Depending upon which set of statistics you choose, either 112 or 154 people were recorded as being killed in accidents during the construction of the Hoover Dam. The discrepancy arises because the 112 were listed as construction deaths, and 43 were recorded as "pneumonia" which many people unofficially associated with carbon monoxide poisoning in the site's diversion tunnels.
This sort of fatality rate would have been the norm for this era (1931-1936). Deaths during large projects such as the dam were expected and considered as inevitable a part of the project as the weather.
Health and Safety laws in most countries have come a long way since then. That level of fatalities would not be tolerated at present. Certainly in the US and in Europe these days, you can go to work and be reasonably certain of coming home again, with all limbs and faculties intact. Workers are protected now; an employee cannot be required to perform tasks that are unsafe. This is a very good and just thing. No worker should be coerced or threatened with being fired for refusing to do something that they reasonably deem unsafe.
Part of this change has come about through legislation. Companies can no longer simply budget for deaths (and the compensation payments) as part of any project. CEOs can go to jail for corporate manslaughter now. There are all kinds of regulations covering any imaginable aspect of every sort of industry, all aimed at the safety of the worker or the end user.
However the other part of this change comes from a very natural progression - learning. We've learnt what's dangerous and what isn't. This is what drives safety standards and "best practice".
There's another huge component to this though, one that we are in danger of losing. It's a skill which is eroding and fading like Latin or long division.
Common Sense. It's in demise, and soon people will look at you funny when you mention it. Your grandchildren won't even know what you're talking about.
In my opinion, we've taken the Health and Safety crusade too far in certain critical aspects. I'm all for sensible industrial regulation but The Men In Yellow Jackets are taking it to ludicrous heights. When the Hoover Dam was built, those people were killed because, in the midst of the Great Depression of the 1930s, they were under threat of being sacked if they refused to comply, and some of the modern equipment we use now had not yet been invented. The situation we have now is people being hurt (or worse) largely because they did something stupid. They either knew the risks and did it anyway (arrogant and stupid, the most dangerous character combination known to man), or should have known the risks if they had at least a pair of functioning brain cells. Either way, in almost all cases, no-one else should be blamed as a result. There reaches a point where you can no longer reasonably account for the determination of an ignoramus to do something outrageously cretinous, deliberately or otherwise.
I think it's no coincidence that mankind's greatest achievements occurred before Health and Safety became the mantra that it now is. We might not have known as much as we know now, but I believe that as a people we were more clever. More inventive. More ingenious. A lot of the advances that we take for granted at present could not be invented today, such as the aeroplane. Can you imagine the Risk Assessments the Wright brothers would have had to fill out before they could even start?
There really are people who are mindless enough to smoke while they refuel their cars. They should be stopped from doing that, naturally, because they might blow you or I up at the same time. Of course these are the sort of people who sit on the branch that they're sawing, or cut a live power cable. I knew someone once who proudly told me he'd done the gas piping in his new kitchen and checked for a gas leak with a match.
So where does Darwin come into this? You've all heard of Darwin's theory of evolution, or 'Survival of the fittest' published in "On the Origin of Species" in 1859. The reason that I think that we were more intelligent a hundred years ago, is that somebody who was, by all measurements and common agreement, a moron would eventually do something equally senseless and remove themselves from the gene pool. Permanently. Ideally this would happen before they had the chance to procreate any correspondingly half-witted spawn. The result was that all the idiots were thinned out by nature, leaving only those with enough sense to stay alive with the opportunity to propagate.
Health and Safety is making it ever harder for the truly thick to remove themselves from the gene pool, and the problem is that it brings everything down to the lowest common denominator. What are we left with then?
"Survival of the Thickest". Darwin must be wondering where it all went wrong.
A comment on virtually anything, usually current affairs, from my viewpoint in East Yorkshire, England.
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Monday, January 30, 2012
Equation for bankers' bonuses doesn't add up
This will be a shorter than usual blog entry. This is because this is a much simpler subject than normal, although I have to admit to being a little confused by the various arguments about bankers' bonuses.
If the various employment contracts of the people involved says that under conditions, X, Y and Z, then a bonus payment of M is due, then to withold this payment would appear to be a breach of contract. It's about as simple as it comes. It's one thing to argue about the formulation of bonus calculations for future years, to take into account whatever protective measures would seem sensible. Quite another to repudiate agreements already made.
However if the payments are discretionary, as some accounts seem to suggest, then why on earth even contemplate paying them? You'd think someone high up in the banking industry would have the sense to say "Look chaps, we need all the PR help we can get. Let's not pay discretionary bonuses while we're still mostly owned by the Taxpayer."
The fact that this hasn't happened only confirms how arrogant and/or out of touch with reality and common decency the banking industry really is. This shouldn't come as a surprise. This is the same industry that's been stealing from consumers for years with unlawful bank charges and PPI misselling.
Don't even get me started on how Labour have tried to dress this all up as a failure of leadership from Cameron and Osbourne. Basically that boils down to criticism that the Government didn't break a promise that Labour made. Someone needs to tell Labour that there's more to Opposition than hypocrisy and name-calling.
The banks say that they don't have a choice about bonus payments; that they are worried about their best employees going elsewhere, and this is the part that really confuses me.
If all the "best" and "talented" people are still with these banks, then who caused all this mess in the first place? And why aren't these "talented" people doing something about it?
If the various employment contracts of the people involved says that under conditions, X, Y and Z, then a bonus payment of M is due, then to withold this payment would appear to be a breach of contract. It's about as simple as it comes. It's one thing to argue about the formulation of bonus calculations for future years, to take into account whatever protective measures would seem sensible. Quite another to repudiate agreements already made.
However if the payments are discretionary, as some accounts seem to suggest, then why on earth even contemplate paying them? You'd think someone high up in the banking industry would have the sense to say "Look chaps, we need all the PR help we can get. Let's not pay discretionary bonuses while we're still mostly owned by the Taxpayer."
The fact that this hasn't happened only confirms how arrogant and/or out of touch with reality and common decency the banking industry really is. This shouldn't come as a surprise. This is the same industry that's been stealing from consumers for years with unlawful bank charges and PPI misselling.
Don't even get me started on how Labour have tried to dress this all up as a failure of leadership from Cameron and Osbourne. Basically that boils down to criticism that the Government didn't break a promise that Labour made. Someone needs to tell Labour that there's more to Opposition than hypocrisy and name-calling.
The banks say that they don't have a choice about bonus payments; that they are worried about their best employees going elsewhere, and this is the part that really confuses me.
If all the "best" and "talented" people are still with these banks, then who caused all this mess in the first place? And why aren't these "talented" people doing something about it?
Monday, January 23, 2012
Evolving Politics, or Growing Up?
“If you're not a liberal at twenty you have no heart, if you're not a conservative at forty you have no brain.”
- Winston Churchill
I grew up in a household where my mother had no discernible politics at all, and my father was a passionate supporter of the Labour party who liked to put his point across in a well-reasoned argument which was very persuasive to a teenager. I also grew up in the Thatcher years in Britain which saw a great deal of injustice and protest across the country. By the time I was first able to vote in a General Election, in 1992, I was very hopeful that Neil Kinnock would be the new Prime Minister in the morning. Of course, it didn't work out that way. I was full of youthful enthusiasm for equality, and liberal idealism. Fast forward to 1997 and I was only too anxious to vote for Tony Blair, and delighted when they won. At last, I thought, finally we'll have a Government interested in making life better for everyone. I was full of optimism.
By 2005, I realised that such optimism was naive and unrealistic. Politics and adult life didn't have the black and white that I had imagined as a child. I still was strongly opposed to the Conservative Party, but beginning to wonder whether or not that was objective, or the result of my conditioning.
By the election of 2010, I had evolved as far as to be fairly neutral between the two major parties. I no longer clung to the optimism that Labour was the answer to all our ills, nor was I petrified or disgusted by the thought of a return to a Conservative Government.
This is the year that I will turn 40. I work full time and always have done. I fully realise that I've been fortunate never to have been unemployed, however if I were to lose my job, I would rather do almost anything than sit at home claiming benefits.
I'll be completely honest; I have absolutely no idea how many families are currently receiving more than £26000 in benefits. I know that there are some, but how big a problem is it really? Is the Government about to solve a real problem for the country in imposing this cap on benefits, or is this effectively a popularity stunt? Again, in the spirit of honesty, I don't really care. As a matter of principle, it can't be right that a family can receive more money in benefits than a lot of families that work full time.
It is true that £26000 in benefits is equivalent to a pre-tax income of around £35000. I know several families who work full time and their income is a great deal less than that. They manage, and so must those who receive benefits. Yes, there may well be some exclusions. Iain Duncan Smith spoke on BBC Radio 4's Today programme this morning about safeguards and discretionary measures. Not to mix metaphors, but the devil is in the detail of course, and the proof of the pudding.....well you know what I mean. We'll see about these safeguards in due course.
As I started to write this, there was a gentleman on the Jeremy Vine show who is a single father and full time carer to his mother. His sole income is from benefits, and he depends upon them. His situation may well be a deserving exception. I don't know. But should he really be paid effectively £35000 by the state for looking after an elderly relative? This country is in a dire economic situation at present, and to my mind we simply can't afford this on any sort of scale. Having said that, imagine for a moment that the economic crisis did not exist, and Britain could afford this. Surely it's still wrong that benefit claimants can receive more than a great deal of working families?
So as I near 40, with Winston Churchill's quotation in the back of my mind, are my politics evolving with the times, or am I just growing up?
Friday, January 20, 2012
Is Equality fair?
You'd think it was straightforward wouldn't you? It turns out that equality might not be fair after all.
As often happens, my source of blog inspiration comes from the BBC Radio 4 Today programme. I do have to admit that I was half awake and showering at the time, but the debate was about a researched assertion that boys and girls natural capacity for maths is naturally and genetically different. Then there was someone complaining that the UK has the lowest number of female engineers in Europe.
At other times, we might hear about the differences in school grades in various subjects between the sexes.
I don't really accept this modern "liberal" phenomenon that everything has to be equally distributed or else foul play must be at work. There really are times when you would and should expect things to be distributed in a certain way. For example, academic results across the range should always be a Bell curve (like an upturned bathtub) unless the exam is made so facile that everyone gets 100%. In fact, if that were to happen, that would be unfair to the brighter, higher achievers. In this case, total equality would be the most unfair way to proceed.
Having said that, teachers are on a hiding to nothing when it comes to results, especially in certain section of the media. This is particularly true of A level results. Every August, you can guarantee that the same "newspapers" will launch the annual "A levels getting easier" line. If A level results did not improve year on year, you can guarantee that the same sections of the press would be lamblasting the teachers for not improving results. A story carried in the Daily Mail within the last couple of months ran "Only 10 teachers sacked for incompetence in the last year". I love the Daily Mail headlines; the screaming prejudice and lack of fairness that's regularly exhibited is at least consistent. The story neatly sidesteps any discussion about how many teachers actually are incompetent, the discussion is just about why more aren't sacked. This was followed in the last couple of weeks by an "initiative" by the Court Jester, sorry Education Secretary, Michael Gove that he was going to make it easier to sack bad teachers. Hmmm.
Anyway, back to the point in hand - equality. There are nearly always several debates running at any one time which are similarly framed. "Police recruits from ethnic minorities aren't representative of the proportion of the population", "top executives are under-represented by women".
There are several things wrong with these complaints. Firstly, there's the major question of Free Will. Women typically do not choose Engineering as a profession because, by and large, women aren't interested in these things, whereas boys are always taking things apart to see how they work, whether they be bicycles or flies. Of course it would be valid to ask Ethnic minorities why they choose not to apply for the Police force, and police authorities should do all that it reasonable to encourage them to apply and change any perceptions within both the force and the community that conflict with that aim. However, they should not have to bend over backwards or take steps which dilute the service. Police height restrictions were removed as a step towards sexual and racial equality. Personally I would rather that the policeman who turns up to a pub fight was taller than 5'2".
The next point is ability. A decent size secondary school will have in excess of 1500 pupils. Of those, let's face it, not everyone is of equal ability. There will be a large number of children who will excel at university and academic subjects, but there will be a not inconsiderable number who will be better suited to vocational education and employment. That seems to me to be an immutable fact, obvious to all but the most blinkered. This represents a problem either way: no parent would want to hear that their child had been shunted towards vocational courses, dashing their aspirations for their offspring. Equally, one would not want a school to cast a borderline student towards vocational education purely for the sake of the school's league table placement. Indeed, school league tables are another Utopian folly that all schools are capable of competing together. The columnist Peter Hitchens has written much on the naivety of educational equality, and argues for the return of selective education.
I honestly don't remember where I heard the quotation now, but I recall something about management of employees, and how treating everyone equally was the most unfair thing that a manager can do. I personally think the same applies to the population.
As often happens, my source of blog inspiration comes from the BBC Radio 4 Today programme. I do have to admit that I was half awake and showering at the time, but the debate was about a researched assertion that boys and girls natural capacity for maths is naturally and genetically different. Then there was someone complaining that the UK has the lowest number of female engineers in Europe.
At other times, we might hear about the differences in school grades in various subjects between the sexes.
I don't really accept this modern "liberal" phenomenon that everything has to be equally distributed or else foul play must be at work. There really are times when you would and should expect things to be distributed in a certain way. For example, academic results across the range should always be a Bell curve (like an upturned bathtub) unless the exam is made so facile that everyone gets 100%. In fact, if that were to happen, that would be unfair to the brighter, higher achievers. In this case, total equality would be the most unfair way to proceed.
Having said that, teachers are on a hiding to nothing when it comes to results, especially in certain section of the media. This is particularly true of A level results. Every August, you can guarantee that the same "newspapers" will launch the annual "A levels getting easier" line. If A level results did not improve year on year, you can guarantee that the same sections of the press would be lamblasting the teachers for not improving results. A story carried in the Daily Mail within the last couple of months ran "Only 10 teachers sacked for incompetence in the last year". I love the Daily Mail headlines; the screaming prejudice and lack of fairness that's regularly exhibited is at least consistent. The story neatly sidesteps any discussion about how many teachers actually are incompetent, the discussion is just about why more aren't sacked. This was followed in the last couple of weeks by an "initiative" by the Court Jester, sorry Education Secretary, Michael Gove that he was going to make it easier to sack bad teachers. Hmmm.
Anyway, back to the point in hand - equality. There are nearly always several debates running at any one time which are similarly framed. "Police recruits from ethnic minorities aren't representative of the proportion of the population", "top executives are under-represented by women".
There are several things wrong with these complaints. Firstly, there's the major question of Free Will. Women typically do not choose Engineering as a profession because, by and large, women aren't interested in these things, whereas boys are always taking things apart to see how they work, whether they be bicycles or flies. Of course it would be valid to ask Ethnic minorities why they choose not to apply for the Police force, and police authorities should do all that it reasonable to encourage them to apply and change any perceptions within both the force and the community that conflict with that aim. However, they should not have to bend over backwards or take steps which dilute the service. Police height restrictions were removed as a step towards sexual and racial equality. Personally I would rather that the policeman who turns up to a pub fight was taller than 5'2".
The next point is ability. A decent size secondary school will have in excess of 1500 pupils. Of those, let's face it, not everyone is of equal ability. There will be a large number of children who will excel at university and academic subjects, but there will be a not inconsiderable number who will be better suited to vocational education and employment. That seems to me to be an immutable fact, obvious to all but the most blinkered. This represents a problem either way: no parent would want to hear that their child had been shunted towards vocational courses, dashing their aspirations for their offspring. Equally, one would not want a school to cast a borderline student towards vocational education purely for the sake of the school's league table placement. Indeed, school league tables are another Utopian folly that all schools are capable of competing together. The columnist Peter Hitchens has written much on the naivety of educational equality, and argues for the return of selective education.
I honestly don't remember where I heard the quotation now, but I recall something about management of employees, and how treating everyone equally was the most unfair thing that a manager can do. I personally think the same applies to the population.
Monday, January 16, 2012
Who'd be a politician?
For a short period in time, me.
At the height of the MPs expenses scandal in 2009, I did consider becoming an MP. I considered it for about two weeks. On the face of it, initially, the idea had very few drawbacks. It certainly seemed the best chance I was going to have to earn above £60 000 a year, and, let's face it, what do they actually do anyway?
Since Parliament began, there has always been scandals and sordid little (and not so little) stories about individual Members of Parliament. In the 1890s there was the Balfour affair, in the early 20th Century there was insider trading within the Liberal Government. Some scandals were bigger than others; the Profumo affair of 1963 threatened to bring down the Macmillan Government. In the 1970s, Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe was tried for conspiracy to murder his homosexual lover, and in the 80s there was Cecil Parkinson's infidelity with his secretary. All of the major parties have been hit by scandals of various natures.
Most of these cases involved one or two, at most a handful, of individual members. The establishment, the press and the public were content to believe that as an institution, Parliament was not corrupt or suffering from moral turpitude.
The story of expenses in 2009 changed all of that. For the first time, there was a credible account of mass corruption, malfeasance and dishonesty that affected virtually all of the 650 members of Parliament. For what seemed like months on end, the Daily Telegraph published lists of expenses claimed by politicians for such surreal items as a floating duck house. The (then) Leader of the Opposition David Cameron claimed for clearing wisteria from his property. Some went so far as to claim mortgage interest payments for houses they didn't have mortgages for, or didn't even live in. The then Home Secretary Jaqui Smith came under the spotlight for allegedly claiming that her main residence was a house in London owned by her sister, so that she could claim allowances on her family home in Redditch. It later transpired that a claim had been submitted for an adult movie that her husband had watched.
Expenses scandals themselves were nothing new. Newly published documents show that shortly after her election victory in 1979, Mrs Thatcher claimed for an ironing board at Number 10 which she subsequently had to pay for herself. What changed in 2009 was the sheer scale of the numbers of people involved.
It would be a huge understatement to say that the publics opinion of their representatives had never been lower. They were portrayed in most sections of the media as having their noses squarely in the trough, caricatured as such as pigs or parasites.
Normally, if one is to seek election in a local constituency, it is vital to seek and receive the support of the local major political party. Without this support in terms of finance and publicity, it is very difficult to campaign effectively. In most constituencies in the UK, the predominant party is related to the socioeconomic profile of the people living there. In some places, it would be almost possible to get a mannequin elected provided it had the right party colours. There are times when this changes, usually at times of national change where there is a "swing" from one party to the other, such as 1997 where a slim Conservative majority was turned into a Labour landslide with a huge swing from Conservative to Labour. This large swing to Labour gradually eroded during the 2000s to the point where the Labour majority in the 2005 General Election was much smaller than it had been.
In 2009 though, with an election less than a year away, all of this was now uncertain. The "rules" such as they were seemed to have been discarded. It looked entirely possible that established, "career politicians" would be booted out en masse and replaced with a host of independent candidates elected on a pledge of cleaning up the system and eradicating this system which was by general agreement, in tatters. There were even some pundits in the media who were warning in advance that to replace "proper" politicians with "ordinary" people would be a bad thing, reducing the quality of debate and legislation passed as a result.
I gave enough consideration to the idea of becoming an MP to realise that I would not have sufficient time or money to campaign whilst holding down my current job, and neither did I really relish spending most of my time living in London. I discussed it with my wife and we collectively agreed that it was probably not a good plan, and we left it at that.
Looking back, 2 1/2 years later, I'm glad that I did. Because apart from the reasons mentioned above, I've come to realise that it's a position where you really can't win (even when you do win) and the very fact that you are there makes you eligible for the worst sort of scrutiny as well as the good kind, the kind that we should all expect of our representatives. I mean that whatever course of action one takes for a given situation, there will always be a group of people somewhere, and usually it's the Daily Mail, who question your sanity, your competence, your ethics and your morality, and sometimes all simultaneously. Some time ago, the public lost all trust in their elected representatives, even though they elected them. This was long before the expenses scandal and will probably carry on for a long time to come.
This isn't surprising; it's virtually impossible for us, remote from the situation and most of the relevant facts, to distinguish between a Manifesto promise made in good faith but overtaken by the pragmatic choices required once in office, and the cynical pledge made to gain popularity but which never really had any prospect of being enacted. The current Liberal Democrats have found themselves caught by a trap of their own making. They could say pretty much what they wanted in their Manifesto; there wasn't a snowflake in Hell's chance of them being elected. Was this a cynical attempt to gain popularity and share of the vote, or was it the earnest expression of their values? Who can really answer that question? I can't. What we can say for sure is that they did promise things which now that they have a share of places at the top table of the Cabinet, the practicalities mean that they are unable to deliver on such things as the abolition of student fees. There are two main reasons why this is currently unrealistic for them; the current state of the British economy and the fact that this is idealistically abhorrent to the "real" governing party, the Conservatives. The Liberal Democrats now find themselves in the position of having all the responsibility for the Governments actions but little effective authority to change or control any of it. The bedrock support for the party has been seriously eroded, especially in the student populous which was hoping to benefit from the abolition of fees. This section of society has seen it as a broken promise, a betrayal of the worst kind. As is often the case, their view of the world polarised through idealism into black and white, blinding them to the more pragmatic shades of grey.
This polarisation is not at all a uniquely British phenomenon. Over in the US, the trail to the election in November has already begun. Barack Obama, overwhemingly elected in 2008, is attracting all kinds of vitriol from all sides, even those who voted for him. I'm no expert on American politics, but it seems to me that there is one crucial difference between the UK and US systems; here, the majority party rules and their leader becomes Prime Minister. Hence the Government of the day gets to create policy and new initiatives and legislation and doesn't usually have a problem getting it approved because they hold the majority. In the US of course, you can have a Democratic President and a system where the majority is Republican. The President can propose, cajole and suggest all he wants; if the Majority party disagrees, then it doesn't get approved. Under these circumstances it seems to me to be a little unfair to blame the President for either a) not passing legislation on those things he promised or b) the results of anything that was passed by the House of Representatives or Congress.
Similarly the expenses scandal was not quite as black and white as most of the media portrayed it. The simple fact is this; like any other expenses system that you or I have ever worked with, there was a book of rules or guidelines as to what could be claimed, and what could not. This should have informed the individual MPs what to submit claims for. The claims are then passed to a group of people responsible for inspecting, auditing and authorising those claims. Only once the submitted claim had been authorised would any monies be reimbursed. I heard very little, if anything, about the robustness of any system that could allow a claim for a duck house to be checked and then approved, or even who approved it. Of course, it is true that the people concerned appear to have bypassed the section of their brains handling common sense and shame. They should have had a sense of what was reasonable and what wasn't. I wouldn't consider claiming garden maintenance or cleaning of my swimming pool (if I had one) on my work expenses. However the point remains that if the system was working correctly, such claims would have rightly been thrown out without a penny paid. It's good that more than one former MP has been imprisoned for "irregularities" in their accounting and expenses. What's odd though is that there's little clear reason as to why some members were prosecuted and convicted and why some were simply allowed to repay what had been claimed for and paid to them.
So am I saying that I now feel sorry for politicians? No, not for a moment. Politicians are still a privileged breed. Yes they come in for some stick at times, and those at the very top have to make literally life or death decisions. For the most part though, the majority of MPs don't really do all that much for their money. As mentioned at the top of the article, they get in excess of £60k per year, claim expenses on things that you or I would have to pay for themselves, a huge pension and even if they lose their seat, a whopping "resettlement" allowance to get them back on their feet again, the poor dears.
Have a look at the blog of "Guido Fawkes" here to see some of the things that are still going on. For example, their gourmet lunches served in Parliament which are subsidised by the taxpayer to the tune of 50%. Not only are they subsidised by us, if you or I visited Westminster today and ordered the same dishes, we would pay up to twice as much!
And they wonder why nobody trusts them? Beats me....
At the height of the MPs expenses scandal in 2009, I did consider becoming an MP. I considered it for about two weeks. On the face of it, initially, the idea had very few drawbacks. It certainly seemed the best chance I was going to have to earn above £60 000 a year, and, let's face it, what do they actually do anyway?
Since Parliament began, there has always been scandals and sordid little (and not so little) stories about individual Members of Parliament. In the 1890s there was the Balfour affair, in the early 20th Century there was insider trading within the Liberal Government. Some scandals were bigger than others; the Profumo affair of 1963 threatened to bring down the Macmillan Government. In the 1970s, Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe was tried for conspiracy to murder his homosexual lover, and in the 80s there was Cecil Parkinson's infidelity with his secretary. All of the major parties have been hit by scandals of various natures.
Most of these cases involved one or two, at most a handful, of individual members. The establishment, the press and the public were content to believe that as an institution, Parliament was not corrupt or suffering from moral turpitude.
The story of expenses in 2009 changed all of that. For the first time, there was a credible account of mass corruption, malfeasance and dishonesty that affected virtually all of the 650 members of Parliament. For what seemed like months on end, the Daily Telegraph published lists of expenses claimed by politicians for such surreal items as a floating duck house. The (then) Leader of the Opposition David Cameron claimed for clearing wisteria from his property. Some went so far as to claim mortgage interest payments for houses they didn't have mortgages for, or didn't even live in. The then Home Secretary Jaqui Smith came under the spotlight for allegedly claiming that her main residence was a house in London owned by her sister, so that she could claim allowances on her family home in Redditch. It later transpired that a claim had been submitted for an adult movie that her husband had watched.
Expenses scandals themselves were nothing new. Newly published documents show that shortly after her election victory in 1979, Mrs Thatcher claimed for an ironing board at Number 10 which she subsequently had to pay for herself. What changed in 2009 was the sheer scale of the numbers of people involved.
It would be a huge understatement to say that the publics opinion of their representatives had never been lower. They were portrayed in most sections of the media as having their noses squarely in the trough, caricatured as such as pigs or parasites.
Normally, if one is to seek election in a local constituency, it is vital to seek and receive the support of the local major political party. Without this support in terms of finance and publicity, it is very difficult to campaign effectively. In most constituencies in the UK, the predominant party is related to the socioeconomic profile of the people living there. In some places, it would be almost possible to get a mannequin elected provided it had the right party colours. There are times when this changes, usually at times of national change where there is a "swing" from one party to the other, such as 1997 where a slim Conservative majority was turned into a Labour landslide with a huge swing from Conservative to Labour. This large swing to Labour gradually eroded during the 2000s to the point where the Labour majority in the 2005 General Election was much smaller than it had been.
In 2009 though, with an election less than a year away, all of this was now uncertain. The "rules" such as they were seemed to have been discarded. It looked entirely possible that established, "career politicians" would be booted out en masse and replaced with a host of independent candidates elected on a pledge of cleaning up the system and eradicating this system which was by general agreement, in tatters. There were even some pundits in the media who were warning in advance that to replace "proper" politicians with "ordinary" people would be a bad thing, reducing the quality of debate and legislation passed as a result.
I gave enough consideration to the idea of becoming an MP to realise that I would not have sufficient time or money to campaign whilst holding down my current job, and neither did I really relish spending most of my time living in London. I discussed it with my wife and we collectively agreed that it was probably not a good plan, and we left it at that.
Looking back, 2 1/2 years later, I'm glad that I did. Because apart from the reasons mentioned above, I've come to realise that it's a position where you really can't win (even when you do win) and the very fact that you are there makes you eligible for the worst sort of scrutiny as well as the good kind, the kind that we should all expect of our representatives. I mean that whatever course of action one takes for a given situation, there will always be a group of people somewhere, and usually it's the Daily Mail, who question your sanity, your competence, your ethics and your morality, and sometimes all simultaneously. Some time ago, the public lost all trust in their elected representatives, even though they elected them. This was long before the expenses scandal and will probably carry on for a long time to come.
This isn't surprising; it's virtually impossible for us, remote from the situation and most of the relevant facts, to distinguish between a Manifesto promise made in good faith but overtaken by the pragmatic choices required once in office, and the cynical pledge made to gain popularity but which never really had any prospect of being enacted. The current Liberal Democrats have found themselves caught by a trap of their own making. They could say pretty much what they wanted in their Manifesto; there wasn't a snowflake in Hell's chance of them being elected. Was this a cynical attempt to gain popularity and share of the vote, or was it the earnest expression of their values? Who can really answer that question? I can't. What we can say for sure is that they did promise things which now that they have a share of places at the top table of the Cabinet, the practicalities mean that they are unable to deliver on such things as the abolition of student fees. There are two main reasons why this is currently unrealistic for them; the current state of the British economy and the fact that this is idealistically abhorrent to the "real" governing party, the Conservatives. The Liberal Democrats now find themselves in the position of having all the responsibility for the Governments actions but little effective authority to change or control any of it. The bedrock support for the party has been seriously eroded, especially in the student populous which was hoping to benefit from the abolition of fees. This section of society has seen it as a broken promise, a betrayal of the worst kind. As is often the case, their view of the world polarised through idealism into black and white, blinding them to the more pragmatic shades of grey.
This polarisation is not at all a uniquely British phenomenon. Over in the US, the trail to the election in November has already begun. Barack Obama, overwhemingly elected in 2008, is attracting all kinds of vitriol from all sides, even those who voted for him. I'm no expert on American politics, but it seems to me that there is one crucial difference between the UK and US systems; here, the majority party rules and their leader becomes Prime Minister. Hence the Government of the day gets to create policy and new initiatives and legislation and doesn't usually have a problem getting it approved because they hold the majority. In the US of course, you can have a Democratic President and a system where the majority is Republican. The President can propose, cajole and suggest all he wants; if the Majority party disagrees, then it doesn't get approved. Under these circumstances it seems to me to be a little unfair to blame the President for either a) not passing legislation on those things he promised or b) the results of anything that was passed by the House of Representatives or Congress.
Similarly the expenses scandal was not quite as black and white as most of the media portrayed it. The simple fact is this; like any other expenses system that you or I have ever worked with, there was a book of rules or guidelines as to what could be claimed, and what could not. This should have informed the individual MPs what to submit claims for. The claims are then passed to a group of people responsible for inspecting, auditing and authorising those claims. Only once the submitted claim had been authorised would any monies be reimbursed. I heard very little, if anything, about the robustness of any system that could allow a claim for a duck house to be checked and then approved, or even who approved it. Of course, it is true that the people concerned appear to have bypassed the section of their brains handling common sense and shame. They should have had a sense of what was reasonable and what wasn't. I wouldn't consider claiming garden maintenance or cleaning of my swimming pool (if I had one) on my work expenses. However the point remains that if the system was working correctly, such claims would have rightly been thrown out without a penny paid. It's good that more than one former MP has been imprisoned for "irregularities" in their accounting and expenses. What's odd though is that there's little clear reason as to why some members were prosecuted and convicted and why some were simply allowed to repay what had been claimed for and paid to them.
So am I saying that I now feel sorry for politicians? No, not for a moment. Politicians are still a privileged breed. Yes they come in for some stick at times, and those at the very top have to make literally life or death decisions. For the most part though, the majority of MPs don't really do all that much for their money. As mentioned at the top of the article, they get in excess of £60k per year, claim expenses on things that you or I would have to pay for themselves, a huge pension and even if they lose their seat, a whopping "resettlement" allowance to get them back on their feet again, the poor dears.
Have a look at the blog of "Guido Fawkes" here to see some of the things that are still going on. For example, their gourmet lunches served in Parliament which are subsidised by the taxpayer to the tune of 50%. Not only are they subsidised by us, if you or I visited Westminster today and ordered the same dishes, we would pay up to twice as much!
And they wonder why nobody trusts them? Beats me....
Friday, January 13, 2012
Do We Really Need a High Speed Rail Link?
The UK Government announced this week that they intend to proceed with the proposed high speed rail link (HS2) from London to Birmingham.
News of the decision has generated a lot of column inches on both sides of the debate. Business leaders appear to be keen for the scheme to proceed, and it would seem that lots of new jobs will be created. You'd think it'd be universally well received, wouldn't you?
Er, no. Predictably enough, there has been a barrage of criticism of the proposed scheme. If that wasn't surprising, then neither was some of the rhetoric employed by the scheme's proponents against their opponents. If you are not in favour of the proposal, then you can expect to be labelled as one or more of "Luddite", "anti-business" or even "NIMBY" (Not In My Back Yard).
I really enjoy travelling by rail. I drive enough miles in a year that I appreciate it when every now and then, my travelling schedule overlaps the rail network and there's actually a train service to where I need to go. Occasionally, there's even a train going where I need to go, when I need to go, and at a reasonable price. On these rare instances, travelling by train becomes a no-brainer. It is a pleasant change to be able to sleep, read, look out of the window or indeed anything else I want to do. No traffic jams, no worrying about the price of fuel, no navigation. Bliss; or it would be if this wasn't an idealised view of rail travel.
Let's face it, UK rail travel is rarely that romantically perfect. For a start, it's usually prohibitively expensive. A few years ago now, the BBC motoring programme Top Gear demonstrated that it was possible to buy a cheap car, drive from London to Manchester and then scrap the car, all for less than it cost to undertake the same journey by rail. Thousands of people commute to work each day using season tickets that cost £1000s per year, and they seem to increase in cost above inflation every year.
For my purposes, the problem is that there happens to be not much in the way of train service between where I live, and where I visit. I can get to London from Hull easily enough, and you can reach a lot of destinations via York. However the place I visit most frequently, Bedford, is difficult to get to. The problems are threefold: often there simply is no viable service to and from where I want to go and then come back; the cost is enormous; and by the time I've negotiated the train changes necessary, the whole thing takes a lot longer than it would by car.
If I could find a service for that route which took a similar amount of time as driving (or less), and the cost was similar (or less) than driving it, then I would pick the train any time. However the practicalities for me simply don't stack up and the only reasonable option for me on most of my journeys are to drive. I could perhaps reduce the cost of the journeys by buying season tickets or rail cards, I know. However you can only buy season tickets for an individual train company, not for use anywhere on the network. So if I were to leave, say Hull, on train company A and arrive at Bedford on train company B, then my season ticket is only valid for part of that journey. Bizarrely, I could get a "Friends and Family" railcard, but whilst that can be used anywhere on the network, it's only valid if I've got the kids with me. Further pain is added when we consider the "on-peak", "off peak", and "anytime" tickets.
Train companies further muddy the waters by having a different price for the same ticket depending on how and when you buy it. Buying your ticket online from home, 20 minutes before you leave for the station can be vastly cheaper than buying the same ticket half an hour later at the station. Why?
Yet, the great advantage of my car is that it costs me roughly the same to travel at 8am as it does at 2am. It costs roughly the same to have one person in the car as it does to have four, and that's important if you're travelling with family.
It boils down to this simple equation: it takes too long and it costs to much for me to use the train except, as I said earlier, in those rare cases where there's a reasonably direct service.
And I haven't even mentioned reliability. My car is 8 years old and has now covered over 130 000 miles, yet the only time it's broken down was when my wife put petrol in it instead of diesel, and you can't really blame the car for that. Other than that it has a spotless record of reliability, in all winds and weathers, even deep snow. The same is not true on the trains. At any given time, on any given journey, you are liable to be delayed severely by any or all of the following; signal failure, track maintenance, lack of availability of rolling stock, strikes, staff shortages, "wrong type of snow", leaves on the line, all manner of petty and avoidable issues which are almost impossible to solve because of the structure of the railway system, where one company owns the tracks and several different companies own all the trains. This arrangement ranks as one of the most hare-brained schemes ever thought up. As the railways evolved, there were four different UK rail companies, some even used different gauges of track. Early in the 20th century, these companies were amalgamated into one overall company to manage the lot. It wasn't an overwhelming success, granted, and the cuts recommended by Beeching in the 1960s was an attempt to streamline the "business". This might have been the heart of the problem, seeing it as a business rather than a service.
In the 1990s the then Government decided to break it all up again, and we now have the sorry mess of franchised train companies and RailTrack or NetworkRail or whatever they're called these days. All I know is that we now have a continuous Mexican stand-off, with all the companies pointing the finger at each other for the system's failures.
At one point, the train services were claiming that "over 80%" of services ran on time. Well done, take a bow. 80% is a lot, isn't it, certainly a lot more than half. As Jeremy Clarkson once put it though, that's like saying that you would tolerate a car that refused to start in the morning once every two weeks.
Why should HS2 be immune to any of the existing failings of the current system? It'll be run by the same witless groups of management, track maintained by the same people, and staffed with people from the same prehistoric RMT union. Who's going to use it? I know that sounds obvious, but who? People in Birmingham and people in London. What about those in between? Surely it'll benefit everyone in between? I don't think so. If it's going to be "high speed" then I'm assuming that the service isn't stopping more than, say once, in between London and Birmingham, let's say in or near Oxford. So the actual numbers of people using it will be small, to be generous.
There's the environmental aspect to consider too. This scar on the countryside is going to be over 70 metres wide, that's similar to the width of Wembley Stadium. No problem, say the planners, we'll stick it all in an enormous tunnel. At a cost of £500m. This was additional tunnelling added to the scheme to overcome objections. "The scheme is cheaper with the tunnel" says the DoT (source). OK then, if that's so, why wasn't the tunnel in the plan from Day 1, and why isn't the whole line underground?
Let's put this in perspective. That extra tunnel is costing £190 000 per yard! £5200 per inch! Whichever way you slice it, that's a very expensive tunnel. In addition one would imagine that the preparatory work required to lay track on the floor of a tunnel was similar to laying track on open ground on the surface. If that's true, how exactly is tunnelling cheaper?
I admit I'm getting cynical in my old age, but someone who is willing to throw an additional £500m at a scheme, in order to grease the wheels of the Government approving it, must stand to make a great deal of money from its adoption. More than £500m too.
And all of this to save a handful of people about half an hour on a journey from London to Birmingham? Gimme a break.
Martin
News of the decision has generated a lot of column inches on both sides of the debate. Business leaders appear to be keen for the scheme to proceed, and it would seem that lots of new jobs will be created. You'd think it'd be universally well received, wouldn't you?
Er, no. Predictably enough, there has been a barrage of criticism of the proposed scheme. If that wasn't surprising, then neither was some of the rhetoric employed by the scheme's proponents against their opponents. If you are not in favour of the proposal, then you can expect to be labelled as one or more of "Luddite", "anti-business" or even "NIMBY" (Not In My Back Yard).
I really enjoy travelling by rail. I drive enough miles in a year that I appreciate it when every now and then, my travelling schedule overlaps the rail network and there's actually a train service to where I need to go. Occasionally, there's even a train going where I need to go, when I need to go, and at a reasonable price. On these rare instances, travelling by train becomes a no-brainer. It is a pleasant change to be able to sleep, read, look out of the window or indeed anything else I want to do. No traffic jams, no worrying about the price of fuel, no navigation. Bliss; or it would be if this wasn't an idealised view of rail travel.
Let's face it, UK rail travel is rarely that romantically perfect. For a start, it's usually prohibitively expensive. A few years ago now, the BBC motoring programme Top Gear demonstrated that it was possible to buy a cheap car, drive from London to Manchester and then scrap the car, all for less than it cost to undertake the same journey by rail. Thousands of people commute to work each day using season tickets that cost £1000s per year, and they seem to increase in cost above inflation every year.
For my purposes, the problem is that there happens to be not much in the way of train service between where I live, and where I visit. I can get to London from Hull easily enough, and you can reach a lot of destinations via York. However the place I visit most frequently, Bedford, is difficult to get to. The problems are threefold: often there simply is no viable service to and from where I want to go and then come back; the cost is enormous; and by the time I've negotiated the train changes necessary, the whole thing takes a lot longer than it would by car.
If I could find a service for that route which took a similar amount of time as driving (or less), and the cost was similar (or less) than driving it, then I would pick the train any time. However the practicalities for me simply don't stack up and the only reasonable option for me on most of my journeys are to drive. I could perhaps reduce the cost of the journeys by buying season tickets or rail cards, I know. However you can only buy season tickets for an individual train company, not for use anywhere on the network. So if I were to leave, say Hull, on train company A and arrive at Bedford on train company B, then my season ticket is only valid for part of that journey. Bizarrely, I could get a "Friends and Family" railcard, but whilst that can be used anywhere on the network, it's only valid if I've got the kids with me. Further pain is added when we consider the "on-peak", "off peak", and "anytime" tickets.
Train companies further muddy the waters by having a different price for the same ticket depending on how and when you buy it. Buying your ticket online from home, 20 minutes before you leave for the station can be vastly cheaper than buying the same ticket half an hour later at the station. Why?
Yet, the great advantage of my car is that it costs me roughly the same to travel at 8am as it does at 2am. It costs roughly the same to have one person in the car as it does to have four, and that's important if you're travelling with family.
It boils down to this simple equation: it takes too long and it costs to much for me to use the train except, as I said earlier, in those rare cases where there's a reasonably direct service.
And I haven't even mentioned reliability. My car is 8 years old and has now covered over 130 000 miles, yet the only time it's broken down was when my wife put petrol in it instead of diesel, and you can't really blame the car for that. Other than that it has a spotless record of reliability, in all winds and weathers, even deep snow. The same is not true on the trains. At any given time, on any given journey, you are liable to be delayed severely by any or all of the following; signal failure, track maintenance, lack of availability of rolling stock, strikes, staff shortages, "wrong type of snow", leaves on the line, all manner of petty and avoidable issues which are almost impossible to solve because of the structure of the railway system, where one company owns the tracks and several different companies own all the trains. This arrangement ranks as one of the most hare-brained schemes ever thought up. As the railways evolved, there were four different UK rail companies, some even used different gauges of track. Early in the 20th century, these companies were amalgamated into one overall company to manage the lot. It wasn't an overwhelming success, granted, and the cuts recommended by Beeching in the 1960s was an attempt to streamline the "business". This might have been the heart of the problem, seeing it as a business rather than a service.
In the 1990s the then Government decided to break it all up again, and we now have the sorry mess of franchised train companies and RailTrack or NetworkRail or whatever they're called these days. All I know is that we now have a continuous Mexican stand-off, with all the companies pointing the finger at each other for the system's failures.
At one point, the train services were claiming that "over 80%" of services ran on time. Well done, take a bow. 80% is a lot, isn't it, certainly a lot more than half. As Jeremy Clarkson once put it though, that's like saying that you would tolerate a car that refused to start in the morning once every two weeks.
Why should HS2 be immune to any of the existing failings of the current system? It'll be run by the same witless groups of management, track maintained by the same people, and staffed with people from the same prehistoric RMT union. Who's going to use it? I know that sounds obvious, but who? People in Birmingham and people in London. What about those in between? Surely it'll benefit everyone in between? I don't think so. If it's going to be "high speed" then I'm assuming that the service isn't stopping more than, say once, in between London and Birmingham, let's say in or near Oxford. So the actual numbers of people using it will be small, to be generous.
There's the environmental aspect to consider too. This scar on the countryside is going to be over 70 metres wide, that's similar to the width of Wembley Stadium. No problem, say the planners, we'll stick it all in an enormous tunnel. At a cost of £500m. This was additional tunnelling added to the scheme to overcome objections. "The scheme is cheaper with the tunnel" says the DoT (source). OK then, if that's so, why wasn't the tunnel in the plan from Day 1, and why isn't the whole line underground?
Let's put this in perspective. That extra tunnel is costing £190 000 per yard! £5200 per inch! Whichever way you slice it, that's a very expensive tunnel. In addition one would imagine that the preparatory work required to lay track on the floor of a tunnel was similar to laying track on open ground on the surface. If that's true, how exactly is tunnelling cheaper?
I admit I'm getting cynical in my old age, but someone who is willing to throw an additional £500m at a scheme, in order to grease the wheels of the Government approving it, must stand to make a great deal of money from its adoption. More than £500m too.
And all of this to save a handful of people about half an hour on a journey from London to Birmingham? Gimme a break.
Martin
Thursday, January 12, 2012
Guess What? We're Being Swindled!
** I must declare an interest up front - I drive a diesel powered car and I do about 30 000 (non-business) miles a year. I travel 20 miles each way to work every day, so that's around 10 000miles a year just getting to and from work. The rest is mostly maintaining contact with family who are all at least 200 miles from me.
So - the price of diesel in the UK, as I write this, stands at about £1.41 per litre. That's about US$2.18 per litre or US$8.28 per US gallon.
UK petrol prices are around the £1.31 mark making diesel about 10p per litre or 45p per UK gallon dearer than petrol. How does this compare to prices across Europe?
Source
We can see from this data that UK diesel prices are second only in the EU to Italy (by €0.01 per litre) but we have the biggest, by far, additional cost of diesel over petrol. Our diesel is €0.11 per litre more expensive than petrol. Why is this? Well, the obvious answer, you'd think, is taxation. At present, in a litre of diesel, 57.95p is fuel duty, VAT (now 20% of course) of the total price, making taxation on a litre of fuel around the 80% mark.
So, is diesel more heavily taxed than petrol? No. The UK fuel duty for petrol is exactly the same as it is for diesel. So it's not taxation that directly causes the differential.
Well, in that case, diesel must cost more to produce? No. Diesel is actually less heavily refined than petrol.
Ok, it must be demand that's driving up the price of oil then? It's true that there are more diesel cars in the UK now that there was 25 years ago. There are several reasons for this. Modern diesel cars are now faster, more comfortable, less noisey and more efficient than the first passenger diesel cars from 20-ish years ago. Another big impact has been the introduction of the current road tax system based on CO2 emissions. A diesel engine nearly always produces less CO2 than a similarly sized petrol counterpart.
We know that the US uses vast quantities of petrol every day, but diesel cars are rare by European standards in the US, so the ratio of petrol used to diesel used is vastly in favour of petrol.
So who's making all the money on motor fuel then? It certainly is not the retailer. The retailer makes about 5p per litre whether it's diesel or petrol.
By process of elimination then, this leaves us with the big oil companies. We've seen how much of the retail cost is taxation, and how much is for the retailer. The remainder goes to the oil company. Of course they have their costs involved in extraction, refining and delivery, but their global profits are obscene. Sure, banks have played a major role in screwing up the economies of the world but oil companies have not been far behind. Here in the UK, motor fuel prices have gone up from around £1 per litre to now £1.40 per litre, a hike of 30-40%. Fuel duty has gone up by a penny or two in this time but it's a small part of the overall increase.
Some of you will be saying "So what? Fuel's gone up by 30 or 40 pence. Big deal!". Some 80% of our food is transported by road in the UK. This means that the transport costs of that food has also gone up by 30%. The increase in inflation to over 5% has been in large part down to the increase in the price of fuel. Guess what else gets transported by road? Petrol and diesel! It's a vicious circle.
This statement accredited to Brian Madderson, Chairman of BMI Petrol was published on Twitter on Tuesday via the account of a BBC journalist:
So, effectively we aren't refining enough in this country to supply ourselves, so we have to buy it on the "international market". BP, Shell and the other oil companies in this country have been making astronomical sums of money in the UK, yet apparently have not invested enough of this money back into the generation of fuel. Why is this? Who decided to reduce the number of refineries from 19 to 8? Call me cynical.....
In winter the demand for heating oil increases apparently. Well, if we're buying on the international market now, then it's always winter somewhere. Unless perhaps the northern hemisphere uses a lot more heating oil than the southern hemisphere? Really? The argument about heating oil used in the UK might have made sense last winter, when it was one of the coldest winters on record. This winter has been extremely mild and yet the same tired old excuse is being trotted out. Diesel is currently more expensive now than during that cold winter last year.
Madderson also brings up the different level of taxation across Europe. He's right, some countries do tax diesel less than petrol. But think for a second, why is this? Could it be that they realise that the price of diesel is a crucial part of the national infrastructure? That the price of almost everything is related to the price of fuel?
Oh, but the UK finances can't support a huge reduction in fuel duty, the politicians will tell you. Looking back at the graph near the top of this article, let's exclude Greece and Italy as the two countries whose economies are even more broken than ours. Let's look at, say, Luxembourg. They have one of the lowest diesel prices in Europe at €1.20 per litre, €0.07 per litre less than their petrol prices.
Or, let's look at Belgium, Denmark, or Germany. All of these countries have more than a double-digit Euro cent price gap between diesel and petrol. Germany is €0.11 a litre cheaper, Denmark €0.14. Look at The Netherlands - the price of diesel in Holland is a whopping €0.23 per litre cheaper than petrol.
If we're all buying our diesel on the international market, then why are we, the UK, getting a worse deal on diesel than the rest of the EU? And if the actual wholesale price of diesel is the same, are UK consumers getting ripped off? Or is it that successive UK governments are woefully out of step with other EU countries on fuel taxation? If that's the case, how are UK companies meant to compete with the rest of the EU region with higher transportation and inflatory costs?
We are being royally screwed in this country, by the oil companies and a succession of governments (of all colours). Probably both. Why can't we do anything about it.
So - the price of diesel in the UK, as I write this, stands at about £1.41 per litre. That's about US$2.18 per litre or US$8.28 per US gallon.
UK petrol prices are around the £1.31 mark making diesel about 10p per litre or 45p per UK gallon dearer than petrol. How does this compare to prices across Europe?
Source
We can see from this data that UK diesel prices are second only in the EU to Italy (by €0.01 per litre) but we have the biggest, by far, additional cost of diesel over petrol. Our diesel is €0.11 per litre more expensive than petrol. Why is this? Well, the obvious answer, you'd think, is taxation. At present, in a litre of diesel, 57.95p is fuel duty, VAT (now 20% of course) of the total price, making taxation on a litre of fuel around the 80% mark.
So, is diesel more heavily taxed than petrol? No. The UK fuel duty for petrol is exactly the same as it is for diesel. So it's not taxation that directly causes the differential.
Well, in that case, diesel must cost more to produce? No. Diesel is actually less heavily refined than petrol.
Ok, it must be demand that's driving up the price of oil then? It's true that there are more diesel cars in the UK now that there was 25 years ago. There are several reasons for this. Modern diesel cars are now faster, more comfortable, less noisey and more efficient than the first passenger diesel cars from 20-ish years ago. Another big impact has been the introduction of the current road tax system based on CO2 emissions. A diesel engine nearly always produces less CO2 than a similarly sized petrol counterpart.
We know that the US uses vast quantities of petrol every day, but diesel cars are rare by European standards in the US, so the ratio of petrol used to diesel used is vastly in favour of petrol.
So who's making all the money on motor fuel then? It certainly is not the retailer. The retailer makes about 5p per litre whether it's diesel or petrol.
By process of elimination then, this leaves us with the big oil companies. We've seen how much of the retail cost is taxation, and how much is for the retailer. The remainder goes to the oil company. Of course they have their costs involved in extraction, refining and delivery, but their global profits are obscene. Sure, banks have played a major role in screwing up the economies of the world but oil companies have not been far behind. Here in the UK, motor fuel prices have gone up from around £1 per litre to now £1.40 per litre, a hike of 30-40%. Fuel duty has gone up by a penny or two in this time but it's a small part of the overall increase.
Some of you will be saying "So what? Fuel's gone up by 30 or 40 pence. Big deal!". Some 80% of our food is transported by road in the UK. This means that the transport costs of that food has also gone up by 30%. The increase in inflation to over 5% has been in large part down to the increase in the price of fuel. Guess what else gets transported by road? Petrol and diesel! It's a vicious circle.
This statement accredited to Brian Madderson, Chairman of BMI Petrol was published on Twitter on Tuesday via the account of a BBC journalist:
In winter the demand for heating oil increases apparently. Well, if we're buying on the international market now, then it's always winter somewhere. Unless perhaps the northern hemisphere uses a lot more heating oil than the southern hemisphere? Really? The argument about heating oil used in the UK might have made sense last winter, when it was one of the coldest winters on record. This winter has been extremely mild and yet the same tired old excuse is being trotted out. Diesel is currently more expensive now than during that cold winter last year.
Madderson also brings up the different level of taxation across Europe. He's right, some countries do tax diesel less than petrol. But think for a second, why is this? Could it be that they realise that the price of diesel is a crucial part of the national infrastructure? That the price of almost everything is related to the price of fuel?
Oh, but the UK finances can't support a huge reduction in fuel duty, the politicians will tell you. Looking back at the graph near the top of this article, let's exclude Greece and Italy as the two countries whose economies are even more broken than ours. Let's look at, say, Luxembourg. They have one of the lowest diesel prices in Europe at €1.20 per litre, €0.07 per litre less than their petrol prices.
Or, let's look at Belgium, Denmark, or Germany. All of these countries have more than a double-digit Euro cent price gap between diesel and petrol. Germany is €0.11 a litre cheaper, Denmark €0.14. Look at The Netherlands - the price of diesel in Holland is a whopping €0.23 per litre cheaper than petrol.
If we're all buying our diesel on the international market, then why are we, the UK, getting a worse deal on diesel than the rest of the EU? And if the actual wholesale price of diesel is the same, are UK consumers getting ripped off? Or is it that successive UK governments are woefully out of step with other EU countries on fuel taxation? If that's the case, how are UK companies meant to compete with the rest of the EU region with higher transportation and inflatory costs?
We are being royally screwed in this country, by the oil companies and a succession of governments (of all colours). Probably both. Why can't we do anything about it.
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
Are you there, God?
I'm currently reading "God Collar" by Marcus Brigstocke. OK, really I bought it for my wife for Christmas, but she's still reading something else from her book club, so I've nabbed it as I've run out of stuff to read.
It's an honest and endearing read. Given the author, you'd think that this might be an endless attempt to poke humour at all manner of different religions. Yes, there is some of that but in between is some soul searching and intelligent debate. My own opinion on matters such as these appears to be close to Brigstocke's - not convinced that any sort of deity exists but would be greatly relieved and comforted to find that it did. People with faith sometimes show a love of life and enthusiasm for why they are here which I am envious of.
It's an honest and endearing read. Given the author, you'd think that this might be an endless attempt to poke humour at all manner of different religions. Yes, there is some of that but in between is some soul searching and intelligent debate. My own opinion on matters such as these appears to be close to Brigstocke's - not convinced that any sort of deity exists but would be greatly relieved and comforted to find that it did. People with faith sometimes show a love of life and enthusiasm for why they are here which I am envious of.
I haven't finished reading it yet, but I'm enjoying it greatly.
Oh, and if you're tempted to get a copy for yourself or someone else, I'd be much obliged if you would use the link above.
May your God go with you.
Martin
Are you sure about that?
Global warming. Guaranteed to divide opinion more quickly and effectively than almost any other issue. It's been an issue for a few years now and to me it doesn't seem any closer to consensus. There are huge legions of people on either side of the argument, both convinced they are right. It's becoming the new religion of the 21st Century.
Here in England, this winter has been largely mild, even exceptionally so. For a lot of the winter, even here on the Yorkshire coast, it's been around 8C (46F) which is unusually warm. This is the first time in four years (I think) that we've seen no snow here before Christmas.
On BBC Radio 4 this morning (@bbcr4today) there were guests discussing the number of different wild flower species that are already emerging, thinking that winter is over. Unfortunately, sometimes with a discussion such as this, it's clearly telegraphed where the conversation is headed. I waited and sure enough, the "elephant in the room" finally got it's mention. Global Warming. Cue some rather elementary statements about seasonal warming etc. Seems reasonable on the face of it, doesn't it?
The thing is, last winter (2010-11) we had an awful lot of snow, and it was the coldest I can ever remember. I saw -15C (5F) on several occasions and we had snow almost constantly from early December to the middle of January, if not even later. What were we told then? Oh yes, global warming. I am not a scientist, admittedly, but I really am struggling with this. So when it's really, I mean, really cold, that's because of global warming? And when it's really quite mild when it shouldn't be, that's global warming too? Hmmm.......
Now don't misunderstand me - I am not for one minute suggesting that we should abandon Kyoto or other such initiatives. It makes sense to me, no let me rephrase that; it seems obvious to me that we really should limit the amount of noxious substances that we put into the ground, water and air. It quite simply doesn't belong in the atmosphere and if it resulted in something harmful or unusual happening, then we ought not to be terribly surprised.
Having said that, the global climate went through some considerable changes long before the internal combustion engine or indeed any other form of industrialisation. So who's to say that any changes that we see now are anything to do with anything else?
All I'm saying is that I remain unconvinced that the model of global warming we are being sold at present is fully valid. But please stop chucking all that crap into the air.
Martin
Here in England, this winter has been largely mild, even exceptionally so. For a lot of the winter, even here on the Yorkshire coast, it's been around 8C (46F) which is unusually warm. This is the first time in four years (I think) that we've seen no snow here before Christmas.
On BBC Radio 4 this morning (@bbcr4today) there were guests discussing the number of different wild flower species that are already emerging, thinking that winter is over. Unfortunately, sometimes with a discussion such as this, it's clearly telegraphed where the conversation is headed. I waited and sure enough, the "elephant in the room" finally got it's mention. Global Warming. Cue some rather elementary statements about seasonal warming etc. Seems reasonable on the face of it, doesn't it?
The thing is, last winter (2010-11) we had an awful lot of snow, and it was the coldest I can ever remember. I saw -15C (5F) on several occasions and we had snow almost constantly from early December to the middle of January, if not even later. What were we told then? Oh yes, global warming. I am not a scientist, admittedly, but I really am struggling with this. So when it's really, I mean, really cold, that's because of global warming? And when it's really quite mild when it shouldn't be, that's global warming too? Hmmm.......
Now don't misunderstand me - I am not for one minute suggesting that we should abandon Kyoto or other such initiatives. It makes sense to me, no let me rephrase that; it seems obvious to me that we really should limit the amount of noxious substances that we put into the ground, water and air. It quite simply doesn't belong in the atmosphere and if it resulted in something harmful or unusual happening, then we ought not to be terribly surprised.
Having said that, the global climate went through some considerable changes long before the internal combustion engine or indeed any other form of industrialisation. So who's to say that any changes that we see now are anything to do with anything else?
All I'm saying is that I remain unconvinced that the model of global warming we are being sold at present is fully valid. But please stop chucking all that crap into the air.
Martin
Welcome. No, really - welcome!
Hello.
I know what you're thinking. "Oh my dear God. Do we really need another inane blog from some idiot that thinks they can write?"
Well, probably not. But it's either this or sit at home shouting at the telly, and I hear that they lock people up for that. You wouldn't want that now, would you?
I'm hoping that this blog will become a reasonably frequent activity, a view on life from my vantage point in the Yorkshire countryside ("The Sticks"). Sometimes it'll be serious, sometimes it won't be. Sometimes I'll be sarcastic. I know sarcasm is the lowest form of wit, but frankly, it's often the best I can do. You might well agree with some of what I write here, you might not. I will never set out to deliberately offend anyone, however my views might differ from yours, and some people call that "being offended".
Despite it being January as I write this, I promise you that this is not a New Year's Resolution. If it was, I'd have broken it by now. I just like to have an opinion on things, and as much as I like Twitter, sometimes I'd just like to use more than 140 characters. To be honest, I'm envious of people who are fortunate enough to earn a living babbling on about things that they already enjoy. I'd love to be a cricket commentator but my own playing standard wasn't really high enough, and I know nothing about broadcasting. Ho Hum.
So who am I? I'm a father of five children between the ages of 6 and 13. I work full time as a software engineer in the packaging industry, but I've done a few other things in life beside that. I've been a Special Constable, I've done voluntary teaching for people with mental health difficulties, I even helped administer electronic vote counting in the Scottish elections of 2007. I've lived abroad and seen a reasonable amount of the world travelling for work.
This is going to be an interesting year for me. Whisper it, but I'm going to be 40. Join me as I attempt to get some thoughts written down before dementia sets in.
Martin
I know what you're thinking. "Oh my dear God. Do we really need another inane blog from some idiot that thinks they can write?"
Well, probably not. But it's either this or sit at home shouting at the telly, and I hear that they lock people up for that. You wouldn't want that now, would you?
I'm hoping that this blog will become a reasonably frequent activity, a view on life from my vantage point in the Yorkshire countryside ("The Sticks"). Sometimes it'll be serious, sometimes it won't be. Sometimes I'll be sarcastic. I know sarcasm is the lowest form of wit, but frankly, it's often the best I can do. You might well agree with some of what I write here, you might not. I will never set out to deliberately offend anyone, however my views might differ from yours, and some people call that "being offended".
Despite it being January as I write this, I promise you that this is not a New Year's Resolution. If it was, I'd have broken it by now. I just like to have an opinion on things, and as much as I like Twitter, sometimes I'd just like to use more than 140 characters. To be honest, I'm envious of people who are fortunate enough to earn a living babbling on about things that they already enjoy. I'd love to be a cricket commentator but my own playing standard wasn't really high enough, and I know nothing about broadcasting. Ho Hum.
So who am I? I'm a father of five children between the ages of 6 and 13. I work full time as a software engineer in the packaging industry, but I've done a few other things in life beside that. I've been a Special Constable, I've done voluntary teaching for people with mental health difficulties, I even helped administer electronic vote counting in the Scottish elections of 2007. I've lived abroad and seen a reasonable amount of the world travelling for work.
This is going to be an interesting year for me. Whisper it, but I'm going to be 40. Join me as I attempt to get some thoughts written down before dementia sets in.
Martin
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