Tim Worstall

That ignoring the requirements of law is worrying in itself. It indicates a civil service that has been corrupted by greed and the ethos of personal gain.

The answer, of course, is that the State administered by the corrupt and greedy must be given more power over the rest of us.

Facepalm.

The question we have to ask ourselves is whether these people’s gums bleed for a week each month. Without, you know, the saving grace of being enjoyable, servicable and of purpose the other three weeks?

Ulrich Beck, Daniel Cohn-Bendit,Yuri Andrukhovych, Jerzy Baszynski, Zygmunt Bauman, Senta Berger, Patrice Chéreau, Rudolf Chmel, Jacques Delors, Gabor Demszky, Chris Dercon, Doris Dörrie, Tanja Dückers, Peter Eigen, Olafur Eliasson, Joschka Fischer, Jürgen Flimm, Anthony Giddens, Alfred Grosser, Ulla Gudmundson, Jürgen Habermas, Dunya Hayali, Michal Hvorecký, Eva Illouz, Mary Kaldor, Navid Kermani, Imre Kertesz, Rem Koolhaas, Kasper König, György Konrád, Michael Krüger, Adam Krzeminski, Wolf Lepenies, Constanza Macras, Claudio Magris, Sarat Maharaj, Olga Mannheimer, Petros Markaris, Robert Menasse, Adam Michnik, Herta Müller, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Thomas Ostermeier, Petr Pithart, Martin Pollack, Alec Popov, Ilma Rakusa, Peter Ruzicka, Joachim Sartorius, Saskia Sassen, Hans-Joachim Schellnhuber, Helmut Schmidt, Henning Schulte-Noelle, Martin Schulz, Gesine Schwan, Richard Sennett, Martin M. Šimečka, Johan Simons, Javier Solana, Michael Thoss, Klaus Töpfer, Klaus Wagenbach, Richard von Weizsäcker, Christina Weiss, Wim Wenders, Bob Wilson, Michel Wieviorka.

As to their major proposal yes, there is indeed a suitable answer:

A new contract needs to be agreed between the state, the EU, the political structures of civil society, the market, social security and environmental sustainability.

What is good about Europe? What is the value of Europe to us? Which model could and should be the basis for Europe in the 21st century? These are open questions that urgently need to be addressed.

And I shall address such questions for you. Firstly, you can fuck off, all of you.

Secondly, the European Union can fuck off.

Thirdly, the Council of Europe can fuck off.

Oh, and did I say that you can all fuck off?

For to ask these questions is to prove why Britain simply should not be a part of whatever idiocies you continentals wish to indulge in. We just don’t do things this way. We’ve a thousand years of the organic growth of the structure of our society: we’ve never let madmen with a plan anywhere near how our State is constructed. As opposed to, say, the French, who had what was it, four different constitutions between 1939 and 1959?

So you go off and play your games and we’ll continue to muddle through as we always have done.

And do recall, that you can all just fuck right off.

A European Year of Volunteering for Everyone – for taxi drivers and theologians, for workers and the workless, for managers and musicians, for teachers and trainees, for sculptors and sous-chefs, for supreme court judges and senior citizens, for men and women – as a response to the euro crisis!

The young people of Europe may be better educated than ever before but they still feel powerless in the face of the looming bankruptcy of nation states and the terminal decline of labour markets. Every fourth European under the age of 25 is unemployed. In the many places where disenfranchised young people have set up camp and made public protests they are clamouring for social justice. Wherever such camps are – in Spain, Portugal, the countries of North Africa, American cities or Moscow – this demand is being made with great force and fervour. Anger is mounting over a political system that rescues banks with eye-watering mountains of debt but squanders the future of young people in the process. But how much hope can be held out for a Europe with a steadily ageing population?

US president John F Kennedy astounded the world with his idea of founding a peace corps. “Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.”

We, the undersigned, wish to provide a mouthpiece for European civil society. For this reason, we are asking the European commission and national governments, the European parliament and national parliaments to create a Europe of actively employed citizens and to secure the financial and legal requirements for the European Year of Volunteering for Everyone – as a counter-model to the top-down Europe, the Europe of elites and technocrats that has prevailed up to now that considers itself responsible for forging the destiny of the citizenry of Europe – if need be, against its will. For it is this unspoken maxim of European politics that is threatening to destroy the entire European project.

The aim is to democratise the national democracies in order to rebuild Europe in the spirit of the rallying cry: “Don’t ask what Europe can do for you but ask what you can do for Europe – by doing Europe!”

No progressive thinker – from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Jürgen Habermas – ever wanted a democracy that consists merely of being able to periodically vote. The debt crisis that is currently driving Europe apart is not simply an economic problem but also a political one. We need a European civil society and the vision of younger generations if we are going to solve the burning issues of today. We cannot afford to allow Europe to be transformed into the target of an “angry movement” of citizens protesting against a Europe without Europeans. Europe cannot function without Europeans committed to its cause, and Europeans cannot do Europe unless they can breathe the air of freedom.

The practical action transcending the narrow bounds of nation state, ethnicity and religion that the European Year of Volunteering for Everyone is meant to promote is not intended as an institutionalised fig leaf for European failures. The vision is instead to open up space for creativity. Far from being a means of providing handouts to unemployed youth, the European Year of Volunteering for Everyone is an act of self-assertion by European civil society: an act that can be used to construct a new proactive constitution from the bottom up in order to re-establish Europe’s political creativity and legitimacy. Political freedom cannot survive in an atmosphere of fear. It only thrives and becomes established where people have a roof over their heads and know how they are going to live tomorrow and in their old age. That is why the European Year of Volunteering for Everyone needs a robust foundation of finance. We ask businesses in Europe to make their appropriate contribution.

If Europe is to develop a bottom-up culture, it cannot afford to fall back on predefined courses of action. The citizens of such a Europe will want to go to other countries and get involved in transnational problem areas in which national states are no longer able to offer appropriate solutions – environmental degradation, climate change, mass movements of refugees and migrants, and farright radicalism. They will also want to make use of European networks of art, literature and theatre as stages to promote the European cause. A new contract needs to be agreed between the state, the EU, the political structures of civil society, the market, social security and environmental sustainability.

What is good about Europe? What is the value of Europe to us? Which model could and should be the basis for Europe in the 21st century? These are open questions that urgently need to be addressed. For us in “We are Europe” the answer is this: Europe is a laboratory of political and social ideas without parallel anywhere else in the world. But what constitutes European identity? You might say that Europeanness arises out of dialogue and dissent between the many different political cultures – of the citoyen, the citizen, the staatsbuerger, the burgermatschappij, the ciudadano, the obywatel. But Europe is also about irony; it is about being able to laugh at ourselves. There is no better way to fill Europe with life and laughter than for ordinary Europeans to come together to act on their own initiative.

Richard Drayton is Rhodes Professor of Imperial History at King’s College London

Hmm, so what’s he got to say about Argentina then?

YPF, under Repsol, paid extraordinarily high dividends to its foreign owners – some 9% in 2011 – which it paid for by borrowing. So while YPF debts soared and Argentina’s oil went undrilled, Repsol both banked profits and “invested” Argentinian capital elsewhere in its corporate structure. As the rating agency Standard & Poor’s commented on 19 April: “Repsol does not guarantee any of the debt at YPF.” Madrid got the juice, but the liabilities all fell on Buenos Aires.

High dividends allowed Repsol also to cash out of 25% of its YPF holding by selling it on to the Eshkenazi family, with the capital coming from Credit Suisse, Goldman Sachs, BNP Paribas, Standard Chartered and Citibank, with banks then making money buying and selling derivative contracts on Repsol and YPF debt.

Err, no. Wrong way around. Repsol was given, erm, a little bit of political encouragement to sell that 25% stake. As the Eshkenazi family didn’t have the income to service the loans they had taken out to purchase the stake then YPF was encouraged to pay out 90% of income in dividends so that they could.

YPF in the 1990s drilled three times as many exploratory wells in Argentina as it did in the 2000s under Repsol. Argentina’s oil and gas output was falling, and new reserves were not being found to replace exploited deposits.

Bit strange.

In nationalising, Argentina showed that a democratic government can stop predatory financiers. And it has not scared away new investors: already Talisman, ConocoPhillips, Chevron, and Chinese companies are seeking access to Argentina’s shale oil reserves, the third largest in the world.

It was Repsol, through YPF, that found those shale reserves.

I do think that those wishing to study history might want to give King’s a wide berth.

What bastards, eh?

A row has broken out over a debt-ridden NHS hospital being handed over to a private company that will keep a large chunk of the millions of pounds in savings it will seek to make.

Bosses at Circle, which is running the Hinchingbrooke Health Care Trust in Cambridgeshire, have insisted they will improve standards despite claims that they will need to make what have been described as “eye-watering” cuts.

The Health Service Journal (HSJ) has published a report saying the hospital will need to make surpluses of at least £70m over the next decade if it is to clear its debts and meet Circle’s contracted share.

A letter deposited in the House of Commons library by Earl Howe, a junior health minister, and uncovered by the HSJ, details for the first time the terms of the deal to hand running of the hospital to Circle.

A statement from the HSJ said: “The first £2m of any year’s surplus goes to Circle; the company then takes a quarter of surpluses between £2m and £6m and a third of surpluses between £6m and £10m.

Cue wailing about cuts.

However, that’s not actually what is going to happen. The services they must provide are detailed elsewhere. They can’t, for example, collect a cheque for doing hip replacements and then not do any hip replacements.

What they have to do is increase the efficiency with which the money they get is spent. That is, provide the services they are contracted to provide at a lower cost, thus creating that surplus through greater efficiency. Only if they manage to do that do they then get a slice of those efficiency savings.

Which brings us to the meaning of “cuts” in this instance. There will be no fewer services: only less money spent on providing those services. So what we’ve actually got is people whining about inputs again instead of what we all want to be concerned about, the efficiency with which inputs get turned into outputs.

Very, very, British lefty. Insisting that it is the amount of money spent which is important instead of the outcome of having spent it.

Two thousand senior civil servants could be minimising their tax by being paid off the Government payroll, it has emerged.

That people who are not really eligible for not PAYE are getting paid through not PAYE is indeed pretty dodgy.

However, this of course is bollocks:

Being paid through a service company allows the recipient to be taxed at the corporation rate tax rate of 21 per cent rather than pay up to 50 per cent in income tax.

The deal was estimated to allow Mr Lester – who received £182,000 a year via a headhunter to his own service company – to save as much as £40,000 a year in tax.

Because when you take the money out of the company as a dividend then you’ve got to pay the extra income tax to take you up to the regular rate.

Where you do save is on national insurance. But this causes another problem:

But he added: “I also believe that departments should be able to assure themselves that highly paid specialist staff are meeting their income tax and [national insurance] obligations.”

Under the new crackdown Mr Alexander will force any official who is not on the pay roll, has been employed for more than six months and is paid over £220 a day – the equivalent of a senior civil servant’s salary – to prove that they are paying their fair share of tax.

If cannot prove they are paying the same income tax and National Insurance Contributions as an employee, they will have their contracts terminated.

The major saving is in fact on employers’ national insurance. And it is that that the government itself hasn’t been paying on these wages as a result of the paying through service companies. So it is in fact the government that has been dodging taxes here.

Which is amusing, isn’t it?

And to add to John B’s comment:

“Departments have provided the Treasury with information in relation to all individuals engaged off-payroll – for payment in excess of £58,200. Over 2,000 such individuals have been identified,” he said, before adding that around 1,500 are paid more than £380 a day.

He continued by stating that around 1,600 people have been working for their departments for more than six months. Of these, 1,200 have been working for in excess of a year and 800 of them have been working for at least two years.

“From the start of the crisis, central banks provided emergency loans but these amounted to little more than holding a sheet in front of the emperor to conceal the nakedness of the banks. They didn’t solve the underlying problem – banks needed not loans but injections of shareholders’ capital in order to be able to absorb losses from the risky investments they had made. From the beginning of 2008, we at the Bank of England began to argue that UK banks needed extra capital – a lot of extra capital, possibly £100 billion or more. It wasn’t a popular message.”

Sir Mervyn said the “bold action” to largely nationalise RBS and Lloyds Banking Group took another nine months.

“That bold action in October 2008 could have happened sooner,” he said. “Bailing out the banks came too late to prevent the financial crisis from spilling over into the world economy. The realisation of the true state of the banking system led to a collapse of confidence around the world and a deep global recession. Over 25 million jobs disappeared worldwide. And unemployment in Britain rose by over a million.”

Politicians: even when doing the right thing they manage to do it at the wrong time.

And stopping the banking system from falling over was indeed the right thing. Maybe more shareholders should have lost their money as well, but doing it 9 months late isn’t very good, is it?

I’ve been tipped off to something that I’m absolutely certain is a scam.

But I have a feeling that it’s a legal scam. Not as in a scam about the law, but as in a scam that is legal.

There’s some blokes out there advertising for phone salesmen to sell rare earth metals to the general public.

Nothing illegal about that at all. Very silly of anyone to buy them, this is true, but nothing illegal.

In fact this was done a couple of decades back in the US. Blokes started getting small ingots of germanium and indium made up and selling them using boiler room tactics. Of course the price they were sold at was way above wholesale value. The spread (I think they were willing to buy and sell) was absurd etc.

So, given that I’m almost, almost, certain that anyone who buys from these guys is being ripped off, what actually can or should I do about it?

For it isn’t illegal to phone someone up and ask “Wanna buy some neodimium?”, nor should it be.

But what next?

So, something that every woman didn’t do before, what, 1950* or so, and many women haven’t done since the late 1960s, what with hairy feminism and the hippies, is now new and unorthodox if you don’t do it now?

The idea that pudendas should remind of pre-pubescent girls is new and odd but not shaving hardly is.

* I have no idea when female depilation really started but surely it wasn’t entirely commonplace before the advent of safety razors….which does predate 1950 agreed.

Additionally, the Commission has acted to cut the amount of money being spent on olive trees which have been criticised for being a waste of money.

The cost of maintaining the shrubs, which dominate the MPs’ new offices in Portcullis House, has been around £44m a year. The Commission says it has negotiated the maintenance deal of £18.5m which will include other shrubs on the parliamentary estate.

Substitute thousands for millions there laddies.

Jeebus, these Oxbridge humanities graduates just don’t grok numbers at all, do they?

The increase in higher-rate taxpayers is due to reductions in the threshold for paying 40pc tax, in combination with so-called “fiscal drag”, where tax bands do not move up in line with inflation, meaning inflation-linked wage increases push more people into higher rate tax bands.

Fiscal drag is more subtle than just not moving the bands up with inflation. It’s that (outside recessions of course) wage inflation, or perhaps wage growth, is higher than general inflation. It must be, that’s how everyone gets richer over time.

So, even if you move the bands up with inflation you still get fiscal drag as wages rising faster than inflation push ever more people either into the tax band or into the higher ones.

Which is how we end up with the current situation. Wasn’t all that long ago, within my parents’ life time if not my own, that you didn’t pay income tax until you were on average or above wages. Now you do if you’re part time on the minimum wage.

The Coalition’s much vaunted “huge rises” in the personal allowance are merely undoing a couple of decade’s worth of fiscal drag, nothing more.

Of course, it’s also true that that bastard Brown didn’t even raise allowances in line with CPI inflation. But no one at all has raised them in line with wage growth.

A Sainsbury’s potato buyer accepted £5 million in corrupt payments from a key supplier, staying at Claridge’s and taking luxury holidays in return for a lucrative contract.

I have worked in parts of the world where this is actually the point of contract negotiations. Who gets what slice in the middle. This is actually what takes all the time and effort, not whether to be corrupt but how to be so.

I’ve also worked in the UK and the subject has never even raised its head. Not even working with advertising companies which, as we all know, are staffed with the scum of the Earth.

I have a very strong feeling that there are many who don’t realise quite how lucky and unusual we are with the business culture in the UK.

In at least one country I can think of those in business reading the Sainsbury’s story will be wondering whether they’re nicking enough themselves. Almst everyone in British industry will be horrified that it was happening in our green and pleasant land.

The Internet wallah Tim Worstall thought that Miss Williams had sort of missed her own point with that bit about politics, media, and the third sector: “When the desirable jobs are spending other people’s money, reporting on spending other people’s money and lobbying to spend other people’s money then you know that the society is f***ed.”

Mark Steyn.

Chris Webber ‏ @ChrisWebber12

Bang on deconstruction of #greenjobs idea in first chpt of Chasing Rainbows by @worstall #climatechange #goodbooks

Personal opinion of course but he is a Senior Editor at the Economist Intelligence Unit.

Three principal criticisms can be made of our proposal for a 15% cap. First, this is just an arbitrary figure.

No, actually, it isn’t. It’s very carefully chosen.

UK media businesses, including computer games and book publishers as well as TV, radio and press, have revenues of about £32bn a year. The enlarged News Corp would have had about 20% of this total,

It’s less than News Corp has and more than anyone else has. Thus it achieves the principle aim of shrinking News Corp. It’s not arbitrary at all.

However, it fails at a deeper level too. You’re counting only that part of the media that is monetised. And rather missing the developments of the last 10 years which have led to the demonetisation of large parts of said media.

Shouldn’t you read up on these things first?

In this respect it corresponds to other global powers. Despite its trumpeted reforms, the International Monetary Fund remains under the control of the United States and the former colonial powers. All constitutional matters still require an 85% share of the vote. By an inexplicable oversight, the United States retains 16.7%, ensuring that it possesses a veto over subsequent reforms. Belgium still has eight times the votes of Bangladesh, Italy a bigger share than India, and the United Kingdom and France between them more voting power than the 49 African members.

It’s a bank. With shareholders. The shareholders put up the capital for the bank and they get voting rights in proportion to hte amount of capital they put up. It’s very, very, simple.

Humans are still evolving, scientists find

Just bizarre.

Sure, perhaps the natural selection isn’t running away from lions any more and the sexual selection might be taking place at the point of deciding who to be monogamous with but the idea that neither are still happening seems most odd.

Once only has to look at the lack of chins among Guards officers to note that something has indeed been going on.

Mr Moore added there were “well-rehearsed plans” in place and the agency was “fully prepared” for busy periods during the Olympics.

Asked how he would feel if there were four-hour queues to enter Britain during the Games, he said: “If that is necessary in light of the threats and risks that we face at that time, then so be it. We will not compromise on safety.”

Safety, just like anything else, is a trade off.

And we always, but always, trade off safety against other considerations. We would undoubtedly be less free but safer if we all had a luminescent bard code tattooed on our foreheads which the police could read at 200 metres. Despite successive Home Secretaries we are less safe but more free.

Part of the point of the Olympics is to show off London as a great place to come as a tourist or to do business.

4 hour delays at passport control rather fuck up the point of spending the £10 billion in the first place. At which point, this is the job that we pay you to do: sort it out mate.

From the comments about great engineers:

Brunel was voted something-or-other by the great unwashed, when James Watt or Geordie Stephenson were available. Those two changed human history: Brunel changed the means of getting to Bristol.

Sigh.

Brunel made it easier to get out of Bristol. A greater contribution to human happiness than no man has produced.

Ritchie picks up on a piece in the New York Times:

Without such tactics, Apple’s federal tax bill in the United States most likely would have been $2.4 billion higher last year, according to a recent study by a former Treasury Department economist, Martin A. Sullivan. As it stands, the company paid cash taxes of $3.3 billion around the world on its reported profits of $34.2 billion last year, a tax rate of 9.8 percent.

It’s amusing that the country’s leading tax expert doesn’t pick up on the important point about that statement. Apple’s 9.8% tax rate is entirely mind gargling nonsense.

US Corporation tax is paid a year in arrears. Thus the $3.3 billion cash taxes paid this year refers to the profits from the previous year.

And what do we know about Apple’s profits recently? Yup, they’ve been rising very strongly, haven’t they?

And what that 9.8% tax rate, cash taxes paid on last year’s profits when compared to this year’s profits is that profits at Apple are growing very fast.

It’s an interesting thing for the country’s leading tax expert to miss, isn’t it? Almost as if he doesn’t know the subject upon which he is pontificating.

It is especially annoying that Banerjee was put back in the committee two years after he gave the award to his colleague and lover (not a secret any more now that they have a baby).

About the award of the John Bates Clark Medal by the American Economics Association to the best economist under 40.

Often thought of as as an indicator of a future Nobel.