Welcome to the new green ethical nationalism.

A SCHOOL has suspended two teachers after claims that teenage pupils on a cultural trip to the Far East ended up watching a live sex show in Bangkok.

Umm, isn’t that what Ed Balls wants?

Britain’s claim to be a world leader in green energy investment has been called into question by an authoritative new study that will embarrass ministers as they prepare to launch an important climate change initiative tomorrow.

A report from Deutsche Bank says that the UK does not have the right climate change strategy to attract international investment and is lagging behind other countries, such as Germany, France and China.

Not got it yet?

The Green New Deal has as one of its centrepieces the idea that we should have capital controls. That is, that we don’t want any of this Johnny Foreigner money coming in and disturbing our bucolic peace.

Well, there we go, we’re already doing that. So a victory for the Greens then, eh?

Downing Street was keen to point out that the prime minister is not in the business of throwing sand in the wheels of capitalism, but his speech, with its talk of the “social contract” between finance and the people breaking down, did make clear that it would be partly about taming the money men.

Of course, the Tobin Tax was originally designed specifically and exactly to throw sand into the wheels of capitalism. James Tobin actually told us so.

American economist James Tobin originally proposed the tax – levied at up to 1%, on foreign exchange transactions – in the 1970s, to tame damaging financial speculation, and throw “sand in the wheels” of turbo-charged capitalism.

Quite, and there was a very specific reason to: it was a world of fixed exchange rates. What he wanted to do was preserve the rigidities of the Bretton Woods settlement, to make it possible for countries to pursue independent economic policy paths without having their (fixed rate) currencies coming under attack and thus forcing them to change those policies.

We don’t have fixed currency rates now, so the case for the Tax has largely gone.

Calculations by the Austrian government, which is keen on a transaction tax, showed that even if the number of deals fell by up to 65% as the fee dissuaded people from unnecessary trades, it could still raise $700bn (£420bn) a year.

Isn’t that a lovely formulation? We now have the Austrian Government making the decision about whether my trades on the currency markets are necessary or not? As just a very minor example, my income is variously in $, £ and €. My expenditures are similarly, variously in $, £ and €. Incomes in one corrency rarely match with outgoings in that same currency so there’s a certain amount of shufling things around month by month. But according to the Austrian Government I should be taxed because, umm, well, apparently I’m some bastard international bank who deserves to be screwed.

And the biggest reason why this is all nonsense?

There are three main reasons a transaction tax suddenly has mainstream appeal. First, there is intense public pressure, after the taxpayer-funded bailouts of banks, for the financial sector to pay something back to society. Governments have struggled to exert any control over bankers’ bonuses: by levying a tax on their risky activities, they can grab some of the banks’ profits directly.

You can levy a tax wherever you like. But just because you levy it somewhere doesn’t mean that that’s where it stays: there is this thing called tax incidence.

And as the report says, we do have a transaction tax on financial transactions in the UK: Stamp Duty on share transactions. And who actually bears the economic burden of that tax? The wheelers and dealers? Actually, no: a report back in 2002 pointed out that it was individual’s pension funds that bore part of the brunt, the other major effect being a rise in the cost of equity capital to UK based firms. And as we know, a rise in the cost of capital shows up in the workers’ paycheques as a reduction in them.

So far from a Tobin Tax screwing the bankers, it, once again, screws the workers.

Which isn’t what we really want to happen, is it?

Ed Miliband, the Energy and Climate Change Secretary, will give the go-ahead for a new generation of power stations and explain how new planning guidelines will speed up the time it takes for them to come into operation.

Those doing the screaming will of course be exactly the same people who insist that the planning rules should/have been changed to allow wind farms to be pushed through.

Sauces, geese and ganders come to mind.

Very much the same as the argument over subsidies. We all know that fossil fuels remain, without accounting for externalities, the cheapest forms of energy generation. Thus the development of any alternative system will depend upon taxes/subsidies.

But there are those who are vociferous about the subsidies nuclear will require (amounting, in the words of one energy company, to a minimum carbon price of £30 or so per tonne CO2-e) while remaining very quiet indeed about the costs of solar PV subsidies. (on hte German model, around $1,000 per tonne CO2-e).

Gooses and ganders again, eh?

A heavily pregnant woman and her fiance have gone on the run after social workers threatened to take away their baby at birth.

Kerry Robertson, 17, and Mark McDougall, 25, had been told that she was not bright enough to raise their child and that they would have to give him up.

It’s not all that long ago that the caring sharing lefties would have happily sterilised you rather than allow you to reproduce.

However, newly released statistics show that the number of children admitted to hospital with scurvy soared by over 50 per cent in the past three years.

Released following a parliamentary question, the figures show that in 2004/05 there were 61 children admitted with scurvy in England.

But by 2007/08, the latest year for which figures are available, there were no fewer than 94 cases: up 54 per cent in three years.

Well, yes, given the numbers,…..well I think we could probably find 100 kids across the country suffering from all sorts of diseases that we thought we’d got rid of. But the bit that interested was this:

Ursula Arens, of the British Dietetic Association, said it was not possible to say how the children were getting scurvy: whether it was from a poor diet, or as a by-product of other diseases such as cancer.

‘There may be examples of children just living on bread and jam and nothing else because of poverty,’ she said.

I rather doubt that as a cause actually. Jam is a pretty good source of Vitamin C. Not as good as fresh fruit to be sure but pretty good nonetheless:

Fresh peeled pineapple fruit contains an average ascorbic acid content of 24.8?mg/100?g of fruit. During the juice making process, peeling led to the highest percentage loss of vitamin C (41.8 per cent) followed by exhausting (23.7 per cent). Processing of pineapples into jam was revealed to be most destructive towards ascorbic acid (a loss of 46.8 per cent) as compared to juice making (38.5 per cent) and sorbet preparation (15.5 per cent).

We’ll put that remark down to someone just saying anything off the top of their head shall we?

The headline war is won (at least so far) by the Mail:

How was it for me?

Yes, there really is such a thing as too much education.

British families could be forced to pay up to £227 extra on their annual energy bills to help to fund a new generation of nuclear power stations under plans proposed by the French company expected to build most of them.

EDF Energy, which wants to build four reactors in Britain at a cost of about £20 billion, was accused of holding the Government to ransom last night, after an executive told The Times that none would be built unless the Government agreed to underwrite part of the cost. Speaking before a government announcement on Britain’s energy future on Monday, Humphrey Cadoux-Hudson, managing director of EDF Energy’s new nuclear business in Britain, said the nuclear programme would proceed only if the Government ensured that consumers paid more for electricity from fossil fuels, such as coal and gas, which is cheaper but produces more greenhouse gas, making nuclear more competitive.

To fix the market in favour of nuclear energy he proposed a minimum price on the permits that energy companies need to buy to emit carbon dioxide. The cost of permits was too low — at about €14 per tonne — for energy companies to be encouraged to invest in nuclear rather than gas-fired power stations, which are far cheaper and quicker to build.

He said that a price of €25-35 per tonne of carbon dioxide was necessary to make construction ofnuclear stations profitable. “A floor price for carbon is needed … The waste product of fossil fuel generation needs to have a cost,” he said.

And guess who the outrage will come from? Yes, that’s right, the very same people who scream that we must have feed in tariffs for solar PV.

That solar PV that, by the German figures, costs over $1,000 per tonne of CO2 not emitted.

€35 per tonne really seems very cheap as an option, doesn’t it?

But good luck looking for Greenpeace of FoE to tell you that.

Darling’s target was the agreement in which the two governments share the revenue from VAT and duties on gambling and alcohol, which in various forms and to various formulae has survived for hundreds of years.

Ritchie has of course been banging on about this for years. And calculating how much of it is a gross overpayment from us to them. But as far as I can remember he’s only been doing his numbers on VAT: entirely leaving out booze and gambling (and I would assume, although don’t know, that it would also cover ther excise taxes like fags as well….anyone know?).

Is anyone actually interested enough though to follow his calculations?

The de facto authorities have the support of many middle class and conservative Hondurans as well as the supreme court, congress and military.

I do rather love this insistence that all the lefties have of calling the Honduran government the “de facto” government.

If you’ve got both the Congress and the Supreme Court on your side then it’s pretty much a given that  you’re the de jure government, not merely the de facto.

Especially since Zelaya was deposed entirely legally under the Honduran Constitution (even if his expulsion from the country was less than legal).

Britain should give up its place on the International Monetary Fund to make way for a single European Union seat on the fund’s board, a leading economist has said.

There are two very good reasons why this should not happen (and, strangely, neither of them are that the EU is the spawn of Satan).

1) The EU is not a single currency area. The perceptive will note that the UK still has the pound: meaning, among other things, that there is no unity of interest on such matters as exchange rates, something which the IMF is charged with monitoring/dealing with. One seat would therefore not represent the still potentially divergent interests.

2) You don’t actually get an IMF seat because you’re big and important. You get an IMF seat because you’ve coughed up the money to buy one. We have coughed up such dosh and thus we have a seat. If we’re not to have a seta then we should get our money back…..

Girl ‘cried rape after living out fantasy of having sex with two strangers’

I’ve seen official figures (which of course I cannot find now) which state that some 6% of rape allegations are in fact false in hte UK (that is, I think, the UK Govt’s own estimation/figure).

Around 6% of rape allegations lead to a conviction for rape as we are endlessly told.

Two interesting figures, no?

We’re special, the arts, so we deserve more tax money.

That’s pretty much it. No mention of the way in which the entire State arts budget is simply a subsidy from the non-metropolitan poor to the metropolitan upper middle classes, providing large amounts of indoor work with no heavy lifting to anyone who can package a grant proposal together.

My solution? Abolish the Arts Council altogether and have no public subsidy at all. If you want to watch a fat bird sing or a thin bird dance then come up with dosh yourself.

MPs demand answers over Nutt sacking

Alan Johnson, the Home Secretary, is under pressure to fully explain his decision to sack his chief drugs adviser.

And Liberal Democrat Evan Harris said that giving up the Westminster flat which he owns and moving into rented property could actually result in a bigger bill for the taxpayer, as rents for similar properties were generally higher than monthly mortgage payments.

Look laddie, well done you for owning a flat in Westminster. But you’re not seriously saying that given that you already own it you’re going to move out and into a rental just so the taxpayers can pay for it, are you?

It is true that Lisbon provides a route out, negotiations and the rest, if a country wants to leave the EU. And it would be complex and difficult because those “negotiations” would lead to our being entirely screwed if the FCO had their way.

However, do note that what has been passed is in fact simply a set of amendments to the original Treaty of Rome. It isn’t in fact a Constitution, despite the fact that it contains just about everything first proposed.

But the fact that it is simply a series of amendments to the Treaty of Rome means that it’s very simple indeed in British law to withdraw from it. Repealing the 1972 European Communities Act repeals the whole lot, amendments and all.

Including, of course, the tortured system for a country to leave.

This might actually be the only significant difference between the Consitution and Lisbon. Because Lisbon is now all part of the one same treaty it’s actually easier for us to leave.

One vote and we’re out.

Wall Street firms have always been famous for their generous bonuses to managers and traders — their so-called rainmakers. The graph above shows that employee bonuses have actually exceeded the estimated pretax profits of United States securities dealers in many years.

Staff compensation has been larger than profits for just about ever in just about every company I can think of.

So?

In future, ONS will highlight the following measures:
• All female employees’ median pay compared with all male
employees’ median pay
• Female full-time employees’ median pay compared with male
full-time employees’ median pay
• Female part-time employees’ median pay compared with male
part-time employees’ median pay

The fuller report is here.

And those numbers are?

The measure for all employees showed a pay difference of 22.5 per
cent in favour of men and the pay difference for full-timers was 12.8
per cent in April 2008. When looking at part-time employees, the
difference was -3.5 per cent, meaning that part-time men were paid
less on average than part-time women.

And the real meaning of this? Fuck off Harman you lying cow.

And that goes double for the Fawcett Society and the EHRC.