Thoughts on a beknighted man

So, it's finally happened: Fred "the Shred" Goodwin has been stripped of his knighthood, to cheers and further vituperation from "the left". Some of the stuff I've read on twitter has been at least as offensive as any dole-bludger bashing I've ever read. Or indeed, written.

But let's have a look at the chronology of all this. Back in 2007, when RBS beat Barclays to the takeover of ABN Amro (which was effectively the deal that fucked RBS so hard that it will limp for the rest of its life) financial analysts were full of praise for Fred's hardball strategy. Even the notoriously milquetoast BBC said:

Barclays' failure to pull off the deal will inevitably raise question marks about its future strategy.

It was shortly after this that everything turned to shit, but at the time, everybody was impressed with Fred's perspicacity. He had made RBS the world's largest bank (by asset value) during his tenure. Now, you might well argue with the benefit of hindsight, but at the time, everybody was impressed.

He was knighted in 2004, by the Labour government, starring Ed Miliband, who is currently stroking himself into a coma at having convinced the dishfaced social democrat into revoking said knighthood. If he was that fucking outraged, why didn't the mongtarded fuckwit do something when he was actually in government?

Secondly, Fred's pension, which is now the target of such opprobrium from "the left" was agreed by Labour as part of getting him sacked and replaced by Stephen Hester, another name some of you might recognise as a bloke who is getting royally fucked over thanks to chiselling whingeing from "the left".

So, Labour, having agreed that Fred was a hero, knighted him, agreed to his pension to get rid of him and struck a deal with his replacement. Immediately they were out of power, they started using both of these people that they had been so generous to while in power, as whipping boys and ways to froth up public resentment (that didn't exist among Labour voters when they were in power, obviously!)

If the massively-foreheaded douchebag actually was a Tory, he would have turned around in the face of all this public fauxtrage and said: "These deals were agreed by Labour when they were in government and I can't understand why they're complaining now." And continued to honour the deals.

If he was an astute politician, he would have said: "These deals were a bad deal done by Labour and I'm calling time on them behalf of the hard-working taxpayer." At least that way, he would have still been a massive cunt, but he would have been able to garner some plaudits for his actions.

But because he's a slippery social democrat weasel who has nothing more in mind than to one day be able to say "I was Prime Minister, you know!" he has opted for the weakest possible option: to bow to manufactured outrage and use it as a diversion for some of his other unprincipled actions. It speaks volumes that the only thieving shit who is claiming any victory over this is Ed fucking Miliband!

If this sorry saga doesn't make you question your party allegiances and doesn't make you see why I can't tell the difference between any of the major political parties, then you are definitely part of the problem.

And if this little fiasco doesn't prevent any future businessman from running a state-owned business, then they really are stupid enough to deserve everything they get.

Lest you think I'm a corporate shill

I did have to laugh when I read this:

Royal Bank of Scotland boss Stephen Hester refused to give up his £963,000 bonus yesterday as pressure escalated when his own chairman rejected a shares reward.

Hester, 51, sparked fury by accepting a £963,000 payout on top of his £1.2million salary as RBS chief executive – despite the state-owned bank’s share price falling 48 per cent.

But he is facing more calls to give up the bonus after RBS chairman Sir Philip Hampton rejected a£1.4million windfall he was due next month.

Hampton told the bank’s remuneration committee it would not be appropriate for him to receive the 5.17million shares.

So Hester is sticking to taking his cash bonus and Hampton is declining his shares. My immediate thought is that Hester should be taking a bigger share bonus and no cash, but because he insists on taking cash and Hampton is not keen on shares, even though he is contractually entitled to them, they both reckon the shares aren't going to be worth shit.

Hampton is playing a canny game here, because I'm sure someone will slip him a quiet bung somehow. Probably the Chancellor.

My best guess is that the government is planning to intervene massively in the running of RBS within the next year, which will really fuck RBS's value completely. Hampton can't take his shares and dump them without a massive alarm signal going off. Hester is going to rack up the cash while he can.

I am such a fucking cynic sometimes.

Update: Unduly cynical, it seems. (To be fair, I had thought Hester's bonus had been share based, but my Google-fu failed me.)

Tip of the clown wig to @williamhenryson for the correction.

The virtues of representative democracy

I frequently get into debates about democracy with people. In essence, I don't believe in government at all, so I wouldn't believe in democracy anyway.

If you have direct democracy with minimum levels of voting mandated for everything, you still wind up with a potentially significant section of the population having to live by rules by which they don't want to. There is nothing inherently more noble in 50.1% of the population beliefs over the beliefs of the remaining 49.9%. Yet no-one who argues in favour of democracy would disagree that the 50.1% have "won".

But the truth of the matter is that direct democracy is hard work. There are so many bits of law being created, we would never do anything else.

So in order to free us up to get on with our lives, we have "representative democracy", where we appoint people for five years to vote on everything for us. The problem with this is the inevitable issue that our representatives will represent us on some issues but not represent us on others. In addition, the people who voted for other parties are not, in general, being represented at all.

But in the delightful world of modern British politics, it's not even that good. The days of MP's taking their constituency's pulse on keys issues are long gone, if they ever existed.

Nowadays, MP's are referred to as "lobby fodder". By and large, policies that are deemed important by the party leadership are "whipped" and the opinion of the constituency are roundly ignored. The party leadership has decided what will happen, which means that as far as many core, central issues are concerned, the people who live in an affluent area in Oxfordshire have the most incredible levels of influence in the country.

But even that isn't true, because the cachet of having the Prime Minister as your MP means that even if you prove to be a complete fucking mentalist, mong, loser and profligate maniac, you will never get thrown out by the "democratic" process. Look at Gordon Brown.

So the Prime Minister is largely untouchable. And he drives vast swathes of policy that everyone has to live by.

But wait! It gets even better. Because MP's are lazy cunts and because there are so many new laws and regulations being introduced, not every bit of law that we are governed by is actually even debated in Parliament. They have introduced something called Statutory Instruments that aren't even submitted to the trivial scrutiny that our laws are.

Here is an example of just how fucking stupid these can be:

Weaknesses in parliament's law-making procedures have been exposed by a curious case encompassing a Tyneside egg-collector, the hatching of a non-existent offence, and the criminalisation of Britain's museums.

Museums. Made into criminals. At the stroke of an entirely unelected and unaccountable bureaucrat's pen.

Seven years after a statutory instrument updating nature regulations glided virtually unobserved through Westminster, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) has this week admitted it "unlawfully" put a new crime on the statute books.

The unintended outcome of the rarely deployed Wildlife & Countryside Act 1981 Amendment Regulations, Statutory Instrument (SI) 1487/2004, has been shot down by lawyers' persistent questioning.

Quincy Whitaker, a barrister at Doughty Street chambers, London, and Nigel Barnes, a solicitor at the Sunderland and Newcastle firm Ben Hoare Bell, realised that a parliamentary drafting error had accidentally removed a previous defence and laid in its place, cuckoo-like, a constitutionally impossible crime.

The regulations, meant to harmonise UK bird protection rules with EU laws, made illegal the possession of wild eggs collected from 1954-1981. Police and wildlife agencies used the new regulations to prosecute a number of people.

For seven fucking years, people have been prosecuted, fined, punished, chivvied, bothered by an unlawful law. Who has been punished for this? Who will ever be punished for this?

And the chances are that more than 50% of the people who read this blog would say "Fuck you" to EU law anyway.

The change in the law was never the subject of public consultation, neither was it debated in parliament. The retrospective criminalisation of historic collections has caused museums, scientific research organisations and private collectors to the risk of prosecution.

One of the first people to discover the law had changed was John Dodsworth, 52, who has past wildlife convictions. His home was raided by the police wearing riot gear in 2006 and about 1,000 eggs were seized from there. "Officers used a battering ram to force their way in. The children were very upset to see their parents manhandled by the police."

Riot gear? Battering ram? For EGGS?

At South Tyneside magistrates court three years later Dodsworth, an asbestos removal supervisor, pleaded guilty to one offence of possessing wild birds' eggs, but said: "I should never have been prosecuted. But when I was taken to court I was told it was a strict liability offence and I had to plead guilty. I was given a 100 hours community service order."

So not only do we have an unlawful law, but it's a law that you cannot argue with. You WILL be punished, you CANNOT be found innocent.

He later decided to appeal against both conviction and sentence. The sentence –was quashed in January 2010 and Dodsworth was granted an absolute discharge on the grounds that no one was aware such possession had been an offence at the time. "But they were still prosecuting people for this as recently as September," he said.

An overturn of the disputed section of SI 1487/2004 has proved more difficult.

Whitaker told the high court: "The retrospective criminalisation of possession of eggs that were lawfully held prior to the enactment of the regulations (those collected from 1954-1981) has widespread implications for museums and other public collections, natural history and scientific research collections and private egg collectors throughout Britain.

"[The creation of a new crime] would have been expected to have been widely announced and debated within the relevant communities if it was the intention that the regulations should have such an effect." Her judicial review case was also brought against the Crown Prosecution Service to prevent pursuit of fresh cases.

Evidence was given by Bob McGowan, senior curator of birds at the National Museum of Scotland, who said that the change in the law required him to assess 36,000 clutches of eggs in his collection. "It is difficult to imagine this particular outcome was an intention of the amendment," he said in a statement.

So, a demonstrably bad law was created, it was a strict liability offence, it was blindly and enthusiastically prosecuted right up to the last minute before being repealed. And this was all created in a democracy.

For several years after the law was changed the CPS website continued to advise that possessing historic eggs was legal, Whitaker added. The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds believes the change was a legislative error rather than intentional.

Nigel Barnes, who represented Dodsworth in his appeals against sentence and conviction, submitted a series of freedom of information requests. "I questioned whether the statutory instrument was lawful," he said. "What are the CPS going to do now about the people who have been convicted? It may be a handful, it may be more. There are many more who may have committed an offence without realising it."

Whitaker searched through the parliamentary papers and Defra files. "When I got the papers I realised it must have been a drafting error," Whitaker explained. "The department has now conceded it was wrong.

Whitaker said: "It's an example of how much modern-day legislation is passed by civil servants without anybody understanding it.

"Had anyone realised what had happened, it should have been referred to parliament because it creates a criminal offence. As it was, it was unconstitutional.

"The House of Lords had specifically rejected the creation of the offence which the amendment regulations in fact created when the original act (the Wildlife & Countryside Act 1981) was debated in parliament.

"To create an offence that was contrary to the express will of parliament by delegated legislation without informing anyone that it has that effect is highly unconstitutional to say the least."

A Defra spokesman confirmed that the department now accepted the change to the law was illegal.

A statement said: "The 2004 consultation documents on the draft statutory instrument did not outline an intention to remove the pre-1981 defence in relation to the possession of wild bird eggs. Defra has accepted that, as the consultation did not mention those particular changes, they were unlawfully made."

The Crown Prosecution Service's website said that something was legal while they were actively prosecuting people for that very act!

How many lives have been affected by this law, how many people needlessly criminalised, just because our duly elected representatives are too fucking lazy to actually debate and discuss every law that we are supposed to live by?

Still think democracy is such a good idea? Did you vote? Because if you did, this kind of shit is your fault.

Unintended Consequences

So, folks, it's time to ask that awkward question again: if tax is such a benefit to society, and if business is not taxed "enough" according to "the left", how do we explain this complaint from the fantastic RaspberryPi project:

I’d like to draw attention to one cost in particular that really created problems for us in Britain. Simply put, if we build the Raspberry Pi in Britain, we have to pay a lot more tax. If a British company imports components, it has to pay tax on those (and most components are not made in the UK). If, however, a completed device is made abroad and imported into the UK – with all of those components soldered onto it – it does not attract any import duty at all. This means that it’s really, really tax inefficient for an electronics company to do its manufacturing in Britain, and it’s one of the reasons that so much of our manufacturing goes overseas. Right now, the way things stand means that a company doing its manufacturing abroad, depriving the UK economy, gets a tax break. It’s an absolutely mad way for the Inland Revenue to be running things, and it’s an issue we’ve taken up with the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills.

So, if this project to bring low-cost computing to the masses, to provide disruptive and innovative technology to the world, to generate a remarkable potential manufacturing opportunity in Britain, creating jobs, bringing money in to the country from around the world, and yet the stupidity of the tax code is denying all this from happening.

Why does this happen if tax is such a boon to society?

Stupid Regulation

Tory MPs go to war

Oh dear God:

Conservative MPs are trying to sabotage David Cameron's plan to legalise gay marriage, threatening a rebellion bigger than the one in which 81 voted against the Government on Europe.

Really? This is important enough that you're going to rebel against it, but you wouldn't rebel to the same level over Europe?

What the fuck is wrong with these people? What is the fucking problem with two people who want to seriously commit to a permanent relationship? Why the fuck is it the government's business to stop this?

I wish these fuckers were actually at war. I wish they either got shot dead or captured and bummed to death.

Utter fucking cunts.

Minor blogroll addendum

The more eagle-eyed among you will have noticed a new blog on my roll.

He's not a total tossbag for a Tory.

Elfin Safety

I gather from frothing on Twitter that iDave is talking about reigning in the lunatic madness of Health and Safety regulation. Predictably, tribal lefties are screaming about corporate murderers and how "the workers" will now be electrocuted, thrown into mills, and sacrificed to various frivolous profits.

The Daily Mail tendency are, of course, equally cheered. A triumph over the lunacy of elfin safety will now be won.

The truth is that both sides are wrong. iDave will tinker with the regulations but do nothing substantial.

Why the frothing from the left? Businesses have no particular interest in killing or harming their employees, because dead employees demotivate staff, reduce retention and cost in compensation - at the most cynical and heartless level. And of course, this ignores the fact that employers are human beings as well. So, I don't believe that it's in any way "good business" or profitable not to take a reasonable level of care for your employees.

But the other side of the coin is true as well: do employees not have a duty to take reasonable care of themselves? No person takes a job which says "one of your duties is to stick your arm into this tree shredder", do they? Do employees not have any responsibility in any industrial accident that may happen?

The problem with blindly relying on checkbox regulations is that people assume that they don't have to think about their own safety any more. I would argue that the mere presence of overweening health and safety regulation is that many people assume they don't have to think about their own safety any more.

I don't have a problem with each business clearly articulating the level of risk to each employee and letting them voluntarily transact. Some people have more of an appetite for risk than others. If the risks are crazy, employers won't find staff and will have to do something. But the massive burden of irrelevant, voluminous regulation that applies to all business is just a stupid cost.

And another thing

Tory MP attends at party where someone else dresses up as a Nazi is sacked from the government to approving murmurs from the left, while Ed Bollocks who actually dressed up as a Nazi is still regarded as entirely acceptable as Chancellor and Shadow Chancellor.

Can anyone explain that to me?

Iz it becoz she iz black?

@bimadew White people love playing "divide & rule" We should not play their game #tacticasoldascolonialism

-- Diane Abbott, MP

Now, correct me if I'm wrong here, but if I'd tweeted something like:

@HackneyAbbott Black people love playing at being thugs and sleeping around with as many lovers as possible #pastimesasoldastime

I would be condemned and vilified as a racist. Yet I am still to see one of the lefties I follow having a go at her. Is it because she's one of their tribe? Or is it because she's black and therefore can't be racist?

Why is it acceptable to make sweeping generalisations about one race and not about others?