Peter Reynolds

That’s you and me.  We’re the one’s who’ve been conned and cheated.  Gordon, Alistair, the FSA – they’re all either criminally negligent incompetents or co-conspirators.

Absolutely nothing has changed in the world of banking.  Is any more proof needed that the people running banks are liars, cheats and thieves?  Aside from the systematic extortion of the taxpayer, none of the promises about lending to the real ecomony or reining in their depraved “culture” have been kept.

Spineless assurances will not do anymore.  The government must radically overhaul the terms of the licences under which banks operate.   Real leadership and responsibility is needed now to ensure that this happens  before the end of the year – not after months or years of consultation and behind the scenes corruption.

Businesses that want to enjoy the huge privilege of serving UK consumers as bankers must be held to a strict and rigidly enforced rulebook.   No participation in casino banking, minimum levels of lending, maximum levels of interest rates and charges, a “right to borrow” for those businesses and consumers who meet straightforward criteria.

These steps are essential to re-establish the operation of an effective market economy.  In a world which has become entirely monetised we can no longer be subject to the rapacious and avaricious behaviour of those who run the money business.

Today I launched a new website.

www.leadingedgepersonaltechnology.com

It was wonderful to see Tiscali exposed on Watchdog this evening.  For years it has demonstrated itself to be a company to avoid. It is so clearly focused on profit rather than on customers that its death wish is about to be fulfilled.

When will the dumb suits that run businesses like this wake up to real life?  This is a tale of greed and disrespect for consumers – just like the banks.  The company has consumed itself with avarice and aspiration rather than delivering a service

I’ve had two Iomega Storcenters now.  The first was 1 TB and after about 18 months it failed for no reason I can understand and took nearly a terabyte of movies and backups with it.  The second was 3 TB – yes, you may well ask, why did I do it again?  That has failed now after about 12 months with about 2.5 terabytes of my data on it.

Iomega support is as useless now as it was the first time.  I’d already tried everything they could suggest before I rang them.  Being told in a thick French accent that the Iomega warranty does not cover any data loss and that I may want to contact a local data recovery expert just doesn’t do it for me.  It leaves me extremely fed up.

The problem is these NAS (Network Attached Storage) devices are a RAID array of disks interrupted by a Linux subsystem so if anything goes wrong you’ve got no chance of using a Windows PC to do anything about it.

Having failed to learn my lesson the first time, now I know that I will never, ever even consider Iomega or NAS as a solution again.  These are inevitable disasters in big shiny boxes just waiting to happen.  I have seven SATA hard disks in my system that I can monitor and maintain under Windows.  If the worst happens I know I can at least try to recover some of the data and will almost certainly succeed to some degree.

Stay well away from NAS.

It’s hit British TV already so I’m a little bit late but I’m delighted and enthralled by this “Desperate Housewives” about the Madison Avenue ad business in the early 60s.  I think that the hiatus and hysteria that I participated in thirty years later in London was the fantasy fulfilment of those earlier years.

Mad Men is the story of Donald Draper, a handsome creative director (in the days when they wore suits!) who has everything:  a beautiful, adoring wife; a beautiful, adoring secretary; a beautiful mistress who kicks him out even before he gets his breath back and a host of adoring colleagues and staff.  He seems to have just one skelton in the cupboard: a long, lost half brother who he doesn’t want to know any more.  The story is still unfolding but, thank heavens for the internet, I have the whole of seasons one and two waiting to be watched.

You have to be an ad man to get all the in jokes.  If you don’t understand the significance of the DDB VW ads then you’ll miss out on much of the point of episode three.  The indolence and last minute, off the top of the head ideas are the truth about the ad business as are the enormous quantities of alcohol and the  pampering and pimping for clients.   The almost constant cigarette smoking by every member  of the cast is the truth about the 60s too.

So who put these ideas down on paper and sold them to the production company?  It’s Matthew Weiner, writer of The Sopranos and, as far as I can tell, no background as an ad man so all credit to his talent as a researcher.  It’s a great show and demonstrates the sort of quality TV that we just don’t do in the UK.

http://www.worldsworstbanker.com/

I urge you to go to this site and sign the two petitions listed there.

The first is about the reduction of his pension.  Personally, I think he should lose it all.  I would have no objection to the introduction of the Fred Goodwin Pension Confiscation Act 2009.  As the Prime Minister endlessly repeats: “These are extraordinary times…”

The second is on the Number 10 website and calls for the removal of his knighthood “for services to banking”… cough, cough, choke, gag, choke, cough…

Pundits talk about whether the future of democracy is in online participation.  There’s no doubt that it is worth making the effort and signing these two petitions.

In a cold hearted, clinical and utterly callous way, we must bring “Sir” Fred Goodwin to heel, to the gutter, to grovel and to ignominy as he richly and deeply deserves.

There are many ways that the government can do this.  I suggest that the most effective is simply not to pay him and let him sue.  This is a pragmatic and commercial approach but, irrespective of its outcome, simultaneously we must prosecute this fundamentally evil individual with all the vigour that honourable and decent society can muster.

If we force him to sue for the rewards of failure then he will have to make his case and I do not believe he wil be able to under the overriding doctrine of “reasonableness”.

However, in the interests of justice, denying him money is insufficient.  Nothing less than criminal punishment will suffice.  Surely,  if our tradition of common law has any relevance, it must be able to sanction his behaviour.

Lawyers must consider whether there is a case for criminal negligence, for conspiracy, for perjury or for any derivative of theft.  Our Judges must package his offences in a way that can produce serious and effective penalties.

Without doubt though this “man”, this “Sir” has deceived.  He lied to the Select Committee saying that he had received no compensation for loss of office.  He has cheated us all.  Whether he retains his obscene pension or not he must be jailed.  Only then will justice be done.

It is truly pathetic isn’t it to see these pathetic, small men grubbing around in the gutter to try and save themselves?

“Sir” James Crosby runs HBOS into the ground then bails out at the last minute to become vice-chairman of the FSA.  You really couldn’t make these things up unless you were writing a Mafia or organised crime novel.

He becomes one of the Prime Minister’s cronies and overpaid advisors but then is caught out by the whistleblower who he sacked.

They are tumbling like nine pins now but who is still getting away with it?  Who has been in post for longer than any of these bank robbers?  Who was responsible for settiong up the regulatory system that has proved to be corrupt and incompetent?  Gordon Brown, the worst, most corrupt, most incompetent, most myopic, most venal of them all.

There is no more time.  This tyrant must be overthrown now.  All these knighthoods must be withdrawn.  Criminal investigations and personal bankruptcies must follow.

When “Sir” Fred Goodwin lost the plot this morning and started wandering off in his hallucinatory world about how he could legitimately re-package sub-prime mortgages as a AAA security, well then we saw the truth.

The man is stark, raving mad.  He continues in his delusion that the world he helped to create makes some sense.  He should be sectioned immediately.

In this competitive internet world, what happens when your ISP (and your long-established email address) gets taken over or merged into another organisation?

In a market where there are no prizes for customer service at all, what can you expect from a provider who already has a reputation as the blackest of the black sheep?

When Tiscali took over Homechoice about a year ago, the Homechoice website continued up until early this month. Last year there was a downtime of far too many days on the Homechoice POP servers and all sorts of problems with trying to administer email accounts. There was no explanation at all, let alone any apology.

Early this month everything went down again for several days. When the POP server came back up the website had disappeared leaving just a re-direct to the Tiscali homepage.

Then last week everything stopped again. Emails to Homechoice support were returned as undeliverable and those to Tiscali went unanswered. I went to Tiscali’s PR agency and then direct to the Tiscali’s Chief of PR and my own email address started working again.

I discovered today that Tiscali has dumped Homechoice. Apparently “legacy” Homechoice email addresses have been ported over to Tiscali’s own servers but it’s quite clear that there will be noi more support for creating or deleting email accounts or changing passwords.

The Tiscali insider I spoke to said himself “You’d think they could have sent out a letter or an email or something”.

Unfortunately, of course, this is just par for the course for this industry and Tiscali’s reputation is such that it seems to set the standards for abysmal and irresponsible customer service.

No explanation. No communication. No apology.

It is infuriating to see them now scurrying and rushing to reduce their interest rates after the outcry at their dilatory and greedy response to the Bank Of England’s massive rate cut.

We are going to to have to drag the w**ker bankers every greasy step of the way to a place where they start behaving responsibly and fulfilling their obligations to us as major shareholders.  We are going to have to watch their dishonest and deceitful efforts to snaffle huge bonuses, in shares if not cash, and we are going to have to treat them as the completely untrustworthy spivs that they are.

What is clear that some of them are already getting away with it because the government has been so weak in stipulating the conditions and “mechanisms”, as Gordon Brown put it, that will control their greed and thievery.

It is time to start naming names and for the work to be done that will uncover and expose those who have manipulated the system for their own ends.

The first candidate for the WANTED DEAD OR ALIVE poster is Bob Diamond of Barclays. 

Bob Diamond, Barclays

It is generally agreed that he has spurned the government’s rescue package in favour of the Arabs so that he can hang on to his outrageous, undeserved multimillion pound bonus.  I will be researching his record in more detail.

Please submit your nominations for WANTED DEAD OR ALIVE bankers with as much evidence as you can.

I had the misfortune to have to visit London briefly last week.  I was thoroughly disheartened to see how few people in Hammersmith were wearing poppies. They should be ashamed of themselves. More worrying though was just how difficult it was to buy one.  Hardly any of the shops had them available.  Even those that we should be able to rely on to show a responsible lead like Tescos and Sainsburys are letting down our heroes.  None of the staff are wearing them.  What is going on?  Weymouth and Dorchester are doing much better and the BBC appears to make it a compulsory requirement – and that’s no bad thing.

London is a miserable place full of miserable, selfish people and it reminds me again how I have no enthusiasm for ever returning there.  Tired of London?  Yes, tired of death.

“Why, Sir, you find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.”
— Samuel Johnson, 1777

Samuel Johnson

To someone living in 18th century Britain this famous quotation may have had some relevance  After all, you could walk from the heart of the city into open countryside in little more than an hour.

Today, any man, with any intelligence, will spend only as little time in London as he has to, for today London is all about death.

The death of our children as they run wild, out of control, knifing, abusing and assaulting each other.

The death of liberty as we are watched and spied on relentlessly without proper cause by jobsworths and parasites.

The death of our culture as we have allowed minorities to create ghettoes that now overwhelm our indigenous communities.

The death of integrity as those who run our government and financial systems become ever more venal and corrupt.

Perhaps the only cause for hope in London is the bright light that is Boris Johnson.  This apparent disinterest in the Poppy Appeal, this insult to our heroes really is the final straw for me.  London has become a vile, oppressive hot bed of greed, violence and selfishness.  I shall fiddle with delight while it burns.

The Heart And Soul Of London

So is this to be pattern that our rescue of the w**ker bankers will follow?

Northern Rock is now owned by you and me.  Not by Gordon, Alistair and their cronies but by British taxpayers.  Do we want them throwing people out of their homes onto the streets so that we then have to pick up the bill for re-housing and supporting them?

Now that the “new” management has got its greedy hands back on the tiller they’re heading straight for deep water where they can pillage, plunder and overfish yet again.

I say get rid of all the w**ker bankers and put some real business people in charge.  We don’t want the “experience” of those that have mismanaged banks already.  We want new blood, fresh ideas, people who know the reality of business, not the fantasy world of banking.

I hope and pray that our rescue of these organisations will prove successful based on root and branch reform of the way they do business.  We don’t want a few token sacrifices.  We want all the dead and rotten wood cut out.

Let’s remember that these scoundrels still owe most of us many thousands of pounds in illegal bank charges they have stolen from us.  Perhaps as much as £50 billion over the last six years.  The sooner the OFT gets its finger out and resolves this outstanding matter the better.

I am delighted to see that The Times and now, this morning, Andrew Marr, are joining me in calling for bankers to be brought to account.  The “Thunderer” even said that “heads must roll”.  Roll they must, many of them, until the baskets are full and the streets of the City are running with blood.  The executions should take place in public so that the greedy thieves and scoundrels who have pillaged our economy can be subject to public humiliation and villification as they meet their doom.

I will carry the metaphor no further but the dread and fear that should now be ruining the weekends of the chief executives and chairmen of the banks should be little different from that of the French aristocrats awaiting the guillotine.

We must insist that those individuals who have taken multi million pound bonuses from banks, funds and all forms of financial institutions that are now insolvent must be able to justify the payments in the same way that a director of a small business that had gone bust might have to explain his drawings to a liquidator.  In many instances money will have to be recovered.

Whether guilty of personal wrongdoing or not, the chairmen, chief executives and non-executive directors who have presided over this catastrophe must take responsibility and go!  The same sanction must fall on the heads of the regulators.

Lord Adair Turner, Chairman, and Jon Pain, Managing Director Retail Markets, who both accepted poisoned chalices at the FSA only last month may have some excuse but the rest of the board should be summarily dismissed, not even allowed to resign.

Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling have been extraordinarily unequivocal in many of their statements this week.  We want to know much, much more detail about the “mechanisms” that will put in place to restrain the banks in future.   If the taxpayer has saved your business then in future you will not be gambling on ludicrously complex financial products that only you understand and for which you set the rules.  We prefer that you lend £100,000 to a small business rather than £10 million to a virtual roulette wheel.

“There a million stories in the Naked City”.  Now is the time for “le dénouement”.

Recently I have been the victim of false and inaccurate information published on my credit file.  I am certain that there are hundreds of thousands of other people in the same position.  Experian and Equifax, the two key offenders in this, seem to be above the law, certainly above justice.  They can say what they want with impunity and if you want to do anything about it you are faced with convoluted, complicated and lengthy processes that are clearly designed to grind you down and deter any correction of the nonsense that these modern day robber barons want to publish.

The Data Protection Act, which is supposed to protect us from such iniquitous conduct and the Information Commissioner, who is supposed to be our guardian in such matters, are both toothless, useless and all part of the self-sustaining system promulgated by the banks which is a matter of national scandal.

Of course, a large part of their power comes from the fact that nobody wants to put their head above the parapet for fear of making their own position worse.  This is the real iniquity which makes their oppression self-sustaining, in fact, makes it stronger and stronger the longer it is allowed to continue.

At the most basic level you are entitled under law to get a copy of your own credit file within seven days for a fee of £2.00.  I wonder if anyone has ever actually achieved this?  It took me something in excess of six weeks to get mine after I’d been told that my requests hadn’t been received, that my identity needed to be verified, that they had a large backlog of requests.  They use the Data Protection Act as a reason they cannot  comply with the Data Protection Act and if you make a complaint to the Information Commissioner, as I have, well you might as well p**s in the wind because it just gets lost in a morass of queues, delays, bureaucracy and I expect I’ll be lucky to hear anything a year from now.

There are many, many more impenetrable layers to this.  Experian and Equifax both operate some of the worst designed, most difficult websites I have ever come across.  They provide you with reference numbers that when you enter them precisely as given to you in writing you are told that they are in an “incorrect format”.  They promise to acknowledge queries but do not do so.  They provide hundreds and hundreds of pages of useless, confusing, mind-numbing “information” which you have to wade through before you can make a specific enquiry.

There is only one conclusion that any reasonable person can make and that it that these websites are deliberately designed to obfuscate, to confuse and to deter the man in the street from proceeding any further.

I discovered a County Court Judgment registered against me in a case where I am suing a local authority (yes, I am suing them!) and in which I have a document in front of me with a Court stamp stating that no such judgment exists.  I discovered another entirely fictitious judgment which was shown on my credit file this month (August), supposedly made in 2006, which did not show on my own copy of my credit file in June.

The buck really does stop with the Information Commissioner but he, Richard Thomas, appointed by the Queen, as I have already demonstrated, is worse than useless and is merely a sop to deflect any concern about this dastardly conduct that the banks and financial tyrants are engaged in.

The property market is, once again, difficult for everyone.  In recent weeks we have even been asked to have some sympathy for that most despised group of parasites, estate agents – but I have none.  Truth is that their “profession” is a necessary evil and in good times as in bad it is only those with some standards and, maybe, a little integrity that are worth dealing with.

In the past twelve months I have had comprehensive experience of the estate agents in and around Emsworth, Portsmouth and Chichester.  There have been one or two who have been a pleasure to deal with, who have been professional, efficient and helpful.  Others have been uninterested and disinterested, unethical, inefficient and some are little short of crooked.

First, the positive.  There is one firm that shines out as example to all others – Henry Adams.  I have not bought, sold, rented or let a single property from them but I have viewed many and I can truthfully say that every transaction has been smooth, easy and as it should be.  If only I could say the same for the rest.

Borland & Bound of Emsworth, Charlotte and Alison in their lettings department are liars.  If you stalk the internet property sites, as I know how to do, you can catch the new properties immediately they come to market.  If you’re quick on the draw the truth becomes evident.  Agents which pick and choose who they sell or let to and at what price.  Whether it is their sister’s best friend’s cousin’s daughter or their next door neighbour’s husband who they share a bottle of cheap white wine with every Wednesday afternoon, there are  dishonest people out there that you cannot rely on to deal with you properly.  Borland & Bound told me for a week that they just couldn’t get hold of the landlord to arrange a viewing.  Then I met another prospective tenant outside another property who told me that they’d viewed the Borland & Bound property the day before.  Borland & Bound then told me they’d had a “bad” reference on me.  I ask, from who, on what authority, when did I give you the information or source from which to take a reference?  Is that the best bullshit you can come up with?  I wonder what the truth is?

Then there was “Zone” of Chichester.  What dreadful 1980s-type “brand” is that and can anyone take a firm with such a name seriously?  I had to try to because some unsuspecting property owner who had exactly what I wanted in Bosham had made the mistake of hiring this firm and apparently causing it all sorts of problems.  After all, business would be so much easier, wouldn’t it, if it wasn’t for those dreadful people we call customers?

It was so much trouble to arrange a viewing.  Five or six telephone calls were never returned and eventually produced the reaction that “we might be able to arrange a viewing in a week or so”.  “Please don’t pester us.  You’re probably not the sort of tenant we want because you’d be on the phone all the time”.

Eventually a viewing was arranged but when I called to ask for directions I was told “I’m far too busy.  Ask someone in the street”.  Then surprise, surprise, “the landlord has a prior offer”, “the property is now off the market”.

It must be unpleasant to have to demean yourself, to lie, to cheat, to deceive but perhaps some of these estate agents enjoy their work.  I can think of no other explanation.