Nigel Stanley
You can’t have missed the ad for the TUC’s Beyond Crisis conference, but Put People First are also organising an interesting event on November 7 from 10:00 – 17:30 at Central Hall Westminster, SW1H 9NH.
This is what the conference leaflet says:
In March, we marched in our tens of thousands to demand the G20 Put People First. Far from putting people first we’ve seen nothing but a tinkering around the margins followed by the return to business as usual.
Nigel Stanley
There have been two important economic speeches in the last 24 hours both of which which should be recorded here.
First, Bank of England Governor Mervyn King has delivered a pretty devastating attack (pdf) on the failure to reform the banking system, saying that it was a “delusion” that greater regulation and bigger capital requirements would stop failure. Alistair Darling has gone on to defend borrowing.
Adam Lent
I’ve often been struck when meeting very successful business people, how many of them know a lot about making money but have the political nous of an avocado. I wonder if the current behaviour of the banking sector is a case of collective failure in this regard. It is certainly striking to contrast the comments of Mervyn King (a man with a surfeit of nous) and the Chancellor today with those of Brian Griffiths of Goldman Sachs. And one can’t help but speculate if, as The Indy suggests today, the banks are not storing up a vast amount of political trouble for themselves over coming months and years.
Philip Pearson
With 4 million households now in fuel poverty, is switching public funds from the winter fuel payment to lagging the loft the answer, as the Audit Commission argues today?
Drilling down into today’s Government report on fuel poverty, householders interviewed for the study say there are two reasons why they were unable to keep their main living room warm enough:
So home insulation is cutting into fuel poverty.
Philip Pearson
John Prescott’s call for local councils to be put under an “obligation” to find a place where a wind farm could be built in their area irritated the National Alliance of Wind Farm Action Groups (NAWAG), but not half as much as those of us protesting at the jobs lost from the closure of the Vestas wind turbine maker on the Isle of Wight.
NAWAG was launched this summer with the goal of orchestrating a “grass-roots revolt” against “ruthless” wind farm developers. Their leading lights include corporate communications and public affairs lobbyists. They might want to take a look at the UK Climate Impacts Programme website. All areas of the UK get warmer by mid-century, and the warming is greater in summer than in winter. Precipitation (rain, hail, snow etc) is likely more often in the winter, with drier summers, for much of the UK. If countryside residents are anxious to protect their “chocolate box” views, as Prescott argued, the chocolate will melt in the summers of the future.
Nigel Stanley
There have been hints in the media that the government is considering a windfall tax on bank profits (repeating what Sir Geoffrey Howe did in the early 1980s) though it looks rather like there have been efforts to close this speculation down today.
It looks rather like ministers are caught between wanting to respond to public anger at excessive bonuses and wanting to “allay City fears that Labour is planning a big pre-election cash grab”, to quote from today’s FT.
There may well be a case for a one-off windfall tax on profits – particularly if its proceeds are put to good use – but it is not a good way to deal with bonuses.
Philip Pearson
At the Lancaster House Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate today, Gordon Brown argued for “convergence on the principle issues” for the Copenhagen agreement to succeed:
With these building blocks, every national economy – North and South – is now bent on a low carbon pathway. The UN kept our call for a “Just Transition for the workforce” in its Bangkok text, and now heading for Barcelona next month.