Holiday to Alderney
After failing to book a proper holiday since I started my job (most of my weeks off work have been consumed by UKUUG events and other voluntary groups), I have decided to go back to Alderney for five days in October. Apart from being beautiful and quiet, it also has military history (the Germans occupied and fortified it in World War II) and a superb walk around the entire island. It seems to be reasonably well mapped already (coincidentally by another member of UKUUG), but perhaps I can improve on that whilst I’m there.
I feel slightly guilty about flying over, even though it’s the only way to get to the islands (my dream of owning a private yacht has yet to be realised), but perhaps I will go and fix the Wildlife Trust IT systems or something to make up for it. 
Goals before heading off are to get Pub Gateway into a usable state and acquire a camera, so I can add all the pubs on the island on my return. I’m just starting to get to grips with symfony, so hopefully that will speed up the task of getting the bare bones of the site up and running.
posted by Paul at 6:34pm on Tuesday 24th August 2010 | Comments Off
BarCamp Manchester 3
This Saturday I attended my first unconference, in the form of BarCamp Manchester 3. Part of the reason for attending was to see how the unconference model works in preparation for UKUUG’s FLOSS UK Unconference in October this year, and also to do a bit of networking within the web development community.
Things stuttered slightly at the beginning, mainly because people seemed to be a bit reluctant to volunteer to give talks, and the organisers were running round pushing post-it notes and pens into people’s hands. I ended up volunteering to talk about ‘Templated PDFs in PHP’, which I managed to ad-lib, although the fact that most people in the audience hadn’t heard of a templating language made things a little tricky to begin with! Next time I will ask if people know about template languages beforehand and jump into the talk at the appropriate part.
The rest of the day was taken up diving in and out of other talks. I was surprised by how few talks involved web development, as I’d been lead to believe that this topic dominated most unconferences. I also found out about synctus, a company which sells hardware for replicating shared file stores across multiple branch offices without having to setup a VPN.
Attendance was lower than I expected, there were supposed to be 100 tickets available but I don’t think more than 70 people could have turned up on the day. I suspect this was partly down to the event being free – if you don’t feel like going on the day for whatever reason, there’s no cost in not turning up.
I didn’t stay around for the post-conference social, mainly because I had lots of stuff to do which I hadn’t managed to get through during the week, including all the boring domestic chores which no one has managed to build a robot for yet (e.g. washing and ironing).
Overall, the event was worth attending, and I picked up a few useful tips during the day. I’m in two minds as to whether I would go again, whilst the whole point of an unconference is that the talks are decided on the day, this does mean that you can be left disappointed if no one wants to give a talk on a subject which you want to learn about.
posted by Paul at 5:13pm on Sunday 22nd August 2010 | Comments Off
Thoughts on the emergency budget
George Osborne stood up in the House of Commons earlier this week and pronounced that we’re all going to be stuffed for the rest of this Parliament as a result of foolish Labour overspending, and an age of austerity (i.e. spending cuts and tax rises) awaits. Here’s my thoughts on some of the measures announced on Tuesday:
Personal allowance increase: I’m disappointed to see this measure make it into the budget, as I don’t think we have sufficient funds to afford it and increasing the personal allowance does nothing to help people on very low incomes who already pay no tax. I suspect this was a concession extracted from the Conservatives by the Lib Dems so they could claim to at least be having some input into economic policy. At least Osborne has done the sensible thing and reduced the higher rate threshold to compensate, so people on incomes of £42,000+ (roughly) won’t benefit from the extra allowance.
VAT increase: This had been predicted by almost all the pundits for several months, so it wasn’t a particularly big surprise when Osborne announced that VAT was going up to 20% from January 2011. Personally I think this is the right thing to do, as VAT will raise a lot of revenue for the Treasury and putting off the increase allows the economy to recover somewhat beforehand. My only concerns are that it might hit people on low incomes and small businesses who won’t necessarily be able to adjust their prices easily.
Insurance Premium Tax: For some reason this was ignored by almost all the mainstream media (though the insurance media were up in arms), despite the fact that it’s effectively a 20% increase in tax on most short-term UK insurance products (e.g. motor insurance). I suspect this is because few people are aware of the tax, and most of us spend relatively little on insurance compared to other goods and services (average spend per year is around £800 I think, most of which will be car and home insurance). It’s a sensible increase though—and one I advocated because of its ease of collection and low impact—which will hopefully reduce the need for more severe cuts elsewhere.
Housing benefit: There is going to be a cap on the amount of housing benefit offered, although at £250/week for a one bedroom flat (more than twice what I pay for somewhere in Didsbury) I don’t think that will be a major problem for anyone outside the South East. More worrying is the move from using the median rent value to the 30th percentile when setting levels of benefits in each area—this will result in a big cut for many people.
Bank levy: This seems like a sensible idea in principle, although I would prefer that it was put off for a short while in order to give banks time to rebuild their balance sheets. I like the fact that it will only be levied on “risky” funding, as this should shield building societies and sensible banks (e.g. HSBC, which funds a lot of its lending from retail deposits and shouldn’t be penalised because Northern Rock didn’t). The City doesn’t seem too upset either, clearly they were expecting something far worse.
Public sector pay freeze: Anyone earning over £21,000 in the public sector is going to have their pay frozen for two years. Whilst I think this is a sensible idea from a financial point of view, the limit should have been set a bit higher—perhaps the same rate as the median wage.
Capital gains tax: A modest increase from 18% to 28%, implemented with immediate effect—presumably to avoid a mass sell-off of assets. I’m not sure that this will raise a large amount of money, but it’s a step in the right direction for aligning capital gains with income taxation.
There have been lots of arguments over whether the budget is progressive (i.e. the burden falls more on the rich than the poor, as a percentage of their income), as claimed by George Osborne when he commended the budget to the House of Commons. The main argument against appears to the reputation VAT has as a regressive tax. This is justified to an extent, because people on lower incomes do tend to spend a greater proportion of their income on VAT in comparison to people on higher incomes. However, many essential items—particularly most foodstuffs—are exempt from VAT and so won’t be directly affected, although there may be a small feed-in increase from ancillary costs of transportation etc.
Overall, I think Osborne did a reasonable job, given that he only had a few weeks to prepare this budget and the economy was left in a right mess by the outgoing Labour government. The housing benefit overhaul is the one change which I am worried about, because I think it will hit people on low incomes particularly hard. I’m also disappointed that no radical proposals for tackling the problems of pensions were announced (e.g. a cap on annual contributions), although there is going to be a review of public sector pensions. I would have preferred to see more emphasis on tax rises for the middle classes (income tax gradually increased back to 23% for basic rate taxpayers) and less on cuts, but I’m sure there’s more to come in the autumn.
posted by Paul at 10:53am on Saturday 26th June 2010 | Comments Off
My emergency budget
Tuesday will see George Osborne’s emergency budget, which I expect will contain a swathe of cuts and an increase in VAT. Since my A level in economics makes me more qualified to write a budget than Osborne (with his Modern History degree from Oxford) here’s what I would do:
No tax cuts: It would be jolly nice to give people an increased personal allowance of £10,000, but there simply isn’t the money to do this. The only concession I would make is to increase the allowance in line with average earnings, as there was no increase in the 2010 budget. The higher rate band would remain the same, to drag a few thousand more into the 40% bracket.
Increase Insurance Premium Tax: This tax, levied at 5% on most insurance policies (excluding life insurance, and a higher rate applies to travel insurance) brings in £2.2bn for the Treasury. Increasing it to 6% would bring in another £400m, without pushing up premiums too much – a 1% rise in price but a 20% rise in tax. It’s a tax which few people outside the industry are aware of, so a small increase would probably fly under the media radar – i.e. you could implement it without facing a backlash from the Torygraph and the Mail.
Increase capital gains tax: I’m slightly wary of increasing CGT in case a huge rise results in a large scale sale of assets in order to avoid the increase. There is also no point in reducing the annual allowance, as the Lib Dems suggest, because at that level you would probably spend more money collecting the tax (there’s no automated method like PAYE) than the actual receipts. Therefore my suggestion would be to increase the rate from 18% to 20% for now, which offers an increase in receipts with little additional cost (you simply get the people already paying CGT to cough up a bit more), but the increase wouldn’t be so large as to cause a huge sale of assets to avoid it.
Increasing VAT: I would put this off until the next budget in order to give the economy time to recover, but send out a warning that VAT will rise to 18-20% from 2012.
Reintroduce the 10% tax band: Gordon Brown got rid of this progressive taxation band. I would reintroduce it, and revert the next band of income tax back to 22%. I would also announce another penny on income tax (rising to 23%) in the 2011 budget, which would bring the rate back into line with what it was before Labour came into power.
Cap pension contributions at £25,000: At the moment, you could put up to 100% of your salary into a pension and get tax relief on the full amount. This greatly assists fat cat bosses on huge salaries, but has little benefit for people on lower incomes. I would still allow contributions over £25,000 a year, but these would not receive tax relief.
Cap public sector final salary schemes: Public sector final salary schemes are likely to cost the country a small fortune in the coming years, as people live longer and healthier lives. £50,000 a year should be more than enough for a retired civil servant to live on, so that would be the maximum benefit, regardless of final salary or length of service. For anyone expecting to receive more than £50,000, they would still be required to continue contributing even when they had accrued the maximum level of benefits.
Increase stamp duty but introduce marginal rates: Currently stamp duty on property purchases is levied based on the total value of the property. However, unlike income tax, stamp duty is not marginal, so if the purchase price is just £1 into the next band you pay the full rate on the whole amount. I would change this so that the tax was only levied on the marginal amount (e.g. on a property worth £126,000 you would pay stamp duty on £1,000), and also increase the levels slightly to compensate for any lost revenue.
These various changes would raise some much needed cash, save money on pensions and make the tax system a bit fairer.
posted by Paul at 4:40pm on Sunday 20th June 2010 | 2 Comments »
Trip to Bletchley Park
On the off-chance that there are some people who read my blog but aren’t on Facebook, a group of us will be going to Bletchley Park on Saturday 19 June for the Vintage Computer Festival. Full details can be found on the mailing list archive of the original email.
Join us for old computers and WWII heritage buildings, followed by food and beverages in a local pub!
posted by Paul at 5:30pm on Thursday 10th June 2010 | Comments Off
A plan for buying Manchester United
I’m not a big football fan—I don’t even understand the offside rule—but I’m somewhat concerned about the finances of football clubs in the UK, especially Manchester United, after watching Panorama this week. Apart from anything else, United is part of the culture, heritage and landscape of Manchester, and no doubt provides a boost to the local economy in terms of direct and indirect employment (591 people are employed directly by Manchester United, according to its latest set of accounts). So, I have a plan to buy the club, albeit with some help.
No matter how often the Glazers might say ‘the club’s not for sale’, the reality is that there will be a price which they will accept, because they’re businessmen and not die-hard United supporters. Furthermore, they have outstanding debt with interest rates of 16.25%, and it would make good business sense to clear that if they can.
Let’s assume that the Glazers would sell for £2bn, which is £500m more than the last offer by the Red Knights and a considerable gain on what the Glazers originally paid for the club (roughly £800m, of which £500m was debt). Assume also that the number of United fans in the UK is 150,000 (10,000 less than the membership of the Manchester United Supporters Trust) and we require an average contribution of approximately £13,400 per supporter. That might sound like a lot of money, but there are some extremely rich United fans out there who could probably contribute a few million each, if not more. A season ticket also costs £500-£900+ for adults, so if supporters can scrape that together every year they can probably put a bit more towards buying the club. These figures assume that you want to buy the club outright in cash—if the deal was part-funded by debt then the amount required per supporter could drop considerably.
The first stage is therefore to ask supporters (and potential investors) to pay their money into a trust fund whose ultimate aim is to purchase the club. The trust would keep their money on deposit across a variety of highly liquid instruments (i.e. mainly cash, possibly a few gilts), so supporters could get their money back if need be, albeit with a short notice period. The interest would be placed in a separate account and used to pay the running costs of the trust, such as basic administration, preparation of accounts, compliance with FSA regulations etc. Only around £1m of capital would be required for the interest to be sufficient to pay for someone to run the business part-time. Any leftover interest would be held as working capital for the club once it was purchased.
The cost to the supporters is that they gain no interest on the money they put into the trust fund, but given the low rates of interest on savings accounts at the moment they wouldn’t be losing much. The trust would effectively operate as a notice savings account paying 0% interest. As the trust wouldn’t be spending any of the capital, only the interest, there shouldn’t be any worries about a run on the trust, because it would be able to meet all demands for repayment. The lack of interest would also put off speculators and hedge funds, as they wouldn’t get a quick return on their investment.
Once a purchase price has been agreed, you incorporate a public limited company and issue 200m shares with a value of £10 each (or any other split which adds up to £2bn), which would be divided amongst supporters based on the amount they put into the trust. This company would then be the vehicle to purchase the club and hold all of its assets. Personally I’d prefer a more co-operative structure for a football club, with one member one vote, but that might not go down well with those who put in substantial sums of money. If the club can’t be purchased after a set amount of time, say five years, the trust is wound up, the money is returned to the supporters, and any leftover interest is donated to a nominated charity.
The club would probably remain as a public limited company after purchase, but it could be unquoted to save on listing costs. In other words, you’d be able to buy and sell shares and perform rights issues, but you wouldn’t need to pay fees to the London Stock Exchange or some other listing body. This has the advantage of discouraging speculators and hedge funds, because the lack of liquidity would make it difficult to build a large stake over a short period of time. If you wanted to be doubly secure, you could set up a new trust (as a company limited by guarantee) to which supporters could donate their shares in the knowledge that the trust would not sell them, and therefore ensure the club’s independence in perpetuity.
Given that the club is currently profitable even when debt payments are included—the 2009 accounts show an operating profit of £47m, excluding the £80m sale of Ronaldo—it shouldn’t be too difficult to keep it on a sound financial footing if the purchase included paying off all the club’s debt. It might even be possible to pay a dividend after a few years under new management.
I’m aware that something along these lines has been tried before with the Phoenix Fund, but it seems to have flopped—and was too unambitious to begin with (they aimed to raise £50m in 3 years, which is not even close to what would be required to purchase the club). I think the idea has potential though. Getting publicity would be easy—stick out a press release and the Manchester Evening News would no doubt lap it up, after which point you’ve got interviews on Channel M, BBC Radio 5 Live, North West Tonight etc. Finding a local MP to put down an Early Day Motion supporting the move wouldn’t be difficult—what’s not to like about showing constituents that you’re working to save the local club from indebted destruction by foreign owners? (I exaggerate somewhat, but I’m sure that’s how politicians would present it).
No doubt there would be legal issues to deal with, and financial expertise would be required, but there are probably enough football-mad United supporters working at the various legal firms in Manchester that you could get most of that done pro-bono. I almost reckon it’s worth a punt…
posted by Paul at 8:35pm on Wednesday 9th June 2010 | Comments Off
Job title of the week
Found in The Guardian: Breast Biomechanics Researcher (apparently there are five in the UK).
posted by Paul at 10:00pm on Sunday 16th May 2010 | Comments Off
Don’t upgrade Ubuntu on old Thinkpads
Basic message of this post: If you have an old Thinkpad with a built-in Intel graphics driver (particularly a R50e), do not upgrade to the latest version of Ubuntu (Lucid Lynx) as there is a critical bug with the graphics handling. I made the mistake of upgrading this weekend and now I’m stuck with a broken system.
The first thing which went wrong was that my screen went blank after rebooting. Nothing would make X load, the only way out was to hold down the power button until the laptop switched off. Admittedly this is mentioned briefly in the release notes, but it is right at the bottom and no attention is brought to it, despite the fact that this problem effectively renders your laptop unusable.
Yes, there are workarounds, but they’re not exactly user-friendly. I’ve been using Linux for 10 years now and I can follow the instructions, but I suspect a relatively new user would struggle. There is no one workaround which will fix every system, you have seven to choose from. I tried three with little to no success and eventually chose the nuclear option of switching to vesa in order to avoid the drivers altogether. This means that I can’t play DVDs or games, but on the other hand my system runs and I can continue to write code without having to reboot every 30-60 minutes.
Second problem is that Flash stops working, which is rather annoying as it means I can’t watch programs on iPlayer. Thankfully this is not mission-critical and can be solved by running the following command:
sudo dpkg-reconfigure flashplugin-installer
The only good thing about this problem is that it has forced me to bring forward my decision to buy a new laptop, otherwise I might have kept putting off the purchase. I am a bit concerned about the Ubuntu QA though, as this sort of major bug shouldn’t end up in a release—especially a Long Term Support release—and it’s the second time a widespread bug which brings down systems has snuck in. 
posted by Paul at 3:37pm on Sunday 16th May 2010 | Comments Off
Don’t break up the banks
(Disclaimer: I own, or have owned, shares in some of the companies mentioned below)
There has been a lot of talk recently about breaking up the banks by separating their retail and investment arms—more so now that Vince Cable has a position in government. What makes me rather cross is that the politicians have clearly not looked at the banks which have failed in the UK and US:
Northern Rock: Lent too much money to borrowers in the hope that house prices would keep on rising. Relied too much on funding from the money markets instead of retail deposits and got caught out when these markets dried up. Did not have an investment banking arm.
Bradford & Bingley: Similar problems to Northern Rock, except it lent to people without asking for any proof of income. Did not have an investment banking arm.
Royal Bank of Scotland: Got into trouble by paying over the odds for ABM Ambro just before the credit crunch. Does have an investment banking arm, but that is currently profitable and was not the main cause of the bank requiring taxpayer support.
Halifax Bank of Scotland: Made too many dodgy loans to companies who could not pay them back, particularly in the property sector. Has some investment operations, but not at a scale which would cause a complete collapse.
AIG: An insurance company, not a bank, so does not take retail deposits. Got into trouble primarily by writing too many Credit Default Swaps (a form of insurance against default on corporate debt), which were activated when Lehman Brothers et al started to go under.
Lehman Brothers: Probably the most famous bank to collapse, caused partly by its inability to offload securitised mortgages before they started to default. However, it was not a retail bank, so depositors did not lose out as a result of the collapse.
Now let’s look at some of the banks which have survived the crisis more or less intact:
HSBC: Well diversified, both in terms of business areas and geography. Decided to raise capital through an early rights issue, and therefore did not need to tap investors for cash again and was able to pay dividends throughout the crisis. Has an investment banking arm and did not require bailing out by the government.
Barclays: Did not require a bailout from the government, instead tapping foreign investors for cash. Has a well known (and notorious for pay rewards) investment banking arm. Currently on the road to recovery and has reinstated its dividend.
In conclusion, most of the big bank failures were either pure investment banks, retail banks with no investment arm, or combined banks which were brought down by factors other than their investment operations. Some of the banks which survived the crisis also have investment operations, so the suggestion that combining investment and retail banking in one company is somehow a recipe to bring down the financial system is dubious to say the least.
posted by Paul at 5:23pm on Wednesday 12th May 2010 | 3 Comments »
Spinning around
Now that the majority of the results are in, here’s some spin on the results for each party:
Pro-party spin
Conservatives: Huge gain in number of seats, beat Labour into second place, can probably form a minority government or possibly coalition with Lib Dems. David Cameron will likely end up as the new occupant of Number 10.
Labour: Better than expected, weren’t pushed into third place. Could in theory hang on to power with a Lib-Lab coalition.
Lib Dems: Increased their vote share by the second largest amount, if you ignore the Conservatives, who were always going to do well. Could hold the balance of power between Labour and the Conservatives.
BNP: Largest increase in vote share, again if you ignore the Conservatives.
Green: Caroline Lucas elected as MP.
UKIP: Slight increase in vote share.
Pirate Party: Erm, I can’t think of any positive spin. I think even Alasdair Cambell and Peter Mandleson would be stumped by this one. The official spin is “0.3% swing to the Pirates!”
Anti-party spin
Conservatives: Failed to get a majority, really ought to have done better.
Labour: Kicked out of power (probably). Party finances may not stretch to fighting a second general election if one is called in 6-12 months.
Lib Dems: Vote increase less than the BNP, net loss of seats, failed to make the breakthrough despite Cleggmania. Has the difficult choice of deciding which party to support – either Labour (difficult as they clearly lost) or Conservatives (the Lib Dem party members will probably have a fit). Lost some big names, including Lembit Opik.
BNP: Failed to win any seats.
Green: Fall in vote share, lost deposits in most seats, big hitter Tony Juniper failed to get elected.
UKIP: Failed to win any seats.
Pirate Party: Lost all their deposits and got fewer than 250 votes everywhere they stood. Epic fail.
posted by Paul at 12:42pm on Friday 7th May 2010 | Comments Off