Utopia, you are standing in it!

The new Chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, is said to be considering scrapping the EU’s cap on bonuses in the financial sector. This would be hard to sell to the public, but is still the right thing to do.

The ‘bankers bonus cap’ is part of the Capital Requirements Directive IV that was first applied to credit institutions and investment firms across the EU in 2014. It limits the discretionary bonuses that they can pay to senior managers and other “material risk takers” to no more than 100% of their fixed (basic) pay, or 200% with the approval of shareholders. It remains part of the UK rules after Brexit.

The case for scrapping the cap is straightforward. It is a clumsy rule whose costs outweigh any potential benefits. In particular, it has led firms to increase basic pay and made it harder for them to adjust variable pay, This has added to…

Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth has passed away, and the overwhelming majority of people in New Zealand mourn her passing.

Not, of course, because her death was unexpected, or a tragedy in the ordinary sense of that word: at the age of 96 and increasingly suffering “mobility issues”, she had outlived the great majority of her subjects by at least a decade and was able to perform her royal duties right up to the end. Not for her, prolonged physical incapacity or mental decline. Just hours before her passing, she asked Liz Truss, the new Leader of the Conservative Party, to form a new British Government.

But mourn her passing we do because she was, for seven decades, not only the Head of State of New Zealand but the wise and mature head of the Commonwealth, that loose agglomeration of countries which at one time or another were ruled by the…

The Wokeists in company with a small number of radical extremists have been falsifying NZ history for some time now, but their new narrative often clashes with the facts:

MP Karaitiana Takamoana (Eastern Maori) in c.1871 tried to pass legislation to force all Maori school children to learn only in English. According to Parliament’s website, he did not himself speak English. However, he did dress himself up and otherwise indulge in expensive Western ‘urban sophisticaiton’. For example, this chief went into debt building his own, large, Maori Club House in Napier and ended up having to sell off his people’s land to cover the damage.”

PETITION OF WI TE HAKIRO AND 336 OTHERS (PART OF)

[TRANSLATION.] — 7. “NATIVE SCHOOLS ACT, 1867.”

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[Translation.]
7. “Native Schools Act, 1867.”

Wedesire that “The Native Schools Act, 1867,” should be amended to this…

There’s been a political earthquake in Sweden overnight:

Sweden’s right-wing parties combined to win a remarkable, if slim, election victory on Wednesday, buoyed by surging supportfor a far-right nationalist party, the Sweden Democrats, an electoral convulsion expected to shake national politics and likely end eight years of rule by the center-left.

But it’s been coming for some time as crime has risen relentlessly and Sweden’s famed Centre-Left consensus on all matters began to fade due to hubristic, ideological and frankly stupid decisions by the The Powers That Be, starting with mass immigration from the Middle East:

Over the last twenty years the Sweden Democrats have gone from being a “extremist fringe party” at nearly zero percent in the polls to twenty percent plus , while the Social Democrats have dropped from 45% to 30%, having ruled the nation for all but 15 years since 1932.

I don’t envy the…