Great questions of our time

From an excellent website.

Sue who?

There was a court judgement that money paid out to benefit claimants through the incompetence of the DWP can be reclaimed by the DWP - about £2.6 billion (I wonder whether the law in Scotland allows the same?).

A Parliamentary Question answered last month showed that millions of pounds get paid out to dead people by mistake and that the DWP will pursue repayment of that money.

But at least the London Government intends to lash out money to compensate all those poverty-stricken businesses which were tendering to run the Post Office Card Account.

So, if you're in one of the poorest groups in society, and if, through no fault of your own, the DWP gives you too much money the London Government will seek to reclaim it - even after you're dead - but if you're tendering for a contract and the deal gets pulled you'll get compensation.

Mind the gap!

Good news for Gordon Brown

Well, not really. Compass commissioned a survey of Labour party members here's some of the results:

1. More than one in every five Labour party members thinks Gordon Brown is doing badly as Prime Minister.

2. Almost a quarter of Labour's membership thinks that Alistair Darling is doing badly as Chancellor.

3. The figures for others aren't good either; Foreign Secretary - one in five, Home Secretary - 39%, Mandelson - 30%, Harman - 32%.

4. 14% of Labour members think that Brown is right-wing and another 5% can't place him on the spectrum. Half as many Labour members think that David Cameron is very left wing as think the same about Gordon Brown - but it's only 1% and 2%.

5. Only 17% of Labour party members think that Labour's policies to tackle the recession are working. 68% hope they'll work in the future, right enough, although 12% think that there's no chance that they'll work.

6. 66% of Labour party members oppose Labour's policy of privatisation of the Post Office and 5% think it doesn't go far enough.

So, if Labour party members don't trust Labour, why should anyone else?

Mind how you go!

Godtramit!

I've been working on the tramtrack

All the livelong day

I've been working on the tramtrack

Just to pass the time away

With the Tram Project in a descent beyond farce, way behind schedule, massively over budget, ludicrously mismanaged, now shrunk from 3 lines to a third of a line, and completely undeliverable, isn't it time to end the pain and cancel it? Moreover, tie has to be wound up and some forensic accountants sent in to look over the books to see what was done properly and what was not during each of the massive failures for which the company was responsible. Such raging incompetence has to be looked at in fine detail, firstly to learn what mistakes were made so that they can be learned from, but secondly to discover whether any of the huge amounts of public money that have been wasted can be recovered. The record is of seven years in which uselessness has been raised almost to an art form. Incorporated in April 2002 it has lurched from one embarrassment to another, dragging Edinburgh's reputation through the mud.

The Freedom of Information requests that used to be available on the trams website have gone, but have a look at the documents on tie's website - strangely, only one set of accounts appears on the site - for 2003/04. You could buy the rest from Companies House, of course, but it's public money, we should be told how it is being paid out. If you want a wee fleg, though, have a look at the Business Plan for 2004/05 (yup, the only one there), here's a couple of excerpts:

1. They bought the charging system for Edinburgh's congestion charging before they ran - and lost - the congestion charging referendum.

2. They were planning multi-storey underground car parks under George Street and Shandwick Place.

3. At that point the trams were intended to be running in 2009 ... on two tramlines ...

Anyway, as I perused the Tram Business Case again, a thought struck me (it hurt) - the point of these tram things was to provide transport from where people were going to be flocking to live in the Granton Harbour area with the new development there (which has, of course, halted) and who would be working on the western periphery of the city - RBS at Gogar, places in the Gyle, that kind of thing. Given that the intention was to move people from Granton to the west, why is the tramline intended to run east from Granton, through Leith, up Leith Walk and along Princes Street and Shandwick Place? Why isn't it designed to go west? After all, that would have avoided the subterranean problems they are about to encounter. Then again, that would have required forward thinking, wouldn't it?

pushyoupullme?

It may not be the right spelling (or the right word) but it's the animal from Dr Doolittle that looks both ways.

Today Iain Gray spoke to the COSLA conference and condemned the Scottish budget - which he voted for on the 4th of February - exactly four weeks ago.

hmmmmmm......

Labour or SNP?

Let's have a wee look at Labour's recent achievements:


1. Economic downturn turning into a depression. OK, they got some help from the rest of the world on this one, but the limping and lame state of the UK economy allied to the poor regulation of the banking sector has really stuffed people here - and it will make it much harder for us to recover.


2. Police numbers in England are shrinking while numbers in Scotland are at an all-time record high and well on course for fulfilling the SNP pledge to put 1,000 additional officers into operational duties.


3. PFI/PPP companies are getting a public bail-out while the CBI finally backs the SNP alternative.


4. Gordon Brown thinks he saved the world while even the Americans are moving towards disposing of their nuclear weapons.

5. Brown wants to steal a pension that his Government committed to.


6. Stealing pensions isn't a new trick for Brown, right enough - nor is his contempt for pensioners in poverty - and his chancellor is no better.


7. Student support is being slashed in England where tuition fees and top-up fees have been imposed while students in Scotland have seen the Graduate Endowment tuition fee removed, additional monies ploughed into support, and are now being consulted on another tranche of support. It's a pity that the Treasury (or perhaps the Chancellor for reasons of his own) decided not to allow the Scottish Government to take Student Loans funding into the DEL and turn student loans into grants, but I'm sure that the SNP Scottish Government continues to press for that.


In the meantime, Labour in Scotland just can't get any traction on making sense, one of their rank opining that proper alcohol controls in Scotland would lead to teenagers taking a motorised conveyance southwards to Carlisle to buy alcohol - he's obviously never been to Carlisle, wouldn't they stop at Guard's Mill in any case, and how does he think they're taking a car to England if they can't afford the extra cash in Scotland? He wasn't alone, though, John Lamont thinking that Wooler was an attractive option (someone ought to have a word) and David Mundell wasn't sure about much.


Just to top it all off, it would appear that the US President is treating Gordon Brown's supplication like a visit from a hick cousin.


Aye, well, mind how you go!

Trams are a success at last!

It's true, the Tram Project has finally become a great success. I know this because Jenny Dawe, Lib Dem Heid Bummer on Edinburgh Council, big tram fan, boss of Phil Wheeler issued a news release to say that the kiddie-on mock-up tram outside Jenners has become one of Scotland's busiest visitor attractions having attracted 22,000 visitors.

Excellent, what more could we want? 22,000 visitors at a current projected cost of £512 million means that it's only cost £23,272.73 per visitor - perhaps the poor visitors mistook this oversized toy for one of the buses which can no longer be found on Princes Street? Can we stop now?

Labour MPs trying to outdo each other

From East of the capital comes the cry "hoi, look at this!"

Following on from Anne Begg's example, Anne Moffat has leapt into the breach.

After the Labour Government in London closed the Post Offices in two East Lothian villages as part of the Network Change programme (to save money for the UK Government), Labour councillors demanded that the council took on the cost of running the Post Offices. Costs, remember, which the UK Government felt it couldn't meet.

Having had a look at the costs involved in that the council decided it simply didn't have the resources to pay for that, but that it could afford to subsidise bus services so that these communities could access Post Office services.

Up steps the local MP - who was on the Commons Committee which helped the London Government force through the Network Change programme - to accuse the council of "planning [...] absolute nonsense, a waste of money".

Be careful out there, publicity seekers are everywhere!

Publicity rather than working for a living

I was shocked and stunned and, perhaps, even a little amazed to read about Labour MP Anne Begg refusing to deal properly with a constituency case, deciding instead to seek headlines from what is little other than administrative errors on the part of council officers.

A phone call from the MP's office with a confirmatory letter would be the way to handle such cases - it would be sorted out quietly and without any fuss. Surely this Labour MP isn't more concerned with making headlines than with working for her constituents? Is she just concerned that there's an election approaching?

Another thing - why is the BBC running this guff as if it's news? What happened to professional pride?

Fred Goodwin should keep his pension

I think that Fred Goodwin should keep his pension - all of it. It's a very large pension and it might be appropriate to question whether such sums should be paid, but it's the bung he was thrown by Gordon Brown's Government in return for his resignation from his post at RBS without any fuss.

That's the Government which currently has Ministers threatening to renege on the contract which it so recently signed with Fred Goodwin. Interestingly, the deal was negotiated on the Government side by a Minister who might have come across Mr Goodwin once or twice:

And the appointment of new City Minister Paul Myners raised eyebrows. He is a director of GLG, one of the biggest hedge funds in the world, which has the largest short position in Bradford&Bingley, having sold short tens of millions of shares in the troubled bank.

If your diet is a bit short of irony, have a wee keek at the comments of Lord Mandelson:

In his interview, Mandelson used the strongest language yet to attack Sir Fred Goodwin's £693,000 RBS pension, saying that it was "obscene that such an individual, after such failure commercially and after such terrible misjudgment ... for which he is personally responsible ... can get away with such a pension pot".

Yes, that is the same Peter Mandelson who had to resign from Government twice as a result of terrible misjudgements, including over a mortgage, and who has a nice little line in pensions himself, £31,00 from Europe for four years service on top of his Ministerial pensions and his pension from his days as an MP - that's on top of the European Commission paying him £78,000 a year because he gave up his Commissioner's salary for a job that was paying less - that public money tops up his salary to match his old salary of £182,500.

Politicians are not overpaid but it would seem there's a bit of a lack of self-awareness in Mr Mandelson's comments - which were made during an interview about his battle to privatise the Post Office where he is using threats against Post Office workers' pensions as a weapon.

I find myself wondering why there was no such fuss and great worry from Labour Ministers about the deal that was done to allow Andy Hornby - once of HBoS - to nail himself a £60,000 a month consultancy with Lloyds "after such failure commercially and after such terrible misjudgment" as Peter Mandelson might have said. One wonders what additional goodies Hornby got as part of the deal for him to go quietly and what Dennis Stevenson got as hush money - or are we not allowed to ask that question because the deal involved Gordon Brown's good mate Victor Blank?

I find myself agreeing easily with Jeff Randall that Gordon Brown's Government is throwing muck at Fred Goodwin in an attempt to hide their own galloping incompetence. Randall was the BBC's Business Editor before Robert Peston - ah, the good old days!

Mind how you go!