I covered the tube drivers’ pay about six weeks ago. Actually it is even more pronouncedly ridiculous in hard cash terms – starting pay is clearly well over £50,000 p.a.. The negotiating position of RMT is strong – they can at any time cause widespread chaos. Save that by making the trains driverless there is no need to have RMT members anyway.
Driverless trains are already widely deployed in London and are reckoned to be safer even than driver-operated trains. No, the position is similar to Murdoch taking on the print unions all those years ago. This resolute response closed The Times for about nine months but the end result was a revolution whereby society beat the dinosaurs.
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My short of Euro/USD started in a drab manner but, being an enthusiastic fellow, I kept increasing it as it got worse. It is now showing true subservience. The target is parity by Christmas. I should however mention that the chairman is more cautious than I. And history is with the chairman.
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I spoke to my brother’s wife who is called Maggie. My purpose was to get her to compose a few lines about some favourite food of the past in this week’s Spectator competition. I had and have in mind such as Vienetta or Black Forest Gateau. However, I gave her Maggi Noodles principally in the light of that product’s current Indian difficulties and just perhaps because I seek to call upon her Noodle.
She is jolly good at poetry and, for instance, came up with a terrific piece on Mad Cow Disease about eleven years ago. I submitted this to the BBC who took up the item with alacrity on the Today programme. So much so that it seemed that I had claimed authorship. My wife was jolly angry with me. Maggie did not overtly give a damn. Talk about a tame poetess.
Incidentally, she is a bit other worldly and imagined (your trusty correspondent quickly put her right) that it is the Ecuadoreans who pay the £12m bill for hemming in Assange. That noted, and misinformed though she can be, she is not voting for Corbyn. Phew!
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It’s hard to borrow Mulberry (MUL). But why it should stand at 870p is beyond me. 170p would be closer the mark and I think time will prove me right. The devaluation of the renminbi might be the catalyst for the onset of realism.
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Never a borrower be?: Eton has borrowed £45m over 45 years at a fixed rate of 3.6% p.a.. That seems to me to be a really shrewd move. Borrowing must be the thing to do when nobody else in this particular arena will. Be it noted that the purpose of the loan is to finance investments and not extra rowing lessons.
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Finally, these Chinese devaluations must hit the buying strength of Chinese visitors to the London property market. I have bored so many that I am hardly taking a risk in boring yet more but these currency and economic expectation changes are so profound that Foxtons (FOXT) must be getting it in the neck. FOXT touched 222p yesterday and has reappeared today at 233p. Time to short with enthusiasm.
Finally, I know the editor has firm rules about unauthorised advertising but I draw readers’ attention to my younger daughter’s firm 7th Floor Design & Illustration. www.7thfloor.co.uk. I recommend readers use her since she charges hardly anything (she lives in India, one hundred miles or so from Mumbai). As a bonus, she is witty. Her phone number is 00 91 954 555 7548.