Just for the avoidance of doubt:

1) The democratically elected Icelandic government, under EU/EFTA financial regulation equivalence rules, agreed long before the crisis even began that it would guarantee compensation of the first EUR20887 of deposit to retail depositors in Icelandic banks from other EU/EFTA countries.

2) The Icelandic banks, with explicit permission from the democratically elected Icelandic government (as part of the economic boom that vastly enriched Icelanders for many years), actively marketed their savings accounts to depositors from other EU/EFTA countries.

3) The Icelandic banks then went bust and lost their depositors’ money.

4) This means that, unequivocally and in every possible sense, the Icelandic government is responsible for paying the first EUR20887 of compensation to retail depositors in Icelandic banks from other EU/EFTA countries. They agreed to take on that debt, and retail depositors in the Icelandic banks made the deposits on the basis that the Icelandic government weren’t a bunch of ropey shysters who’d refuse to pay debt that they owed.

5) For understandable reasons of domestic harmony, the governments of the UK and Netherlands (where the majority of Iceland’s victims were located) agreed to pay the compensation themselves, and subsequently chase the Icelandic government for the money it owed.

6) Today’s populist refusal by Iceland’s president to pay the UK and Netherlands government the US$5bn it owes as a result, despite the extremely generous payment terms they’d been offered, represents every single Icelandic person nicking more than US$10,000 from British and Dutch taxpayers.

If that’s democracy, screw it.

Update: Dsquared in the comments has a good summary of the Iceland situation:

The basic story here is that a small and wildly self-regarding Nordic nation, with a history of electing right-wing governments on the back of get-rich quick schemes, did so. Then that right-wing government proceeded to deal with its creditors in an amazingly stupid and dishonest manner because it wanted to pretend that something close to boom levels of consumption could be sustained. Then it all fell apart and a left-wing government was elected and started trying to clean up the mess. Then the elected President (from the same party as said right-wing government) decided to veto the solution. And this is, in some way, Gordon Brown’s fault.

He’s also written the whole, erm, saga up as a morality play. Well worth a read.

The usual suspects are in full-on froth mode about the non-news on Goldman Sachs allegedly moving to somewhere godawful to escape a small, one-off tax on salaries.

Obviously, like nearly all right-wing frothers nearly all the time, they’re talking complete and utter bollocks.

US culture site the Awl nails it on why:

Goldman Sachs “is understood to be considering its options in the wake of the UK’s windfall tax on bankers’ bonuses, a new 50pc top income tax rate, and increased banking regulations” is hilarious, and it is also a dead giveaway that the Telegraph uses the phrasing “is understood” to introduce this idea. Let’s see: here’s an incredibly-secretive, super-private financial institution of which it can be “understood” that they’re going directly to the papers as the first volley in a bargaining plan. But: hilarious! They’re going to pretend that they’re willing to leave London? They’re going to offshore the London office? To where? Glamorous downtown Sofia? Belfast? Tallinn or Toronto?

Think it through, boys. Nobody who works in that office will leave London! What’s the point of being rich if you have to live somewhere crappy? It just doesn’t work like that. You can near-shore and off-shore the jobs no one wants to Salt Lake City or wherever—but you can’t move the income producers to a town where they can’t get a cab and a fat steak. If you give Goldman Sachs anything at all to stay put, it means you both are huge morons, just like New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg was when GS pretended it was going to move from downtown Manhattan to more expensive quarters in midtown, and they wouldn’t even have done that. Ever.

Word.

Let’s forget the actual data for a second. Let’s assume that we know absolutely nothing about the likelihood of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) theory being true, but that either the climate scientists or the [denialists/sceptics - insert loaded term of your choice here] are right.

Let’s also assume that one side consists of crooks, cheats and liars, and the other side of bold seekers for truth – but we don’t know which one.

What happens if you try and deduce which side is lying from how the world has acted, based on every actor’s incentives?

Who’s in it to win it?

If AGW is false and people are lying to try and show that it’s true, who benefits? To start with, some geeks who get money to build computer models, some hippies who get to feel less silly about 50 years of veganism and hair-shirt-wearing, and some companies selling turbines and carbon filters.

The nuclear industry is the obvious big potential money-draw, and has form on extorting enormous quantities of state cash – but almost the entire environmentalist establishment hates them and rails against their product, and nuclear currently isn’t counted as ‘renewable’ by any major standards. Still, they’re the ones to watch if there were a conspiracy.

On the other hand, if AGW is true and people are lying to try and show that it’s false, who benefits?
continue reading… »

IT news site The Register has spotted the first person ever to be sent to jail for refusing to give the police the keys to their encrypted files under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act.

Unsurprisingly, he’s not an extremist or a terrorist or any kind (neither white supremacist nor Islamist fundamentalist) – he’s just mentally ill with an odd relationship with society:

With a deep-seated wariness of authorities, he did not trust his interviewers. He also claims a belief in the right to silence – a belief which would later allow him to be prosecuted under RIPA Part III.

continue reading… »

Trying to understand what we find funny by dissecting comedy routines is roughly as effective as trying to do so by dissecting the brains of Jim Davidson fans. And slightly less funny. Charlie Brooker wrote a good, but not very funny, column to this effect on Monday.

In the same Guardian comedy special, Brian Logan wrote a bad, and not very funny, column about the ‘new offenders’ of comedy. It’s made worse by the fact that his initial thesis that sexism and racism are back, wearing an Irony Cloak that makes their attackers manifest themselves as Humourless Sandal Wearers, isn’t a bad one at all.
continue reading… »

Excitingly for data-mining weirdos, the Department for Communities & Local Government has released data on various happiness-related statistics broken down by local authority. What else is broken down by local authority, that I’ve written about recently? – yup, ethnicity statistics.

One of the questions asked in the poll is “% who agree that their local area is a place where people from different backgrounds get on well together”. If the theory that BNP voters are driven by fear of gangs of steaming Somalis, murderous mullahs and crack-dealing Caribbeans were correct, then you might expect there to be some kind of negative correlation between Nick Griffin’s multi-ethnic nightmares and the belief that ’round here things are pretty much OK’.
continue reading… »

Which schools in the UK do worst? No, it’s not the ones in areas crammed with ethnic minority kids. Or at least, not only do all ethnic groups other than black kids perform more-or-less identically in GCSEs [*] – out of the four worst-performing councils in London educationally, two of them have above-average levels of white-British kids, and one is hovering on the margins.

continue reading… »

Labour’s defeat in the 2010 election is a near-certainty – and it’s also clear that the defeat will come for two main reasons:

1) the economy is shafted
2) everyone hates the leadership

All the other factors being claimed as reasons for the impending defeat are a subset of the points here (indeed, arguably 1 is a subset of 2 – it’s a lot easier to excuse the government’s other failures if you aren’t being thrown out of work and having your house repossessed at the time).

And together, they lay the foundations for the defeat of the New Labour project and the resurgence of the Labour left.
continue reading… »

One of the most popular sports played by politicans across Europe is ‘blaming unpopular things on the EU’. The specific unpopular thing varies across countries: here, it tends to be Rules And Regulations; in France, it tends to be the ability to buy things without enormous tarrifs; while pretty much everywhere it’s immigration.

However, it’s only in the UK where we have a large, or at least vociferous, group of utter maniacs and obsessives who’re willing to blame absolutely everything that happens on the EU, and to view the organisation as a tool of the Devil, or possibly Hitler, to bring about a communist Hell, or possibly a Fourth Reich.

continue reading… »

There is a massive false meme, prevalent both in the UK and in Iceland, that Gordon Brown last month froze Icelandic companies’ assets in the UK as an angry gesture after the collapse of Landsbanki, by labelling Iceland as a ‘terror state’ like Sudan or North Korea.

The existence of this meme is sad, very slightly because it’s caused large numbers of British morons to explode with rage (here’s a good example by ignorant buffoon and Tory MEP Daniel Hannan), partly because it’s hurt Icelanders’ relationship with and perceptions of us – and they’re people who we really ought to get on with, both because of our enormous shared cultural heritage [*] and because they’re great (full disclosure: I’ve just returned from a week in Reykjavik), but worst of all because of the myth’s impact on the already-struggling Icelandic economy. continue reading… »

There’s been an enormous tabloid fuss about Recorder Shaun Smith’s comments on namby-pamby sentencing guidelines, which he says prevented him from sending a burglar to jail.

[Dominic] Wong had admitted battering his way into [seven months pregnant] Safa Moustafa’s home and stealing cash while she cowered upstairs with her two-year-old daughter… [She said] ‘I’m now very nervous and anxious in my own home. I’m forever checking doors and windows and keep looking outside to see who’s around. I can’t even go into the garden unless my husband is here. I can’t be alone in the house and have friends to sleep over.’

Said Judge Smith:

This is sentencing by numbers. I want to send you to prison.The public want to see you go to prison. But I can’t send you to prison because of the guidelines I have been given.’

Indeed, this is an outrage. But the outrage is that the judge doesn’t appear to know the guidelines that he’s working from.
continue reading… »

Note 1: Lloyds TSB’s involvement in the government plan to stop RBS and HBOS collapsing is not evidence that Lloyds TSB’s own loanbook was dodgy, or that it had funding problems: rather, it’s taking the government bail-out money so it can buy a bank with assets equal to its own for half the price.

Note 2: it is probably true that as a shareholder, having the government take a majority stake in your company for far less than the price you paid isn’t ideal. However, if the alternative is that the company goes bust, then it’s still a pretty good deal for you. So anyone suggesting that the bail-out is bad news for HBOS or RBS shareholders is entirely clueless.

Note 3: if you were looking to ‘featherbed Scottish jobs’, then creating a nationalised HBOS would be a better way of doing that than the alternative of selling to an English-based bank with a large existing Scottish branch network.

Note 4: if, in 2003, you say “house prices are going to crash and we’re all fuxxored OMG OMG!!!!”, that doesn’t mean that you’re prescient for projecting a downturn in 2008, it means that you’re a moron (see also: anyone who thinks that the current problems invalidate the concept of fractional reserve banking, aka “the main thing which turned us from being really poor to being really rich”).

Note 5: the taxpayer isn’t “footing the bill” for anything. The taxpayer is getting an excellent portfolio of assets, which will be worth a great deal of money in five years’ time, for next to nothing. I don’t normally believe it’s appropriate for the government to engage in financial speculation, hence why people who think Gordon Brown should have run the government’s currency portfolio as a commodities hedge fund are morons, but in this particular case it’s an excellent call. Hell, I’m currently looking to buy Lloyds TSB stock because they’re so clearly undervalued today given the brilliant deal they’re doing [*] – and I’m certainly not getting the ‘borrowing at 5% and lending at 12%’ which makes the government’s preference shares an incredibly good deal.

[*] NB I’m not a UK retail banking analyst or fund manager, and I’m not qualified to offer financial advice in the UK or elsewhere. My view is based on publicly disclosed information only, and may turn out to be nonsense – I’m piling in a bit of spare cash, not my life savings.

Surely, if there’s one constant in life, the Guardian ought to be mildly biased toward the Labour party? But based on its latest interview with Alistair Darling, we can’t even rely on that anymore.

The headline the Guardian has put on the interview – and therefore, the headline that the gibberingly mad press will also put on the interview, whilst also interviewing perverted and insane former Tory ministers, who’ll point out that actually it’s even worse still – is “Economy at 60-year low, says Darling. And it will get worse”.
continue reading… »

Bob Crow, the leader of the RMT rail workers’ union, is one of the less popular men in London due to his union’s propensity to go on strike at, apparently, the slightest provocation (most recently, a 5% pay rise, and someone being sacked for punching a customer – although I’ve got a theory about the 5% one).

And indeed, as someone who has to go to work, I irrationally hate and despise Mr Crow and the RMT for interfering in this already unpleasant process – in the same way you hate and despise the ‘person taken ill at Temple’ and hope the ‘person under a train at Moorgate’ is thoroughly squashed. But these hatreds are obviously unfair, and they disappear once you’re out of the tunnels and back in the real world…
continue reading… »