BACK TO THE FUTURE HAMMOND'S BRITISH JOBS GO TO GERMAN WORKERS

“British Jobs for British Workers” cried Iain Duncan Smith at a recent gathering in Spain, echoing Brown’s flat footed attempt to encourage employers to recruit British workers instead of Poles, Lithuanians or Filipinos (supposing they can find any that are prepared to work under the conditions on offer).

But days later about half the workers at Bombardier, the last train-making factory in Britain (but owned by Canadians), are being made redundant, because the British government has awarded the contract for Thameslink trains to the German company, Siemens. British jobs for German workers?
This is a strange action for a government, the stated aims of which are to create a manufacturing sector renaissance in the country; a government professing a pro-industry agenda.

Philip Hammond, the Transport Secretary, was amusing in his interview with Evan Davis on the Today programme. It was, he said, all the fault of the Labour Government who set up the bidding process. We should look to the Continent of Europe, he continued, and copy the way the French and the Germans do business. French companies build French trains; German companies build German trains. So, within the constraints of the free market, of which he professed himself to be a staunch advocate, he wanted the government to "look more strategically" at how it can support domestic manufacturers by awarding contracts. British jobs for Canadian workers?
Hammond somewhat unwisely went on to scorn the fact that the last government had called the project “Thameslink 2000”, and that ...here we were in 2011... Dangerous, I thought, given the anticipated forthcoming travails, and delays, concerning the high speed link between London and Birmingham!

The Bombardier plant at Derby employs 3,000 people, but its future is now in serious doubt. Its contracts to produce trains for National Express East Anglia, London Midland, and London Underground's Victoria line are due to be complete by September, leaving the Derby plant with only one contract to produce trains for the London Underground. It is doubtful that this will be enough to sustain the company’s plant in England.

I do agree that we should look at creating jobs in the domestic market. I personally try to buy Scottish made goods whenever I can. But we also need to look at the cost, the quality and the reliability of what we buy. I think it unlikely that I will ever use a Thameslink train myself, but I’m pretty sure that the people who do will be looking for as reliable a service as possible.

PS: If you were wondering about the Michael Fox reference in the title, I was just pondering what it is with politicians like Hammond (as he did in his "Today" interview) that they feel compelled to use the buzz expression “going forward” and then add “in the future”? I mean, you really can’t go forward in the past!

YOU COULDN'T INVENT THIS MAN IF YOU TRIED

Sorry if I seem to be going on and on about Geoff Hoon (and the rest of the sorry assed bunch of losers that constitute the Labour Party) but I really just can’t get over what a complete balloon (yeah, it rhymes too) the man is.

He was stupid enough to give an interview to the Today programme this morning. Amazingly the BBC saw fit to give him the coveted 8.10am spot with the star interviewer. (For anyone reading who doesn’t listen to the Today programme [Radio 4], the interview right after the 8 o’clock news is considered to be the most important of the day, when most people are listening, and is much sought after by politicians wanting their message to reach the largest number of ears.)

Well, I don’t know what he thought he would achieve by this, but whatever it was, he certainly didn’t in my house.

He apologised for "showing-off" to an undercover journalist over his political influence, and admitted, "I certainly got it wrong. I should've known better”. He then went on to justify that behaviour, arguing: "Most people faced with a situation where they know they are leaving a job, working their notice, would think about their future. The skills, the experience of a member of parliament are not readily translatable into other walks of life." {Skills?????}

He repeated this matra over and over again. He had to think of his future. He needed to ensure that he had employment. Most people would think it was reasonable, indeed sensible to be looking for work. His pension wouldn’t kick in for many years. (When do they get their pension; at 80?)

He continued: "I accept that in the course of that conversation I said a number of things that because I thought I was engaged in what was an informal chat - wasn't leading to any particular position.”

Interviewer James Naughtie was particularly amusing when Hoon protested that he didn’t want to be a Lobbyist. Naughtie responded: “No, you seemed to suggest you were a bit above that.”

Naughtie, never one to miss the opportunity of knocking a politician when he’s made a fool of himself, dragged up the matter of Hoon’s attempt with Hewitt to topple the prime minister in a coup which had fizzled out before it was launched. The journalist asked if he had believed that he had the support of cabinet ministers, and Hoon in true politician style dodged and dived. But for any of the public who might have forgotten that farce, it was all brought back to life.

If Hoon is looking for a job, what he was doing was a very public, very bad interview. The message was: I’m a tube; I run off at the mouth and show off; I promise stuff I can’t deliver: I am a liar. Geez a joab!

As a post script, I heard that Pat Hewitt is being considered for a job on the board of the Channel Tunnel. Now I’d have said that that poor tunnel has more than its fair share of bad luck in the past, and that Pat Hewitt is a further piece of misfortune that it could well do without, but I’d like to add that if she ever becomes a director, I for one, will never travel on its trains again.

Pictured: Buffoon Balloon Prune Goon Hoon and the lovely Patricia Hewitt, the train drivers amie! The cover of Hoon's CV.

MoD REJECTS CALL FOR INQUIRY INTO SUBSTANDARD DANGEROUS EQUIPMENT

Sometimes I wonder if the Ministry of Defence is on our side and working for us, or indeed what planet they come from.

According to a report in The Times the MOD has rejected calls to reopen the inquiry into the deaths of 25 British intelligence officials killed when an RAF Chinook crashed into the Mull of Kintyre in 1994. New documents uncovered by Radio 4’s Today programme revealed that the MoD’s own aircraft testing specialists had warned that the computer software in the doomed Chinook Mark 2 was “positively dangerous”. (So, why were Chinooks not immediately grounded?)

After a board of inquiry found no evidence of mechanical failure, two senior RAF commanders decided that there was no explanation other than gross negligence by the two pilots. Flight Lieutenants Jonathan Tapper and Rick Cook were officially blamed for the crash for flying too low, and despite numerous calls for the judgment to be lifted, the charge against the two dead pilots has remained. (Could this be a case of it being easy to blame people no longer able to answer for themselves?)

A spokesman for the MoD said that the documents referred to by the Today programme had been seen by the members of the RAF board of inquiry and that there was no reason to reopen the case based on the documents referred to by the BBC.

Malcolm Rifkind, who was the Defence Secretary at the time of the crash, said he had not been made aware of any warnings. The latest revelations meant that finding that the pilots were guilty of gross negligence was “unsustainable”, Rifkind told Today. He added: “The original problem for the RAF was that it was a matter of huge embarrassment that a Chinook should have crashed with the loss of 29 lives, including senior intelligence personnel." (Personally, I don’t see that the rank of the personnel would have made any difference Malcolm. A life is a life no matter how junior the person is.)

David Davis, the former Shadow Home Secretary who chaired a Commons inquiry into the disaster, said: “Under the circumstances of this crash, the finding of gross negligence amounts to a conviction for manslaughter on the basis of very little evidence at all, and in defiance of their own documentary evidence. I would ask the Ministry of Defence to quash this finding which smears the reputation and honour of two brave, young, and very capable pilots who served in the RAF Special Forces Squadron.”

Given that two senior Tories have criticised the finding of “gross negligence” and ask for it to be overturned, will David Cameron or Liam Fox undertake to do just that if and when they take over?

Furthermore, will the Tories undertake to have inquiries which tell the truth about equipment rather than cover up for cheap substandard and shoddy kit that put the lives of our servicemen, and others at risk?

P D JAMES GIVES BBC DIRECTOR GENERAL A GRILLING ON HIS OWN NEWS SHOW

Yesterday P D James, the 89-year-old crime writer, attempted to bring some of the order she applies to her plots to BBC finances by giving its Director General a grilling on his own flagship news programme “Today”. Lady James, who is actually a Conservative peer and a one time member of the BBC Board of Governors, was a guest editor on the Radio 4 morning news magazine. She interviewed Mark Thompson in a way that perhaps no one employed by him would have dared.

She started by criticising the huge salaries that some BBC executives get. 375 employees earn over £100,000 per annum, a tenth of these earning more than the Prime Minister.

Mr Thompson insisted that high salaries were essential to prevent defections to the private sector. He said that the controller of BBC One had a £1 billion annual budget, underlining the importance of getting “the very best person doing that job”. However Lady James was having none of that. Where, she asked, in the private sector would these people get better money? When Mr Thompson said that they might go to ITV she laughed at the suggestion, pointing out that ITV was cutting both positions and salaries.

Well done P D James. How many times have highly paid people defended their immense salaries by saying that they could earn more if they worked in the private sector? Please! If someone cares about money and could earn more in the public sector then that is where they would be. Not one of these BBC managers is doing us a huge favour by working for a pittance with the public service broadcaster.

The other matter in which Lady James went for the jugular was the duplication of managers’ tasks: “You have a director of marketing, communications and audiences who gets over £300,000, then there is a director of communications. One wonders what actually is going on here.”

Mr Thompson said that bureaucracy was a “real issue”, adding: “One of the things we’re looking at is whether we can make an auditable commitment to how much of the licence fee we can spend on content.”

Describing the corporation as a “large unwieldy ship” that was “bringing more and more cargo”, Lady James said that the BBC had changed for the worse since its inception in the 1920s. She told Mr Thompson that some BBC programming was indistinguishable from commercial equivalents.

Again I couldn’t agree more. The people in higher middle management in the BBC seem to have the most amazing jobs with fantastic conditions, salaries and pensions of unbelievable size, all of which they get from us, the public. Hopefully Mark Thompson will be as good as his word with regard to this.

P D James has risen immeasurably in my book. I rarely heard so much good solid common sense spoken in such a short time.

(Just an interesting little afterthought: P D James is one of the country’s best known, and much loved mystery writers, and sits as a Conservative peer in the House of Lords. Ruth Rendell is of equal rank in the murder mystery stakes, also much loved, and sits as a Labour peer.)

THE BLACK HOLE OF GOGARBURN

Gogarburn: Head office of RBS

I listened to an interview with the chief executive of RBS, on the Today Programme the other day, as a further £25 billion of our tax pounds was deposited in it.

It was literally unbelievable. I was pinching myself to make sure I wasn’t still dreaming. The need for the bonuses was an absolute, according to Mr Hester, despite that fact that they are being paid by our taxes; taxes of people who earn a tiny fraction of what the bonus is, to people who are effectively civil servants and not very good ones at that. “We have to pay competitive bonuses or they will go elsewhere “, he whined, over and over.

There was no question of negotiation; no humility about the fact that we are paying bonuses to executives of a bank which has lost so much money, and continues to lose so much money that most ordinary people can't begin to comprehend the figures. They mean nothing to us.

It was Alice in Wonderland stuff from a bank that made the biggest loss in history. “We have to keep our good people.”

WHAT BLOODY GOOD PEOPLE? I was shouting at the radio. The ones that lost so much money that no one in the world knows how much it will come to in the end? Those good people?

At the same time I read about the reduction in the Scottish block grant of around £3 billion over three years. The cutting of expenditure in Scotland, is a tiny fraction of the money being poured into RBS, and, along with a downward spiral of unemployment, more poverty, and more unemployment, it will cause untold grief to some of the most vulnerable people in Scotland.

Old people's care doesn't just employ carers, it cares for old people. Old people will have to be kept in hospital, and take up beds sick people might have used. Free school meals don't just employ dinner ladies; they may be the only meals that some poor hungry kids get.

Reduced price prescriptions have meant that more people, handed a script with 3 or 4 medicines on, may not have had to choose which ones they can afford.

Untold misery will come from these decisions.

But we can't have bankers going without their Porches, can we? Apparently not.

I wonder if this reduction in spending isn't some sort of punishment to the Scottish people for voting SNP and for continuing to think that they are doing a good job.

Is this Brown's way of saying ... this is what you get if you don't vote Labour?

In the amount of money that they are chucking at banks, three billion is such a tiny sum that no one would notice it. But we should have known. It was a mistake to humiliate Gordon Brown, and now we must pay.