Bishop Hill
Quite why the BBC thinks the opinions of a footballer-turned-cook are of any great interest is beyond me, but they are reporting today that Mr Ramsay wants to ban out of season produce from restaurants. And he has been telling Gordon Brown so as well.
I'm probably becoming a bit of a stuck record on this subject, but it's hard to know what else to do in the face of a never-ending barrage of demands to ban imported food.
So here we go again. If we ban out of season food then people in Africa and Chile are going to be out of jobs and that may well mean starving.
Just because you can't see them Gordon, doesn't mean they can be flung on the scrapheap without a second thought.
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Tim W's favourite accountant, Richard Murphy, wonders what the fuss is about Aberdeen Asset Management's rumoured departure from these shores.
Guess what? Here we have another company threatening to leave the UK that is not only not paying UK tax in 2007, it’s such a seasoned UK tax avoider that it’s downgraded its previously stated UK tax liabilities by £7.8 billion in two years.
Michael Meacher refers to our Dicky as one of the UK's foremost tax experts. Its a pity then that Mr Murphy has such trouble telling the difference between millions and billions. This is probably the same affliction from which Gordon Brown suffers.
Richard's argument is a bit dicky too (it always is). Why should their 2007 tax bill be the criterion used? What happened in 2006? Well, the comparative figures show that last time round they had a tax charge of nearly ten million and, adjustments aside, that's not an inconsiderable sum. And never mind the charge - what did they actually hand over in cash in 2007? The answer, according to the cashflow statement, is £9.7m and the year before that £6.7m.
So in simple cash terms, a company which has handed over £16.4m in cash in the last two years is, according to our Dicky, "contributing little or nothing".
You can see why they'd want to leave, can't you?
The news that the Tories are now enjoying a 26% poll lead over the government has got them rattled over at Labour Home. There is still not the slightest sign that anyone among the readership has the slightest idea about why people have turned against them. (Hint: it's the economy, stupid.)
The latest lot of solutions from the red corner are no better than the last lot either. A core vote strategy is today's bright idea with radical redistribution mooted by one commenter on the thread.
The issue of having "tax and spend" as your solution to all known problems can be tricky when you are in a tight corner caused by too much taxing and too much spending. Unfortunately, I don't think anyone in the Labour party has the sharpness of mind to work out how to solve this conundrum.
The British Crime Survey is widely held to be the most reliable representation of the incidence of crime in this country. It's all relative though. Think tankers Civitas have just put out a press release which says that the BCS might be leaving three million crimes per year out of the figures. Probably par for the course for government statistics.
It reveals that, ever since its inception in 1981, the British Crime Survey (BCS) has omitted many crimes committed against people who have been repeat victims. If people are victimised in the same way by the same perpetrators more than five times in a year, the number of crimes is put down as five. The justification for this was ‘to avoid extreme cases distorting the rates’, but, as Farrell and Pease point out, ‘if the people who say they suffered ten incidents really did, it is capping the series at five that distorts the rate’.
So please remember people. Once you've been mugged five times, don't even bother telling the police, cause they'll just throw the report in the bin.
Economist Indur Goklany, writing at the Cato Institute site, takes a long hard look at second generation biofuels - so-called cellulosic ethanol, which is going to replace fossil fuels without any of the unpleasant side effects (like mass starvation) associated with corn-based ethanol.
Farmers will do what they’ve always done: they’ll produce the necessary biomass that would be converted to ethanol more efficiently. In fact, they’ll start cultivating the cellulose as a crop (or crops). They have had 10,000 years of practice perfecting their techniques. They’ll use their usual bag of tricks to enhance the yields of the biomass in question: they’ll divert land and water to grow these brand new crops. They’ll fertilize with nitrogen and use pesticides. The Monsantos of the world — or their competitors, the start-ups — will develop new and genetically modified but improved seeds that will increase the farmer’s productivity and profits. And if cellulosic ethanol proves to be as profitable as its backers hope, farmers will divert even more land and water to producing the cellulose instead of food. All this means we’ll be more or less back to where we were. Food will once again be competing with fuel. And land and water will be diverted from the rest of nature to meet the human demand for fuel.
A bet you a large pint of the foaming stuff that this argument will be entirely ignored until the point that people start dying again.
A few days ago I wondered about whether the Labour party understood why they were so unpopular and made light of some of the Fabians' ideas for putting things right.
Now, there's a new set of ideas being bandied about over at Liberal Conspiracy, which are, to say the least, no improvement on the last lot.
When your job, household income, housing costs are inherently unstable you then need active and interventionist government to counter-balance wider and unpredictable economic forces.
Richards argued the fact that Northern Rock has been nationalised without obvious political cost demonstrates how the mood has changed. He’s right and there is a discussion to be had about the appropriate level of regulation of financial markets and the need for consideration of how we can create more proactive financial watchmen.
As someone pointed out in the comments, the three hundred-odd councillors the Labour party lost the other day suggest strongly that there was, in fact, a ginormous political price paid for the Northern Rock fiasco. And more regulation? Get real man! How many major multinationals have hinted that they're going to leave the country in the last couple of weeks?
Aberdeen Asset Management, WPP, United Business Media, Shire?
You can lead a horse to water, and all that...
Apropos of my earlier comments on the Labour party's new found love for inherited privilege, it's also worth pointing out that the Tories are wondering whether to start a new political dynasty too although, perhaps unsurprisingly, they're going to do it in reverse.
Speaking to Cambridge University Conservatives tonight, Boris Johnson's father Stanley confirmed that he would put his name forward to succeed his son in Henley.
In the interests of party political balance, I should probably stick the boot in for this one too, but dynasties are rather the point of the Tories, aren't they?
- Imported flowers have large carbon footprints.
- So don't buy imported flowers.
- But wait! Africans depend on the flower trade! They'll starve!
- The flower trade uses toxic chemicals too.
- Oh! We can probably do without the Africans in that case.
Greenies are being offered the opportunity to put their money where their not inconsiderable mouths are:
Ethical bank Triodos is offering people the chance to become shareholders in Triodos Renewables, a public limited company which came into being 13 years ago as the Wind Fund. This is its fourth share issue - the last was in 2005.
Triodos Renewables invests mainly in small and medium-sized wind farms, hydroelectric schemes and emerging renewable energy technology companies in the UK. It owns and operates two wind farms, Caton Moor in Lancashire and Haverigg II in Cumbria, and two single turbines, Gulliver in Lowestoft, Suffolk, (recently out of action for a few months following lightning strikes) and Sigurd in the Orkney Islands. It also owns the Beochlich hydroelectric project in Argyll, Scotland, and it has a stake in Marine Current Turbines, a tidal energy company whose first commercial turbine will begin operating off the coast of Northern Ireland later this year, and is a partner in Connective Energy, which is developing ways to capture and re-use waste heat from industry.
I'm all for people investing in things in which they believe. The problem is that this is not really an investment in green energy so much as an investment in the chance to win a share of some government subsidies.
(Via The Graun)
There's a rather important article over at EU Referendum this morning. Richard North highlights a recent FAO report, which shows that changing diet in China and India has not affected their share of the global grain harvest. This puts the kaibosh on the argument that demand for meat production has sucked in huge quantities of grain. The change has in fact largely come from the USA, where production has been shifted massively over to biofuels.