Dennis Benson

As we toiled in the mud this morning we found ourselves wondering if Stephen Hester, the chief executive of RBS, has a chicken farm on one of his three estates. Certainly the 350-acre one in Oxfordshire is big enough, and this bunch of aged chicken-keepers would be delighted to help run it on the basis that a change is as good as a treat and the wages are likely to be good, if Mr Hester’s are any indication.

If you believe this morning’s papers, the nation is in shock at the decision to award him almost a million pounds in bonuses to add on to his basic salary of £1.2 million. We doubt that since, as forecast in a previous blog, we anticipated no reluctance on his part to pocket another pile of taxpayer’s money and great reluctance on the part of the government to stand up to him. The hilarious aspect of the decision is that Vince Cable is touting a plan to curb executive pay by granting shareholders the power of veto. Few believe that pension funds and the rest will bother and here we have a perfect example of the reluctance of a shareholder (holding 84% of the equity) to do anything. And the shareholder is the government.

When the news broke David Cameron was at Davos telling the Germans how to run their economy, but other politicians were quick to cry foul. Foreign Office minister Jeremy Browne appeared on Bumblebee’s Question Time and said that Hester should decline the bonus as “a question of honour”. He went on to draw an analogy similar to one we used yesterday. Hester’s total package means that he is paid for three day’s work what a soldier in Afghanistan, risking his life on a daily basis, gets in a whole year. Browne suggested that Hester “should reflect on that”. Some chance.

Another of the leading Lib Dems, Lord Oakeshott, said the bank should realise that any bonus for Hester this year was “totally unacceptable”. He went on to draw attention to the fact that RBS has failed to honour the Project Merlin agreement, and has continued to deny small businesses the loan facilities they need. And all this on the day that a ComRes poll revealed that one in four of Conservative MPs believe that economic growth will not improve over the next twelve months.

Inevitably Hester will attract a good deal of vitriol over this, but some of that should go to the government which sanctioned the bonus. In a way it sums up the extent to which people like David Cameron and George Osborne are out of touch with what they like to call “ordinary” families. They genuinely seem to believe that, given his task, it would be ungracious to oblige Stephen Hesler to manage on a basic salary. But that alone is over one million pounds!

Some claim that he had put a gun to Cameron’s head. If so the prime minister should have, to quote Robert Peston, called his bluff. Where would he have gone? Certainly not to any other UK bank and it is hard to imagine a queue in Europe for his signature. Anyway he has those lavish estates to oversee.

What do we actually know about this man who now takes from the taxpayer a zillion times what any benefit claimant aspires to. He started work in a sweet factory where, he claims, he was taught the value of money. His first job was packing Polos and he therefore doesn’t need anyone “to tell me what it’s like being a normal person on normal amounts of money”. He tells us that even his parents think he is overpaid.

A curious aspect of this decision is that David Cameron was recently vitriolic about the £700,000 salary paid by the BBC to its Director General. At the time we agreed on the grounds that it is our cash that the Beeb is tossing around. Suddenly it is okay to hand nearly three times that to a banker who, so far, has done little beyond firing 33,000 staff.

At least there should be one outcome that will be a blessed relief. We will no longer have to listen to ministers banging on about our all being in this together. If ever there was proof that there is one rule for the rich and another for the rest of society this is it.

Of course should Mr – the knighthood is in the post – Hester respond to the public outcry by refusing the obscene handout we will be the first to praise him. ’38 Degrees’ has this afternoon launched a petition so you never know, perhaps he does have a conscience. But we are not holding our breath!

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WHAT THE STARS SAY ABOUT COMPUTERS;   ” Computers are like humans – they do everything except think”….John Von Neumann     “I know nothing about computers. I don’t even know how often to change the oil”….Buzz Nutley    “Bill Gates declared to the world ‘I am Microsoft’. Mrs Gates had no comment”…..Whoopy Goldberg   “Computers don’t poop, fart, shag or laugh, and cannot detect irony. These, then, are the distinguishing characteristics of humanity”…..Eric Idle     “The trouble with the Internet is that it is replacing masturbation as a leisure activity”…..Patrick Murray     “How do I set my laser printer to stun?”….Chris Moyles     “A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kickboxing”…..Emo Philips

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For some time now we codgers have suspected that any nation that includes amongst its citizens millions of people who follow every tweeted word from Lady Gaga is a little, er, gaga. But we have never dreamed that a society once renowned the world over for its honesty and sense of fair play is now a nation of liars and cheats. Indeed had anyone dared to suggest such a thing we would have slapped them with a pair of hen poo-encrusted gloves and challenged then to a duel with beansticks.

But that is the conclusion of a survey just completed by Essex University. Its conclusion is that Britain has become a more dishonest and cynical country over the past decade. The study finds that Britons are more likely to lie and cheat than we were ten years ago. Those aged over 45 remain decent people, but attitudes have changed sharply for the worse among the young. Less than 20% would hand back money they found in the street, a statistic that has halved in just ten years and which was almost 80% in the post-war period. In fact the survey has used all the usual indicators and the younger part of our society has fared badly.

It would of course be easy to wheel out the usual guff from older people about ‘the youth of today’, but we surely need to ask ourselves why this massive decline in standards has occurred. From our teens onward, whether we realise it or not, we are heavily influenced by the examples of others. It seems reasonable to assume then that today’s generation has been, and is, influenced by some dodgy people. In an age of constant communication the behaviour of national figures comes under the spotlight far more than was once the case, and that means that cases like the one involving Chris Huhne, the environment minister, do not pass unnoticed.

The allegation there is that he asked Vicky Pryce, his ex-wife, to pretend that she had been at the wheel of his car and would therefore take his speeding points. He has yet to be convicted but in any respectable organisation he would have been obliged to step down pending a verdict. But he continues as a minister. And the rumour circuit has it that if he is convicted the prime minister may well bring back David Laws, a minister who falsified his expense claims

Of course the rot starts at the top, and there is no denying that in whatever area you care to consider – personal repsonsibility, behaviour, truth telling, neighbourliness – there has been a catastrophic collapse. Start your recap with the Blair government. It became normal for his official spokesman to lie on the record. Blair himself repeatedly deceived parliament, and used his position to obtain favours from wealthy wannabies, a practice that he continues to this day. This amorality spread to MPs and the 2005-10 parliament was probably the most corrupt since the 18th century. For months on end we were regaled with stories of lies and cheating in regard to expenses. And even today we have some of those found wanting holding cabinet posts.

More recently we have learnt that much of the media ( and in particular Murdoch’s empire) has been systematically corrupt, bribing police officers and leading politicians alike. Blair and Cameron have both been shamefully complicit in this, and the decision by Cameron to employ Andy Coulson, the former News of the World editor who has since been arrested, remains the most shameful episode of his premiership.

But it is not only politicians who have led the nosedive in standards. Shake hands with a banker and count your fingers. And their greed is breathtaking. Right now Stephen Hester, chief executive of RBS, is reportedly pressing for a substantial annual bonus in addition to his massive £1.2 million salary. And Hester is in fact a civil servant, his bank being 84% owned by the state. His boss is Robin Budenberg, the chief executive of UK Financial Investments, who earns £145,000. He in turn reports to Nicholas Macpherson, Treasury, who earns £175,000. So Hester believes that he is worth umpteen times the amount paid to his superiors. And you can add his colleague John Hourican, head of the calamitous RBS investment arm. He is reportedly demanding a bonus of £4 million which would mean that, despite being a state employee, he would be pocketing £11,00o for every single day at work. In just three days he would receive more than a young corporal, risking life and limb in Afghanistan, gets in an entire year.

No, it is not difficult to develop an explanation for the massive fall in behavioural standards amongst the British public. If Blair can lie to parliament about Saddam Hussain, and get away with it, if Cameron can employ the appalling Coulson as his spokesman, if bankers can demonstrate blind greed and MPs likewise, why on earth would a teenager feel even a twinge of conscience when he steals money or dodges fares?

Today for the first time Nick Clegg has made clear that the present situation in which ordinary families are struggling to survive, whilst the wealthy are being allowed to avoid even stamp duty, is no longer acceptable. Could this be a small light at the end of a very dark tunnel. We shall see, but at least he deserves credit for casting his gag aside.

It will only be when someone at the top takes a stand against cheating and lying about what is really happening, that the rest of us will begin to look in the mirror. When a group of us read the survey someone commented that we cannot sink lower. Oh yes, we can!

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A FEW QUOTES FOR PET OWNERS;   “Cats are smarter than dogs. You can’t get eight cats to pull a sled through the snow”….Jeff Valdez   “The simple rule about pet cats is this; like exclamation marks, more than two signifies a complete nutcase”…..Jeff Green    “I am fond of pigs.  Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us.  Pigs treat us as equals”….Winston Churchill    “A dog is not intelligent. never trust an animal that is surprised by its own farts”….Frank Skinner   “I had a cat once. That was the roughest night of sex I ever had”…..Matt Vance    “They say that dog is man’s best friend. I don’t believe that. How many of your friends have you had neutured?

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We allotment codgers must declare an interest before commenting on the case involving ‘Arry Redknapp. We are amongst his number one fans and, almost blindly, applaud his every word. And most of them are worth listening to, a perfect example being his comments of last week on the obsession of the media with football managers. ‘Arry said that the manager of bottom Premiership club Wigan is in fact cleverer that him, he simply doesn’t have the players. And as for oil-rich Manchester City, a local hack could triumph there since all he has to do is buy up the world’s best players.

Sadly our hero now finds himself in a spot of ‘bovver’. Our hope is that he will be aquitted but that is not something we can decide. Our sense of outrage is centered on the huge media attention and the implication that a tax ‘haven’ is something unique, something no one has ever used before.

Time and again this blog has named many of our largest companies which pay very little tax by basing skeleton ‘processing’ units abroad. The vast majority of the richest indivuals in the UK  do the same. Just last week the figures covering Tony Blair’s money-making organisation were revealed and, lo and behold, it pays very little tax. But it is unfair to single out any individual for a list of the top thousand richest people who pay full tax would require only the back of an envelope. And we can of course throw in the companies who have reached ‘agreements’ with the Inland Revenue which have cost taxpayers millions.

The truth is that the approach of our governmnet to tax avoidance is unique. an example is provided by the US insurance company Aon. It is moving its head office here and makes no secret of its reason. This, says the firm, “is to take advantage of the new rules which permit a significant reduction in our global effective tax rate”. The firm has $300 million stashed offshore and admits that were it returned to the US, it would “spark a tax charge”. In return we get merely the possibility of 20 senior executives relocating here. Tax haven Britain is open for business!

And there are literally hundreds of similar stories. Estimates of the amount being lost to the treasury each year are in the region of £180 billion. And today we learn more about the mysterious ‘Chemistry Club” which runs invitation events at the Sartoria restaurant in Mayfair. For a charge of £1800 leading business gurus can enjoy what are described as “relevant introductions” to ministers. Chief executive of the Club, Mark Simon, says that the events “target key decision makers”. No surprise there. No surprise either that Labour MP Lisa Nandy has remarked that it is “hard to avoid the impression that ministers are just paying lip service to the principle of open government”.

One of the attendees paying heed to the lobbyists has been the chief secretary to the treasury, Danny Alexander. Yesterday he was on his feet in the Commons defending criticism of the fact that the national debt has now passed the trillion mark. He did the tradional assault on Labour for “creating this mess”, and then turned his ire on wealthy tax-dodgers. “Our message to you”, he droned, “is that no matter how well known you are, how clever your accountants, however far away you hide your money, we are coming to get you”. At least he won’t have far to travel for Mayfair is but  caber-toss away (Mr Alexander is one of those MPs who will presumably join Mr Salmond when he creates his kingdom).

It was of course a statement similar to those made many times by both the last government and this one. Tax avoidance is now a UK national sport, and the amounts being syphoned off make the amounts being quoted in the Redknapp trial sound mere pocket money.

So when all those massed photographers have finished snapping ‘Arry for the umpteenth time, they might like to point their cameras elsewhere. Then again, the Press barons might not care for that!

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A FEW QUOTES TO REFLECT ON;   ” I always pass on good advice. It is the only thing to do with it for it is never of any use to oneself”…..Oscar Wilde    “If you’ve got them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow”…..Motto, The Green Berets    “If you’re going through hell, keep going”…..Winston Churchill    “Never accept a drink from a urologist”…….Erma Bombeck     ” To be sure of hitting the target, shoot first and call whatever you hit the target”……Ashleigh Brilliant    “Always be wary of any helpful item that weighs less than its operating manual”….Terry Pratchett 

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Have we ever had such a wet winter? Don’t say yes, we grumpy codgers know better. A glance back at the blogs of last year will show that we struggled with the snow, but at least it was manageable. But this wet stuff is different, every day sheets of water form on the allotments and heaps of gravel are tipped on. A century from now archeologists will excavate our site and spend months analysing the stones, perhaps we should leave a note in a bottle explaining that they came from B & Q.

Bedraggled and soaked to our Long-Johns, we gathered around the ‘clubhouse’ wood fire with more steam rising than from Red Rum in his pomp. But there was a mystery to debate. Today’s opinion polls show the Conservatives now six points ahead of Labour, with even the supposedly doomed Lib Demmers up to 16%. With most people now feeling the pinch, many local services being axed, the NHS in chaos, the wealthy becoming ever more wealthy, and the Manchester police openly commenting that they can no longer cope, how can this be?

One possible explanation is that the polls are wrong. Most unlikely since they all tell roughly the same story. Another is that the coalition is becoming increasingly popular. Most unlikely, indeed few people one meets have a good word to say for them. That leaves only one logical reason, the vast majority do not see the Labour Party as remotely capable.

When broken down, the polls show that managing the economy is the biggest gap in opinion. Around a half believe that Cameron and Osborne are making the best of a bad job. Only a bloke in Wapping believes that Miliband and Balls could do better. And this gap has widened significantly. Why? The likelihood is that Miliband’s decision to announce that, if elected, he will follow the same path of cuts as the coalition has left people bemused. I realise that he didn’t actually say that, but he provided the headline writers with a soundbite, and most people just read the headlines. What he was trying to do was demonstrate that he is not in the pocket of the trades unions, what he actually did was create the impression that the attachment of his party to the Keynes principle of a slower deficit reduction coupled with growth stimulation has been tossed aside.

In fact it is difficult for the casual observer to spot any difference between what the governmnet is doing and what the opposition is suggesting. This weeks big issue is benefits, and shadow ministers have gone to some lengths to demonstrate that they agree with the Osborne line. On this, as on much else, they have misread the public mood. The vast majority want concessions for those in real hardship but there is widespread resentment at the idea of someone not bothering to work, as against desperately seeking to do so, receiving more in benefits than the average person earns for full time employment.

On Europe the opposition is again out of kilter with public opinion and seems to have no proposals for curbs or changes. On the NHS it has failed to make any contribution to the debate and voters could be forgiven for thinking that protest organisations such as 38 Degrees are the opposition. On capitalism the coalition seems the only show in town for those outraged by the spectacle of bankers and leading FTSE executives earning almost one hundred times the average wage for everyone else.

The worrying aspect of all this is that the Labour Party seems devoid of ideas aimed at different policies that could improve things. In areas such as youth unemployment it has nothing exciting to say other than to yell abuse at the government. Yet there are surely many imaginative opportunities for completely new initiatives.

In fairness the shadow of Blair is a long one and given his present money-grabbing way of life, it isn’t going to shorten. But the past is past and constantly trying to defend the indefensible isn’t going to help. The nation needs the option of alternative policies, it needs at least a choice.

We codgers have no wish to kick a man when he is down, but it has to be said that Ed Miliband is proving to be a disappointment. Even Baldrick could work out that there are different and arguably less damaging ways of tackling many of the current problems. But Miliband seems to be falling for the notion that because the coalition is ahead in the polls he should ape them.

The reality is that they are only ahead because unaligned people hear nothing different from his lips than pours forth from Cameron, a king of spin if ever there was one. The opposition plan should be to come up with alternatives. Unless, that is, it feels that the coalition is right in all things. Should that be the case we should perhaps send for the Monster Raving Loony party.

Juts one example of being unable to spot the difference relates to the Lansley plan to raise the limit for NHS Foundation Trust’s private practice. At 49% this will create a two-tier system, one in which wealth will determine longevity. Labour should surely at least propose a lower percentage, or indeed a total ban. But like the less-than-wise old owl, it says nothing.

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SOME QUOTES TO MAKE YOUR DAY;   “There is nothing so improves the mood of the party than the imminent execution of a senior colleague”….Alan Clark    “Did you sleep with Bill Clinton? No., neither did I. Small world isn’t it?…..Marty Allen   “Clinton’s probelm was that he misunderstood th role of President, which is to screw the country as a whole, not individually” ….Betsy Salkind    “Today, the L A Times accuse Arnold Schwarzenegger of groping six women. I tell you, this guy is presidential material”…..David Letterman    “The duty of an opposition is very simple; to oppose everything, and propose nothing”….Lord Derby  “Nixon’s motto was if two wrongs don’t make a right, try three”….Laurence J Peter     “Clement Atlee is a modest little man with much to be modest about”….Winston Churchill  ”It’s not enough to have every intelligent person in the country voting for me, I need a majority”…..Adlai Stevenson

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My headline is in quotes since the words are not mine. They were uttered yesterday by Lord Oakeshott, the Lib Dem peer who resigned as his party’s Treasury spokesman over the lax treatment of banks by the coalition. His reaction came after research showed that the average remuneration of 1,265 bank employees was £1.8 million in 2010. And, as far as is known to date, it has continued to climb since. As the good Lord says, the lid has been lifted for the first time, and what we see is that the astronomic pay dished out for what amounts to gambling is not confined to the likes of Barclay’s Bob Diamond. Albert may be lacking in taste when he wears his tee-shirt emblazoned Bankers are ******* but we all agree with his sentiments. 

Banks are being forced to publish the information under EU rules that aim to lift the lid on City salaries and bonuses at a time when unemployment is rocketing, and those in employment are suffering pay cuts or freezes. It was reprehensible when the economy was booming, now it is an utter disgrace. The truth is that the ghastly alternative of shareholder capitalism engineered by the Conservatives in the 1980s, and cravenly supported by New Labour, has destroyed UK manufacturing and turned the country into a spiv’s paradise. Investment banks and hedge-fund managers have held everyone, including the government, to ransom. Where is the moral compass in gambling on corporate failure, or in ensuring that one of the few profitable UK manufacturing sectors left is an arms industry mostly in partnership with war-exporting economies?

Asset stripping has become a national sport, devastating families and communities, and the ‘bankers that take risk’ are the very people who have played the game, and have printed their own fortunes into the bargain. What Lord Oakeshott surely realises is that Cameron and Osborne are hardly likely to do anything to derail the super-rich parasites who have devastated our economy. To people of their wealthy background a million or so each year, plus bonuses, is not unusual. To the rest of us it is unimaginable.

And all this is taking place at a time when many will suffer benefits cuts, and I am not referring to the so-called ‘problem families’, most of whom are in social housing. And it is taking place at a time when even the horrendous unemployment totals tell only half the story. At first glance the news that the number of self-employed has rocketed to 4.14 million is reason to cheer. But within that ‘boom’ are vast numbers of part-time workers who are being exploited.

For example, adverts last week offered vacancies as Courier Drivers which were described as “self-employment business opportunities”. What it actually means is that the employer, like many others, has realised that such an arrangement frees him of national insurance payments, sick pay, maternity leave or holidays. It even rules out the minimum wage and any thought of pensions.

But the people I feel most sorry for right now are the thousands of ordinary workers employed by the high-street banks. They are not particularly well paid, but attract a lot of comment from a public that is rapidly reaching the end of its patience at the failure of the government to take a hard line. We should leave the tellers alone, they feel just as the rest of us do. Executives of those banks now owned by the state should lose their bonuses entirely and have pay-cuts in line with other public-sector workers. Ministers warn that they will all head off to other lands. Greece perhaps?

The attitude of bankers is illustrated by the legal action of 100 London based employees of Dresdner Bank, which was told by the new owners, Germany’s Commerzbank, to pay no bonuses, a not unreasonable stance given that losses had brought the bank to its knees. The brave 100 are demanding more than £1 million each as overdue bonuses.

In reality the rich-club brigade has moved into an unreal world, one in which executives four layers down the pecking-order see a million pounds as a normal amount even when the company is struggling. And they regard tax-avoidance as entirely normal.

Who knows, maybe the attitudes struck by Lord Oakeshott and Paddy Ashdown may just prompt Messrs Clegg and Cable to insist on real action. Their party now stands at single figures in the polls – what have they to lose other than their big cars and salaries?

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