Banditry

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.

Sorry for radio silence, I’ve been in Istanbul (not Constantinople) doing Exciting but Hardworking things.

Quick comment on the budget: many people, mostly on the “we believe in free markets except when, err, I’ll get back to you on that one” right, seem to think that the government’s rise in beer excise duty spells the death knell for struggling pubs.

The rise in beer tax is 4p. A pint of beer costs £2.50-£3.50. If you can find anyone, anywhere, who’s willing to drink a £2.50 pint but not a £2.54 pint, then I’ll eat a hat salad, a hat casserole and a hat meringue pie…

Sorry, has this man actually ever been to London or New York?

At present we are offered a ‘choice’ between an oligopoly of three or four chains, all spending so much money on advertising and formulaic minimalist interiors, that they haven’t got enough left over to spend on a filling, so have to make up for this with mayonnaise. The main alternatives are those italian sandwich bars, which are scarcely any more appetising.

Yet if real, vigorous competition were to arrive – a new cafe selling better food, for a decent price – would anyone notice? If it was in the toytown world of Borough Market, maybe, but elsewhere people would be either too distracted to spot it or then too busy to remember it. The problem in such situations, as the left liked to complain about markets, is inadequate information and rationality. Whereas the discerning New Yorker would discover such a place, tell their friends, and carry on eating there until an even better option had arisen, the Londoner dolefully heads off to Pret for another ‘Bacon Mayo Supermayo’.

I mean, seriously. London’s Italian cafés are pretty good; our chains aren’t at all bad (Eat, Leon and Pret are better than most of the food, chain or non-chain, that gets served anywhere, even if you eat the no-mayo sandwiches, which is a lot of them); and most of New York’s delis are absolutely bloody awful…

Is there a word, beyond ‘lying’, for this kind of claim – that a sandwich served by a company is inherently worse than a sandwich served by a worker, that a small grocery shop provides a better range and better service than a supermarket, that Fawlty Towers is better than a Malmaison, and so on? It’s analogous to the pastoralist belief that 12 hours a day of back-breaking manual labour on a starvation diet followed by death at 40 is better than an oh so unnatural modern lifestyle – and very nearly as silly.

Update: although I stand by my views on London sandwiches in general, the tuna melt I had this lunchtime from Bagel Factory is one of the most inedible things I’ve ever been served – I had to throw it away after a single bite. And I’ve happily eaten chicken feet and fish eyes…

A BBC article on alcohol consumption statistics features a stupid comment:

The figures also suggest that alcohol consumption is increasingly a problem among the middle classes. Men and women in “managerial and professional” households drank an average of 15.1 units a week.

The same study also shows that men drink, on average, twice as much as women. Hence, the average professional man drinks around 20 units and the average professional woman drinks around 10 units.

So, even based on the insanely low guidelines of 14 units per week for women and 21 for men (a man would have to drink 63 units a week to reach the same risk of death as a teetotaller), the figures actually suggest that alcohol consumption is not a problem among the managerial and professional classes.

(yes, I also believe the strong libertarian case, that even if someone is downing a bottle of gin every lunchtime, that’s only a problem to the extent that it causes them to inflict misery and suffering on others. However, I’m not impressed by the view that this is only relevant when applied to feckless chavvy teens and not also, say, surgeons to the royal court – especially as incidents like Gary Newlove’s murder are extremely rare whereas violent domestic abuse is extremely common…)

I’ve got a new piece up at the Sharpener on the myth that London is a crime-ridden wasteland that anyone in their right mind would do well to flee before they get their throat slit. Enjoy…

Also, Burning Our Money has a slightly silly piece on the Cheap Booze Menace – it highlights that you can buy a tin of dubious 3% lager at Asda for 22p, which works out as about 0.6p at retail pre-tax.

The piece goes on to link this to the Feral Teen Menace, which is dubious given that I’ve only ever seen street-drinking youths on strong lager, strong cider, wine or spirits, and that supermarkets are by far the best retailers at not serving booze to kids. Still, it’s always amusing to see professed free-marketeers calling for restrictions on a trade that they find distasteful…

Relatedly, can anyone think of a good reason why alcohol tax shouldn’t be levied on a “X pence per ml of ethanol” basis, rather than making pointless and arbitrary distinctions between different types of grog?

From the Observer:

Of 377 National Health Service and private hospitals surveyed in England, 173 – 46 per cent – were found to have poor cleanliness in their kitchens, or canteens or cafes used by staff, patients and visitors. Nine of the 377 were private hospitals, of which six were found to have at least one area of concern.

So, 46% of NHS hospitals had food cleanliness problems, while 67% of private hospitals had the same problems? That’s +1 for the NHS, I reckon (not quite sure why Wat thinks otherwise.)

More importantly, the whole story is massively overblown. Only eight of the 377 hospitals inspected were found by health inspectors to have sufficiently serious problems to go onto a six-month inspection schedule – i.e. had real problems that might get them closed down if not addressed, rather than ticking the wrong boxes to meet vaguely nannyish rules. That’s a hell of a lot better than you’d get if you inspected 377 randomly selected food establishments…

I’ve got a new piece up at The Sharpener on Threshers’ brilliant ad campaign unfortunate voucher mistake.