stormymonday_2011

The only equality worth having is equality of opportunity. Those were the details revealed by Alan Milburns Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission back in 2014 ( Milburn is definitely not a Corbynista) Given that privately schooled individuals have disproportionate influence over the way the UK is run you have to ask are they delivering the desired results for society at large in terms of economic success and good governance . By any objective criteria I think the answer to that question is they do not. Therefore the question being posed by the Labour conference is legitimate even if their proposed solutions may not fix the problem.

Surely this article is not from the same BBC that spent the previous 20 years ramping property prices.

This article sums up how brief that ‘window’ was https://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/special-reports/11523196/A-turbulent-history-of-British-pensions-since-1874.html

By 2020 the median age of women in the world will be over 30 and rising. Think about it.

Labour under Corbyn got 40% of the popular vote in 2017 which is 5% more than the 35% of the vote which gave Tony Blair a majority of over 30 in the House of Commons in 2005. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_United_Kingdom_general_election https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_general_election,_2017

Weekly death rates in the UK have been running above the 5 year moving average consistently for a number of years now. That does not suggest we are all going to be living longer no matter what the government claim.

Charming. What have elderly Americans done to you. Reading the ZH article it looks like quite a few of the bankruptcy filers are on the hook for underwriting their kids borrowings, student loans etc

I can see the slogans for the next set of election manifestos "Creating Tomorrow's Slums Today"

Strange how the end consumer rather than the producer is deemed to be the problem here. I dont remember shoppers demonstrating on the streets demanding that items that previously came in glass containers, paper bags, cardboard and grease proof paper be wrapped in layers of plastic often more impenetrable than tank armour.

As always the BBC chose the most extreme example but there is definitely a change in life expectancy trends in the UK It is odd that despite the two World Wars, the 1918 flu pandemic, the Great Depression, widespread absolute poverty and the prevalence of slum housing average life expectancy in the UK rose steadily throughout the 20th century both before and after the introduction of the welfare state and under governments of all political colours be they Lloyd George's Liberals, Baldwin's Conservatives or Attlee's Labour. Now it has ground to a halt in the 21st century when there are no major wars or serious outbreaks of infectious disease. As a consequence there is distinct possibility that on average people born today may not live as long as their parents something that was not the case when the Battle of the Somme or the Battle of Britain were being fought. I don't find any of the pat explanations convincing but clearly something has gone seriously wrong in the UK because few other European countries are showing this trend.

The UK also consumed more of the oil and gas from the North Sea internally rather than exporting it The net surplus that Norway enjoys comes in part from this fact Its exports were worth $15 billion dollars more than those for the UK in 2017 which is quite a large sum for a relatively small country like Norway. Norway is the worlds 11th biggest exporter of oil and gas while the UK is 20th on the list.

The figures on the historical amount of tax raised directly on North Sea production can be found here http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20140508003900/https:/www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/306222/140424_UK_oil_and_gas_document_update_for_publication_in_April_2014.pdf The peak was £12 billion in 1984-85 and during the oil price bubble pre the 2008 financial crash. The yield was significant but nowhere near as huge as most laymen outside of the oil industry assume. The huge extraction costs of operating in the North Sea that could be offset against things like PRT meant it was never going to be the tax bonanza some imagined. In truth the UK government probably raised more tax money on the activities associated with the oil extraction industry (VAT, Income Tax on employment, Corporation Tax) than it did from the oil itself. What is significant about the North Sea now is the fact that the oil companies can still reclaim their decommissioning costs against past tax from the UK government once production has ceased. These are likely to be substantial and a net drain on the Treasury for years to come. As a consequence whatever windfall the UK received in the past is likely to have to be paid back in the future

I see the figure of a 20% tariff on European car imports being bandied about in the press. That will hurt Trade Wars hit everyone but presumably those countries running current account surpluses have most to lose. I am not a fan of Trump's trade policy but the EU does not have clean hands on this issue. The whole concept of the EU membership and Customs Union is that members enjoy trade privileges that outsiders do not so it is explicitly uses protectionism to advance is political and economic agenda. Neither the US or EU policies on trade are not exactly friendly to third world countries in Africa and elsewhere either.

They will be trotting out the Zinoviev letter next. This sort of stuff about Russia has a pedigree so long it can be traced back to the Napoleonic era. Can't MI6 change the record occasionally.

It is the old adage. Your IT Project can be On Time, Cheap, Reliable. Choose two out of three. TSB were clearly more worried about cost and the implementation date than whether it worked properly. That might be fine with a new system with marginal impact on the business. It is an absolutely bonkers strategy with a data and systems migration of this type. No project of this sort should have been implemented without fully tested DR. As for the software I think too much is made about old programming languages etc ( particularly when a lot of new programming languages are actually written in old programming languages under the bonnet). It should be remembers that computerised bank systems have been around for decades and certainly longer than modern internet banking. They used to be so reliable and boring no one noticed them. Now banking IT disasters are regular front page news. So what gives ? How could banks provide generally reliable systems in the era of reel to reel tapes, punch cards but not in the 21at century ? Answers on a post card to the CEO TSB.