http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-34612421
I wonder if scruff bag Corbinski will dust of Foots old Donkey Jacket for the occasion?
By: Beermat - 31st October 2015 at 23:00
While we prefer a liar in a suit to an honest man in a jumper to be our leader, while facial hair is of political relevance, regardless of left or right we can expect no better.
By: silver fox - 30th October 2015 at 21:10
In terms of the fabled “big picture”, Thatcher’s decision to deregulate the city lead directly to the financial melt down in western economies (something I believe one of her cabinet secretaries said).
But…if we must talk about selling things off……
What about :
Our Post Office
Our Gas
Our Electricity
Our Water
Our Rail
Need I go on ?
Great decisions ……. not…….
Just watch the Autumn statement for Osborne to announce another “fire” sale of national assets, the Tories have sold/gifted practically everything they possibly can, dedicated to buying in as much as possible in preference to British or British based companies, what happens when Osborne runs out of things to sell? does someone then turn up and repossess the country?
By: Tony - 30th October 2015 at 19:04
Tony sans T
Phew ! I’m re-assured.
So am I! (I doubled checked!).
By: John Green - 30th October 2015 at 18:56
Tony sans T
Phew ! I’m re-assured.
By: Tony - 30th October 2015 at 18:51
Tony,
You appear to have been truncated/cut off in your prime/abbreviated/less than your former self/a diminished person – if you get my drift.
I am seriously worried. Why are you now Tony and not TonyT ? Perhaps you are not one and the same person ?
I sense the onset of a campaign: “Bring back TonyT”, “TonyT is nearly innocent,” etc.
I think we should be told.
Hello John,
Just to reassure you I definitely (last time I checked ;-)) haven’t been cut off in any way! It’s always been just Tony without the T….
I am sure the wholly innocent TonyT is still around somewhere and will be back soon!
Perhaps he hasn’t had a chance to post for a while….I know I can go months without posting if really tied up…; -)
By: John Green - 30th October 2015 at 18:35
Tony,
You appear to have been truncated/cut off in your prime/abbreviated/less than your former self/a diminished person – if you get my drift.
I am seriously worried. Why are you now Tony and not TonyT ? Perhaps you are not one and the same person ?
I sense the onset of a campaign: “Bring back TonyT”, “TonyT is nearly innocent,” etc.
I think we should be told.
By: Tony - 30th October 2015 at 17:04
Surely he’s the exact opposite of a lame duck. With no prime ministerial ambitions he can do whatever he likes (and persuade his party to accept) with no worries about the next election?
Moggy
Nah, he’s demob happy having had a good run as PM…..he’s thinking about lovely dinner parties with the Chipping Norton set….it’s been a while but he can have Rebakah Brooks for Christmas dinner again now she’s been cleared…cough…cough….and talk about her nice few millions pay off (together with a new job) from Rupert Murdoch for her trouble to take the “hit” for him.
It’s like end of term but five years too early for him….the others are jostling for the top spot now….George has got his bods in every department (didn’t reckon 3 million on tax credits would vote for him anyway…turns out quite a few did vote tory!)….Teresa May may deserve it but can’t see her getting the support.
….as for Boris he’s got plenty of chances to muck it up and there’s plenty of skeletons (a whole graveyard full at least…well done Boris, keep your pecker up 😉 in his cupboard mainly of the Bill Clinton variety,…but times change and people don’t get so het up about things like that anymore….at least here, can’t say that for say America who still have almost half the population still believing in talking snakes (talking to Adam and Eve) and believing the world was created 6000 years ago in 7 days etc.( 6 if you don’t include the day he rested…only trouble is they got the order of creation slightly mixed up in Genesis….I forget which was first the sky or earth or something :D).
By: Moggy C - 30th October 2015 at 15:52
(Dave is a lame-duck after announcing he is going….should have kept it under his hat for a while
Surely he’s the exact opposite of a lame duck. With no prime ministerial ambitions he can do whatever he likes (and persuade his party to accept) with no worries about the next election?
Moggy
By: Tony - 30th October 2015 at 15:34
In similar vein isn’t it appalling how quickly the review of the Lords has been announced after the current government was embarrassed?
If nothing else it comes across as petty and revenge based….
Snafu, what’s happened here is the Government tried to slip through important legislation in a sneaky way using Statutory Instruments that would have hit hard three million people in April by withdrawing tax credits to those can least afford it because they earn the least in the country.
While getting rid of complicated rules brought in by Brown is a good idea, George Osborne is so out of touch he doesn’t understand £1500 (peanuts to him) make a big difference to someone earning very little.
(Don’t even get me started on that complete t**sser Ian Duncan Smith! Living in a grace house (and not paying a penny on it) on an estate owned by his rich in-laws and moaning about scroungers not paying for anything (the irony!) and poor people being poor because they want to be!:D)
Statutory Instruments are delegated legislation meaning they are not debated or scrutinised and can’t even be amended as can “normal” bills that are presented to parliament to be enacted.
The Tories voted down Statutory Instruments during Blair’s time and are now crying when they have it done to them!:D
Put through a full bill that can be debated and tweaked a bit and it would have passed.
Now the Tories will have to water down the tax credits arrangements anyway and bring them in over time to soften the blow on three million people earning the least….a miscalculation that will hurt George Osbourne in his bid to be Prime Minister (Dave is a lame-duck after announcing he is going….should have kept it under his hat for a while ;- ))….Boris will be chuffed (Boris’s policy is simple: Boris No.1. Fcuk everything else including UK. That’s it!)
By: waco - 30th October 2015 at 15:19
In terms of the fabled “big picture”, Thatcher’s decision to deregulate the city lead directly to the financial melt down in western economies (something I believe one of her cabinet secretaries said).
But…if we must talk about selling things off……
What about :
Our Post Office
Our Gas
Our Electricity
Our Water
Our Rail
Need I go on ?
Great decisions ……. not…….
By: Arabella-Cox - 30th October 2015 at 13:51
In similar vein isn’t it appalling how quickly the review of the Lords has been announced after the current government was embarrassed?
If nothing else it comes across as petty and revenge based.
I’m not at all in favour of unelected folk, particularly the hereditary element, having a say on the governance of the country but this government knew the deal before allowing the embarrassment to occur and have now behaved like a bunch of posh spoiled brats with a massive sense of entitlement.
Having said that the idea that unelected folk with influence, through either family or money, who are only representing interests that are worthwhile to them don’t have massive input into the way the country is governed is sadly incredibly naïve.
In some ways the House of Lords is the lesser of the two imperfections as at least the folk voting there are known and the way they vote is recorded.
By: paul178 - 29th October 2015 at 22:50
That applies to most of those in Parliament IMO. As for laying a wreath on his own, no chance all the snakes have to go together this year to cut down on the time the Queen and Duke have to stand there.
By: silver fox - 29th October 2015 at 20:27
As per thread starter, a little Corbyn bashing appeared to be the sole reason for the thread, in that case how about “call me Dave” trying to rearrange who, how and in what order politicos would lay wreaths, giving himself prominent single position and first post behind The Queen, the man’s arrogance and self promotion knows no bounds.
By: Tony - 29th October 2015 at 19:22
Let’s agree to differ on that?
Moggy
Yes, of course we can agree to differ on that.
Just think if it wasn’t for the crash in 2008 people would still be saying what a great chancellor Gordon Brown was with 13 years of uninterrupted boom….but he didn’t actually make it happen!
He was just lucky to be in office when there was a boom and there was no connection between Gordon Brown and Britain have a boom during the Blair years because that was just where we were in the economic cycle (fuelled with cheap debt and a property bubble).
Towards the end when he took over from Blair and bottled the election the wheels were starting to come off a bit and people starting revising their opinion of what a great prudent chap he was, because before the bailout money was borrowed to give to our clammy handed friends in the bank, Britain was actually in a better position than Germany with debt (our debt in 2008 was only 43% of GDP because Brown paid off a lot of debt, compared to 65% debt to GDP owed by Germany!).
For me the mistake was how he did it because he could have got a bit more money than he did.
If you say he should never have sold half the gold reserves because look at the price today….my answer would be isn’t that a bit like people saying I bought a house for £1,000 years ago and it’s worth £300,000 today and I should never have sold it 10 years ago for £150,000.
Well, selling then was the right option….sometimes people say if I’d known how much property went up I’d bought ten houses at £1,000….but sadly at that time one house to live in was what most people could afford and they probably couldn’t afford to buy ten houses that would go up in value 10 years later….I’ll leave it at that.
By: Arabella-Cox - 29th October 2015 at 14:45
Does this mean that we’ll be spared your future political observations ?
Just as soon as you stop posting your rubbish John. 🙂
By: Moggy C - 29th October 2015 at 08:14
…. selling the gold wasn’t a mistake
Let’s agree to differ on that?
Moggy
By: Tony - 29th October 2015 at 02:55
Yes, he ‘refreshed the portfolio’, achieving around $250 per ounce. Today’s price is well over $1,100. Prudence personified. So glad he kept his eye on the ball.
Moggy
If you want to bash him feel free….I am not a fan of his and Blair’s (we now know it was Alastair Campbell’s) damning of him as ‘psychologically flawed’ turned out to be quite accurate.
The mistake he made was not in selling the gold but announcing to the world that he was selling so much (395 tonnes) and that gold was being sold by auction (sold in 17 tranches over three years 1999 to 2002 at an average of $275 a ounce)….it was the advance notice of the sale that drove the price down 10% by the time of the first sale.
Why sell it? To reduce potential volatility in the UK reserves because the price of gold can be volatile.
So selling the gold as a matter of monetary strategy was ok and it was not a mistake to unload gold and buy other currencies instead.
(If you think anyone can predict the price of any metal then they would make millions….I don’t know many people who can; -) ….those that think they know the market can lost their shirt like the billionaire Nelson Bunker Hunt and his brother did when they tried to corner the silver bullion market).
Instead of big public announcements, he should have quietly unloaded it to the market over a few years without a big fanfare of an announcement like many other countries did and do. The money raised from the sale the gold was used to buy Euros, which also went up in value.
As a result of the announcement of these massive series of sales, central banks made an agreement to limit sales to 400 tonnes a year and this triggered a price hike of almost a third in a couple of weeks in 1999.
The price of gold hadn’t done much for years and prices remained steady in the years after the sales in 1999-2002 until 2007, where in a bull market, the price more than doubled to $675…giving a net loss of £2 billion if the gold hadn’t been sold (because the Euros bought with the proceeds of the gold sales had also gone up in value). So you can see there was a bit more to it.
Gold’s high was almost $2,000 an once end of 2011 and now about $1,100…so why are you bringing in the price today and not the price in 2011? Should we have held onto 400 tonnes of gold? And on what basis? Who is smart enough to work out the price years ahead?
Shoot down the man down (use Jeremy Clarkson’s words if you like) but selling the gold wasn’t a mistake….it was how he did it with advance notice his intention of selling half the country’s gold that was bad. In contrast, if you remember when the Tories were in power, we had to leave the European Exchange Rate Mechanism on Black Wednesday in 1992 and this cost even more loss, £3.3 billion….and weren’t the conservatives supposed to be good at running the economy!
Answer, none of them (Tories or Labour) are as good as they think they are in stopping boom or bust because of so many variables! 😀 If you’re lucky enough to be in office during a boom then people will say you’re good (some even said that about Gordon Brown! :D). A bit like the US Fed chairman Alan Greenspan who was lauded until the crash! 😎
By: Moggy C - 29th October 2015 at 00:47
Moggy, it wasn’t that he sold gold reserves….all central governments “refresh” their portfolio holdings of currencies and gold from time to time
Yes, he ‘refreshed the portfolio’, achieving around $250 per ounce. Today’s price is well over $1,100. Prudence personified. So glad he kept his eye on the ball.
Moggy
By: Tony - 28th October 2015 at 18:12
David Laws, the Liberal Democrat MP who was appointed by the coalition government to succeed Byrne as No 2 at the Treasury.
This is the same millionaire David Laws who made false expense claims for £40,000 (his claims for rent were in excess of market levels for a lodging agreement, and a market level agreement would not have included contributions from the lodger towards building repairs and maintenance, which Laws also falsely claimed).
He didn’t need £40,000 being a millionaire and this was pure greed (whatever other reason he gave had absolutely nothing to do with making the fake claims)…so I wouldn’t take any lessons on financial probity from him!:D
As regards the note left in the Treasury saying there’s no money left, it was patently a joke…even if it was a poor or lame joke ;- ) But if you need a stick to beat someone with you then can pretend it was meant to be serious!
They also repeated the lie the economic crash was because of labour. It wasn’t! It started with the collapse of Lehman Brothers just a few hundred yards away. A bit like when the neo-cons were spreading the lie that Al Qaeda was in Iraq (planting fake news about meetings in Vienna etc. Nice try boys ;- )) and another (fake) reason why we should invade Iraq when Saddam the whisky drinker hated the Al Qaeda lot!
By: Tony - 28th October 2015 at 17:51
Have you ever stopped to wonder why this was necessary? ….The man who sold off our gold reserves at just about the lowest point in the market to fund his spending.
Moggy, it wasn’t that he sold gold reserves….all central governments “refresh” their portfolio holdings of currencies and gold from time to time by selling and buying currencies and gold in order to spread and mitigate future risk (not all eggs in one basket and all that).
The reason why Gordon Brown is reviled is because he was so guileless when selling the gold by announcing publically how much and when! ….you can imaging that would depress prices quite a bit! 😀
If I recall correctly the Swiss were selling gold at the some time but did it quietly and discreetly….if Brown had ever run a business or had any idea of the “market” he would have done the same and perhaps we would have got more money for the Treasury.
Selling gold was never the issue because all central banks re-arrange their holdings from time to time to spread risk….and no one can foresee the price of commodities and metals for too long in the future as happened when gold went through the roof during the global economic meltdown (again nothing to do with Labour, the conservatives would have had to do exactly the same by bailing out RBS and Lloyds banks that Thursday afternoon).
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October 23, 2015 at 6:43 am