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GUARDIAN Wed, 01 Feb 2012 11:55:27 GMT
The Full Monty tariff, offering 'all you can eat' calls, texts and internet useage, could spark price war among networks
T-Mobile has thrown down the gauntlet to the other mobile providers after launching a phone tariff offering unlimited calls, texts and internet access.
Prices for the Full Monty tariff start at £36 a month, although customers have to sign a two-year contract. Those taking out the plan can take their pick of all the handsets in the T-Mobile range, including iPhone, Android and BlackBerry phones. The firm insists the tariff will not be subjected to a fair use policy, meaning those who sign up really will have unlimited internet, texts and calls.
The deal reverses the trend of recent years. The original iPhone came with free internet access, but more recent tariffs have set data download limits, often as low as 500MB a month.
T-Mobile UK's Ben Fritsch said the mobile network developed the plan on the back of increased sales and demand for data-hungry smartphones. "Over the past two years we have seen a rise in mobile internet use of over 250%, which reflects the consumer trend of being 'always on' wherever they are. However, consumers also want to retain a more personal level of communication by calling or sending a text," he said.
Customers on the plan will also be able to use their phone for tethering (using it as an internet connection for a laptop or tablet) at no extra cost.
The tariff will be available, including on a 16GB iPhone 4S for £99 upfront, from £36 a month for two years with unlimited internet access, texts and calls to other T-Mobile customers, but a limit of 2,000 minutes for calls to other networks. If you think you will exceed that you can go completely unlimited across all networks for £41 a month.
The same iPhone from O2 on a two-year contract would also cost £99.99 upfront, but comes with 600 minutes, unlimited texts and just 500MB of data a month. The only other operator to offer unlimited internet data at a similar price is Three.
The Full Monty will also be available on the Samsung Galaxy SII and HTC Sensation XE with no upfront cost on the £36-a-month plan.
Before you sign up, be aware there are still a few things for which you will be charged: calls to international numbers and those beginning 08 (including 0870) or 070 are charged at 40p a minute; and picture messages are not included in the text allowance.
Dominic Baliszewski from Mobilechoices.co.uk says smartphone users should check their usage before rushing to switch.
"The plan will provide excellent value for customers who make a lot of calls, send a lot of texts and do a lot of downloading. Chewing through 500MB to 1GB of data in a month is easy to do with an iPhone," he said.
"However, anyone who sends 300 texts and makes 100 minutes of calls a month will almost certainly be wasting their money. Also remember that other providers may follow suit and launch their own 'all you can eat' tariff to compete with T-Mobile, so it could be worth waiting to see if a price war erupts, lowering costs even more for consumers."
Internet, phones & broadband
Household bills
Consumer affairs
Mobile phones
Telecoms
T-Mobile
Telecommunications industry
Miles Brignall
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GUARDIAN Wed, 01 Feb 2012 12:47:00 GMT
Economists say 'vast improvement' in manufacturing at start of year suggests return to recession 'is by no means a certainty'
Government hopes that the latest UK economic downturn will prove to be a blip have been boosted by news that Britain's manufacturers enjoyed a strong start to 2012, as their output grew at the fastest pace in almost a year.
Contrasting with a manufacturing slump that dragged down overall growth last quarter, the closely watched purchasing managers' index (PMI) survey for January was more upbeat than expected and was taken by some economists as evidence recession can still be averted. The report suggested activity at Britain's factories had recovered in January to the strongest since last May and orders were rising.
But their eurozone counterparts did not fare so well as they continued to battle fierce austerity measures and weakened confidence. A similar survey for the single currency area suggested manufacturers there continued to see activity and orders slowing.
In the UK, the headline activity reading rose to 52.1 in January from 49.7 in December on the Markit/CIPS UK manufacturing PMI. That was well above the 50 mark that divides contraction from expansion and stronger than a forecast for 50.0 in a Reuters poll of economists.
The news that orders also rose for the first time in seven months brings some respite for the government after official data last week revealed the economy shrank 0.2% in the final months of 2011. Economists said the early signs from industry in 2012 suggested growth could rebound somewhat, avoiding recession, which is technically two consecutive quarters of contraction.
"Manufacturing was a key area of weakness which caused the UK economy to contract in the final quarter, so this surprising rebound in January means a return to recession is by no means a certainty," said Rob Dobson, senior economist at survey compilers Markit.
The survey also showed output expanded at the fastest pace since last March, new orders rose following a period of contraction and employment numbers stabilised as large firms laid off staff but smaller manufacturers hired new workers. Cost pressures on manufacturers continued to ease, as average input prices fell for the third straight month.
David Tinsley, UK economist at BNP Paribas commented: "We believe that the UK will avoid recession and post some positive, if moderate, growth in the first quarter... It's clearly early days, but the outlook for the economy has distinctly improved over the last few months."
As UK manufacturers are urged by politicians and lobby groups to look beyond traditional trading partners in the troubled eurozone, there were modest signs of demand further afield picking up. Manufacturers reported improved orders from clients in Brazil, China, the Middle East and the US.
But with manufacturing making up just 10.2% of the UK economy, analysts said a report on the dominant services sector due on Friday would be more telling for the overall UK outlook.
There were also concerns that headwinds from the eurozone show little sign of easing. PMI surveys from the eurozone on Wednesday showed manufacturing activity there declined for a sixth straight month in January. In Germany, business improved in the sector, but that was not enough to offset contraction elsewhere in the region.
Output rose but new order levels continued to decline and Markit's eurozone manufacturing PMI remained well within contraction territory at 48.8, up from December's 46.9.
UK-based economists said that the strains in the eurozone, and signs inflation is easing, left the door open for the Bank of England to pump more money into the economy when it announces its latest policy moves next week. Such an extension of the Bank's quantitative easing (QE) programme is widely expected but policymakers could choose to raise it by a little less than previously expected following the upbeat manufacturing report.
"The consensus is split between an........
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GUARDIAN Wed, 01 Feb 2012 15:06:33 GMT
If we're going to have honours, they should surely reflect people's social worth – not reward wealthy parasites
Poor old martyred Mr Fred Goodwin. According to ex-CBI supremo Lord Digby Jones, this latter-day Joan of Arc is the victim of a "lynch mob" mentality. Quite right: it's the unemployed and poor who are supposed to get a kicking from the tabloids, not multimillionaire pillars of the establishment. Has the world gone mad?
But now the poor bloke has had his knighthood shredded, it's a good time to rethink the whole honours system. For a start, handing out "Orders of the British Empire" strikes me as more than a little tasteless in the first place. Poet Benjamin Zephaniah turned down his OBE nearly a decade ago because "it reminds me of how my foremothers were raped and my forefathers brutalised". He has a point: as a country we're far from coming to terms with the barbarity of empire. As Mike Davis points out in the seminal Late Victorian Holocausts, millions of Indians starved to death in unnecessary famines under British rule. It is surely possible to recognise achievements without celebrating this murderous era.
It's not just the name that's the problem, though. These days, we barely even blink at the fact honours are routinely handed out by prime ministers to their mates or to establishment patsies. Sometimes it appears that contributions to party coffers – rather than to society – is the way to go about getting a knighthood. I'm sure we can all be proud of hedge fund manager Paul Ruddock being knighted this year for his inspiring contribution to British society: most notably, making £100m out of the collapse of Northern Rock, and depositing £500,000 in Tory party bank accounts since 2003.
Those who have actually made contributions to society generally end up with the bargain basement honour, the MBE. I'm pretty confident that Maureen Adams, handed an MBE this year for dedicating her career to helping those affected by HIV/Aids, has had more of a positive net impact on society than, say, Centrica chairman Roger Carr, who was knighted last year after prices were raised by 7% just as winter approached.
So let's ditch the whole system and start from scratch. This morning, the BBC's Evan Davis proposed that, if he ran the system, "honours would go to people whose material compensation vastly under-rewards them for their achievements". That's a great place to start, although those that society depends on to function and who often scrape by on poverty wages should, of course, be paid properly, too.
But if we're going to have honours, they should surely reflect people's social worth. The New Economics Foundation found that for every £1 a hospital cleaner is paid, £10 of social value is created. City bankers, on the other hand, destroyed £7 for every £1 they created. But who is more likely to be honoured as things stand?
So here's my suggestion. Instead of knighthoods for wealthy parasites, let's have a new honour, which could be called Pillars of Society. The title would be pretty self-explanatory. Establishment types would be barred; let's stop celebrating wealth and power for the sake of it. Instead, let's start by recognising the efforts of those increasingly demonised as "vested public sector interests" who "leach off the taxpayer": like nurses, refuse collectors, lollipop ladies, teachers, and so on.
There's a whole host of other Pillars of Society, too: community workers; activists who dedicate their lives to fighting racism, sexism and homophobia; trade union reps who fight the corner of workers in the workplace; those who fight for the sick and disabled; volunteers and charity workers; and those who show great bravery or commit great sacrifices for others.
Instead of starting every year with a roll-call of millionaires, senior civil servants and royal servants, we'd have an inspiring insight into the best British society has to offer. It would provide a much-needed platform for those we all depend on,...
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GUARDIAN Wed, 01 Feb 2012 18:25:40 GMT
BAE Systems, which owns a third of the Eurofighter consortium beaten by France's Dassault for preferred bidder status, denies risk of redundancies
The government is again under fire for failing to support UK manufacturing after the Indian government declared France the preferred bidder to build 126 fighter jets in a deal worth £7bn.
New Delhi said the French company Dassault, which makes the Rafale fighter, was frontrunner for the contract, robbing Eurofighter's Typhoon of one of its most important export orders to date.
BAE Systems, Britain's biggest manufacturer, owns 33% of Eurofighter and unions are worried that jobs could be jeopardised, though this was denied by the company. David Cameron also denied there would be job cuts after he was quizzed during prime minister's questions in the Commons.
Downing Street said it would ask Delhi why it had chosen the French. There was also suggestions that the British might ask the European commission to examine whether EU state aid rules had been breached, but officials said it was premature to speak in those terms.
There was uproar last year when Siemens of Germany was awarded a £1.4bn contract to build 1,200 carriages for the London Thameslink route instead of Bombardier of Canada, which could have built them at its Derby plant. Bombardier has since announced plans to cut 1,400 jobs at the East Midlands factory.
The Indian decision is a bitter pill for the British government, following remarks by French president Nicolas Sarkozy that Britain has destroyed its manufacturing base, and in the light of pledges by the government to boost the private sector – and make the UK less dependent on banking.
Cameron, who last year led one of the largest-ever business delegations to India to persuade its government of the value of British industry, had lobbied heavily in favour of Eurofighter, but the Indians are now talking exclusively to the French.BAE's shares initially fell in the City.
Tory MPs are complaining about the wisdom of the UK aid programme to India if New Delhi goes ahead and awards the contract to France, although observers said the Indians could still change their minds. In the House of Commons, Cameron said the Typhoon was a "superb aircraft, far better than Rafale. Of course, I will do everything I can to encourage the Indians to look at Typhoon, because I think it is such a good aircraft."
He added: "The decision is obviously disappointing, but it is about who the Indians have assessed as making the lowest bid and therefore asked to enter into further negotiations. They have not yet awarded the contract."
But the shadow defence secretary, Jim Murphy, said: " If he [Cameron] is serious about jobs and growth this will be a priority as it could have a real impact on the future of UK aerospace. Workers at BAE plants in Lancashire, Yorkshire and across the country will be worried and will want to see real leadership.
"The government appears unable to produce an industrial strategy for the UK defence industry. This is now more essential than ever."
The row over the Indian contract came on the same day the government published a defence procurement white paper which critics said would favour foreign companies over British ones, although the government denied there had ever been a "British first" policy.
Observers said the paper underlined the government's shift to buying "off-the-shelf" defence equipment rather than developing new technologies, as part of a bid by the Ministry of Defence to cut tens of millions from its budget.
"Off-the-shelf" is viewed by some as a euphemism for buying cheaper equipment that is already in use by other countries, although a spokeswoman for the MoD said the move did not preclude buying from British companies and that a proportion of the budget would be specifically earmarked for developing new technologies and systems.
Peter Luff, the minister for defence equipment and technology, said: "Given the defence black hole we inherited,..
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ECONOMIST Mon, 30 Jan 2012 15:58:40 GMT
CASSANDRA must first declare an interest: I am a decades-long customer of Britain’s Royal Bank of Scotland, and an extremely small shareholder in RBS. So should I be pleased that Stephen Hester, the bank’s CEO, has just announced that he will not take a bonus (in shares) worth just under £1m ($1.56m)? Or should I resent the fact that Mr Hester’s decision seems entirely the result of pressure from the government (which owns 83% of “my” bank, having bailed it out after the disastrous and hubristic regime of Sir Fred Goodwin)? Actually, my reaction is one of wry amusement. By most accounts Mr Hester, wooed by the government to bring RBS back to health, has been doing a pretty good job—though there is justified criticism that the bank has failed to meet its targets for lending to small and medium-sized businesses. But it is instructive to see how public near-fury over the outrageous awards common in the banking sector affects politics. The Conservative-led government (supposedly in favour of free-market pay) puts pressure on the RBS remuneration board to make sure that the Hester bonus does not break the voter-sensitive £1m mark; and the opposition Labour Party joyfully calls for a full-scale House of Commons debate (ignoring its own role in agreeing RBS contracts when in office). Meanwhile, the RBS chairman, Sir Philip Hampton, adds to the pressure on Mr Hester ...
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GUARDIAN Mon, 30 Jan 2012 19:18:40 GMT
In RBS's case, there will be a row every January until the bank is sold – for the government, doing nothing is not a policy
What's a fair bonus for a boss of a nationalised institution, vital to the functioning of the UK economy, that has undergone an internal revolution but has yet to succeed in selling a single share from the state's collection? Stephen Hester could be forgiven for noting how little political fuss accompanied the award of a £1.5m bonus in 2010 to Adam Crozier for his efforts as chief executive of the Royal Mail.
There are differences, of course. For a start, Crozier's bonus represented the flowering of a three-year incentive scheme; Hester's near-£1m bonus was for a single year's performance and he remains a member of a long-term scheme. On the other hand, fixing Royal Bank of Scotland is probably a stiffer challenge even than modernising the Royal Mail.
The point is that the government needs to decide how to treat pay and bonuses at nationalised and semi-nationalised companies that wish to recruit executives from the private sector. In RBS's case, there will be a row every January until the bank is sold – indeed, there will be more argy-bargy within weeks when executives below board level are handed their winnings. Doing nothing, while praying that Ed Miliband doesn't table a Commons motion, is not a policy.
Executive pay and bonuses
Royal Bank of Scotland
Banking
Stephen Hester
Adam Crozier
Nils Pratley
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GUARDIAN Mon, 30 Jan 2012 20:30:01 GMT
All the focus has been on bankers' bonuses, yet no one has looked at the economists who argued for rewarding bosses by giving them a bigger financial stake in their companies
Take a big step back. Ignore those sterile debates about how Dave screwed up over Stephen Hester's pay and where this leaves Ed. Instead, ask this: which profession has done most to justify the millions handed over to the boss of RBS, his colleagues and counterparts? Which group has been most influential in making the argument that top people deserve top pay? Not the executives themselves – at least, not directly. Nor the headhunters. Try the economists.
The ground rules for the system by which City bankers, Westminster MPs and ordinary taxpayers live today were set by two US economists just a couple of decades ago. In 1990, Michael Jensen and Kevin Murphy published one of the most famous papers in economics, which first appeared in the Journal of Political Economy and then in the Harvard Business Review. Its argument is well summed up by the latter's title: "CEO Incentives: It's Not How Much You Pay, But How."
The way to get better performance out of bosses, argued the economists, was by giving them a bigger financial stake in their company's performance. You couldn't have asked for a better codification of bonus culture had you stuck a mortar board on Gordon Gekko's head. So popular, so influential was Jensen and Murphy's work that it opened the door to a new corporate culture: one where executives routinely scooped millions in stock options, apparently justified by top research that they were worth it.
The usual criticism of economists is that they missed the crisis: they preferred their models to reality, and those models took no account of the mischief that could be caused by bankers running wild. Of all explanations, this is the most comforting; all academics need to do next time, presumably, is look a little harder – ideally with a grant from the taxpayer.
But economists didn't just fail to spot the financial crisis – they helped create it. They provided the intellectual framework and drew up the policies that helped caused the boom – and the bust. Yet rather than a full-blown investigation, their active involvement in this crisis and their motivations have barely got a look-in. As Philip Mirowski, one of the world's leading historians of economic thought, puts it: "The bankers have got off the hook, and gone back to business as usual – and so too have the economists." It's the same discipline that spoke all that nonsense about markets always being efficient that is now deciding how to reform the economy.
A few weeks ago, I described the current economic system as a bankocracy run by the banks, for the banks. Mainstream economists play the role of a secularised priesthood, explaining to the laity just how and why the markets' will must be done. Why are they doing this? Luigi Zingales, an economist at Chicago, calls it "economists' capture". Much of the blame for the financial crisis has fallen on regulators for being captured by the bankers, and seeing the world from their point of view. The same thing, he believes, has happened to academics. When Zingales looked at the 150 most downloaded academic papers on executive pay he found that those arguing that bosses should get more (à la Jensen and Murphy) were 55% more likely to get published in the top journals.
Anyone who saw the film Inside Job will recall the scene in which leading economists are shown puffing financial deregulation, or the outlook for Icelandic capital markets, or whatever – and then revealed to have taken hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions, from the very interests they are advocating. But this goes wider than direct payment; many academics also believe those arguments about how markets work best when they are left alone. As the economist Steve Keen puts it: "Most economists are deluded."
Maybe, but it also pays to be deluded. Think about the rewards for toeing..
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GUARDIAN Mon, 30 Jan 2012 20:58:56 GMT
Hector Sants told the Treasury committee, that FSA could not block merger of Royal Bank of Scotland's and ABN Amro
Sir Fred Goodwin and other Royal Bank of Scotland executives criticised in December's 450-page Financial Service Authority report are "not fit" to run a bank and will never again work in regulated financial services, according to Britain's top regulator.
Hector Sants, chief executive of the Financial Services Authority, said that although no enforcement action had been taken against them, in his opinion, executives responsible for a catalogue of disastrous decisions leading to the near-failure of RBS in 2008 would be effectively blackballed.
The FSA has struck a formal agreement with RBS's former head of investment banking Johnny Cameron in which it has dropped enforcement action against him after he undertook not to work again in a senior banking role.
Asked about Goodwin and other RBS executives criticised in the FSA's report, Sants said: "In my personal judgement there were a set of failings, over a long period, by the executives of RBS. And in my judgment that means they are not fit to run a regulated institution… these people will not work again in the regulated sector, in my opinion."
He explained that the regulator had taken no formal decision on this as none of those concerned had applied for authorisation. He nevertheless insisted he was confident any such appointment would be blocked.
Sants said that while the legal threshold for incompetence which would trigger enforcement action was very high, it was less so when it came to reviewing an individual's suitability to operate in regulated financial services.
The prime minister earlier this month revealed he had asked the honours committee to examine whether Goodwin could be stripped of his knighthood for bringing RBS to its knees. The bank was rescued with taxpayer funds and is now 82% owned by the state.
Sants also gave a robust defence of his record at the FSA, accusing his predecessor John Tiner of ignoring concerns raised about the lack of expert regulation of British-based investment banks in 2007.
Sants told the Treasury Select Committee he "complained" to Tiner repeatedly about the "silo structure" the former FSA boss had deliberately cultivated.
Until his promotion to chief executive in July 2007, Sants reminded the MPs, this structure meant he had only been responsible for regulating overseas investment banks such as Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank and Morgan Stanley.
Despite its aggressive push into investment banking from 2005 until the credit crunch hit in 2007, Royal Bank of Scotland was not supervised by Sants and his team. Instead, RBS was regulated as a retail bank by his colleague Clive Briault.
Sants said his investment bank supervisory team "had considerable expertise and they were not able to share that with regulators in the UK banks department".
Sants said he had expressed his views about "weak management" in Briault's division at regular meetings with Tiner, but the then FSA boss had told him he was happy with the structure as it was. Sants recalled: "We were not encouraged to question or debate across the silos. The chief executive did not encourage any discussion."
One MP said this was astonishing, to which Sants replied: "I agree with you." Another member of the committee suggested Sants was "dumping on your predecessor" in an effort to avoid responsibility. Sants denied this.
As soon as he was promoted to FSA chief executive in July 2007, Sants claimed he set about a radical overhaul of the regulators' structure. "If you are an integrated regulator, it doesn't make sense not to have an integrated structure," he told MPs. He further claimed to have "asked for the resignation" of Briault "as soon as possible". The FSA chief executive suggested the regulators could possibly have intervened to stop RBS's ill-fated acquisition of part of Dutch rival ABN Amro in 2007, but after he became chief executive such a move.....
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GUARDIAN Tue, 31 Jan 2012 07:51:02 GMT
Apple's new vice-president of retail will oversee the continued expansion of the technology group's stores around the world
The chief executive of Dixons has been poached by Apple to head up its worldwide retail operations.
John Browett, who has been chief executive of the struggling high street electronics firm since 2007, has been appointed Apple's senior vice president of retail reporting directly to chief executive Tim Cook. In his new job Browett will be charge of Apple's already phenomenally successful retail strategy and the continued expansion of Apple's 361 stores around the world.
"Our retail stores are all about customer service, and John shares that commitment like no one else we've met," Cook said. "We are thrilled to have him join our team and bring his incredible retail experience to Apple."
Browett's appointment marks the first external senior-executive appointment by Cook, who replaced Steve Jobs as Apple's chief executive last year. Browett, who starts his new job in April and will be based at Apple's headquarters in California, replaces Ron Johnson, who left Apple last year to become CEO of JC Penney.
Browett, who has previously held a series of executive positions at Tesco, including chief executive of Tesco.com, said: "Dixons Retail is a great business, and with the support of a very strong management team we have made excellent progress in transforming the group into the leading customer focused specialist electrical retailer in its markets. The opportunity ahead of me is an exciting one and I leave knowing that the group has a bright future under strong leadership."
Dixons said Browett would be replaced by Sebastian James, who has been with the company since 2008, most recently as group operations director.
Dixons chairman John Allan said: "I would like to thank John for the very considerable contribution he has made to the group through the renewal and transformation plan over the last four years. The Group is now in a significantly stronger position and can look to the future with confidence. I wish him well for the exciting opportunity ahead."
Retail industry
Apple
Dixons Retail
Rupert Neate
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