We're Agin' it!

There's a story about the old time minister of religion who, when asked his opinion on sin, replied "I'm agin' it!".

Older readers (not so old actually) will remember when the SNP was agin' Devolution. They said it wouldn't work, and it wasn't what the people wanted. Only after everybody else had worked through the Constitutional Convention for ten years, preparing the ground and grinding out the detail, creating the consensus and writing the bills and laws that enabled Devolution to go ahead, did the Nats deign to come aboard the Devolution train.

Even the YesYes campaign divided the SNP, with some SNP politicians and members campaigning in favour and many not (they were agin' it!). Once everyone else worked to make it a fact, the whole of the SNP accepted it.

Well, now the Parliament in Holyrood is due to get more powers in the Scotland Bill which is getting a 2nd Reading today. And you know what? The SNP is agin' it!

They have tabled a motion that states the new powers are unacceptable.. the Commons Order Paper reads;

SCOTLAND BILL: Second Reading

Angus Robertson Stewart Hosie Pete Wishart Mr Mike Weir Mr Angus Brendan MacNeil Dr Eilidh Whiteford That this House, while recognising the need to further enhance the powers of the Scottish Parliament, nevertheless believes that the measures the Scotland Bill seeks to devolve are inadequate to meet the ambitions of the Scottish Government for the people of Scotland; considers the measures relating to air weapons, road safety and drink driving to be incomplete; regrets that the Calman Commission’s recommendations to devolve the aggregates levy and air passenger duty, and to devolve responsibility for the marine environment to match the Scottish Parliament’s responsibility for fisheries, as well as its proposal for a Scottish role in welfare benefits, have all been abandoned; regards the proposals for the Crown Estates Commission as inadequate; deplores the proposals in the Bill to re-reserve already devolved responsibilities; concludes that the tax varying provisions would embed a long-term deflationary bias in Scotland’s budget and that the proposed borrowing powers remaining subject to HM Treasury controls and limits render them insufficiently flexible; and therefore considers the Bill as a whole to be unacceptable.  For the life of me I cannot understand why we put up with this bunch of chancers. The SNP adds nothing of value to Scottish politics, they oppose everything that anyone else suggests and, when there is actual work to be done, they let other people do it. Even when they get hold of power, as they did in 2007, they manage to achieve virtually none of their main manifesto pledges. They are intellectually and physically lazy and monumentally incompetent. On top of that they blame everybody else, Westminster, Labour, Tories, Lib Dems, for any problem they can't solve (quite a lot of problems in that category BTW). The bet must be that, when this bill passes into law, when others have done the work and laid the foundations, the SNP will be queuing up to use whatever powers it transfers to Holyrood, and criticising any other politician that doesn't meet their "exacting" standards.... They won't be agin' it then.....

More Bad News for Ed?

 Ed Miliband has been the butt of criticism from Conservatises and their press poodles. Too young, lightweight, not up to the job, go the jibes. Not to mention "Wallace and Grommit" (not sure which he's meant to be the eccentric inventor or the genius dog).

But Ed is having, if not the last laught, at least a quiet smile to himself as the ToryDem government ploughs into problem after problem.

An Ipsos/Mori poll for Reuters News Agency has; 

Labour at 43% (up 4), 
Conservatives at 33% (down 5) 
Lib dems at 13%. 

That's a ten point lead for Labour. And, as the poll was conducted before this week's GDP data showed a dramatically shrinking economy, pessimism could now be even worse than shown in the survey's findings.

If this is bad news for a weak leader, I'm sure that Ed would welcome more of the same.....

A Stitch-up in the Sky....

The other big story today is the sacking of Andy Gray from his job as football commentator. Lot's of speculation as to why, and why now?

My analysis, which may not be absolutely correct, but it fits the facts....

Gray sued the NotW, not popular within NewsCorp.

He then made a faux pas just as ole Rupe swaggers into town, under pressure from the phone hacking scandal.

Bad timing. Rupe wants to look tough and clean, needs to find an example, take some action...Gray makes his mistakes at the wrong time...

Too bad. Heaveho Andy

Why did these things leak from Sky? I have seen not one, but three pieces of film and audio. Somebody released it.

Coincidence? mebbes aye mebbes naw.

Am ah right or a meringue?

He told you so

Paul Krugman, Nobel Laureate, published this prediction in the New York Times in October 2010...

Entitled British Fashion Victims, it decried the fleeting fashion for austerity that was so enthusiastically embraced by the UK government and it predicted some dire outcomes.

"The British government’s plan is bold, say the pundits — and so it is. But it boldly goes in exactly the wrong direction. It would cut government employment  ......at a time when the private sector is in no position to provide alternative employment. It would slash spending at a time when private demand isn’t at all ready to take up the slack.

Why is the British government doing this? The real reason has a lot to do with ideology: the Tories are using the deficit as an excuse to downsize the welfare state. But the official rationale is that there is no alternative......

....... Never mind that British debt as a percentage of national income is actually below its historical average; never mind that British interest rates stayed low even as the nation’s budget deficit soared, reflecting the belief of investors that the country can and will get its finances under control. Britain, declared Mr. Osborne, was on the “brink of bankruptcy.”

What happens now? Maybe Britain will get lucky, and something will come along to rescue the economy. But the best guess is that Britain in 2011 will look like Britain in 1931, or the United States in 1937, or Japan in 1997. That is, premature fiscal austerity will lead to a renewed economic slump. As always, those who refuse to learn from the past are doomed to repeat it."

I haven't seen the NYT blogs today, and anyway it's a bit soon for Mr Krugman to have composed a gloating reprise of his October epistle, (indeed I'm sure he's to nice a man to gloat openly), but I would not be the least surprised to find, in the next few hours, some gentle comment from the Nobel laureate to the effect of "I told you so"....

The wrong type of economic snow..

Just saw George Osborne on TV tryng to explain away the 0.5% shrinkage in the economy over the last quarter. If he had mentioned the weather one more time you would begin to believe he was Thomas Shafernacker.....

A few years ago the management of Railtrack had much derision heaped on it when it tried to explain away train delays by claiming that "the wrong type of snow" had fallen...

It's a ridiculous excuse for a rail company, but for the Chancellor to claim the economy shrank because of "the wrong type of snow.."

The mind boggles...

More a warning than a model......

I know that, in the past, the SNP has lobbied for a lower rate of business tax in Scotland "to attract inward investment". I presume that's still their policy: that an independent Scotland would have very low rates of Corporation Tax, and that would bring more Foreign Direct Investment (FDI).

Unfortunately for the SNP, the evidence would seem to be to the contrary. In June 2010 the coalition announced a stepped reduction in UK Corporation Tax from 28% to 24%. This analysis of FDI in London has a few telling points to make, including the info that...

"...60% said the lower tax rate would not change the attractiveness of London as an investment destination, 13% said it would make them more likely to invest, but 22% said it would make them less likely to invest. Therefore a net balance of 9% said lower corporate taxes would make London less attractive to investors!..." (my italics)

"...US and Japan have business tax at 39%. Germany has a 30% rate. The lowest rates are in Iceland (15%) and Ireland (12.5%), which should be more a warning than a model!..." (my italics).

 So the  survey of potential foreign investors has shown that they are less likely now than before the tax cuts to invest in the UK, and those countries that adopted a lower business tax to attract investors (the erstwhile "Arc of Prosperity") are the same countries that are now chin-deep the an economic mire and in danger of defaulting on their debts. Which rather leaves this particular SNP strategy in tatters, don't you think?

BMJ calls NHS changes "mad"

Mark Twain said, expressing the view of many when faced with changing their modus operandus:

"I'm all in favour of progress, it's change I don't like"

The British Medical Journal has an entertaining and trenchant editorial analysis on this theme of Andrew Lansley's NHS changes. In short, they think that Lansley and/or his proposals are "mad".

Under the heading:  Dr Lansley’s Monster

and the sub heading:  Too soon to let it out of the lab

the authors ask: 

"What do you call a government that embarks on the biggest upheaval of the NHS in its 63 year history, at breakneck speed, while simultaneously trying to make unprecedented financial savings?"

Their reply is succenct:

"The politically correct answer has got to be: mad."

I have I say: I agree. Having spent much of my working life in managing change, and knowing that a cultural and organisational change of this magnitude is the most difficult challenge for any management, I know that they will fail, and that there will be serious collateral damage along the way. Changes such as this have to properly handled, planned for and managed carefully through the many sensitive stages of communication, organisation and implementation.

The pity is our old Etonian masters, never having had a real job and having practically no experience of how change is resisted and frustrated in all organisations, have embarked on a monumental change to a huge organisation with no planning, no piloting and no preparation. And, crucially, no mandate.

The BMJ is right: it really is mad.

There's much more from the BMJ in the same vein here