Instead of demoralising teachers with his ill-informed comments about what makes a good teacher, Cameron should commit himself to putting proper money and time into training the existing teachers in the system. Instead of paying for the training of a “brazen elite” of graduates, he should improve the wages of all teachers so that we are all treated like an “elite”. His current policy, if implemented, won’t improve the standards of teaching, and will instead further dishearten an already deflated profession. Francis Gilbert, The Guardian.
How did it come to this? I’ve just been called an anarchist in a live radio interview by a woman who works for a company that head-hunts financial high flyers. Why? Was I suggesting that we should abolish all forms of centralised authority? Was I calling for the overthrow of the capitalist system? What exactly had I done to suggest to her that I wanted to tear apart the very fabric of society?
I had told her that I am withholding my tax until the chancellor of the exchequer acts to curb the bonus payments to investment bankers at RBS. “What if everybody did that?” she cried. “We’d have anarchy!”
There isn’t much chance of everybody doing that, given that most people’s tax is taken directly from their wages via PAYE. However, some of us will have recently received a reminder to pay our tax online by the end of the month. I came across mine the day after seeing RBS executive director Stephen Hester smirk as he told a commons select committee that, rather than explain to the public that he was about to pay his staff an estimated £1.5bn in bonuses next month, he’d avoid the ensuing rancour by sloping off on holiday for a long while.
Never mind that RBS posted the worst corporate losses in British financial history last year. He’s had his empty coffers replenished with taxpayers’ money and now he’s going to fill his boots. Watching Hester’s “let them eat cake” moment on TV, I felt both outraged and at the same time powerless.
Outraged because we’d spent the week being softened up for painful public service cuts by both the government and opposition and powerless because I knew that neither party has the will to do anything about excessive bonus culture.
Googling RBS, I found that, as part of the loan they took from the government, the chancellor has the right to veto the bank’s bonus payments. That loan made us all shareholders in RBS. By rights, that veto belongs to us. So I wrote to Alistair Darling telling him that I would be withholding my taxes on 31 January unless he used our veto to limit the RBS bonuses.
What if everybody did this? Perhaps some form of anarchy would ensue. But if we are going to bring “what ifs” into the debate, then what if we lived in a society that heaped financial rewards on teachers and nurses and soldiers rather than bankers? What if we had a financial system that encouraged fairness rather than greed? Too utopian for you? Well how about this: what if we had a political party capable of winning power at the next election? Billy Bragg, The Guardian.
Satan’s terms and conditions must have got worse in recent times. America’s most prominent TV evangelist, Pat Robertson, announced that the Haiti earthquake was a result of a “pact with the Devil”, made when they overthrew slavery 200 years ago. But in the old days a pact with the Devil brought you a life of fame and riches and earthly pleasures. Now you get a few years of life in the world’s poorest country and then buried under a pile of rubble.
…
Maybe someone should consult an expert on theology, but I’d say there’s a chance that if the Devil’s still doing pacts, there’ll be something way off the Richter scale soon passing right under Wall Street. Mark Steele.
Steven Major, HSBC’s global strategist on sovereign debt, believes the rating agencies and the markets are systematically under-valuing Britain’s debt.
“The chances of Britain defaulting are zero. Yet the only thing a rating measures is that chance. There will not be a downgrade,” he says.
He believes the methodologies of the agencies are open to question. Above all with Britain, he believes, a “true sovereign” country can tax, print money or devalue its currency to avoid default.
While this poses risks to some investors, above all the roughly 36% of UK gilt holders who are based abroad, it is not the same risk as that measured by the agencies. Paul Mason, The BBC.
‘Is it fair that a wife abandoned by her husband loses her marriage bonus, while he takes it with him to marry for the second or third time?” I asked David Cameron at a press conference last week. Uncharacteristically he muttered rather crossly that the “details” had yet to be worked out. PollyToynbee, The Guardian.
The move, of course, places a major question on Gordon Brown’s table. By comparison the Banking Bill going through parliament is not so far-reaching. But you’ve got now Mervyn King and potentially Adair Turner pushing at the edges for a more decisive solution to the “too big to fail” problem. And the Conservatives and Libdems. Plus serious, non-ideological voices in the economics community, like former IMF man Simon Johnson.
Wierdly, after 18 months of the most minimal and timorous reform moves, we now not only have a bonus tax here, a levy in America, but suddenly the philosophical outline of a Glass-Steagall type solution coming out of Washington and the Tobin Tax on the table in Europe
And none of it was pushed by activist groups or mass demonstrations: it’s arisen out of the simple realisation that the capital cushion idea is not going to stop another boom-bust cycle on its own; and that cycle has already begun; and if another bust happens there is no ammo left in the clip. And that populations and electorates are going to be, mad as hell and are probably not going to take it anymore.
In the face of this the state, and politicians have quite simply decided that the banks will have to be restructured and finance made to pay for the risk free business environment it enjoys. The main political debate now will be about how you make this happen. Paul Mason, The BBC.
