The single important ...

..quality the non-dom should expect to pay for, and it's not our NHS or social security safety ...

Alice Thomson writes in today's Times ...

The Chancellor must scrap their bizarre hereditary status, then make them pay fair taxes ...

...They are our guests. We should be flattered that they have chosen to live here rather than anywhere else in the world. They tend to use private schools and private GPs. They employ nannies, chauffeurs and endless builders as they convert their basements into swimming pools. They buy £500 Laboutin shoes — think of the VAT on those — and they give employment to our bright graduates as tutors to their children. Britain’s 200,000 non-doms are an asset to our country.

.............................

These aren’t people who will flounder if the Government toughens up the rules. The Treasury should look to America, where above the entrance to the US Internal Revenue Service in Washington are Oliver Wendell Holmes’s words: “Taxes are what we pay for civilised society.” The wealthy come to Britain because it is civilised. They need to pay to keep it that way. 

... it's not the swimming pools or preference for Laboutin shoes that interests me, it is those that claim the non-dom status fail to pay the piper in full, the £30,000 a year (rising to £50,000) entrance fee to the UK fails to account for the sacrifices that the peoples of the UK have made, made so that it is possible for this relatively small group of people can enjoy democracy without the Mafia, either Italian or Russian, democracy needs paying for ....

... by all, including the Non-dom.

... in full.

... (update) every German should read ...

... the Times Sam Fleming: Economic view ...  Published at 12:01AM, June 4 2012 

Hank Paulson, the former US Treasury Secretary, got down on bended knee to plead with congressional leaders to prop up America’s banking system in 2008. His Democrat successor Tim Geithner is not the type for such flamboyant gestures, but last week there was mounting desperation in the Obama Administration as it urged Europe to summon up the political will to save its single currency.

Only five months before the American presidential election, economic frost is spreading its fingers across the globe. Weak hiring figures in the United States, poor factory data in China and dismal production numbers in Britain were merely three snapshots from what might be turning into a synchronised global economic downturn.

The bickering and dithering in the eurozone are playing key roles.  Lars H. Thunell, chief of the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation, told me last week that the malign influence of the euro crisis was being felt in Africa and Latin America. European banks are curbing the provision of trade finance and cross-border lending as they prepare for further turmoil at home.

Last week’s evidence of accelerating capital flight from Spain raised the stakes dramatically. In Athens a gaggle of feckless politicians are openly toying with Euro exit, in the full knowledge that their tiny country could destabilise not only Europe but also the world economy.

It will not take much, it seems, to persuade increasing numbers of savers in Spain to decide that if Greece is heading for the exit, it would be rational for them to move their euros out of their own country, too.  As we saw with Northern Rock, once bank runs start they have a terrifying momentum. If Spain suffers a full-blown banking collapse, things will move into fast-forward mode. Italy will not be far behind. The Euro could begin to unravel quickly, in an event with far more momentous consequences than the Lehman crash of 2008.

At that point, a new Great Depression could be on the cards, according to one former central banker. A full-blown collapse of the Euro might well be welcomed by Tory backbenchers as vindication of their well-founded suspicions of European federalists, but it is of little use critiquing a skyscraper’s girders when it is collapsing with you in it.

After more than two years of failed summits, the region’s leaders are well aware that they are entering the last chance saloon. Eurocrats are working towards the European Council summit on June 27-28, pitching it as the decisive moment. In Brussels, plans are afoot to put forward what is being called EMU-Two — a radical reboot of the single currency project.

Critically, this will begin to pave the way to a banking union, one of the glaring pieces of unfinished business that has left the Euro so dangerously ill-formed. The elements include a European facility to recapitalise banks, a bank resolution regime, integrated regulation and a Europe-wide deposit guarantee scheme. Notably, this plan is likely to exclude Europe’s financial capital, the City of London, even though it is the home of the region’s bank regulator.

The trouble is, of course, that a month is a long time in a financial crisis. Before the summit we have the twin hurdles of the Greek and French elections on June 17. The latter is no less significant than the former. If President Hollande is confronted by a badly fractured National Assembly, with the extreme Left and Right heavily represented, it will be even more difficult for him to drive through the economic reforms that France needs so badly.

And Germany is deadly earnest when it says it will not hand over its credit card to France, Italy and the rest without strict curbs on how the money is spent. France is going to have to venture a huge surrender of sovereignty as a precondition to fiscal burden-sharing initiatives such as eurobonds. Selling this to the French public will be an historic feat, even for a committed Europhile such as Mr Hollande.

More imminently, Europe faces the threat of accelerating flight from the periphery banking system. Spain urgently needs to be convinced to accept a European bailout of its banks, given that the cost is too much for Madrid alone to bear. It is a measure of the gravity of the situation that policy-makers are talking about capital controls and bank holidays in periphery nations as a way of stemming any full-blown bank runs.

European ministers may have to stand together and make a blanket declaration that they will keep depositors’ money safe, given that a deposit insurance scheme will take a long time to set up. Whether Europe’s citizens would find this convincing is anyone’s guess.

We stand on the brink of a new, 2008-style financial disaster. As Mario Draghi, the European Central Bank president, told the European Parliament last week, it is up to Europe’s politicians to fill the vacuum at the heart of the single currency. With a chill descending on the world economy and the panic in the periphery escalating, the fear is that they have left it too late.

 ... and consider a very bleak future of Germany hog-tied by the ne'er-do-wel of Europe, those who will hang onto the heels of Germany at work.

Update ...

HSBC is testing its cash machines in Greece to ensure that they can cope with a return to the drachma, if the country pulls out of the Euro. Britain’s biggest bank is taking the precaution because of concern that Greece could pull out of the 17-nation currency bloc amid political chaos. HSBC is understood to have conducted tests on the machines to establish whether they could be adapted to disgorge banknotes of a different size and texture.  

... a warning if ever there was !

Update ........ Britain’s balance is shifting towards ....

... the South and East. The City now gets what it wants, or Stay or go, Scotland’s power is on the wane ... thus wrote William Rees-mogg (The Times 20 Jan 2012), read it in full here £.

For those without a subscription, the former Editor of The Times (1967 to 1981) sums up by writing :

Power in Britain is moving south and east, not north and west. The independence of Scotland is a secondary element in a shift that is already under way. One should not mention it, but the embarrassing fact is that Boris, rather than Alex, is the future. As far as the English are concerned, Scotland is a country that is completely free to make its own choice between independence or sticking with the good old UK. Power is going to London, which makes the money, not to Scotland, which spends it.

........... no doubt he thinks the same of Wales, should we be telling our children to follow Dick Whittington and go east to London town in search of a future ?


Update Groundskeeper Willie wrote in response to a Scottish blog conversation ...

January 2012 19:28 EyeEdinburgh said ... 'a referendum that has a clear democratic mandate.' The turnout was 50%. Of that 45% voted SNP. The SNP manifesto didn't mention a two question referendu. It didn't mention changing the voting rules to include 16 and 17 year olds. The SNP's mandate, such as it is, is to have a one question referendum, for adults. No one would object to that. No one other than the SNP. They know they would lose such a referendum and Salmond knows he'll be left high and dry, like a beached whale, with no hope of seeing independence in his lifetime.

Interesting times we live in ............

Wales through the eyes of the Times ...

...journalist Giles Coren :

God, I love Wales. And I love the Welsh. They are so much more mellow, more at peace with themselves and with the world, than the people of this United Kingdom’s other smaller nations. They’re not all up in your face with their tedious folklore and nationalist yearnings and the anti-imperial truisms of long, fighty memory. They’re not all wiry and shouty and drunk and thinking they invented poetry. They just chill their boots in their gorgeous country, and speak to each other in the lilting calypso of their magical language – no doubt about what terrible bastards the rest of us are – and sing their songs and eat their wonderful food and look out at the sea. 

  ... yesterday 19 Nov 2011, he obviously missed the ten percent that would float Wales off into the Irish sea, fortunately for the reputation of the peoples of Wales.

Power and Responsibility, those ...

... attributes we naively thought the great and the good would exercise on our behalf as a norm with its excesses only appearing rarely, how wrong we have been.

As a subscriber to The Times and The Sunday Times, paper and on-line, I have helped finance through News International Newspapers Limited some of the excesses of public life being debated in the media around the world.  As Matthew Paris wrote in today's Times ...

Please don't protest: "I didna ken." C'mon reader, ye ken ...

1. prison officers complicit in the supply of drugs ...
2. banks or energy suppliers. ... cartels, robbing their customers.
3.  Many sporting records that still stand ... have been fuelled by performance-enhancing drugs
4. Insider trading. It’s absolutely endemic
5. The stock exchange has all but lost its original purpose — the financing of new business...
6. Insurance has become an almighty racket, ... citizens parted from billions by the unscrupulous sale ...
7. The policing of the criminal law is riddled with corruption.
8. This goes for the Crown Prosecution Service too.
9. The easing of credit ... that will strangle (us) them when interest rates rise.
10. Dentistry and the NHS ... Where’s the market?
11. The way that British ministers and mandarins ... to take up positions on the boards of companies in the fields that they have until recently supervised is an absolute disgrace. We’re not talking shades of grey here. It’s outrageous.
12. So is the “government-relations” lobbying industry.
13. The social services departments of local authorities are an incompetent and occasionally vicious element in public administration, particularly as regards child protection.
14. The way children get allocated to state schools is indefensible, and a huge anxiety to parents.
15. The public sector is chronically incapable even of understanding, let alone managing, large IT projects; and private sector contractors are guilty of daylight robbery.
16. When all is told there will have been some shocking war crimes in Afghanistan
17. Euro-MPs’ expenses. Enough said.
18. EU budgeting. Enough said.
19. Lawyers. That the practice of law in England has for centuries been a stitch-up to enrich a professional monopoly
20. August will be unusually dry or wet.

... there is a perfect storm coming, and now is the best time for that storm when money is tight, when the people who will always pick up the tab have nothing else to lose, when politics and politicians will be held to account for the excesses, because Power and Responsibility rests with "Parliaments" ... and with those people who manage the organisations we do business with, every aspect of the business from employee welfare to customer satisfaction.

I discovered recently that parliament is a collective noun for a group of owls or rooks, wise owls or noisy rooks I wonder.

Carwyn Jones and the Welsh Assembly Government would do well to keep their heads down for some of the debris caused by this perfect storm in waiting could very well be coming our way.


... the thunderer reminds us that ".. you must own your mistakes, or your mistakes will own you", Bethan Jenkins might like to take that little ditty on board.