Bailing out Jaguar

This news rather surprised me this morning.
Jaguar-Land Rover is reported to be in line for a taxpayer bail-out worth up to £1bn after holding talks with Government ministers.

Eh? I thought we were supposed to be not wanting people to buy great big gas guzzlers?

For the past 10 years, we’ve had government telling us all how bad it is to drive big cars, and has through numerous incentives (fuel tax, road fund license, congestion charge rules, subsidies to rail, bus lanes) made big cars (or cars in general) less of a good buy.

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How low can we go?

After yesterday’s inflation figures – showing that CPI inflation fell to 4.1 percent in November – the question on every economist’s lips is: just how low can we go?
 
While Alistair Darling doesn’t see deflation as a threat, many analysts do.  And, in his letter to the Chancellor, Mervyn King even warned that inflation could drop below 1 percent in 2009:

"Given the short term outlook for inflation, it is quite possible that I will next need to write to you to explain why inflation has deviated

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Deeply confusing

Jon Cruddas and Jonathan Rutherford say that:

There is no going back to the old order of free market capitalism and a micromanaging, centralist state.

Eh?

I can imagine having free market capityalism and I can imagine having a centralist micromanaging state. But what I can't imagine is having both at the same time. They are alternatives, not complements. So, OK, there's certainly no going back to a situation where we have both of them as we've not had that and cannot have that in the future.

The interesting question then becomes which do we want to have? Excuse me if I plump for the free market capitalism rather than whatever plans these two deeply confused politicians are proposing.

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The Royal Mail protest picks up pace

The Labour protest over the Government's plan to allow foreign investors to take up a stake in Royal Mail has just been ramped up a notch by the resignation of Jim McGovern as PPS to Pat McFadden, Minister of State for Employment Relations and Postal Affairs.  All signs now are that this could turn into one of the biggest rebellions that Gordon Brown's faced during his premiership - and certainly something that could punctuate the general stream of positive coverage that's been flowing his way recently.

Given the quantity of foreign cash that's propping up the British economy - albeit mostly in sectors that don't have quite the same national-sentimental kudos as Royal Mail - one thing to look out for is whether this kind of thing dissuades foreign investment more generally.  Another is how Peter Mandelson deals with the situation; the first major test of his resurrected ministerial career.

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Breaking up BAA

This story interests me:

"The most effective way to introduce competition in the South-East and in lowland Scotland is to require the three London airports and the two principal Scottish airports to be separately owned," said Christopher Clarke, chairman of the BAA Airports inquiry. "Under the common ownership of BAA, there is no competition"

BAA's ownership of the country's three biggest airports has come under fierce criticism from passengers and airlines alike for failing to deliver a good service for the millions of passengers that pass through Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted each year.

The...

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