The Climate Change Act is a mind-bogglingly stupidity but what is worse the government’s Climate Change Committee is in the hands of an extreme doctrinaire socialist whose track record is mind-bogglingly awful - failure after failure after failure. He first sprung into public notice as quite the most disastrous chairman the CBI has boasted for very many years. After that he migrated under Gordon Brown’s patronage to become chairman of the Financial Services Authority tasked with supervising the banks. In this he was - as we can all see with our own eyes - a total failure. So much so that the Tories would scrap that supervisory role of the FSA and return it to the Bank of England.
But before he goes he is making trouble not just for The City which he detests - it’s mutual! - but for Britain’s leading role in world finance in cahoots with the french and Germans who are determined to wrest London’s leading role from it. See my “Turner is hardly the man fit to advise” sent 28 August 2009
But this should be causing outrage here. The whole of investment banking is to raise “RISK capital” (That’s what it’s called!] The City has been superb at doing that but there’s no place for the entrepreneur in this regime so as a nation we will go bust knowing that nobody is taking any risks, or building anything or innovating. As I was told when still at school by a successful company director who was teaching me poker and winning “If you don’t speculate, you can’t accumulate”
What’s the matter about the British public. They are more interested in getting revenge on the bankers for the failure of Brown’s stewardship than in rebuilding a competitive and dynamic economy, So will Britain will have no future at all, taking no risks and just being 2nd class with the X-Factor as our great achievement - and that merely second-hand.
And today, to complete the madness the Archbishop of Canterbury says a bucket full of daft things on economics on which he is totally ignorant.
But Boris Johnson has - in his own individual way got it right. See separate posting!
Christina
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SUNDAY TELEGRAPH 13.11.09
The staggering cost of crazed quangocrats
The Climate Change Act will present us all with a bill of mind-boggling proportions, says Christopher Booker.
It is almost exactly a year since Parliament all but unanimously approved by far the most expensive piece of legislation ever put before it. The Climate Change Act, according to our Climate Change Secretary, Ed Miliband, is due to cost us all £404bn, or £18bn every year until 2050, to reduce our carbon emissions by well over 80 per cent. Just what this will mean in practice we have lately been hearing from that galaxy of quangocrats who have clustered round the new Act like wasps round a honeypot.
Lord (Adair) Turner, chairman of the Government's Climate Change Committee (also chairman of the Financial Services Authority), tells us that we will all have to spend between £10,000 and £15,000 on making "a whole house approach to carbon efficiency". He also proposes that a "carbon tax" of £3,300 should be imposed on every new car, an idea coming from the Green Fiscal Commission, chaired by the former green activist Robert Napier, who is also chairman of the Met Office, one of the leading promoters of the global warming scare.
Then there is Lord (Chris) Smith, former culture secretary, now chairman of the Advertising Standards Authority and of the Environment Agency, who looks forward to wind turbines "all over the countryside" and wants us all to be issued with our own "personal carbon allowances". We would each, in effect, have a CO2 ration book, to be used every time we pay for petrol, an electricity bill or an airline ticket. When we exceed our allowance we shall then have to buy carbon credits from those who don't drive cars or fly off on holiday to the sun.
Mr Miliband also tells us that we shall have to spend £9.5 billion through our electricity bills to pay for the CO2 from coal-fired power stations to be piped away and buried in holes in the ground (even though the technology to do this hasn't yet been properly developed). Not to mention the further £100bn we shall all have to pay, according to Gordon Brown, for his dream of building 7,000 new wind turbines.
Even if these could all be built (which in practical terms is out of the question), these machines would still only generate little more electricity on average than the single giant coal-fired power station at Drax. But then we shall never again be allowed to build one of those because Mr Miliband will not allow it unless it is fitted with the technology that doesn't yet exist.
All in all, it would be much easier to admit that the belief in manmade global warming arose just through a very unfortunate scientific blunder, and to redeploy all these crazed quangocrats in jobs where they can do us no more harm.
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TELEGRAPH 16.11.09
Bankers warn laws on pay and bonuses will scare off talent
Britain's bankers have warned that tough new laws on pay and bonuses to be announced in Parliament this week could trigger an exodus of talented professionals and stifle economic growth.
By Angela Monaghan
The British Bankers' Association (BBA) said the Financial Services Bill – which would require regulators to tear up existing contracts if pay packages were deemed to encourage excessive risk-taking – would threaten the UK's prominence as a global financial centre.
"British banking is a global business and many of our banks operate outside the UK. Moves to bind how our banks operate overseas could put the industry at a serious disadvantage and also discourage global banks from coming to the UK. This would be a major problem for the economy as well as bad for business," said Angela Knight, chief executive of the BBA.
"What we need to see is the preservation of high-quality talent and international banks operating here. The Chancellor has to have that competition focus fully in his sights," she said.
She said that no other country had plans for such legislation, which is to be outlined in the Queen's Speech on Wednesday, and added that if international banks opted to leave the country they would take jobs and gross domestic product with them.
However, Lord Myners, the City minister, said bankers who were willing to take excessive risks and threaten the British economy were not welcome. He said: "It might drive out people involved in excessively risky activities, [Investment in anything worthwhile doing is riskly. It’s getting most of those risks right which matters. London WAS the best in the world at it. -cs] but we don't want reckless people here.
"It is very important that we have a viable and profitable, but also a stable, secure and de-risked financial centre [= run by people who can’t run businesses -cs] . We're trying to make sure we have a responsible framework so that the taxpayer will never again have to step in." [The do what’s need ;et the capitalists take the risks and the rewards and split the banks so that depositors deal with regukated tetail banks, That’s the solution and the governor of the bank of England wants it So DO IT! -cs]
It is understood that banks based outside Britain and within the EU, but with UK subsidiaries, will not be subject to the rules because they are not regulated by the FSA. [Can you credit that nonsense! ? -cs]
The Conservatives said the plans for the bill were about little more than "headline-chasing". Philip Hammond, the shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, said: "The public will be asking what this means for the bonuses that are due to be paid this Christmas – and the answer is nothing at all. When we announced plans to stop significant cash bonuses being paid this year the Government was quick to criticise before eventually agreeing with us. It is clear that Labour prefers to talk about laws that would only be effective after a general election."
The new rules would be imposed next year, if the Bill completes its passage through Parliament by the next general election, which must be held by June 3. Lord Myners said he was confident the Bill would be passed in time.
Vince Cable, the Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesman, said he did not see the need for new legislation because the FSA already had considerable powers. He said bankers paid more than £200,000 should have to make a full disclosure. [To whom? -cs]
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[ALL via the socialistic Turner-led FSA -cs]
What to expect from the Bill
• FSA to be given power to tear up existing contracts if pay packages incentivise risk
• Consumers will be allowed to launch class action suits
• Banks to be brought to account when FSA receives a group of similar complaints about mis-selling
• A ban on unrequested credit card cheques
• The FSA to establish a consumer education agency
• A new Council of Financial Stability
• An advice service to give consumers direct help
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