Death Wish?

The second planned strike by Unite has gone ahead and BA reckon that 75% of their scheduled flights will go ahead.

The two statements within that one sentence should be the most terrible things a world class airline could possibly imagine but for Willie Walsh, the CEO of what was once 'The World's Favourite Airline', it seems to be music. He has been described recently as being 'macho' in the face of an unreasonable Union but the reality is that the fight with Unite over changes to Cabin Staff contracts is only one area of failure amidst a whole plethora for the CEO. In fact, about a year before the recession, he was voted one of the Executives of the Decade, right now he is about the biggest chump. Having lost the hearts and minds of some of the best and most loyal staff a business could have, it seems that the Board of BA are 100% behind his absurd actions but this cannot be good for shareholders.

In the grip of the first strike, I had to travel to Germany. Our agency got quotes for the required travel times and BA came out at £800 for the planned journey vs Lufthansa's £237 - standard economy fares on a standard route. OK, so that was in the middle of the strike, but last week I flew to Milan and Lufthansa again came in at around £325 to the similar flight of BA's at over £700.

All along, it has never been about the cost cutting for me - it's been Walsh' abject lack of strategy and business acumen. How can you have a business that is going to succeed when it is charging such prices at recessionary times against its main rivals? Lufthansa is cleaning up - full planes each trip, efficiently run, on time and with decent service with real technological advantages like Boarding Cards via SMS. BA is lost in the wilderness between premium class and low cost. So what does it do with the cash injection it got? It buys the second largest loss making airline in Europe, Iberia, who is similarly placed and tries to combine them. Iberia is perhaps worse off - all its old premium roots into Malaga, Valencia and other cities are dominated by low cost airlines who fly customers in waves - supposedly cheaper - for no frills. BA inherits few new profitable roots, a heavy cost based business and a management equally defunct of ideas from an airline that does not yet lose as much money as BA.

But that's not all - less than a year after two decent airlines flying all business class service to New York went bust (and both were excellent), BA launches one from City Airport which flies just 32 people via Shannon for around £5,000 each. The target customers are City Bankers, the most hated part of society since the recession and credit crunch - Walsh could not have made a bigger PR and business blunder.

Yet he survives. The lack of strategy is almost childlike, the tackling of Unite is pathetic. You can feel it happening again as the whizz kids at Royal Mail found out when capitulating to the Unions for a cost much higher than originally asked for, that modern businesses cannot take prolonged industrial actions and Walsh will have to relent or let his business die. Why would you do that?

BA is basically ruined. It will never rise again to be the airline it was but maybe the world wants something different. The trust and belief that the loyal staff had prior to all this has been ruptured and will never be regained. Walsh has put a sword through the heart of what was one of Britain's best companies.

It takes some skill to be that incompetent; to make a once loyal and much loved staff strike to kill their own company. When BA was the world's favourite airline, it was all about the staff.

He simply does not get it, does he?

They Think It's All Over.....

Oh, how naive of us to believe that dodgy expenses was the full extent of Political trough-snouting.

No one seems to realise that Politics is the ultimate game of sales - how else can a former PM be suddenly worth an accumulated £20m in just 3 years whilst being a Middle East Envoy. I mean, think about it - it's all about selling your rolodex of contacts, it's all about telling people that you can get things done - why else would someone like Blair be useful to Insurance Companies?

And we thought the Hamiltons' were sleazy. Just look at the crop we have now, not emptying mini bars anymore, the going rate for the likes of Byers and Hewitt, allegedly, is between £3,000 and £5,000 per day. Yes, that's per day.

It puts fiddling expenses into it's correct perspective - it's all just part of the way of making money.

By sheer coincidence I had lunch with a couple of people who are employed in the Lobby Industry and they had no idea this story was about to break. They talked about only the bit of the industry which they see - the endless stream of 'freebies' which MPs regularly and repeatedly partake of which royally look after their holidays and make their schedules less stressful. They believed it was right on the edge, and in some cases, well beyond the boundaries of 'influencing opinion'. The latest revelations remind me of the famous case of John Prescott being taken across the US by private jet and lauded at a ranch owned by the CEO of the lottery co-bidder, who gave him the infamous cowboy suit. Soon after, the same company landed the rights to run the lottery as part of the Camelot consortium and have remained at the heart of the biggest and easiest money making scheme since it's start in 1995.

My lobbyist friends believe that there is growing fear in Westminster and Brussels that there will be a hung Parliament causing at minimum financial inertia where no one can get things agreed and done. They said there is also a growing belief that over half the sitting MPs will lose their seats and be replaced by a new batch of wannabe MPs - the biggest churn of Politicians in ages. It would be a great thing if it happened and we got rid of the stagnant thinking, populist policies and cynical abuse of the system but I think it's naive to think so.

I agree that a huge number of people are really upset about the expenses thing and will clearly be angered about the lobbying scandal too. The belief that constituencies will vote as they should, about the individual candidate, is likely to occur in the extreme situations like Luton South or Bracknell but politicians have thick skins and voters have short memories with a limited capacity to reason. In many areas, the local MP could commit murder but the locals would still vote by Party while many will just look at the value of their staples like beer and fags and vote accordingly.

This year is unusual. We have a sitting Inquiry into the steps that led to a war that cost us billions, led to unnecessary loss of life and has stoked up the rattler's nest of fanaticism to endanger us more. The sitting PM has already admitted he has lied to the Inquiry - God knows that others have. Our economy, that we were led to believe was impregnable, has suffered a worse recession than any of its rich counterparts and our GDP is now lower than that of Italy's. We have a spiralling budget deficit and no plan to tackle it; we have the prospect of more taxes and yet we are already the most taxed British citizens of all time.

The fact we haven't voiced our discord to date is testament that we will revert to type at the General Election. It may get close but the sweet talk of the likes of Mandelson will likely win the day. And before you think I'm too biased, I predict the likes of Nadine Dorries will somehow get voted back in and what about Julie McBride?

It comes to something when we trust the likes of a twice disgraced MP.

The Truth Will Out?

The revelation today that 'Bush's Brain', former senior adviser Karl Rove, has admitted he was 'proud' of the use of waterboarding as a form of 'information gathering' may be startling to some - simply necessary to others.

Under legal notes passed at the time, Bush's administration effectively relegated waterboarding to a 'non-torture' status therefore allowing its use in extracting information from alleged terrorists. It was the non-torture method of choice in places like Guantanamo and if that was considered non-torture, then the mind boggles at what methods were used in the name of 'getting the truth' on non-US territory.

Waterboarding is a lovely method of 'questioning'. It involves putting a prisoner into a position where water is doused over their face so that they cannot breath, therefore making them think they are drowning. Clearly, it is a method which may not work first time and so it is repeated ad nausea until the information required is extracted. For anyone who has been in the very terrifying position of believing they are going to be drowned, there are few more dreadful feelings in life, especially when you know that the difference between you living or dying is entirely controlled by someone else.

Under such pressure, it is argued from laymen to eminent psychologists then the prisoner will say anything in order to stop the torture. Often prisoners will say many things, much contradicting what they have already said in an avalanche of extracted information in the vain hope that the investigators get what they believe they are looking for. In fact, so primal is the whole thing that more intelligent people than I would strongly argue that any such information extracted under such duress is most likely to be unreliable.

Rove reckons that umpteen terrorist plots were foiled by using such methods. Perhaps it could be argued that umpteen plots that US investigators wanted to believe were to be perpetrated were uncovered. After all, amid the failures in Intelligence Agencies leading up to the Iraq War to get even the basics right, the last thing you would want is that new, more aggressive methods, actually found that no new attacks were known about. It could be argued that success rates were written by the investigators in order to justify their methods and their jobs, for that matter.

Anyway, it's a moot point as the method is rightly outlawed by the Obama Administration and Guantanamo hardly achieved a thing with only one tribunal enacted so far. Even the famous case implying MI5 knowingly gleaning information from torture seemed to come from a person who was ultimately freed with no charges against him, to be hailed as some kind of hero. But, with the definition of 'non-torture' afforded to waterboarding and its enthusiastic approval by Government officials, would it not be interesting to find out what would have been revealed had we used the methods in official inquiries such as the Chilcot Inquiry?

Perhaps the sleek, svelte calm of Tony Blair and Alistair Campbell would have been broken. Perhaps the contradictory evidence from Jack Straw might have been tested for veracity. Perhaps we would have easily got Gordon Brown to tell the truth about his spending policy when many officials before him had attested to it.

But in reality it is all about the skill and tenacity of the questioner to obtain information. Sir John Chilcot and his team seem to be just writing down whatever is said with no cross referencing or rebuttal questions to test the truth. I watched the film 'Frost/Nixon' last night and saw how devastating good questioning can be in terms of putting powerful, intelligent people on edge and taking them into territories in their minds that they do not want to go - forcing the real truth out of them. I am an exponent of testing truth in interview techniques as I have a firm belief that those coming for jobs only want to talk about what they want to talk about and highlight themselves to their own advantage. Getting at the truth in an interview is vital as only under pressure will you find out how people will really perform.

The Chilcot Inquiry has had lines of questioning which frankly could have been put together by school kids and the follow ups to answers have been woefully absent. Ministers have gone before the Inquiry and basically said what they want with impunity from challenge, even when others have already said something entirely contradictory. It's as if the whole thing is choreographed and scripted to once again suit the Government and the stooges involved.

Perhaps Karl Rove is right - waterboarding and the like does get at the truth. Personally, I think it would be far better if we got a bunch of investigators in the Chilcot Inquiry who really want to get at the truth and who have a healthy cynicism about how Politicians and their mandarins lie to protect themselves. We will have spent millions, learnt nothing and will repeat the same mistakes time and again until we find out just why Iraq was so important for us all to be lied to in order to justify a war.

With that central question asked, perhaps we would have got somewhere near the truth.

A Month Is A Long Time

I am happy to say I have enjoyed a month away from writing as I have been lucky enough to become a father for the first time at my ripe age. It's been a very rewarding time.

Not much has changed around us, if truth be told. I thought Gordon Brown's performance in the Chilcot Enquiry was cynical beyond belief when even ex-Ministers, let alone ex-heads of Services, have already told everyone that the UK troops have been denied vital equipment through budget restraints. It just seems that lying to the Enquiry is perfectly acceptable and Brown is playing a 'It's your word against mine' routine. I just hope that documents to be reviewed by the Enquiry actually discover what actually went on and that the word of a defunct PM is not taken as gospel.

Brown has told us that we still have a long road to go on the economic crisis and cuts should not be implemented right now for fear of upsetting the delicate recovery. His precise judgement, which has served us so dreadfully in terms of a ballooning budget deficit which is growing faster than he predicts each month, is that at approximately midday on 10 May will be the exactly time when a tumult of cuts will be finally be required - uncannily that is almost certainly to be one day after the election result is known. How spookily cynical is that?

Meanwhile, the IOD and CBI have urged the Government to start making cuts immediately as the budget deficit seems to be completely on its own spiral with Alistair Darling completely unable to predict where it will be month on month let alone in 2014. It's laughable but somehow on the back of this and the appalling news in Afghanistan and the lies about Iraq, the Government has closed the gap in the Polls to just 2 points.

The old Mandelson Magic is at work - our brains are washed. If we really do think things are ok, then we are barking mad.

Misplaced Priorities

I was accused by someone who read my blog on London 2010 and my chance meeting with a homeless person that I had lost a sense of perspective and implied I had gone soft.

I understand the point the person was making -without banking and bankers we would have no system for trading and the fabric of our world would collapse. The fundamental point that you need a system for transferring credit and money around to make the world grow and get better - that's obvious.

However, I think we lost all sense of perspective not just in the last two years but over the last 15 years or so. We have missed enormous opportunities to get to grips with problems and get our priorities right yet so much of the last 15 years has been about greed and gain - and usually involving a relatively small amount of people.

As well over 1 billion of the world's population struggle and starve, in the West we fight wars about control of oil that really benefits the US and UK in the main, whose combined population is around 400m but in reality it benefits just a slim percentage of those populations. The banking system is allowed to trade amongst itself for 12 clear years and create vast profits based around fictional products that ultimately depend on their over-inflated view of our properties and then we when they get it wrong and lose it all, we actually get told we have to pay the entire bill so that these people can maintain their standards of living and once again earn the vast profits and salaries they are used to.

Meanwhile the world passes by the homeless person I saw on the train in London - it passes by the millions in Africa who look on in total amazement that we would waste so much money saving the skins of so few people in order to preserve our way of life and forget about those we have left behind.

The polarity of our world is more than just two white caps of snow - it is about those who have and those who have not. I am not in favour of communism or even full scale socialism but I am not in favour of allowing besuited creeps in fast cars being saved when they are abject failures and fraudsters.

The global bailouts are thought to be totalling more than $11 trillion - it will not go down as the price paid willingly to save our world as Gordon Brown would put it but the cost of the missed opportunity to do something more fundamental for a world lost in its own self-importance and greed.

I don't think I am being soft in my view or misunderstanding the point. There was a time when banking was an honourable industry because it did what it was supposed to.

My father used to describe compulsive gamblers as the sort of people who would sit in the pub and bet on the hair colour of the next person who entered the door. Go take a look at the range of products you can 'buy' in the world of banking today and it's no different and has little to do with reality but much more to do with the spinning wheels of a casino.

We have just funded the whole thing to perpetuate. That makes us all culpable for that missed opportunity. Here is the rub, if the Government had issued a tax before all this happened to go pay for feeding Africa or the homeless we would have rose up and told them where to go. But because it saves the fortunes of a few thousand bankers we have, without question or complaint, paid the lot and there will be more to be paid.

So run that question by me one more time. Who is the soft person who misunderstands?

How Much Is A Greek Urn?

The old Morecambe and Wise joke doesn't seem so funny anymore as one of the beneficiaries of the modern innovation of a single European currency is virtually bankrupt - Greece is on its knees and the Eurozone is having to bail it out.

It sounds chillingly familiar. I blogged on the subject of National Debt being the new sub-prime and Greece was not the first to succumb as arguably that was Dubai. In both cases to date, rich neighbours or alliances have had to bail the countries out, but in the case of Greece they are part of the Eurozone unpleasantly known as PIIGS or Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain where National Debt is about to send the countries into crisis. Greece, having gone effectively belly up first, is the beneficiary of a bailout but can the Eurozone and the Euro currency sustain a long, hard attack on it from all those countries? Can the rich, like Germany and France actually have deep enough pockets to help them all? Will it affect us in Britain?

As we sit here making pithy jokes at the expense of the Greek economy it's worth a thought that part of Greece's huge budget deficit problem was the cost of the Olympics and guess what is just around the corner for us. While we sit here doing nothing about our budget deficit in case the frail recovery falters, we share with Greece the nasty fact that both our deficits are over 12% of GDP. We are both in the current state through stupid spending, low savings and cheap money.

On a league table I saw of currency debt swaps, Britain's position in the league table is just behind Austria who, in turn, is just outside the PIIGS zone. In other words, speculators are beginning to rate our Sovereign Debt and our ability to pay as weakening and only marginally worse than those in the PIIGS zone.

While we sit here contemplating a General Election and the possibility of a hung Parliament leading to a further period of economic inertia and all the while no-one actually tackles the growing budget deficit, we are sending further alarming signals to the world markets that our National Debt is not only a huge problem getting bigger but that we really see paying it off as a low priority. That will not help us if a) we need to borrow more - even as we speak the cost of borrowing for Britain is far higher than say that of Germany whose economy Gordon Brown scoffed at for so long and b) if the frail recovery starts to falter as it has done last quarter in Germany.

Our current hope that growth will lead to our recovery alone has already been dented by Germany's latest figures of flat growth while France's advance of 0.6% last quarter was only slightly more encouraging. The fact of the matter is that Britain is not that far different to Greece and time is running out for us to address our problems.

In the week, we saw a cleverly timed documentary on Gordon Brown designed to show him in a more human light just two months before an Election and to dispel his imagine of a granite-faced, humourless old fart with about as much feeling as an ice cube. Yes, we saw that he has feelings - to be frank he has suffered tragedy and to have not been emotional would have been strange beyond belief. The program's aim was to present an alternative view to the PM than hustings or debate - this was a sugar-coated sell worthy of the masters of spin themselves, Blair and Campbell, stage-managed by the obsequious Piers Morgan.

I just wish he would take his eye off the Election and act. Britain is sinking fast - Dubai and Greece are the warning signs of a potential domino effect and we are in the line of dominoes waiting our turn.

Will someone not do something about it?

London 2010?

I am not sure what point I'm making here but bear with me.

Yesterday, on a tube train in the bowels of London, I was sitting in a crowded carriage, travelling from Kentish Town to Bank. At Camden Town at young man with gingery hair and beard, supported by a crutch got on. I vaguely noticed him as he steadied himself as the train pulled off.

"I know you're thinking, it's another homeless person," said the man. He was no more than 30, looked not scruffy but not smart in a mock leather jacket. His voice was clear, bearing no discernible accent and he sounded intelligent. "But I am just collecting to get enough money to get some food and a place to sleep tonight. I know it's not you're problem and I am not here to force you or make you feel guilty but if you could spare some money, I would appreciate it."

As he spoke, he made no eye contact and kept looking at the carriage floor. In his free hand he held is woolly beanie hat and he limped through the carriage holding it ahead of him. The lady next to me and I dipped into our purse and pocket respectively. I felt a coin in my pocket - it was bigger than most and I knew it was a £2 coin. I hesitated a second as I had a few smaller coins but as the man passed me, he must have known that I was reaching into my pocket yet he did not offer the hat to me. I pulled my hand free and I dropped my £2 coin into his hat and he said, "God bless you" to the lady and I.

He made his way to the next part of the carriage and used his clearly well rehearsed patter on the people in there.

Several things crossed my mind as I looked back at my crossword. I was struck by the man's humility and humbleness - and the fact he was not transferring his problem onto us or blaming us. He just needed some money. Another thing struck me - the act of giving him anything made me feel no better or worse - I neither made eye contact with him nor attempted to engage him in conversation; it was a perfunctory donation on my part and, financially, I was only marginally worse off. I don't know why I chose a £2 coin and I had no idea if it was the going rate or whether I was being wildly generous.

I had no idea what the cost of maintaining myself in food and shelter for the night if I was in the same position. I was intrigued that such a unscruffy looking man with an intelligent voice and manner could be a homeless person - he did not look drunk or on drugs, he was not dirty or smelly; he clearly had some pride in his looks.

His patter was well honed and his delivery was good - he made no attempt to engage with people or to make them feel uncomfortable or guilty. His manner was non-pushy and there was no implied threat; it was simple and easy to understand. There was no attempt to make you feel sorry for him or to get angry with the intrusion into your journey. The man had a gift to to get what he needed without need to resort to emotional blackmail. It was actually quite skilled.

With all that going in the man's favour, I wondered how could such a person be homeless and down on his luck. He had more things going for him than against him. Yet he was homeless and £2 or any coin meant something to him.

Last night, I looked up that there are estimated some 1 million, of which 400,000 are known as 'hidden', homeless people in Britain and up to 2008 this number had trended downward. London is one of six regions in Britain which statistically has the highest concentration of homeless people - around 0.6% of the population of people in London are homeless. These figures go up to 2008 and obviously do not take account of the recent recession.

I have no idea how much is the bare minimum in terms of cash required to get food and a place to sleep in London if you are homeless.

As I travelled home last night, I realised that this young man, without meeting my eye or talking to me personally had said something to me. I looked back over the various themes to my blog and realised that much of my own issues are with the injustice of greedy bankers getting a 'get out of jail free card' and then moaning about how few £millions they are allowed to earn this year or at 50% taxation and that Britain is pricing itself out of the financial market. That or trough-snouting politicians on the make, justifying themselves as if they needed it. Or lying politicians sending kids to die or get blown to pieces. I am angry about something.

I am not sure of my figures but I would suggest that 0.6% of people in London may be far more than the number of bankers who earn over £1m a year in bonuses. Perhaps it would be pertinent for the two populations to swap for a night or two just so that we can all get a sense of perspective.

Modern Britain is full of such peculiarities - in a population of 64m in Britain, over 1m are still classified as homeless. I would suggest just than a few thousand people in Britain are rich bankers earning over £1m for trading on the back of their company's big name. They are the people who leaned out of their windows at the time of the G8 talks waving £10 notes at protesters after losing £billions.

It would be good for such apparently educated and intelligent people to get some real education and humility.

Again, I am not sure of my point here but I guess I felt more humble about some homeless guy asking me for £2 than some rich kid robbing me of thousands so that he or she can continue to earn £millions and for them to act as if I owe them.

I shall remember that the next time I see bankers trying to justify themselves on TV or a politician feeling stressed by questions of their honesty or greed. What I shall forever feel guilty about is that I hesitated giving the man just £2, thinking it too much while I had no choice in giving thousands to some ungrateful little swines who had lost £billions and did not even have the humility to ask us to bail them out or thanks us.

They just expected it and we paid. And we keep paying. Perhaps we all need some education.