DSg 30 November briefing 8 – Thank you to the 15,000+

The action on 30 June was at that point the best ever supported by PCS MoD members. Today, we have eclipsed that and by some margin. From myself as group secretary, can I thank every single member of our group who took action today.

Below are some reports from MoD establishments throughout the country with the same message repeating itself over and over again – very few, if many PCS members went to work in the MoD today. Indeed, we signed up numerous new PCS members either on the picket lines today or in the days preceding today’s action. Reps saw a particular swell in membership after the Chancellor once again attacked public sector workers yesterday.

From the feedback we have had from picket lines at almost every main MoD location, we estimate that in excess of 15,000 members have taken action today and supported our union and the wider labour and trade union movement in the fight for fair pensions.

Across the country, we have been part of a three million strong band of brothers and sisters who have told this government that enough is enough. Your action today will send a clear message to the government that our union will not allow them to tear up our contracted pension entitlements without a fight.

In the coming days, we will get full details of all the picket lines across the Ministry of Defence. The following is just a quick snapshot of what has happened today –

Merseyside – Only 14 went into work and none of these were members.
Leconfield - 60 members on 2 picket lines. Virtually closed the whole establishment staff car parks virtually empty.
Yorkshire – Picket lines at five different sites, reps reported that no members had crossed the picket line on 4 out of these 5 sites.
Bath – Picket lines at all 3 sites with Ensleigh reporting hardly anybody at work. DBS management board was changed at last minute from Imphal barracks in York because they heard we would have a strong picket line there. They held the meeting at Foxhill and were met with an equally strong picket line!
Scotland West - 5 picket lines. Kentigern House – 1 member went in out of over 600 members (99.8% out). 20 pickets at Faslane who stopped every car and caused gridlock around Faslane. At Coulport, it was only contractor staff and they had to be kept in the canteen all day for health and safety reasons. The march in Glasgow had in excess of 20,000 trade unionists marching, more than 5 times the STUC expected.
Cosford – 60+ on the picket line, the place “was virtually deserted” PCS, Prospect and NASUWT members there.
Cheadle Hulme - 10 on the picket line Approx 97% of the site out.
West Midlands - 2 picket lines. 95% support. At Donnington we had 60 pickets at one entrance and 150 at the other.
Salisbury Plain – 4 picket lines with 34 pickets in attendance.
Greater London – St Georges Court closed. Joint picket lines at Main Building with Prospect and FDA, “Significantly less people crossed the picket line than in June 2011”. Chinese television and Spanish TV filmed the pickets.
Abbeywood –Picket lines set up jointly with Prospect and Unite on several gates. Estimate that it is about 75% out with 40 pickets. Avon and Somerset constabulary had to order the MoD to open the gates after members did not turn up for work. Gridlock almost reached the M4 and took hours to clear.

Rallies have been held all over the country and addressed by hundreds of speakers to literally millions of trade unionists striking, but I wanted to finish by quoting a teaching union rep who spoke at one of the rallies today –

“They want us to work longer, pay more and get less – GET STUFFED”

It may not be the most eloquent statement ever made, but it is straight to the point and I think it sums up exactly the mood of the three million plus public service workers today. Once again, many thanks to every PCS member in our group who has taken action today. You have made a stand and should rightly be proud of yourself by doing so.



Bob Rollings
PCS DSg Group Secretary

One out all out

PCS, with PROSPECT and FDA at SPVA sites are on strike 30th November along with all public sector unions locally and nationally.

All SPVA sites will be picketed and members are invited to support the action on the picket lines or on the joint public service march in Blackpool meeting at St Johns Square 12:00 noon.

Budget update and impact on MoD staff

As 60,000 plus MoD civil servants prepare to protest tomorrow to defend their pensions, jobs and terms and conditions, they have been dealt another savage blow in today's autumn statement by Chancellor, George Osborne.

The Chancellor has announced that the public service pay freeze will be replaced by a 1% increase in the two years following the pay freeze. If inflation remains at the current rate of 5.6%, in reality this means that MoD civil servants will face a real terms pay cut in the region of 20-25%.

This is even before the proposed increase in pension contributions that will mean we will work longer, but get less pension. Contrast that with the friends of this government - the casino bankers that caused the global economic problems. Do they face similar financial pressures? NO!

The Robin Hood tax that our union has supported and would have put a transactional tax on each banking transaction will not be supported by this government. Today, George Osborne said such a tax would be, "a tax on people's (bankers) pensions." The hypocrisy is staggering. There were many, many more statements within the Autumn statement that will penalise working people.

Where the defecit came from?

It is often said that government income and expenditure were out of synch before 2008.

And it is also claimed that it is excessive spending before then that caused the current crisis.

Neither claim is supported by data. The graph reflects HM Treasury out-turn data to 2009-10 and June 2011 budget data for 2010-11 onwards.

The visual imaging tells the story.

Labour ran surpluses.

And then it ran tiny deficits that related in large part to investment spending.

And then tax revenues collapsed, which had nothing whatsoever to do with excessive spending and had everything to do with banking collapsing.

Supposedly this will correct by 2015.

We don’t believe that.

But let’s not for a minute think that Labour mismanaged the economy. The data simply does not suggest it did. Banks did that. And it was banks that created the deficit.

Fox-Werrity. In Gus we trust?

This weeks Private Eye reports:

Cabinet secretary Gus O’Donnell’s “inquiry” into the Fox–Werritty affair identified two meetings between the former defence secretary Liam Fox, his chum Adam Werritty and Matthew Gould, the UK ambassador to Israel. But a former diplomat has been able to uncover at least six meetings between Gould and Werritty.

According to O’Donnell, Fox and Werrity met Gould in Tel Aviv at “a private dinner with senior Israelis” and before Gould took up the ambassador’s post in Tel Aviv for “a general discussion of international defence and security matters”. O’Donnell says Werritty was invited “as an individual with some experience in these matters”.
While O’Donnell did at least say it was “not appropriate” for Werritty to be briefing British ambassadors or meeting “senior Israelis” at dinners with the defence secretary, ex-diplomat Craig Murray has established that there were at least four other Werritty-Fox-Gould get-togethers that O’Donnell did not consider.

Outfoxed?
The Foreign Office (FCO) admits that the three men had a formal meeting and a “private social engagement” when Dr Fox was still shadow defence secretary in 2010. Murray spotted two more meetings at conferences in 2011; but the FCO won’t even discuss whether there were meetings between Werritty and Gould without Fox.

Murray, who lost his job as ambassador to Uzbekistan after complaining about torture, speculates on his website that the meetings involved talks about attacking Iran. Given Gould’s experience in British embassies in Washington and Tehran, Werritty’s interest in Iran and his Atlantic Bridge charity linking US neo-cons and UK Conservatives, Murray might be right. But the cabinet secretary seems to have avoided the question entirely – surely not because he was trying to put a lid on the affair as quickly and cleanly as possible?

Evading the questions
More recently O’Donnell has been busy mimicking senior HM Revenue & Customs officials’ economy with the truth when discussing the dodgy Vodafone and Goldman Sachs tax settlements in parliament (see last Eye).

Defending tax boss Dave Hartnett’s legendary lunching (and coincidental sharing of his corporate schmoozers’ view of the tax world), O’Donnell scoffed at any link: “The fundamental flaw with that argument,” he told MPs, “is that, if you discovered that Dave was secretly having these lunches and had not told anybody, it is a fairly weird conspiracy when it is all published, and we took the initiative to publish all these things.”

Er, not quite. “These things” – ie details of Hartnett’s and top mandarins’ hospitality – were published only after a two-year freedom of information battle fought by the Eye, which O’Donnell’s Cabinet Office resisted at every turn. His officials even instructed other Whitehall departments to block requests for information on grounds they knew to be false, and they were eventually forced to apologise by the Information Commissioner (see Eye 1279). Only then did O’Donnell make a virtue of the “transparency” that had been foist upon him and start publishing limited details (omitting names of restaurants etc to spare embarrassment).

This knee-jerk porkie is part of a “defend Dave” mission across HMRC, the Treasury and the Cabinet Office. Losing one civil servant, in Brodie Clark, is unfortunate. If Hartnett had to go it would make the government (and Sir Gus) look distinctly careless.

The unions would be mad not to strike

Dan Hodges, The Telegraph, 24th November

Yesterday the Prime Minister launched a robust assault on the impending strike action by public sector workers. “It is the height of irresponsibility,” he chided.

David Cameron couldn’t have been more wrong. If union leaders hadn’t decided to call strike action next Wednesday they’d have needed their heads examining.

Let’s start from the basis that even within a modern, mixed economy, collective representation in the workplace has its role. Obviously there are some who still hanker for the Pinochet model of industrial relations, and long for the day Mark Serwotka and Len McCluskey are safely incarcerated in the bowels of Wembley stadium. But beyond the confines of the Carlton Club, and the odd reunion of former members of the Blair cabinet, that remains a minority view. Even Margaret Thatcher stopped short of making membership of a trade union a proscribed activity (though it was touch and go).

Legitimacy does not, of course, equal respect or empathy. And the charge sheet frequently levelled against the modern trade union movement is a lengthy one. Its leaders are aloof autocrats, out of touch with their memberships. Their agenda is divisive and political, shaped by dreams of a Marxist-Leninist utopia. They exist solely to sow the seeds of economic and social unrest. Plus Bob Crow wears a very silly hat.

OK, the RMT leader’s choice of headwear has no defence. And the trade union movement has been guilty of some spectacular own goals, some of which, while working for the GMB, I side-footed home myself. But next Wednesday will not be one of them.

“I'm so angry union bosses are ordering millions of public sector workers to strike next week,” David Cameron told the Sun. This slightly synthetic outpouring may make for good copy and sound politics. But it also represents wishful thinking on the part of the Prime Minister.

Britain’s trade union leaders aren’t having to force their members to the barricades. If anything they’ve been struggling to keep them in check. "Even if we wanted to hold back the members, we couldn't," said one trade union insider. "We're having to do everything we can to keep from being left behind."

The depth and breadth of this anger is underlined by the names of the unions participating in next week’s action. The Chartered society of Physiotherapy. The Society of Radiographers. The First Division Association. The National Association of Headteachers. Next Wednesday’s strikes aren’t being led by the angry brigade. They’re being fronted by Sir Humphrey and Mr Chips.

Despite what some on the right fear, and some on the left hope, this is not a return to the militancy of the 1980s. Indeed by recent standards, next week’s protests will be positively restrained. There will be no street theatre. High tea at Fortnum and Mason will not be interrupted, nor the Cenotaph defiled. This is because the TUC have been careful to shun the hotheads and fellow travellers calling for the pensions issue to be subsumed beneath a general and incoherent assault on the Government. In fact the unions most heinous tactic will probably turn out to be the release of their solidarity record “Let’s Work Together”.

Nor, despite efforts by ministers to hang next Wednesday’s action around Ed Miliband’s neck, is this essentially a political dispute. It’s a good old fashioned dust up about pay and conditions. Or specifically what the TUC is calling the “Triple Squeeze” on public sector pensions; namely the shift in calculating uprating from RPI to CPI, the increase in individual contributions and the proposed increase in the retirement ceiling.

Some may see these as perfectly sensible changes, which reflect modern economic and social realities. That’s a matter for debate. But what’s not debatable is they mean an erosion of the existing pension entitlements of public sector workers. And however moderate or far sighted, trade union general secretaries get paid to improve their members conditions, not sit idly by as they decline. Again, some may question why trade unionists should expect better pension provision than the rest of the population. But that’s the whole point of collective bargaining; to obtain better terms collectively than you can individually.

There’s also another important element to next Wednesday’s proposed strike action. It’s already working. We know this because David Cameron told us it is. “What is on offer is an extremely reasonable deal," he told prime minister’s questions, including lower and middle income earners getting a larger pension than now, existing accrued rights being fully protected and any worker within 10 years of retirement seeing no change to retirement age, or payment. “It’s a tragedy,” he added, “the party opposite refuses to condemn these strikes”.

Condemn them? If Labour’s leader could wring concessions like that from the coalition the Durham Miners’ Gala would be renamed the Ed Miliband Appreciation Ball.

Britain’s trade union leaders have become accustomed to accusations of industrial recklessness. They will face them again next week. But this time they march to the picket lines with their membership broadly united, a cause they feel is just and a government seemingly in a mood to compromise.

The height of irresponsibility? Hardly. From the unions' perspective it’s the most responsible course of action they’ve taken for some time.

Pants on fire!

Ministers' misleading claims that their proposals for public sector pensions will mean better retirement packages for some have been exposed by PCS using the government's own figures.

On 2 November, when the government made its latest offer, prime minister David Cameron told the Commons: "I can tell the House that low and middle-income earners will actually get more from their public sector pensions."

Publishing a document, 'Public Service Pensions: good pensions that last', chief secretary to the treasury Danny Alexander also claimed on the same day: "...we are offering the chance of a significantly better pension at the end of it for many low and middle income earners."

The document makes a similar claim and used case studies to illustrate the point.

But a pensions calculator placed on the civil service website by the Cabinet Office last week – then hurriedly removed, but not before we saved a copy – confirms the proposals deliver year on year lower pensions than existing schemes.

Case study B in the Treasury document is a civil servant on £22,000 a year with 18 years' service who will be 40 when the new scheme is introduced in 2015.

The figures given show retiring at 60 under the existing scheme and working just 18 months longer under the new scheme would give them the same pension of £9,100.

But, as reported by Channel 4 News last night and on its FactCheck blog, the calculator gives a very different outcome to the same example.

It shows the Treasury underestimates the case study's pension and that even working four years more, they would still get less. The calculator shows: pension at 60 under the existing scheme, £13,932; retiring at 64 years under the new scheme, £13,791.

The total pension the civil servant would miss out on under the new scheme by working to 64 would be £87,888 over a normal retirement, including:
Four years of pension at £13,932 a year (£55,728)

Additional pension by working to 64 of £1,608 a year, totalling £32,160 over a normal retirement of 20 years.

The same civil servant will still be required to pay extra pension contributions of at least £704 a year from April 2015 onwards – including the additional four years working until 64. This totals £16,896. The switch in indexation from RPI to CPI would also cost them around £21,500 over a normal retirement.

The calculator confirms we are right to oppose the plans because civil servants will be required to pay more and work longer for less in retirement.

From the outset the government has tried to mislead the public and public servants. This confirms ministers have also given misleading and inaccurate information to parliament and they must correct it and apologise.

All in it together?

"Call Me Dave" has just paid his neighbour, the rather wealthy Conservative party donor Lord Chadlington, nearly £140,000 for a small piece of land that edges his driveway and garage.

This payment did not require a mortgage... he paid for it outright it seems.

The point?

When those in power tell us we are "all in this together", in facing financial and other hardships caused by their policies, it is deeply insulting to spend the equivalent of the price of a decent two to three bed house in this area for what is essentailly a garden border.

In what way can this qualify him for being IN THIS TOGETHER with any normal person in this country.

Disability History Month

Read more about Disability History Month at the PCS website here: http://www.pcs.org.uk/en/equality/guidance-and-resources/disability-history-month-toolkit.cfm

PCS and UK Disability History Month

Learn more at the PCS website here: http://www.pcs.org.uk/en/equality/guidance-and-resources/disability-history-month-toolkit.cfm

United in Defence

Click image to enlarge

Members Meeting Today

Just a reminder that there is a Members Meeting today at 10.30am in 6201A/B. 1.5hrs facility time has been agreed for members to attend this meeting. As well as KC Jones coming to speak about Future Contracts, Jayson Sloss from PCS will also be attending to speak about Pensions. Feel free to ask questions.

Unite union members vote 3-1 in favour of pensions strike

UK's biggest trade union backs 30 November day of action against public sector pension reforms

Probation officers, bus drivers, police civilians and museum staff were among the latest workers to back a pensions strike on Thursday, increasing the prospect of the biggest day of industrial unrest for decades.

Unite and the National Association of Probation Officers (Napo) said their members had voted in favour of taking industrial action in protest against the government's controversial pension reforms.

More than 2 million workers are set to walk out on 30 November for a day of action co-ordinated by the TUC. The action will disrupt schools, courts, government offices, jobcentres, driving tests, council services and hospitals.

Read more here:http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/nov/17/unite-union-votes-pension-strike

MoD spent £600m on consultants

Cash meant for equipment was used to pay outside specialists in breach of government guidelines on expenditure – internal report - reports the Guardian today

The Ministry of Defence has spent almost £600m from the military's equipment budget in the last two years to hire hundreds of outside specialists and consultants, routinely breaching government guidelines controlling this type of expenditure.

An internal audit of signed defence contracts has highlighted numerous flaws and warned that control of the MoD purse appeared to be "poorly developed or non-existent".

The report also stated that defence officials made little or no effort to ensure that contracts provided value for money. Despite the numerous concerns raised in the report, a defence minister said nothing was wrong.

The scale of the spending, and the apparent lack of control, come at a time when the department has been making thousands of civilian and military personnel redundant to cut spiralling costs.

The MoD confirmed the figures and said stricter rules had been introduced.
The disclosures have angered union leaders, who argue that the MoD is paying the price for losing too many in-house specialists, forcing it to rely on hiring expensive help from the private sector.

Figures obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show the MoD spent £564m in the last two years buying in "technical support" for teams running the department's biggest engineering and procurement projects. In 2006, the MoD spent £6m. The sums have been rising dramatically year on year in part because of a new regime introduced by Labour in April 2009, which allowed senior defence officials to hire specialist, short-term help for "niche" tasks – without needing authorisation from a minister. In the first year of the new regime, spending jumped by £130m to £297m. Spending this year will reach £267m.

In total, 380 firms are now being paid to give the MoD technical support and consultancy.
Amid concern from union leaders that spending was running out of control, the MoD asked a senior civil servant to conduct a review of the programme – called Framework Agreement for Technical Support (FATs).

The final report was circulated earlier this month. It concluded it had "no assurance" that guidelines were being followed.

The executive summary said:
• There were "significant weaknesses" in the cases submitted for money.
• There were "weaknesses in the robustness of scrutiny" by those in charge of the budget.
• Contract extensions were approved when they probably should have been rejected.
• In 75% of cases looked at, contracts were awarded without any kind of competition, meaning that the "ability to demonstrate value for money was compromised".
• Not enough effort was put in to ensure the jobs could have been done "in-house".

Despite concerns within the department, two weeks after the interim report was published, the defence minister Andrew Robathan told union leaders in a letter: "I am ... content that appropriate safeguards are in place."

Steve Jary, national secretary of Prospect, a union representing MoD civil servants, said his members had first raised concerns about FATs months ago, and said the MoD had to publish more details of the spending.

"We need to know what this money has been spent on and at what cost to the equipment programme. We need to know how much of the £250m-plus spent on FATs has been spent wrongly, without proper scrutiny and without ministerial approval."

The union believes the increase in spending on contractors is a direct result of cuts over the past few years.

"Thousands of engineering and scientific jobs have gone in pursuit of arbitrary headcount reductions. Their work now has to be contracted out, and FATs has been a way to do this while hiding the extra costs," Prospect argued. "A saving on FATs of just a third – £100m – equates to 5,000 jobs."

Jim Murphy, the shadow defence secretary, said he was "concerned" about the revelations.
But one Whitehall source blamed Labour for introducing a programme that was too lax. "This looks like another case of waste and profligacy under Labour. Ministers in the last government clearly had no control on what the MoD was spending its money on."

The MoD said that a new, stricter regime had been adopted because of the internal report. A spokesman said: "The framework ensures that equipment programmes can access a range of technical support services such as independent airworthiness certification to ensure our military aircraft meet the very highest safety standards, something civil servants cannot provide.

"This summer the government instigated an internal audit to assess the procurement of this technical assistance. As a result of the findings of that report we are tightening the approvals process to ensure proper scrutiny of spending under this framework."

The MoD was unable to say whether Robothan knew about the internal audit when he sent the letter.

The ministry has a separate budget for management consultants. It spent £20m on them last year, and £71m the year before.

Unions want it to disclose whether any money from the equipment budget has been spent on management consultants too – which would be another clear breach of government guidelines.

Northern Rock sold to Virgin Money at a loss...

The government has sold taxpayer-owned Northern Rock to
Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Money in a £1bn deal as it off-loads a big liability for the Treasury - but at a estimated £400m loss.
Reports the BBC

UK Financial Investments said it has agreed to sell 100pc of Northern Rock to Virgin Money for £747m in cash, but this could rise to around £1bn.

Under the terms of the deal, another £50m is “expected” to be paid within six months. The Treasury will also benefit by to up to £80m in the bank floats in the next five years and retain £150m of Tier 1 capital notes.

Northern Rock, which signalled the start of the financial crisis in Britain when it collapsed in August 2007, is the first bank to be returned to the private sector.

The Newcastle-based lender received a £1.4bn bail-out when it was nationalised in February 2008 at the height of the credit crunch.

George Osborne said the deal was a “good thing” for taxpayers, consumers and the banking system.

He said: “We are, with the announcement today of the sale of Northern Rock, starting to get our banking system back into better shape, lending to people, helping families.”

In January last year the company was split into a “good bank”, which Virgin has bought, and Northern Rock Asset Management, the “bad bank” of closed mortgages and unsecured loans which remain in Government ownership.

Virgin Money beat competitors including JC Flowers to buy the bank which includes a £14bn mortgage book, a £16bn retail deposit book and a million customers.

It plans to merge the assets with its existing Virgin Money business to meet the Government’s objective of creating a new competitor in Britain’s high-street banking.

As part of the deal, the group, which employs 2,100 people, agreed that there would be no compulsory redundancies at Northern Rock for three years and none of the existing 75 branches will close.

The headquarters will stay in Newcastle.

To start with the business will continue to focus on UK retail savings and investments but will aim to launch current accounts in 2013.

David Clementi, chairman of Virgin Money, said: “It is our intention to build a significant banking competitor in the UK and to take that business to the public markets within five years through an IPO”.

Ron Sandler, executive chairman of Northern Rock, said “The return of Northern Rock to the private sector has always been one of our key objectives. We said that this would be done at the right time and when there was a proposition in the best interests of taxpayers and other stakeholders. In addition to delivering value for taxpayers, it brings good news for colleagues, customers, jobs in the North East and the Northern Rock Foundation.”

As well as Northern Rock’s “bad bank”, UKTI still owns Royal Bank of Scotland, Lloyds Banking Group and Bradford & Bingley.

The Self-Attribution Fallacy

Intelligence? Talent? No, the ultra-rich got to where they are through luck and brutality.
By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 8th November 2011

If wealth was the inevitable result of hard work and enterprise, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire. The claims that the ultra-rich 1% make for themselves – that they are possessed of unique intelligence or creativity or drive – are examples of the self-attribution fallacy. This means crediting yourself with outcomes for which you weren’t responsible. Many of those who are rich today got there because they were able to capture certain jobs. This capture owes less to talent and intelligence than to a combination of the ruthless exploitation of others and accidents of birth, as such jobs are taken disproportionately by people born in certain places and into certain classes.

The findings of the psychologist Daniel Kahneman, winner of a Nobel economics prize, are devastating to the beliefs that financial high-fliers entertain about themselves(1). He discovered that their apparent success is a cognitive illusion. For example, he studied the results achieved by 25 wealth advisers, across eight years. He found that the consistency of their performance was zero. “The results resembled what you would expect from a dice-rolling contest, not a game of skill.” Those who received the biggest bonuses had simply got lucky.

Such results have been widely replicated. They show that traders and fund managers across Wall Street receive their massive remuneration for doing no better than would a chimpanzee flipping a coin. When Kahneman tried to point this out they blanked him. “The illusion of skill … is deeply ingrained in their culture.”(2)

So much for the financial sector and its super-educated analysts. As for other kinds of business, you tell me. Is your boss possessed of judgement, vision and management skills superior to those of anyone else in the firm, or did he or she get there through bluff, bullshit and bullying?
In a study published by the journal Psychology, Crime and Law, Belinda Board and Katarina Fritzon tested 39 senior managers and chief executives from leading British businesses(3). They compared the results to the same tests on patients at Broadmoor special hospital, where people who have been convicted of serious crimes are incarcerated. On certain indicators of psychopathy, the bosses’s scores either matched or exceeded those of the patients. In fact on these criteria they beat even the subset of patients who had been diagnosed with psychopathic personality disorders.

The psychopathic traits on which the bosses scored so highly, Board and Fritzon point out, closely resemble the characteristics that companies look for. Those who have these traits often possess great skill in flattering and manipulating powerful people. Egocentricity, a strong sense of entitlement, a readiness to exploit others and a lack of empathy and conscience are also unlikely to damage their prospects in many corporations.

In their book Snakes in Suits, Paul Babiak and Robert Hare point out that as the old corporate bureaucracies have been replaced by flexible, ever-changing structures, and as team players are deemed less valuable than competitive risk-takers, psychopathic traits are more likely to be selected and rewarded(4). Reading their work, it seems to me that if you have psychopathic tendencies and are born to a poor family you’re likely to go to prison. If you have psychopathic tendencies and are born to a rich family you’re likely to go to business school.

This is not to suggest that all executives are psychopaths. It is to suggest that the economy has been rewarding the wrong skills. As the bosses have shaken off the trade unions and captured both regulators and tax authorities, the distinction between the productive and rentier upper classes has broken down. CEOs now behave like dukes, extracting from their financial estates sums out of all proportion to the work they do or the value they generate, sums that sometimes exhaust the businesses they parasitise. They are no more deserving of the share of wealth they’ve captured than oil sheikhs.

The rest of us are invited, by governments and by fawning interviews in the press, to subscribe to their myth of election: the belief that they are the chosen ones, possessed of superhuman talents. The very rich are often described as wealth creators. But they have preyed upon the earth’s natural wealth and their workers’ labour and creativity, impoverishing both people and planet. Now they have almost bankrupted us. The wealth creators of neoliberal mythology are some of the most effective wealth destroyers the world has ever seen.

What has happened over the past 30 years is the capture of the world’s common treasury by a handful of people, assisted by neoliberal policies which were first imposed on rich nations by Thatcher and Reagan. I am now going to bombard you with figures. I’m sorry about that, but these numbers need to be tattoed on our minds. Between 1947 and 1979, productivity in the US rose by 119%, while the income of the bottom fifth of the population rose by 122%. But between 1979 and 2009, productivity rose by 80% , while the income of the bottom fifth fell by 4%(5). In roughly the same period, the income of the top 1% rose by 270%(6).

In the UK, the money earned by the poorest tenth fell by 12% between 1999 and 2009, while the money made by the richest 10th rose by 37%(7). The Gini coefficient, which measures income inequality, climbed in this country from 26 in 1979 to 40 in 2009(8).

In his book The Haves and the Have Nots, Branko Milanovic tries to discover who was the richest person who has ever lived(9). Beginning with the loaded Roman triumvir Marcus Crassus, he measures wealth according to the quantity of his compatriots’ labour a rich man could buy. It appears that the richest man to have lived in the past 2000 years is alive today. Carlos Slim could buy the labour of 440,000 average Mexicans. This makes him 14 times as rich as Crassus, nine times as rich as Carnegie and four times as rich as Rockefeller.

Until recently, we were mesmerised by the bosses’ self-attribution. Their acolytes, in academia, the media, think tanks and government, created an extensive infrastructure of junk economics and flattery to justify their seizure of other people’s wealth. So immersed in this nonsense did we become that we seldom challenged its veracity.

This is now changing. On Sunday evening I witnessed a remarkable thing: a debate on the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral between Stuart Fraser, chairman of the Corporation of the City of London, another official from the Corporation, the turbulent priest Father William Taylor, John Christensen of the Tax Justice Network and the people of Occupy London(10). It had something of the flavour of the Putney debates of 1647. For the first time in decades – and all credit to the Corporation officials for turning up – financial power was obliged to answer directly to the people.

It felt like history being made. The undeserving rich are now in the frame, and the rest of us want our money back.

Read the references here: http://www.monbiot.com/2011/11/07/the-self-attribution-fallacy/

Why we should celebrate the death of PFI

The Private Finance Initiative's toxic legacy of debt proves there is a better way to improve Britain’s infrastructure.

In the interests of security, the head of North Bromsgrove High School recently asked BAM, the PFI contractor managing the facilities, to price up the installation of three locks and deadlocks to three sets of double doors in the school atrium. BAM’s charge for this was £961.85 in capital costs, and a recurring sum of £49.40 in “lifecycle” costs for the remainder of the contract. There are 26 years still to run on this, meaning a total of £2,246.25.

So the school checked to see how much the job would cost if it organised it itself. The answer was the three locks would cost £85, inclusive of VAT, plus a day’s labour at £150, for a total of £235. That’s a saving of £726.85 up-front, or £2,011.25 over the life of the contract. In other words, the effect of PFI was to make the locks cost 955 per cent more than they should have.

Yesterday, the Government announced the death of PFI as we know it, and this latest example of its horrific costs shows exactly why that is so welcome. The Private Finance Initiative, to give its full title, has been an enormously costly, inflexible and non-transparent way to procure and manage public infrastructure. Started under John Major as a means to draw private finance and expertise into the public services, it expanded tenfold under Messrs Blair and Brown, as “the only game in town”. The result has been a toxic legacy of £200 billion in debt, which will last a generation.

As its former chief executive Lord Crisp recently acknowledged, the NHS in particular has been burdened, with a Maginot Line of huge and expensive hospitals that greatly distort healthcare provision, especially affecting community hospitals. And, irony of ironies, this has come just at a time when healthcare itself is moving towards more flexible models that combine specialist institutions with social care nearer to the home.

Read more here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/8892122/Why-we-should-celebrate-the-death-of-PFI.html

Defence cuts 'led to MoD project cost rise'

Cuts to defence spending have contributed to a £466m rise in the cost of the UK's 15 largest military equipment projects in a year, the spending watchdog has said. (reports the BBC today)

The National Audit Office said the decision to delay the Astute submarine programme could also leave the Royal Navy short of attack submarines.
The NAO said the cuts and delays represented poor value for money.

But Defence Secretary Philip Hammond said the MoD had "got a grip" on costs.
In an update on the state of the MoD's 15 largest procurement projects, the National Audit Office said costs had continued to increase over the past year.'Limited options'
The projects - including new submarines, fighter aircraft, helicopters and destroyers - are now £6.1bn over budget compared with forecasts made when the main investment decisions were taken.

Combined delays on the projects now total nearly 27 years, the watchdog said in its report.
The main factors pushing up costs over the past year were a 12-month delay to the Watchkeeper unmanned aerial vehicle project and the decision to further extend the building programme for the new class of seven Astute attack submarines announced in last year's defence review.

This, the watchdog said, had pushed up costs of the submarine programme - which has been plagued by delays since it was first conceived in the 1990s - by another £200m.
It warned this decision also created a dilemma over future capability and ministers must either to extend the service life of existing submarines or "reduce scheduled activity" to fill a possible gap.

On this and a range of other issues, the NAO said the MoD "had limited options to manage a legacy of poor planning and performance on some past projects".
Amyas Morse, the head of the NAO, added: "These circumstances were largely, however, of the department's making and the resulting cuts and delays to capability are not value for money."

“An efficient procurement policy is central to an effective defence policy. The government have neither”End Quote Jim Murphy Shadow defence secretary. Labour said cuts to defence spending had left "serious holes" in the UK's future capability. But the government has accused Labour of leaving it a £37bn black hole in the procurement budget.

The defence secretary said his department was getting control of procurement costs as a result of "difficult" decisions taken in last year's defence review. "The trend of vast cost increases seen under the last government has been halted," Mr Hammond said. "The 0.9% overall increase this year is still too much but it is seven times lower than the last year of the previous administration."

Margaret Hodge, the chairman of the Commons Public Accounts Committee which oversees the work of the NAO, said: "Short-term measures to balance the budget account for a significant cost increase on these projects during 2010-11. Delaying projects and reducing what they deliver are not sensible ways to invest in defence capability."

On the issue of attack submarines, the MoD said it would guarantee operational capability by extending the life of the older Trafalgar class boats and the situation remained "manageable".
The Royal Navy currently operates 11 nuclear-powered submarines: six Trafalgar class, four Vanguard class and one Astute. The Vanguard class, which carry Trident nuclear missiles, will be replaced as part of the renewal of nuclear deterrent system but this is not expected to happen until 2028 at the earliest after the "main gate" decision on Trident was delayed until 2016.

Shadow defence secretary Jim Murphy said the latest overspend figures were "almost unbelievable". "An efficient procurement policy is central to an effective defence policy. The government have neither. Ministers need to start taking responsibility for their actions.
"We need a new defence industrial strategy which builds equipment to fit requirements, has tough targets on time and cost for industry and ensures greater accountability within the MoD."

Wealth Destroyers

The Corporation of the City of London has harmed you more than you know. By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 1st November 2011

It’s the dark heart of Britain, the place where democracy goes to die, immensely powerful, equally unaccountable. But I doubt that one in ten British people has any idea of what the Corporation of the City of London is and how it works. This, at last, could be about to change. Alongside the Church of England, the Corporation is seeking to evict the protesters camped outside St Paul’s cathedral. The protesters, in turn, have demanded that it submit to national oversight and control(1).

What is this thing? Ostensibly it’s the equivalent of a local council, responsible for a small area of London known as the Square Mile. But, as its website boasts, “among local authorities the City of London is unique”(2). You bet it is. There are 25 electoral wards in the Square Mile. In four of them, the 9,000 people who live within its boundaries are permitted to vote. In the remaining 21, the votes are controlled by corporations, mostly banks and other financial companies. The bigger the business, the bigger the vote: a company with ten workers gets two votes, the biggest employers, 79(3). It’s not the workers who decide how the votes are cast, but the bosses, who “appoint” the voters(4). Plutocracy, pure and simple.

There are four layers of elected representatives in the Corporation: common councilmen, aldermen, sheriffs and the Lord Mayor. To qualify for any of these offices, you must be a freeman of the City of London(5,6). To become a freeman you must be approved by the aldermen(7). You’re most likely to qualify if you belong to one of the City livery companies: mediaevel guilds such as the worshipful company of costermongers, cutpurses and safecrackers. To become a sheriff, you must be elected from among the aldermen by the Livery(8). How do you join a livery company? Don’t even ask.

To become Lord Mayor you must first have served as an alderman and sheriff and “must command the support of, and have the endorsement of, the Court of Aldermen and the Livery”(9). You should also be stinking rich, as the Lord Mayor is expected to make a “contribution from his/her private resources towards the costs of the mayoral year.”(10) This is, in other words, an official old boy’s network. Think of all that Tory huffing and puffing about democratic failings within the trade unions. Then think of their resounding silence about democracy in the City of London.

The current Lord Mayor, Michael Bear, came to prominence within the City as chief executive of the Spitalfields development group(11), which oversaw a controversial business venture in which the Corporation had a major stake, even though the project lies outside the boundaries of its authority. This illustrates another of the Corporation’s unique features. It possesses a vast pool of cash, which it can spend as it wishes, without democratic oversight. As well as expanding its enormous property portfolio, it uses this money to lobby on behalf of the banks.

The Lord Mayor’s role, the Corporation’s website tells us, is to “open doors at the highest levels” for business, in the course of which he “expounds the values of liberalisation”(12). Liberalisation is what bankers call deregulation: the process that caused the financial crash. The Corporation boasts that it “handle[s] issues in Parliament of specific interest to the City”, such as banking reform and financial services regulation(13). It also conducts “extensive partnership work with think tanks … vigorously promoting the views and needs of financial services.”(14) But this isn’t the half of it.

As Nicholas Shaxson explains in his fascinating book Treasure Islands, the Corporation exists outside many of the laws and democratic controls which govern the rest of the United Kingdom(15). The City of London is the only part of Britain over which parliament has no authority. In one respect at least the Corporation acts as the superior body: it imposes on the House of Commons a figure called the remembrancer: an official lobbyist who sits behind the Speaker’s chair and ensures that, whatever our elected representatives might think, the City’s rights and privileges are protected. The mayor of London’s mandate also stops at the boundaries of the Square Mile. There are, as if in a novel by China Miéville, two cities, one of which must unsee the other.

Several governments have tried to democratise the City of London but all, threatened by its financial might, have failed. As Clement Attlee lamented, “over and over again we have seen that there is in this country another power than that which has its seat at Westminster.”(16) The City has exploited this remarkable position to establish itself as a kind of offshore state, a secrecy jurisdiction which controls the network of tax havens housed in the UK’s Crown dependencies and overseas territories. This autonomous state within our borders is in a position to launder the ill-gotten cash of oligarchs, kleptocrats, gangsters and drug barons. As the French investigating magistrate Eva Joly remarked, it “has never transmitted even the smallest piece of usable evidence to a foreign magistrate”(17). It deprives the United Kingdom and many other nations of their rightful tax receipts.

By undermining the standards set elsewhere, it has also made the effective regulation of global finance almost impossible. Shaxson shows how the absence of proper regulation in London allowed US banks to evade the rules set by their own government. AIG’s wild trading might have taken place in the US, but the unit responsible was regulated in the City. Lehman Brothers couldn’t get legal approval for its off-balance sheet transactions in Wall Street, so it used a London law firm instead(18). No wonder priests are resigning over the plan to evict the campers. The Church of England is not just working with Mammon; it’s colluding with Babylon.
If you’ve ever dithered over the question of whether the UK needs a written constitution, dither no longer. Imagine the clauses required to preserve the status of the Corporation. “The City of London will remain outside the authority of Parliament. Domestic and foreign banks will be permitted to vote as if they were human beings, and their votes will outnumber those cast by real people. Its elected officials will be chosen from among people deemed acceptable by a group of mediaevel guilds … “.

The Corporation’s privileges could not withstand such public scrutiny. This, perhaps, is one of the reasons why a written constitution in the United Kingdom remains a distant dream. Its power also helps to explain why regulation of the banks is scarcely better than it was before the crash, why there are no effective curbs on executive pay and bonuses and why successive governments fail to act against the UK’s dependent tax havens.

But now at last we begin to see it. It happens that the Lord Mayor’s Show, in which the Corporation flaunts its ancient wealth and power, takes place on November 12th(19). If ever there were a pageant crying out for peaceful protest and dissent, here it is. Expect fireworks – and not just those laid on by the Lord Mayor(20).

For references see the full article here: http://www.monbiot.com/2011/10/31/wealth-destroyers/

Senior Civil Servants Vote To Strike

Senior civil servants have voted to join industrial action to protest against changes to public sector pensions.

The FDA union, which represents 18,000 senior staff, said 81% voted in favour of industrial action. The ballot had a turnout of 54% of members.

Prospect, which has 30,000 members in more the 120 government departments, voted three to one for strike action.

Eleven unions have now voted to take industrial action.

They are widely expected to announce strikes on the TUC's day of action on 30 November.

Ten more unions will announce the results of ballots this week.

'Decisive'

Under the proposed government changes to pensions, public service staff will work longer and contribute more for their pensions, the cost of which is being driven up because people are living longer.

Under the current proposals, most staff will see their contribution rates rise in the next three years.

Pension schemes based on average pay over a career are due to come in for most current and all new staff in 2015.

Their future pension ages will be linked to the state pension age, which is expected to rise from 65 to 68.

The FDA's members include tax inspectors, special advisers, government lawyers, crown prosecutors and diplomats.

"This is a decisive vote for industrial action, but this ballot should not have been necessary," said Jonathan Baume, general secretary of the FDA.

"No one has worked harder than the FDA to seek a negotiated settlement, often in the face of government delay and procrastination."

He said that the union had only held a national strike ballot once before.

"The government needs to reflect upon why senior public servants feel driven to vote to strike," Mr Baume said.

'Damaging'

There was a 52% turnout of Prospect members in its vote, in what it described as the first civil service-wide ballot held in more than 30 years.

"Even at this late hour we urge the government to come forward with new, fairer proposals that would avert the need for strike action," said Prospect's deputy general secretary Dai Hudd.

DSg 30 November briefing 3 – Pay and 30 November

The 30 November focus for much of the country is on public sector pensions, and whilst this is quite right such are the attacks on them, we should not forget other reasons we are in dispute with our employer that are leading us to take action on 30 November.

In the Ministry of Defence, as well as the pension attacks, we are facing threats to 32,000 civilian jobs, an assault on our sickness absence and various attacks to travel and subsistence within the department. On top of all of this, we have just started a two-year pay freeze.

Our union has certainly not accepted that this pay freeze is either necessary or fair. In the MoD we sought to use the dispute resolution process, but this was simply ignored by senior MoD management who claimed the pay freeze was Cabinet Office policy.

Over the past three years civil servants have seen their pay increase at only half the rate of inflation. The figures from the Office of National Statistics show that average pay in the civil service is £22,850 compared to £24,970 in the private sector.

What does the pay freeze mean for me?

Energy - Since early June the “big six” - Scottish Power, British Gas, Scottish and Southern Energy (SSE), E.ON and npower - have announced inflation-busting increases in the price of gas and electricity – many of these double and triple the official government 5.6% inflation figure. These “big six” supply 99% of UK households.

Fuel - Many MoD sites are necessarily in remote locations and members have to drive to work. Whilst members who drive have had some slight respite in the last couple of months, fuel price rises still mean an increase of 16.4% in petrol and 17.2% in diesel in the last year.

Train fares - These will now be rising by about 8%. From next year, tickets will rise by the rate of retail price index inflation plus 3% until 2014, with room for a further 5% increase on some services. With the RPI at 5.6%, MoD commuters face a 13.6% increase on certain routes

Food and drink - According to the My Supermarket website, a typical shopping basket in Britain now costs around 6% more than it did last year but specific foods and key staples are clearly much dearer. Some butter is up 40% in a year, chocolate biscuits 50%, coffee 20% and pasta 29%. Every member will have their own examples of how their weekly shopping basket has gone up in the last year, at a time when their salary has been frozen.

What does the pay freeze means for others?

In contrast, the super rich continue to reward themselves with six-figure salaries, bonuses and benefits whilst preaching austerity and pay restraint to workers. In September the government issued a discussion paper to look at the issue. It comes with the caveat that it will not cap salaries but rather will look at ways in which ‘confidence’ in the current system of executive remuneration can be promoted. It is silent on the issue of the living wage and makes no mentions of the pay of the government’s own employees whether in the civil service or related private sector contracts.

A pressure group called One Society has produced some data on pay differentials, called ‘A Third of a Percent’ and is based on the pay of a low-paid worker in the UK compared to their chief executives (CE’s).

The report found that private firms whose main income came from the public sector paid CE’s far more than the highest paid public sector employee. For example, Serco, which receives over 90% of its business from the public sector, paid its CE an estimated £3,149,950 in 2010 - six times more than the highest paid UK public servant. Serco is currently one of the partners in the two bidders competing for the DBS commercial management contract.

Members will also have seen recent media coverage of the Qantas dispute that grounded the company’s entire fleet. The dispute centered on the trade unions claim for a 2.5% increase for each of the next three years. The Qantas CE, Alan Joyce said unions had an “extreme claim” and were “trashing our brand.” At the same time, he was awarded a 71% pay increase.

What does the pay freeze means for those who caused the recession?

The average annual bonus paid to finance staff in the year to April 2011 was £12,500. The average public sector annual bonus is £180. Public sector employees, who make up 22% of the workforce, accounted for 1.5% of the £35bn bonus payments across the economy.

However even these figures disguise huge disparities in the amounts paid to senior investment bankers compared with retail banking staff outside London and the south-east.

Barclays revealed this year that its new chief executive Bob Diamond got a £6.5m bonus for 2010. In January this year, an unrepentant Bob Diamond faced down his critics at the Treasury Select Committee. He told MP’s that the 'period of remorse needs to be over,' He also told MPs that he "resented" some of their lines of questioning.

Last week it was reported that the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) saw its operating profit climb 15 per cent in the third quarter of 2011 to £2.13 billion. Despite pocketing a personal bonus of £4.5 million this year, chief executive Stephen Hester’s reward for staff was to warn of further job cuts in RBS.

As our union has stated several times; we are in agreement with Mervyn King, the governor of the Bank of England, who said, “The price of this financial crisis is being borne by people who absolutely did not cause it".

Conclusion

One of the most asked questions to union reps is, “What's the point in striking, this government never retreats?' Last week the government retreated on pensions. Not enough, but a retreat nonetheless. Since coming to power they have also taken a step back regarding the coastguard service and over plans to sell Forestry Commission land.

On 30 November you have the chance to show that as well as everything else that is not acceptable, a pay freeze when inflation is at 5.6% and rising is equally unacceptable. Although we probably deserve them, nobody in our union is asking for pay rises above the rate for inflation – follow an old union motto – all we want is a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work.

The wrong questions are being asked about banking reform

From The New Statesman
It is extraordinary that more than three years into the biggest global economic breakdown for nearly a century, precipitated by a financial crash, virtually nothing has been done to reform the banks which were the major cause of it. It is even more extraordinary that the two initiatives that have been taken -- the Vickers Commission and Basel III -- are so ineffective as to be risible.

Vickers didn't even ask the right question, which is: how can public control of the money supply be regained? The question it did ask -- how can retail High Street banking be separated from casino investment banking? -- it fluffed, by proposing the erection of Chinese Walls which City financial engineering will have little trouble quickly getting round.

The international Basel Commission on Banking Supervision, a private body made up of (guess who?) central bankers as well as a few regulators, was little better. It proposed increasing capital ratio requirements on banks from 7 per cent to 10 per cent, though capital ratios have little influence over bank lending. Besides, it did not demand this change till 2019, even though the chances of another financial crash within the next 8 years are very real.

The reason why banking reform is urgent isn't just the risk of another finance conflagration, but because banking policy has played a major part in the continuing and relentless decline of the British economy over the last half century. Previously bank credit had been rationed by quantity, but from the 1971 Competition and Credit Control reforms it was increasingly rationed much more flexibly by interest rates.

That began the staggering rise in broad money in the economy from miniscule quantities in 1963, to £2.2trn today. Then in 1979 exchange controls were lifted, and at Big Bang in 1986 all controls over consumer credit were abolished and housing finance was de-regulated.
These measures have given the banks enormous powers and privileges. They can create wealth out of nothing simply by making loans to businesses and householders, and they can decide who uses it and for what purpose. If they fail to meet their liabilities, they are not even penalised; someone else pays up for them. The first £85,000 of an individual's deposits are covered by guarantee underwritten by the State, and even in the event of a major financial collapse they are bailed out by the implicit taxpayer guarantee. In the current crash, that amounts to over £70bn in direct bailouts and a further £850bn indirectly in loan guarantees, liquidity measures and asset protection schemes.

The charge sheet against the banks is that they have used these powers -- particularly in the neoliberal era since 1980 -- recklessly and in self-interest, which has done huge long-term harm to Britain's economy. By the issuance of loans they are now responsible for generating over 97 per cent of the money supply, and have used this privilege to allocate just 8 per cent to productive investment. This means that 11/12th of bank lending goes towards mortgages, real estate and business, foreign investment, high-risk speculation and financial intermediation.
This has been a significant cause of Britain's long-term decline. Last year the UK balance of payments deficit on trade in goods reached an unprecedented £100bn; equal to 6.8 per cent of GDP. British manufacturing, the lifeblood of the economy, has been systematically hollowed out. Britain remains low in productivity and innovation, and output per worker is still 40 per cent below US levels, and 20 per cent below Germany and France. Within the OECD only the UK had a lower share of GDP spent on research and development in 2000 than in 1981.

Of course, not all this can be laid at the door of the banks. But a great deal can. UK banks' relationship with industry is far more distant and unhelpful compared with Germany's Mittelstand.

The City has relentlessly driven short-termism at the expense of market share. The UK banks have used their control of the money supply to regularly generate unsustainable asset bubbles which destabilise industry and, when they crash, beggar the taxpayer. They have engineered a massive mis-allocation of global capital into tax havens which, worldwide, now shelter over £11trn of global wealth. They have exacerbated inequalities between the super-rich and the rest, the growing disparities between regions, and the crowding out of manufacturing by finance.
And by setting up a huge and powerful shadow banking system, buttressed by the proliferation of credit derivatives and securitisation, they have deliberately evaded public controls in order to boost their own selfish interests to the detriment of the nation.

So what should be done? Above all, control over the money supply must be brought back into the public domain. This is not a partisan objective. Direct credit controls have been used by many of the most successful countries over the last century; notably Japan, Korea and Taiwan after the Second World War.

Unproductive credit creation -- for example, speculative transactions like today's lending to hedge funds -- was firmly checked. Consumer loans which would trigger inflationary demand for consumer goods or draw in increased imports were discouraged. Priority was given to investment in plant and equipment, key services, and enhanced productivity via new technologies and R&D.

Of course other reforms are urgently needed too. These should include control by public authorities over potentially toxic and dangerous financial derivatives, a clean separation of retail from investment banking and specialist banks for infrastructure improvement; as well as development of the new digital green economy and reform of credit rating agencies.
But the key issue, so far ignored, is to restore accountability to the banking system via public control over the money supply.

Michael Meacher is Labour MP for Oldham West and Royton.

Tory Party Donor, Meets Hague, Gets Oil Deal

Mr Hague had a private meeting with a representative of Heritage Oil in March and has exchanged letters with an aide over the past few months, it has emerged.

In October, the company was awarded a $19.5 million [£12.23 million] oil deal in Libya which it believes will provide it with a foothold in the region.

Tony Buckingham, the chief executive of Heritage Oil and a former mercenary, has given the Conservative party almost £60,000. He was embroiled in controversy earlier this year when the Telegraph disclosed that Mr Hague had personally intervened in a £175 million tax dispute between Heritage Oil, its partner Tullow Oil and the Ugandan government.

Industry sources have disclosed that as the war in Libya was raging, Mr Hague met Christian Sweeting, a representative of Heritage Oil, at the Carlton Club in London. At the time, the company was seeking inroads into Libya after the breakdown of the Gaddafi regime.
After the meeting, letters were exchanged in which Mr Sweeting provided the Foreign Office with intelligence on the situation on the ground in Libya.

Read more in todays Telegraph here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/8882816/Hague-facing-questions-over-Libya-deal.html

Revised Pensions Calculators

PCS have relaunched the revised calculators - which include a part-time calculator. http://www.pcs.org.uk/en/campaigns/pensions/pensionscalculator.cfm

Please note that there are two tabs on each spreadsheet - one part-time and one full-time.

Robin Hood never had it so easy!

The taxman was yesterday accused of letting Britain’s biggest phone company off paying up to £8 billion in a “sweetheart” deal not available to ordinary people.

MPs attacked HM Revenue and Customs for allowing Vodafone to pay just £1.25 billion to settle a tax dispute and claimed the amount lost to taxpayers lost may be even higher than previously thought.

They even took the extraordinary step of forcing Anthony Inglese, HMRC’s top lawyer, to swear on the Bible that he was telling the truth about a series of deals with major companies and banks.
One of the last times a committee of MPs asked for an oath to be sworn was the appearance of Neil Hamilton, the Tory MP, during their cash-for-questions investigation in 1997.
HMRC has always refused to reveal how much it believes Vodafone owed in total.
Dave Hartnett, permanent secretary for tax at HMRC, claimed earlier this year that reports saying Vodafone owed £6 billion were “absurd”.

However, Stephen Barclay, an MP on the public accounts committee, yesterday put the figure even higher than that.
“We are looking at potentially £8 billion of tax lost,” he said during a hearing. “We’re looking at a company that was given five years to pay even though it was sitting on a cash pile.”
Despite being HMRC’s most senior solicitor, Mr Inglese admitted he was “not what you’d call a tax lawyer” and said he could not comment on the deal.
“All I can say is lawyers were involved throughout,” he said.

The MPs suggested there need to be much greater oversight of tax deals with big companies. (Really?)

Read more here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/8875360/Taxman-accused-of-letting-Vodafone-off-8-billion.html

The City's ethics don't bear scrutiny

It is difficult to see why St Paul's suppressed its report into the ethics of the City of London at a time when the cathedral was surrounded by anti-capitalist protesters. Now that the report, commissioned to mark the 25th anniversary of the deregulation of Britain's financial sector, has finally seen the light of day, what emerges from its survey of bankers, brokers and traders is a strikingly unattractive picture. Its publication should remove any ambiguity about whose side the Church of England ought to be on in this era-defining debate.

Two thirds of the financial professionals consulted admit they are overpaid and yet reveal that money is their main motivation for turning up to work each morning. They say there is too great a gap between rich and poor in Britain and yet also complain that the financial services sector is not valued for its role in the UK economy. Paradoxes and contradictions leap out everywhere.

The report makes strikingly little capital out of the fact that those in the City believe in God even less than the rest of the population. The idea that banking godlessness might be responsible for the global financial meltdown must have seemed too open a goal for the clerics. The report does underline that what these financial wizards do believe is that the Church has nothing useful to say to them.

The bankers are surely mistaken about that. It was the Archbishop of Canterbury who set out most eloquently in recent times why it was an illusion to suggest that economics can be separated from wider issues of social well-being. Ethics is a state of solidarity with other human beings, as the St Paul's report notes. This is certainly a message the world of finance needs to hear. Pious banking self-congratulation about corporate social responsibility initiatives means little when the system overall enshrines or exacerbates inequalities, continues to pay obscene bonuses, and when the pay of the directors of top companies rises by 49 per cent, as it did last year.

The world of finance requires reform and regulation. What this survey shows is that this will undoubtedly have to come from outside.

from The Independent Tuesday 8th November 2011