Martin Vander Weyer
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A report for the US Coastguard in December 2010 found ‘no exceedances of EPA’s Human Health benchmark’; residual ‘exceedances of Aquatic Life benchmarks’ were found only within three kilometres of the offshore rig site, and 98 per cent of previously closed fisheries had been reopened. When I was in Louisiana last month discussing the resurgence of New Orleans, the spill received a single passing mention — from a city official who said casually, ‘The oil dispersed real fast, there wasn’t a whole lot of long-term damage.’ I sense the campaign to wring the last dollar out of BP has as much to do with political grandstanding, greedy lawyers and hostility to foreign competition as it does with sad pelicans.
Our still-free press leapt exuberantly to the task of finding something negative to report about Bank of England governor designate Mark Carney, but no luck so far. For a moment it looked as though the Canadian’s ‘eco-blogging’ English wife Diana might turn out to be the new Sally Bercow — or at least the new Gretta Duisenberg, the outspoken leftist wife of the first president of the European Central Bank. But then Mrs Carney was discovered to be a sister-in-law of plutocratic Oxfordshire landowner Lord Rotherwick, safe in the establishment fold. Canadian pundits contributed the suggestion that Carney’s low-interest-rate policy — combined with well-capitalised Canadian banks’ continuing willingness to lend — has created at least the possibility that he will leave behind a looming real-estate bubble, and that his reputation might one day go the way of Alan Greenspan’s: godlike while he was at the Federal Reserve, now judged to have been fatally wrong all along.
But this is pretty thin stuff so far. We might have to accept that Carney really is the clean and competent central-banking professional he appears to be. So come on, gutter press, seven months to go till he arrives and the reputation at stake is not his but yours. There must be a skeleton in his cupboards somewhere.
I’m intrigued to see Delta Air Lines named as a likely bidder for Singapore Airlines’ 49 per cent stake in Virgin Atlantic. A friend in the travel trade tells me that no discerning traveller flies with any US carrier for choice these days, only for Air Miles. If you want luxury, pick a sheikh-funded Gulf airline; for charm, Singapore, Thai or Cathay Pacific; for sheer style, Virgin; for all-round service, British Airways. Having flown with both this autumn, I’d say Delta and Virgin are peculiarly ill-matched. How can I put this without sounding sexist? If a Virgin flight crew, male as well as female, looks like the cast of The Only Way is Essex, Delta’s — selected, no doubt, under fierce anti-discrimination rules — looks like a US version of Dinner Ladies. I’ll be fascinated to see how that culture clash plays out.
Ahead of his grim Autumn Statement, it was smart of the Chancellor to use ‘Mega Monday’, the day when Britain’s online shopping bill was expected to set new records, to launch a stunt spotlighting tax avoidance by multinationals. It’s easy enough to embarrass the likes of Starbucks: when I declared loudly outside its Kings Cross outlet last week, ‘We won’t go in there, they don’t pay enough tax’, passers-by nodded approvingly. But Amazon, an even worse sinner, is so cyber-remote and so damned convenient to use that protest won’t touch it. Yet its market power is daily destroying real shops in real high streets, making it a politically potent tax target. So here’s my simple suggestion: deem every online transaction in which goods are dispatched from a UK warehouse to reside in a UK company for the purpose of calculating corporation tax, full stop.
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