Curtain comes down on BMI business class
TODAY is an auspicious day in local aviation history. This morning BMI dropped its business class service on domestic flights to and from Heathrow.
I never saw the point of paying over for odds for a one-hour flight, but can well remember the days when travelling to London on business I had to walk past the rows of civil servants who occupied the business class section at the front of a BMI aeroplane as I headed towards steerage. I guess businessmen are inclined to treat customers' and shareholders' money with more respect than civil servants treat the taxpayers'.
Indeed, last August the NI Department of Finance and Personnel revealed that in a period of just nine months in 2008 civil servants took more than 2,584 BMI flights to Heathrow, at an average price of 199 per seat, resulting in a bill to the taxpayer of 514,503.
So is BMI's decision to go classless a result of the recession, competition from easyJet or the fact that Aer Lingus now has the contract to ferry our civil servants between Stormont and Whitehall?
RBS-Kraft deal wrapped in controversy
It is good to see that the billions of pounds of public money that was poured into propping up the failed banking sector is proving to be such a boon for the economy.
Northern Rock, based in the Labour heartlands and the first bank to be bailed out with taxpayers' cash, has just shelled out 10million, of what is in effect your money, to stick its name on the shirts of Newcastle United.
But it is not just the Rock that is behaving a questionable manner with your dosh.
When the Royal Bank of Scotland, headquartered on the home turf of both the Prime Minister and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, had to be bailed out with 76bn of your money, it agreed to lend more to consumers and businesses. You might have been forgiven for assuming that this meant that the RBS (including its local subsidiary the Ulster Bank) would be doing its bit to help struggling British businesses stay afloat or grow. Instead the RBS has chosen to help fund the 11.5bn takeover of Cadbury by American conglomerate Kraft. It is expected that the takeover will result in job losses in the UK.
Facilitating big takeovers is an extremely lucrative business and the Cadbury deal will doubtless help RBS to keep its investment bankers' bonus packets good and fat. It is widely estimated that RBS will shortly be doling out 1.5bn in bonuses: money that might otherwise have been available to lend to small businesses, paid back to the taxpayer, or used for investment in customer service.
RBS/Ulster Bank recently announced that it is cutting 25 technology service jobs in Belfast and businesses here continue to suffer from a lack of availability to bank credit.
The rights and wrongs of big takeovers, and in particular the seemingly one-way street in which iconic British businesses are fair game while other governments, in particular the American and the French, put up hurdles to foreign companies on the acquisition trail, have been widely discussed elsewhere. That debate will rumble on, but surely it cannot be right that a bank that is 84 per cent state-owned should be using up its scarce capital to fund the expansion of foreign companies while local businesses are crying out for relatively small loans.
Nor should it be and handing out massive bonuses with one hand and P45's with the other. That just does not add up.
The long march to our destiny
Over the weekend Sinn Fein and SDLP politicians travelled to Mayo to meet with senior Fine Gael representatives to discuss the latest developments in the Northern Ireland peace process. They also touched on the subject of how to maximise the nationalist vote in the forthcoming elections in Northern Ireland.
Actually this did not happen, at least not as far as I know. But if it had, would anyone have even raised an eyebrow?
Political parties, with overlapping interests, getting together to compare notes and sound each other out seems to me like a perfectly normal thing to be doing.
However when the three largest pro-Union parties, the Conservatives, UUP and DUP, got together for a chinwag recently it became major news. Predictably we were subjected to the tiresome banshee wail of "sectarianism".
The SDLP's Alasdair McDonnell rounded on Conservative leader David Cameron, accusing him of "… playing the Orange card… being sectarian… being divisive." And declaring "... Conservatives at this stage are not fit for government." You may recall Alliance's Anna Lo was singing a similar tune a while back.
What Alasdair seems to be saying is that supporting the DUP or the UUP is de facto sectarian. Sadly it demonstrates an outdated view on the part of the SDLP's deputy leader that equates unionism exclusively with Protestantism and tars all Protestants as sectarian. I find this very offensive.
Were the much vaunted Hume-Adams talks a "sectarian initiative"? Is it now the case that every time Alasdair McDonnell sits down privately with a member of another Irish or nationalist party we are entitled to scream "sectarian" at him and accuse him of playing the "green card"? Is the SDLP's flirting with Irish republican party Fianna Fil "divisive''? And every time Alasdair has a private chat with Taoiseach Brian Cowen does that confirm the SDLP is not fit for government? After all, this is the same logic of his analysis of discussions between pro-Union parties.
It is very disappointing that Mr McDonnell has gone down the traditional Orange name-calling route as in the past I have generally found him likeable, rational, hard-working, pragmatic and on occasion capable of the sort of fresh thinking that is all too often in short supply around these parts.
If he would give up the double-jobbing, he still has the potential to be one of the better Ministers we will see at Stormont.
However, with a bruising party leadership battle under way and a growing number of aspirational, conservative-minded pro-Union people who happen to go to a Catholic church in his constituency, maybe he feels that it is to his advantage to paint the entire unionist family as sectarian.
Yes, of course there are bigots here and there within the ranks of the unionist parties, just as there are in the nationalists. The Conservatives and the unionists in particular are at least trying to move on from the old sectarian based political status quo, even if it is not always easy going. Can the same be said of the SDLP?
(For the record, I am a Conservative).
Email to a friend
Print this page
Looking for...
Featured advertisers
Jobs
Search for a job
Motors
Search for a car
Property
Search for a house
Weather for Belfast
Tuesday 14 February 2012
Today
Cloudy
Temperature: 6 C to 9 C
Wind Speed: 17 mph
Wind direction: North west
Tomorrow
Cloudy
Temperature: 5 C to 10 C
Wind Speed: 17 mph
Wind direction: North west
