Another new year's eve...oh dear...

So here we are at New Year's eve again. The scene for this is as usual: mounds of turkey still in the fridge, fighting for space with ham, cheese, brandy butter, etc., etc. The house still littered with Christmas detritus including half-eaten boxes of chocs, bowls of peanuts, dates, satsumas and about 80% of the Christmas cake which stares at us threateningly. We haven't even touched the Christmas pudding yet. In our house, it's a custom around this time of year to ask ourselves why we buy so much stuff at Christmas and to swear never to do it again but of course the following year, we do exactly that.

So we all suffer from a bit of what the Catalans might call post nadal depression. And then along comes New Year's eve to jolly us all up again or not, as the case may be. I've never been much of a fan of New Year's eve myself. It amounts to celebrating the fact that you're one more year closer to death and it's hard to see what's so great about that. Of course it's compulsory to go out and drink a great deal but you can't get a taxi, or if you can you need to part with a sizable part of your life savings; and if you've got kids, you can't get a babysitter so going out at all is something of a nightmare. That's why we have developed the cunning ploy of staying in and having people come to our place, thus avoiding all the problems associated with going out, which includes the fact that we've eaten so much over the festive period that it's hard to move anywhere without mechanical assistance anyway.

So we slave all day, cooking up a load of exotic curries and our friends do likewise, bring them all round to ours and we pig out (as if we haven't done this enough already). There's always way too much curry and in a kind of loaves and fishes scenario, by the time we've finished, there appears to be just as much left as when we started. Then, digestive systems screaming for mercy, we collapse in front of Jools Holland's programme on the box. Cue mutterings about the line-up not being as good as previous years. And then we're left with mountains of uneaten curry to add to the turkey, ham, Christmas cake, etc., etc.

But it's all change this year. Someone round the corner is having a party which ticks all the boxes about not wanting to travel and means our uneaten food pile will not increase exponentially as in previous years. Of course it still means having to sing some bizarre old Scottish song and wish everyone a happy new year, which as I've said, I can never quite see is something to get excited about.

Still, by that time, the alcohol will have numbed the pain of the whole thing and we can stumble a few yards back home to catch the end of what really does look like a mediocre list of acts on Jools' annual knees-up.

And then it's back to more cold turkey and stilton for breakfast. Have a good one won't you and try not to drink too sensibly.

At Christmas time, there'a no need to be afraid...

...at Christmas time, we let in light and we banish hate...." So sang Paul Young at the beginning of Bob Geldof's mega charity smash hit, "Feed the World". Hard to argue with the sentiments and the objective although some cynics have noted that the Bandaid/Liveaid project seems to have done far more to enhance His Bobness's well-being than that of the average Ethiopian. Ah well, a bit of collateral benefit is no reason for not trying to help.

 

It's hard to know what to say about Christmas that hasn't already been said. I love it myself, even though I may moan with the best of them about the commercialising of the whole thing, nothing good on TV, turkeys don't taste like they used to, etc., etc. We might not be able to raise millions like Bob G but we all feel a bit more charitable at this time of year I think and chuck a few bob in the direction of the Sally Army band. Or even that dodgy busker we've been avoiding all year. Wouldn't it be good if you could somehow capture this mood and extend it over the rest of the year? But that never seems to happen.

 

The same sort of problem applies to the Olympics. During the summer, everyone marvelled at the change of attitude in London and indeed, the whole country, helped along by some great British sporting achievements. There was constant talk of "legacy" and how we had to ensure that this sporting fervour penetrated to the further reaches of the population and transformed us into a nation of finely-honed athletes, instead of the pizza-munching fatties that we are. Well some of us. Not me and you, obviously. We also wanted to make sure that the vast amount of money lavished on the new facilities was not wasted on a few weeks of sporting endeavour but would provide the means for our crop of newly-enthused youngsters to reach new sporting heights. Well this is where I do put on my cynical trousers and express serious doubts.

 

You see people have short memories. In a week or two, we'll have forgotten about Christmas, apart from the reminder provided by the expanded waistline, and already the Olympics are fading from memory. The issue here is "cultural change". This is rarely talked about in the context of national culture but is a term often bandied about in companies and other corporate bodies, where the practical application of this often involves some dreaded team-building "awayday". You've probably been on one of these: you have a series of group exercises where you have to be nice to everyone, including those people from the sixth floor who make your life a misery the rest of the year, and you all pretend to love each other and subscribe to whatever new corporate ethos is flavour of that particular month. Does the corporate culture change as a result? Rarely.

 

So how do you effect cultural change? Well of course it happens naturally over time in any case but if you want to do it quickly and steer it in the direction you want it to go, you need to do something pretty big and you need to be the head honcho. You need to be a Hitler or a Mao Tse Tung or a Stalin. My word these people shook things up. Only problem was the millions of dead bodies left in their wake.  So a few drawbacks here.

 

Or you need to be Jesus. Or Buddha, or Mohamed. Which, in the case of the first, brings us back to Christmas. No mean achievement to have a large proportion of the world's population celebrate your birth some 2,000 years after your death, even if most of them tend to forget about your ideas for most of the year. So you must have been quite a guy and that's what it takes to change the world: a big man with big ideas, who hangs around longer than most elected politicians and who doesn't have to worry about buying votes. And one who doesn't have a gun in his hand.

Speaking of guns brings us to the awful event in the USA the other day. Obama said all the right things but will he be able to change the US's gun-toting culture? Not a chance. Unlike the people listed above, he doesn't have the power and he won't be around long enough. If Jesus really does pop up in Utah then you might see some movement in the right direction but until then...

 

Only 3 more days until that Mayan calendar runs out. So get back to your Christmas shopping and don't get me any more bloody socks!

 

Too busy watching chefs on TV to cook?

There's an incredible number of cookery programmes on TV these days, with everything from Jamie "pukka grub innit?" Oliver to Raymond "ooh la la" Blanc and Heston "brain the size of a chest freezer" Blumenthal. The last one is particularly good for chips as long as you don't mind waiting three days for them. Then you've got the amateurs having a bash on Masterchef and that Come Dine With Me programme where you invite people in to be rude about your cooking and cast disapproving glances at your kitchen ("distressed MDF in pale green...very 1980s"). Or at least I think that's what it's all about - I've only ever seen the trailers.

 

 

A potato peeler. Apparently some of you are not familiar with one of these.

 

 

So given all this televisual outpouring of tips on how to fatten yourselves up, not to mention the zillions of books by the above celeb chefs which jostle for space at the top of the bestsellers lists, you'd imagine that we'd all be slaving away over our hot stoves, producing endless exotic culinary creations, no?

 

No. A survey today (yes another bloody survey - where would the media be without them?) says that large numbers of us think that "cooking" amounts to heating up a pizza or nuking something gooey in a plastic pot in the microwave. Of course as usual, we don't need a survey to tell us this. We know it must be true from the vast volume of frozen gunk in brightly coloured packaging clogging up the supermarkets along with "easy cook" versions of everything, even things like roast potatoes. (If you really can't prepare your own roast potatoes then I expect you can't tie your own shoelaces either or dress yourself. How do you get through the day?) It seems that the more cookery programmes there are, the less inclined we are to actually do any cooking. It must be some kind of vicarious exercise of cooking by proxy: once we've finished watching Nigella getting all saucy with lashings of butter, fromage frais, chocolate and some weird Slovakian confection from that super little deli round the corner from her place in Belgravia, we feel we've done it all ourselves and can just give that frozen lasagne 800 watts of particle physics.

 

So if, as it appears, there's an inverse relationship between the amount of cooking on TV and the amount done by the (wo)man in the kitchen, could it be that this can be extended to more useful behavioural effects? Let's have a go at putting on lots of programmes featuring mugging, rape and murder and watch as crime rates plummet. Maybe a few more war films on the telly would reduce the incidence of the real thing. I don't know if this would work but I'm sure that wall-to-wall documentaries on Eds Miliband and Balls would cure people of socialism.

 

Although this sounds like a brilliant idea, I can't help thinking there's a flaw in it somewhere. You don't think that the reason people buy ever increasing volumes of pre-prepared this and microwavable that is something to do with the profits to be made by the food companies? Surely not. Pass me a Pot Noodle.

Wake up and smell the tax law

I can't resist saying something about this tax business that's dominated the news recently although the whole thing is so bonkers it's hard to know where to start. It's also hard to know where to finish but the main conclusion has got to be about the sound-bite culture we live in these days rather than anything to do with tax.

 

First off, why has everyone picked on Starbucks, Amazon and Google? There are goodness knows how many multinationals operating in the UK and all of them will be using similar techniques to minimise their tax bills. At least they will be if they're doing their jobs right. Companies have a duty to their shareholders to make as much money as possible and this means paying as little tax as possible. Just like the rest of us: do you pay more tax than you need to? Only because of laziness, ignorance or incompetence.

 

The difference between you and I and multinationals is that the latter have more weapons in their anti-tax armoury. They obviously want to make a profit but they want that profit to appear in the accounts of their companies which operate in the countries with the lowest tax rates. To achieve this, they can buy and sell stuff to each other and lend and borrow money between group companies. That's how the world works and has done for ages.

 

Other ruses are possible, as I well know. I was once employed by a very large multinational and worked on a deal which involved a subsidiary in one country investing a vast amount of money in a new one set up in Ireland (because they had a very generous tax regime if you made sure you ticked the right boxes), which then lent it back to the first company. This meant the first company paid tax-deductible interest to the Irish one which paid tax on it but at a much lower rate than that being saved by the first company. Result? Tax savings running into the tens of millions. So did I get a vast bonus for administering this lucrative wheeze? Unfortunately not - that wasn't really the done thing in those days. How times change eh?

 

Another thing I worked on was moving an operation out of London and into Holland. You'll have noticed that Holland has been mentioned in Starbucks' intra-group shenanigans so I guess those friendly Dutch chaps still have some helpful tax laws on their statute book.

 

So why all the excitement, when this kind of thing is very old news? It must be because of the massive appetite of our massively enlarged news media to gorge itself on tasty news titbits and spew out half-eaten remains of poorly digested (read: poorly understood) stories. So to major on Starbucks is great because we've heard of them. If it had been Mega Widgets plc (who may be even sharper on tax avoidance than the coffee people) it's boring and not news.

 

The main story here is not Starbucks and co but HMRC and the way they're held to account, or not. That and the EU.  As you might expect, HMRC have all sorts of rules to stop companies getting too cheeky with their tax-reducing ploys. Unfortunately, some of these rules have been challenged recently as being contrary to EU rules. The EU take the view that it doesn't matter which EU country you pay your tax in as we're all jolly good friends together in the EU and never mind that some of our "friends" have much lower tax rates than we do. You may think it's a bit lopsided to have rules making us all conform in certain ways but not in others, like tax rates but there you go, and the hands of our tax collectors are, to at least some extent, tied.

 

But don't think that HMRC are blameless. In recent years they seem to have developed a strategy that involves doing deals with companies rather than getting legal. In fact in the last few years they have hardly taken any companies to court at all. Most spectacular was the deal they did with Vodafone which, depending on who you believe, let Vodafone off a potential tax bill of anything up to £6 billion. That's an awful lot more than anything Starbucks may have dodged.

 

Then there's the other guilty party, the MPs. The recent goings on in parliament have seen some extraordinary rubbish being spoken which has simply served to highlight the ignorance of those who are in charge of making laws. How on earth can they have a go at a company which has simply played by the rules which the interrogators are responsible for making? Bonkers. If you don't like the rules, change them. Do you seriously expect companies to pay tax voluntarily?

 

But ironically, and just to increase the bonkers-ness angle further, that's exactly what Starbucks have said they're going to do. Happily, I am not a Starbucks shareholder, or else I'd be pretty cross at this large increase in what amounts to the PR budget. But now Starbucks are being criticised for doing this so they just can't win. These Starbucks knockers should be directing their anger at HMRC, the Government or the EU, rather than an outfit that, despite doing nothing wrong, has offered to chuck many millions into the UK's depleted coffers.

 

Finally, another bit of drivel has been the dumb suggestion by some MPs that we need a sales tax to recoup the profits tax that is apparently so easily avoided. Er...hello? We already have one...it's called VAT and it's currently set at a very stonking 20%. Not only that, we also have a hefty tax on jobs called employers' national insurance and then the employees have to hand over a not insignificant amount of their wages in tax and (employees') national insurance. Add all this up and you'll find that a very sizable chunk of Starbucks' turnover already finds its way into the UK government's bank account. Not to mention all the other economic activity generated by Starbucks' UK operation.

 

Of course this is a good thing for the UK and is why we, like all other countries, are very keen to attract multinationals to our shores. This is why places like Holland and Ireland have juicy tax arrangements and why George Osborne has just reduced the UK corporation tax rate.

 

So what do we make of all this? We can conclude that the job of the multinational is to make money for its shareholders; MPs are stupid; tax law is complicated; HMRC needs to be more accountable and, while we remain in the EU, there's an awful lot of stuff that the UK government can't do much about anyway. But mainly, in the age of the 140 character Twitteresque headline, you need to go out of your way if you want to understand what's really going on.

 

Phew, I'm exhausted. Double espresso please!

 

 

What we did on our holidays - part II

My early new year's resolution: update the blog daily. The old blogging has become rather intermittent recently and I hold my hands up - it's just not good enough.

 

 

Work continues on the Sagrada Familia: any chance of being finished by the end of the world chaps?

 

 

Anyway, we've just come back from a visit to Barcelona, which the locals will tell you is in Catalonia, not Spain. As usual, we did a lot of walking and managed to tick off most of the places in our I Spy book. I recommend the Sagrada Familia, the extraordinary church designed by Gaudi which they're still working on, about 100 years after they started. Now I know the Spanish are famous for their manana attitude to work but that's really pushing it. If you've got the builders in, for goodness sake don't let on about this Spanish job or they'll slow to a crawl.

 

We also did the Picasso museum but I'm afraid I was more impressed with the building than the artworks within although the stuff from his teenage years was pretty impressive. I guess when you're that good you get bored after a while and start doing the weird cubist stuff he's most famous for. Well it's either the boredom or the absinthe that inspired it.

 

 

Any time is shopping time in glitzy downtown Barcelona

 

We messed up a bit on the food front. We had a number of tapas type meals, noting an incredible variation in prices between the tourist spots and those just a few yards away but we didn't have a decent meal at a decent restaurant and Barca must be full of them. We also noted that although there are places selling food absolutely everywhere, you don't see too many overweight Spaniards. They must have a different metabolism because we were only there for a few days, didn't eat that much (or so we thought) but still put on weight.

 

But the two things that will stay in the memory more than anything are (1) the Christmas lights, which were down almost every street and put the West End of London to shame and (2) the shops, both in terms of their sheer number and their tendency to be positioned right at the top of the price scale. The brand names seemed to go on forever, like someone had taken Bond Street or Fifth Avenue and cloned it twenty times over. Either Barcelona must be a very rich city or attract a large number of very rich visitors. Mind you, no one seemed to be buying anything, perhaps because all these posh shops had threatening looking doormen which rather puts one off entering.

 

 

Bonkers Gaudi buildings in Park Guell: what was he smoking?

 

 

Well anyway, we're back in Blighty now, just in time for the Christmas shopping season. Luckily our local shops are more Matalan and Sports Direct than Gucci and Prada.