The British government’s Christmas gift to the English this year was minimum pricing on alcohol, a tax that will penalise the millions of occasional drinkers who cause absolutely no problems whatsoever and the off-licences who are already struggling to make a living in the face of stuff competition from supermarkets. The Calais booze cruise is [...]

I’ve written about Northern Rock quite a few times since they were brought down by Saint Robert of Peston in 2007 and looking back at what I wrote and what others said is quite interesting. When Saint Robert of Peston whipped up a frenzy of consumer panic with his misleading reports on Northern Rock’s request [...]

The British government has announced plans to force banks to separate their high street and investment banking arms which it says will protect ordinary customers and make sure bailouts are never required again. The theory is that by ringfencing high street banking operations, the investment banking arms of those banks can’t gamble with (and lose) [...]

HMRC is targeting plumbers in its latest attempt to extort a bit more money out of us proles.  This is a similar exercise to the recent one where they targeted 30,000 doctors and ended up getting money out of just 5% of them. According to the British government, £45bn per year is “lost” through unpaid [...]

Well, isn’t little Georgy Porgey Osborne a clever boy?  He’s decided to means test for family allowance to stop the well off from getting money they don’t need but being the clever boy that he is, he’s dropped a bit of a bollock. The means testing is being done by taking family allowance off anyone [...]

So, who was impressed with the Ask the Chancellors programme last night?  Nope, nor me. The three of them – Darling, Osbourne and Cable – were utterly unconvincing and short on ideas.  Darling and Osbourne were more interested in getting their catchphrases out whilst ignoring Cable who actually came across as the most credible person [...]

Gordon Brown has plumbed new depths of diplomatic incompetence and financial illiteracy with the announcement that the UK will contribute £1.5bn to a £6.5bn fund for “poor” nations to combat climate change. The pre-budget report this week set out the bleak outlook for the economy – taxes are going up, £30bn of extra pre-election vote [...]

Gordon McBrown, the unelected Scottish British Prime Minister, has shown his commitment to inflicting global communism on the world’s population by using a meeting of the G20 in St Andrews to call for a global “social contract” for banks and “just distribution of risks and rewards”.  He’s also suggested a global tax on bank transactions [...]

British Airways has reported a £292m pre-tax loss for the last 6 months. The chief exec of BA says that revenue was down 13.7% in the last 6 months and next year it is likely to be £1bn less than last year.  On top of this, they are facing more strikes from staff unhappy at attempts [...]

El Gordo had an easy time for his decade as Chancellor with the global economy booming and he still managed to fuck the economy up. Today’s budget was a proper socialist budget – people who work for a living are going to see their tax burden go through the roof while unemployed people and the [...]

The BBC’s financial fraud, Robert Peston, has “predicted” that the Dunfermline Building Society could be bought by the Nationwide.  Like most of Peston’s “predictions”, it’s already old news by the time he makes his pronouncement. It was surprising that the Treasury didn’t bail out the Dunfermline because most of its branches are in El Gordo’s [...]

The following story graced the front page of Wednesday night’s Shropshire Star: MP’s bid for equal rights at factories Workers at a Japanese car part factory in Shropshire are not receiving the same state aid in the current economic climate as their Welsh counterparts, an MP has claimed. Shimizu UK has operations in Hortonwood, Telford, [...]

Good news!  The Royal Bank of Scotland has announced that it is going to use £1.7bn of the magic money the Bank of England invented to issue new mortgages.  But only in Scotland. RBS is, I imagine, keen to reassert its Scottish credentials now that the “English” government owns most of it.  How ironic that [...]

Alistair Darling has said that injecting more taxpayers money into the banking sector “is not your first port of call”. Well thank fuck for that because printing a few billion extra pound notes just isn’t an option.  Darling has already handed over £50bn to the biggest banks and £200bn to the Bank of England for [...]

I know it’s hard to believe but it appears that being a Scottish bank hasn’t, as previously thought, been a good enough reason for investors to plough their life savings into a bankrupt Royal bank of Scotland. Go figure. RBS had another bumper rights issue as part of the deal with the devil Alistair Darling [...]

The Bank of England has reduced the headline rate of interest by 1.5% to 3% – the lowest rate in 53 years, apparently. All of which is good news to those people struggling to pay the stupid mortagages on their stupid houses that they can’t afford to pay.  Assuming, that is, that the banks pass [...]

The governer of the Bank of England has said that we might be entering into recession which is don’t panic the plebs code for “shit, how am I going to keep up the payments on my yacht”.  Of course we’re in a recession, we’ve known for months that it was starting and that things were [...]

Well, what a bumper day this has been for letters. First of all there’s this one in the Shropshire Star, in response to the council announcing that they’re going to put in average speed cameras on one of the safest roads, relatively speaking, in the borough: Average speed trap not fair for motorists Councillor Bentley [...]

The Bank of England is loaning £100m to the UK arm of Landsbanki so that it can repay its UK customers. Landisbanki was nationalised by the Icelandic government last week and its UK arm closed down leaving customers here unable to access their money. The Icelandic foreign minister has responded to the economic problems there – national [...]

For the last year or so El Gordo has been encouraging fuel prices to increase, rubbing his hands gleefully at the prospect of an extra few billion in bonus cash flowing into the slush fund. But now the arse has fallen out of the economy and he’s spent a decade’s worth of slush fund on bailing out [...]