So Mr Murphy thinks the UK is a "finance dependent economy"?

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I ask this because Richard Murphy and the folks at "Tax Justice Network" think that the UK is a finance dependent economy. And of course that doing that moving-money-around business that we've been doing since the 18th century is damaging our economy.

Just for clarity - according to UKTI:

The financial services industry accounted for 10% of UK GDP and 11% of UK tax receipts. 

That's it? We're a 'finance dependent economy' at 10% of GDP?

This, it seems to me, is a load of nonsense (something Mr Murphy seems to specialise in) - especially since manufacturing - you know we don't make things anymore, don't you - accounts for a mere 12% of GDP.

This "Finance Curse" is just ideology looking for a theory and then making up some statistics to fit the resulting bias.

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"Big Oil! How the EU works...a reminder

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There has been a hoo-hah about the proposal to force restauranteurs to sell only factory-produced and approved olive oil. It hasn't quite been described this way rather as a ban on those cute little dipping bowls and in unlabelled bottles. The proposal has been dropped  - a welcome and unusual reaction (I guess that the EU was found out). And this is what the industrial olive oil folk have to say:

Copa-Cogeca, a farming association that represents industrial olive oil producers who would have benefited from the ban by getting a higher price for factory packaged bottles, attacked the climb down.

"It is totally ludicrous that the commission just withdraws this measure due to political pressure - it has been discussed for over a year and passed through all the correct legal procedures," said Pekka Pesonen , the general secretary of Copa-Cogeca.

"Perhaps it wasn't explained well enough. But it was necessary to ban refillable bottles and the traditional aceiteras found on restaurant tables. It is totally unacceptable that the Commission has done a complete U-turn and has succumbed to political pressure like this." 

You will notice a couple of things here - these producers "would have benefited from the ban by getting a higher price" and that the proposal has "been discussed for over a year". Moreover the ban, we're told is "necessary" - presumably for the owners of these industrial oil companies.

This is how the EU works. Organised lobbies corral officials and MEPs to browbeat them with proposals to protect their particular interests. We see this with the car industry and OEM parts, with industrial cheese manufacture in Italy and Greece using PDOs and PGIs, and with the pharmaceuticals business over herbal supplements (and more recently e-cigarettes).

All of this is wrapped up in warm words about 'health', 'safety' and 'protecting business' when, in reality, it is simply a ramp for the interests of the lobby. As a European consumer my interests are not served - and I am the poorer for this - by the failure of those who represent me (politicians, ministers and so forth) to do so. Now this is a feature of government everywhere - you only have to peek at the sugar industry in the USA to know that - but the EU has managed to achieve its perfection.

This olive oil ban is overturned (it will be lack, trust me) but ask yourself how many restrictions, bans, privileges and preferences have damaged our interests that haven't made the papers and haven't caused an outcry? The EU may have grown too large for us to take it round the back of the barn and finish it off with an axe but we have to option to leave.

We should take that option.

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On that clever online booze advertising...

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It seems that the evil drinks industry isn't very good at the online stuff:

"The research found that some of the big alcohol brands - and subsectors - are vastly under performing in social video.

"For wine and spirit brands, the opportunity to increase brand awareness and sales conversion rates through social video is huge, as there has been very little mass movement from these brands in creating shareable video content.

"Additionally, leading brands like Diageo and SAB Miller that have very strong market share are lagging behind competitors when it comes to social video share of voice."

Hey ho.

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On the bankruptcy of our political and media culture

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A striking observation - about the USA but could be the UK or indeed any other 'Western' nation:

Credibility is a capital asset, which may take years to accumulate but can be squandered in an instant; and the events of the last dozen years should have bankrupted any faith we have in our government or media. Once we acknowledge this, we should begin to accept the possible reality of important, well-documented events even if they are not announced on the front pages of our major newspapers. When several huge scandals have erupted into the headlines after years or decades of total media silence, we must wonder what other massive stories may currently be ignored by our media elites.

We could see this as just conspiracy nonsense but if you read what goes before this quote - stuff like the man who designed (with Keynes) the Bretton Woods deal being a Soviet spy or the strange tale of Bernard Kerik - you may let a seed of doubt enter your mind.

Sobering stuff.

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Tell me Sir David who are you going to kill first?

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It seems that (at least according to George Monbiot*) the sainted David Attenborough has been peddling his eugenicist message again:

On the Today programme on Wednesday, Sir David Attenborough named the rising human population as the first of the factors causing the loss of the UK's wildlife. 

We know that Sir David believes in a mythical thing called 'optimum population':

On joining the Optimum Population Trust, Sir David said growth in human numbers was "frightening".

Sir David has been increasingly vocal about the need to reduce the number of people on Earth to protect wildlife. 

What interests me (leaving aside that the current population projections for the world suggest stabilisation by the middle of this century and decline thereafter) is who Sir David wants to kill off.

Is he proposing to sterilise less productive members of society - cripples, people without university degrees, members of parliament? Or are we to expect a sort of Logan's Run:

"The seeds of the Little War were planted in a restless summer during the mid-1960s, with sit-ins and student demonstrations as youth tested its strength. By the early 1970s over 75 percent of the people living on Earth were under 21 years of age. The population continued to climb—and with it the youth percentage..."

Perhaps 21 is too young to pop us off, maybe thirty as in the film or perhaps a more modest 45!  Or will we have be some dystopic variant on the National Lottery - with the prize being sterilisation or even death.

The truth is that Attenborough is perhaps the last of a dinosaur generation - the inheritor of the authoritarian state direction (I hesitate to give it its real name) that so appealed to Keynes, to Beatrice and Sidney Webb, and to that self-indulgent English elite: Shaw, Wells, Tawney, Foot. These people, for all their supposed socialism, saw a load of little peons to be herded about, organised, hectored, lectured and patronised. And if needs be, neutered.

So given it isn't gorillas Sir David plans on killing, who is it?

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*Can I point out that Monbiot's article is (as usual) a pile of factually incorrect dribble

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This really isn't a big surprise

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I'm not making a partisan point here but it shouldn't be a surprise to us that:

The Work Programme is not doing enough to move the hardest-to-help members of society closer to work...

Note the language - 'hardest-to-help' and 'closer to work'. The Work Programme - charged primarily with supporting all those falling off the end of six months with no work - will focus on those cases with the greatest chance of success. And they aren't 'hardest-to-help' or 'furthest from work'.

Think about this for a minute - the limited funds available (we may argue over the size of the pot but it will always be limited) are surely better spent on that 'greatest good for the greatest number' idea?

Which means that:

...those people who are homeless, have mental health issues or drug and alcohol problems...

...will probably miss out.

Maybe, instead of writing letters and trying to browbeat the government into changing the system (to the detriment of somebody else - probably more than one other unemployed person), these large charities might care to spend some of their voluntary income on helping these folk?

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Ban cars!

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Yes folks it's the latest piece of public health nonsense. The people who brought you "third hand smoke", "obesogenic environments" and "passive drinking" -  a veritable torrent of nannying fussbucketry - now want to do the same for cars:

Private cars cause significant health harm. The impacts include physical inactivity, obesity, death and injury from crashes, cardio-respiratory disease from air pollution, noise, community severance and climate change. The car lobby resists measures that would restrict car use, using tactics similar to the tobacco industry. Decisions about location and design of neighbourhoods have created environments that reinforce and reflect car dependence.

I seem to recall that tobacco was 'unique' as a product and that no other product was so exceptionally damaging. So why is it that the judgemental little authoritarians in the public health fraternity keep finding more things they wish to ban? That they advocate:

Car dependence is a potent example of an issue that ecological public health should address. The public health community should advocate strongly for effective policies that reduce car use and increase active travel. 

How long before they start banning car ads 'targeting children'? And adding health warnings to cars? Sock puppet organisations  - Traffic Concern or some such wibble - will spring up and the lobby the councils and government departments that fund them?

Will we have laws restricting engine size, saying we can only own one car, rationing petrol - all in the cause of making us healthy (whether the policies work or not - it's the campaign that matter).

 And just before we dismiss the article as just another bit of daft academic nonsense - the lead author works for the NHS.