More mindlessness

The Telegraph reports that the Government is to give its consent to a new European Directive which allows agency workers - temps - the same rights and benefits as others.

While one side of the Government (Gideon 'George' Osborne) assures us that there will be measures in favour of jobs and reducing regulation, the other side (John 'Vince' Cable) comes up with this idiocy. In the midst of an awful recession and rising unemployment the Government proposes to increase the costs of employing people. We can almost forgive the unelected bureaucrats in Brussels who came up with this idea, because they don't have to live in the real world. But the elected government of the UK does have to live in the real world and they have completely lost it.

The truth of the matter is that Mr Cameron's unelected and anti-democratic coalition has to say yes to everything European, however mindless, just to keep the likes of Mr Cable on board. The workers and the unemployed can go hang.

Politicians: the self-importance index

What do we think of our politicians? How bad? Hmm, as bad as that, eh?

Of coure some politicians are clearly mad, some are living in the 1950s or '60s but for the rest we should strive towards a system of evaluation. 'By their fruits ye shall know them' ran the Sermon on the Mount but I'm not sure it referred to politicians, most of whom achieve so little that there are no..er..fruits.

One way I favour is to make a measurement of a politician's perceived sense of his own importance relative to his actual importance. It is in the nature of politicians that this ratio should be high, but surely no one has a higher self-importance index than John 'Vince' Cable.

Cable is all over today's papers saying tht if he is pushed too far he could resign and bring the Government down. I have two problems with this: first, it is far from clear that his resignation would bring the Government down; his colleagues are getting too much pleasure from their ministerial cars and salaries to want to hand it all in on account of some diva's complaint from the Business Department.

Second, it is not clear to whom the threat is directed: if he were to cause an immediate election his party, the Liberal Democrats would be annihilated.

'Let your light so shine before men' says the Sermon, 'that they may see your good works'. But it also says that it's the meek that's going to inherit the earth.

Signs of the times (374)

Ian Dale reports that two convicted murderers in America, Edmund Zagorski and Ralph Baze, were seeking a judicial review of Business Secretary Vince Cable's granting of an export licence for sodium thiopental, a drug used in executions.

Expensive business, a judicial review. How are they paying the lawyers? Easy: we grant them legal aid. The taxpayer pays for the foreign murderers and for the defence of the politician.

How could we make a saving here?

Vince Cable

I have just been listening to the conference speech of John 'Vince' Cable and have been left with the impression that the Tories have got into bed with some very strange people indeed.

Perhaps I could just say something about bank bonuses. Britain had, essentially, four large banks. Two of them, Lloyds and Natwest, have been bailed out by the taxpayer while the other two, HSBC and Barclays, have not.The government has no business telling the independent banks what to pay their staff, so if there are two jobs for a dealer and Barclays is offering £1 million whereas Natwest is constrained to offer £25,000 plus luncheon vouchers, it is pretty obvious where the talented staff are going to go. But we need talented staff in these temporarily nationalised banks to make top profits to improve the valuation of the bank to let us get our money back.

There is public concern at bankers but it is being misdirected. The recession didn't happen because of bankers' bonuses and Vince Cable knows it. The dealers (these are the people who get the big bonuses)were encouraged by the senior management to take risks. Why? Because Gordon Brown had made money too loose, interest rates too low. The banks were over-leveraged. Why, you might ask, didn't the Bank of England have a quiet word with some of them, as it has always done in the past, and just warn them to behave rationally? Because Gordon Brown took the job away from the Bank of England and gave it to some other people who didn't have a clue what they were doing.

Lastly it would have been easy to make the banks ringfence the capital of their traditional businesses (the bits you and I see) and when what Cable regards as the casino bit got into trouble we could have let them go under. Simples.

It is no good Cable railing that capitalism is sometimes horrid. It is, but it has made us rich.

UK Elections 9: Saint Vince

The Liberal Democrats are doing fairly well in the polls at the moment, in particular in the marginal constituencies. In my view this is largely as a result of John ‘Vince’ Cable, the treasury spokesman.

Formerly an adviser to Labour Party chief John Smith, Cable stood for the Labour Party unsuccessfully in Glasgow Hillhead in 1970. He joined the Social Democratic Party when it spun away from Labour in the 1980s and the Liberal Democrats when the SDP merged with the Liberal Party in 1988.

Cable is a likeable man and made a name for himself when as stand-in leader he accused Gordon Brown of moving rapidly ‘from Stalin to Mr. Bean’.

Cable seems to run a remarkable spin operation, with many people believing that he, and he alone, forecast the financial crisis. What in fact he did do was to warn, in 2003, that consumer debt was too easy in Britain, and that it was secured on unsustainably high house prices. Many others did, too, notably the Conservative Party. Cable was right, but it was no great shakes. He could have read it in the newspapers. Cable did not go so far as to advise higher interest rates. Gordon Brown was keeping interest rates low – even changing the definition of inflation to stop the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England from raising them – to keep house prices rising and everybody happy.

At the same time Cable was urging the Government to join the euro, which he has now admitted was not sensible advice: ‘there are various things that we have learnt about euroland, and about the eurozone, which are clearly problems that need to be resolved.' Many of us had been saying it was a disastrous policy but 'Vince' wouldn't listen.

Cable’s spin operation went wrong recently when he let it be known that he had been briefed by the Treasury as a possible future chancellor and that he was ‘ready to serve’ (a phrase drawn, I think, from Paris Hilton’s unsuccessful and brief campaign to be President: I'm ready to, like, serve). The Treasury fed out to the media that the meeting had been at his request and that they had not been briefing a future chancellor.

As regards the rest of the recession Cable has admitted in his book that he had no idea what was going on in America. In fact he hadn't come close to what was happening.

For me, as I have said before, the writing does not go all the way through. Cable is a help to his party because he gives them credibility by looking like some sort of sage. Both Labour and the Tories need to find him out, which in my view shouldn’t be difficult.