The UK banks owe their very existence to the British taxpayer with the Governor of the Bank of England estimating that they have received the equivalent of £1 trillion in taxpayer support. That’s nearly £17,000 from each and every one of us.
But it doesn’t stop there. The banking industry is unique in having the taxpayer acting as a safety net.
I’ve written before about the danger of a few giant banks that we cannot afford to see fail and why we need to split them up and share out the risks. Well until the banks can be successfully broken up, they should pay for the explicit guarantee that they receive.
That’s why I’m backing the call to crate a new levy on bank profits at a rate of 10 per cent, with all the revenue raised (estimated next year to be around £2 billion) going towards tackling the structural deficit. It’s not much given the scale of borrowing, but it’s better than cutting health or education spending.
The Government should use next month’s pre budget report to ask for a modest contribution towards paying off the deficit the banks were partly responsible for creating.
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How difficult can it be to make a profit when just about everyone has to receive your services, and customers cannot take their business to another supplier. There is only one thing worse than a public monopoly and that’s a private monopoly.
It really grates when the owners of South West Water expect praise for investing nearly £500,000 a day in water and sewerage undertakings, when at the same time they are declaring an underlying operating profit of nearly £300,000 a day.
If they were still publicly owned they might deserve a pat on the back for investing nearly £800,000 a day, or for keeping charges down to affordable levels. Fact is Governments past and present have allowed them free reign, while the customer has had no choice but to pay up whatever the company has demanded.
The water companies are a reminder that competition works, monopolies don’t.
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A Euro-sceptic friend asked me why I was in favour a referendum on UK membership of the EU when there is a chance the public will vote “no”.
William Ewart Gladstone was the answer. The grand old man summed up the differences between those of a liberal persuasion and others when he described Liberalism as trust of the people tempered by prudence, and Conservatism as mistrust of the people tempered by fear.
If you trust the people, you trust them to make the right decision, and their right to have a say on our membership of the EU is long overdue.
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Retired engineer Denis King writes often to this paper about the poor deal Torbay received under South West Water’s clean sweep programme. Torbay’s scheme was one of the last pieces in the clean-up jigsaw around the Devon and Cornwall coast and it fell far short of the original plans.
As Denis has rightly pointed out time and again had the more expensive (and expansive) tunnel scheme gone ahead it would have had the capacity to meet the extreme weather conditions that have occurred more frequently than originally predicted, protected our bathing waters from raw sewerage outfalls, and reduced the risk of flooding in Station Lane, Paignton, and elsewhere.
I don’t blame South West Water for this but the last Government that reduced the environmental standard that allowed the company to complete a scheme within the new rules.
I predicted at the time that the environmental standard would rise again and we could end up back at square one. It is not quite that bad yet, our waters are generally cleaner than ever before – or at least since their quality was first tested. The problem is that we have lost some of our blue flag beaches and with higher standards likely to be demanded there is a threat that we could lose some more.
I have always been of the view that no amount of raw sewerage outfall is acceptable so the highest standards should be demanded locally whatever the agreed standard nationally.
Whether Torbay ends up having to find 10,000 or 15,000 new homes by 2026 the pressure on our water, sewerage and drainage system will be greater than ever. The risk of polluted seas and flooded homes will increase.
Burying our head in the sand – no pun intended – and trying to spin our way out of this, is not the response required from the local authority leadership.
People like Denis King with their vast local knowledge and wealth of experience should not be dismissed because they ask difficult questions of the powers that be. We should all be asking Torbay Council, South West Water, the Environment Agency and Government why they have allowed this to happen and what they propose to do about it.
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The news that Torbay Council has declared war on rude cabbies reminded me of an opinionated taxi driver I had in the front of my cab recently.
He was not a fan of the Mayor. “Public school pompous twit”, “Thinks everything’s a joke”, “always grinning at us out of the newspaper” were about his only repeatable statements.
I told him I knew the Mayor and had worked with him, and actually rather liked him. Sadly, this didn’t shut him up. Eventually we reached the House of Commons and I suggested he should try driving a cab in Torbay and see how Boris compares to our Mayor.
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