Staying Safe With Jacqs

THURSDAY, JANUARY 22, 2009

Staying Safe With Jacqs

No longer safe anywhere

According to today's quarterly crime update from the Home Office, "since 1997, crime has fallen by 39% and violent crime reports have decreased by 40%." 

Jacqs adds:

"I welcome the figures which show that overall recorded violent crime is down 6% – more than 15,000 fewer violent crimes."

Hurrah!

Meanwhile back in the real world, another village sub-Post Office has been robbed in broad daylight, and the postmaster badly beaten. The Windsor Express reports:

"A postmaster in Eton Wick has been threatened with a gun, robbed and beaten - in the middle of the day on a busy Saturday afternoon.

Police are appealing for witnesses after a robbery at the sub-post office in Bell Lane, Eton Wick, at 12.20pm on Saturday. Three men burst in and threatened the man in his 50s with an imitation handgun. He was hit in the face and tied up before the men escaped with an undisclosed amount of cash in a waiting car."

As it happens, Tyler knows Eton Wick very well, and knows this Post Office. And he can say for certain that this is the first such outrage the village has ever suffered.

The residents are shocked. They're also angry that a succession of wibbly low-grade hand-wringers like Jacqs have failed to keep them safe.

They're asking "Why can't we bring back proper punishment for scum who do things like this? Why do we let 4 in 10 of them off with a caution? Why don't we have proper prisons? Why do we have to let them out again? Why don't our useless politicians get off their backsides and do something? HTF do we make them listen?"

A good question, and one we've mulled once or twice before.

Yes, of course, there's the issue of cost. But according to the Ministry of Justice the cost of a prison place is "only" £40 grand pa, so we could double the number of places for around £3bn pa - a pittance compared to all the cash the government routinely squanders (plus, the Major's plan for cut-price economy prisons would cut the cost considerably).

The real stumbling block is not cost but wibble. Our political class has somehow convinced itself that its massaged target-distorted goodnews crime stats are right (see this blog and this), and that the villagers of Eton Wick (along with the rest of us) are wrong.

The only bit of good news is that the police apparently reacted to the EW Post Office alarm with lightning speed. Indeed, it's believed they've already caught one of the thugs involved. So on this occasion, well done to the boys and girls in blue.

We will be watching to see what sentences eventually get handed down.

Public Service Broadcasting

Ready to serve

Yesterday we were treated to an endless stream of self-styled "public service" broadcasters telling us why we should pay for even more of them.

Is the BBC anywhere near enough? Is it credible that the BBC's mere hundreds of TV and radio channels can really satisfy the public's boundless need for public service broadcasts? Wouldn't the public be even better served if taxpayers bolstered the £3.5bn pa telly tax with, say, the gift of future spectrum auction proceeds to C4?

In a week when the £6m pa Wossy returns to serve us, the latest "Celebrity" Big Brother is in full swing, and the real world is in melt-down, most of us will have vomited blood at such self-serving whining.

As it happens, last night brought the chance to compare melt-down coverage on the public service BBC with that on Sky.

For Sky we had Jeff Randall Live, a new daily programme that has already become required viewing for anyone seriously interested in business and finance.The programme was packed with informed grown-up discussion, and mercifully light on gimmicks. Randall does not spend his "show" trying to prove how clever he is, and after 30 minutes you've always learned something from his interviewees.

For the BBC we had The City Uncovered with Evan Davis, part 2 of a 3 hour series aiming to explain how we got into our current mess.

Now, we actually quite like Davis, and we have no doubt he could do a good informative programme about the melt-down. But this SHOW is really disappointing. Despite getting interviews with an amazing group of players (from the Nobel laureate fathers of quantitative finance, to the legendary Hank Greenberg, the man who built AIG), its style is shallow and gimmicky, everything pitched at a 20 second attention span, and a soundtrack of intrusive Newsnight-style techno beats*.

Last night Davis spent most of it - and I promise I'm not making this up - clad in tight-fitting leathers astride a big Yamaha, Gay Biker of the Year style. Why? We don't want a personality show about Evan Davis; we want a serious programme and time to understand exactly what the players have to say for themselves.

So there we have it. A lightweight - and by the look of it, expensive - showboat from the tax-funded BBC, vs quality grown-up coverage from the free-market Murdoch.

Take your pick.

And note that Randall's programme is now on Sky News Monday to Thursday at 7.30. Which means that if like us you find half-an-hour of Bishop Snow's evening sermons more than enough, you can now switch over for some serious coverage of the day's events.

(And see here for Randall's views on his time at the BBC. Yes, he's got a big ego too, but I like this bit:

"Randall may have made the leap from print to broadcasting, but it wasn't an easy transition and he admits he had some terrible days at the office, including a live 'two-way' with Huw Edwards on Marks & Spencer. 'Huw asked: "Jeff, what does it mean for shoppers?" I thought: "Well Huw, I'm fucked if I know." I goldfished.'

He clearly hadn't worked out that the BBC business coverage naturally reverts to its consumer news default position).

*Techno note - The Major's not so sure Davis' beats are techno - according to him they may be ambient garage. Like he's a Big Expert. Either way, they are feckin' pants.

PS The BBC's coverage of the Obamafest was everything we'd expected, but it was still hilarious to watch them brushing over the great man's fluffed oath taking and let-down speech. Now just suppose it had been Bush who had blundered like that. Can you imagine how the BBC would have guffawed, and gone on about how it was a terrible start and how the world was now in the hands of an idiot?

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 21, 2009

Knock Knock

This month's scary scaaarrry card statement*

Knock knock.

Who's there?

I M F.

I M F who?

I em efraid we've come to repossess your public services, your pensions, and your standard of living for the next twenty years.

Unfortunately, they won't be joking. In exchange for bailing out Britain, the IMF will demand big cuts in public spending, both now and in the future. They will demand much higher taxes, and an end to living off foreign credit. The righteous and the unrighteous will be squeezed dry. It will be dire.

True, we have been here before - in 1976 under the last Labour government. So maybe you're thinking it wasn't all that bad: we still had food on the table, and we still enjoyed first class entertainment from Red Robbo and the Bee Gees.

But last time through we actually escaped quite lightly. When Callaghan called in the IMF, they provided a £2.3bn loan (just under 2% of GDP) in exchange for a public expenditure cut of 4% in real terms. It felt tough at the time, and the associated public sector pay restraint did end in the Winter of Discontent, with all those unburied corpses in the street. But compared to the howling gales we now face, it was a walk in the park.

Oh, if only we could go back there now.

Back then (1976-77), public sector borrowing was only 6.2% of GDP and falling.This coming year it will be 8-10% and rising.

Back then, public sector debt was only 52% of GDP and falling. This coming year it will be 60-70% and rising (and that's on the fiddled official definition).

Back then, our banking system was not collapsing, and taxpayers had not been forced to guarantee its entire balance sheet. This coming year taxpayers will be supporting bank liabilities equivalent to four times our GDP.

Back then, we had a Prime Minister and a Chancellor who had come to understand - however reluctantly - that the governments cannot simply spend us out of recession. This coming year we will have a PM and poodle who seem to believe they can pretty well spend what they like.

So grim though an IMF bailout would be, as a taxpayer, Tyler is now thinking a return visit may be preferable to the alternative. These clowns have clearly lost the confidence of the markets, yet they still have another 16 months to run. God knows what further damage they'll have done by then.

A year ahead of the 1976 IMF bailout, Wislon's favourite economist wrote to himsecretly, warning that a collapse of market confidence could lead to "possible wholesale domestic liquidation" and "a deep constitutional crisis".

With sterling plummeting, the public finances wrecked, and the printing presses being warmed up, we may be about to find out what he meant.

*Footnote - a quick scan of this month's public finance stats is enough to have you reaching for the Major's gin bottle. All the dials are pointing in the wrong direction, with spending up, revenue down, and borrowing through the roof.

PS So why hasn't Brown nationalised RBS outright? The only coherent explanation we can think of is that he's worried about RBS's huge overseas liabilities. As long as RBS remains nominally a private sector company, Brown could still walk away from its liabilities. That would be very difficult if it was nationalised. Confidence rating? Minus 17.5.