Friday 1st September 2023

[refitman]

Morning all.

[refitman]

Oh, I missed that the Tories were on the 'National Service' bandwagon again

[frog222]

Here's the link to the Blair AIR Traffic Control Privatisation scandal --

apparently blame does not lie with that French Flight Plan

https://archive.ph/6be6r

" So, to cut through all this fog, here’s who the stranded passengers should blame: Nats’ owners, the crew who’ve taken out hundreds of millions of pounds in dividends over the past 18 years and seem to have produced an under-invested company. Who they, you ask? Well, for starters, the government, owner of a 49 per cent stake. The second biggest? The Airline Group, with 42 per cent, an outfit half-owned since 2013 by the Universities Superannuation Scheme but still starring British Airways, easyJet, Virgin Atlantic and that specialist in cancelled flights and lost bags, Lufthansa. Making up the numbers is Heathrow airport, with 4 per cent, and Nats’ staff, with 5 per cent.

The company was contentiously part-privatised in 2001 as a “public-private partnership”, when the government took out £758 million. It left Nats “burdened with over twice as much debt as it carried before”, as the public accounts committee noted in 2003. The money came from the then seven-strong Airline Group. But, as the PAC pointed out, it “paid only one sixteenth of the purchase price, the rest being financed by loans repayable by Nats itself”. When the USS bought half the airlines’ stake, they shared £143 million.

Nats paid its first £5 million dividend in 2005, but by 2011, they were really cranking up. Between then and 2020, the shareholders pocketed £550 million in dividends — as much as £82 million one year, until Covid forced a halt to the payouts. To boot, the biggest airline investor, with about 7 per cent, is none other than British Airways, the carrier once run by the IATA’s Walsh: a fellow whose cost-cutting prowess earned him the soubriquet “Slasher”. He was hardly immune from his own IT screw-ups, incidentally, not least May 2017’s: a farrago that messed around 75,000 passengers after the “uninterruptible power supply” failed to live up to its name.

Yes, Nats manages about two million flights annually. And last year it did spend £114 million on capex. But it admits it’s cutting its spending proposals out to 2027 to £120 million a year versus plans for the previous regulatory period of up to £160 million. Wouldn’t some of the money paid out in dividends have been better-spent building system resilience? And how come the CAA — the regulator now investigating the cause of the chaos — wasn’t on the case? As for the passengers demanding compo, there’s an obvious place to start: Nats’ dividend-guzzling owners. "

[frog222]

Refit -- The Lord high Admiral's wheeze turned my mind to this --

Why the nation’s young manhood ended up painting coal white


https://www.standard.co.uk/culture/book ... al%20white

Google tells us another reason apart from military bull

Try " whitewashing heaps of coal "

[AnatolyKasparov]

Oh, I missed that the Tories were on the 'National Service' bandwagon again

The charge (so to speak) being led by the utterly ludicrous Sebastian Payne.

[frog222]

Oh, I missed that the Tories were on the 'National Service' bandwagon again

The charge (so to speak) being led by the utterly ludicrous Sebastian Payne.

Chuckling as I imagine BSM Williams at work on that 'orrible little recruit

[refitman]

Aren't we lucky to have such a generous Gov

[gilsey]

[AnatolyKasparov]

Rachel Reeves is a former junior champion, so it may be that she throws chess a few crumbs despite the general "prudent" approach she will surely adopt.

[refitman]

Rachel Reeves is a former junior champion, so it may be that she throws chess a few crumbs despite the general "prudent" approach she will surely adopt.

Seeing as Labour have no plans for any additional spending (their reason for not planning any tax increases), I can't see Reeves even springing for a single chess set.