What Native Americans and the starving Irish had in common

The heartwarming tale of pay-it-forward with a 173 year gap.

173 years ago, Ireland was starving. 3 million people either died or were forced to emigrate due to the potato famine. Amid that crisis, a tribe of Native Americans collected $170 – worth $5000 in today’s money – and sent it to help the Irish people. Now the Navajo nation tribe has itself been badly affected by the Coronavirus and reached out to the Irish people for help. I spoke to Naomi O’Leary from https://www.theirishpassport.com/ on the Newsroom Programme on the BBC World Service.

LISTEN HERE: https://www.joelynam.com/blog

Should Govts issue vouchers to consumers to save the High Street?

Why ending ‘lockdown’ must come with ongoing support and in phases in order kickstart High Street spending post COVID-19. 

Joe Lynam & Chris Leslie

Originally published on HuffPost UK

The much desired ‘V’ shape recovery in consumption may well be illusory, but policy-makers must surely try hard to get there.  Certain ‘offline’ sectors could bounce back from lockdown relatively well – hairdressing, garden centres, pharmacies maybe. But for most on the High Street it could take many months as demand returns tentatively, especially from customers who have adapted to online alternatives for the first time.  

This will doubtless compound the meltdown on the High Streets. Stores were closing at an alarming rate before the crisis. A tenth of high street stores lay empty last October – well before coronavirus struck.  Many familiar brands had ceased trading.  How many retailers, landlords and town planners must yearn for such a figure now?

Alas, we should not only be focusing on how many chains or individual shops end up winding up entirely but rather count how many will open back up.

After three months of no income, many retailers may decide to wind up their companies entirely because the world of consumption is set to be so different.  

Of those shops which do re-open, how they serve customers and what products they sell will have to be reappraised entirely by their owners.  

Social distancing and mitigation measures are not incompatible with the gradual return of widespread business activities. Shops and workplaces will need to adjust significantly, varying hours, limiting customer proximity, protecting staff. The psychological impact of the lockdown will make many people wary of circulating for some time to come – and the shielding of vulnerable and older customers will itself reduce footfall for businesses probably for the rest of this year.

Can retail turnover recover in such an environment? Customers may refuse to wait for 20-30 minutes just to enter a store and even when inside, they won’t enjoy the process of shopping as before. It takes an incredibly patient shopper to queue up for ages and then be directed to follow arrows through a store, maintaining a distance of 2m from the person in front, particularly if only to buy one or two items. You may be discouraged from hanging around or touching and feeling the very products that you were interested in buying – lest you pass something on to someone else.

So, in order to survive, shops will hold fewer products – because sourcing them from wholesalers impacted by the virus and closed borders just can’t facilitate niche or specialist items. Thus a smaller range of products could lead to the ‘ALDIfication’ of what were bountiful retailers.

New ways to funnel customers through stores, following specified routes, picking, scanning and paying at self-service machines themselves before exiting through a different door could mean shopping without having any human interaction at all – the ‘IKEAfication’ of stores.

All of this still won’t be enough to save retailing as we know it. The latest ONS statistics already show retail sales collapsing at the fastest rate on record, even when accounting for online goods. 

Regulators and governments will have to step in. The Government’s exit strategy planning cannot simply be about the process of release from lockdown; it must also provide the financial adrenaline to jolt the economy back into life. A rapid rebound may not be completely realistic, but that shouldn’t stop us striving for as close to the ‘V’ shape recovery as possible.

Online businesses will be able to weather this storm more effectively than the High Street, helped of course by lower overheads and no business rates.  But when lockdown eventually ends, specific and tailored interventions to get the High Street and ‘offline’ businesses back on their feet must begin. Three measures in particular should form the basis of a time-limited High Street reboot plan.

First, at the point of easing of lockdown, there should be a total relaxation of shopping hour restrictions including Sunday shopping, as some MPs have started to demand, so that customer ‘bunching’ in a narrow range of hours can be eased especially for that set of shops where very high demand for services is likely at the outset.

Second, we should actively encourage traffic into town and city centres for the first couple of months after lockdown, so there should be a nationwide suspension of town centre parking charges and an easing of parking and congestion charging restrictions to make it easier for the public to return to their shopping habits on the high street.

Third, the Treasury should introduce a time-limited High Street Voucher Scheme, worth £100 for each UK citizen, that can only be redeemed in offline retail premises (who normally pay business rates) within two months of the end of the lockdown phase. If the vouchers are not redeemed within those eight weeks then their value would cease. A ‘use-it-or-lose-it’ incentive for everyone to return to the High Street, following any adapted social distancing rules, would be the kickstart that the offline economy needs. The £7billion maximum cost of such a scheme could allow £200m for local authorities to administer and distribute vouchers rapidly. Vouchers are preferable because there is a risk that cash would simply be saved rather than spent. And voucher schemes have worked successfully in other times of economic recovery, for instance in Belgium with energy costs or with car scrappage schemes, which could also be considered again.

We cannot assume that the High Street will bounce back unless policies actively drive footfall into our town centres and as soon as possible. Offering more debt to firms worried about their prospects simply cannot have the right stimulating impact. One-off interventions may cost the taxpayer in the short term, but tumbleweed town centres won’t generate revenues for the Exchequer any faster.

Exiting lockdown won’t be easy and safeguarding public health must be paramount. But now is the time to think through how best to inject new life into a dangerously ailing economy – especially our high street retailers who, once gone, may never return.

 

Chris Leslie was MP for Nottingham East and Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer in 2015

 

Joe Lynam is a Presenter on the BBC World Service and former Business Correspondent http://www.JoeLynam.com 

 

When Joe met Joe – the day Joe Biden shocked me at Davos

Now that Joe Biden is certain to be the Democratic nominee and has a 50% chance at least of being the next president of the United States, my mind wandered back to the day I met him in Switzerland 17 years ago.

 

I was among the most junior of junior producers in the BBC at the time – effectively a ‘meet and greet’ or ‘pump and grin’, to pick up guests at the studio door and ensure they had a paper to read and coffee to sip before they were put on air.  My then editor, who rated me as highly as gastroenteritis, needed a gopher for the beeb’s coverage at the annual pilgrimage for the rich and well connected, the World Economic Forum and asked me to do it because doubtless someone else was either unwell or their passport had expired.

 

As I couldn’t be trusted to book anything more taxing than a restaurant, a more seasoned producer registered me for the WEF and booked all the flights and accommodation (this was a chalet with a pullout bed in my case).  Amazingly and certainly by accident, I ended up with much better accreditation than I deserved: a white delegates badge. These prized cards cost around $20,000 each and there was no way the BBC would fork out that for my presence.  To this day I’m convinced that the badge should have gone to the billionaire investor Joe Lewis and I try to imagine the look on his face when surley Swiss security guards refused to allow him into the conference with his peach-coloured media badge that had been destined for me.

 

Don’t worry I’m getting to how Joe Biden ruffled feathers in the Alps.

 

So where was I?  I know. I was enjoying ice driving on a frozen lake in an Audi S8, sampling the finest champagne courtesy of the richest banks in the world and meeting the most important humans on Earth in those days – including Bill & Hilary Clinton and a rather lonely Secretary General of OPEC.  You see my white Badge literally gave me Carte Blanche to almost every single posh event and ‘do’ that was being held in Davos that year.  This more than aggravated the far more senior BBC correspondent for whom I was supposed to be working and who was barred from attending all the events that I glided into.  She exploded at me on the final day and told me to ‘buck up my ideas’. I almost spilled some of my caviar listening to her rant on the phone.  

 

Before that verbal explosion happened, I was attending a discussion in one of the smaller halls in the convention centre about Geopolitics.  I attended because the world – especially Britain and the US – were preparing for war with Iraq. George W Bush wasn’t in Davos but he sent his Secretary of State Colin Powell to ‘sell’ the war to a very dubious Europe (this was well before anyone cared what China, India or Russia thought).  I imagine that General Powell doesn’t reminisce fondly about those days peddling nonsense about clear and present danger as well as WMD.

 

Powell was thus keen to leave Europe and go back to the hawks in Washington as quickly as possible and as such cancelled his attendance at the event I was due to see about Geopolitics. An unknown US Senator from Delaware was there though and I went along for a shufty.  He was unknown in Europe but well known within the Beltway in Washington as the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee which had held hearings about the Iraq war build-up and heard mostly from those who supported it.

In Davos, he was charming, entertaining, well read, well travelled, well tanned, and in total command of the room.  He was a hit.

 

As a Democrat, he was ostensibly less of a warmonger than the Cheney/Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz Republicans but had voted in favour of the invasion. And as an American public representative, he was also disinclined to attack his own nation’s policies while overseas.  He gave a wordy, convoluted fireside-chat-of-a-reason why Saddam had to be disarmed to his sceptical mostly European or Middle Eastern audience. He has since disowned his own stance on that war.

 

But it was the metaphor he used to describe US-European relations that I thought was worth retelling.  He paced the stage like a tiger saying that the transatlantic relationship with respect to the planned Iraqi invasion, was akin to a dysfunctional marriage.  

 

“Imagine if you will, a husband coming home from work,’ said the Senator who would be Vice President 5½ years later,  ‘seeing a brand new Porsche parked in the driveway as he arrived back at 6pm. In a functioning (or dare I say new) relationship, the husband would stay calm and serenely inquire of his beloved wife:  ‘Honey, I can’t remember discussing buying a brand new sports car. Are you sure we need it or can afford it?’”

 

Joe paused his pacing to deliver his punchline.

 

“Instead, this transatlantic couple is in bad shape and tends to jump to angry conclusions. So in this case, the husband would shout at his spendthrift wife: ‘You stupid dumbass bitch.’”

 

I looked around the room.  Most laughed – even the women (and there were very few) – smiled. Not sure they’d laugh now.

 

I collared Sen Biden at the end for a chat with this memorable lawmaker on the pretence that we wanted an interview with him for the BBC.  He said no thanks and rushed to do something else – possibly even driving on ice. Lucky for me he declined. Imagine me explaining to my already livid correspondent colleague that she had to interview some senator with little or no link to business nor any subject of interest to BBC business viewers.

 

I have followed his career with great interest ever since.

Published on http://www.JoeLynam.com

The world needs a new Bretton Woods after COVID19

By David McWilliams and Joe Lynam for the Irish Times

 

The world as we know it is about to change radically as a result of COVID19.  How we live our lives, how we work, how we socialise and how money moves will change – and profoundly. We’ll leave others to figure out the first three but in terms of how money moves around the world, we will need to find a new way of financing the global economy when this virus has passed.   

 

And before you say it’s too soon, please remember that the Bretton Woods conference, which set out a post war economic system, was agreed a year before the end of hostilities and only a month after D Day in 1944. It established a new global exchange rate system tied (in part) to the value of gold, created the IMF and the World Bank to bail out struggling countries and decreed that the US dollar would be the global reserve currency – or the currency into which all other currencies should be exchangeable.

The world needs to start thinking about a New Bretton Woods now and not muddle through, hoping to put it all back together with sticking plaster over the next few years. 

 

What will the world look like at the end of 2020?

Over the coming weeks, consumption will collapse, as will confidence. The hospitality sector as we knew it will be over. Most airlines will have ceased flying. House-buying or selling will disappear and with it home furnishing and renovations.  No-one will start a major new project and very few will be completed. Broadly speaking, the economy will cease to function.

 

Even if they are proactive now and lend immediately to robust businesses backed by last year’s profits, banks will experience widespread default from unpaid loans, mortgages and overdrafts.  

 

Capitalism will be suspended. The most optimistic view is that we put the economy to sleep, inoculating it as best we can with massive injections of cash or ”helicopter money”.  This could be done if governments and central banks – acting together – deposit free money in businesses’ and people’s accounts’, not so much to maintain spending as to prevent contagious mass default. This monetary ‘vaccine’ would best work alongside (and not instead of) governments taking on the wage bill for workers.  

 

‘Helicopter money’ could be delivered without incurring significant debt but, intellectually,  it would mean tearing up the central banking rule book. Although this is the most sensible thing to do, governments may well choose to raise the money (unnecessarily in our opinion) by issuing massive amounts of sovereign debt. 

    

As Ireland is one of the most export-dependent economies in the world, it’s not unreasonable to assume that Ireland’s national income or GDP could sink by 10-25% this quarter and next- depending on how long this crisis continues. The budget deficit (or national overdraft) could spike to 20% of GDP (total national income). Unemployment, even with the wage subsidy to dissuade employers from laying off staff, is bound to sky-rocket – possibly to 20%.The usual escape valve of emigration will not be open to Irish youth because nearly every developed country in the world will also be in recession with mass unemployment.

 

How will the world respond?

At the outset, politicians will tend to prefer maintaining the current system – even though it will have been completely broken by COVID-19.

 

Having taken the measures outlined above, debts will be crippling, but interest rates will remain on the floor. Big central banks will create more money and use Quantitative Easing (QE) to fund this debt. 

 

Globalisation, of which Ireland has overwhelmingly been a beneficiary, is predicated on travel, trade and the free movement of capital. This will go into reverse.  The speed of any reversal will depend on the type of governments that emerge from the crisis. There is a higher likelihood of more nationalist, protectionist and less cosmopolitan politicians emerging in countries traumatised by the virus.     

 

How could or should the world respond?

If we want to preserve the liberal order, which has delivered relative prosperity for the past forty years, we need to convene the G20 immediately with a view to a new Bretton Woods arrangement. 

 

This disparate group includes major nations from all continents and the 3 biggest economic players:  the US, China and the EU.  

 

The UN is too cumbersome.

 

Before its first emergency meeting (via Zoom or Skype), the G20 would have asked its brightest thinkers and economists to come up with some creative ideas to kick-start the post Covid-19 world.  Alas, these recommendations will inevitably be watered down once the politicians get their hands on them. The US, for example, would probably demand that the dollar remain the global reserve currency but China simply wouldn’t wear that and the Chinese might even be backed by EU governments.  

 

Assuming the gravity of the situation forces politicians to come to a compromise, we could be looking at a brand new global reserve currency, which might be based on a basket of currencies including the yuan, euro and dollar.

 

This new virtual unit of credit (eg ‘The Globo’ or ‘The Mundo’) could then put a worldwide value on all debts and assets. That could then restart supply and demand and might even lead to cash and coins being issued in the new clearing currency by a reconstituted IMF – one which the old Western countries would no longer control.

 

Apart from what kind of money we’d all be using, the most pressing issue would be debt. 

 

In the worst case, bankrupt western governments might have to print trillions of euros and dollars in order to give their citizens enough money to survive. It’s not unreasonable to assume that they would consider nationalising vast swathes (if not all) of the economy – especially those in travel, hospitality and essential services such as rubbish collection and banking (again).  This is already underway in some countries. 

 

That means sovereigns – for a while – would own hundreds of thousands of distressed companies, all their debt, all their assets and all of their wage bills which could then be leased or sold back in chunks to those who could afford it.

 

Ireland and Germany have recent experience in how to do this. Unpalatable as it may sound, those who ran NAMA and the Treuhand (which disposed of East German assets after the fall of the Berlin Wall) would become the most sought after consultants in the world. In fact, ‘Nama-isation’ could go into the global lexicon as the by-word for returning distressed assets back to the private sector.

 

But even if none of these ideas are implemented or even debated, something urgent and drastic will have to be done.  Just as the calendar was bifurcated into BC and AD, the economic future will be delineated into two eras: Ante Corona (AC) and Post Corona (PC).

 

David McWilliams writes for The Irish Times and presents “The David McWilliams Podcast” @davidmcw   

 

Joe Lynam presents the Newsroom programme on the BBC World Service www.JoeLynam.com  
ORIGINALLY published in the irish Times on March 25th 2020

https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/world-will-need-new-financial-system-after-covid-19-1.4211363

Japan – a Uniform place

Japan – a uniform country 

 

It was a near perfect semi circle around the coach.  Around 20 teenage boys – immaculately presented in their baseball uniforms – arcing around a single man.  They listened in absolute silence to what he had to say. As we walked by on a quiet footpath, perhaps only 10m from the group, we could not hear his voice nor his advice. He did not gesticulate nor give any physical indication that he was talking about baseball.  He was certainly speaking but to us it was inaudible, about a notch above a whisper.

None of the boys shuffled their feet or looked around or limbered up or even so much as moved a finger.  This was the epitome of respect being shown for the trainer, the wiser person, the experienced man, the authority figure.

 

 

I tried to imagine the scene in Dublin when I was growing up. Indeed the picture I conjured up from my own memory banks was a very different one. Forget about the perfectly formed arc around the coach. Forget about the silent respect. Forget about the inaudible advice being offered. That would never have happened when I was playing GAA or soccer in Ireland in the 1980s.  I can safely guess the same would apply in the UK in that time or even now. Players would bounce up and down. Mini conversations would continue, the odd guffaw. The coach would have to order his players to gather around and remind them to ‘shut up and listen’ every few minutes.

 

For me that sums up Japan. The respect, the order and above all, for me at least, the uniforms.

 

Japan loves uniforms and uniformity.

 

From the most senior naval officer to the luckless chap whose job it is to clear a path for cars to drive into and out of a building site.  Everyone has a uniform. The millions of male office workers wear white short-sleeved shirts, boring shoes and dark trousers. Their female equivalent have dark long(ish) skirts and their shoes are almost as boring.

 

Staff on the underground have a hat, epaulettes and the famous white gloves to push in the last few passengers onto an already full train carriage.  Taxi drivers with even the minimum in education and social status also wear hats and gloves. Their staid boxy saloon cars are trapped in the 1980s rectangular designs.  The rear doors are opened from the inside and the driver will bow to greet customers and again as they depart.

 

The respect and deference takes on a new level on the Shinkansen (bullet) trains. Upon entering and exiting every single carriage, the conductor – in his hat, gloves and full company uniform – bows towards the customers in that compartment.  

 

It doesn’t matter that those self same passengers barely look up from their phones or acknowledge his (and it’s mostly ‘his’) presence. That’s not the point or the ethos of Japan. Demonstrating respect for customers and most of all for one’s work, is at the heart of everything in Japan.  Irrespective of how menial the task is, the Japanese wish to do it as good as is humanly possible while showing deference to customers and superiors – even if there are millions of them.

 

During our 10½ days in Japan for the rugby world cup, we travelled thousands of miles on the bullet trains.  We saw Hiroshima, Kobe, Iwata, Kyoto and Tokyo by train. And yet no one ever checked our tickets. No one ever asked whether we had reserved the seats or whether we were in the correct carriage – let alone class.  The Japanese are so honest and they assume (naively) that everyone else is too. And even when they know you are in the wrong seat, they still won’t make a scene or fuss. Again imagine that in Germany or France or Britain.  Mass brawls have started over less. 

 

On one occasion I ordered a young woman out of her seat because I thought she was sitting in my reserved place.  She politely collected her things and moved, asking me if it was ok that she sat in the row in front of mine. I was on the wrong train.  She had been in the correct seat. I still think about what I’d do if someone had tried that on me in Europe.

 

 

 

Seated in the correct seat on Bullet train

This respect for humans is replicated for the immediate environment too. The Japanese do not litter.  They are insanely clean. After the Ireland v Japan rugby match, as the fans departed (the Irish fans disappointed and the Japanese fans delirious) you could see in the stadium exactly where the Irish fans had been sitting. There was the usual detritus following a rugby international.  Beer cups everywhere and the odd plastic bag or scarf. But where the local fans had been sitting was spotless – left as it had been found. The natives take absolutely everything with them. They hate rubbish.

 

In fact on one occasion my travelling companion, Gavin, was holding two empty cans of Asahi near a stadium. He was whirling around like a dervish seeking a bin to plonk his brace of silver tins. Nothing in sight.  A Japanese man approached Gavin – having sensed his frustration. Without a word of English, the individual offered to take the cans with him. He opened his rucksack and placed them inside, beer still dripping from them. Gavin’s jaw dropped slowly but clearly.  Both men walked away in separate directions. Both satisfied with the strange encounter.

 

In fact Japan has more fancy toilets than public bins.  They might need their bums warmed and then power-hosed but they don’t need receptacles for their litter because they don’t generate waste.

 

 

 

Not just a toilet

The other intriguing encounter we had was with a group of 10 year old school kids in the Peace Park in Hiroshima. They were doing a survey of all the visitors and wished to ask us a few questions.  They carefully read out their questions in English and scribbled our answers in Japanese. Again the uniforms, again the respect and deference. Again I was trying to imagine young British or Irish kids doing the same in a foreign language.  Our reward for taking the 5 minutes to chat was a piece of beautiful origami that they had made themselves. I still have that ornate swan at home. My wife seemed to prefer that to all the silk purses and handkerchiefs that i bought her.

 

It’s a fabulous country full of lovely people who don’t want to stand out from the crowd.  They work non-jobs in full costumes and despise clutter as much as disrespect. The older men don’t lose their hair and remain raven-haired into their 60s.

 

But that doesn’t matter because he’ll be wearing a hat – mostly, gloves – often and a uniform – always.

 

Star Wars VII review

Why does Finn played John Boyega (British/Nigerian) speak with an American accent and General Hux played by Domhnall Gleeson (Irish) speak with a pre world war one English accent?
Why does Finn – after 20 years of brain washing by the First Order (post Empire)- so instantly change his mind in the opening battle scene about what he’s finding for – and none of his hundreds of thousands of stormtrooper predecessors ever contemplated such a switch in sides before?

The baddies also werent scary enough.  Maybe because i’m 38 years older than when i watched my first Star Wars, but Kylo Ren (the updated masked (then unmasked) baddy with a deep voice) didn’t frighten me enough.  IN fact he didn’t worry me much at all.

There: my 3 moans about Star Wars. For the rest of it: I loved Star Wars VII – The Force Awakens

Reliance on non-stop blaster shoot-outs and hurtling aircraft fighting each other which no-one can really see or comprehend has thankfully been abandoned in favour of off-green-screen action ie the real world.  Loads of sumptuously shot desert scenes and giant film sets in Pinewood studios work much better than a blur of fight scenes in space.

The plot was easy to follow. I cared about the characters – unlike the prequels – and older, younger, male and female, pretty and ugly people were allowed on our screens. Vicious droids from Star Wars I are gone to be replaced by the the finest collection of aliens ever.  The famous Cantina scene from IV is emulated with different music but just as interesting.

I think SW purests (and I count myself as one) will like -if not love – this re-imagining of the franchise.  It has more humour, more colour and more authenticity than the prequels.

The nods to previous great lines are there but the dialogue is not too stodgy, too knowing, too nerdy.

Finally it was amazing to see the beautiful Skellig Islands in Co Kerry at the very end of the movie but how the hell did they get the Millennium Falcon onto the jagged rocks?

 

This IS the Star Wars we were looking for.

James Murdoch leaves Isleworth in London for Manhattan

James’s resignation has a lot to do with the BskyB share price. Having fallen by 26% last summer, BskyB – which has nothing to do with News International (the Times, Sun etc) other than the Murdoch family presence – has had what’s called a ‘share overhang’. This means that the question marks over James Murdoch relating to hacking and whether he knew it was going on or not at NOTW has hindered the BskyB share price advance.

By resigning James distances himself from BskyB and this will probably benefit the share price going forward – assuming there are no further damaging revelations at Leveson or indeed the Culture Committee.

It also means that if Ofcom finds that JM is not a ‘fit n proper’ person to run a broadcaster, BskyB will now be only tangentially affected as he’s no longer in charge – though still on the board.

Non Murdoch shareholders in BskyB – led by Blackrock and Legal & General – are less concerned with hacking and more with up and coming media issues. The bid for Premier league football rights are to be decided this year. These rights account for 1/4 of BskyB’s programming budget and there is a worry that someone new eg Al Jazeera (back with Qatari oil wealth) might come in and push up the price for the football rights as they did in France. That would eat into profits – especially if Al Jazeera actually secured the broadcast rights.

BskyB investors are also worried about the impact of Apple TV which is on its way and could prove to be a viable alternative to Sky’s pay TV offering

Away from the financial side of things, JM’s resignation denotes the all but complete withdrawal of the Murdoch family presence from the UK media scene. Rupert arrived with great fanfare in 1969, his anointed son arrived in 2003 and now they are both back in New York licking their wounds

Although Murdoch enemies will tell you that JM is not fully gone from the UK. He remains deputy COO at News Int (the papers) and on the board of BskyB.

The bid from News Corp to buy the rest of BskyB (it already owns 40%) is probably only parked for now until the heat dies down. So JM will have to settle for only running the biggest global pay TV company in the world from Manhattan instead of Isleworth!

Iceland supreme court ruling may accelerate repayment to UK and NL governments

My instant reaction to today’s ruling from the Icelandic Supreme court would be that this ruling now unties the hands of the Icelandic government to repay UK and NL the £2.4bn owing from the collapse of Landsbanki in 2008.

After 2 referendums in Iceland which both rejected a plan to repay the Netherlands and UK between 2016 and 2045, this ruling from the highest court in Iceland means that Reykjavik is now legally bound to repay both countries under the teams which it rather than the Icelandic people see fit.

Iceland’s main banks collapsed at the height of the financial crisis 3 years ago, which meant that 300,000 British savers with one of those banks – Icesave- couldn’t access their deposits. The UK Treasury refunded them in full and the government in Reykjavik agreed to repay that £2.4bn with interest.

That refund did not cover dozens of British local authorities which had saved with Icesave because they were considered to be educated investors rather than depositors.

Today’s Icelandic Supreme court ruling sets out that Depositors (including councils’ money) have “priority creditor status” for the deposits they had in failed Icelandic banks.

UK Govt proposes a more permanent clock change – Is Britain moving closer to Europe after all?

For those of you who read today’s press release from the Dept for Business & Innovation and assumed that Britain’s clocks are set to change permanently soon, might I ratchet your expectations downwards?

There is a Private Members Bill winding its way through parliament at the moment which goes to committee next month and must be agreed upon before April 2012 to avoid being guillotined. The Govt is now formally supporting the Bill.

Assuming it passes all these hurdles, the Govt would then commission a review and that might determine when or even whether there should be jump onto CET – possibly by 2013.

The Review though will consult all the devolved UK parliaments and assemblies and there is nothing to suggest that Scotland would change its tune. In fact Edinburgh said as recently as last March that the SNP administration was against it because of the increased risk to Scottish children travelling to school in the dark.

Furthermore the UK govt has said that ‘consensus’ was needed for a change but what it really meant was unanimity because as a spokesman for BIS told me “if there is any disagreement then it wont happen”.

This begs the question: Why would the UK govt back a plan which it knows in its heart will fail due to an effective Scottish veto?

The answer seems to lie (according to my BBC Millbank colleagues) in the right wing of the Tory party whose MPs predominantly like the idea of brighter evenings in Winter. So, in order to placate them after the Commons Euro referendum vote on Monday, the Govt will throw them a bone to chew on, which ironically would bring Britain that bit closer to Europe i.e. in the same time zone.

PS: For those of you who cant get enough of this story, I’ve attached my TV piece on it from 12 months ago

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-11659956

Why the #Occupy movement should occupy the minds of politicians

There’s a key barometer of income disparity, which some might describe as a measure of fairness. It’s called the Gini Co-efficient and the higher the number the more unequal the distribution of wealth in that country.

The so-called Anglo Saxon nations of the UK and US have a very high Gini. In the US alone, the top 1% of the population owns 23.5% of that country’s income.

This is at the heart of the #Occupy movement.

And governments – whether democratic or otherwise – should not ignore this movement because it could be the start of a gamechanger.

That’s because these Occupy movements aren’t the usual collection of hippies, communists and conscientious objectors – though they are well represented here as well. They are mostly populated by young educated middle class men and women. People who are seriously worried that they have no future and no way of creating a future for themselves.

50% of 18-24 year olds in Spain have no job. One million young people in Britain are unemployed and finding it very tough to get on a career ladder.

These people are the voters and leaders of the future and they cant even get unpaid internships because the sons and daughters of the elite have those slots mopped up.

They are experiencing something their parents never did.  They have forgone early income streams in order to get an education and when they come out the other side burdened with massive university debts, they either cant get a job or the job they get pays no better than the guy who left school at 17.

This is why the Labour leader Ed Miliband (who has otherwise been  uninspiring) knew exactly what he was saying when spoke of the ‘squeezed middle’.

Why would you bother getting a 3rd level education if you dont earn considerably more than the person without a degree?

This is frightening politicians who know that the middle classes drive every economy and decide every election.  If they see their young adults out of work with good degrees and nowhere to emigrate to, that bodes ill for society as a whole.

And it’s getting worse. Even if you have a nice white collar job like an accountant or solicitor, you face the very real prospect of being priced out of the market by your equivalent in India.  Companies, which outsourced blue collar jobs such as manufacturing are now targeting the professions.

That doesnt make companies nor capitalism evil. It’s just a natural yet unexpected by product of the same globalisation which has lifted hundreds of millions out of abject poverty.

And so the cost-cutting and austerity which is a by-product of the banking crisis – caused by the 1% – has spawned a new very mobile and very switched on protest movement on behalf of the 99% .

Theirs is the earth and all that’s in it. Yet for the first time they (the young middle class) are poorer in real terms than the generation before them.

How long will it be before the well heeled start rioting on the streets of London, Manchester, Boston or New York ie the countries with high Gini Co-efficients?