Vince Cable – sly old fox leaks his speech and is everyones mate

Don’t you just love all the new politicians in charge these days. All fresh faced and scrubbed up – all armed with the “it wasn’t us that made this mess” excuse – love them, love them all.

But whose my favorite, Surf Boarding Dave, Yellow Tie wearing Nick, Daveward Milliband…. oh he’s Labour is he… hadn’t noticed.

This week my favorite has been mainly Vince Cable – the crafty old fox. He pre releases his “capitalism murders babies on the end of bayonets” quote and then delivers a few jokes about being Marxist at the Lid Dem Conference – brilliant stuff. He has a gift for doing the “honest broker” thing and of creating empathy – but will he do anything? (Apart from come over as your favorite uncle).

His speech was well publicised and more reported than his leaders (the Nick leader not the Dave leader). And what was in the speech – well errm – it was full of wonderful insights… maybe.

The link to the full speech is below – but in summary:

The banks need to support SMEs. We need Higher Education. We need to make sure capitalism doesn’t squash competition. Adam Smith was a very clever man. The Tories aren’t perfect. Labour don’t have the answers. Royal Mail staff will get free stamps when we flog it. Lets tax graduates fairly.

OK, OK fair enough Vince – can you please go fix it.

Top priority…. Go fix the fact that the banks are sitting on their hands and our QE money. And the fact that the Enterprise loan fund isn’t working despite the insurance premium demanded. 

Next priority – treat graduates fairly – if they get a good job they already get top tax rates – why should they get double taxed – what’s all that about. Why is taxing graduates fairly being interpreted as they need to get taxed even more – what a lot of complete twaddle.

The leaked, widely reported, statements of the bleeding obvious, from my favorite new uncle is here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/sep/22/vince-cable-full-speech

Vince enough talking – do something to help the economy.

regards

your new nephew

Dear Darling…

The predictions are that Bank of England Governor Mervyn King will be getting the quil qwerty keyboard out to write a wee note to Alastair Darling – Chancellor and all round scape goat for anything bad happening in the UK economy.

The reason – well its the tipping point for inflation. Stats from the Office of National Statistics suggest that when they add up all the numbers we’ll be at 3.1% next week for the CPI. Maybe aye maybe no. But watch out for the media talking endlessly about this. The reason – petrol, and output prices, and petrol, and food prices and petrol. Lets face it – its petrol… it impacts everything we do. 139 USD for a barrel of Oil ain’t good news – but it can’t last….can it?

42 + 9 = interconnected

We’re safe again. We can lock up suspected terrorists for 42 days without charge. All thanks to 9 MPs – the balance of the Yes vote today in Westminster.

42? The Answer to Life The Universe and Everything ….. including homeland security. The interconnectedness of all things.

3 is the magic number again

Inflation (CPI) up 0.5% since last month to 3%. Quite a jump.

With housing now being trailed by government advisors (thanks to a long lens and a careless visitor to number 10) to fall at least 5 to 10% and housing new starts on the decline you’d look to a decrease in the bank interest rate.

But with CPI inflation on the up cutting interest rates to keep the economy ticking is not an easy decision to make.

Things appear to be unravelling pretty quickly for Mister Broon…. there was the CGT turnaround, now the 10p tax rate fiasco, and of course Wendy in Scotland encouraging the SNP to go for a referendum. Bad news normally comes in 3′s. But it could be 33 or 333 bad news items as the economy slides from housing boom to banking credit crunch to who knows where.

On the upside its nearly July and bad news tends to go away in the summer months – mainly because the media and the great and the good all head of to the South of France. So don’t worry all the bad news is going away soon (but only for a vacation).

Free Scotland (with every 4 tokens)

Good for Wendy. I like a good public scrap. For those that have missed it Wendy Alexander is the leader of the opposition in Scotland and has caught out her PM boss in Westminster by announcing “Bring it On”. This apparently means lets have a vote for independence and settle this once and for all. The idea is to catch out the SNP and force a vote before the SNP can line up all of their kilt wearing ducks.

I kind of agree – but the idea of any vote bringing this to an end flies in the face of history and other more elegant quotes, notably “there’s the end of an auld sang” (do a google it’ll be quicker) .