Not much of a Premium

National Savings and Investments (NS&I) has announced that the number of prizes awarded to holders of premium bonds will be cut from the 1st of August. The effective interest rate is being cut from an already miserable 1.5% to 1.3%.
This is very disappointing and more bad news for those people who are still attempting to save and is counter to what government related financial agencies could and should be doing. The excuse offered by NS&I was that it set the prize fund in a way that ‘balanced’ the interests of savers, taxpayers and the ‘broader financial services sector’.
My goodness, who would want to see the financial services sector experience any challenge or discomfort? How do those bankers manage to exist on their incomes anyway?
Taxpayers? Sounds reasonable at first but of course savers are usually taxpayers and so of course are many borrowers. But borrowers have gained hugely from the protracted artificial suppression of interest rates – except of course those in the grip of financial sector firms such as Wonga and its appalling ilk – but then this class of borrowers hardly registers with government.
If any sector of the economy needed shaking up and presenting with a serious challenge it is the banks, pseudo banks (which is what most ‘building societies’ seem to have become judging by the way they behave) and the multifarious money lenders and financial gamblers that riddle what’s left of our economy.
It is no use waiting for such a challenge to come from within the private sector – it will never happen when extracting profit from hapless punters is the driving motive. This financial fracking has got to be stopped. The only way this will come about is if the public sector takes distinctive action and stops running with the private sector wolves.
NS&I should do its own thing and give savers a break. If there’s an inrush of money this would nudge up private sector savings rates too. But even better of course would be a genuine public sector bank - or several of them in the form of the municipal banks for which I have campaigned on this blog and elsewhere.
I hope that the Church of England initiative against payday lenders gets into gear once they have disentangled themselves from their embarrassing indirect investments. Why are they not more careful about this sort of thing?
But while they get most of the headlines it is not just hard-pressed borrowers that need protection and support it is the equally hard-pressed savers. Maybe it will happen, but it is a bit like waiting for Godot for either Westminster or Whitehall to get their heads out of the clouds and put the interests of ordinary people, savers included, first.

Parliament Must Pardon Alan Turing

Members of Parliament are at last taking action to right the appalling and longstanding injustice which saw world ranking scientist and code-breaker Alan Turing convicted in 1952 of what was then officially condemned as ‘indecency’. This was to be punished ruthlessly regardless of the presence of discretion and affection and the absence of any complaints.
There followed his subsequent cruel, legally imposed, physical mistreatment (chemical castration) and persecution that led to his death from cyanide poisoning – which was then officially classified as suicide.
A 21st Century Parliamentary pardon for Alan Turing is the very least the politicians should do. In fact they should also strike a medal and commission a statue – ideal for the plinth in Trafalgar Square that has seen so much rubbish displayed.
The Government that refused calls for a full pardon in 2012 has now said it would not stand in the way of the bill, but this dismal passivity may not be enough to guarantee the bill’s passage. The Government needs to give it their full backing.
Alan Turing was pre-eminent in the team at Bletchley Park that cracked the Enigma code, a breakthrough critical to the allied war effort. He is now universally recognised as a leading computing pioneer and a highly original scientific thinker in mathematics, computing and indeed other fields.
But at the time of his death he was virtually unknown to the general public, as his work at Bletchley Park was kept secret until 1974. His work to crack the Enigma code probably turned the course of the Battle of the Atlantic, shortened World War II by two years and may have saved hundreds of thousands of lives.
The country would have faced starvation - and some of us may not have been alive today - if Turing and his team had not cracked the codes that showed where U-boats were intercepting vital supplies from the United States. You may owe him your life. The country certainly owes an enormous debt to Alan Turing and debts should be repaid - as the Chancellor of the Exchequer is constantly reminding us.
In 2009 the Prime Minister at the time, Gordon Brown, did issue an apology for Alan Turing’s appalling treatment at official hands, but campaigns for a full pardon for Alan Turing have not so far been successful.
The prime ministerial apology, though welcome, is not nearly enough. The fundamental concern is not about putting legal technicalities first; rather it is about much higher things - atonement, justice, recognition and indebtedness to Alan Turing.
After the war, Alan Turing went on to help create the world's first modern computer, the Manchester Small-Scale Experimental Machine – pioneering work that was built upon by the mathematician John von Neumann in the United States. Alan Turing also devised the famous Turing Test for the detection of artificial intelligence, which is still widely referred to in the literature.
Many of Britain's leading scientists, including Professor Stephen Hawking, have called on the Government to grant Alan Turing a posthumous pardon. The Government should respond to this call and rapidly revise its position and take the lead in expressing gratitude to Alan Turing and according him, after 61 years, the full public recognition and standing that he so richly deserves.

A Privatisation for Ideologues

Only one third of the population support the privatisation of Royal Mail. This is not surprising given the high esteem in which the Royal Mail is held notwithstanding the enforced price hikes to set it up for the profit, sorry, private sector.
I expect that this one third includes most government supporters, funders and lobbyists, so the rest of us can just lump it. In terms of strength of feeling only one person in 25 strongly supports the disposal of yet another public service. I wonder if these are the tiny minority who have their chequebooks at the ready to buy shares before selling them at a profit to absolutely anyone just as happened with earlier privatisations.
There is massive public support for the re-nationalisation of the railways and well over twice as many people believe that former publicly owned utilities such as energy and water should be in the public sector as believe they should remain private. And of course ‘private’ does not mean ‘British’.
The aforementioned utilities have introduced deliberately confusing price structures and rip off consumers more or less as they please – sorry, with the approval of regulators. Furthermore, those of us who do not dodge our taxes contribute to a three times greater subsidy for private railways than British Rail required. Digging deep into the public purse is par for the course be it for G4S, A4e or PFI not to mention the Banks.
Given the positive feelings towards the Royal Mail and the sorry saga of privatisation just touched on above, the opposition to privatisation of the Royal Mail should be no surprise. If not immediately, the Royal Mail will fall into the hands of foreign owners, possibly German or Chinese. Prices will go up even more and services will be degraded - hardly in the interest of the common good.
It’s not just a case of nation-wide coverage that may, for the time being at least, be reluctantly continued under private ownership. There are many other ways to lessen the service – for example no weekend collections or deliveries of letters (and maybe not even every weekday) and maybe you’ll have to install a mailbox at the end of your drive US style.
The Royal Mail is not in Government ownership – it’s ours. And that’s the way it should stay.

Why the Royal Mail?

As expected, the Government has confirmed the sale through the London stock exchange of the world’s oldest postal service, the Royal Mail, or at least a majority stake in it.
The Government is unconcerned about who will end up buying the bulk of the shares - hedge funds, other city speculators, institutional ‘investors’ or anyone else who sees an opportunity to cash in. We’ve seen to our cost the consequences of privatisation before and we don't want to see the results again.
This is a tragic decision, the Royal Mail is no ordinary business, it is part of our national inheritance. But if this wretched government gets its way, the Royal Mail is about to be ripped from the heart of our communities and put into the hands of private profit makers.There's money in the millions to be made also by the bankers (mostly in foreign ownership) and lawyers who will be called in to 'advise' on the sell-off.
Centuries of history are being discarded for a paltry £2-3bn that could be raised in other ways - for example by withdrawing the government’s recent tax cut to the very rich.
Having already had prices for letters and parcels hiked up massively to make the Royal Mail more saleable; prices will certainly be jacked up again, year after year as we have seen with other former publicly owned services.
Long gone are the days when the Royal Mail was overstaffed, inefficient and loss-making. Many changes have been made under public ownership. Last year, Royal Mail delivered over £600 million in profits back to taxpayers and is set to do so again this year even after the disgusting payments to the chief executive. With profits already on this scale what more ‘commercial freedom’ is needed?
The Royal Mail is a public service not a means of making more money, just as is the NHS and, tax dodgers apart, that’s what we pay our taxes for. There has to be some national infrastructure that is retained in public ownership with a service ethos and that is not subject to the greed, dishonesty and tax-dodging of today’s profiteering companies and super rich individuals.
If this process isn’t stopped and the Royal Mail falls into ruthless hands, if I were HMQ I would insist that 'Royal' be rescinded. Why should this prestigious seal of approval for a public service be carried over to enhance the profits of any old money maker?
But protests, petitions and the wishes of the people count for very little and the government will almost certainly make the disposal regardless of public opposition. This is just one more example showing that the country desperately needs to have a political movement that will undo some of the damage that is being done and which will seek to promote he common good. But if this comes at all it will not be in time to save the Royal Mail.