Entries from May 1, 2008 - June 1, 2008
Bishop Hill
I've just got myself a very cool add-in for Firefox called Hyperwords. This is what I've been looking for for ages. Select a bit of text and you get a pop-up menu which will take you anywhere on the internet you want to go - Wikipedia, search engines, shops, Technorati, you name it. Select a number and you can do currency conversions on it, you can tag things in delicious.
The menus are configurable, so you only get the functionality you want, and there's all sorts of clever tailoring you can do as well.
Well worth a look for Firefox users.
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Nigel Lawson is on the Simon Mayo show on Radio Five today at 2pm, discussing his new book on global warming.
Ok, so the BBC won't let me see the emails. Information held for journalistic purposes is exempt, it seems.
This isn't the end of the world though, because all I want is some confirmation that there were some emails, and if there were, when they arrived at the BBC.
I've gone back to the Beeb and asked if I can see the dates and times of email correspondence between Roger Harrabin and the WMO. Surely the dates and times of the emails isn't information held for journalistic purposes.
According to my researches on the interweb, the young lady in the photo above is called Divya Dwivedi.
Further research reveals that Divya Dwivedi was appointed by Ken Livingstone to be London's representative in Delhi! Strewth! I imagine the good people of Delhi will be pretty pleased with that particular appointment! Certainly, from the pic above, the ambassador's cocktail parties look like a lot of fun.
Says Ms Dwivedi of her appointment:
This is an exciting new challenge for me and I keenly look forward to representing the Mayor of London’s Office in India. I am firmly convinced about the opportunity that lies ahead of me to function as a keystone in bridging opportunities between London and India. In this position, I hope to successfully promote brand London and develop a mutually beneficial relationship between India and London.
Mutually beneficial relationships appear to be a speciality for Ms D. And she certainly seems to have "got into the swing" of her new job, as we learn from this article that she's going to be appearing naked in a Hollywood movie, something that will presumably create "lots of bridging opportunities". One can only applaud her dedication to the job.
Do you know, I suddenly realise why Boris and the Conservatives have made a U-turn on doing away with the London "embassies".
Here's another photo of Ms D, this time with Ken himself. She looks kind of different in this picture...
The BBC have now responded to my request to see the email exchange which Roger Harrabin claims took place between himself and the World Meteorological Organisation at the time of the Jo Abbess "change the report or else" story.
It will probably come as no surprise to anyone that the Beeb is refusing to release the emails.
At the end of the day then, we have the word of one man, Roger Harrabin that the email exchange took place and what its contents were.
If he were a blogger, we would not accept this lack of any evidence. If you don't present evidence, the blogosphere isn't going to take your word for it.
This same principle applies to the BBC too. But more so.
I've commented a couple of times on how the Labour party just doesn't seem to understand why it has become so unpopular, as demonstrated by their failure to come up with any sensible suggestions for new policies to regain the initiative.
There's no suggestion that the higher echelons of the government have twigged the problem yet either. Take a look at this article from the Low Incomes Tax Reform Group, which is a pretty clear example of the madness which has become the stock in trade of Labour government. It tells the story of a hypothetical French student called Henri who studies in the UK and works at home in his summer holidays. Having a bit of cash to spare at the end of his hols, he buys himself a pair of new trainers to impress Les Anglaises.
At this point, Gordon Brown, or more to the point, his tax policy on non-doms steps in:
The new Finance Bill proposes that if Henri lands at Dover wearing his new trainers, he should declare that fact to HMRC and be charged to tax on their cost.
We should also add that if Henri needs to buy some books to study in the UK and uses his French debit card to buy them, he will also have to declare that to HMRC and potentially pay tax on those as well.
These are what are known in tax law as “remittances”.
Henri could declare all his income (including his earnings in France) like a UK student and avoid the charge on remittances, but that would mean completing a Self-assessment tax return, reading around 100 pages of HMRC material about double taxation agreements and residence, as well as corresponding with the French tax authorities.
Whatever he does, he is in a fix. Henri may not pay any UK tax at the end of the day; but he will probably have to spend half the year studying tax law in order to satisfy the requirements of HMRC.
If you spend six months finding out how to pay your taxes and the rest of the year earning enough money to pay them, you wonder why anyone gets out of bed at all. But these are the facts of life in Brown's Britain.
It's happened. I've been outed. The awful truth has finally seen the light of day.
Yes, it's true. I'm a LABOUR supporter.
Or at least according to Labour councillor for Lambeth, Christopher Wellbelove, I am. According to his dinky "Inside Social Media and Search" site, I am one of the "Labour supporters who blog". Where on earth did he get that idea from?
Christopher apparently works in search engine optimisation at BT. I hope he didn't use any of his patent search techniques in researching my political persuasion.
Twenty working days have now elapsed since I put in my FoI request asking for the email correspondence between the BBC's Roger Harrabin and the WMO. Twenty days is the maximum time period that they say the request should take to process. It goes without saying that I've had no word from the BBC since their acknowledgement of the receipt of the request.
Time to start digging again....
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.
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?