Canals to be used to transport the poor: New Tory Proposals

So the government spending review is imminent, and one of the chief Tory targets in this review are the quangos.  Quasi non-governmental organisations (as they are rarely referred to) look after everything from teaching school kids how to cycle bikes safely (Cycling England) to looking after Britain's canal system (British Waterways). The Tories hate quangos because they see them as big government interfering in the lives of people, although the "non-governmental" part of the title clearly escapes them.  

A spokesman for British Waterways was adamant that while British Waterways might be axed the canals and their management would be protected for all eternity for the british people to enjoy.  However, there are contradictory messages emanating from the Tory camp. 

In a statement, the Tory transport minister, Lord Tottermouth Fotheringill claimed that actually as well as British Waterways being abolished so too would the canals in their current form. Lord Fotheringill argues that full use is not being made of the canals with current usage statistics signifying massive waste in the system.  Instead he is proposing to drain and clean the canals to use them as a new, below-eye-level, dry-transport system.  Lord Fortheringill claimed that "Such a system will be an invaluable way of transporting poorer members of our society around the country.  It is an efficient, low-cost, and importantly low-visibility solution", adding that "If everyone was being honest they would admit that they do not want to have to look at or smell poor people as they move from place to place, regardless of whether they are making their way to work in the mines or if it is part of their annual migratory patterns".  Appealing to fairness, Lord Fotheringill pleaded "Isn't it right that poor people should be able to travel freely around the country in the same way as their betters? My goal is to remove the social barriers built into our current, arcane transport network".  

Downing Street later responded to these statements saying that these are only policies that are under consideration and it is wrong to read too much into the transport minister's statements. 

Progressive Smrogressive

Joe earns £200,000 per annum, while Derek earns £15,000.  If you think that everyone should "share the pain" in the current government's programme of cuts, you might think that knocking 10% from both Joe and Derek's salary would be the most equitable thing to do.  If you do, you are wrong.  And possibly a member of the conservative party.

To suggest that leaving Derek with £13,500 would not have a more deleterious effect on his life than leaving Joe with £180,000 is, quite frankly, ludicrous.  Over a certain amount of income, you need incrementally much larger sums of money to make substantive improvements in quality of life, life chances, health, well-being, and so on. In other words, taking £1,500 from Derek has a far greater negative impact on his life than taking £20,000 from Joe.  One means not being able to run a car this year, the other means not being able to buy the new Ferrari this year.

The government's current approach to making the tax system more equitable really tells the tale of a government with a split personality.  On the one hand, the Lib Dem backed tax plans will raise the amount at which people begin paying tax to £10,000 over the next 3 years. Obviously this will massively benefit low-wage workers, but it will also help everyone else who earns over this amount.  This is a relatively progressive tax.  On the other hand, there is the new Labour-proposed and Tory-backed 50% tax rate targeting the "middle classes".  Except that this will only apply to individuals earning over £150,000 per year.  If you think this is going to affect the middle classes you are either a) mad, b) a conservative party member, or c) both.  This £150,000 threshold will only affect the top 1% of earners - since when did this mean "middle class"?

Given the tax avoidance strategies routinely employed by the very wealthy ,which some estimates put at upwards of £40 billion every year (and yes, if you earn over £150,000 a year you ARE very wealthy), it remains to  be seen how much money this will even bring to the Treasury.  Realistically, this threshold needs to be considerably lower if it can be considered anything approaching this "progressive" word that Dave and Nick (or "Dick Clameron" if you prefer) have been bandying about. What are the chances? Progressively low, I'd say.

Would you give BT £1 million just for being a helluva nice company?

We're doing a bit of a Watchdog service today.  Let's talk about phone calls.  Because it's good to talk!

Let's say you make a call of 3 minutes and 20 seconds at a cost of 2.45 p per minute.  How much should it cost?  Well, that's a duration of 3.4 minutes x 2.45p = 8.1666585p (£0.081666585). Oh, and there's a call connection charge of 9.9p, and then we should add VAT to this (17.5%), which gives us 21.2283237p.  Ok, so on your bill it should read £0.2123 as the cost of this call. Right? Wrong!

For BT and many other companies, they do this instead.

The call lasting 3.4 minutes is rounded up to the next minute, making the call duration 4 minutes.  Now, anyone who has completed primary school maths will tell you that you only round up then the number after the decimal is .5 or greater.  Ok, so they've rounded - it's not a big deal. Well, it might not be, if they just rounded once, but they don't. 

The cost for that call is now 4 x 2.45p = 9.8p.  Guess what? That's now rounded up to 10p.  Ok, so now the call-placement charge is added, which is 9.9p, except before this is added, guess what happens? That's right, it's rounded to 10p.  So lastly we add our VAT which gives us a grand total of 23.5p.  Phew, finally got there. Oh, except I forgot to round that one too.  Right, so the actual final cost is 24p for my call. This amounts to an additional 2.77p just from rounding at these various stages.  That's an extra 13% on your call cost.

Ok, so this is just a toy example, but it does illustrate the ridiculous nature of the phone companies' approach to maths.  You could do many examples where the cost of rounding would be greater (for even shorter calls with greater rounding discrepancies) or lesser (for longer calls that have lower rounding discrepancies). 

But how much would a company like BT actually make from this little mathematical sleight of hand? Well, it was recently announced that BT would be increasing call charges by 10%, which would affect about 12.5 million customers. How much could they make from these customers with their method of rounding?

If customers made say three calls per week, with similar rounding discrepancies to the example above, this would raise BT an additional £1 million per year (actually £1,038,750).  Does this seem fair to you?  Of course, this amounts to just pennies to individual customers, but I'm still not sure that justifies this particular billing formula.  BT made a profit of over £1 billion in 2009, surely they don't need to be multiplicatively  rounding customers' individual calls as well as increasing their call charges by 10%. 

I've mentioned BT here simply because they are the biggest telecoms company with the largest number of landline customers.  However, almost every other phone company operates a similar approach.  Is there any need for it?  Is there any justification for it? Absolutely not.  This is simply corporate greed creaming off as much as they can from people who can little afford in a time of deep recession.  These companies should feel shame, but of course that's the great thing about corporations; they have no heart.

For those who support PR we salute you!

The campaign for a proportional voting system has been trundling along for a LONG time in the UK.  It's always formed part of the liberal (or liberal/SDP alliance previously) platform and only now is there the tiniest glimmer of hope of some change to the existing system.  While a change to the Alternative Vote (AV) from first-past-the-post is a move in the right direction, it is so far from being fair and proportional it is laughable - check out my previous graphs on this matter! 

What is more amazing is that politicians are still shovelling out the same unfounded, misrepresented comments and, in some cases, downright lies regarding the nature and implementation of PR.  If you know of a politician who is anti-PR, ask yourself (or them) why would anyone be against a fairer system of representation?  Just to hammer this message home, I invite you to take a look at an ad done by Monty Python's very own John Cleese in 1987 highlighting the pros and cons of this new, scary and complex voting system.  Enjoy!

 

Is Citibank Seeking Dress-Code Advice from Iranian Clerics?

I recently posted a story about the Iranian cleric who was blaming the provocative dress of Iranian women on earthquakes in the region.  It seems that men telling women what to wear is not the sole preserve of deluded Iranian clerics; it also happens at Citibank in New York.

Here's an interesting case, being filed by Debrahlee Lorenzana who claims her male bosses found her business suits too alluring and distracting and could she please stop wearing them please.  Citibank reportedly argued that she was dressing "in a manner that was upsetting to her easily distracted male managers". Poor guys!  Maybe if they focussed more on their shoddy investment practices (Citibank received over $50 million in the bank bailout) they wouldn't be so easily flustered by what their female colleagues were wearing.

2010 Election Results Under Different Voting Systems

Thanks to some number crunching from the Electoral Reform Society, we can now see what the election might have looked like under different voting systems.  I've taken their figures and plotted them below in a couple of different formats.  In each graph you can compare results as they actually are (under First-past-the-post) and results under AV (Alternative Vote), STV (Single Transferrable Vote - the Liberal Democrats preferred system) and under a fully proportional allocation (based on share of the national vote).  I don't think it takes much to realise that pretty much any of the alternatives is going to be fairer than FPTP, but there's still quiet a discrepancy between the different systems.

How would PR have changed previous election results?

Here's a quick link to a BBC article that shows how 2005's election outcome would change under various voting systems.  One of the issues for the UK to consider is how difficult it is to implement these different systems.  For example, moving to Alternative Vote (AV) where you simply rank candidates could be done very easily - no changes in constituency boundaries or in the number of MPs per constituency.  However, if we moved to Single Transferable Vote (STV), we would need to design larger, multi-member constituencies which would take quite some time to sort out I imagine!  Of course, the ones take a little longer to implement also seem to be the ones that are more proportional.  More on this later!