Loathe as I am to agree with the Chancellor George Osborne on pretty much anything, I do agree with his plans to suspend the current restrictions on Sunday trading hours for retail outlets above 280 square metres, as announced today in the press. The Sunday Trading Act 1994 reached a compromise with all interested parties (including church groups, unions, and the various political parties) to restrict trading in such stores to no more than six hours on the Sunday, between 10am and 4pm. A sensible compromise, I’m sure we all agree.

However, as no doubt all of you have noticed, this year is Olympics year, and canny George Osborne has realised that we should capitalise on the hundreds of thousands of visitors coming to the UK for the Olympic and Paralympic Games. As he said, he wouldn’t want them to see a Britain “closed for business,” so proposes to introduce emergency legislation to amend the Sunday Trading Act 1994 for a period of 8 weeks during the duration of the Olympic and Paralympic Games to remove the current restrictions on trading hours. This is A Good Thing. With our finances in such a dire state, the more we’re able to fleece visitors relieve visitors of their money help visitors enjoy Britain by encouraging them to visit our assorted retail emporiums, the better it will be for our economy their experience of our country will be.

Naturally, I hope that the current opt-out system for people of religious belief to refuse to work on Sundays without incurring disciplinary action by their employers will be retained, but I imagine that there will be quite a bit of overtime to be earned during that period of 8 weeks over the summer. I do wonder what dear old Arkwright would make of it all. I should imagine he’ll be quite pleased.

Today’s Daily Telegraph reports that national pay-bargaining for public sector employees are to be scrapped. Obviously this will mean that two civil servants doing the same job in different parts of the country will receive different salaries, based on the mean private sector salary for their area. Of course, the motivation to this is entirely financial on behalf of George Osborne, but it will have a deleterious effect, and it’s difficult to imagine that he isn’t deliberately goading the trade unions (especially Unison) into industrial action. I feel that this is a trap that he’s set for them, and may lead to a showdown between the unions and the Government similar to what happened during the 1984 miner’s strike. But I digress.

The relevance of this to rural Wales and the Welsh language is that it’ll exacerbate the already bad situation of Welsh-speaking families having to relocate out of the heartlands of Welsh-speaking Wales towards more cheaper places to live, where houses may be marginally cheaper to buy or rent, and jobs will be more plentiful. This is the rub. It’s a cruel twist of fate that the Welsh language is strongest in what might be termed the “pretty” areas of Wales. Naturally, it follows that the pretty areas of Wales attract the highest house prices, together with a mainly agrarian and tourist economy, which both pay extremely low salaries.
I don’t have the source to hand, but in recent years, the reported average salary for Llandrindod Wells was £18,000 across all industries and for both public and private sector. If one excluded Powys County Council’s salaries, the average salary dropped to £12,000. Due to wage freezes (or even decreases) in subsequent years, I doubt that those figures have crept upwards, and will have remained static (at best). The situation in Llandrindod Wells is likely to replicated across most, if not all, of mid-Wales, and a large part of the rest of Wales. I think only Anglesey has lower average salaries, but as a whole, across rural Wales, average salaries are typically 60-70% of the UK average. On top of that, our house prices are extremely expensive, especially here in Powys.

So, these are the factors for rural depopulation: poverty wages (if one’s actually able to find a local job), house prices which are astronomically expensive, so that families have to relocate to less expensive areas of Wales or the UK to find work. And in return, it’s typically English (and the rich, retired) who move into those vacant properties, as they’re able to out-bid the indigenous Welsh. In the Llangadfan area, 30 years ago it was the case that if an English family or English couple moved to the area, it was quite a novelty; these days it’s so common that nobody hardly ever notices. The problem isn’t necessarily the English per se, but the fact that, for the most part, they don’t learn Welsh, nor have anything to do with our culture. If they did both, then I’d be a little more welcoming of the mewnfydwyr (incomers). But they typically don’t. I don’t mean to single out the English in this way, but it’s they who move in, and it’s they who don’t learn Welsh. I could write the same about, say, the Poles who live in our towns, or indeed the British Asians. If our language and heritage weren’t at stake, I wouldn’t give two hoots as to who’s moved into our towns or cities. And indeed, there are plenty of Asians and other ethnic minorities who have learnt Welsh, and good on them for doing so. Yet the problem remains that us Welsh-speaking Welsh are at danger of becoming an ethnic minority in our own country.

It’s against this backdrop that it was revealed that it’s Leanne Wood who’s been elected as the new leader of Plaid Cymru, the Welsh nationalist party. Congratulations to her, but even if Plaid Cymru gained a majority of the seats at the next Welsh Assembly elections in 2015, she faces numerous problems. Hopefully her background will mean she’s able to poach votes from Labour (who desperately need to be kicked out of power), but her goal of independence will be difficult to achieve given the continued sweeping Anglicisation of Wales.

The only way that Welsh independence could be achieved from a “yes” vote in a referendum is to rebalance the Welsh against the English. Ditto the Welsh language and culture can only be safeguarded by bringing about some form of compulsion for all incomers to learn Welsh, but I don’t think that this will realistically be possible. As ever, the only mechanism which will work is financial. Incentives must be made to keep Welsh-speaking families in their cynefin (habitat, or place of origin), possibly by positive discrimination in the jobs and housing market. The latter might be possible, but would most likely need legislation. It might, however, fall foul of various EU free trade laws. The ultimate solution would be for average salaries to be increased to such a level that Welsh families and their children in modest jobs are able to comfortably afford to outbid anyone else (i.e. non-Welsh) for properties. Sadly, I can’t see that happen. It would be nice to think that the mewnfydwyr had a sense of responsibility to either not move here in the first place, or if they do, to actually learn Welsh and immerse themselves in our culture. Experience has shown that, while a few have done this, they’re in the minority. And the Welsh language and culture are put at greater risk for every family that moves away from Welsh-speaking Wales and get replaced with people who refuse to learn it.

Really, well done Ed Miliband and everyone else who stuck the knife in. That’s another £580m that Stephen Hester and the rest of the management at RBS will have to recover, on top of an already depressed share price. As Rowena Mason writes in her article:

It makes the prospect of recouping the £45 billion used to prop up the banks in 2008 even more distant.

Well done, excellent work Ed Miliband. Perhaps the taxpayers can sue you to the tune of £900m for having wiped that amount of value off the UKFI’s stake in the banking sector? Please, just keep your trap shut. Each time you open it you wipe millions off the value of our banks, and the FTSE100 as a whole. Even better, just get out of politics, shut down the Labour party, and take up counting paperclips for Lambeth Council.

Gosh, it’s about a month since I resumed this blog, despite telling myself that I should keep it updated regularly this year. What’s prompted me out of my torpor has been the furore over the award to RBS’s CEO Stephen Hester of £963,000 in share options, deferred for two years. What follows is a bit of a rant, so hang on!

It’s this last bit that seems to have escaped pretty much everybody’s attention, except for economics reporters in the media, and the usual apologists in the City. So why on earth am I defending this bonus, which Hester has now declined? Me, of all people, who’s an ardent left-winger? It’s all about increasing the share value of RBS in order that it be sold at a profit. People, wake up! That’s the sole purpose that Hester was hired for. Like it or not, money is a great motivator, and yes, it even works at the bottom end of the money pile. It’s not as if Hester was being awarded a cash sum of money that he could fritter away to his heart’s content. I’ll repeat it again: it was a share option, deferred for two years. That means he does not receive the shares until 2014.

It’s evidently fashionable to “bash bankers,” and I have little sympathy for the breed. Indeed, I’m as tamping mad as the next person for the short-termism bonus culture which largely got us into this financial mess in the first place. But lest we forget that it was the Labour government who loosened regulation, and indeed Conservative MP John Redwood (PDF) urged even less regulation of the financial services sector, despite later trying to “clarify” what he said. This, however, is a distraction.

It’s not widely known that Stephen Hester is actually paid less than the market rate for the type of job he does. It’s also conveniently forgotten that he was appointed by the previous Labour government to sort RBS out. Labour – via UK Financial Investments – would’ve had a hand in hammering out Hester’s contract of employment, including what bonuses he would be entitled to. So it makes my blood boil that the very same Labour party have now been crowing loudly about this deferred share option, even though they would’ve approved it in the first place! A source who has worked inside RBS at a high level has told me that things are “difficult” inside RBS, thus the current management team have a mountain to climb in order for UK Financial Investments to sell it at a profit, unlike the loss they made selling Northern Rock to Virgin Money.

So, this is the situation we’ve got ourselves into. Because society has successfully exacted revenge on Stephen Hester by putting pressure on him to reject his legitimate bonus, it’ll now make it less likely for us to recoup our investment in RBS. Thanks a bunch, you ignorant public. What’s to stop Hester throwing the towel in and walking off to a similar position at another bank for less stress, more money, and less public opprobrium? Nothing. And do you honestly think that Mabel from the corner shop, or the guy who flips burgers at McDonald’s is able to step in should Hester resign? (This needs no answer.) The harsh reality (and I’m deeply uncomfortable about this) is that the number of people with the necessary skills to run a bank like RBS and improve its share price are terribly thin on the ground. Yes, I know that it’s all their fault we’re in this mess to begin with, but we have no other choice but to turn to those sort of people to return these financial institutions to private ownership, and at no loss to the taxpayer.

If Stephen Hester does manage to return RBS into private ownership and at profit to the taxpayer, as far as I’m concerned you could give him the moon on a stick. If he succeeds in driving up the share price prior to its flotation or sale, with a share option, he gains, but so do we, massively. It’s quite simply a win-win situation. Sadly, the population (and most of the media) have forgotten this, or are too stupid to understand.

The funniest suggestion I’ve heard regarding this saga is that because Stephen Hester is effectively a civil servant (due to the taxpayer owning 83% of RBS), he should be paid a civil servant’s salary. That’s easily the funniest thing I’ve heard so far in 2012, and just goes to show the level of people’s (and politicians’) ignorance with this matter. There’s a vast gulf between what a CEO of a bank like RBS is expected to do and some Whitehall or Powys County Council mandarin who mainly counts paperclips. Since when has a civil servant increased the share price of a private company? I’d imagine they’d know how to decrease it quite effectively. (The gross inefficiencies of the public sector will be written about sometime later.)

Back to my title: revenge may come at a price. This is the danger. My source who spent some time at RBS reckons that now this bonus option (plus all future ones) have been turned down by Stephen Hester, and the fact that he knows he’s publicly hated, it’ll make the recovery of RBS – and Lloyds Banking Group and Bradford & Bingley plc – even longer to achieve. Indeed, my source reckons it’ll add two more years to the economic downturn and consequent austerity measures. A pyrrhic victory for populism. Nice one, plebs.

Very little has changed in the meantime, except that the country’s on its knees, thanks to the Labour Government’s mismanagement and “light touch” regulation of the financial services industry. Not that the Conservative Party would’ve been any better – indeed, they were pushing for even less regulation. That’s conveniently forgotten about these days. Few would’ve thought that over the past three years or so that things would end up this bad.

I’ve always wondered if David Cameron or Nick Clegg anticipated that we’d see such a large decrease in living standards (or that incomes remain static or even fall, as household costs rise). While the economy was discussed during the leaders debate, as far as I can recall nobody admitted that the economy would end up in such a mess, and that the vast majority of the population would end up shouldering tax hikes and enjoying a severe reduction in public services, while CEOs and directors creamed even more money out of publicly-listed companies, and ditto senior bank staff looting from the state-owned banks we had the misfortune to bail out.

In better economic times, we’d have looked back at the premiership of Gordon Brown with humour; sadly, we don’t have that luxury. It was a time of abject horror, and this has become even more apparent in the 18 months since, not less so. His one saving grace was that he kept the UK out of the Eurozone; however, this is more likely to be due to accident rather than by design. A case of incompetence having a fortuitous outcome for once.

Spotted in the window of Derek’s Plaice fishmongers in Welshpool.