Friday 4th April

City A.M., my bête noire of a newspaper carried three stories on its front page yesterday.

The first was about the disparity between the increase in house prices in London compared to the rest of the country.  Prices here are now double the rest of the U.K.  Everyone apparently wants to live here, and yet those born here cannot afford to buy here without parental help.  But it is far worse than that, the truth is that the main purpose of buying a house now is to make money rather than have a roof over ones head.  Whole blocks of flats are being sold ‘off-plan’ in Russia and China, simply as investment vehicles for rich foreigners.  Everything is being sucked into London, and even though only about an eighth of the population lives here I imagine a far higher proportion of wealth resides here.  The disconnect felt in other towns and cities can only make the cohesion of the country worse.  What sort of madness is this?

Second story was that UK Coal, which was handed the UK coal mining industry for a song and has received huge Government grants is to close two of its last three remaining deep coal mines.  A once great industry is almost gone, destroyed by greed and market forces.  During the eighties and nineties coal was too expensive and gas was cheap so our short-term market closed coal power stations and opened gas-fired ones.  And pits closed.  Now that coal is again cheap and gas expensive coal mines do not make any profit so pits will close.   And we are hostage now to countries like Russia producing gas. What sort of madness is this?

Story number three was that Sports Direct shareholders have rejected a 70 million pound bonus for the majority shareholder Mike Ashley.  What greed?  The man is already a multi-millionaire, he owns Newcastle football club among other assets.  The very fact that he thought that the sum of seventy million might in his wildest dreams be acceptable is amazing.  While most of us can only imagine a salary of 70, 000, this man thinks he should be paid one thousand times that much.  The disparity between rich and poor is growing at a pace and nobody has any idea how to stop it.  If anyone suggests taxing the rich there are howls of anguish and declarations that they would all decamp to some other place to live.  Meanwhile the penny-pinching of the poor continues as the cuts dig deeper.  What sort of madness is this?