Lord love a duck...

Amid the furore over Mp’s expenses during the last 14 days, aren’t we missing the point in lambasting Tory back bencher Sir Peter Viggers who today announced he was retiring at the behest of David Cameron?

Amidst expenses claims for various gardening projects totalling some £30,000 was a relatively meagre outlay of £1,645 for a “duck island”, identical to the one shown here, which provides a safe haven for waterfowl amidst the distressingly opulent surroundings of Sir Viggers’ back yard.

Rather than a spiteful show of contempt for the British taxpayer, shouldn’t Sir Viggers’ endeavours instead be hailed as a triumph of nature preservation in a harsh economic time where environmental budgets are otherwise facing decimation? Clearly Sir Viggers has the best interests of our billed buddies at heart, and is in no way interested in populating his garden with expensive follies on a tab picked up by those of us in gainful employment.

The Top Banana salutes you, Viggers. May your altruistic endeavours in the name of the humble British water fowl continue well into your retirement, where we are sure you will have more than enough spare cash to continue your pricelss preservation work.

Nice work if you can retire from it

Now, the thing I like about this continuing kerfuffle about useless ex-RBS head Sir Fred Goodwin’s pension scheme, and I say ‘like’ in the sense that I ‘like’ being blinded with unbridled fury, is that it combines so many of my favourite things, and I say ‘favourite’ in the sense of ‘most infuriating’. Useless, greedy bankers, useless, hypocritical politicians, and the knee-jerk populism of pandering to tabloid media kangaroo-courtism. I’m so happy I could vomit.

Obvious points first, I suppose. Does Freddy deserve the better part of a seven hundred thousand spondoolicks a year for presiding over a well-publicised catastrophic collapse? Well, no, but it’s similarly difficult to justify your average Premier League footballer’s weekly wage, especially if they hit a run of bad form. Perceived values aside, there’s these things called ‘contracts’ that determine this sort of thing, which has some sort of legal basis behind it, I gather. Y’know, speaking as a layman.

Which makes it rather surprising that the all-round disappointing use of carbon that represents Harriet Harman is spouting such patent drivel as she has over the past few days. Harman, before taking her current post as Gordon Brown’s Official Wingperson was Minister of Justice and claims to be a lawyer. So one would be forgiven for thinking that she may have some interest in the rule of law, and that sort of thing. Y’know, speaking as a layman.

Statements, such as was made to the Beeb such as “The prime minister has said that it is not acceptable and therefore it will not be accepted” and “…it might be enforceable in a court of law, this contract, but it is not enforceable in the court of public opinion and that is where the government steps in” show not only a baffling confusion between the role of Prime Minister and role of Tinpot Dictator, but also demonstrate a clear intent by a government to ignore all established legal frameworks to satiate a baying mob stoked up by tabloid journalism. Given that there is no legal recourse for stripping Fred Fauntleroy, the only possible interpretation of her statements is that they are proposing pushing through a law designed specifically for this one case.

This is lunacy. This is stupidity. If this has, for some reason, become an endemic problem with banking executive’s pensions then why not tackle this through a robust series of financial regulation that, while they’re at it, will ensure that our banks don’t piss all our money up the wall and collapse? Well, a bit late for that, I suppose, but wasn’t it a good, blindingly obvious idea?

I have two real problems with this mess. We already have a number of ways of getting money from people. Income tax, capital gains tax, we have more taxes that we know what to do with. Surely, one would think, if the public are getting this angry over one massive pension payout, they must be equally angry about all of the other massive pension payouts? Could, perhaps, a tax on the ludicrously well-off be the way forward? Our would such an outbreak of social justice perhaps cause New Labour’s financial backers to rethink their positions?

Secondly, there’s the continued insistence that Gordy Brown knew nothing about these pension arrangements, and couldn’t possible be expected to know anything about it, and none of it’s his fault and we should all trust our PM in these trying times. Leaving aside the issue that under his watch as both Chancellor and Prime Minister he sleptwalk into the single greatest financial disaster in recorded history, let’s take a look at who, precisely was so bullish about the gunpoint merger and patented ‘renationalisation without any of the benefits’ scheme? Oh. The Broon.

People, largely politicians, bemoan the public’s continuing disengagement with the political process and the increasing levels of cynicism. Yet at the same time, they make no effort to stop being oafish bunglers who’ll happily swear that black is white safe in the knowledge that laws do not apply to them, as evidenced by Jack ‘The Demon Headmaster’ Straw’s recent veto of the Freedom of Information Act demand for the cabinet minutes relating to the decision to go to war in Iraq. A decision, incidentally, in which that pesky public opinion that is so important now was utterly ignored.

My only consolation in all of this mess is that in five year’s time when we’re all staving each other’s heads in with rocks after humanity’s utter collapse politicians will likely be the first up against the wall.

Alistair, darling, could you pop out and fix the entire foundations of capitalism?

The financial markets are, of course, the closest thing mankind has developed to real magic over the course of their history. When iron ore is extracted from the earth, there is an obvious cost and an obvious product that, obviously, requires a profit for it to be worthwhile. When that ore is taken and refined, again there is an obvious cost, obvious product and necessary profit.

This process continues, until suckers like us by their latest car or computer or shiny bauble. The difference of this process occurs at a level above most of us can aspire to, where banks and financial institutions take the baffling steps of selling money to each other in such a fashion as to somehow magically increase the net amount of money that exists in the world. The difference, for those who haven’t fixed upon it yet, is the complete absence of any tangible product. Oh, perhaps if you’re lucky you’ll get some piece of paper that promises you the lion’s share of the Brooklyn Bridge, but if you’re buying into that then you’re part of the problem, and not the solution.

With the sub-prime crisis, collapse of multiple American banks and now the entirely arbitrary collapse of the venerable and entirely financially sound Halifax and Bank of Scotland and its resultant merger with Lloyds TSB seemingly on the whim of some financial traders on the lookout for a quick, short sold buck, it seems that the world has finally seem through the smoke and mirrors to see the horse and pony show that the FTSE and the NASDAC and their acronym compadres represent and called shenanigans.

The downside to this, of course, is that the entire basis of our capitalist civilization falls right over with the money grubbing tosstards. Repossession rates are on the rise, food costs so much it may unintentionally prove to be a boon to obesity statistics and old age pensioners are hoping for a warm winter, lest they become cryogenically frozen earlier than anticipated due to being unable to meet the fuel bills.

While any child raised in Scotland under the harsh flags of Thatcher’s Britain will typically have a natural sympathy for anyone made redundant through mismanagement and market forces, it strains my wooly, liberal heart to find any sympathy for the besuited purveyors of increasingly dodgily constructed houses of cards.

With acccusations of the FSA’s stop on short selling having been delayed so that the Americans could announce it first, directly contributing to the LloydsHBOSTSB fiasco, surely it’s time to ask quite what has been so special from our ’special relationship’ with America, apart from now having a cratering economy to add to the substantial number of craters in the hole where Iraq used to be. This relationship is special in the same way that ’special schools’ are special.

The Top Banana’s financial advice remains, as always, to keep your assets liquid, mainly in stocks of vodka. It won’t solve any economic crises, but it makes the pain of them somewhat more tolerable.

The Face of The Enemy

The entirely unnecessary inquiry into the circumstances and execution of the execution of Jean Charles de Menezes by police hunting a suicide bomber has opened, further wasting taxpayer’s money in these trying economic climes.

The 27-year old Brazilian electrician, known to the Metropolitan Police as being both ‘foreign’ and ‘not entirely Caucasian’ was humanely shot seven times the day after a botched attack on the London Underground entirely unrelated to de Menezes.

While bleeding heart liberals have pointed out that Brazilian electricians were never considered major players in the Axis of Terror who Hate our Freedom, our upstanding police force have repeatedly produced evidence that de Menezes lived in a block of flats where a terror suspect was once linked to, in some way, somehow.

Combined with de Menezes’ flagrant and repeated acts of being a foreigner, there can be no doubt to any rational, balanced observer that de Menezes act of getting on board a train with malicious intent to travel deserved any less than swift, immediate bullet-based justice.

Despite our Boys in Blue performing their duties flawlessly, the left-wing media and court system have nonetheless forced Met po-po chief Ian Blair to say that procedures had “failed” that day, and that “No-one set out with any intent to let a young man die.” Cynics have suggested that the police actions were rather less ‘letting’ him die than ‘actively enabling it’, however this attitude is clearly pandering to terrorists so deeply that those who take such a tack are, in a very real sense, actually terrorists themselves.

Let no man doubt that this great country must remain steadfast in the face of people who would do harm to our culture and our wiring. We must deal swiftly not only with Brazilian electricians, but with the causes of Brazilian electricians, and indeed all electricians in general. In a culture so inured to electricians that they openly advertise their services in terror-related publications such as the Yellow Pages, we have a long way to go before we can declare “Mission Accomplished”, and much, much further than that before the mission is actually accomplished, but with our God and our faith and our faith in God on our side we are surely guaranteed victory.

Our cause is just. We must prevail. Over electricians.