If you bank with Lloyd’s – demand a ‘Sharia Account‘.

The Islamic account is available to all customers at Lloyd’s TSB. In theory, anyone who does not need a permanent overdraft facility could switch to this account to avoid being hit by interest charges for going into the red.

A Lloyds TSB spokesman said: ‘The Islamic current account is for customers who cannot receive credit or debit interest due to their religious beliefs.

‘All of our Islamic accounts comply with Islamic law and are available to anyone regardless of background or faith.

Customers with standard current accounts who go into the red by at least £100 without authorisation are hit with an ‘unplanned overdraft fee’ of £20 a day for a maximum of ten days. This could mean a customer has to pay £200 in one month.

If your religious beliefs are offended by the idea of paying such swingeing interest rates to Lloyd’s Bank – you now know the answer.

Lloyd’s Sharia Account. is a post from: Anna Raccoon

This afternoon Bernard Madoff was given a 150 year prison sentence for masterminding the largest fraud the world has ever seen .

The gallery cheered as the sentence was handed down.

But his wife Ruth said after the hearing that she felt “betrayed and confused”, though probably not as much as the billions of tax payers who have had to pay for his and others’ greed.

I think this limerick from the New York Times sums it up quite well;

With Bernie’s cachet as the lure,
Even smart folks invested, quite sure
That with Madoff, funds grow
And sweet dividends flow.
Now they find themselves swindled … and poor.

The last person to emigrate from countries which reward people like Madoff until they get caught out, please shut the door on your way out.

Madoff given 1% in years of what he stole in pounds is a post from: Anna Raccoon

Whilst the Punch and Judy show that PMQ’s has become was distracting the collosseum crowds upstairs, Mervyn King lobbed an Exocet into the basement of 10 Downing Street with surgical precision yesterday.

There were more gems in this speech than any regal crown.

Take this one – ‘what is needed is a credible statement’ – a beautifully crafted phrase that was laser guided to fly in through the keyhole of No 10, before exploding its crude message of ‘I’m telling the oiks they haven’t yet heard the truth’.

Or this – ‘the scale of the deficit is truly extraordinary [...] there will certainly need to be a plan for the lifetime of the next parliament [...] to show how those deficits will be brought down [...] to figures below those which were shown in the Budget figures.’ – a cluster bomb, contents ranging from ‘I can’t believe my eyes’, to ‘whoever gets in next time round will need five years to even begin to make a dent in these figures’, with an aftershock of ‘ the budget figures you were fed were nonsense on stilts’.

My personal favourite was ‘I don’t think the chancellor is remotely relaxed’ – the unseen suicide bomber this, ‘I understand that the chancellor is having a nervous breakdown over all this, and I sympathise with his difficulties in the Brown bunker’.

The killer blow, though, was landed by the Excoet.

‘We were given a statutory responsibility for financial stability in the Banking Act. The question I put to you in February, and to which I’ve not really received any adequate answer from anywhere, is what exactly it is that people expect the Bank of England to do? [...]

If you’re content with that, that’s fine by me. What you can’t do is turn around afterwards and say ‘You have the statutory responsibility, why didn’t you do something?’ when there is nothing we can actually do.’

There you had it, the Bank of England has been nobbled, there is nothing they can do to stop the carnage, just as there is nothing parliament can do to remove Gordon Brown, the man is out of control and unstoppable.

Even Nick Robinson, that bastion of support for Gordon’s lies was forced to call his claim that capital expenditure was ‘going up’ an ‘inaccurate claim‘ yesterday.

The British public should be camped on the grass of parliament square, chanting ‘Out! Out!, Out!’; we deliver portaloos to make the Tamils more comfortable whilst they protest, we cheer our celebrities as they protest on behalf of the Gurkhas, we line the streets in our millions to protest against the Iraq war, but we cannot work up the energy to take direct action on our own behalf.

Mervyn King has told you the truth, are you happy to sit quietly not making a fuss whilst the consequences wash over you?

Truth and Consequences. is a post from: Anna Raccoon

We all know that Britain is a bit short this year, like the rest of the world it’s had a bad run. There’s been the expensive outlay on essential items like bringing democracy and a significant reduction in population to Iraq, which we are now attempting to do in Afghanistan; spending more on police to keep the criminals from taking over, I mean we wouldn’t want a bunch of money grabbing fraudsters, liars, cheats and hypocritical shysters running loose now would we?

Unfortunately the country sized equivalent of getting a red letter has been received; the Guardian reports that:

Britain could lose its cherished top-tier credit rating that provides access to cheap borrowing on international markets after a downgrade of its economic outlook by Standard & Poor’s. The ratings agency expressed alarm about the country’s ballooning budget deficit and switched its outlook from “stable” to “negative,” prompting the Conservatives to issue further calls for an immediate general election.

The job losses that have ensued as a result of the recession aren’t affecting bankers and politicians they’re affecting the bottom of the ladder, the poor and the young.

Figures out today showed Britain ran a record deficit in April of £8.5bn and consultancy PricewaterhouseCoopers warned that balancing the public finances will cost every British family £5,000 a year by 2018.

And what have we done to the people behind this catastrophic collapse? Absolutely nothing.  If you entrusted your future, your savings, your children to someone or to a group and they totally screwed it up you would fire them, immediately, and possibly bring charges against them including criminal negligence and fraud.

I arrive at a point of rational departure when I look at Gordon Brown or Alistair Darling, the smug harbingers of doom continue to lie, squirm and refuse to do the right thing and allow the public to speak with its strongest voice and most powerful weapon; the vote.

The voting system needs an overhaul for people to trust in it and for it to deliver the results we, as a people, as a country, need.  It should be fair and accessible to all and shouldn’t rely on candidates delivered through a corrupt mediation system, parties committed to selling their own grandmother to secure a vote (and then claim the loss on their expenses) and a First Past the Post system which rewards the powerful and greedy and punishes the under-represented.

A good leader should be, according to Sun Tzu, “enlightened, heedful, and full of caution”.  I don’t believe Brown has shown any of those qualities and if he has they have been overshadowed by his continuing, gross, escalating and pitiful ineptitude.

I don’t know what would replace labent Labour but surely it couldn’t be worse than these political cowboys.

We need an election, we need a leader we can trust, we need Brown gone. Now.

Red Letter Thursday. is a post from: Anna Raccoon

The present outbreak of the disease which threatens to cull all the livestock in the House of Commons can be traced back to 1976 and Michael Foot’s cowardice in the face of a pincer movement – a deputation of MPs unable to live on the pittance that was allocated to them and a concurrent acrimonious row with the unions regarding pay policy.

As a Labour politician, Foot was sympathetic to the plight of the many junior Labour MPs who did not have the benefit of rich ancestors, but he could not get tough with the unions whilst handing out pots of gold to MPs, many of whom were ex-union officials themselves.  He compromised by appearing to act tough on MPs’ salaries but to quietly increase the allowances.   MPs came to regard the total package as their “remuneration” and increasingly to see their only obligation as to obey the letter of the,  deliberately,  very lax rules for claiming allowances.

The ‘mouth’ of the House of commons is the Speaker, a position which has been in existence since 1377 when Sir Thomas Hungerford was appointed the first speaker of the house. Loyalty to the speaker is traditionally a ‘hallowed commons tradition’ and there is no precedent of a speaker being removed against their will in modern times. However the current speaker Michael Martin is facing unprecedented calls for him to resign by MP’s from all across the party spectrum, due to his handling of the expenses scandal that originated with Michael Foot. The speaker is responsible for maintaining not only the privileges of parliament but it’s dignity also, and as the symbolic leader and highest authority in the house,  there are demands, notably from Douglas Carswell MP, that the MP for Glasgow North East should take responsibility for his fellow MP’s excesses and be removed from his position.

The last time this happened was in 1694, when Sir John Trevor had to announce the motion calling for his removal on the grounds of his ‘sordid rapacity’.  Sir John left the house after a unanimous vote, and, pleading ‘illness’,  never returned.  We have been here before, obviously.

There is precedent for an interim chair. Following a General Election, a member will move to propose that ‘x’ take the Chair of this House as Speaker. Until this vote is held, the Father of the House, who is currently Alan Williams, the Labour MP for Swansea West, would be the presiding officer of the House.

I suspect that if Douglas Carswell’s  Early Day motion is successful, then this is the route that will be taken.  I cannot support this idea, the anger in the country is so great, that it is not sufficient to offer up a sacrificial lamb and then return to normal.

We have heard a catalogue of excuses from exposed MPs, prevalent amongst which is a variety of ‘accountancy is not my strong point’ and ‘it was a book-keeping error’.

In the midst of the greatest financial crisis this country has known, how can we possibly leave 646 people in charge of balancing the books, who cannot tell when a debt has been paid up, nor when an invoice is justified or not.

The only way to deal with rampant and diseased livestock is to cull them all – so the Government ‘experts’ tell us.

I’ll warrant there are more than a few Farmers and Huntsmen who would be prepared to take on the job – free of charge.

Foot and ‘Mouth’ disease. is a post from: Anna Raccoon

Throw money at the problem, it’s Labour’s answer to everything.

This morning Sir Stuart Bell has come up with a spiffing wheeze to control the profligate spending of MPs. He’s going to set up a new unit which will ‘reassure the public that we do take fully into account their concerns’.

This audit body will be staffed by ‘skilled people’ from outside parliament.  The new unit is expected to cost around £600,000 a year to run.

I have news for Sir Stuart.

The Government already has just such a unit.

It has skilled staff who specialise in overseeing the expenditure of other people’s money. It has a case management system designed to look after up to 50,000 individual cases a year, it won’t bat an eyelid at another 646.

It has an investigatory unit which will actually go and physically look at the bath before sanctioning a new bath plug – just to make sure that it is really needed.

It has sour faced civil servants who will put every possible obstacle in the way of releasing money.  It cares less if your wife is going to divorce you if it doesn’t pay out before Christmas.  It releases no money until it has receipts it is totally satisfied with.  It goes through those receipts with a tooth comb.

It requires that those who are spending other people’s monies lodge a hefty deposit with it to indemnify it against possible fraud.  It never fails to prosecute those who commit any fraud.

It is perfect, and perfectly fit for purpose.

It’s called the Public Guardianship Office, and it’s duty is to look after the finances of those who are vulnerable and who cannot supervise the expenditure of their money directly.

There is no other body of people more vulnerable than the tax payers at the moment.

The money go-round. is a post from: Anna Raccoon

A Peer is a person who can stand up in Parliament and make this statement:

Tower Hamlets has a significant problem of overcrowding[...]other areas of the borough remain with old, run-down private housing.

With over 20,000 families on the waiting list [...]it is of extreme importance that this Government begin to address the housing crisis in the public and private sectors.

Hansard: Housing in England 26 Oct 1998 : Column 1764

Or this one:

My Lords, what are the Government’s plans in relation to what the Prime Minister said earlier today in the other place about extending the house building programme each year? Will that have any bearing on relieving overcrowding, especially in the boroughs that she mentioned?

Hansard:Housing: Overcrowding 11 July 2007 : Column 1385

With a dead straight face, whilst occupying one of the very social housing units that might have relieved the overcrowding she was so concerned about.

Spittlefields Housing Association has a Lettings Policy.

Spitalfields HA works together with Tower Hamlets Common Housing Register Partners to meet local housing needs through ‘Choice Based Lettings’. This system gives the applicants more choice about where they want to live. It was introduced to replace the old complicated system where applicants were awarded points depending on your housing circumstances. Community Groups are a way for us to make sure that we comply with the Government’s rules about who should be given reasonable preference for housing. Normally, each eligible application will be included in one of these four groups:

2.2.1 Group 1: Community Gain 2.2.2 Group 2: Community Priority

2.2.3 Group 3: Community Mobility 2.2.4 Group 4: Community General

If you still can’t understand how Baroness Uddin came to be occupying (and claiming second home allowance on another, perfectly good, but unoccupied, home in Kent) You might wish to take advantage of this little gem, courtesy of Old Holborn.

Phone up the Housing Officer, Faruque Uddin, on 0207 392 5415 – ask him what criteria his namesake came under in order to take priority over all those vulnerable people patiently waiting on his list.

You might also wish to write to Baroness Uddin, since she is so interested in the subject,  and ask her to oversee the assessment of the Spittlefields Housing Association with the Regulatory Code Part 2:

The governing body, supported by appropriate governance and executive arrangements, maintains satisfactory control of the organisation.

Here’s her e-mail address:

uddinm@parliament.uk

Go on, she works for you, you pay her.  Several times what she is worth.

Uddin sleeping in my Bed? is a post from: Anna Raccoon

The chattering classes are flocking onto the wires, emboldened by Guido’s successful raid which knocked out the guard dog, they sense the opportunity to finally rid themselves of the ‘cuckoo’ Prime Minister that was planted in their nest by the departing Tony Blair.

True to Labour form, we are fed a major scare to keep us occupied whilst the lobby rats prostrate themselves, purging their sins of ‘compliance under duress’; ‘Swine Flu’, is the new media pandemic, paedophilia as practised by swarthy foreigners being rather overplayed these days, (and it is uncomfortably close to the anniversary of Miss McCann’s disappearance to risk kicking that one off again) the main stream press are busy cloaking each new political confession with blanket coverage of prurient contagious fear – of the snuffling individual standing right next to you.

Never mind that Peter Mandelson, architect of the entire Nu-Labour project is reportedly lecturing on how civil servants had ‘a duty to embrace the Tories as soon as possible’ – huh! chief rat turns and consumes own tail – nor that the petition calling for Gordon Brown to resign is the best supported petition on the Downing Street website, nor that Charles Clarke is ‘ashamed to be a labour MP’, what we are really intended to be concerned with is whether the crashing headache we are burdened with is as a result of the banking crisis or the onset of terminal influenza.

Should we risk going to work? In a recession – it might be cheaper and safer to stay at home. To mask or not to mask, that is the question? Tamiflu or not Tamiflu? Tony Blair bought enough to supply 25% of the UK population, Gordon Brown says he has enough for ‘60 million doses’ – is that 60 million doses, or sufficient doses for 25% of the population?, we know not, and the prone bodies of the lobby rats are too exhausted by their mea culpas to enquire on our behalf.

Supplies of Tamilfu are to be kept ‘under armed guard’ – suggesting in itself that there will not be enough to go around, those thought to be infected with the virus will be told to stay at home and instead send a “flu friend” to pick up their drugs. Have you picked your ‘flu friend’ yet? – that special person entrusted with carrying your germs out into the big bad world, and returning with your salvation, courtesy of the government? If you had to declare which way you were voting to get a bank loan, then you can be sure you won’t get your Tamiflu without authenticated proof that you are mad enough to vote this government back into power.

It is left to the Internet to speculate on the fortunes of Gilead Sciences which climb ever skyward with each new pandemic scare; Bird Flu, Swine Flu, half a dozen people world wide die, and the stocks of Gilead soar. Each year some 30,000 people die of common or garden flu – but that piece of information is not as saleable as a nice shinny new ‘scare flu’ especially when you want to bury bad news.

The Swine we really need to hear about are in the Houses of Parliament. They are the deadly virus we need protection from.

Swine Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest is a post from: Anna Raccoon

In the wake of the Chancellor’s Budget, Directgov has today launched Moneyspeak, a new, free simple tool.

Moneyspeak is an interactive tool that puts those confusing and alarming economic terms we hear every day into context.

I thought I’d give it a try with one of those confusing and alarming economic terms – like ‘broke’.

You can see how helpful it was!

This web site cost us good money – which bit of ‘broke’ don’t they understand?

Hat tip to Dizzy for the original link.

The Government doesn’t know what ‘broke’ means. is a post from: Anna Raccoon

This is for the blondes among us (male and female) as explained to me by someone seriously intelligent – and very patient.

If you start work when you are 20 years old, and stop work at 60, then you should put £3 out of every £10 you earn into a pot so that you can eat for the 20 years you will probably live after you retire.

See – working from 20 –60 equals 40 years……..in which to earn enough money to live on for half as long again…..i.e. another 20 years.

Still with me? Good.

Now what can you do with the £7 that is left?

Feed and clothe your children first – but cautiously, bread and water until you have digested the next bit.

You not only have to feed your own children, but you must feed other peoples children who don’t have any money, and you must also feed  all the adults who reached 60 and didn’t put that £3 in the pot.

6 out of every ten of the people in Britain are potential ‘worker bees’ ; but  1 1/2 of them are unemployed, so you must feed them too.

Then again, 2 of them work for the government, so you have to feed them…..so that makes 3 1/2 people the 2 1/2 of you actually grafting are supporting, and it takes roughly £3 out of every ten pounds to do so.

Feeling a bit outnumbered yet? I haven’t even started.You’ve got to give over a pound out of every ten pounds you earn to the banks, because they couldn’t add up, and its not their fault. If you don’t give it to them, your children will have to.

You’ve got £3 left and you haven’t had anything to eat yet.

Nor have you put a roof over your head.

Go easy with that £3, you haven’t got to work yet, you’ve got to buy a car and fill it with petrol, or pay British Rail some vastly inflated sum.

Try sleeping in the car – its the only way you’ll make ends meet.

Or don’t put the £3 in the pot and accept that you won’t be able to eat once you’ve passed 60.

That nice Mr Darling says things will get better by 2018.

The IMF says he’s got his sums wrong.

Very simple economics……. is a post from: Anna Raccoon

Last week in The Times it was reported that a so-called Government behaviour expert had completed a four-year review and had concluded that ‘satisfactory performance’ should no longer be considered good enough. The study suggests that “moral principles” might be a very good thing to help certain individuals recognise that “when certain boundaries are crossed they will have to bear the consequences.” It is also said to include warnings on the dangers of putting embarrassing personal material on social-networking sites and of posting insulting or defamatory material on the internet.

Rather astonishingly, though, this review has nothing whatsoever to do with the Government’s grubby practices regarding second homes, expenses or internet smear-campaigns; the report is on Britain’s schools and schooling and recommends that lessons should be made much more fun (think Bingo and Blockbusters) and that all pupils’ work should be written with a fountain pen. Doodling on schoolbooks is definitely a no-no.

Sir Alan Steer, a retired head teacher (and Government behaviour expert?) who undertook the study on behalf of Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary, said “Schools should aim for the highest possible standards of pupil behaviour.”

I wonder whether anyone else has been tempted to replace the words ‘school’ and ‘pupils’ with ‘Government’ and ‘MPs’?

Government Balls. is a post from: Anna Raccoon

The House of Commons at 2pm today……..waiting to hear how their second home allowances would be affected by the Budget proposals. Standing room only.

The House of Commons at 4pm today…….doing a day’s work discussing how the Budget was going to affect their constituents……….I could only count 19 out of the 646 who were sufficiently interested to remain for the debate.

The rest had not even stopped to pick up their rubbish before legging it out of there.

They wonder why we have no respect for them any longer.

The budget – interest dwindles….. is a post from: Anna Raccoon

In which case – hang on to it!

The Lilangeni is worth at least 14 pence on the open market and shows no sign of devaluing, which is more than can be said for the NuLabour ‘Brown’ pound.

Last November Angela Eagle told parliament that the Royal Mint had managed to retrieve £97,000 fake pound coins from circulation, whilst a private company which specialises in identifying fake coins for the vending machine industry has told the Independent that it estimates that 1 out of every 20 pound coins is a forgery.

That is around £73 million of them.

Some of these are home made forgeries, but some are the Swazilan lilangeni which may turn out to be a sound investment in this banking crisis as Gordon Brown’s printing presses churn out inflationary paper money.

The Pound in your Pocket may be a Swaziland lilangeni is a post from: Anna Raccoon