June 2010 Archives

You might be forgiven in thinking it is April 1 if you go into your newsagents today. The splash in one of the Sundays claims we will soon have to buy eggs by the pound - sorry kilo - rather than by the dozen. The same for packs of bread rolls.

I don't actually buy that particular paper - you have to doubt the credibility of any paper that employs Piers Morgan as a sports columnist and once managed the remarkable feat of publishing a review of the 9/11 concert in Madison Square Gardens, New York, several hours before it had actually taken place - but amid all the hype, scare mongering and no doubt claims it will affect house prices there seems to be an element of truth.

No doubt the Government will cravenly submit as they do with pretty well everything demanded by the Euromeisters - unless it benefits the ordinary man in the street of course in which case it is a no no but perhaps it is time that for once stood up and told Europe enough is enough.

A little Anglo-Saxon might not go amiss here or in crossword parlance . . . (4,3) go away in a jerky manner.

My local Sainsbury's has just installed some self serve tills - those do it yourself jobs when you have to tell yourself to have a nice day at the end of scanning everything in, calling the assistant twice because you have moved your bag on the sensor and called them again because you needed your Daily Telegraph coupon verifying.

Personally I don't mind them. It adds a bit of interest and is certainly more fun than watching your items on a conveyor belt like a cheap version of The Generation Game and stuffing them in bags at an ever more franatic rate as you fall behind the line of scanned items..

I suspect the idea behind them is to save on staff at peak times with six tills being managed by two assistants but then Sainsbury's management did not take into account the great British public.

An elderly lady arrived at one of the tills yesterday and persuaded one of the assistants to scan all her shopping through the till for her packing her bag for her at the same time.

She paid, thanked the assistant then left announcing she would look for the same assistant the next time she shopped. Not so much self service as personal shopper.

Dame Helen Mirren must be desperate for work - any work - in the USA if her blast at BP and, worse, Britain on the David Letterman show is anything to go by.

I might be wrong but I suspect that her knowledge of the oil industry and the running of BP is on a par with that of my local newsagent - probably less as he puts his own petrol in his car - and as for her cobblers about not going on the show if England had beaten USA in the World Cup telling the world she was "mortified and embarrassed at being British!". . . it just makes you cringe and embarrassed that she is British.

If you can't support your country in the World Cup, and worse, confuse England with Britain, it is a pretty shameful affair - and all for a few US Brownie points.

What the World Cup, the England team or even Britain has to do with an oil spill in the gulf of Mexico only someone desperate enough to ingratiate themselves with the USA to join them in their Brit bashing would understand.

If she wants to leave Britain for good I am sure no one will mind and presumably, mortified as she is, her gong is already in the post being returned to the real Queen . . . or perhaps not. Being a dame gets a lot of airline upgrades and good tables at restaurants and must be a help when you are touting for work in Hollywood.

Looks like the Brit baiting season has opened on Capitol Hill where the House Energy and Commerce Committee seem to have no interest in letting BP CEO Tony Hayward answer any question just poke him with sticks every time he opens his mouth.

It seems they don't so much want answers as blood and a chance to say how much better US oil companies are. Oh yeah. There but for the grace of God and all that.

Old Obama really has got his knickers in a twist about BP or British Petroleum as he seems to prefer calling it.

WIthout trivialising the impact of the old spill there does seem to be a a bit of a personal agenda going on here which I am sure has nothing to do with the fact Obama claims the British tortured his grandfather in Kenya nor the pressure from the US oil companies waving receipts for what they poured into the political pot prior to the Presidential election.

Obama seems so concerned with his anti-British diatribes that he hardly manages to mention Transocean and Halliburton.

The Deepwater Horizon rig, made by South Korea's Hyundai incidentally, which exploded then sank, rupturing the riser pipe, was operated for BP, at a cost of $600,000 a day or so, by Transocean, which was as American as Mom's apple pie until it shipped out to Switzerland, via the Caymen Islands, for tax reasons.

The firm cementing the well closed at the time of the blow out was shady US outfit Halliburton which, incidentally, is making a fortune in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Neither firm seems to be being threatened with losing all their US licences or indeed being told to bung £13 billion into a compensation pot - or else.

Nothing wrong with BP being expected to pay for the clean-up and compensation which they had already promised to do.

But speaking of compensation, remember Bohpal? That was a leak at US owned Union Carbide's pesticide plant in India in 1984. Some 500,000 people were exposed to Methyl isocyanate and the death toll was somewhere between 3,787 and 16,000 depending upon which official figures you accept. Around 200,000 were left with permanent disability of various degrees and another 20,000 or so have since died

Union Carbide, now a subsidiary of Dow Chemical, paid a paltry $470 million in damages to the 554,895 people affected, some 15 per cent of the $3.3 billion figure initially requested by the Indian Government, itself way below the actual cost.

Remember though we are only talking about foreign villagers here not people who vote in mid-term US congressional elections or the next Presidential election.

Twenty six years on the site, where Union Carbide had happily been dumping toxic chemicals, is still heavily contaminated, drinking water contains toxins up to 1000 times the recommended safe levels and there are frightening levels of poisons and pesticides found in breast milk. Deaths from cancer, kidney and liver disease in the area are, not surprisingly, above average.

Oh, and legal battles are still going on. This month seven former employees of Union Carbide, including the chairman, managing director and vice-president of Union Carbide India were jailed for two years for causing death by negligence and fined £1,776. They were released on bail pending appeal. US executives have so far not been troubled by the authorities over international arrest warrants, a US court summons nor an extradition request.

US courts consistently dismiss claims for compensation and more than a quarter of a century on there is still a class action creaking its way through the US legal system seeking damages for personal injury and a clean up of the Bhopal region water supply. Don't hold your breath.

So when it come to responsibility and paying every last cent of compensation the good ol' US of A knows exactly what it is talking about.

I kid you not, the chairman of the Royal Mail Group, Donald Brydon, who presumably comes from a galaxy far away, has the brass neck to tell us that the £2.4 million pay packet for Adam "Axe man" Crozier in his final year administering euthanasia to the postal services was necessary to attract the right calibre of executive to run the operation.

At this point he might have added "into the ground". I don't remember in the good old days of the GPO that the bloke in charge had to be given a lottery win every year to get out of bed each day.

There must be a fairly long queue of more than competent people who could make a fair fist of running Royal Mail as a public service - public and service being words not in Crozier's vocabulary. We might even get post offices remaining open, early morning and second deliveries, regular collections and the like. In short the sort of things you might expect from a civilised, publicly owned and funded postal service. Service being the operative word.

We have had this having to pay obscene amounts to attract the right suit cobblers ever since public utilities were privatised and the Government thought it was a good idea (Government and good idea do not fit easily in any sentence) to run public bodies as quasi plcs.

Produce a trough and snouts and, in many cases, front feet are in there before you can say bonus. Strangely in most cases it was the people who were already running these operations who found their wages suddenly having to be delivered by Securicor.

I could never work out, if they were doing the job at what was still a pretty good salary, and no one was trying to head hunt them before the public bodies were privatised or given commercial freedom, why they needed to be paid a king's ransom to keep them afterwards. They had no where else to go.

Cameron has a job on his hands if he wants to control it now though. There is a whole new class of civil servants who are screwing the taxpayers for millions with ridiculous salaries and spurious bonuses based on targets they set themselves. Quite a few make bankers look almost restrained.

Perhaps a pay scale with a sensible ceiling would be a start and the only bonus available should be the same as that offered to most of the population - if you do your job properly then your employment will continue.