Mrs Sane has finally accepted that we’re not having another baby and decided on a puppy instead so last night the Sane family welcomed Charlie, an 8 week old West Highland Terrier crossed with a Toy Poodle.

And before any bright spark makes a comment, yes I am well aware of the irony of me having a half Scottish, half French dog.

Technorati Tags: Pets

One day the people of England will realise that socialists just cannot run the country.  The last time Liebour was in government they left the economy in tatters and sure enough, the economy is in tatters again.  Is it a co-incidence that most of Europe is run by socialists?

The Bank of England has dropped the interest rates again to 0.5% and asked the Chancellor for permission to start quantative easing which, being a clueless idiot, he agreed to.

Quantative easing is where the Bank of England magics money out of thin air to buy assets off banks which gives the banks more cash.  The value of the pound reflects the value of UK Plc and inventing another £75bn of cash dilutes the currency, reducing its value against foreign currency.  This makes imports more expensive, exports worth less and all the foreign money the British government has borrowed to bail out the banks more expensive to pay back.
The Zimbabwean central bank has been doing this for the last couple of years and has just had to knock 12 zeroes off the Zimbabwean Dollar to bring the exchange rate down from 161 trillion dollars to the pound.  It was also used by the Germans between the two world wars, devalued the reichmark to a trillionth of its pre-war value and as a direct consequence, the Nazi’s came to power on the back of a policy of national socialism depriving Jews and bankers of their wealth.

The general feeling of the ruling class – certainly in the European Empire – is against national socialism and in favour of international socialism.  More iNazi than Nazi – very 21st century and the Apple logo will look great on the EU secret police uniforms.  Bankers and stock market traders are being held up as the cause of the recession and while the bankers, certainly, have to take some of the blame, they are not the cause of the recession.  The British government’s attempts to deprive Fred Goodwin of his pension is precisely the sort of policy the Nazi’s pursued between the two wars.

Quantative easing is going to cost us a lot of money and it will take decades or an event on the scale of the second world war to rid ourselves of the consequences.

Technorati Tags: Quantative Easing

There’s lots of talk about trying to take Fred Goodwin’s pension off him and the British government are making vague noises about a legal challenge but is there a case to answer?

I’m sure the British govenment has a team of lawyers going through every clause of Goodwin’s contract, looking for any get-out clause but they might be missing something more fundamental – Wednesbury Unreasonableness.

Wednesbury Unreasonableness is a legal precedent set in 1948 in the case of Associated Provincial Picture Houses -v- Wednesbury Corporation in which the judge ruled that the courts could only overturn a legal administrative decision if the decision was “so outrageous in its defiance of logic or accepted moral standards that no sensible person who had applied his mind to the question to be decided could have arrived at it”.

That Fred Goodwin should receive a pension which the media is now telling us is over £700k per year after taking the UK’s second largest bank to the brink of bankruptcy is certainly outrageous and in defiance of logic.  Rewarding someone so handsomly for bankrupting a bank and costing the taxpayer billions of pounds to bail it out is morally objectionable and no sensible person would have given him a £700k pension given the choice.

But a pension isn’t a performance related bonus and Goodwin’s contract says he’s entitled to it so, understanding that fact, would a sensible person still have failed to come to the conclusion that he should be paid his pension?

Any armchair lawyers out there with an opinion?

Technorati Tags: RBS, Fred Goodwin, Pension, Wednesbury Unreasonableness

Basque nationalists have won 37 out of 75 seats in the Spanish general election which leaves them one seat short of a majority.

The Basque Nationalist Party will have to form a coalition with Aralar, Eusko Alkartasuna and Ezker Batua and hope that the conservatives don’t jump into bed with the socialists if they are to form a government.  It’s certainly unlikely but as we know in England, when the unionists are faced with nationalists they can be thick as thieves.

The nationalists’ performance was hindered by the Spanish High Court banning two nationalist parties in the run-up to the election.

Technorati Tags: Spain, Basque, Elections

I’ve just had an interesting heated discussion with my parents and ended up calling them communists!

My dad was having a bitch about the RBS chairman, Sir Fred Goodwin, and his eye-popping pension.  Naturally he thinks it’s a disgrace and that he should lose his pension because he’s failed at his job.  God, it was like listening to someone reading the front page of the Sun.

I tried to explain that a pension isn’t performance-related pay, that his contract said that he was entitled to it and that the British government can’t just ignore the law and tear up a contract because someone is shit at their job.  I said that once they’d got away with doing it once they’d do it again and again.  I tried to explain that socialists are jealous people and that they would do it to more and more people and that it wouldn’t be the people at the top with all the money that lost out because they’re the ones who give the parties all their money.

“Yeah, it’ll be Joe Public that loses out, not them buggers in charge,” said my dad.  Erm, isn’t that the point I’ve been trying to make for the last 10 minutes?

There’s was no talking sense to them, they were convinced that Goodwin’s pension was so outrageous it was worth giving the British government carte blanche to break the law whenever it suits them and I ended up telling them they were communists.  Like so many people, the poll tax was the straw that broke the camel’s back and they voted Liebour to get rid of the Tories.  They can’t wait to get rid of Liebour now after the balls up they’ve made these last few years.  They’re just the sort of fickle swing voters that make or break a party’s fortunes at an election, people that will vote for a party that they don’t support and one to which they are ordinarily diametrically opposed on the strength of a single issue.

Disaffection with the whole system has caused such a general disinterest in politics that people see no problem voting for someone they don’t want to get rid of someone else they don’t want or because they agree with one thing a party says on a topical news item.  People feel like they aren’t being listened to and that no matter what they say or do, nothing will change.

It’s a sad state of affairs but that’s English politics for you.

Technorati Tags: Communists, Parents, Disaffection