Skip to main content

New Year- same old, same old

Although I was back in the office yesterday, it was something of a quiet day- few people around. As I arrived at my local tube station the joy of the latest tube fare increases was fully apparent: a zone one journey has gone from an extortionate £3 to an eye popping £4- a 33% increase. As usual Ken "sobersides" Livingstone came out with some tosh to justify this disgraceful state of affairs. London tube fares are not just higher than any other major city in the world- they are a multiple of the fares in any other major city in the world. This, together with the near doubling of bus fares and the likely further increase in the congestion charge beyond £8 a day, is just another example of the punishment that the incompetent administration in City Hall visits upon Londoners. I might feel less aggrieved, were it not for the constant drip of Mayoral propaganda on posters across the tube network: the latest being an anti-nuclear poster campaign. Frankly, the cost/benefits of nuclear power stations may not be quite what Greenpeace suggests, and I resent my money being spent on simplistic propaganda based on questionable science.

Mind you, this morning my good humour was slightly restored by the comedy act that is Migration Watch. Having claimed that the benefits of immigration were actually only 4p per citizen, the very next item on the Today Programme was about the elementary mistakes that job seekers make on their applications. Such things as poor grammar, including misspelling "Curriculum Vitae" were amongst the most basic errors. Migration Watch would prefer to impose further costs on British business by forcing them to pay for training, in order to fill skill shortages and thus eliminate the need for immigration. The fact that this would erode British competitiveness to the point that British firms would leave the UK in greater numbers does not seem to have occurred to these Daily Mail reading bigots. Immigration keeps jobs and taxes in the UK. Without it, the jobs would move to where more skilled and more disciplined workers actually live: the quality of the native British labour force is simply uncompetitive as it stands. The 4p number is as spurious as most of the other Migration Watch statistics. Still- it did allow me a chuckle as I emerged from the shower.
Labels:

Comments

chris said…
Even with their dodgy statistics Migration Watch still had to admit immigration was a good thing! I bet that the real result is a much greater benefit to those already here, even if you don't count (like they didn't) the benefit to to immigrants themselves which are even higher still.
11:40 am
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Concert and Blues

Tallinn is full tonight... Big concerts on at the Song field The Weeknd and Bonnie Tyler (!). The place is buzzing and some sixty thousand concert goers have booked every bed for thirty miles around Tallinn. It should be a busy high summer, but it isn´t. Tourism is down sharply overall. Only 70 cruise ships calling this season, versus over 300 before Ukraine. Since no one goes to St Pete, demand has fallen, and of course people think that Estonia is not safe. We are tired. The economy is still under big pressure, and the fall of tourism is a significant part of that. The credit rating for Estonia has been downgraded as the government struggles with spending. The summer has been a little gloomy, and soon the long and slow autumn will drift into the dark of the year. Yesterday I met with more refugees: the usual horrible stories, the usual tears. I try to make myself immune, but I can´t. These people are wounded in spirit, carrying their grief in a terrible cradling. I try to project hop
Post a Comment
Read more

KamiKwasi brings an end to the illusion of Tory economic competence

After a long time, Politics seems to be getting interesting again, so I thought it might be time to restart my blog. With regard to this weeks mini budget, as with all budgets, there are two aspects: the economic and the political. The economic rationale for this package is questionable at best. The problems of the UK economy are structural. Productivity and investment are weak, infrastructure is under-invested and decaying. Small businesses are going to the wall and despite entrepreneurship being relatively strong in Britain, self-employment is increasingly unattractive. Red tape since Brexit has led to a significant fall in exports and the damage has been disproportionately on small businesses. Literally none of these problems are being addressed by this package. Even if the package were to stimulate some kind of short term consumption-led growth boom, this is unlikely to be sustainable, not least because what is being added on the fiscal side will be need to be offset, to a great de
Post a Comment
Read more

Media misdirection

In the small print of the UK budget we find that the Chancellor of the Exchequer (the British Finance Minister) has allocated a further 15 billion Pounds to the funding for the UK track and trace system. This means that the cost of the UK´s track and trace system is now 37 billion Pounds.  That is approximately €43 billion or US$51 billion, which is to say that it is amount of money greater than the national GDP of over 110 countries, or if you prefer, it is roughly the same number as the combined GDP of the 34 smallest economies of the planet.  As at December 2020, 70% of the contracts for the track and trace system were awarded by the Conservative government without a competitive tender being made . The program is overseen by Dido Harding , who is not only a Conservative Life Peer, but the wife of a Conservative MP, John Penrose, and a contemporary of David Cameron and Boris Johnson at Oxford. Many of these untendered contracts have been given to companies that seem to have no notewo
Post a Comment
Read more