Prof

You list a lot of sad facts. I am not sure that your question is always relevant. Particularly:

The North/South divide. The North already in recession, but not the South. Is that fair and reasonable?

House prices falling everywhere except London and SE. NE down 8.8% according to the Land Registry. Is that fair and reasonable?

Surely largely this is cause and effect are at work?

Moylando

I do not mind that many people have income and wealth magnitudes higher than mine. I do care that so little effort is made to spread it around through redistributive taxation.

Government pump priming in the short term, spent on education and infrastructure would create jobs. Jobs would increase the receipts from taxes and so make funding benefits easier in the short term and far less necessary in the long term. Increase the size of the cake and even the (putatively) more highly taxed investment bankers would take home a bigger piece of cake even though it would be a smaller share of the total.

Keynes is dead. Long live Keynes!

I think we probably have more actually destitute and homeless than in 1945. I have not checked the figures and of course you have to allow for wartime destruction and forcibly shared housing. This is after the efforts of the unbroken run of Tory governments since 1979 to destroy the welfare state and turn the idea of human decency into a joke. Conservative, New Labour and Lib-Dem are merely factions of the Tory Party squabbling over the spoils of office.

All

I have known three MPs quite well. Two were one nation Conservatives in the days of Alec Douglas Hume and Ted Heath, one was Old Labour under Callaghan. All were caring and (outside their personal lives) intelligent. One died, his successor was dropped because of zipper trouble and the Labour man fell to boundary changes. I knew two Conservative parish councillors quite well, relatives about whom I will draw a veil of silence. I knew two City Councillors, both JPs, both competent and compassionate, both personally honest. One was a Conservative retired businessman, the other an Old Labour working railwayman. I was less well acquainted with two Conservative City Council members who went to prison for conspiracy to commit theft and illegal harassment of tenants respectively. The former a Conservative, the latter a Liberal (it was that long ago).

Rabble-rousers are a public menace. Whether they are from the left or the right. Which is another reason to improve education and create jobs. Gainfully employed and educated people cease to be a rabble. Rabble-rousers: whether religious nuts, nationalist nuts, racist nuts or just plain nuts are out of a job when their potential followers have fewer grievances and more time to think.

Democracy works best when the electorate is purposefully active, has something to lose from anti-social behaviour, is well informed and able to use reason. Far too many of us make the Gadarene Swine look like MENSA members.

As an aside

Swine is not a swear word, nor is it a rude word. It is the old singular and collective noun for pigs. A herd of swine rushed over a cliff into the sea at Gadara in Palestine. A swear word is one used while taking The Lord's name in vain e.g. "Effing Jesus" or, "... by God". The word bloody, when not a literal description of the red stuff in the body, is a contraction of "By Our Lady" - the Virgin Mary - and is counted as swearing.

The aside is for those like the parish councillor relative who for ten minutes ranted at me for swearing and utterly refused to believe I quoted from the Bible. But then she was a Christian and a Conservative so naturally had never read the Bible and did not like to clutter her head with facts.

Anonymous 1 needed this 'Off the Record'

Moylando
Not clear to me why you should be frightened of a strong charismatic leader, fair and reasonable.Is your preference for leadership of the kind we now have or have had in recent times. In the posts I have seen on citywire and elsewhere, it seems that not many people are thrilled by the leadership we have/had.

Prof Eman

Prof

Strong and charismatic leaders able to sway large numbers of ignorant half-wits rarely do so with truth and reason. They may begin with good intentions and see stirring up nationalist or religious mania as simply a tool to gain power and then behave decently. But "Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely", Lord Acton.
http://en.wikipedia.org/...-Acton,_1st_Baron_Acton

Interestingly, Acton, a well known Catholic, wrote this in opposition to the doctrine of Papal Infallibility. In 1870 the Papacy decreed that when speaking ex cathedra (from the Chair of St Peter, Jesus' principal follower), he was infallible when he decrees what Catholics should believe and how they should behave. Anyone who did not accept this was declared anathema - it was pronounced that they would burn in hell for ever and so would anyone who communicated with them. Since anyone included friends, family, employers, shopkeepers who sold food... this was a very harsh punishment.

The Catholic Church is on a moral level with the Ayatollahs whose fatwa ordered the murder of Salman Rushdie. The current Pope is trying to establish Pius II, his predecessor during World War II, as a saint. Pius II ordered German Catholics to collaborate with Hitler. Number of German Christian clerics murdered by Hitler around 400. Number of those who were Catholic: zero. Share of the German population which was Catholic during the Third Reich: around one third.

For the benefit of the wilfully ignorant and stupid my opposition to one or another gang of religious and or nationalist "charismatic leaders" does not imply support for any other gang.

Freedom of speech and communication combined with education in the wider sense: to include moral philosophy, logic, numeracy, history, literacy and science just for a beginning - are our defence against fascism, communism, religion and every other organised crime syndicate on Earth.

Anonymous 1 needed this 'Off the Record'

Dear all
Back to the usual?
BBC News Economy, to-day
UK manufacturing output shrinks (in August)
BCC cuts economic growth forecast (for the third time this year)
Eurozone factory output shrinks
Brazil makes surprise rate cut (at least they are able to cut it)

Alistair Darling attacks 'stupid' bankers in memoir.
FT- Britain's biggest banks to escape any major restructuring till after 2015 election.

Bank bonuses rule OK stupid?

Prof Eman

Afternoon

At risk of aggravating all the bank haters out there, it’s important to remember the financial contribution that essentially 5 companies (HSBC, Barclays, LTSB, RBS and Santander UK) plus some minnows make to the UK economy. Last year, these companies were responsible for 11% of UK GDP, 15% of net Corporation Tax receipts to the Treasury (£6.1bn out of a total £42bn), employment in excess of 600,000 UK individuals (with the corresponding income tax and NI receipts), a positive contribution to the UK balance of payments as each of these business brought more revenue into the UK than they paid out, and loaned £bn's to businesses and individuals in order to help achieve countless aspirations.

Agreed that customer service leaves a lot to be desired, management has made some particularly questionable decisions at LTSB and RBS, and that their collective PR needs a LOT of work, but given where we are as an economy with slow growth, appalling national finances, stubbornly high unemployment and a need for the private sector to drive recovery, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to me to drive a regulatory axe through the middle of this “golden egg” laying sector right now.