Driving back from Oxford on Tuesday afternoon I passed a large roadside advertisement, put up by UKIP, calling for “less intergration”. I am unacquainted with the desirability of this since I have always thought grated parmesan and cheddar compote quite delicious. But that chap Nuttall is definitely nut all there and he might have developed a loony passion.
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These ladies, formerly of Fox News, who have lately posed outside Ofcom, claiming that in the light of their experiences of being groped by a couple of prominent employees of that organisation Ofcom should deny the Fox News takeover of Sky (LON:SKY). I simply do not get this since the usual procedures to handle such behaviour (some of which occurred ten years ago and all of which seem pretty innocuous to me) have been invoked so proving that Fox News has no need to change its name to Unreported Fux News. It might have been different had these ladies popped up to offer hitherto unconsidered claims. But these claims are nothing of the sort and therefore do not justify any adverse decision by Ofcom. It follows that any discount in the Sky share price that has arisen through these disclosures is not justified.
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Watchstone (LON:WTG) disclose this morning that Slater and Gordon now claim that WTG indulged in fraudulent misrepresentation of its Professional Services Division sold to Slater and Gordon. It’s very hard to take this £600m claim seriously. But it does hang over the WTG share price, now around 130p. I incline to reckon this makes WTG a buy – but with no great confidence.
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Finally, I have been handed an astonishing article about American justice in practice. Here public prosecutors come up with frequently preposterous claims against underfunded low intelligence defendants who plead guilty to avoid mandatory draconian sentences and so achieve much reduced sentences. As a result there are perhaps 20,000 prisoners in American jails (where the prisoner population is six times the rate of other allegedly civilised countries) who are obviously innocent of any crime.