OneGuyFromBarlick

A couple of facts I heard tonight surprised me. I don't know if they are true.

Britain produced 12 million tons of steel last year. China produced 790 million tons.
China has produced, in the last two years, more steel than Britain has ever produced.

We have voted in the EU, against increasing tariffs on Chinese steel, which is being sold at less than the cost of production, (dumped). Assuming (as I do) that China is aiming to be the number one world power - this looks like another step in that direction.

David, I saw the same programme. When we were doing it it was called Economic Imperialism...... I'm all for a degree of protection and control of basic industries in this country.
What amazes me at the moment is that the Republican Party in America is discussing whether women who have an abortion should be gaoled..... Dinosaurs!!

Meanwhile, another backdoor sale being tried by the Tories:

Stop the Privatisation of the Land Registry - 38 Degrees Petition

Fairs fair – Mr Trump has clarified that it is not women that should be prosecuted but the Drs. The women should be left to bear the child of their rapist for example. So, glad he’s cleared that up….

Was in Barlick at the weekend. Had a good time as per (I do like The Barlick Tap, and I managed to get a load of good fresh fish from the market, some diced goat and a couple of pies from the pie shop on Newtown). I noticed the great big ‘Vote Leave’ sign on that row by the Green there; have to say there’s no declarations round my way at all, nor have I seen any canvassers. I hope the Vote Leaver there in Barlick is not as confused as the letter writer to the Barlick and Earby I read while there. Apparently, folk in Australia, NZ and Canada (the white bits of the Commonwealth, if you get my drift) are very keen to trade with the UK and get this: the correspondent is also of the view that should this transpire the Irish (or ‘Eire’ in the letter), the Icelanders, the Norwegians and Danes would come on board. An electic list I think we’d all agree, including two current EU members(!) and two EFTA (but not the Swiss, presumably on the grounds that he was banging on about bankers in the letter too). Seriously, it’s difficult to know how to respond to that level of daftness. Is this what we’ve come to?

Tricky problem the steel business. I’m of the view that we’ll never compete with the Chinese in the production of many things. But then again there’s no real added value in building ships or knocking out steel. The added value comes in the design of the ships and the like. Being generally an exceptionally creative peoples I would have thought that’s right up our street and should be absolutley encouraged and facilitated. But this takes serious investment in knowledge and skills and research across all specilaisms and trades, everything we’re not really bothered about and this current Government less bothered than most. It’s why our productivity is in the toilet – the Italians are more productive than us, and the French. No, we’re nation of self-employed dog-walkers, window cleaners, cupcake makes and Uber drivers.

The Land Registry has a large presence in Birkenhead. Privatisation is to be expected as well, the private sector does things far better than the public sector. There’s no evidence for that statement at all, but it’s a fact (as the satirist Chris Morris would say). Our public sector of course. The French public sector is much better than our private sector, as is the Communist Chinese Government’s…………..

Richard Broughton

Good Lad Richard, so nice to have my prejudices reinforced! Which is to say that as usual I have no argument about anything you say. Any reader of Private Eye knows that the Land Registry is to be sold and free public access will vanish. PE did a very interesting map using info from the Land Registry (LINK) and this is so embarrassing that difficulties have been put in their way in their attempts to update/expand it.
As for steel, you can tell where it lies on the scale of Tory worries by the fact that the Industry Minister Javid hasn't even bothered to come home from his jolly with his daughter.... The bottom line is that this government is so obsessed by the market that as Oscar Wilde said, they know the price of everything but not the value. Cheap steel keeps costs down and our relationship with China who are bankrolling HS2 and Hinkley (so we are told....) is too important to allow them to be upset by us supporting tariffs on their steel by the EU. It slipped out in an interview that UK has been opposing any tariff despite rhetoric to the contrary. In an interview with a steel man he said that the politicians should go to Port Talbot and talk to the people who know about steel because in the case of Port Talbot, Chinese steel wasn't a competitor. The only people producing their high quality steel was Sweden and they are suffering as we are because of a huge drop in demand for specialised steel. The case of the other plants making lower grades of steel is different of course and as far as Tata is concerned, looking at the whole, their dividends are suffering so the market says abandon it. Once again the price rules, the value in terms of capability and skills doesn't enter into their thinking. There is also the fact that they don't actually want to give working plants to possible competitors. They are going to have to take a loss and so they might as well get the bonus of destroying the capacity by neglecting it while ostensibly looking for a buyer. All the government can do is watch and wait.
The only way this deadlock can be broken is for the government to take affirmative action, like nationalisation but that is such a dirty word in Tory circles that it won't happen. My prediction is that the steelworks at Port Talbot is doomed and when it hoes the repercussions on the rest of the industry and those local firms that rely on a viable plant will be enormous. The Tories will say 'Not me Guv!' and blame global trade. There is a route out, back the management takeover by bankrolling them. We did it for the banks, we did it for Rolls Royce, Port Talbot and the ability to make high quality steel is just as important. (In the case of the banks much more so!!)

The Pakistani prime minister hasn't turned up for the international meeting on nuclear security in Washington DC which is to debate the potential for ISIS to acquire nuclear material. There is now major concern among other nations over terrorists being able to obtain the small nuclear weapons being developed by Pakistan to defend itself against India. (What a sad thought, that Pakistan and India are still in an arms race after all these years and with so many other security issues in the world.)

Good piece in the Grauniad this morning...

Exclusive: royal family considering dramatic Brexit intervention

Pity its the 1st of April......

Quite!

I remember other Guardian 1 April stories: ‘Me and My Dad’, a profile with photo of Paul and Bamber Gascoigne; the concern that the Millenium Dome would create it’s own microclimate and it’d start raining in there; and a whole supplement on the tropical paradise Sans Seriff….

A 1 April that took my eye today (reported, not published in The Guardian) was the new 100% efficient superconducting material made from arsenic and selenium (ArSe). Manufactured by a company called MyArSe…

Richard Broughton

I bought the Guardian for the first (and very nearly the last) time in 1977. In my ignorance, I fell totally for the April fool, and well remember getting quite indignant at the adverts for a university lecturer in 'moonbeam studies'

San Serriffe

Question is was Javid doing his April Fool bit when he gave vague reassurances to the steel men.... Would you sleep better after that?

Amazing how quiet the politicians are..... Meanwhile, Port Talbot and the general steel situation looks more and more gloomy. I think about the number of people who will be affected and what a miserable, worrying time they are going through.
One thing I have remembered about my brush with redundancy is the horrible Catch 22 situation that it engenders. The best chance of getting an alternative job is if you bail out early but if you do you lose the redundancy payment. I argued at the time and still believe that your redundancy fund should be transferable to a new job. I know that's pie in the sky but it is so unfair at the moment. There will be workers due for retirement just before the axe falls, they will not get redundancy. I saw that happen at Bancroft....

Talking of redundancy, this sort of thing should be banned:
"A BBC report suggests that "Gagging orders" have been issued to thousands of UK council workers as part of their payoff agreements". LINK

On a different note, I heard on the Radio 4 BH programme this morning that average UK household debt, excluding mortgages, is now at £11,800. This prompted me to search further and I found a January 2016 report in The Independent saying "..household debt [exc. mortgages] has soared by two-fifths in just six months. Aviva’s Family Finances report found that average debt now stands at £13,520 – a climb of £4,000 from £9,520 last summer."...."Aviva’s report makes for sobering reading. It suggests average credit card debt has climbed by more than a fifth in the last six months, from £1,960 in summer 2015 to £2,370 now. The amount owed on overdrafts has increased even more quickly, rising by almost two-fifths from £870 to £1,190. Meanwhile, one in four families now owes money on a personal loan – that’s a rise of almost a quarter from a year ago – with an average outstanding balance of £2,080. Over the last five years, mortgage debt has also risen by a more than a fifth."

It's getting seriously out of control, again. Is no-one taking notice?

I've been watching the inexorable rise of personal debt for a while Tiz and you are dead right. The 'Economic Miracle' is built on debt and in the end it will crash. Every responsible economist knows this, it is the elephant in the room. Despite this rise the number of rough sleepers is rising rapidly, a sign of what is happening at the bottom of the economy when money and credit runs out. See THIS Guardian report. Add to this the rise in other indices connected with deprivation and poverty and you start to get a picture of where we are going. I keep saying that the Tories are dragging us back into the 19th century, anyone want to argue with me?

In one of the recent Radio 4 In Business programmes one of the contributor's was a former chairman of Barclays. Almost the first thing he said was that no-one had seen the 2007/8 credit crunch coming. That's simply not true. There were people working in the financial business who knew it was coming but they kept their heads down because they were doing very well, thank you. Some of these people have since admitted it was so. Either the Barclays man is telling fibs or he wasn't fit to be chairman of the bank if he didn't see what was coming.

The roof fell in on Donald Trump last week when he said 'the woman must be punished for having a termination'. Perhaps he should move to Northern Ireland?

Justice in N. Ireland

I think Eire has the same policy.
The Panama papers have certainly caused a furore.... Any bets it will lead to prosecutions in UK?

It transpires that there is still £30million in Blairmore, the offshore company set up by Richard Cameron, David's father. Yet David says he has no offshore funds.....
I am still watching the complicated gavotte going on round the world over the sale of Port Talbot. Javid, the Industry Secretary is negotiating with a possible buyer and publicly saying that the government wants to sell the plant as a whole and not see it dismembered. If I was a worker at the plant I would be deeply sceptical about these talks. Who, in his right mind, would pay more than scrap value for a plant like this which is losing money on this scale? I don't think this is going to end well, the government is talking but showing no signs of investing serious money or addressing some of the factors like the price of energy and the effects of Green Legislation on the industry. The basic process of running blast furnaces is dirty and expensive, far better for the environment if this function is carried out in some far off country where it is not our responsibility. That's the thinking that I suspect is working in official minds.... I remember Trevor Grice once telling me that only a fool would run a foundry in the UK and that was thirty years ago......

The possible buyer (also called Javid) wants to ditch the blast furnaces and run arc furnaces to simply recycle old steel instead of making new. That strikes me as an unwise, backward step from a technical business to a scrap business - it would be competing with such businesses in much cheaper areas. It reminds me of what happened when the Volkswagen main dealership was taken over in our local town. It had sold both new and S/H cars and provided all the usual facilities and services of a main dealer. The chain that took it over reduced it to selling only S/H cars and now it's in competition with all the other S/H car dealers in the area.

The word is that Tata would sell the whole of the PT plant for £1 if they could find a buyer to take the whole of the liabilities off their hands.
Interesting interview last night with a man who obviously knew his steel. He was saying that the blast furnaces at Port Talbot are 'state of the art' in terms of efficiency and quality of steel. He seemed to be implying that given a level playing field there was no problem with the actual process, it's the overheads and the depressed market that are the killers. Look back at the bail out of the banks.... Comparatively they were a much worse bet. There is still a good case for a full scale takeover and rescue by the government but it is blocked because anything smacking of state ownership and responsibility is anathema to the government.
The analysis of the Panama Papers is progressing nicely. It transpires that almost a third of the firm's business was with China and they have very strict laws about exporting capital. They don't mess about, I'll bet there are some very worried tycoons in China and Honkers.....
THIS BBC report of Thomas Piketty speaking about inward migration to Europe and his views on current policies is well worth reading. I'd rather take notice of his views than Ossie's..... But then I would wouldn't I!

A news report in The Times pointed me to a Washington Post/ABC survey on American's attitudes to Donald Trump. It was done a week ago and he had a bad day on Tuesday so the results if the survey was done now would probably be even worse for him...

`Trump would be least-popular major-party nominee in modern times'
"If Donald Trump secures the Republican presidential nomination, he would start the general election campaign as the least-popular candidate to represent either party in modern times. Three-quarters of women view him unfavorably. So do nearly two-thirds of independents, 80 percent of young adults, 85 percent of Hispanics and nearly half of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents. Those findings, tallied from Washington Post-ABC News polling, fuel Trump’s overall 67 percent unfavorable rating — making Trump more disliked than any major-party nominee in the 32 years the survey has been tracking candidates. Head-to-head matchups show Hillary Clinton, as well as her Democratic rival Bernie Sanders, leading Trump, often by double digits. Even his two remaining fellow GOP contenders this week backed away from earlier promises to support the eventual nominee."

See the chart with the results of the poll here: LINK

I agree about Trump. We often criticise the length of the US Presidential Election process but one thing it does do is give the shysters plenty of time to hang themselves with their own rope. It would appear that this is exactly what Trump has done and it's noticeable that he has gone very quiet over the last couple of days. Looking for a loophole?
Worth reading THIS Mirror article about Blairmore, the £35million offshore fund associated with David Cameron's father Richard. The sentence that jumped out at me was that the trust fund was conceived as soon as Margaret Thatcher lifted capital controls on coming to office. I have always suspected that this change was a quid pro quo for her supporters. Whatever, there is an offshore fund, Cameron did hold shares and take income, what is not clear is what, if any, future benefit he could expect from any family association with Blairmore.
I have always had a natural repugnance when I see wealthy persons advising the poor to take income reduction on the chin, 'We're all in it together' they cry as they sit down to their more than adequate dinner in a warm room..... I know, I'm an old Leftie and as such I am suspect. But where is the fairness in all this? The ability to employ expensive advisers and minimise tax liability using loopholes in the law is only available to the rich. Am I suffering from 'the politics of envy' or simply voicing a universal truth.....

Piketty exposed an obvious truism, if you have enough money to employ other peoples brains to maximize your investment interest, ie; you get 5% when the ordinary investor gets 2%, then eventually you will finish up with a bigger share of the cake. To take this one step farther and not pay tax on the investment income is pure greed. It would appear that a large proportion of the top 1% don't see anything wrong with this approach.

Stiglitz says the same thing P but added that he found a few who recognised that in the end the strategy was self-defeating but 'didn't know what they could do about it'.
I've never seen politics as dirty and messy as this with standards dropping and ministers glued in their posts no matter how bad they are.
THIS BBC report of the latest views on the Cameron offshore fund affair is worth reading. The thing that has always puzzled me about the loopholes in tax law that allow these shenanigans is condemned publicly time and time again but there never seems to be any widely acclaimed action to rectify the situation. There has been some fiddling round the edges but none of it a serious worry to those wealthy enough to pay clever people to get round the obstacles. I suspect the reason for this is obvious and it's high time we decided who is running the country, the government or Big Money...

History was made yesterday. See THIS for a BBC report of David Cameron's tax disclosures. This should be standard practice for anyone holding public office. The days of trust are over, we need evidence.