Lord Lawson on Five Live

Nigel Lawson is on the Simon Mayo show on Radio Five today at 2pm, discussing his new book on global warming.

Keep on knocking

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.

Ambassadors ain't what they used to be

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...

 

BBC says Harrabin emails stay secret

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. 

The madness of King Gordon

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.

Outed!

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.   

Time's up!

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.... 

Gordon Ramsay says "Africans are expendable"

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.

Richard Murphy

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?

Will Labour do something stupid?

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.

Figure fiddling

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. 

Second generation biofuels won't work either

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. 

They really don't get it

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...     

Tory dynasty

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?

An argument, by Carolyn Fry

• 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.

(From the Guardian, a couple of weeks back.)