Front page news in the Daily Telegraph today (link below) and billed online as ‘Chaos over biggest employment tax shake-up in 70 years‘. The Daily Telegraph informs us that “under the new ‘Real Time Information’ (RTI) system, more than a million businesses – as well as charities, churches and families who employ nannies or cleaners – must report immediately any wage payments to the taxman ...

Mark Braund tells us about his new novel, a political thriller entitled The Blueprint, which has just been published.

For those of us who have spent at least the past 5 years pointing out that the developed world has reached the end of growth, in other words the end of industrial age, cheap-fossil-fuelled-energy rates of economic growth, it’s no surprise to learn that the Chancellor of the Exchequer has today announced a halving of his December 2012 growth forecast for 2013, from 1.2% pa to 0.6% pa.

It’s important to realise that what’s happening in Cyprus at the moment is seismic.

Once again I've just been reading Jeremy Warner in today's Daily Telegraph (link below) where he's written an article entitled "David Cameron is 'pure wind' on the economy".  Mr Warner makes reference to George Orwell who pointed out that, "political language – and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists – is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give the appearance of solidity to pure wind".  Reading Mr Warner's piece got me thinking.

Just been looking at the Lloyds Banking Group results.  The Group posted a £570 million loss in 2012.  OK, so we know that the bank is having to make provisions to compensate for its fraudulent selling of Payment Protection Insurance (PPI) and interest rate swap products to the tune of £1,800 million – which masks the Group’s underlying operational performance.

Since around the end of the last century, and certainly within the first few years of the 21^st century it seemed clear to me that the only game in town for the coming 25 years – and quite possibly for the next 50 years – would be energy; specifically, mankind’s insatiable appetite for energy, exacerbated by a declining trend in net energy.  In other words, mankind is finding it increasingly difficult to extract worthwhile energy returns on energy invested (or ERoEI as it’s known).

When asked of her proudest achievement in government Margaret Thatcher said, wryly, and accurately one assumes, "New Labour." She changed the mood music of UK PLC under her watch, and in these times of neo-liberal ascendancy that Thatcher beckoned in, neither Labour nor the Tories will introduce a Hollande style higher income tax bracket so that those who can afford it most contribute more to public finances through their income. 

In one of my recent posts (‘Energy and the Dismal Science’) I said that “our complex society … doesn’t work – it just doesn’t work – unless the economy grows consistently and reliably at around 3% per year … without economic growth the system starts to implode, and pretty quickly at that; honest.”

The man on the Clapham omnibus is unlikely to have heard of Tullett Prebon.  Tullett Prebon is an inter-dealer broker in the wholesale financial markets; Tullett Prebon acts as a link between firms to enable them to trade with each other anonymously; its brokers are the fast-talking middlemen who match buyers and sellers of complex financial products.