Crooks and the rich

 Let me begin this post with a link http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/13/wall-street-scandal-sac-steve-cohen-rich-grow-stronger.

This is about a crook in Wall Street and how he seems to be able to walk away with a fortune through cheating.The fundamental problem is that cheats in the City do not get punished, most of the time the company they work for is fined. By the time this has happened they have walked off with their rewards so they pay no penalty.

I have tried to argue here before and will try again to say that the perpetrators and the directors should be fined. It would make them take their role seriously and examine more carefully their practices. The recent scandal of PPI who has paid the price. Customers are getting their money back but all the managers and directors who took fat bonuses based on profits generated by the sales seem to have gone unpunished. They might have lost their jobs but have probably walked away with enough money never to have to work again.

Whilst the the need for limited liability for directors is important so that new developments can happen the case when their is clearly improper behaviour is wrong. There must be a culture of taken responsibility and paying for mistakes which cost other people significant sums of money. We have to remember that these people make money by gambling with other peoples money not their own.

the whole is bigger than the parts

    We were discussing Scottish independence over dinner and trying to explain to my daughter why I felt it was wrong and quite sad to delete three hundred years of history. She has seen Scotland reject the Thatcherite image of England and understands why the Scots want to break away from right wing southern state. When I was younger the Scot Nats were known at he Tartan Tories and I think that deep down they still are. They are still are it is just that the Tories in England, under Thatcher, have become the nasty party in a way they weren't under the earlier regime

   However that does not answer why I think a separation of England from Scotland would be sad and dangerous. deep down the sum of all the bits is much stronger than the individual bits. Examine the failures of the sports teams, especially soccer. basically the only member of the United Kingdom which can seriously compete at an international level is England. Occasionally one of the other minor nations gets through to a final but then fails even more disastrously than England. Even in rugby, played by very few countries world wide, the British Lions are more successful the the four individual countries, and that includes the whole of Ireland!

  We had a brief flourishing of Ireland as a Celtic Tiger, some of which probably inspired the Scots, but it was quite short lived. It is odd to think that overall Scotland and the people living in Scotland will be stronger as an independent nation nor will England. It is also somewhat curious that only people living in Scotland can vote, presumably irrespective of their nationality. Any Scot who lives abroad is disenfranchised so what is the concept of Scottish nationalism being espoused. If Scotland becomes independent what will be the criteria for holding a Scottish passport? Will it just be living in Scotland at the time of independence, having been born there and will it be automatic if you move there.

why blog and say the same thing time & time again

I sometime wonder why I don't blog more often. Then what can I say that is new, but that does not seem to worry very many columnists. John Naughton, from the Observer, used to be some one I admired but he has got totally fixated about NSA and GCHQ and spying. I do not deny that these are serious issues but writing about then every week gets tedious. Unfortunately the Observer never got to Norwich today so I have not looked at his column yet.

So perhaps I can keep on going about the same things.

My views on Europe haven't changed very much and I didn't watch the live debated by Tweedledum and Tweedledee. I am old enough to have voted in the last referendum, so how often do we need one, every twenty years, 40  years perhaps. We took a decision, it is not sensible to keep revisiting it. The first 45 years of the twentieth century saw Europe torn apart by two disastrous wars. The previous century also say terrible conflict in Europe surely if the European Union helps in any way to keep peace in Europe it is worth being involved. That is entirely emotional but so is the reason that many Eurosceptics are anti-Europe.

It is also somewhat odd the Nigel Farage clams the there is a democratic deficit in Europe. What did he do about it  as an elected member of the European Parliament. The reason for the `deficit' is because nation states do not what to give up power to Europe. A curious fact is that my original concern was that it is essentially a capitalist club and the rules are there to protect business but somehow they have introduced much more social legislation that either Conservative or Labour governments in this country. The NHS has been getting its knickers in a  twist about the 48 hour working week since they knew it was being introduced. They did no forward planning and then are taken by surprise. I do not understand the objections, we do not let truck drivers drive for more than 8 hours because it is known that after that time tiredness creeps in and mistakes are made. How many patients in hospitals get the wrong treatment because of exhausted doctors. I believe that the majority of mistakes are made in the period between 2 am and 4 am. Is that surprising? It is surprising that so many people seem to be happy to take risks with lives. There is almost certainly a complete misunderstanding of its interpretation of its purpose. No one would expect that a doctor in the middle of treating someone would just walk out if he reached 48 hours. It is meant to be an average not a strict limit as in the case of truck drivers.

The interesting feature of the anti-Europeans is that most of them are hostile to Scotland being independent However to my somewhat limited intelligence I can see no difference in the arguments being put forward by Alex Salmond and Nigel Farage et al. The tragedy is that it is all about nation states and that seems to be the cause of much war and hatred.

The reason that someone like Farage is difficult to argue with is related to  Daniel Kahneman ideas of quick thinking and slow thinking. This is not just Farage but most politics and Britain's adversarial system. The quick, that first thought, sounds plausible. The problem is that to see the errors in the argument is often quite tricky and takes time and is even counter-intuitive. It seems obvious to blame immigrants for taking our jobs. s that really true, that takes considerable thought and research but who wants to waste time doing that. As a cousin of mine used to say "Don't argue with my prejudices".

Mrs Thatcher privatised the power industry, which for electricity had one generating company and twelve local area boards who provided the power to customers. What do we have now, 6 companies and one of the biggest is a state owned French company. Could that have been foreseen? Perhaps not but less quick thinking and a more careful analysis of the long term future might have seen this coming. But having privatised this we have to set up regulating authorities, perhaps staying where we were might have been more efficient in the long run.

Another interesting saga where quick thinking might lead one into an error is The Maria Miller case. The press is saying that you cannot trust politicians to police themselves so we should not let them go down the Leveson route. But hang on the presses proposal is to let the press police themselves. The real issue is not politicians but any group who try want to police themselves. It is right that the politicians should be watched by others but so should the press.

It is now 11.30 pm and it is probably bed time!