Making the most of a bad hand

George Osborne will probably not go down in history as a great Chancellor, this has little to do with his abilities or commitment (both significant) but a great deal to do with timing.

George Osborne delivers Autumn Statement

He finds himself in the least favourable circumstances that any post-war chancellor has had to face.  People get plaudits for winning the yacht race not for preventing their yacht from sinking.

As a nation we have huge debts and our income is still less than out spending, our ability to sort ourselves out is significantly dependant on other nations and circumstances beyond our control.  What the Autumn statement said was that we are still very much in the mess that we inherited from Labour.

The sight of Ed Balls washing his hands of economic car crash that he was instrumental in is quite sickening.  His attacks on the deficit reduction plans and failure to condemn today's strike action is telling, it's like setting fire to your house and then criticising the fire brigade from making your carpet wet when they put it out.

As unfair and opportunistic Labour's attacks are they will chime with the public and damage George's reputation because most people cannot imagine that things could be worse.  The situations in Greece and Italy look too remote to be relevant.  The BBC describing today as the "biggest walkout in a generation" reinforces the idea that our situation is as bad as it can get but ask a Greek public sector worker if they'd swap places with a Brit and watch them bite your hand off.

There is no point in pretending that times are anything but very tough.  The actions that George Osborne has already taken prevented a bad situation become catastrophic and the measures laid out in yesterday's statement will eventually dig us out of this hole.  Just don't expect many people to thank him for it.

The unions hoping to ruin your day are subsidised by you

Back when it was the owners of the means of production that suffered financially during a strike I can understand the unions' logic.  If the boss wasn't looking after the workers, hit him in the pocket until he did.

Now that the only unions left are in the public sector the people that they hurt during strikes are other workers trying to make ends meet.  As you can tell, I don't think that there is any moral justification for public sector strikes.

Not only do I think these strikes are unjustified I'm horrified to learn the extent to which the people who are being hit by these actions are actually funding the unions.  Basically you're paying the unions to screw you over.

This report, by the Tax Payer's Alliance, gives a full estimate of the hidden subsidy given to union officials in the public sector, the national total is £113 million.  This frees up plenty of union money for them to give to people like Ed Miliband and Ken Livingstone who noticeably fail to condemn the strikes.

Taxpayer funded political parties? No, no, no, no, no!

There are lots of simple things that could be done to improve the funding of political parties. But a politics tax isn't one of them.

A cap on donations from a person, company or organisation would be a good start, the Conservatives have in the past been too reliant on a small number of donors, and this makes us inward rather than outward looking. The Labour party is now almost totally funded by the unions who excerpt an inappropriate level of influence over it. And the Lib Dems have had their own troubles.

It would be better if political parties genuinely looked to have a broad base of financial support. Modern digital media makes it easier to get small donations from ten or even hundreds of thousands of people and doing so would force all parties to listen to their own grass roots.

State funding of political parties would be hugely unpopular and morally wrong.

Livingstone's promises on fares

Livingstone and his running mate at odds over their own fares policy

Ken Livingstone and his nominee for Deputy Mayor can't even agree as to where the money for his pie in the sky fares commitment would come from.

When announcing his fare cut, Ken said:

'Without touching either future investment budgets, reserves, or existing operating budgets we can put the excess money to work for Londoners by holding down their fares.'

But his deputy Val Shawcross then blew a hole wide open in their spending plans, when she said on Iain Dale's LBC show:

'I think we need to something to deal with working Londoners and certainly, we think, we've done the calculations, there's an enormous amount of money in TfL's reserves'.

So there is either a split in Livingstone's top team (which I doubt) or neither of them have a clue as to how they would fund the 5% fare cut (much more likely).

The fare cut makes for good headlines but Londoners aren't stupid and it is clear that they don't believe Livingstone on this issue.  He has history of saying one thing before an election and doing the opposite afterwards.

Frankie Cocozza, Sex and drugs and.......

Confession time. I watch the X-Factor, there I've said it!

The show has been criticised for catapulting people to huge musical fame without the long battle that "proper" bands have to go through. Like that didn't happen before with Motown or Phil Spector's bands. But the expulsion of young (and as far as I could make out talentless) Frankie Cocozza highlights a new issue.

Many young people clearly believe that success can and should be easy and instant. Frankie seems to have taken this attitude a step further by trying to live the Rock n Roll lifestyle without even doing the Rock n Roll bit. At least the Stones, The Who etc. had some big hits before they shagged groupies, binged on boose and drugs and smashed up hotel rooms.

P.S. Frankie you forgot to smash up the hotel room.

Tom Watson's behaviour is stupid and counterproductive

Tom Watson's Mafia question to James Murdoch was designed to get Tom Watson on the news.  It worked.  However the committee's job is to find out what happened at News International during the phone hacking scandal.

Watson's questions did nothing to get new or significant information was unnecessarily rude and provocative.  He even managed to create a situation where James Murdoch became the sympathetic character.

I have long felt that Tom Watson was a disloyal schemer, I can now add to this that I think he is a coward.  He would never dare to make an accusation like that without parliamentary privilege and in doing so he damages not only his own credibility but also that of the whole committee.

Rubber bullets

A bit of retro musical entertainment for you.

Border controls

I think that the Home Secretary has done a great job since the election and the relative lack of Home Office bad headlines reflects this. But is was never going to last forever.  Theresa May is still doing a good job but there is no doubt that the news about the relaxation of passport controls has been damaging.

But let’s look at this for a second. All security measures are a compromise, a balance between the convenience of individuals and their own safety. We could all be strip-searched in the name of security every time we step onto a plane or train and wait in line for hours for the privilege but I don't think anyone would be happy about that. Therefore there was nothing wrong with a trial period where visitors from lower risk countries had less stringent checks to reduce queues at airports.  The problem arose for UK Border Agency management extending this to all visitors, without authorisation from above.

This issue makes for good headlines for the Opposition but their calls for Theresa to stand down are ridiculous.

"Your flesh will be flayed by demons"

That nice man Mr Livingstone

So says Labour's London Mayoral candidate Ken Livingstone.  The subject of this tirade was Conservative Cllr Peter Graham of Hammersmith and Fulham Council, his sin was to want better housing in his borough.  The detail of the exchange can be read here:

Ken Livingstone, seems increasingly bitter and twisted and projects this onto his opinion of others.  This isn't the first time he has been so graphic and insulting, some recent examples can be found here and here.

It's a matter of when not if Greece leaves the Euro

The Greek government is being forced into an austerity package that would turn your hair grey if it was happening to us.  The choice about the nature and timing of their cuts package has been taken away from them and their actions virtually dictated to them by their international creditors.  This is what happens when the markets lose confidence in a government's ability to manage it's economy.
The announcement of a Greek referendum on the packages negotiated at the weekend immediately undermined the market confidence that was created by the deal and the chances of the Greek people voting "Yes" to more financial pain is minuscule.

The simple truth is the the European economies don't have enough spare money to keep throwing into the bottomless pit of the bailout fund.  The only sustainable answer is for Greece to devalued it's currency and to do that it must leave the Euro.  While this may be politically unpalatable Eurozone leaders need to remember that when all the options open to you are unpalatable you shouldn't hold out for the nice solution. It isn't there.