpeded and celebrated dodgy behaviour became an open secret that spread like a flu virus infecting the upper echelons of Britain. Ripping off clients, customers and constituents was in order to harvest as much money as the bankers. Confusing rewards with merit, they proved their ‘excellence’ by the amount of money they could grab. And then justified the amount of money they could grab by their ‘excellence’. Even our sainted family doctors got in on the act with a 58% pay increase over 4 years for doing less work. British culture itself went through a sarcastic period, Sarc-Art, when unmade beds, stuffed sheep, lights going on and off, and crumpled pieces of paper were selling for ludicrous prices to people with too much money to value it. As soon as our Brit-Artists realised that their sarcasm was profitable, perhaps they too believed in their own excellence?

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Liebrary: The only way to save our children from paying the national debt is to cut services?

Updated September 2016


The former chancellor, George Osborne, has finally admitted that the Bank of England's quantitative easing (effectively printing money) made the rich richer. He was silent about that fact when he was chancellor. 

On top of that, interest rate cuts hurt savers. So, speaking from Washington in an interview with Bloomberg TV, Mr Osborne said: “We need to offset the very necessary loose monetary policy and the distributional consequences that it is having. Essentially it makes the rich richer and makes life difficult for ordinary savers.” He added: “There’s a role for government policy not in stopping that monetary policy which keeps the economy strong but in mitigating its impact. I think all of us who believe in free markets need to work harder to find an answer to the anger that people clearly feel out there.” What he couldn’t bear to say was that the only way to do that is to increase welfare and benefits, which he cut.

The Bank of England’s Quantitative Easing (QE) programme (which means printing money to buy UK government bonds) props up the nation’s asset prices. For it to help the real economy, it needs to – you’ve guessed it – trickle down. That’s because most financial assets are owned by the top 10%. Half of us have no financial assets at all.

How much QE has there been? The UK created £375bn ($550bn) of new money in its earlier QE programme between 2009 and 2012. August 2016 brought a fresh injection of £60bn of QE. 

Did it trickle down? The banks are supposed to invest this new money in businesses. They didn’t. Almost all of it went straight into the financial markets and stayed there.

So, August 2012 threw up another howling hypocrisy in the “we are all in it together” mantra:

• The Bank of England admitted that the wealth enhancing benefits of its Quantitative Easing (QE) money printing exercise had gone to the wealthiest – giving them an estimated £600 billion boost to their wealth.

• Assorted Tory politicians jumped over poor bedraggled Nick Clegg for suggesting a wealth tax.

To put this in perspective, HM Treasury figures show the UK National Debt passed £1,000 billion in the same year, 2012. Just the £600 billion increase to the wealthy resulting directly from QE would have paid off well over half of the national debt.

However the government prefers to pump QE money into inflating the wealth of the wealthy by £600billion, and pay off the debt by cutting jobs, salaries, services, and pensions for everyone else.

The amiable Tory MP Bernard Jenkin dismissed the notion of a wealth tax as the "politics of envy", advising  not to 'strangle the goose that lays the golden egg'.  Jenkin overlooks that while this particular goose ate all the corn, it hasn't produced anything from its nether regions that brought benefit to 90% of ripped-off Britons whose incomes have stagnated for decades.

http://g-mond.parisschoolofeconomics.eu/topincomes/#Database:

And in spite of all the exertions of the corn-fed honkers, half of us have absolutely no assets according to Bank of England figures:

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How collective switching can help households get a fairer deal on energy bills

By Lani Shamash, of thepeoplespower.co.uk, writing on the UK energy market.

Mistrust, alienation and inertia. They’re consumer characteristics which have become synonymous with the UK energy industry as customers, the media and the government rail on a daily basis about the evils of the industry. We all talk about it, we all write about it, in fact I’d go as far as to say it’s a national pastime, a conversation topic so customary it’s become more of a Great British staple than the weather. After all, it’s not just isolated to the energy market, but now synonymous with the pharmaceutical, housing, mobile phone and, of course, financial industries, to name a few.

Clearly, in its current state, the relationship between energy suppliers and household consumers is skewed. And it’s a costly skew too; we collectively over-spend £4 billion a year because we’re on the wrong energy tariff. So when, last week, Nick Clegg announced that he had made a deal with the major energy companies, expectations were high. So what was agreed? Once a year the ‘Big Six’ will tell consumers whether we’re on their best tariff. Anything else I hear you ask? Er, no... That’s it actually.

It’s not much, but it’s a step towards something which we all desperately need; simpler, fairer energy bills. We need it to end the frustration brought on by the thousands of different tariffs which are changed with more regularity than an incandescent light bulb. Or to combat the sense of defeat in the person who throws that quarterly bill straight in the bin before even attempting to decipher its contents. And we need it to prevent the horrifying headlines on the fuel poverty epidemic which, according to a report commissioned by the Department of Energy and Climate Change, contributes to the 27,000 excess winter deaths that occur each year.

But most of us do nothing. The vast majority of us don’t even switch energy suppliers despite government advice telling us to. It might have something to do with the prospect of a big penalty, a phobia of forms, or a cynical little voice in your head which tells you that they’re all the same, that it’s a lose-lose situation so why bother. But you’re not alone.

You could join dozens, hundreds, thousands, and even millions of other little people to become a real force. Group bargaining’s an old idea, but it’s still a good one, and with the advent of mass internet access the possibilities are endless.

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The gang discuss ways to solve the issue of party funding

Gatecrashing the party... donations

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Chris and a monied chum debate revealing MPs' tax returns

Should he or shouldn't he...

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Low-cost accommodation property scandal

KJ and Fee discuss the UK's housing shortage

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Internships – a moral dilemma

Chris and his wife agonise over the ethics of advancing their son's employment prospects

Cameron defends internship places Clegg privilege unfair apprenticeship

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The deficits of the coalition

The deficit reduction is not working and plan B .... what plan B?

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