Bang on Trend

There is always something that gets my goat.

My latest source of annoyance is the current trend for footballers not to wear shinguards or, if they do wear a pair they are about the size of a credit card.

According to Law 4 of the FA rulebook there are some items of clothing/equipment that are compulsory.

The compulsory equipment of a player comprises the following separate items:

  • a shirt with sleeves
  • shorts
  • socks – tape or any material applied or worn externally must be the same colour as that part of the sock it is applied to or covers
  • shinguards – these must be made of a suitable material and be of an appropriate size to provide reasonable protection and be covered by the socks. Players are responsible for the size and suitability of their shin guards
  • footwear

I am not saying that we should return to the good old days where players wore hobnail boots and shin pads that were “substantial”, these mini shin pads are taking things too far.

Why I won’t be buying Bahlsen biscuits any more.

Well, well, well, every day is a school day. The things you live and learn. Where to begin?

Bahlsen is a German company that calls itself a “proud family business.” They make biscuits available in most of the UK supermarkets and they are pretty good too.

Their main brand is the Choco Leibniz biscuit which used to be sold in a 125g packet of 9 biscuits. However this has just all changed. The packets now only contain 8 biscuits and weigh 111g. I know one could just say it’s only a biscuit, keep your hair on. Yet in my view it is a point of principle.

The “proud family business” has made cost savings and not passed them onto the consumer. It seems that this practice is so rife that a new term “shrinkflation” has come about.

Things get even worse for Bahlsen, as whilst doing a bit of research it appears that the “proud family business” has recently been reported on for using hundreds of forced labourers from Nazi-occupied Poland and Ukraine from 1940 till 1945.

Needless to say I won’t be buying any Bahlsen biscuits any more.

PM’s Tax return

A few numbers from Rishi Sunak’s Tax return for 2022-2023

£2.23m – Rishi Sunak’s overall earnings and gains for the last financial year.

£508,308 – paid in tax

23% – the effective tax rate Sunak paid in the UK

45% – the top rate of income tax paid in UK by the highest earners.

That does not make any sense, I smell a rat. What is going on?

Our Prime Minister has a lot of shares in the US wrapped up in an investment fund.

£1.8m – The profit paid out from this US based fund.

20% – the capital gains tax rate in the US.

So has he done anything wrong?

He has not broken any rules in paying a lot of his tax at source. It just happens that he conveniently holds a lot of his wealth in the US rather than in the UK and consequently he makes a financial gain.

One last thought that yanks my chain. The UK Prime Minister pays taxes that pay for public services in the US.

All at the expense of paying capital gains taxes that could be used to fund things like the NHS.

Cronyism by definition

This time last year Grayson Perry was on the New Years honours list. Something I applauded at the time.

This year there were two New Years honours lists. The extra one was a drawn up by Liz Truss. This “Prime Minister’s resignation list” was used to reward friends and party donors with knighthoods, dame hoods and peerages.

Liz Truss was Prime Minister for only 49 days. The photo is provided in case you blinked and missed her.

The awarding of three life peerages is most galling. The recipients are allowed to sit in the House of Lords as un-elected lawmakers. The only reason that they have a seat in the upper chamber of the House is because their mate gave the nod.

I suppose that is the way of the world these days, but talk about having a brass neck.

The PM’s fascination with private jets and helicopter rides.

Rishi Sunak has clocked up another private short haul flight.

He is saving the tax payer having to foot the bill for this one-way helicopter flight from London to Leeds/Bradford because a Tory party donor is picking up the £15,900 tab.

Other private helicopter flights have been been funded by different Conservative donors

His fascination with these VIP flights show:

  1. a complete disregard of the current climate crisis
  2. a lack of enthusiasm to travel on public transport. Why can’t he get the train like the rest of us?
  3. a preference to take the VIP option when most people are facing cost of living challenges that he is totally detached from.

What a state visit.

I have been giving Rishi Sunak some stick for flying around the UK using private jets and helicopters at the tax payers expense.

The Prime Minister does not pretend to have any real green credentials and he is consistent in his travel choices. We all know that he has no shame about the environmental damage he is causing.

King Charles on the other hand is well known for his environmental campaigning. So his decision to fly rather than take the train to Paris for his recent state visit raised a few eyebrows.

The Eurostar was good enough for his Mum when she traveled to France on state visits in the past.

To top it all the King had his Bentley transported over to Paris in order to pick him and the Queen up from Orly airport. Not sure how you measure the carbon footprint for that trip.

The King did plant a tree during his visit. Maybe this was part of the carbon offsetting for his travel plan.

Come on Thérèse sort the sewers out!

Thérèse Coffey revealed her plans yesterday to clean up the sewage being dumped into the environment. Most people agree that her clean water plans are not hard hitting enough.

Feargal Sharkey, a campaigner on cleaning up our polluted rivers and beaches said “There was little in yesterday’s announcement to suggest that the government has a grip on the problem”.

So Thérèse, it’s time to toughen up the legislation, issue fines to the polluters that are big enough to be a deterrent rather than a slap on the wrist and ring fence the money collected in fines to upgrade the sewage network. It is not for you to give up on the problem and let the water companies pass the clean up costs onto the bill payers.

A Flying Shame

In 2019 8% of the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions came from domestic and international flights.

The UK government have made a pledge to have net zero aviation in place by 2050.

Under the the Jet Zero plan commercial airlines will have to use a sustainable replacement for jet engines.

Reaching Jet Zero will be a challenge to say the least.

Electric engines are not a viable option due to the weight of the batteries needed to produce the power to get an aircraft off the ground.

So the sustainable options lie with non-fossil fuels, all of which are far from perfect.

A report on these alternatives has just been published by The Royal Society and it is sobering reading. The four non-fossil fuels outlined in the report are as follows:

  • Bio fuels – these are made from crops such as rapeseed or poplar. However it “would require more than 50% of the UK’s available agricultural land to replace aviation fuels.”
  • Hydrogen – Hydrogen gas can extracted from water using electric current. “Producing enough ‘green’ hydrogen to replace current fossil aviation fuel would require around 2.4 to 3.4 times the UK’s annual renewable electricity generation (2020)”
  • Ammonia – ‘Green’ Ammonia production requires vast amounts of electricity – in fact “producing ‘green’ ammonia as a jet fuel would require 2.5 to 3.9 times the UK’s annual renewable electricity generation (2020).”
  • Synthetic Fuels – “When done sustainably using renewable electricity, this would require 5 to 8 times the UK’s 2020 renewable electricity capacity.”

The report also points out that there is not a full understanding of the impact of non-CO2 emissions from jet engines, and the formation of contrails, which currently contribute significantly to warming by aviation globally.

This should worry us all.

Laugh or cry

Talk about a blast from the past. I give you my first boss in the teaching profession. Former Secretary of State for Education, Kenneth Baker.

The now, Lord Baker of Dorking has been in the House of Lords for the past 26 years. Yesterday he got wheeled out onto Newsnight for his opinion on the teachers’ strike and the current batch of Tory ministers who break their own code of behaviour.

The poor bloke’s phone kept ringing during the interview. I thought Victoria Derbyshire handled it all pretty well.

Compare and Contrast.

A picture says more than 1000 words

Last week Rishi Sunak flew on a private jet to Leeds and back. He also did a quick trip to Scotland for lunch meeting with Nicola Sturgeon using the same method of transport. The taxpayer picked the tab for these two trips.

The “PM” clearly is doing his “green credentials” no good at all. Flying in private jets is not recommended by climate change experts

Meanwhile Greta Tuneberg was protesting in Germany against the expansion of a huge, lignite (brown coal), opencast mine.

Greta got arrested, but she was later released. Sunak got back home in time for tea.

Update – The UK prime minister has continued to use a private jet at the taxpayers’ expense. Trips to Indonesia, Egypt, Latvia and Estonia have clocked up a bill over £500,000.

Meanwhile at the same time Sunak has been tearing round the globe his Government has halved Air Passenger Duty (APD) a decision which encouraged Ryanair to add an extra 9 domestic routes to its flight schedule.

It makes you want to weep.

It just goes on and on. Today the press is reporting that Sunak has used a private helicopter to fly from London to Southampton and guess who pays the tab. A journey that takes just over an hour by train and costs about 30 quid for a ticket.