Banditry

So there’s an interesting piece on Bloomberg quoting the Sunday Times saying that Fosters Group, the Aussie wine and beer company, might sell its beer operations (branded Carlton & United Breweries, confusingly enough) to SABMiller.

This makes sense. Since I was working as a drinks industry reporter getting on for ten years ago, I’ve been saying Fosters should flog off the beer business. They’re a combination of a global premium wine company, a low-margin domestic beer business, and one mysteriously popular global beer brand – which, oddly enough, has almost entirely disappeared from their home turf. Being a global wine distributor, while providing a global beer company with a global brand, and an opportunity to distribute their other brands into Australia, was always going to be a better call.

I’d always taken a British take on ‘appropriate buyers for CUB’, on the basis that Heineken (formerly Scottish & Newcastle) owned the EU rights. Obviously, that would’ve been a good fit. But I’d forgotten the fact that the USA is the world’s largest beer market, that Foster’s is a popular import brand in the USA (”throw another shrimp on the barbie”, etc), and that Miller owned the US rights to the brand.

Meanwhile, SABMiller – which, like Kraft Foods, is part-owned and heavily cash-backed by Altria (= Phillip Morris) in a desperate attempt to stop all their shareholders’ money going to compensate lung cancer victims – has fallen way behind Anheuser-Busch Inbev in the “being a serious global brewer” stakes.

A leading position in a mature but profitable beer market (yes, oddly enough, selling beer to Australians is popular. See: selling crack in Baltimore; selling expensive houses in Mayfair) is nice from a cash-generation point of view. And for some utterly mystifying reason Foster’s is a much-loved beer brand everywhere except Australia, and as brand promotion becomes global it’s becoming important to have the rights to your most important assets, rather than having them owned by some comedy convict jokers [*].

So if the news is true, then it’s a good call on SABMiller’s part, as well as a bloody relief to Fosters Group (who’ll presumably have to rename themselves to ‘Australian Wine Company’ or a made-up name like Geadeo or something). And some kind of deal with Heineken to sort out the global rights would probably also be sensible.

And no, none of my alcoholic drinks market wisdom would have made the slightest difference to share-tippery at any point ever. If you want to make money on markets by thinking you know more than people about fundamentals, horse-racing is still a better bet. Stock analysts are still voodoo-merchants; my skills are only worthwhile if you actually want advice on what to do if you’re trying to market grog.

[*] dear the Australian Department of Immigration and Citizenship: I don’t believe that all Australian businessmen are comedy convict jokers. As the owner of an official certificate of being an Australian Businessman, I take Australian business very seriously. And mentioning Alan Bond and John Elliott at this point would be deeply unfair, and the fact that Mr Elliott used to own CUB isn’t even slightly relevant.

From Popbitch:

In the 2004 European Championships a whole load of Jamie Carragher’s family went out to Lisbon to support him. Our favourite over-heard moment from the posh WAG hotel where they stayed, from one of his close relatives: “Call this a 5 star hotel? They don’t even have a kettle in the room!”

I hate, hate, hate hotels that don’t have kettles (or, preferably, like any hotel in the US – even one which only costs $50 and has a coin-operated bed – filter coffee machines) in the room.

Yes, I could get room service. But I want a bloody coffee now, because I’ve just bloody woken up, and I don’t want to have to get dressed before I drink it, and whilst I’m aware that the amount you’re charging my company would probably entitle me to let in your room service person naked without them complaining, that really isn’t my bag.

In conclusion: Scouse footballer relatives are better at appraising hotels than gay gossip columnists. Probably because the former actually have to get up in the morning.

So there’s yet another alcohol-bashing study out. This one says [*] that sports stars’ drunk behaviour has no impact on young adults’ drinking behaviour (that’s ‘over 18s’, or ‘legally responsible adults’), but that alcohol marketing does.

This isn’t surprising. Of course alcohol marketing makes people drink more of the brand being marketed, otherwise people wouldn’t do it. But we need people to research things that seem obvious from time to time, because sometimes we find out that what we think we know is wrong. So, decent study, worth funding, all good.

But:

“There’s always been a link made between alcohol and sport… the detrimental effects of that, in the same way as there was previously between cigarettes and sport,” Professor Kolt said.

Err, no. The difference is that smoking, full stop, is harmful. Alcohol consumption below 30 units (300ml of alcohol; 15 pints of bitter) a week has not been demonstrated to do harm, even compared to not drinking at all, and you need to get up to 50+ units before the risks of morbidity or mortality are substantially higher than for non-drinkers.

Unless the study shows that the impact of alcohol marketing is to encourage people aged 18-22 to drink more than 30 units a week, then it’s only of interest to alcohol marketers, and not to policymakers. And if they had found that, they’d most certainly have put it in the press release…

The problem with this kind of alcohol research (i.e. social science on consumption behaviour, rather than epidemiological science on health outcomes) is that nearly all the work commissioned and published by public bodies is carried out by miserable puritans who hate the concept of anyone ever having any kind of fun. This is because researchers who don’t hate the concept of anyone ever having any kind of fun work for drinks companies instead: they pay better, you get a free bar after work, and you don’t have to hang out with people from the first group.

But drinks companies tend to keep their studies private, because they don’t want their rivals to see them…

Therefore, the general pattern in the public arena is that some people will create a report which actually shows mildly interesting things about how people like to consume alcohol – but because of the prejudices of the people who’re writing it, the abstract and the PR make groundless accusations about negative impacts on disorder and health. And then the media reports the groundless accusations as “a study has concluded that”, and the public debate is ratcheted slightly further towards miserable puritanism.

[*] I have no idea what the study says. The above is what the press release says; the press release features quotes from and has been approved by the study’s main authors, and is what will shape the public debate.

In the last couple of weeks, Boris Johnson has done three good things that I can remember:

* Allegedly had a row with David Cameron about Crossrail, taking London’s side
* Endorsed cycling home after a couple of beers
* Supported restarting tours of London’s disused Tube stations

Meanwhile, I can’t think of anything bad he’s suggested over the same time. And yes, I know the whole point about the probably-manufactured Crossrail row is to do a ‘moderate’ act, and I know the latter two points are irrelevant identity statements with no serious policy implications, and this kind of thing still isn’t going to make me vote for him.

And yet… and yet the latter two are identity statements that I approve of. The public admission that having a few drinks isn’t a problem, and doesn’t impair your functionality to the extent that you can’t ride a bleedin’ bike [*], is both entirely true and against the mood of these curmudgeonly times. And tours of disused Tube stations will make existing geeks happy and help recruit new ones – and were done without any problems until 2000, so clearly could be restarted without causing any major harm. Indeed, both are the kinds of things that humourless pseudo-experts rail against, whilst not causing any major harm. They’re the opposite of the showcasing, ‘let’s ban stuff that doesn’t do any major harm but that we don’t like to send a message’ side that makes the current government so loathsome [**].

And yes, I know that Boris’s tube-booze ban is the ultimate example of a spurious ban, second only to the Tory plans to turn back the licensing laws to the absurd WWI-dictated situation that prevailed previously [***].

So, can we have someone on the left who’s prepared to stick up for Fun Stuff over Spurious Bans? Hell, someone on any official side would do. Then again, since the target audience at this election apparently consists of middle-aged nurses who’re afraid of everything, probably not.

[*] Car comparisons are spurious. We allow kids to ride bikes, fercrissakes.

[**] I might, through extremely gritted teeth, vote for them this time round as discussed. But my God, they are.

[***] The licensing laws are an excellent example of lobbying from big business creating an unalloyed improvement that neither party dared to or wanted to bring about in their own right. Since the public mood at the moment still seems rather puritan, I’m thanking all deities for the fact that the booze industry has deep pockets and political influence.

Every prediction I made in this piece from 2005 on 24-hour drinking has proved to be correct: on-trade alcohol consumption has fallen, levels of alcohol-related crime haven’t changed; pubs haven’t made any extra money; but puritan idiots have continued to rail against the rule change anyway.

The most offensively stupid puritan argument is that ‘24-hour drinking hasn’t cut violent crime, so it was a failure’. No – the point is, it means that law-abiding people can go out for a drink without having to obey insane rules created to stop soldiers in the trenches getting jealous of civvies back home during WWI. That is a good thing in its own right. If drink-related violence had risen, we’d need to weigh the good against the bad. Since it hasn’t, we can say that the licensing law changes are an unequivocally good thing, and crack open some booze to celebrate. Hurrah!

(it’s also worth noting that on this issue, the Tories are lying crooks who should be run out of town on a rail. Quelle surprise…)

Individuals who lost more than £50,000 in the Landsbanki collapse certainly let greed get in the way of good sense, and certainly don’t deserve the generous bail-out terms that the government has given them. However, that pales into insignificance compared to the 20+ local councils who’ve lost tens of millions between them in Landsbanki deposits. And who won’t get a penny back, as compensation schemes for bankrupt banks only protect retail investors.

These organisations actually have people employed with financial qualifications in working out what to do with their money. And it’s not like they haven’t been burned before by the collapse of a dodgy bank that just happened to be the highest interest payer (if it is in fact possible to work in local government finance without being told about the BCCI collapse and its knock-on effect for councils, then there’s a systemic problem in that everyone in the entire industry is completely inept).

It’s unfortunate that local taxpayers can’t recover the missing assets from the idiots in question, and the councillors who’ve singularly failed to oversee them (and who, I’m willing to stake near-Landsbanki-style amounts of money, will be more or less equally drawn from the ranks of the major parties).

Update: The Daily Mash calls it right: “oh fuck, we meant ‘Luxembourg’”…

So, when I said “don’t bother switching banks,” what I actually meant was “don’t bother switching banks unless your bank, instead of falling under the UK compensation scheme, falls under the compensation scheme of a small, rainy, historically very poor island which crazily overexpanded over the last five years and has absolutely no chance of meeting its bailout obligations if things go wrong”.

Sorry, Icesave investors. On the plus side, my point about the daftness of transferring money to Irish banks is made rather conclusively.

Oh, and while I’m clarifying – I’m in the lucky position where my savings (just about) go over the protected limit, and I’ve had them split between several accounts to diversify risk even before the current crisis started. While I think it’s likely that a crash – especially if it’s of a real bank, rather than ultra-high-interest online chancers – will bring full protection, it might not, so get transferring now if you’ve still got over £50k with one institution.

Relatedly, Seth Freedman has a piece in the Guardian, wondering why people who chose to sign up for ultra-high interest rates with a ropey over-leveraged bank should be bailed out at the expense of the poor and the prudent – and he has a good point. It’s fair for the government to fully compensate savers in banks that a reasonable person would see as ’safe’ [*], but hard to justify going over the clearly stated FSCS limits for people who’re choosing to gain an extra 2% interest in exchange for investing in, say, the First Bank of Nigeria rather than Lloyds TSB.

Looking to the longer term, and today’s liquidity-for-shares UK bank nationalisation announcement, my dad has a piece up on Liberal Conspiracy arguing that liquidity bail-outs are a terrible idea, as the crisis would otherwise be an excellent opportunity to get rid of the parasitical bastards at the major investment banks and end the toll they’ve exacted on the global economy ever since the Depression. If my dad were Mark Steel, that’d be unsurprising; since he’s been a stockbroker for 30 years and is currently head of investment banking for a broking firm, it’s a little more interesting…

[*] there’s a difference between savers in Northern Rock or HBOS, and Icesave or First Bank of Nigeria here. Northern Rock was originally a safe, conservative institution that made itself unsafe without most of its customers noticing, while HBOS did something similar (with less ineptitude and worse luck). On the other hand, Landsbanki was a foreign investment bank that nobody in the UK had ever heard of, and that was massively over-extended when Icesave started – and FBN is actually a reasonably good institution by local standards that appears to be holding up well, but hello! it’s a fucking Nigerian bank!

Update 8/10: Darling has copped out slightly. Rightly, he’s agreed to pay the €20,000 that the Icelandic government should have covered to Icesave savers; and rightly, he’s frozen Landsbanki’s remaining UK assets in the hope of recovering some money to offset against the compensation. Wrongly, he’s also covering deposits over £50k, which should have been written off to “if you’re that stupid then you don’t deserve to have 2x the average annual wage in cash”. Still, it’s more evidence for my “put the deposits in whatever goddamn bank you choose and you’re still safe” theory…

Nando’s is great, in general. Fact.

Separately, I’ve been to the Vortex in Stoke Newington, and it’s one of the worst venues I’ve ever had the misfortune to frequent. Fact. It was a quality piece of British [1] service, indeed: they told our party we could eat there, then told us we couldn’t, then told us we could phone in for delivery pizza, then told us we were interrupting the jazz (dig it, man…) when the pizza arrived and so couldn’t eat it in the venue.

So the fact that some daft Stokies are opposing the conversion of said rubbish-hole into a thoroughly good chicken-eatery makes me despair for the future of humanity.

Sod it, I’ll continue living in unfashionable parts of town [2], having enjoyable dinners, and eating food that’s good. I know Maccy D’s is not only unpopular but also socially eeeevil, because it serves cheap fatty and nice-tasting food to people who don’t have much money and like cheap, fatty and nice-tasting food; but Nando’s actually serves real whole unfried chickens that taste really really fucking good. If you slate it without having been there, it’s sheer snobbery – it is genuinely better than nearly all foodservice in this country. And most other countries.

Also, a a quick bit which makes no sense to people who aren’t from north-east London, but is a massive bloody great dog-whistle to those who are: people in Church Street saying “sod off to the Stroud Green Road if you want Nando’s”. In terms of the relative areas’ demographics, that equates to “wealthy white City couples tell people who actually grew up in the area to sod off to somewhere which still has poor people in it if they don’t want to eat organic fruit smoothies” [3].

[1] i.e. “actual people from the UK work here, and resent it and wish they were investment bankers and media co-ordinators like the rest of us, and therefore treat their customers in exactly the contemptuous way they believe their customers deserve to be treated – rather than being people from elsewhere trying to make enough money to buy their entire home town and therefore being correspondingly jolly with customers in the meantime”.

[2] I actually live in one of the four most fashionable parts of town; this is deliberate irony.

[3] in the interests of social commentary, I note that the people who’re born in the area in question tend to be black or Asian, whereas the people who write wanky petitions about restaurants tend to be white. However, the latter lot are saving the former lot from their ignorant selves [4], which isn’t neo-imperialist because it’s in a good cause.

[4] I particularly hate the way I have to highlight sarcastic comments in footnotes these days in case idiots [5] try and cite me out of context.

[5] if you don’t know, you don’t need to know.

A comment on this Guardian thread, about the prospect of extending the insane Tube drinking ban to – even more insanely – cover all public transport expresses confusion over why this is a problem:

“I haven’t lived in the UK for some time but where I live in Europe I frequently see people drinking in public and have never seen any trouble of any kind.”

Unfortunately, he goes on to wonder why things are worse in the UK. This isn’t the point – the UK is exactly the same as the rest of Europe. Our problem is that we have an unusually high concentration of paranoid nutjobs who think anyone found Having Fun should be arrested, stirred up by the Daily Hate Mail’s propaganda lying that crime and Anti Social Behaviour (whatever that may be) are serious problems.

The truth is that crime is falling, that drinking is fun, that binge drinking is not a serious problem, that you are incredibly unlikely to be the victim of drink-related violence, that even if you are it is unlikely to do you much harm, and that the number of people seriously harmed through drink-related violence every year in a country of 60 million people is sufficiently low that only the statistically illiterate or the paranoid and gullible need worry about it.

[there is one exception, an example of a crime from which a large proportion of the population have suffered in which alcohol is a trigger factor in large proportion of cases: domestic violence. However, this doesn't fit the nonsensical 'terrorised by ASBO yobs' narrative beloved of the tabloids; nor is it visible; nor is it increasing; nor is it more prevalent in the UK than eslewhere...]

It ought to be pretty obvious that banning drinking in a place is completely different from banning drunken louts from a place.

If you ban drinking in a place, it prevents people who aren’t louts but fancy a beer from having one, while doing absolutely nothing to prevent louts who are drunk from causing a nuisance (even if the drinking legislation were actually enforced against groups of rowdy chavs, which it won’t be).

If you actually want to stop drunken loutery, then you need to ensure that drunken louts are arrested, under the existing laws that provide a perfectly good arsenal of charges and punishments against rowdies, harrassers, disorderly conductors and affrayists. You don’t impose a new measure to punish the law-abiding.

Hence, the only two reasons to support Mr Johnson’s impending ban on drinking on the Tube are:

1) a belief that alcohol is inherently wrong and its consumption should be impeded wherever possible; or
2) idiocy

Neither of these are attractive traits, so it’s worrying that the plan is seen as a vote-winner…

Side note: the ban appears to advertised as “making everyone’s journey more pleasant”. Since it will very clearly make journeys less pleasant for those who enjoy drinking while on a journey, this is clearly false advertising, and I’d urge everyone who sees such a poster to report it to the ASA.