Snouts in the Trough

Many travel websites – for booking hotels, holidays, train and plane tickets etc – have a function that identifies each person accessing them by their computer and which then charges them more once the website knows which hotel date, holiday or ticket they are interested in. Let me explain from what happened to me yesterday:

I tried to book a train ticket from London to Bournemouth using Thetrainline.com and was quoted £18. I couldn’t remember my password and so didn’t go ahead. A few minutes later, I thought I’d found the right password and so tried again and was quoted £26 for the same train, so I booked on an earlier train for £18. But the password I found was an old one and when The Trainline sent me a new password and I tried to do the booking again (just a couple of minutes later) on the earlier train, the price had also jumped from £18 to £26. I tried from two other computers in my home and on both got the higher ticket price for both trains. But a few hours later, I went to an Internet cafe and made the booking. This time both train journeys had returned to the original price of £18 as Thetrainline.com did not identify that I was the same person who had tried to make the earlier booking.

I realise that a jump in price from £18 to £26 is trivial. But I’ve had the same experience when booking flights, hotels and ski holidays – then the price jump can be hundreds of pounds. Many travel booking websites identify which trains, planes, hotels or holidays you are interested in. If you buy immediately, you get a low price. But if you want to think about things or discuss with someone else, next time you visit the website it recognises you and pushes up the price because it knows exactly what places, dates and times you want.  The only way you can then get the original lower price is to go onto those travel websites from a different location so the website doesn’t recognise you or to use their usually expensive phone booking services.

I’ve also heard, though don’t know if it’s true, that if you make a booking from an Apple computer, you’ll be charged more than if you make it from say a Samsung as the website knows that Apple users will usually be prepared to pay more.

This is not an earthshattering revelation. But it’s still worth knowing about this little trick that many travel websites use to fleece their customers.

Yesterday, US economic growth hit 3.1% – around ten times the growth rates we have in Britain and the Eurozone. As for Asia – growth rates are anywhere from 5% to 8% a year depending on the country. Asia is booming. Our lying politicians tell us they’re working hard to stimulate economic growth, but where are the results? In spite of more than ten key supposedly “successful” summit meetings, Eurozone leaders have actually delivered massive economic collapse and soaring unemployment in some countries (the PIIGS) and stagnation in others (except Germany). In Britain, our part-time, work experience, lying chancellor knows nothing, understands nothing and does nothing.

(Apologies for the poor quality of the chart, but I think the top three lines are Canada, Germany and the US. The bottom three lines are Italy, the UK and Japan).

Of course, like his useless lying predecessor Brown, useless napkin-folder Osborne blames the Eurozone and the US and everyone else for his failure. But if other countries can grow, why has Britain had a triple-dip recession?

OK, it’s easy to criticise – so, what should the Coalition have done?

To improve the economy Abolish Corporation Tax and replace it by retention of a part of VAT. This would double the tax take from businesses from £44bn to around £100bn and encourage foreign companies to move to Britain creating jobs here. Put all central government departments, quangos and public-sector administrators on a 4-day week. This would both save £100m a week and challenge the culture of spend and waste that grew under Brown. This money could be used to build over 100,000 new homes creating tens of thousands of new jobs. After 6 months, many should be put on a 3-day week. Set a maximum public-sector pension of average earnings – about £25,000 a year. Increase constituency size to cut the number of MPs at the next election to around 300. Made any member of the House of Lords sign in four times each day to claim their expenses to end the SOSO (Sign On Sod Off) culture. Cut the BBC’s budget by 5% a year for the next 5 years, so the BBC can focus on public-service broadcasting, instead of producing the kind of crap the commercial channels specialise in. Withdraw all troops from Afghanistan and let the Afghans rot in a hell of their own making. Stop all aid to corrupt Third World  countries.

To change our culture of people demanding something for nothing Set a minimum age for council housing and housing benefit of 25 – if people want to have children earlier that they can’t afford, they can live with their parents. Restrict access to benefits to British citizens and only give benefits to people born abroad after they have worked and paid taxes in Britain for 5 years. Replace cash benefits with a card that can only be used to buy food – not alcohol, cigarettes, Playstations and large flatscreen TVs. Stop giving full citizenship to new arrivals. Instead, give provisional passports that automatically get withdrawn for ten years if the person or any dependent commits any criminal offence, however trivial. Withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights and replace this with a UK charter of responsibilities and rights.

I thought it worth reproducing an ad that appeared in my local newspaper. It seems to represent much that is wrong in Britain today where millions of people apparently believe there’s no point in getting an education or working as they’re entitled to money either from being a talentless minor celeb on a supposed “reality” show or just from living off benefits. Here’s the ad:

ITV NEEDS YOU!

Lively characters needed for new Friday night ITV show.

Do you have a crazy nan, chatterbox housemate, embarrasing dad, know it all in-law?

Or are YOU the life and soul of the party?

!!!NO TALENT REQUIRED!!!

Just an opinion on anything and everything that you’re willing to share

We are looking for outgoing people nationwide of ALL ages.

Call NOW on………

Over the last decade, Germany has spent almost £100bn subsidising solar power. The only problem is that Germany is mainly a northern European country with plenty of clouds even in the summer and gloomy rain-drenched winters. So solar power only provides 0.3% of German power. And, if we round that 0.3% to the nearest whole number, solar power provides 0% of Germany’s electricity needs. Moreover, assuming man-made global warming exists (doubtful) Germany’s £100bn investment has been calculated to slow global warming by just 23 hours by the end of this century.

This is one of the key reasons why Germans now pay the second-highest price for electricity in the developed world (exceeded only by Denmark, which aims to be the “world wind-energy champion”). Germans pay three times more than their American counterparts.

Not to be outdone in utter stupidity, Britain too is wasting massive amounts to confront the fantasy of man-made global warming. To meet completely arbitary carbon reduction targets, our government is to spend £100bn of our money over the next eight years building 30,000 wind turbines and billions more building infrastructure to carry the little energy produced by these 30,000 wind turbines to the places it’s actually needed. That’s over £4,000 for every British taxpayer. Of course, if the wind blows too hard, then the turbines need to be shut down otherwise they get damaged. So we’ll need back-up power stations to keep the lights on. And if there’s not enough wind, then the 30,000 turbines will be useless and so we’ll need back-up power stations to keep the lights on.

So far, we have about 3,000 wind turbines in Britain and they supply around 0.4% of our energy. Again rounding this to the nearest whole number, this gives us 0%.

“But what about global warming?” you may protest. “The Arctic ice cap is shrinking by the day,” the eco-fascists constantly scream. Yes, there has been a loss of ice in the Arctic. But the eco-fascists seldom mention that the ice cover in the Antarctic is at an historic high. We definitely have a changing climate. And this change is due to many causes, primarily solar activity. But Germany pissing away £100bn on solar power and Britain pissing away £100bn on wind power are completely asinine ways to waste huge amounts of taxpayers’ money, push up our energy prices, make our industry uncompetitive, destroy hundreds of thousands of jobs and consign us to economic stagnation while the US and Asia experience eye-watering economic growth and prosperity.

Next week, I have a 3-year fixed interest bond maturing. I used to get 4.5% interest, now Britannia are offering me a supposedly “highly competitive” 2% claiming this will “keep your savings working harder”. With inflation at around 2.7% and with my interest being taxed at 20% (giving me just 1.6% interest after tax), I fail to see how 2% will get “my savings working harder”. They’re not working at all. With only 2% interest, I’m losing money every day.

So why are interest rates so low? Because of George “Gordon Brown” Osborne – the latest incompetent, lying fool and buffoon to become chancellor. The problem is that the banks and building societies don’t want my savings. They don’t need my money. So they don’t offer reasonable rates of interest. They have plenty of cheap taxpayers’ money from lying, incompetent fool George Osborne’s multi-billion pound ‘funding for lending scheme’.

A couple of years ago, liar Osborne tried to boost the economy with Project Merlin. This was intended to boost bank lending to businesses and homebuyers. The banks made promises, but failed to deliver and lending collapsed. But because Osborne and his (IMHO) useless, sycophantic, self-serving, career-obsessed, overpaid, overpensioned advisers (hello Claire, Robert and Neil) don’t have any new ideas for stimulating growth, they’re trying yet another version of Project Merlin – funding for lending. They’ve given their friends and supporters in the banks billions of our money virtually interest-free. But the banks have hardly cut the rates at which they lend to businesses and homebuyers. Instead they’ve used this cheap taxpayers’ money to boost the profits they make on each loan. Moreover, because they are drowning in taxpayers’ money, they don’t need savers’ money and so have slashed the interest they pay to savers. Funding for lending has just let the banks make even greater profits from both borrowers and savers while doing absolutely nothing to help the economy.

But why should Osborne and Perry and Chote and O’Brien care? They all have well-paid, well-pensioned public-sector jobs and when the Coalition gets thrown out in 2015, theyll probably get nice highly-paid sinecures supposedly working for the banks they’ve enriched with our money.