Brexit exit: first step. With a stumble

There’s always one thing that goes wrong, isn’t there? Still, as long as it all works out in the end, it’s hardly worth complaining. And I call an excellent unplanned Chinese meal a good ending.

Some time ago, I mentioned that my wife Danielle and I have brought forward our plans to move to Spain. That’s our exit from Brexit and if we’re reasonably quick, we can probably pull it off before the UK leaves the EU.

The first concrete step was selling Danielle’s car. It was a small car and already second hand when we bought it so we knew it couldn’t be worth much. In fact, a little online searching suggested the best we could hope for would be around £3100.

So she advertised it for £3200.

First step towards the Brexit exit:
a bit of a wrench but we had to part company with Danielle’s Aygo

She also contacted one of those online organisations that buy cars for the trade. Once she’d given all the details, they suggested they might pay £3100. That sounded fair enough, so we agreed they could send someone round to check out the car.

‘Don’t get your hopes up,’ Danielle said, ‘these guys are well known for always finding reasons to knock a price down after an inspection.’

The character from the company showed up on Saturday. A large cheerful man, all hail-fellow-well-met, with lots of jokes, and an open, friendly countenance. So naturally I decided I couldn’t trust him any further than I could kick him, and given his size, I certainly wouldn’t have been able to kick him far.

He checked out the car and expressed himself satisfied with its state. He liked the fact that the service record was bang up to date. He liked the fact that Danielle had all the documentation ready for him. So he phoned his head office. Then turned to us and cheerfully announced, ‘we can offer you £2300.’

Danielle looked shocked.

‘Down from £3100?’

‘What’s the least you’d accept?’

‘Not less than £3000,’ she said, firmly.

He rang his office again.

‘The best we can do is £2600,’ he told us.

We said goodbye.

Danielle immediately re-advertised the car. Again at £3200.We weren’t best pleased with the trader, so we were delighted that it was the very next day, on Sunday, that someone expressed an interest in it.

It was a family from Milton Keynes, about 40 minutes away from where we live in Luton. They wanted the car for their daughter. All three turned up to see it.

They too were impressed. By the state of the car. By the service record. By the fact that all the documentation was available.

So we reached the key moment.

‘Are you OK with our making an offer?’ said the father.

‘Please do,’ said Danielle.

‘Would you take £3000?’ he said.

Danielle looked at me.

‘What do you think?’ she asked.

‘It’s your car,’ I said, which was a copout, I know. But I’ve cocked up this kind of negotiation more than once in the past.

A silence fell. I’ve learned the power of silence so I certainly wasn’t going to be the one to break it.

‘What about if we split the difference?’ he said. ‘Would you take £3100?’

Since that was exactly the figure she’d first thought of, Danielle didn’t hesitate. ‘Yes, that’ll be fine,’ she said.

Given we’d been offered £2600 the day before, that had to represent about the quickest £500 we’d ever made.

Everything had gone smoothly up to then. Now we just had to manage the financial side of things. That, sadly, involved a bank.

‘I’ll send you a pound first,’ said the buyer, ‘to check that the details are right.’

Minutes later a pound showed up in Danielle’s account.

‘Excellent,’ he said, ‘now for the £3100.’

‘3099,’ I corrected him.

‘The pound’s on me,’ he said, jovially, as he pressed Submit on his phone.

And then his face fell.

There was another silence. Not a powerful one this time. More distraught, really.

‘Is there a problem?’ asked his wife.

‘They’ve blocked the transfer.’

Well, I’m not going to bore you with the details. Let me just say that twenty minutes later he was still arguing with his bank.

‘I know it’s a security question,’ he said repeatedly, ‘but how can I possibly tell you how much the last payment from my account was for, since I’m not at home and don’t have access to any statements?’

His wife had been able to access the account, and she showed us that the £3100 had already been debited from their account. It just hadn’t reached out ours.

We could hear the bank representative talking to her husband.

‘That’s fine now, sir,’ they were saying, ‘the payment will go through. It shouldn’t take more than two hours.’

‘Two hours? But I’m sitting in someone else’s house. And trying to buy a car we were going to drive home. You expect us to sit here for two hours?’

We suggested that we could take them out for dinner somewhere. They didn’t like that idea, since their dog was at home and no doubt getting sad.

‘No,’ he said, looking defeated, ‘we’ll just have to come back tomorrow.’

We weren’t keen, particularly as it would mean we were looking after someone else’s car overnight. What if some moron scratched it? It wouldn’t have been the first time.

And then an idea dawned on us. The Taipan restaurant in Central Milton Keynes is one of the best Chinese I’ve ever been to. We hadn’t eaten there for ages.

The Taipan in Milton Keynes:
one of my favourite Chinese restaurants. Anywhere

‘We’ll go and have a Chinese in Milton Keynes,’ we told them, ‘and you can pick up the car there when the money comes through.’

Which is how things worked out.

They were pathetically grateful.

‘It’s so good of you to have come up here with the car,’ the father told us.

‘No,’ I said, ‘I’m indebted to you for a great dinner I wouldn’t otherwise have had.’

‘Oh, yes. I suppose I made that possible.’

‘You and your bank.’

‘Right. I can’t take all the credit.’

So things all worked out fine in the end. Everyone was happy.

And I enjoyed the object lesson as much as the meal: things go well while people of good will are working with each other. But that doesn’t include professional car dealers. And once a bank gets involved – watch out. They don’t make those massive profits for nothing – they’re world-class champions at turning a simple transaction into a major inconvenience.

The Italians: more in common than I thought

One of the many features that I like about the job I’ve been in since last November is that it takes me to Italy from time to time.

While my roots are unquestionably English, I was born in Italy – specifically in Rome – and spent my first thirteen years there. Each time I return therefore feels like a homecoming. That’s true even when, as on my latest trip, I travel to Milan.

The trouble with Milan is that it isn’t really in Italy. That’s a proposition vehemently denied by most of its inhabitants when I put it to them, but since it’s not unusual for them to assure me earnestly that “Africa starts at Rome” (one told me on this occasion, “a long way north of Rome”), I try to impress on them in turn that Milan is, essentially, in southern Austria. It’s far better organised than most of Italy, cleaner and wealthier, but also – in my experience – just a tad more standoffish and sure of its superiority.

The Milan Duomo: fabulous but just a touch Austrian?

Romans, by contrast, have more of a devil-may-care attitude about them. “Yep,” they seem to say whenever they do something egregiously inappropriate, whether it’s do a U-turn in heavy traffic or litter the streets, “in another, better life I might not do that, but I’m a mere mortal and have none of the purity or the remoteness of the angels.”

Still, as I begin to get to know the Milanese better, I’m beginning to enjoy being with them more. Not that I haven’t enjoyed Milanese company in the past, I hasten to add. My wife and I have a good friend from the city who first introduced herself to us as a ball-breaker, because at the time she was doing life sciences research which involved crushing mouse testicles (not usually while they were still attached to a living mouse, as I understand it). With such a beginning, how could the relationship be anything but a warm and close one? And these days I have an excellent Milanese colleague who always contrives to make visits rewarding and cordial.

What was new on this visit was that I also had some good contacts with complete strangers. One was in the taxi that took me to the airport, which was particularly gratifying as my first encounter with a Milanese taxi driver ended with badly because, as I explained that I needed to get to a hotel near the airport, he decided it was all too much a bore for him to deal with, made a gesture of impatience and drove away leaving me at an empty taxi stand in the middle of the night.

On the latest occasion, on the other hand, we had a perfectly cordial explanation. He explained to me that he wanted to catch up with a friend and colleague of his who was at the airport, but at the part that deals with private planes. I assured him that I was taking a scheduled flight.

“Oh, I knew that, from the start of the trip,” he assured me, and then broke off, clearly concerned that he might be offending me.

I decided that he didn’t mean his statement that way. That, if anything, his comparison between me and most private plane users was likely to be favourable towards me rather than the contrary.

“The private plane types tend to be a bit arrogant?” I asked.

“Exactly right,” he told me. “Why, I had to drive one to a meeting 70 kilometres away. He decided to stop on the way for a meal, and left me kicking my heels in the car park while he had his excellent lunch.”

I made some appropriately sympathetic response.

“The worst of it,” he went on, “is that he was from a bank which we’re baling out of trouble right now. My money. Flowing to a bank which is being rewarded with public funds for running itself into the ground. And the money I’m paying allows a man like him to keep eating fine meals while keeping people like me waiting for him the car park. It sometimes makes me wonder why IX bother to vote.”

A man after my own heart. I too feel upset at the privileged existence of people who see themselves as entitled, and are perfectly happy to have us finance their entitlement for them. It’s reassuring, though not surprising, that at the opposite ends of Europe, ordinary people face the same problems and react to them with the same resentments.

What saddens me is that though we should be making common cause against the arrogance that abuses its power this way, we in Britain have decided that we should cut our ties with those like my Milanese taxi driver. “Bring back control” our Brexiters say, but we’re simply reinforcing the control over our lives of the people who cause this injustice, in England as in Italy. United we might stand a better chance against them; by separating ourselves off, we make the task far harder.

Ah well. We all have our problems. In Italy, it’s to know where Austria ends and Africa begins. In Britain, it seems to be an inability to decide that we’re not a global power – and that illusion is far more dangerous.

The anniversary of Bannockburn: this time, there may be no winners

“The pound’s ours as much as yours,” supporters of Scottish independence keep telling me, and they’re right. And our shared pound, like our shared union, is looking shaky today, ten days from the independence referendum. That’s because on Sunday we had the first poll ever suggesting that the ‘Yes’ vote was ahead of ‘No’.

Bankers, among their many other sterling qualities, are terrified of change, any change, so the possibility of the dissolution of the union fills them with fear. And when they’re afraid, they sell. So the pound has taken a bit of a nosedive.

Bannockburn: Scots at their most fearsome,
routing the English, in 1314

The news media and conversations generally are dominated by the approaching vote. Few in England want to see the Scots go, but many of us are beginning to wonder whether they might, after all. I have to confess my position remains what it was before: were I a Scot, I’d probably want independence; as an Englishman, contemplating the prospect of losing 41 Labour MPs, and probably seeing the Conservatives encrusted onto power for another parliament or two, fills me with dread.

That being said, even if I were Scots had a vote, I’m not sure I’d vote for independence on the present terms. The Scots want to cling on to the pound – hence the mantra that it’s theirs, too – but in a currency union with the remainder of the United Kingdom. Why on Earth do they want to do that? After all, they’re in a currency union right now. Why leave the Union but maintain a currency union?

The Irish didn’t after all. They split the pound at the same time as their union with Britain. They even renamed it the punt which, as a friend recently told me on Twitter, is the only currency with the merit of rhyming with “banker.”

In any case, one of the main reasons pro-independence Scots give for their view is that they want to get away from the austerity policies being imposed on us by our Tory-led government. I can sympathise with them: they elected one Tory MP, out of the 59 Scotland sent to Westminster in 2010, and yet they got Tories dictating their politics all the same. Scots are keen on keeping the NHS free at the point of care, universities without fees, pensions higher and benefits more generous. Many of us in England want the same, so I applaud their aspiration. Like them, I lament the fact that the Tories deny us the opportunity to fulfil it.

Leaving the UK would give Scots the opportunity to pursue such policies. But not in a currency union. As Greece has discovered in its dealings with Germany, being in a currency union with a much bigger economy leaves you with little room for manoeuvre. Scotland would find itself constrained by policies, on taxation and public spending, imposed on it by the very Tories they wish to escape.

What on Earth’s the sense in that?

Meanwhile, the No campaign maintains its lacklustre approach, awaking no passion, opposing independence with arguments from an accountant’s ledger: leaving the Union might cost Scots the equivalent of a fish and chips supper a night – a painful price if you’re on the bread line (or do I mean chip line?) but hardly a rousing call to arms (“once more unto the chip shop, dear friends, once more”? I don’t think so).

And now the main Westminster parties have suddenly discovered that they can offer Scotland a great deal more autonomy, more devolved powers. The question sceptical Scots are asking is, “why didn’t you mention that before?” It does indeed look terribly like panic in response to a growing momentum for Yes.

The reality, I suspect, is that David Cameron, the most indolent Prime Minister I can remember, probably never thought of it before. He could have organised a constitutional convention a year or two ago, to consider some kind of federal arrangement within these islands. Just think. Alex Salmond would have had to take part, and look compromised, or stay out, and look curmudgeonly.

That would have put us in a strong position now: we could have been saying to the Scots, “look what’s on offer. Are you sure independence would give you more?”

But such an initiative would have involved Cameron in hard work, including tough negotiations. And he’s never shown much inclination for rolling his sleeves up.

Instead he’s left us on the back foot as we go into the referendum on the 700th anniversary of the famous victory of the Scots over the English at Bannockburn, on 18 September.

Sadly, I think on this occasion the Scots might inflict a grievous defeat not just on us, but on themselves too. A battle without winners. With little hope of gain either side of the border.

How bankers make their money, and why we let them

Liar’s Poker is the first of Michael Lewis’s books I’ve read, but it certainly won’t be the last. It explains something that has always been obscure to me: how bankers can make huge amounts of money without doing anything remotely useful, indeed despite doing a great deal of harm.

Invaluable insights

Liar’s Poker was published in 1989, which means it’s way out of date. But ironically that only makes it all the more interesting, since it describes precisely the practices that would lead to the crash nineteen years later.

Here’s how they work. Somebody takes out a $100,000 mortgage to buy a house. Next the lending organisation gets worried for some reason, and decides it would like someone else to take over the debt. But no one will step up unless there’s something in it for them. So the original lender agrees to take less than the full amount of the debt, say $80,000, perhaps because its immediate need for cash means it prefers taking less now, than hanging on for a larger amount in the future. 

So someone has bought the debt and how holds a piece of paper, a bond, entitling him (it’s almost always a man) to cash in $100,000 for an outlay of $80,000. A good deal even if he has to wait 20 years for the profit.

But he may not even need to wait. Someone else hears of the transaction and says “wow! I missed out. I want a piece of that.” So he offers $90,000 to take over the mortgage himself. Buyer 1 doesn’t hesitate: a $10,000 profit after a few days is highly desirable even at the cost of a larger profit 20 years away.

Now something interesting has happened.

Initially, the transaction was about buying a house. That’s something made of brick and mortar, a solid, tangible asset. It has real value: you can live in it.

Then there was the mortgage. Well, that has value too, if at one remove: it made it possible to buy the house.

But then we started trading the mortgage itself, the bond. It’s two moves from reality. It has little value itself, but it does now have a price, since it can be traded.

The reality is that a bond won’t cover just a single mortgage, because that’s too open to risk: the borrower might default leaving the bond without value. Instead bonds cover a thousand loans, as the chances are that there will be defaults on only a small number, leaving enough to generate a healthy profit.

The really clever bit is what the broker does. He charges a fee, which means he makes money on each trade, whether the buyer or the seller does well or not.

My examples involve large percentages: $20,000 out of $100,000, for instance. What Lewis explains is that traders in bonds look for gains as small as one eighth of a percentage point. They might themselves charge one-eighth of a percent in fees. However, one-eighth of a percent of $100 million is $125,000, which is not to be sneezed at. And if the broker sells bonds to one buyer, and then persuades that buyer to sell them two or three days later to another, he’ll double that to over $250,000 for his firm, just by judicious use of a phone.

Not one person will have been fed, educated, housed, clothed, transported or cared for as a result of his actions. The trader will have moved a number from one account to another and then to a third, and generated in days the equivalent of six people’s average yearly earnings. That will doubtless be reflected in his annual bonus.

Remember that this is based on the price of the bond, not what was paid for the house or the size of the mortgage. As long as someone will pay a little more for the bond, the broker keeps making money. Where it all goes pear-shaped is when people stop feeling it’s worth paying a higher price than the last guy. Then someone is left holding a bond he can’t sell.

Imagine what happens if, to satisfy the demand for this kind of bond, people have been out there offering mortgages on properties that simply aren’t worth enough, to people who’ll never be able to pay them off?

Then the person left with the bond when the bottom falls out of the market – the bond market, mind, not the housing market – has only one way of cutting his losses. He forecloses on the mortgage holders, forcing them to sell their properties. And if it turns out that the properties aren’t worth enough to cover the debts, then both the homeowner and the bondholder are in serious trouble, with only one difference between them: if the bondholder is a large bank, the taxpayer will bail it out, but the now homeless borrower gets no help at all and is even blamed for the failure.

Lewis explains that what his company, Salomon Brothers, did with mortgage debt was done with corporate debt on a scale hundreds of times greater, by Michael Milken. He was the innovator in “junk bonds”, the debt of companies regarded as a bad risk. He found that many of these debts were undervalued, and Lewis explains why: “investors shunned [such companies] out of a fear of seeming imprudent.”

Michael Milken: pocketed half a billion while he had the chance

Milken persuaded banks to throw prudence to the wind and buy the debts of dodgy corporations. While the value of the bonds kept climbing, everybody prospered. In particular the brokers who traded these bonds made a fortune: at the height of his powers, Milken paid himself $550 million in a single year, according to Lewis. 

Since then, and since his release from gaol (he eventually spent a couple of years inside), Milken has made himself a name as a charitable donor, funding medical research in particular. That’s very commendable, though we ought to remember that he only made the money by awarding himself astronomical pay for contributing next to nothing to society – and arguably stoking the disaster that engulfed us all in 2008.

Lewis tells us that as a child he learned from his father to believe “that the amount of money one earns is a rough guide to one’s contribution to the welfare and prosperity of our society.” But Lewis himself had to abandon that comforting belief: “when you sit, as I did, at the centre of what has been possibly the most absurd money game ever, and benefit out of all proportion to your value to society...; when hundreds of equally undeserving people around you are all raking it in faster than they can count it; what happens to the money belief?”

He got out of banking, but the belief still pervades society. As Thomas Piketty points out, “modern meritocratic society, especially in the United States, is much harder [than the nineteenth century] on the losers, because it seeks to justify domination on the grounds of justice, virtue, and merit, to say nothing of the insufficient productivity of those at the bottom.”

It may be the belief that if you’re not making much money, you’re not worth as much as the Milkens of this world, that explains why we treat them with so much deference, allowing them to buy our politicians and helping them protect their privilege and power, even from the consequences of their own fecklessness.

There are a lot more of us than of them, and we all have votes. If we could overcome our obsequiousness towards money and those who control it, we could free ourselves of some particularly unpleasant parasites. What a great step forward in justice that would be. 

To say nothing of the of the damage we could stop them inflicting on us.

Banks and the NHS: the joy of numbers

Numbers are such fun.

Here are a couple. Barclays Bank has 481 senior staff who were paid over a million pounds last year. A large proportion of that money came out of its bonus pool that amounted to £2.4 billion.

Meanwhile, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), which offers guidance on safe practice in healthcare, has reported that nursing levels have fallen to levels at which many hospitals can no longer operate separately.

Nurses: numbers are falling to levels where safety is compromised

The government maintains loudly and repeatedly that this has nothing to do with funding: “...hospitals must balance their books whilst ensuring compassionate quality care for all. We know this can and is being done – safe staffing levels lead to better care and can save the NHS money.”

Nevertheless, the service itself knows that faced with the challenge to save £20 billion by 2015, issued when the current government took office in 2010, many hospitals responded by cutting staff numbers. The Royal College of Nursing finds that there are hospitals now with 16% of their nurse posts unfilled. 

Ironically, the economy drive while damaging hasn’t even achieved anything like the savings wanted, as the service is spending several hundred million pounds a year on bank nurses. Just to avoid confusion, that’s not the same kind of bank: it’s the system by which nurses can earn more by doing extra shifts for a fee significantly higher than normal pay. That’s what hospitals are having to pay to make up shortfalls.

NICE now calculates that to get back to safe levels would require in the region of 20,000 more nurses in the service. The cost would be around £700 million: the rule of thumb figure used is £35,000 per year per nurse.

That’s what it would cost to make us all safer at those moments when we most need to be protected, when we’re ill enough to be in hospital.

Now let’s look at those figures again.

481 staff at Barclays bank made at least a million last year. That’s enough for nearly 30 nurses each. And that’s a minimum: many of those million-plus executives took a great deal more.

Barclays Bank set aside £2.4 billion to pay its staff bonuses for last year, a year in which the Bank’s performance actually fell. So for bad performance, it set aside nearly three and a half times what it would cost to make the whole of the NHS safe for all of us.

Barclays Bank has also just announced 19,000 redundancies. Those powerful executives, being paid enough to staff an entire hospital ward on their own, are going to earn their money by taking a lot of people paid a great deal less, and throwing them onto the unemployment scrapheap.

Meanwhile, the government is extremely unlikely to dig up the funds to find the 20,000 extra nurses our hospitals need.

It may, of course, just be me. But I feel these figures say just one thing: this society of ours has got its values into a complete mess.

And just one question springs to mind: how can anyone still be planning to vote again for the parties that make up the current ConDem government? Or, given that UKIP shares its stance on the NHS, its main challenger to the right either?

Against Corporate greed we need to be in a big battalion

‘Banks are pretty good at getting round rules,’ a senior financier recently told the Guardian, ‘if there are restrictions on us paying bonuses, we will be looking at paying some other kind of allowances.’

Meanwhile, among all the noise about Google, Amazon and Starbuck’s miserly contribution to the national exchequer in Britain, we hear from Senator John McCain that even the saintly Apple corporation is ‘among America's largest tax avoiders.’ 

You want to take these guys on?
You're going to need the clout that only size can give.

There seems to be a mood developing in a number of countries to try to rein in corporate greed. That’s the greed of the corporations themselves, uninterested in paying more than a minimal amount in tax to the jurisdictions in which they operate, and the greed of the people who lead them, passionately interested in maximising the amount they can take out of the companies they lead.

The US has the economic might that would allow it to make a move in this direction, but it’s probably best not to hold our breaths: those same corporations are also the biggest donors to political campaign funds. While they control the ability of politicians to get elected in the first place, there’s not a lot of chance of getting the politicians to control their behaviour. I’ve argued it before, and I’ll argue it again: ban political advertising on TV and suddenly you’ve cut the cost of political campaigns and, at a stroke, massively reduced the power of lobbies to dictate policy to elected officials through their wallets.

The US has the muscle to take on the corporations. Now it needs to find the will. 

Curiously, another body that probably has the muscle, simply because it represents such a huge market, is the European Union. It has recently shown signs of having the will as well, as it starts to look at bankers’ bonuses and at tax regimes. Could be interesting to see what happens in the next three or four years.

Because what’s at stake is fundamental: who shall run our societies, the citizens who inhabit them and make up their electorates, or just that tiny privileged handful who control the big corporations? Right now, the power of the latter leaves very little say to the former.

What’s curious in this context is to see that it’s precisely now that there is such a groundswell in Britain to leave the EU. Bob Crow, General Secretary of National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers, was recently arguing the case for departure, from the left, but the most strident voices are coming from the right.

Most people campaigning against the EU, and certainly Bob Crow, would argue that they are forcefully opposed to excessive corporate power. But if Britain were to leave, it would on its own be far too small to exert much authority, it would lose the ability to influence the EU’s decisions, and it would weaken the EU’s own stance by depriving it of one of the main economies currently in its fold.

Big corporations run the world. To take them on, we need the power that a big bloc gives us. Far from giving up our rights by being in the EU, we join 350 million citizens in giving ourselves the clout to stand a chance of defending them.

The Europhobes demand a referendum on the subject of Britain’s membership, proclaiming that simple democratic principle dictates that there should be one. What they ignore is that if a referendum were held and it led to Britain’s exit, it would further erode any democratic control of the forces that shape our lives.

Surely not exactly what they intend, is it?

A modest proposal: solving the problem of corporate greed

Now here’s an idea I think has mileage, but not the slightest chance of being adopted.

There’s a lot of talk, especially in Britain at the moment, of tax evasion, in particular by large corporations. Amazon made £4.3 billion in this country last year and managed to pay just £2.4m in corporation tax, less than the £2.5m it collected in government grants. Meanwhile, Margaret Hodge, Labour chair of the Public Accounts Committee of the House of Commons the other day called Google ‘evil’ for taking £3.2b from UK customers, and paying £6m in tax.

Margaret Hodge
Do you get the impression she wasn't entirely pleased
with what she was hearing?

At the same time, we all get a bit sick of those characters who precipitated the present economic misery continuing to reward themselves handsomely, as often as not for failure, as often as not for failure for which the rest of us, as taxpayers, have to carry the can. Bankers, in particular, continue to take salaries that dwarf those of people who actually do some good (like teachers or nurses), sometimes by multiples of 10, 20 or more. They help themselves to bonuses, though their banks continue to lose value and several of them can only pay out because they’re being kept afloat by the compulsory generosity of the taxpayer. 

It’s not just banks, of course. Board room salaries across industry continue to climb, however bad the economy and however much others suffer. Cuts fall on those same teachers or nurses, and even more severely still on the ill or the unemployed, who are seeing already low living standards slashed still further.

So here’s a solution to the twin problems, of tax evasion and excessive bonuses, simultaneously.

Bonuses to highly-paid staff should be strictly proportional to the corporation tax paid by their companies.

Wouldn’t that be a glorious sight? These are the individuals who take the decisions that keep corporation tax liabilities down. Just imagine how it would be if their bonuses fell with them.

If they wanted to boost their personal pay, they’d have to boost the tax paid by the company by a proportionate amount. That would give a whole new sense to the idea of ‘win-win’.

The big question is, which way would things crack? Would they go on trying to keep tax payments down or would they sacrifice the corporation’s gains for their own?

Having seen how altruistically these characters behave, can anyone have any possible doubt which way they’d go? We might see a long-repeated claim being realised at last: their success would truly be shared by everyone.

A merry Christmas in a Christian country

Sir Joseph Porter, First Lord of the Admiralty in Gilbert and Sullivan's H.M.S. Pinafore, declares that ‘it is one of the happiest characteristics of this glorious country that official utterances are invariably regarded as unanswerable.

So when it was announced the other day, by no less a figure than David Cameron, our great British Prime Minister, or at any rate Prime Minister of Great Britain, that the country we shared was Christian, how could I possibly answer the claim except by immediately concurring?

Cameron was speaking on Friday 16 December, at Oxford, addressing churchmen at an event to celebrate the fourth centenary of the King James’s Bible. This is the one I'm always being told is admirable for the quality of its poetry. So I opened my Bible at random and found myself reading 2 Samuel 8:2. Let’s see how the uplifting message blends with the glory of the language:

‘And he smote Moab, and measured them with a line, casting them down to the ground; even with two lines measured he to put to death, and with one full line to keep alive. And so the Moabites became David’s servants, and brought gifts.’

Too right: I’d become a servant and bring gifts if I’d just watched two thirds of my people cast down. Still, in that event I might perhaps console myself with the thought that it had at least been described in limpid and moving language  –  if that was my idea of limpid and moving language. 

But back to the other saintly David: ‘...what I am saying is that the Bible has helped to give Britain a set of values and morals which make Britain what it is today.’ Well, I’m sure he’s right. We don’t actually measure people in lines before we mow them down in Iraq or Afghanistan, but the rest we follow to the letter.

So it’s about values. Cameron made that explicit. And values matter to our Dave. As David Edgar pointed out in the Guardian on Monday 19December, Cameron’s speech contained a particularly telling passage:

‘A passively tolerant society says to its citizens, as long as you obey the law we will just leave you alone. It stands neutral between different values. But I believe a genuinely liberal country does much more; it believes in certain values and actively promotes them. We need to stand up for these values.’

So that’s the hidden agenda. The government’s going to tell us what our values are. Amazing how these enthusiasts for small government love to tell us how to think as soon as they get into office themselves.

‘We are a Christian country,’ Cameron assured us.

Interesting comment that. Lots of people say it, and I’ve often wondered how they measure it. Even Tearfund, which is a Christian charity with no obvious interest in understating religious practice in Britain, claims that only 15% of the population attend Church regularly (at least once a month). But if as he suggests, it’s values that matter to Cameron, perhaps what he means is that our society lives by Christian principle.

On the radio the other day, my favourite Churchman, Giles Fraser, quoted Luke 1:53. Luke being a book of the New Testament, as opposed to Samuel that I quoted above and which is in the Old, makes it perhaps a better test of what is specifically Christian. So what does it say? ‘He hath filled the hungry with good things; and the rich he hath sent empty away.’

Well, you be the judge. Unemployment is approaching a thirty-year high. Among young people it is particularly disastrous, condemning a large portion of a generation to a life of employment insecurity. Social benefits are being withdrawn – one recent measure had the effect of plunging 100,000 children back into poverty. Meanwhile, bankers’ bonuses, after a brief dip in 2009, are back up to the pre-credit crunch level. And last year top executive earnings rose by an average of 49%.

Filling the hungry with good things? Sending the rich away empty?  Not sure that’s exactly what’s happening.

Still, it’s Christmas Eve. Not point in being a killjoy. Have a merry Christmas, all of you! Whether you’re Christian, of some other faith or of no faith at all. And whatever you think Christmas may actually mean.

Suitably Christian image for the season

... and a happy 2012! Which means one that proves the economists wrong...

Racism: a constant value for our times

Walking the dog the other day, I came across a gate on which someone had scribbled the words ‘No Pakis’.

When I was a child, I used to resent the way many people of my parents’ or grandparents’ generation would tell me that ‘things were very different when we were young’, by which they meant things had been far better. This always struck me as slightly odd, because one of the things they had been doing when they were younger was killing each other in historically unprecedented numbers, in a world war in each of the generations in question.

It appals me how often people of my generation now tell me, and expect me to agree, that things were better when we were younger.

The Vietnam war? The attacks on Civil Rights protesters in the States? Apartheid in South Africa? The Berlin Wall? The assassinations of Kennedy, Luther King and Kennedy?

But of course what they really mean is that at an individual level we were so much nicer. When our parents complained about the drug-taking, foul-mouthed long-haired louts who thought society owed them a living, they were just bigots. When we complain about the violent, drug-taking hooded louts of today, we’re being enlightened upholders of civic values.

It struck me that the sign scribbled on the gate should reassure people who are nostalgic for the sixties and seventies. Even though so much else has declined, at least our fascists are as good as the ones we had when we were younger. They have remained true to the values of brutality and offensiveness that we came to appreciate so much in our teens and twenties.

But then I got to thinking about the words themselves. What is about the ‘Pakistanis’ that these people dislike so much? After all, as I’ve pointed out before, a lot of them aren’t really Pakistani any more at all, but wholly English – and by that token, wonderful individuals. And even if they weren’t, so many members of that community contribute so much to our society.

I mean, I agree with the extreme right that the country is overcrowded – after all, this very morning I had to walk for ten minutes along the Euston Road and, because of the tube strike, even the pavements were almost impassable, forcing me to walk far less quickly than I wanted – which didn’t stop me shooting past the cars, gridlocked on the roadway itself.

Clearly, we could do with having fewer people. But why would we choose to start with the ‘Pakistanis’? As well as their traditional occupations, in corner shops, restaurants and minicab firms, members of this community have branched out into other key services – from running our trains to running huge swaths of the health service. Many are achieving prominence in journalism, politics and the law, but hey, no community is entirely without its flaws.

No, I have a much better idea of how we could set about reducing the numbers living in this country. I saw the other day that the public service cuts this year are set to be around £7bn. Bankers, many of them working for organisations baled out by the taxpayer, are about to award themselves bonuses amounting to – wait for it – £7bn. And, surprise, surprise, the total long-term cost of the bank bale-out (taking into account the sums the public purse is likely to recoup from tax or selling shares) is likely to be getting on for £7bn.

It sounds to me as though we’re suffering major reductions in service and forking out money to the banks that caused the problem in the first place and watching the people who run those banks paying themselves about as much as we put in.

In the meantime, every time someone suggests taxing the leeches, we’re told that if we do that, they’ll all head off to Shanghai or Hong Kong or somewhere.

See where I’m going with this one? Let’s do it. Let’s slap punitive taxes on obscene bonuses in the financial sector. Either these fine gentlemen will stick around and we’ll get some useful funds flowing back into the Exchequer, or they’ll clear off to the Far East, and at least someone else will have to pay for them. 

Another advantage? Most of the plans put forward by the fascists to get rid of the people they regard as unwelcome involve some kind of repatriation plan, for which we’d have to pay. The bankers would pay for themselves. Can you imagine? It’s like having your waste bin emptying itself. Win-win all round, I say.

All these thoughts went through my mind as I stood there by that gate. And then I looked at the slogan again – and noticed that what it actually said was ‘Paki’s out’.

Ah, that misplaced apostrophe. It made all the difference. I could push the gate open and pass through. Because I felt a quite palpable sense of relief (as did Janka, my dog, at finally being on the move again).

Why the relief? Well, obviously a semi-literate fascist can be just as vicious and violent as a literate one. But at least he’s less likely to be any good at getting organised.

At the elections last May, the British National Party was soundly defeated in its stronghold in Barking, with its leader failing to make a significant mark in the parliamentary election which was massively won by the former Labour Minister Margaret Hodge, while also losing every one of the local council seats it had previously held. Wipe out.

Well, if you don’t know how to write a plural, how can you be expected to win a plurality in an election?

My advice to those of my compatriots who some like to think of as ‘Pakistani’: while the fascists can’t raise their game any higher than this, I shouldn’t let them disturb your sleep at night. And in the meantime – thanks for providing such an excellent service at my local GP surgery. And such excellent Bombay Mix in my local shops.

Saying no to joylessness

Yesterday was the night that Luton council selected for iur great national  celebration of the torture and execution, by burning, of a seventeenth-century dissident. This, as I’ve pointed out before, is one of the great family events in the annual calendar of this quaint and traditional nation.

Fun for all the family

The commemoration is actually on the fifth of November, but the British are pragmatic people: we don’t feel obliged to commemorate anniversaries on the exact date but prefer to go for a convenient day close to it, and yesterday was a Saturday.

The dissident was Guy Fawkes, a Catholic, caught in the cellars of the Palace of Westminster with rather a lot of barrels of gunpowder (more than he could really pass of as needing for his personal consumption). The King and both houses of Parliament were due to meet the following day just above, and detonating the powder at that time would have had a very poor effect on the health of the assembled great and good. As well as being distinctly career-limiting.

So Fawkes got tortured and eventually burned, as did a number of fellow conspirators, giving rise to this delightful celebration where we light bonfires and let off fireworks.

Just what was he? A dissident, certainly. A martyr – to the Catholics, no doubt. A traitor – to the king and ministers undeniably. Maybe today we’d call him an insurgent, which is a bad thing if you’re with Nato in Afghanistan, a good thing if you’re with the Taliban. Overall, perhaps we can just say that he was a brilliant illustration that one man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist.

In any case, what he’s become since is a pretext for a good party, and this year was no exception. Generally, Luton is not a physically attractive town, but it does have some very good parks. Yesterday, Pope’s meadow, which is sandwiched between Wardown Park and the splendidly named People’s Park, was the site of a breathtaking firework display. We took our places in the crowd which must have been several thousand strong, and I think being there with them was part of the pleasure: the ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ of the kids have to be one great contributory factors to enjoying fireworks.

But the best thing about the display was that fireworks serve absolutely no useful purpose at all. They cost a lot of money, and they’re gone in an instant, actually destroyed by the very thing that makes them a source of joy. Glorious, extravagant, pure pleasure.

That appeals to me more than ever in today’s atmosphere. The financiers are running Britain today. Though they precipitated today's crisis, and got the rest of us to pay for their failures with bank bale-outs, they've shown they know how to look after themselves: executive pay has risen by 23% in twelve months and bankers' bonuses remain at indefensible levels (which doesn't stop them trying to defend them). In between their trips to the Maldives or St Moritz, they keep telling us that the State has to spend less on things like schools and hospitals and libraries and public transport and decent policing. And jobs. And a government drawn from the same people has decided to do their bidding.

So congratulations to Luton Council for braving all that misery and spending the money on a few moments of pure pleasure in spite of the overpaid cheapskates. That’s just what the people who gave its name to People’s Park need right now, to give us a break from the bleakness ahead.

Besides, it was a great display.

Is it time to give the bankers a break?

There’s something deeply unattractive about the way we tend to look for scapegoats for anything that causes us pain. It’s so facile. Something’s gone wrong so let’s blame somebody, just as long as it isn’t ourselves. Once we have identified our culprit, rightly or wrongly, we can turn our anger on them and enjoy the glow of self-righteousness.

This kind of behaviour may make us feel better, but its ugliness is encapsulated in one of the central parables of Western culture. Faced with a woman about to be stoned to death for adultery, Christ tells the crowd ‘he that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone’. Only if you’re pure yourself can you indulge yourself in judging others.

Right now we have a particularly egregious set of scapegoats, carrying on their shoulders the weight of arguably the greatest calamity to beset the developed world since the end of the Second World War. The bankers are the objects of our wrath for having brought the financial system down around our heads by their fecklessness, and then demanded that the rest of us bale them out of the problems they created. Turning the bankers into scapegoats is obvious and easy. On the other hand, it exonerates us of our own substantial measure of blame: we took the cheap credit when it was available, and we enjoyed the fruits of a prosperity largely fuelled by their activities.

So should we perhaps recognise our share of responsibility and relativise our anger with the bankers?

This was a question I felt was posed particularly strongly last week when I heard our Business Minister here in Britain, Lord Myners’, telling the bankers to get back into the ‘real world’ when it comes to pay.

It transpired that there are 5000 bankers in the City of London expecting a bonus this year in excess of a million pounds. Of course, a lot of them are prepared to settle for the frugal end of the bonus scale and only take a million or little over. There are some, however, who expect real, substantial bonuses, in some cases of 15 to 20 million. Since a worker on median wage can expect to earn about a million in a whole, 40-year career, this means that some of these bankers want bonuses in a single year – on top of their salaries – that represent the earnings of 15 to 20 whole careers of ordinary people.

In total this group wants to take at least 5 billion pounds out of the banks, possibly as much as 10 billion. We, the taxpayers, put in 170 billion to bale them out of the trouble that they created for themselves and us. Now they want to take up to 5% of that sum, one pound in every twenty that we contributed, and stick it straight into their own pockets.

This week the government announced a new, one-off levy on high bonuses (any bonus over £25,000). The banks themselves would have to pay 50% of the bonus sum in tax to the government. Many bankers have reacted by threatening to move out of Britain.

There’s a suggestion floating around that they might head for Shanghai. The sheer layers of irony in this rumour make the mind boggle. Bankers going to an ostensibly Communist country to be free to pay themselves what they like; bankers seeking their freedom in one of the most authoritarian nations on Earth; and that regime accepting, in the name of socialism and proletarian values, that they should be able to do just that.

All this means that I think I have an answer to my question: is it time to relent towards the bankers?

Like heck it is. No way. The ‘he that is without sin’ bit has no place here. We’re talking about ‘he that is without shame’. The bankers may have redeeming characteristics, but if so they keep them well hidden.

You want to turn them into scapegoats? Be my guest. Go right ahead. Nothing you can say can possibly be too harsh. After all, you don’t have to worry about hurting their feelings. They can’t have space for other feelings once they’ve accommodated that level of greed.

The worst they might do if we get really, really rude about them? They might clear off to Shanghai.

If they’d sink so low as to travel in my car, I’d be only too willing to take them to the airport.