HSBC bank profits more than doubled in 2010

HSBC today reported profits more than doubled in 2010 to 19 billion US dollars (£11.8 billion), with every region in the black for the first time since 2006.

The banking giant's result marks a sharp rise on the 7.1 billion dollars (£4.4 billion) posted in 2009.

But HSBC's new chairman Douglas Flint said the group will "not forget" the financial crisis and support from governments around the world, adding the group entered 2011 "with humility".
However, they then go on to pay new chief executive Stuart Gulliver - formerly head of the investment bank - a £5.2 million bonus for 2010, taking his total package for the year to £6.2 million.

The bank's former boss Michael Geoghegan - who stepped down as chief executive on December 31 - picked up a £3.8 million bonus and a total package of £5.8 million for the year. He will continue to work for the group until he retires on March 31, and will be paid more than £1.4 million in pay and pension this year. Mr Geoghegan is also entitled to £200,000 for three months' consultancy work after he retires, although he will donate this to charity.

Well, that's alright then.

Stop The Cuts Demo

Saturday 26th February


Blackpool


11:00 am



Corporation Street



See you there.

Mark Serwotka Guest Speaker at our AGM

Mark Serwotka delighted members yesterday when he attended the Annual General Meeting as our guest speaker.

He gave an inspiring speech to the well attended meeting and answered numerous questions from members.

The main point of his talk was that we are facing the darkest period that any of us will experience during our working lives. Under the cover of the recession, the government is preparing to dismantle the State whatever the cost to jobs and services.

However, there is hope, and it is planned that all the public sector unions will unite to fight the cuts.

A full report will follow.

America’s Tea Party of the left...

...is a warning to the coalition.

The US trade union rallies are spreading from Wisconsin to Ohio and beyond. Leaders in the UK must realise that their own public sector will not sit idly by as austerity measures kick in.

David Blancflower, The New Statesmen

The new US Super Bowl champions, the Green Bay Packers, got a heroes' welcome when they brought the trophy home to the northern state of Wisconsin in early February. The Packers frequently play in below-zero temperatures (Fahrenheit, that is) on the frozen tundra of Lambeau Field, the stadium named after the team's founder, Curly Lambeau. "Cheesehead" is a nickname, sometimes used disparagingly, for a person from Wisconsin - a nod to the large volume of cheese produced in the area. It is also the nickname of Packer fans, many of whom wear cheesehead hats to home games.

But Wisconsin has been in the news for another reason - namely the angry response of many of its citizens to a fiscal austerity bill intended to deal with the state's $3.6bn budget deficit. Around 70,000 cheeseheads have gathered at the state capitol in Madison to protest against plans by the new Republican governor, Scott Walker, to remove the collective bargaining rights of around 175,000 public-sector employees. Teachers have turned out in such large numbers that some schools have been forced to close due to understaffing. Trade unionists have agreed to double their health insurance contributions and to put 5.8 per cent of their salary towards their pensions, but would not accept the removal of their bargaining rights. Walker insists there is "no room to negotiate".

Read the article in full here.

Soldiers to be trained to run prisons

Soldiers will run prisons if guards go on strike as part of protests against public sector cuts, it was revealed today.

Thousands of troops will receive training in restraint techniques and fire safety as the Government prepares contingencies against a wave of industrial action.

Ministers expect staff to walk out over Justice Secretary Ken Clarke's plans to privatise two prisons and have drawn up plans with the Ministry of Defence, The Times reported.

True extent of NHS job cuts

More than 50,000 doctors, nurses, midwives and other NHS staff are due to lose their jobs, according to the most comprehensive survey of health cuts since the Government came to power.

This reveals the absolute lie of the Tories who promised a ring fence for the NHS.

In response to a series of Freedom of Information requests, officials confirmed that 53,150 posts are due to be lost across 155 hospital trusts, 126 primary care trusts, 23 ambulance trusts and 54 mental health trusts in England, as well as 15 Scottish trusts, nine Welsh trusts and six trusts in Northern Ireland.

Nearly every trust in the country admitted that they planned to shed staff over the next four years, with some losing up to one in five employees, according to the study.
More than a dozen hospitals failed to respond to the requests, meaning the true level of job losses could be substantially higher. The requests were submitted by the TUC as part of its False Economy campaign against public spending cuts, which is launched today.

Read more here.

Public sector workers will not be hired by private sector

Survey suggests many private sector firms would not hire redundant public sector workers.



More than half of private firms would not hire public sector workers, according to survey of 500 firms by Barclays Corporate and the Financial Times.

More than half those surveyed stated that they intended to create jobs in 2011. However 52 per cent of the firms surveyed stated that they felt former public sector employees were not equipped for work in the private sector.

Businesses were said to be generally sceptical about the skills of former public service employees. Unemployment is now at 7.9 per cent, and this is expected to rise as cuts begin to be implemented in the public sector.

The Office for Budget Responsibility has forecast that over the next four years, 330,000 public sector workers are expected to lose their jobs. The government hopes that the private sector will create sufficient jobs to offset these losses. 75 per cent of the firms in the survey felt that the private sector would not be able to create enough posts.




Article from The New Statesman, cartoon from todays The Independent.

All In This Together?

Not if you are a banker.

Barclays Bank made £11.6 billion pounds in 2009 but paid a mere £113 million pounds in corporation tax.

That is less than 1%!

Even the Daily Mail is outraged as you can read here.

And after the resounding failure that was Project Merlin, 'The Boy' George Osborne has again failed to live up to his tough rhetoric on the banks. The Chancellor has dropped plans to prevent banks from offsetting their losses from the financial crisis against tax. As Barclays recently admitted, this practice meant it paid just £113m in corporation tax on profits of £11.6bn in 2009. In a report last year for the TUC, tax expert Richard Murphy warned that the banks will avoid paying £19bn of tax on future profits by offsetting their losses -- the equivalent of more than £1,100 for every family in the UK.

It is standard practice for businesses to offset their losses against tax but in the case of the banks, who were the beneficiaries of a public bailout (or, in the case of Barclays, liquidity guarantees), there is an obvious moral objection. Osborne's capitulation means that the banks will receive an effective double subsidy from the taxpayer. Read it here.

All in this together? Don't make us laugh.

Major Major Misunderstanding.

Defence Secretary apologises over the email from an Army Major in the APC Kentigern House informing a group of Warrant Officers on rolling contracts that their contracts will not be renewed in 12 months time.

Dr Fox said: "This is a completely unacceptable way to treat anyone, not least our armed forces. ‘The correct procedure was not followed. ‘I regret this and want to reiterate the unreserved apology already made by the Army and on behalf of the Ministry of Defence."

Unfortunately, and ironically, this incident has allowed renewed calls for further cuts to the MoD, particularily against the civil service. This is doubly ironic as the error, if an error it actaully was, committed by an Army Major on a salary of around £57,000 + allowances, cost the MoD some two to three times the cost of an equivalent civil servant.

Thats right, a civil servant could have failed to follow the correct procedure for a third of the cost.

Stripped Bare

Shocking new financial manouevres by the British government show who it’s really working for.

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 15th February 2011

You think you’ve seen the worst of it; you haven’t. Last week I wrote about how the British government, while imposing extra taxes and devastating cuts on ordinary mortals, has quietly engineered a new tax exemption for the banks and corporations, which also encourages these businesses to shift some of their operations overseas. I thought that was as bad as it got. I was wrong.

On the day I wrote that column, the Conservatives were doing something just as repulsive, and far more dangerous. On Wednesday George Osborne told the House of Commons that “we will make sure we learn every lesson that needs to be learnt – so that this [the financial crisis] never happens again”. Two days before, his government demonstrated that nothing has been learnt at all. Let me first explain the context.

Most people obtain shares or bonds or other securities in the hope that their value will rise. Short-sellers hope that their price will fall. They might borrow, for example, 10,000 shares and sell them for £1 a piece. Then they pray that the value collapses. If they’re in luck, and the share price halves, they can buy the same number as they sold, for 50p each. They return the shares to the broker who lent them, and pocket £5000 (minus fees).

It’s a controversial practice. Some people say that it helps markets find the right price for their wares. Others maintain that it exacerbates risk, as the sellers are using assets they don’t possess to take on potentially unlimited liabilities (while share prices can’t fall below zero, there is no fixed limit to their increase in value). Short-selling also creates an incentive to try to drive down the price of securities, amplifying or even creating economic crises. An example was the Asian financial crisis of 1997, triggered by a coordinated attack by short-sellers on the Thai baht(3). It destituted tens of millions.

You don’t like the idea? Then take a look at naked short-selling. In this case the sellers not only don’t own the assets they’re selling; they haven’t even borrowed them. They sell a promise of shares, hope the price falls, then try to obtain the shares they’ve sold. In the surreal traditions of modern finance they’re effectively selling securities that don’t yet exist (perhaps they should be called insecurities). Naked shorting may grant short-sellers golden opportunities to wreck companies and economies, by flooding the market with low-cost ghosts.

Almost everyone condemns naked (also known as uncovered) short-selling and wants it banned because of the tremendous risks it presents to the economy. It has already been prohibited in the United States, Japan, Hong Kong, Australia and Brazil: none of which are renowned for draconian regulation. The European parliament has drafted a directive to bring it to an end within the EU. I did say almost everyone, didn’t I? There’s one group frantically seeking to protect naked shorting and strangle the directive: the UK Treasury and Conservative MEPs acting on its instructions.

At a committee meeting in the European parliament last week, the Tory MEP Syed Kamall inveighed against the ban. When I asked him how he justified this position, he claimed that ending naked short-selling “will reduce liquidity, meaning that borrowers will insist on higher returns, pushing up the cost of borrowing. This will lead to governments spending more money on servicing debt and less on state-provided public services.” This, as far as I can determine, is rubbish: perhaps the polar opposite of the truth.

Kamall’s office told me his position “reflects that within the government”. The Treasury confirmed this: “the UK does not support permanent restrictions on the uncovered short sales of either equities or sovereign debt … we believe it will do much to impair liquidity”. Tory MEPs will be instructed by the whips to oppose the ban when they vote on February 28th. The UK Treasury will then oppose it in the European Council.

So here we have a government which claims to have learnt the lessons of the financial crisis, opposing an obvious precaution against insanely risky speculation. How is this possible, when it knows what lax regulation does?

To understand its position, you must first understand that the government is not managing the economy for the people of this nation. It is managing it for a tiny transnational elite, a kind of global gated community. To the people inside the gates, who fund the Conservative party, who own our politics, the media and the banks, the rest of us are an inconvenience, to be bribed, threatened or fooled.

The politicians who get to the top in these circumstances don’t just present no threat to the gated community; they actively do its bidding. That is why Blair succeeded where his Labour predecessors failed. Talent, hard work and intelligence all help, but only if they are harnessed to the interests of economic power.

Governments don’t ask themselves “what can we do that is good for the people?” They ask themselves “how do we persuade people that what we want to do is good for them?” The task of both politicians and the corporate press is to convince us that what is good for billionaires is good for everyone but billionaires. This was the thrust of George Osborne’s statement to the Commons last week.

The social isolation of those now in power makes the task easier: they were born into the gated (or moated) economy, and they share its views. Theirs is a different challenge: to disguise their indifference towards the other 99%. They must kiss the babies of the electorate, listen to its complaints, drink its tea – and carry a handkerchief in which to spit. Their interests are not our interests. Their interests are the opposite of ours. If a measure enhances the wealth of the people inside the gates – even if only fleetingly – the government will back it, though it might beggar everyone else. The Treasury’s support of naked short-selling is the homage it pays to naked greed.

An economic war is being fought here. Wealth is being transferred from the poor and middle to the rich at stupefying speed and on a stupefying scale. The financial sector seeks to wring every drop from the productive economy, heedless of the eventual impacts. The government is there to help.

So what do we do? Look to Cairo. I suspect that UK Uncut – the most coherent response so far to the economic transfer – could be the beginning of something very big: a mass citizens’ revolt against institutional theft. The point is not to overthrow the government: that must be done electorally in the UK. The point is to make it impossible to keep fleecing the nation to serve the elite. We go unarmed into this battle; but it’s the government that’s naked.

www.monbiot.com

Demands for military covenant intensify

Amendment to armed forces bill will push for nation's duty of care to armed forces to be enshrined in law see here.

Meanwhile the MoD make politically driven cuts to SPVA that will inevitably lead to a lowering of service to both our serving personnel and our veterans.

Also, after spending up to £4 million pounds each on training 100's of trainee pilots are to be sacked by the RAF in yet more ill thought through cost cutting exercises. Here.

Holland slashes carbon targets, shuns wind for nuclear

In a radical change of policy, the Netherlands is reducing its targets for renewable energy and slashing the subsidies for wind and solar power. It's also given the green light for the country's first new nuclear power plants for almost 40 years.

Why the change? Wind and solar subsidies are too expensive, the Financial Times Deutschland , reports.

Holland thus becomes the first country to abandon the EU-wide target of producing 20 per cent of its domestic power from renewables. This is a remarkable turnaround from a state that took the Kyoto Agreement seriously and chivvied other EU members into adopting renewable energy strategies. The FT reports that instead of the €4bn annual subsidy, it will be slashed to €1.5bn.

Holland's only nuclear reactor, the Borssele plant, opened in 1973, and was earmarked for closure by 2003. In 2006 the plant was allowed to operate until 2034, and the following year the government abandoned its opposition to new nuclear plants.

Critics of wind turbine expansion have found it difficult to get figures to judge whether the turbines are value for money. In January, Ofgem in the UK refused to disclose the output of each Feed-In Tariff (FiT) location.

The UK is expected to urge the installation of 10,000 new onshore turbines, even though some cost more in subsidies than than they produce, even at the generous Feed-In rates. Holland's policy U-turn means the EU renewable targets aren't set in stone - and there are more cost-effective ways of hitting the targets.

Senior Lib Dem sacked for criticising dodgy deal for bankers

ConDem tensions over bankers’ bonuses have been laid bare with the sacking of senior Liberal Democrat Lord Oakeshott who criticised the "pitiful" deal announced by 'The Boy' George Osborne.

Lord Oakeshott, a close ally of Vince 'Lightfoot' Cable, the Business Secretary, was last night removed from his post as the Lib Dem spokesman on Treasury issues.

His departure from the post came after he condemned the Coalition’s agreement with the banking industry as inadequate and accused Mr Osborne’s team of “arrogance and incompetence”.

Under the deal with the industry, the heads of the taxpayer-backed high-street banks will receive staggeringly inappropriate multi-million pound pay and bonus packages for last year.
The Chancellor said it was time to move from “retribution to recovery”, which seems to be shorthand for let them have whatever they want, and agreed to water down laws which would have identified multi-million pound bank traders.

However, under the terms of the “Project Merlin” deal, the country’s main high-street banks have agreed to increase lending and provide funding for community projects – in return for the Government not vetoing their bonus payments. We will believe that when we see it. And frankly, we won't ever see it!

Lib Dem council chiefs speak out against cuts

88 council chiefs rail against the scale and pace of cuts, as evidence builds that the vulnerable will be hit hardest.

In the most significant sign yet of grassroots discontent with the coalition, 88 Liberal Democrat council chiefs have written to the Times (£) to criticise the scale and pace of cuts.

The 17 local authority leaders and 71 local party heads -- including the leaders of Newcastle, Milton Keynes and Hull city councils -- warn that services for the most vulnerable will have to be cut. While accepting the need for local councils to play their part in reducing the deficit, they say that spending reductions are too big and being implemented too quickly. They also personally attack the Communities Secretary, Eric Pickles, for "shak[ing] a stick at councillors" rather than working with them.

Rather than assist the country's recovery by making public-sector savings in a way that can protect local economies and the frontline, the cuts are so structured that they will do the opposite...

This front-loading means councils do not have the lead-in time necessary to re-engineer services on a lower-cost base and ease staff cuts without forced, expensive redundancies. Inexplicably, local government is also being denied the opportunity to spread the cost of reorganisation and downsizing over several years -- at no cost to central government -- which just makes even bigger in-year cuts inevitable.

This intervention is a serious blow to the unity of the coalition, and is particularly significant because the Liberal Democrats are, and have always been a party of local government. Such an unequivocal statement of discontent shows that loyalty to the leadership is stretched to its very limit.

Indeed, while the localism agenda appears at first glance to be an area of concordance between the two coalition parties, this incident points to a key difference: the Lib Dems favour local government as a means of delivering this, but Cameron's Conservatives would rather diminish councils in favour of non-state voluntary groups. However, as outcries in the last week have demonstrated, there is a contradiction inherent in the Tories' view of this, as much of the funding for the charities they would like to expand comes from grants from local councils.
Meanwhile, an in-depth survey of the largest local authorities (also in the Times) suggests that at least 140,000 council jobs will be lost as a result of the cuts, and that the elderly, mentally ill, and disabled will be hit hardest.

Elsewhere, the BBC's Mark Easton shows that the more deprived an area, the bigger the proportionate cut in its budget:
Every voter in Labour-controlled Hackney [will] lose £210.19 in "spending power" as a result of the cuts (8.8% reduction), while their equivalent in Conservative-controlled East Dorset is losing £2.86 (roughly 2%).

These Lib Dem councillors were right to speak out against this assault on local government; now we must hope that someone in central government is listening.

Republished from The New Statesman, 10th Feb 2011

SPVA bidder in "slave-like" labour dispute.

CSC (Computer Sciences Corporation), a US multi-national is one of three companies bidding for the SPVA Future Contract. The others being HP (Hewlett Packard) and CAPITA.


CSC Denmark is facing angry union action over the company's use of temporary Indian workers paid a fraction of normal Danish wages. CSC has had to warn customers of a possible lockout of union workers - about a third of its staff are Prosa (union)members. Some 120 CSC staff have returned building passes and laptops to the company while negotiations continue.


Prosa complains that CSC is bringing staff from India and paying them between 3,000 and 5,000 Danish Kroner a month - between £341 and £568. This is despite Danish immigration law which requires foreigners must earn at least 31,250 Kroner a month (£3,555). CSC insists that because staff get free accommodation and 8,500 Kroner a month in per diem expenses, the wage is fair.

Prosa's secretary, Hanne Lykke Jespersen, said: "This is gross exploitation of the Indians, who virtually live under slave-like conditions and cannot themselves decide whether they to go to Denmark." The union got involved after it was contacted by an Indian man working for CSC who complained he was not getting the money he was promised.

Jespersen said no one would know about the workers' conditions except for "one brave Indian".
Prosa was contacted by a CSC staffer who said he was promised 550 Kroner (£62.56) a day, plus his Indian monthly salary of 3,000 Kroner (£341) and an apartment. But on arrival in Denmark he was paid only 285 Kroner a day and given a flat which he was told cost 11,579 Kroner a month (£1,317). The union said few Danes would pay 11,579 Kroner for the small two-bed apartment.

Prosa said the employee in question had been sent back to India and after he resigned from CSC and was told he had to pay a penalty of 35,000 Danish Kroner (£3,980).

You can read more on this dispute at the Prosa union website here.

It isn't that the other bidders are squeaky clean though. Check out what HP have been up to here and here.

If you are an employee of any of the companies mentioned we would be very interested in hearing about your experiences.

City financiers 'provided half of Tory funding'

A study by the Bureau for Investigative Journalism has found that the City accounted for £11.4m of Tory funding last year – the year in which a Tory Prime Minister was returned to Number 10 for the first time in 13 years.

The research showed that the figure was just £2.7m, or 25 per cent, in 2005, the year when David Cameron became Conservative leader.
According to the study, 57 donors gave more than £50,000 to the Tories in 2010. This level of funding would entitle them to face-to-face meetings with the Prime Minister.

Michael Spencer, a former party treasurer and leading City figure, had a major impact on the party’s funding, according to the study. Mr Spencer was asked by Mr Cameron to increase the number of smaller donations of £50,000 to curb the influence of large donors such as Lord Ashcroft. The City was the obvious place where these donations were secured. The top ten City figures gave £13.16m to the Tories – 13 per cent of Central Office funding over the past five years. David Rowland, who was briefly party treasurer after the general election, was the top donor.

Two of the top City donors were granted peerages in 2010 - Stanley Fink and George Magan. The research will be of heightened interest coming as it does as George Osborne, the Chancellor, imposes an increased levy on banks to try and head off accusations that he and the Prime Minister have admitted defeat in trying to rein in bonuses.

Dr Stuart Wilks-Heeg, leading authority on political party funding at the University of Liverpool, said: “The findings raise issues about how influenced and impartial the Conservatives are as they set about reforming and regulating the banking industry. "It is admittedly difficult to prove that because parties access money from specific sources that there is a feed through into the policies they adopt. Yet, given we have just experienced a blowout in the financial system, and are witnessing an ongoing struggle over its regulation, the scale of Conservative Party funding from the City must be an issue – not least for a party committed to 'taking big money out of politics’. This is a very important piece of work.”

John Cryer MP, a member of the Treasury select committee, said: “With over half of Conservative Party funds coming from the City, it’s no wonder this Tory-led government is letting the banks off the hook. George Osborne is giving the banks a tax cut compared to last year and is refusing to adopt Labour’s plan to repeat last year’s £3.5 billion bank bonus tax as well as the bank levy. Even with yesterday’s panic announcement the Tory-led government is taking less from the banks than the Labour government did last year. And there is still no sign of a deal on increased bank lending, greater transparency and restraint on bonuses. People will now suspect that the real reason why George Osborne has been so soft is that he cannot afford to upset his paymasters.”

I guess some are more in it together than some others?
Published in todays Telegraph .

A Corporate Coup d’Etat

You thought elections counted for something? Look at what wasn’t in the manifesto.

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 8th February 2011

“I would love to see tax reductions,” David Cameron told an interviewer at the weekend, “but when you’re borrowing 11 per cent of your GDP, it’s not possible to make significant net tax cuts. It just isn’t.” Oh no? Then how come he’s planning the biggest and crudest corporate tax cut in living memory?

If you’ve heard nothing of it, you’re in good company. The obscure adjustments the government is planning to the tax acts of 1988 and 2009 have been missed by almost everyone. They are, anyway, almost impossible to understand without expert help. But as soon as you grasp the implications, you realise that a kind of corporate coup d’etat is taking place. Like the dismantling of the NHS and the sale of public forests, no one voted for these measures, as they weren’t in the manifestos. While Cameron insists that he occupies the centre ground of British politics, that he shares our burdens and feels our pain, he has quietly been plotting with banks and businesses to engineer the greatest transfer of wealth from the poor and middle to the ultra-rich that this country has seen in a century. The latest heist has been explained to me by the former tax inspector, now a Private Eye journalist, Richard Brooks and current senior tax staff who can’t be named. Here’s how it works.

At the moment tax law ensures that companies based here, with branches in other countries, don’t get taxed twice on the same money. They have to pay only the difference between our rate and that of the other country. If, for example, Dirty Oil PLC pays 10% corporation tax on its profits in Oblivia, then shifts the money over here, it should pay a further 18% in the UK, to match the corporate tax rate of 28%. But under the new proposals, companies will pay nothing at all in this country on money made by their foreign branches.

Foreign means anywhere. If these proposals go ahead, the UK will be only the second country in the world to allow money that has passed through tax havens to remain untaxed when it gets here. The other is Switzerland. The exemption applies solely to “large and medium companies”: it is not available for smaller firms. The government says it expects “large financial services companies to make the greatest use of the exemption regime”. The main beneficiaries, in other words, will be the banks.

But that’s not the end of it. While big business will be exempt from tax on its foreign branch earnings, it will, amazingly, still be able to claim the expense of funding its foreign branches against tax it pays in the UK. No other country does this. The new measures will, as we already know, accompany a rapid reduction in the official rate of corporation tax: from 28% to 24% by 2014. This, a Treasury minister has boasted, will be the lowest rate “of any major Western economy”. By the time this government is done, we’ll be lucky if the banks and corporations pay anything at all. In the Sunday Telegraph David Cameron said “what I want is tax revenue from the banks into the Exchequer, so we can help rebuild this economy.” He’s doing just the opposite.

These measures will drain not only wealth but also jobs from the UK. The new legislation will create a powerful incentive to shift business out of this country and into nations with lower corporate tax rates. Any UK business which doesn’t outsource its staff or funnel its earnings through a tax haven will find itself with an extra competitive disadvantage. The new rules also threaten to degrade the tax base everywhere, as companies with headquarters in other countries will demand similar measures from their own governments.

So how did this happen? You don’t have to look far to find out. Almost all the members of the seven committees the government set up “to provide strategic oversight of the development of corporate tax policy” are corporate executives. Among them are representatives of Vodafone, Tesco, BP, British American Tobacco and several of the major banks: HSBC, Santander, Standard Chartered, Citigroup, Schroders, RBS and Barclays.

I used to think of such processes as regulatory capture: government agencies being taken over by the companies they were supposed to restrain. But I’ve just read Nicholas Shaxson’s Treasure Islands – perhaps the most important book published in the UK so far this year – and now I’m not so sure. Shaxson shows how the world’s tax havens have not, as the OECD claims, been eliminated, but legitimised; how the City of London is itself a giant tax haven, which passes much of its business through its subsidiary havens in British dependencies, overseas territories and former colonies; how its operations mesh with and are often indistinguishable from the laundering of the proceeds of crime; and how the Corporation of the City of London effectively dictates to the government, while remaining exempt from democratic control. If Hosni Mubarak has passed his alleged $70bn through British banks, the Egyptians won’t see a piastre of it.

Reading Treasure Islands, I’ve realised that injustice of the kind described in this column is not a perversion of the system; it is the system. Tony Blair came to power after assuring the City of his benign intentions. He then deregulated it and cut its taxes. Cameron didn’t have to assure it of anything: his party exists to turn its demands into public policy. Our ministers are not public servants. They work for the people who fund their parties, run the banks and own the newspapers, insulating them from democratic challenge.

Our political system protects and enriches a fantastically-wealthy elite, much of whose money is, as a result of their interesting tax and transfer arrangements, effectively stolen from poorer countries and poorer citizens of their own countries. Ours is a semi-criminal money-laundering economy, legitimised by the pomp of the Lord Mayor’s show and multiple layers of defence in government. Politically irrelevant, economically invisible, the rest of us inhabit the margins of the system. Governments ensure that we are thrown enough scraps to keep us quiet, while the ultra-rich get on with the serious business of looting the global economy and crushing attempts to hold them to account.

And this government? It has learnt the lesson that Thatcher never grasped. If you want to turn this country into another Mexico, where the ruling elite wallows in unimaginable, state-facilitated wealth while the rest can go to hell, you don’t declare war on society, you don’t lambast single mothers or refuse to apologise for Bloody Sunday. You assuage, reassure, conciliate, emote. Then you shaft us.

www.monbiot.com

"Call me Dave" Lies Again.

Despite promising that there would be no cuts affecting our front line troops in Afghanistan...

Despite harraunging the previous government over the provision of helicopters for our troops in Afghanistan...

Despite confirming a reduced order for 12 Chinook's only last November...

Despite that being a reduction from the previous order for 22...

Despite making political capital out this issue at every opportunity for the last two years...

Despite all of this, Call Me Dave now not only approves that the government have already reduced the order under SDSR. Now he is "refusing to place the order. And, worse than that, they appear to have abolished the order." said Shadow defence secretary Jim Murphy in the Commons.

So much for "Call Me Dave". More a case of Billy Liar.

Read more here.

£1,600,000 profit an hour. A word in your Shell like.

Prices are rising... not surprising when VAT increases and crops fail through drought or flood.

But why are prices rising so quickly across a whole range of consumables?

Probably the massive amounts of profit being taken by oil companies is the explanantion.

Shell alone make £1.6 million pounds an hour PROFIT! That is £3.5 billion over the last quarter alone, £18.6 billion profit for the full year. The oil companies blames the high price on the cost of crude oil... which they themselves produce.

It should be remembered that the price of oil is not really being set by tensions in Egypt, despite the claims of pundits and politicians. The real reason is that following the financial crisis many of the worlds biggest investors, especially Goldman Sachs, shifted their liquid assets, much of which was delivered to them via cheap or free state bailout cash, into oil futures thus driving up the crude price for 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011. They made a killing on those profits.

We the people paid the interest on this cash to ensure a money supply to keep the banks solvent, and that is how they repay us.
Read more here
Meanwhile the oil companies unfettered by any form of government intervention are able to make record profits.