just had a quick google – Immediate Media was formed by a merger of Magicalia (that used to own BikeMagic, Golf Magic etc) and BBC Magazines. The group still owns the *magic brands (apart from bikemagic that is owned by Factory Media) but has now purchased What Mountain Bike, Bike Radar, Cycling Plus, Road Cycling and a load of related websites.

…Which I think means that the old parent company to BikeMagic now owns many of the main cycling magazine brands with the exception of SingleTrack, Cycling Weekly and BikeMagic which is pretty much dead anyway. Meanwhile STW are launching their first new brand in the form of Grit Cx and Factory Media will need to write off their entire investment in BikeMagic as there’s no market for it now and it’s almost impossible to scale given the lack of a print edition.

This country is so messed up with regards to looking after its own people that you have rely on the EU to be the responsible parent. And only 40,000 employed in EU operations, which is 60,000 less than HMRC employ, and still crap at tax collecting.

BBC NEWS Today: HMRC Tax Crackdown yields record yield from investigations into tax avoidance

Well it pushes up demand for the cheapest places which means those prices go up and then so do the prices of all properties above them as they become relatively better value.

But this is negated by two things – firstly there aren’t any “cheap” places to buy in the South East, and secondly the majority of Help to Buy transactions have been in the North East, North West and Midlands, where just about everyone agrees there’s no sign of a bubble – to the extent that the average Help to Buy Transaction actually fell £10K between December last year and April this year.

The recent increase began almost to the day that Help To Buy began… (I was looking to buy at the time and prices literally went up in a matter of weeks)

But the facts are that the average mortgage guaranteed under help to buy is under £150K – so this can’t be stoking the “bubble” in the South East as the average house already costs twice that.

This is classic example of causality vs. correlation.

the one in the top post is illegal to use in the UK as it can interfere with the network. For that reason and per the ofcom website any person found guilty of installing or using such devices without a licence would be liable on conviction to a fine of up to £5,000 and/or up to 51 weeks’ imprisonment .

The only legal ones are the femtocells from the networks themselves or the Cel-Fi units that are available for the EE brands and o2. http://www.cel-fi.co.uk/

Basically if you’ve got broadband go for a femtocell, and if you haven’t got broadband but the top of you house can get a 3G signal go for a cel-fi that integrates and optimises itself to avoid interfering with the network.

Everyone, the house of commons champagne budget has gone up – let’s rise up against the greedy shampoo-swilling overlords..

“The increasing trend is to sell more receptions than dinner events which attract a higher number of guests and is the reason for increased consumption and sales in alcohol. To accommodate this increase in demand, banqueting has increased its order of champagne stocks.” (house of commons food and beverage buyer)

the main point is that she didn’t “start using her parents home”. Her parents were invited to live with her in a house she and her husband jointly owned from 1996 – even before she was selected as the candidate for her constituency.

The analysis of the the designation of the homes starts on page 12 of the report, and rather unhelpfully for those seeking to score party political points cites the precedent set by Ed Balls and Yvette Cooper which was confirmed by the Commissioner at the time – so what we basically have is application of a new “standard” to historic events in which an MP checked with the commissioner at the time to confirm what should be done / not done and then followed the advice.

I wonder how comfortable we’d all be if we paid all of our due taxes only for HMRC to retrospectively decide that we should have paid a different rate and the media then reported that we had “dodged” tax – which is basically what this comes down to. I rather suspect we’d make the same defence as Ms Miller i.e. if you check the rules and ask for advice, then follow the advice, it’s quite unfair to then be taken to pieces in public because the standards and application of the standard changes further down the line.

Has anyone else read the Standards Committee Report ?

I have and was quite surprised to learn that the findings were somewhat different to the way it’s been reported in the press, principally:

– the original complaint that she housed her parents at our expense was not the case
– the retrospective application of new standards to events that took place many years before contributed to the delay in her responses
– on the key items of “dispute” she took advice from the standards office and followed it
– the element of “fraud” is very much open to interpretation based on the lack of fact and the lack of clarity in what rules were being applied when

What seems to be happening is a bit a witch hunt in which the loudest voices are either wittingly or unwittingly slating someone without actually having looked at the facts of the matter.

I always find it interesting that so many people are happy to brand someone they’ve never met a thief, liar or dishonest as most people wouldn’t generally act this way in person… the fact that we use “social media” doesn’t alter the need to act courteously or objectively or recognise there’s a real person and family on the receiving end of the death threats and other things that are apparently now taking place.

If Clegg thinks you have to be in the EU to grow the economy / trade, he needs to take a sabbatical and spend some time in the likes of Singapore. He doesn’t seem to have a clue how business works and even less insight into how the majority of countries not in the EU do well despite not having this “competitive advantage”.

One thing a lot of the big charities need to do is actually spend more – it may have changed recently but some of the bigger charities have huge reserves, with the result that the volunteers who spend weekends in the rain collecting money are actually just adding to a cash pile that isn’t being spent… the RNLI were certainly in that camp with £135m in reserves at one point, and anyone who has seen the Salvation Army’s fancy HQ on opposite Tate Modern could easily be mistaken for believing the chop-house canteen and art collection on the walls was actually part of a hedge fund.

Nah. I’ve still got compassion for those less well-off than me.

Best vote for Labour then – after all they care so much about the well off they introduced the 10p tax on income over £4,335 (the limit for the lowest rate of tax has been raised by the current government to £10,000) to ensure people on low wages paid more tax. Then flooded the market with cheap labour to ensure wage growth at the bottom stagnated and the poor couldn’t improve their own conditions. Oh, and then wracked up a massive debt and laid out plans to cut the NHS budget so that everyone’s healthcare would be compromised. Put failing schools into the mix to ensure children from poor families are more likely to be stuck in the poverty cycle and you’ve got a great political option.

Or you could vote for the caring Lib Dems, who will tell you everything you want to hear and cling on to the hope they’ll never get the majority required to implement it and find out it’s unaffordable.

just more usual bbc navel gazing guff – “ooh look, let’s commission a comedy about ourselves”…

Ben yep, got me there!

What the rest of your post doesn’t reflect is that wages in the UK grew at a significantly faster rate than Germany over the 10 years to 2010 – largely driven by massive (and it turns out, unaffordable) increases in public sector pay. This resulted in a massive decline of private sector job creation and the loss of 50% of manufacturing output amongst other things.

So while wage growth has been lower over the 5 years since 2010 we are effectively returning to more sustainable pay levels that should help our economy to grow at a stable rate over the long term. What we also need is less borrowing and spending on imported goods – the average british family now spends more on mobile contracts than holidays which says a lot about how “hard up” people really are – it’s relative.

The “cost of living crisis’ we keep being told about doesn’t seem to be reflected in the data – the most recent ONS family spending data shows that when adjusted for inflation, families are spending less on the most commonly purchased goods and services than they were 10 or 5 years ago:

http://www.neighbourhood.statistics.gov.uk/HTMLDocs/dvc140/index.html

And when you say that anaemic growth has only benefited the top 10% did you mean to write the top 10% now pay 60% of all tax which is significantly higher than 5 or 10 years ago? The data doesn’t show they have benefited once you strip out oligarchs and the like who live in britain on a temporary basis – below that the following 9% have not seen significant growth in incomes but pay more tax and have lost things like child benefit etc.

the best thing for the unemployed is more jobs being created, not slightly higher benefits to keep them trapped in poverty. Our economy is now the fastest growing in the developed world – and is still creating jobs faster than women rejoin the workforce from maternity leave / long term childcare or migrant workers come to fill them.

Someone above commented that the unemployment rate was 5% in 1979 but if you look at the actual number of people in work then it was around 26.5m people. Now we have 31m people working – so although the unemployment rate is higher at 7.2% there are only 200,000 more people out of work.

just write a draft email and then delete it – “they” will contact you.

I would love to give the millionaire Iain Duncan Smith a punch that would knock him dead

Instead of threatening to assault him and writing about it on the interwebs why not write to him and tell him what you think of the standard letter that his department have been sending out for at least the last 10 years if not longer – so way before his tenure started?

upload the video as a native file to the Livemeeting session in advance of the meeting i.e. don’t plat it as an embedded file. Uploading files in advance of the session starting seems to sort a lot of problems with Livemeeting but unfortunately doesn’t sort the hit and miss audio quality or the annoying “feature” that mutes you at random intervals during a meeting.

True- so why start by duplicating existing decent links, at vast cost? I don’t see anyone here saying “We shouldn’t improve infrastructure”

The problem with this is that upgrading existing routes would necessitate 15-20 years of closures every weekend and still wouldn’t create the same capacity that HS2 will bring on stream.

The UK population is due to rise by 50% over the next 30 or so years so we really need to start building out new capacity now just to meet the known future demand. The experience with Crossrail is that by the time it’s open, the capacity needed to serve 1m extra Londoners by the late 2020’s will immediately be consumed as the population has grown much faster than expected so the “unknown” growth in the population already necessitates Crossrail 2 being built.

The planning for Crossrail started in the early 1990’s which perfectly illustrates why the UK really has a problem – particularly so when compared to the likes of France who started to build a new high speed route from Paris to Bordeaux 3 years ago and are expecting to open it in 3 years time (similar length of track to HS2 but 1/3 of the time to build it).

The planning cycle means that much of the cost of infrastructure isn’t soaked up with concrete and steel but in endless consultations that just delay the inevitable and create years of misery for people who are stuck in houses they can’t sell until the details of compulsory purchase are agreed years later.

It’s fair to say that delivering a green field infrastructure project is much more efficient than trying to upgrade existing infrastructure – so with the team delivering Crossrail due to roll off in 3-4 years time it’s a perfect time to do HS2.

Assembling the combination of skills and working relationships needed to take on that sort of project and deliver it to time and budget takes years and in some cases decades of advance planning – so the UK has a relatively short window to make our mind up on HS2 – or risk the cost going up and delivery time slipping if we prevaricate as seems quite likely based on the intellectually retarded King Canute like position the likes of Ed Balls have taken to date.

for anyone that missed it there was quite an interesting 2 part series on BBC2 called “mind the london gap” – researched and presented by Evan Davis. It’s still on iPlayer and in it he made the case for a three things:

1. London is a “superhub” – much of the investment it attracts would go to other global superhubs if we didn’t have it – not elsewhere in the UK. So we need to service the demand it creates (jobs, transport connections etc.) or lose it altogether (financial services contributes 2/3 of the cost of the NHS each year in employment and corporation taxes) so the sums involved aren’t trivial. That means investment in transport infrastructure at a faster rate than the rest of the country (though seeing as most stamp duty is collected in London this seems fair enough).

2. Even though we have a superhub, we still need a national hub as well – a super size city that drives growth outside of London. In the programme he explored the possibility of creating fast links between Liverpool, Leeds, Manchester and Sheffield and creating a single corridor of faster growth

3. Economic growth is driven by fast transport connections / interconnections and scope for co-locating with competitors as well as other industries.

Following the logic in the programme, HS2 seems a bit of a no-brainer as a way of evening out growth and allowing the North West to attract inward investment. In the big scheme of things the £36B capital cost (net of the £14B contingency) is chump change when spread over 20 years and similar to the capital profile of Crossrail which is already showing that development happens right across the length of new transport connections, not just the London end… just the same as the Jubilee Line Extension in the late 90’s.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b03xhcjg/Mind_the_Gap_London_v_the_Rest_Episode_1/

http://www.geolsoc.org.uk/Policy-and-Media/Resources/Shale-Gas-and-Fracking

http://www.bgs.ac.uk/shalegas/

ernie_lynch – Member
The definition of ethical is highly subjective.
I don’t think there is anything ethical about paying the chief executive of the Co-op, who lacked any experience of running a co-op and was clearly not indispensable, over £3.5million for one year in the job.

I’m not sure you’ll find anything ethical in the 100 or so co-operative heads who really govern the “Co-op” either. These people are paid upwards of £40K a year each and many have little or no relevant business experience – so what you basically have is an apparently ethical business and bank that’s now governed by unaccountable people without relevant experience, and up till recently a banking arm chaired by a Crystal Methodist who had reportedly more in common with the behaviours Wolf of Wall St than anything else. On the side it makes large contributions to the Labour party (upwards of £1m a year) when most of it’s members and customers do not realise this is the case.

All this is irrelevant though – the glaring fact is that the Co-op is pretty much ungovernable in its common form and will almost certainly fail. The most recent CEO (contrary to popular and but incorrect reports) did not earn £3.5m or take a multi-million package and actually walked away from a £3m retention bonus that he was contractually entitled to – it’s kind of ironic when the recent CEO actually acted ethically when the organisation that he was brought in to stabilise brands itself as ethical is anything but.

it’s 40% up to £100K and then because of the loss of the personal allowance on a pound for pound basis for the £20K above that effectively becomes a 62% marginal tax rate i.e. for every £2 earned you lose £1 allowance and still pay the 42% tax and NI.

Which is nice work if you can get it but seems a bit bonkers when people on £150k only pay 45% tax on income over that.

Rootmetrics have just published the summary of the nationwide tests for the second half of last year – the results for Vodafone are spectacularly bad albeit they have won the prize for “worst network” for:

– Overall reliability
– Mobile internet (speed and latency)
– Call performance
– Text performance

http://www.rootmetrics.com/rsr/uk

“Average public sector pay £ 16 approx per hour, private sector pay £14 approx per hour. I strongly the average work conditions favor the public sector worker.”

Did you ever stop to think that there may be a disproportionate amount of minimum wage jobs in the private sector, eg hospitality that brings that average down.

If some of the scientists in my department went back into private industry as opposed to working for a government department..eg DEFRA, they’d dwarf their current earnings.

The trouble is that you need to also factor in the value of employer pension guarantees / payments and differences in hours / patterns of early retirement – do that and the gap between median public / private sector total remuneration is as high as 30-40% and partially explains why so many cities outside of London are shrinking as the private sector can’t attract or retain staff when public sector organisations are effectively overpaying for many skill sets.

http://www.rosaltmann.com/public_sector_pensions.htm

don’t worry, 02/giffgaff have hardly got any 4g coverage and won’t have until the end of 2017 so there’s no real “loss” here other than not paying for something that can’t be used in most places

depends what the lady in question wants to use her phone for….

If it’s voice calls and texting GiffGaff is possibly the cheapest at the expense of terrible sound quality on wide areas of the network where half-rate codec is used. It’s also worth looking at the 321 pay as you go product on Three – 3 per min for calls, 2p per text, 1p per Mb data).

If your wife wants to use her phone for the web / data, the coverage areas of the main networks are as follows:

4G
EE – 70%
Three – 35%
O2 and Vodafone 25-30%

3G
EE – 98.7%
Three – 98%
o2 – 91%
Vodafone – 90%

Root Metrics UK provides a lot of independently collected and crown sourced data on coverage / call quality and is worth a look.

In the most recent observational study by British vets, around 13% of cattle who were subjected to religious slaughter tried to get to their feet *after* their throats had been cut.

Large mammals, cattle particularly, have veins on the back of the neck as well as around the throat – cutting the throat doesn’t kill them instantly and for many means they effectively inhale their blood and still have brain function at the point they are hung up – the brain can take several minutes to lose conciousness.

There’s no need for this to happen and it’s abhorrent – if a surgeon operated on patients without anaesthesia in almost all cases they would lose their right to operate and likewise if pet owners willingnly caused suffering to their companion animals they would be subject to prosecution.

When techniques to avoid this trauma are readily available we should not be making the sort of exceptions to our laws that now mean up to 2/3 of all meat is slaughtered according to religious doctrines that less than 10% of the population follow.

As a bare minimum, consumers need to understand the differences between stunning / religious slaughter and should be able to make choices based on clear labels on food packaging.

the government aren’t doing a very good job of “attacking those at the bottom” when:

– they have raised the tax free amount by 20% for the lowest paid
– those with the highest incomes are now paying a significantly greater share of tax than 5 years ago
– the top 1% of earners pay 30% of all tax
– the top 10% pay 40% of all tax
– the income equality gap is smaller now than 5 years ago
– anyone earning £28K or less is now receiving more in services / tax credits than they pay in tax.

theotherjonv – not sure o2 are much cop in towns and cities either.

Rootmetrics’ detailed testing indoors and outdoors over the last 18 months in towns and cities across the UK would seem to suggest that o2 is pretty poor – they are typically vying with Vodafone for the “worst performance” prize on texts, call reliability and data speeds in the majority of UK cities tested to date:

http://www.rootmetrics.com/uk/compare-operators/

Every area is different so whatever you do choose a network that works for you – but on the available data o2 has a significantly smaller coverage area for 3G and also underperforms other networks indoors and outdoors on tests of data speeds and call quality. Three typically beats it on these measures, has much better 3G coverage and is cheaper.

o2 and the MVNOs like Tesco / GiffGaff who use them still have very limited 3G coverage – it’s not long since both they and Vodafone risked losing their licenses due to a failure to roll out 3G to 90% of the population (compared to the 98/99% that EE and Three have managed).

o2 and Vodafone are effectively building a shared network through an initiative called “Cornerstone”. Cornerstone recently put back it’s delivery of the 98% target for 4G population coverage from 2015 to 2017 – EE will get there by the end of this year and are already at 70% 4G coverage.

If you want the best 3G coverage and keen prices, go for Three or Virgin (who use EE’s network). If you want the best current 4G service go for EE, and if you want unlimited 4G at no cost and good coverage then go for Three – who will also be rolling out 4g coverage to 300 towns and cities by the end of the year.

On the handset point – choose the network first then go for the best handset deal you can find – or go SIM only.

Maybe we need to start listing the benefits of an Independent Scotland to rUK?

1. We can extend summer time year round – less accidents, more time for exercise in daylight, and over time a happier and healthier population
2. Some large companies will follow Standard Life and move their corporate entities and staff from the North to the South – a bigger share of corporation tax / employment related taxes will come in to rUK coffers
3. Reduced liabilities on pensions and public spending (an issue as Scotland’s population ages and oil runs out)
4. Voting in the rUK becomes less distorted by the vote north of the border without having to establish a parliament for England
5. Cheaper products from the North as Scotland devalues its own currency to try and survive economically
6. When Scotland goes bust we can buy it back on the cheap without any of the liabilities

anything else?

it’s not a pay cut. They can take redundancy or do a different job and get the same pay for that role as everyone else.

The remaining staff won’t get “pay cuts” – more than 1,000 staff have applied for voluntary redundancy as part of the closure of the ticket offices – those who choose to move to other roles will get the same pay as people already in those roles.

Some ticket offices only sell 4 tickets in a c19 hour working day – with ticket office staff on the best part of £40K when their pensions are taken into account, the staff cost per ticket sale is around £129 (based on the 7 hour working day, 8 weeks leave, 19 “open” hours for the ticket office etc.

I’ve moved from an Iphone 5 to Experia Z1 compact – it was quite painful making the move (combination of the difficulty migrating stuff from iphone to android, and the slightly more clunky O/S) but the phone seems pretty good… I bought it mainly for the waterproof case and better camera. The battery life is a lot better though – with “stamina” mode enabled I’m looking a a week in between charges.

the “billions bailing out bankers” represents just 3 years of the tax that Financial Services companies paid in the years before the crash via corporation tax and employment related taxes.

The banks have got a lot to answer for but even now contribute around £55B a year to the government – or half of the entire cost of the NHS… something that seems lost on those who advocate even higher taxes on banks.

I’ve seen Boris cycling loads of times around Notting Hill and Westminster and he definitely turns up by bike to many of his meetings – to the point he’s had about 3 bikes nicked in as many years… he doesn’t seem to have a car following and normally chats to other cyclists in the advanced stop boxes.

I’m not sure he ever goes by “chauffeur driven” car but one other thing to note is that that one of the first things the current government did was to significantly reduce spending on ministerial cars – putting an end to the ridiculous sort of abuses that saw John Prescott being driven twice a day in a chauffeur driven car the 100 metres between his grace and favour apartment and the office.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-16576674

Generally a pretty painful programme to watch but I did like Starkey’s response to the lady who thought giving the Police the right to strike wouldn’t be something that could have any negative consequences – he basically repeated her gurn back to her and said something like

“is that what counts for debate and thinking in the UK now?”

used the stuff from B&Q and installed it with the thermal liner paste behind radiators on two north facing bay windows – the rooms were both noticeably warmer afterwards – seems to stop the heat from the radiators being swallowed up by the wall.

The chancellor earns about £136K which is £4K less than the head of the RMT.

The whole point of outsourcing to Serco / G4S is to TUPE low skilled / highly paid roles across, then slowly replace these as they become vacant and pay a sensible amount without facing an equal pay claim or being forced to hire people on packages that were bonkers in the first place.

e.g. Traffic Enforcement Officers (directly employed by Councils for £25K wage plus another 40% of on costs and working 7 hour shifts 220 days a year – working out at £22.72 an hour) slowly complemented by people working for Serco etc. doing exactly the same job on 7.5 hour shifts 230 days a year for £16K + £4.5K on cost – or £11.88 an hour.

As reported in the news today, the “deep” cuts in public spending will still take until the mid 2030s until the long term debt comes down to the level of 2007. Paying a fair rate of pay for jobs in the public sector (i.e. that reflects the complexity of the role and experience required) is part of this re-balancing and also means there is more money to pay more to keep good people in the most specialised / challenging / hard to recruit roles.