ACCORDING TO DARLING AND OSBORNE, THE TERRIBLE TWINS, THIS WAS OUT OF THE QUESTION

SNAPS ON SATURDAY

We are still all in it together though, right?

Yep, all RIGHT in it together... except old Merv, who's not made a habit of being right about anything

"I tell you, my nose grew this long, but I don't think any of the thick Nats noticed...

... because of the body guards who stood in front of me, right through my speech"

Oui, Si, Ja, Sea, Ken, Jes, Hai, Oo, 是, Na'am

Does that mean I'll not be able to blog on Petula Clark any more?

Well, Spock is never wrong. That would be illogical

Quick word of congratulations to David Cameron and Theresa May on the splendid and obviously brilliant idea of having elected police commissioners which went down so well will the English and Welsh public. Bravo guys. And it only cost £100,000,000...

NO COMFORT TO BE HAD FROM THE BANK OF BRITAIN, ER NO, I MEAN ENGLAND

The message today from Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of Britain England is that he can do nothing to help savers, who are receiving interest at far less than the rate of inflation, and effectively losing money at around 3 or 4% per year. 

Nor can he help people who have saved all their lives for a pension and now find that their savings buy a derisory annuity; just enough to put them beyond the levels at which the state will help them. In short just above the level at which the state believes that you would starve or freeze to death without help.


He says that he understands the plight of people approaching retirement age who will get their pittance after a life of saving, but you have to ask yourself in what way Mr King can begin to understand or feel the pain. After all he won't have to buy himself an annuity. His salary is over £300,000 per annum and, although I cannot find any details of his pension, I have discovered that the deputy governors have funds between £2 and 3 million. 



“All groups in society are suffering from the financial crisis,” Mervyn said, insisting that there can be no special help for particular groups. “Difficult though it is, we have to make a difficult judgement about the right course of action for the economy as a whole”, says Mr King.


Well, I don't see Mr King suffering much from the financial crisis, for which the banks are largely responsible, and I can't imagine how he can put himself in the place of a 65 year old with a pension pot of £70,000 and a future of financial insecurity. 

So his difficult decisions won't be hurting him. And chucking another £50 billion at the banks won't make a great deal of difference to the economy as a whole, anyway. It will probably remain in their vaults, helping to pay for bonuses and salaries way beyond anything that is reasonable.


If the Bank of Britain England can create that much money, why not pump it in to the REAL economy, and create jobs putting in place an infrastructure that will be there for the happy day when the economy turns the corner?

IT'S ALL EVERYONE'S FAULT ... EXCEPT THE BANKERS

I wonder just how much good Merv King is.


I mean to say, he has got every single prediction he ever made wrong. He constantly downgrades any predictions he has made about any aspect of the economy, and tonight when asked what would happen to inflation he said he thought it would come down in the New Year, but wasn't sure.


OK. I could have done all of these things and I don't get paid his massive salary, nor can I reasonably expect a seat in the House of Lords when I retire. (Actually I think it unlikely that inflation will come down much in the New Year. OK, the 2.5% VAT increase is out of the cycle, but the massive fuel price hikes are not; nor is food; nor are transport increases.)


Anyway, tonight he has told us that the hallowed banks, against whom no one is supposed to utter a word of condemnation for the almighty mess they made of the economy (or they will leave for friendlier shores), won't be able to lend money to businesses in Britain because the Eurozone crisis has left them unable to raise the cash. 


But wait a minute. The banks weren't lending anyway. That's why the chancellor asked them very nicely if they would please lend some of the mass of money that we borrowed or created to keep them afloat to do their job and lend to medium and small businesses instead of taking it all in bonuses. When they said "no", you'll remember, he was obliged to set up a government fund to lend to  businesses which are folding for want of a loan, even when they have orders on their books. Talk about booze ups in breweries?.

So why is it all now the fault of other countries?  


Sheesh.


With his usual vagueness Old Merv said that because of the Eurozone crisis, households, businesses and banks face an extraordinary period of uncertainty. Who knows what is going to happen tomorrow, he twittered, like some fishwife over the back yard fence!


Gives you such confidence, that he's got his hands on the wheel, doesn't it. As governor of the Bank of Britain... ooops no, sorry England, he'd make a really good bus driver.


Talking about  confidence, why is Osborne so intent on talking Scotland into the ground? OK, it's a silly question and we all know perfectly well that the answer is... if you haven't got a credible true argument to put forward for something, make one up.


Businessmen are not in the least put off by a discussion of a referendum. At least I'm sure that a few who have had their ears whispered into by Cameron may be. In return for a knighthood maybe? It's actually far more likely that businessmen will be put off Britain as a whole because no one in the government or the central bank has much of a clue about what is going on.


Unlike John Swinney, who knows a thing of two about finance. 

It is typical of the hapless Osborne that he chooses to disparaging remarks about confidence in Scotland just at the time that the First Minister was joining the management of Amazon to celebrate the new sites that the worldwide retailer is opening in Edinburgh and Dunfermline. 


Clearly one of the most successful companies in the world is so worried about the future of Scotland that it is creating over 1,000 new jobs in the country.


This UK government, headed by a PR spin doctor, is even crap at spinning!

EENIE MEENIE MINY MO, WHICH OF THEM MIGHT HAVE TO GO?

Is Mervyn right, or is George right?

George says that the economic mess is the fault of Labour; Mervyn King says it is largely the fault of the bankers... so who is to blame? That may, of course, be in some way connected to the fact that the Conservative Party gets 52% of its funding from the financial sector.

The fact that the governor of the Bank of “England”, who is about to assume far greater responsibility for the financial conduct of the financial sector, and who agreed Georgie’s deficit reduction policy (making him a financial god in the chancellor’s eyes) has disagreed with Osborne on such a fundamental point must be embarrassing for the government.

It matters, of course, because unless you know what caused the problem, you are unlikely to be able to stop it happening again. If Osborne thinks that it was Gordon Brown, and his policies that caused the crisis, then he may be rather complacent about the City. Get rid of the problem (Labour) and everything will get better. But if the governor is right, then, having got rid of the wrong thing, are we likely to be heading for another crisis soon? If Mr king is to be believed (and he has just that little more experience than Mr Osborne), the answer is, yes.

When he was asked whether there could be a repeat of the financial crisis King replied in the affirmative. "The problem is still there. The search for yields goes on. Imbalances are beginning to grow again."

And once again Mr King brought up the subject of the size of banks, a problem for which I have seen little in the way of a solution from the London government. He pointed out quite clearly that banks paid these bonuses because they could: "Why do banks in general want to pay bonuses?" he asked. “It's because they live in a 'too big to fail' world in which the state will bail them out on the downside."

With such a fundamental difference between them, it’s hard to see how they are going to rub along together from now on. Maybe one of them will have to go?

Anywho... you'll laugh at this:

A banker, a Daily Mail reader and a benefit claimant are sitting at a table sharing 12 biscuits.

The banker takes 11 and says to the Daily Mail reader:

"Watch out for the benefit claimant: he wants your biscuit".

Ha ha ha.

Pics: Top: I was wondering if that was Nadine’s knee at the back there. You’d think that her new boyfriend would buy her a pair of tights. That’s knobbly!!! Left: Mervyn King... poor man. He’s not had an easy life. Gordon Brown, Alistair Campbell and now G G Osborne. (Bet he was called “horsey” at prep school!... G G ... horsey, get it?) Right: A random Daily Mail reader disapproving of something, somewhere...anything, anywhere.

JUST WHEN THE ECONOMY WAS DOING FINE, IT HAD TO GO AND SNOW...

The economy shrank last quarter, but according to Mr Osborne it was because of bad weather. So that will be fine, you’d think. When the warmer weather gets here everything will be back to normal.

But you’d be wrong, according to Mr King, the governor of the Bank of Britain (or that part of Britain that counts). This is going to be a hard year, says he. Inflation will raise and wages will fall again (except for bankers, MPs and the royal family), unemployment will soar, apart from the aforementioned people, who appear to get a by on that too.

We need to tighten our belt and support the government on this, says Mr King (why has he not yet got a title?), because he thinks both they, and he, are right in these matters.

I, of course prefer the theory illustrated so effectively by his own people in the banking industry. When they were worried that there would be no bonuses for them, they arranged for pay rises of up to 50% to compensate; then when they found that the government had only been joking about the bonuses, they kept the pay rises and the bonuses as well.

So with higher fuel, higher taxes, higher domestic fuel, higher food prices, higher clothing prices, higher prices on imported good (almost everything) because the pound is falling faster that the snow that so upset the economy, and lower wages, life in looks like a real holiday (and even they will become more expensive as the pound plummets) as the warmer weather comes our way. A spokesman for the government said that we all have to buy into this because we are all in it together.

You could not make this up.

Pic: Poor wee Georgie can't even afford a hair cut.