Financial crisis “as bad as a world war” says Bank of England official
A top Bank of England official has admitted that the impact of the UK’s financial crisis will be as bad as a world war.
Andrew Haldane told the BBC:
“In terms of the loss of incomes and outputs, this is as bad as a world war. That is the scale we are talking about.
“If we are fortunate, the cost of the crisis will be paid for by our children. More likely it will still be being paid for by our grandchildren.”
He also hit out at bankers’ pay:
“Back in 1980, your average investment banker was paid the same as your average lawyer or doctor. By the time we got to 2006, they were being paid four times as much.”
While Mr Haldane’s conversion is perhaps to be welcomed, one has to ask – just where was he (and all the other Bank of England officials) when all of these disastrous developments were under way. Mr Haldane has worked at the Bank since 1989, soon after leaving university.
Pub closures threaten English traditions
Among many lost pubs is The George in Hyde, near Manchester, which closed in 2009. This is the pub where the famous Martin Webster NF march was planned in 1977!
This month has seen yet further crisis in the pub industry, according to new reports by the BBC and the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA).
Shockingly, a further CAMRA report states that since January 2010 more than two hundred pubs across Britain have been converted into supermarkets!
A historic Oldham pub dating from 1833, the Star Inn closed in 2005.
Eighteen pubs each week are currently closing, compared to a closure rate of twelve a week last year, and the government is making matters worse by continuing to increase beer taxes, forcing the price of a pint in pubs to increase by more than the rate of inflation. CAMRA’s chief executive Mike Benner said:
“Weak and misguided planning laws and the predatory acquisition of valued pub sites by large supermarket chains, coupled with the willingness of pub owners to cash-in and sell for development, are some of the biggest threats to the future of Britain’s social fabric.”
For example, there are now no pubs at all on the Moor Nook estate in Preston where the Heritage & Destiny office is located! H&D writers have to walk to a local church social club a mile away to get a pint!
The Lion pub on the Moor Nook estate in Preston closed in 2000.
Ian Saunders, a spokesman for CAMRA, told the BBC:
“I think what’s happening is people are looking to buy from supermarkets and drinking at home and ignoring their local boozer. We need to stop the price differential between supermarkets and the pubs increasing all the time, which at the moment it is.”
Click below to view the House of Commons debate on the beer duty escalator, or click here to sign the e-petition to save your pint.
Biggest ever rise in UK population
An official UK Census form sorter in 2001 - no we are not joking!
The first results of last’s years UK Census prove that our population during the past decade saw the biggest jump in recorded history. The surge is largely due to the immigration boom, in what was already an overcrowded country. Another factor is the high birth rate among non-European immigrant groups.
England and Wales saw a 7.1% rise in population, from 52.4 million in 2001 to 56.1 million in 2011. Needless to say these figures do not include unknown numbers of illegal immigrants. Population density in London is now 5,200 per square kilometre – ranking alongside Madrid and Athens as the most densely populated cities in Europe.
Moreover in the next fifteen years, official projections show that two thirds of the next population increase will come from immigrants: an extra 5 million people, equivalent to the combined populations of Birmingham, Leeds, Glasgow, Sheffield, Bradford, Manchester, Liverpool and Bristol.
No 2011 statistics have yet been published about racial or religious matters. Click here for the latest official UK Census updates.
Olympic security shambles
Soldiers deployed at London Olympics site after private security company G4S fails to fulfil contract
The utter shambles surrounding security arrangements for the 2012 Olympic Games is perhaps the greatest embarrassment in the history of the event. It’s easy to blame the hopeless Home Secretary Theresa May or her boss David Cameron: but in fact the problem goes back much further, and is best seen as the ultimate legacy of the Thatcher / Blair era.
Ever since the late 1970s British politics has been dominated by the ethos of privatisation, with the sell off of public assets (often at rock bottom prices) to benefit City speculators, and the transfer of many local and central government responsibilities to the private sector.
Hand in hand with this process has been mass immigration, since private companies tore up previous working practices and sought the cheapest possible workers, which usually meant immigrants.
Now we see the ultimate result of this process. The private security firm G4S (a 2004 merger of the long-established companies Group 4 and Securicor) has admitted that it is not capable of fulfilling its contract to provide Olympic security, so Army and Police units have had to be drafted in at the very last minute!
The growth of G4S is itself evidence of how privatised security has become one of the Western world’s few expanding industries. G4S is now the third largest private sector employer in the world, with more than 650,000 workers, beaten only by supermarket giant Walmart and the Taiwan-based electronics conglomerate Foxconn.
Only a few years ago, most people would assume that private security firms were for jobs such as taking cash to and from banks, or protecting offices and building sites from burglars or vandals. Then during the early 1990s the Conservative government of John Major gave Group 4 contracts to provide prison security – leading to a series of embarrassing scandals when prisoners escaped. The company also owns the American private security firm Wackenhut, which handles a number of high-security contracts, for example at military and nuclear power sites.
Even for such a large company, the Olympic security contract was a big operation – G4S was contracted to provide more than 10,000 security guards – and once again it has been proved that security and the profit motive don’t mix. The G4S chief executive Nick Buckles has admitted that many of his guards will not even speak English. As it turns out matters are even worse than that. Many of the guards supposedly recruited by G4s have simply not turned up for work. Many hundreds – perhaps thousands – of police and soldiers will have to be moved in to plug the gap.
One police spokesman describes the situation as “absolute chaos”, and correctly points out: “You shouldn’t lose your local police officer because of the Olympics. Communities are suffering because a private company has failed to deliver on a contract.”
The Olympic security shambles should mean the end of the privatisation era. Of course private companies will often need to be brought in to handle various public tasks, but overall control of operations should always be in the hands of accountable public bodies.
Above all, it should be made very clear from now on that policing and prison service responsibilities should remain with properly trained officers.
12,000 more Indian immigrants on the way
New Delhi today, Newcastle tomorrow? 12,000 Indian workers are heading for England
A secret instruction from the European Union will force thousands more Indian immigrants onto England’s already overcrowded job market.
As part of a trade deal with India negotiated by former EU Commissioner Peter Mandelson, Europe must absorb 40,000 Indian workers – of which a minimum of 12,000 will be heading to the UK. Unsurprisingly we are expected to take 30% of the total, despite representing only 12% of the EU.
Cynically, the workers will arrive under a theoretical six-month limit, which means they will pay no UK tax or national insurance, and will not appear on the official immigration figures. However no checks are in place to ensure that they go back to India when the six months are up!
Former British ambassador Sir Andrew Green commented that the arrangements:
“are quite clearly against the interests of British workers at a time of very high unemployment. That, presumably, is why the government has been keeping quiet about them.
“The six month limit, though completely unenforceable, keeps them out of the official immigration figures. However, in practice, this agreement, if signed, would open the door for thousands of new migrants.
“Of particular concern is our IT workforce – already being undercut by Indian IT companies – which will be put under further pressure.”
Labour tries to recapture English workers
Bury South MP Ivan Lewis is the latest Labour spokesman to try to rediscover Labour’s links with English working class voters. Mr Lewis is “shadow culture secretary” in Ed Miliband’s shadow cabinet, and his outspoken comments come in a new volume of essays The Purple Book, published this week in advance of Labour’s conference at Liverpool at the end of September.
The title indicates an attempt by leading figures in Tony Blair’s New Labour to come to terms with the so-called “Blue Labour” critique of Blairism. “Blue Labour” was a set of ideas associated with the Jewish academic Maurice Glasman (now Lord Glasman) and Searchlight‘s favourite Labour MP Jon Cruddas. Their central insight was that in the pursuit of middle class floating voters, combined with liberal politically correct obsessions, New Labour had jettisoned the traditional values of their movement and was no longer seen by white working class voters as representing their tribal interests.
Lord Glasman was condemned by some of his former allies when he gave an interview this summer calling for a Labour anti-immigration policy:
Britain is not an outpost of the UN. We have to put the people in this country first. The people who live here are the highest priority. We’ve got to listen and be with them. They’re in the right place – it’s us who’s not.
Ivan Lewis echoes some of these concerns in his own essay, as leaked to The Guardian, while not daring to go as far as Glasman. The Bury MP writes:
The party’s instincts to be internationalist, liberal and champions of multicultural societies jar with the growing sense of insecurity of citizens buffeted by rapid economic and social change. Mistrust about Labour’s instincts and values on identity is one of the reasons why voters have rejected social democratic parties all over Europe.
He adds that these voters felt alienated from:
a system which to some appeared to favour receiving benefits and choosing not to work and irresponsible bankers who caused the financial crisis but continued to receive excessive payoffs and bonuses while everyone else was paying the price of their recklessness. Others felt migration was changing the nature of their community and undermining Britain’s way of life.
After acknowledging the effect of immigration on Britain’s housing crisis, Lewis shows his real agenda. Far from seeking to restore the type of country that White Englishmen would recognise as their own, Lewis still wishes to make the Labour Party even more ethnically diverse, criticising:
a Labour Party activist base that while becoming diverse still does not sufficiently look like Britain.
There is one form of diversity however that causes particular upset to Ivan Lewis, who before becoming an MP was chief executive of the Manchester Jewish Federation:
Labour and the previous Tory governments should have acted earlier to tackle radicalisation in some Muslim communities by adopting a zero tolerance approach to anyone including religious leaders who preached hate, and by refusing to legitimise organisations unwilling to condemn extremism or the use of violence.
Notice Mr Lewis’s careful language. He isn’t just talking about anti-British terrorism, he is insisting that organisations must condemn “the use of violence”. It’s a fair bet that he doesn’t want to condemn the violence of the Israeli government in their assault on Gaza, and certainly not condemn the six decades of Zionist violence that forged the piracy of Palestine.
No: it’s a safe bet that Mr Lewis aims to force British based organisations to condemn anti-Israeli violence, in other words to take sides with the Zionist state against the people of Palestine and Lebanon. The abandoned English working class are hoping for decent housing, jobs and health services; a crackdown on crime; and the reversal of more than half a century of mass immigration. But Mr Lewis pays lip service to these concerns, while pursuing quite another, utterly alien agenda.
Oldham election disaster
Cameron junks immigration promise
A new treaty is set to guarantee unlimited Indian immigration into Britain
Long suffering British voters are used to politicians ditching their immigration promises – but Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron is setting a new record by breaking his word less than six months after taking office!
Speaking to business leaders at the CBI this week Cameron assured his audience that “we will not impede you from attracting the best talent from around the world”, regardless of his party’s election pledge to impose a cap on immigration. His spokesman later underlined this policy reversal: “We will be looking at the level of that [immigration] cap and at the way in which it operates and making sure that works in a way that allows business to bring the people that they need into the UK.” In other words the immigration cap will be meaningless.
British dole queues set to lengthen as immigration soars
Moreover according to a new report by Migrationwatch UK, the EU/India Free Trade Agreement due to be signed in a few weeks time will prevent Britain from restricting immigration from India, since it explicitly allows Indian companies to transfer any number of employees from India to EU countries including the UK.
The prospective immigrant needs only to have worked for 12 months in India for the company concerned, and he/she can then be transferred to the UK with no questions asked. There is no need for the company to show that suitable British workers could not be recruited for the vacancy. There is no limit to the number of such immigrants who can use this loophole.
Sir Andrew Green of Migrationwatch commented:
It is time the government came clean about what is in this agreement. It looks as though the Indians are about to drive a bullock and cart through Britain’s immigration system despite government talk about creating jobs in the private sector. There is no point in a limit on economic migration if specialists from India are excluded from the cap by a separate agreement. British IT workers are already suffering the impact on jobs of tens of thousands of Indian IT staff working in Britain; we already have 48,000 unemployed British IT specialists.
UK Government cuts begin to bite – but £7bn overseas aid budget protected
As the new Government’s budget cuts threaten to add another million or two to the dole queues, and VAT increases consume more of the average household’s shrinking budget, one area of government spending remains sacrosanct.
Despite decades of notorious corruption, the U.K.’s £7 billion overseas aid budget is untouchable. A recent survey has shown that only 6% of British voters support the notion that this area of spending should be ringfenced, but that’s exactly what the politically correct Cameron-Clegg coalition is going to do.
43% of the voting public want immediate cuts in overseas aid – but that’s the last thing that the Westminster establishment is going to give them. Many political interest groups benefit from foreign aid spending, such as the £1.2 million given to the TUC to sponsor events such as ‘International Women’s Day’, featuring ‘Caribbean food and musical theme’ – as though England didn’t have enough ‘Caribbean culture’ already!
See last year’s Fake Aid report. (2MB PDF file)
Britain may be forced to bail out Greece
Words fail me... If this goes ahead, people should be taking to the streets in their millions over it!
DAILY TELEGRAPH, 10 Feb 2010: Britain could be forced to help bail-out some of Europe’s crisis-hit economies with tens of billions of pounds, it is feared. (Britain contributes 20 per cent of the EU budget.)
Gordon Brown is under mounting pressure from MPs on all sides to ensure that only eurozone countries contribute to a bail-out of Greece, whose economy is teetering on the brink of collapse.
The Prime Minister will this morning arrive in Brussels for a crucial European leaders’ summit amid fears that the UK could get dragged into a full European Union bail out plan.
Downing Street, however, insisted that the focus of responsibility should fall on the eurozone countries and, failing that, a G20 group of leading nations solution.
Last night European officials were involved in furious efforts to try and complete a €20 billion rescue package, designed to halt the looming crisis in Greece before it spreads to other countries. France and Germany were at the forefront of the eurozone negotiations.
However, Mr Brown – when challenged in the Commons over Britain’s position – was unable to rule out Britain’s involvement in a a Greek rescue package.
Link to full article [external site]
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Also, an article by a financial commentator on the same subject click here [external site]
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And an interesting business site’s view on the Euro and the Rise of Nationalism across Europe [external site]
