Blogs

It seems our news page is full of fraud at the moment - stories about employees committing fraud towards their employers, that is. Maybe it's the time of year, maybe it's the credit crunch hitting home.

Poor old Woolworths. As if they haven't got enough troubles at the moment, they have ended up being fined for exposing their employees to asbestos dust.

The job losses by the end of the year could be as high as half a million in two years according to estimates that CPA chairman Adrian Barden used in his Autumn Lunch speech yesterday.

After the initial euphoria and excitement which I'm afraid I always get when I see someone I know on the telly, it struck me that the BBC TV programme in which PTS md Alan Ball appeared promoting the Boiler Scrappage Scheme fell prey to the blindness that seems to hit just about every part of…

How come, it takes three successive quarters of contraction before we're officially allowed to say it's a recession, yet a measly 0.1% growth in one quarter is enough for the government to claim all its panic-efforts have worked and that the UK is out of the woods?

Bloody hell. I go AWOL for a week and look what happens.

It appears that some energy suppliers had the cheek to charge higher prices to householders wanting to have boilers installed under the last government's Boiler Scrappage Scheme.

Phew! I haven't been to a UK building exhibition as good as that one since, well the 1990s probably. That's not just a quote from me, by the way, it's something that a lot of people were saying about last week's Ecobuild show.

Mick Williams, he of the boiler scrappage campaign, is on the warpath again.

Fred Goodwin must feel as though he's stepped through a worm hole into some kind of parallel universe in which an arrogant banker is seen as akin to a traitor to the Crown or a murdering, genocidally-minded dictator.