Archives

James Beresford may be Britain’s richest solicitor. He made £17m in just one year from handling miners’ compensation schemes. His firm took 25% of the damages as a contingency fee. In fact the Department of trade and Industry was prepared to pay their costs, so all compensation would go straight to the miners. For the 97,000 who claimed through his firm for lung and respiratory problems or ‘vibration white finger’ average compensation was just over £2,000. Tens of thousands got less than £1,000. The smallest claim was just 50p.

While the fat cats are waltzing away from the financial crisis with big handouts for their failure, ordinary punters are getting it in the neck. Canary Wharf cleaners have been awarded the London living wage of £7.45 per hour, though it’s not in their pay packets yet. (If you live in London, you know that’s not a lot of money.) Now the bosses are saying they can’t afford it. London Citizens reply, “If the government can find £50bn to bail out bankers, they can find £5m to pay their own cleaners and security guards a living wage.”

They’re laying people off at all the big brickworks. Hanson has axed 600 staff, mothballed two plants, closed another two permanently and are cutting shifts or having a three month holiday at the remaining four. Meanwhile world leader Wienerberger has made 400 permanent redundancies. No wonder. Hanson alone has 500 million bricks stockpiled. We’ve got the bricks, we’ve got the unemployed building workers – but we can’t put the two together to build the houses people need. That’s capitalism.

What costs £250 for every man, woman and child in the UK? Responding to an analysis of bonuses by the Office for National Statistics (ONS), which found that city bonuses have doubled in the last seven years to £28 billion in 2008, TUC General Secretary Brendan Barber said: ‘These figures are simply staggering. Sixteen billion pounds of city and finance sector bonuses adds up to more than £250 for every man, woman and child in the country. ‘Creating a new class of super-rich people, cut off from the rest of us, was wrong before the financial crisis. Now we can […]

What’s the capital of Iceland? £3.50 What’s the definition of optimism? A banker who irons five shirts on a Sunday. Japan is mired in financial uncertainty. The Origami Bank has folded, Sumo Bank has gone belly up and shares in Kamikaze bank have nose-dived. The Isle of Dogs Building Society has collapsed. They’ve called in the retrievers.

The government is desperate to stop effective action against tax evasion. Tax evasion, remember, is illegal. It is a criminal offence. The UK is lobbying to remove paragraph 10 of the Doha Outcome Document. This provides a framework for sharing information, simplifying tax laws and nailing the criminals. John Christensen, director of Tax Justice Network, said: ‘The European Parliament last week made a strong statement demanding the commission support this document. Britain is out on a limb within Europe. It’s the usual suspects of the US, UK, Australia and Canada. These are the countries that created the toxic financial crisis […]

Keynesianism is the only serious economic theory that contends it
can do away with the tendency of capitalism to move from boom to bust by stimulating
the economy. If it could really perform that miracle and eliminate the
contradictions of capitalism, then it could provide a sound platform for
reformism and ever-improving living standards for the mass of workers under
capitalism. If Keynesianism works, then reformism is practical politics.

The Labour Party has selected David Shaw as its candidate for an East Ayrshire council by-election. A Ferrari-driving multi-millionaire with a fortune from the milk trade, he is a former chair of South Ayrshire Conservative party. During the miners’ strike he enjoyed toasting Margaret Thatcher in the area’s pubs, the better to annoy the locals. Where do they dig these people up?

The two biggest pubcos in the land, Punch Taverns and Enterprise Inns, have seen more than 70% wiped off the value of their shares. Dividends have been cancelled and concerns expressed as to their long term viability. So what happens? The chief executives of the two firms have collected long term incentive awards of £1.17m. Incentives for failure, presumably? Both bosses have laden the chains with debt, careless of the future. Nils Pratley (Guardian 10.12.08) comments, “Punch is an extreme example of the pub industry’s love affair with debt and financial complexity in recent years. The biggest six quoted operators […]

London residents Lakshmi Mittal and family have lost £21.4bn on their shares in the family firm since June as stock markets have plummeted. Mind you, they’ve still got £12bn left. Vladimir Kim has lost £3.28bn, and Anil Agarwal £2.95bn.

At Labour Party Conference Malcolm Wicks criticised energy regulator Ofgem on the grounds that they had “not understood fuel poverty”. To a shocked silence, he went on: “They haven’t been a force in social policy when it comes to all of this. When I met some of them, years ago now, some of their technocrats told me about the wonders of switching. They had no idea that many of my constituents are nowhere near a computer and had other priorities than switching from supplier to supplier every month. So I think, sociologically, that there’s been an ignorance there.” For the […]