Appendices
Appendices
Appx 1 - UK Import statistics
Energy imports
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/631146/UK_Energy_in_Brief_2017.pdf
Essentially, the UK imported 36% of all energy used in 2016.
- 63m tons of oil was consumed, of which 34% was imported.
- 43m tons of gas (in oil equivalent), 47% of which was imported.
- Low carbon sources formed 17% of consumption, of which 8% was nuclear and 6% bioenergy (wood, waste etc)
- Just 1.7% of energy consumed came from wind power.
This isn’t new; before North Sea Oil, the UK had a higher reliance on imported energy. Neither are we alone in our reliance - most EU countries are worse. But historical precedent doesn’t legitimise current practice. Global population has increased substantially since then - from 2.5bn in 1950 to 7.5bn now - and so we contend with many billions of people in emerging countries for those finite resources.
Food imports
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/food-statistics-pocketbook-2017/food-statistics-in-your-pocket-2017-global-and-uk-supply
In 2016, the UK imported 51% of its food.
- 30% from the EU
- Around 4% each from N America, S America, Africa and Asia.
- The UK also exports food, but imports exceed exports for every type (e.g. meat, veg, fruit)
To quote James Lovelock in his book A Rough Ride To The Future: "For a world experiencing severe climate change and the social disruption it will bring, the UK is surely overpopulated. We did not have enough land to feed ourselves in the 1940's war. Now we have a larger population and less land."
Appx 2 - UK Government Expenditure
Analysis of public expenditure in 2017 by category, in £billions
Source www.ukpublicspending.co.uk
Pensions and welfare (various forms) expenditure in 2017.
Total £264bn, of which:
- Pensions £111bn 42%
- Incapacity, disability & injury benefits £44bn 16%
- Unemployment benefits £2bn 1%
- Housing benefits £25bn 10%
- Family benefits, income support & tax credits £46bn 18%
- Personal social services and other benefits £35bn 13%
- Total social welfare costs have increased. Of a total of £264bn in 2017, some £70bn is spent on housing benefits, family benefits, income support and tax credits. That’s about half as much as the entire cost of Healthcare, way more than our entire cost of defence and more than the cost of education. Police Services cost a total of only £3.8bn.
- Working class dependency on the State has increased enormously: the proportion receiving more in benefits than they pay in tax has risen significantly, to 51.5 per cent in 2015 from 45.9 per cent in 1997 and 41% in 1977. Source ONS.
Appx 3 - UK national Debt
Source: ukpublicspending.co.uk
Relative to GDP, those percentages of public are comfortably exceeded by Japan, the USA, France, Italy and Spain. But those countries' predicaments do make ours more comfortable or less risky.
Quantitative easing
See https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-15198789 for an explanation of what this is.
From 2008 - 2016, the Bank of England printed £435bn
From 2016 onwards, after the Brexit vote, another £70bn
was printed.
Appx 4 - UK personal Debt Trends
https://www.moneyexpert.com/debt/uk-personal-debt-levels-continue-rise/
“According to the latest figures published by the Money Charity, the total value of outstanding personal debt in the UK has reached £1.576 trillion.
Households in the UK owed an average of £57,943 in January. This means that the average UK resident currently owes £30,455 (including mortgages), which is 114% of the typical annual earnings for the UK. The amount of interest paid of on debts in the 12 months’ prior sits at £50.8 billion, or £139 million per day.
Debt is expected to continue to climb in the next few years, with the Office for Budget Responsibility predicting that total household debt will reach £2.296 trillion
by the first quarter of 2022 in their March 2018 forecast. This would break down to £84,412 per household, though this is based on the assumption that the number of households in the UK does not change”
According to the ONS in July 2018, households are spending more than they earn for the first time in 30 years, and that the typical household’s outgoings were £900 higher than their incomings in 2017. The poorest 10 percent of households had a disposable income of £5000 but spent nearly £13000.
The national shortfall was £25bn.
Households took out £80bn in loans in 2017 and they deposited just £37bn in bank accounts.
Appx 5 - UK Immigration & Population statistics
Source MigrationWatch and ONS https://www.migrationwatchuk.org
“The Office for National Statistics (ONS) estimate that in 2017, just under 9.4 million people living in the UK were born abroad, (14.3% of the total population of the UK). Of these, 3.7 million were from countries now in the European Union and just under 5.7 million were from non-EU countries.”
- From 1991 to 2001 net international migration accounted directly for 44 percent of the increase in the population of the UK and by 2001-2013 for 56 percent.
- From 1996 to 2014, 65% of UK household growth was the direct consequence of international migration to the UK. MigrationWatch ex ONS
- Between 2010 and 2014, households headed by persons born outside the UK increased by 115,000 or 78%. MigrationWatch ex ONS.
- By 2015, foreign-born workers made up around 7m of the workforce, or around 17%.
- If children born to immigrants are counted, immigration has been responsible for 80% of population growth since 2001 (Source Migrationwatch). According to an ONS report in July 2018, 28.4% of the 680,000 live births in 2016/17 were to foreign-born mothers, up from 11.6% in 1990.
- Net migration has been the dominant component of population growth since about 1997 and the natural increase of the UK- born population of England and Wales has contributed the least. MigrationWatch ex ONS.
- The population of London is now nearly 40% foreign-born.
- There are also now around 1m illegal immigrants by prudent estimates. This is just ignored.
Appx 6 - Net economic effects of immigration
- Between 1997 and 2010, more than half of the rise in employment in the UK was accounted for by foreign nationals.
- In 2016, some 80% of 414,000 new jobs were taken by foreign-born workers.
- By 2015, Foreign-born workers made up around 7m of the workforce, or around 17%.
Despite many claims of benefit for the UK economy, several reports have indicated neutral or only marginal gain:
The House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee, reporting in April 2008, concluded that:
“We have found no evidence for the argument, made by the government, business and many others, that net immigration generates significant economic benefits for the existing UK population.”
In January 2012 the Migration Advisory Committee said that even GDP per head exaggerated the benefit of immigration because:
“It is the immigrants themselves rather than the extant residents who are the main gainers.”
They suggested that the GDP of residents should be the main focus. They recognised that the resident population would gain via any “dynamic effects” of skilled immigration on productivity and innovation, remarking that “these exist and may be large, but they are elusive to measure”.
In their annual Fiscal Sustainability Report, the Office for Budgetary Responsibility concluded in August 2013:
“In our attempt to summarise the vast literature on the impact of immigration on the labour market and productivity we have not found definitive evidence on the impact of immigrants on productivity and GDP. Most of the literature seems to indicate that immigrants have a positive, although not significant, impact on productivity and GDP.”
Appx 7 - Housing supply in the UK
Total dwelling stock, Great Britain (not all UK)
1969 18.5m
1977 20.4m
1997 24.1m
2016 27.7m
In the last 50 years, the total GB dwelling stock has increased by about one third, or 9.2m.
England is the second most densely populated country in the EU with 417 people per square kilometre, after the Netherlands (with 500 people per square kilometre) and excluding islands such as Malta. Source Migrationwatch.
So it’s no surprise, as housing, industry, leisure and agriculture compete for a finite amount of land, that houses became much more expensive due to the imbalance of supply and demand. Politicians and commentators regularly assert for political gain that annual housebuilding rates are so much lower than in the past but they completely ignore the fact that our land mass is finite, and already overcrowded **.
The national cost of an average house has gone from 3.6 times workers’ annual gross full-time earnings in 1997 to 7.6 times in 2017. Source ONS.
** Many commentators observe that ‘only’ 6% (contentious) of our landmass is built on (buildings, roads, airports, quarries etc.) but that is wilfully naive; I would suggest that any landmass is overcrowded when it cannot supply enough food, energy, water and raw materials to sustain its population and when trying to do so creates pollution and significant loss of biodiversity. By those measures, the UK is already heavily overcrowded.
Appx 8 - Road usage in the UK
Source: licencebureau.co.uk
https://www.licencebureau.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/road-use-statistics.pdf
There are some 246,000 miles of roads in the UK. In 1951, there were 186,000 miles of roads.
In 2014, 311 billion miles were travelled by 35.6m vehicles of all types.
In 1951, 37 billion miles were travelled by 4.2m vehicles of all types.
Appx 9 - UK Air quality/ pollution
Air Quality/ Pollution
Global air pollution is rising, according to this Word Health Organisation report from 2016:
http://www.who.int/en/news-room/detail/12-05-2016-air-pollution-levels-rising-in-many-of-the-world-s-poorest-cities.
From 2008-2013, it increased globally by 8%. It’s no surprise really, since there are some 5bn more people on the planet since 1950. The worst air pollution is in low- and middle-income countries, with the lowest pollution in high-income countries like the UK.
This WHO report from 2018 says that 90% of the world’s population breathes air containing high levels of pollutants.
http://www.who.int/news-room/detail/02-05-2018-9-out-of-10-people-worldwide-breathe-polluted-air-but-more-countries-are-taking-action
Air pollutants in the UK - declining
This March 2018 report from UK National Atmospheric Emissions Inventory (NAEI) Programme shows an encouraging trend in reduction of emissions of air pollutants.
https://uk-air.defra.gov.uk/assets/documents/reports/cat07/1803161032_GB_IIR_2018_v1.2.pdf
It covers the pollutants in the table below:
Ammonia
is the only pollutant showing a recent increase, in the last 5 years, from agriculture.
So, despite massive increases in the number of vehicles on our roads, air pollution has either decreased or improved, thanks largely to improvement in motor vehicle engine technology and reduction of emissions from coal-fired electricity generation stations.
See https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/air-quality-statistics
However, in 2017, research by the Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change and the Royal College of Physicians revealed that air pollution levels in 44 cities in the UK are above the recommended World Health Organization guidelines.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/air-pollution-uk-worst-places-towns-cities-london-too-dangerous-to-breath-un-who-report-a8028566.html
Work is ongoing to assess the effects of other pollution from vehicles, i.e. the fine dust from disc brakes and tyres as they wear down. With over 35m vehicles on the roads, this is likely to be a significant factor in air and surface pollution.
Particulates in the UK.
The WHO guideline values for particulate matter are 20 μg/m3 for PM10, and 10 μg/m3 for PM2.5, respectively. According to WHO statistics at http://www.who.int/phe/health_topics/outdoorair/databases/cities/en/
PM10 average UK 18
PM10 London 22
PM10 worst 25 Port Talbot
PM10 best 09 Aberdeen
PM2.5 average UK 12
PM2.5 London 15
PM2.5 worst 15 London
PM2.5 best 09 Aberdeen
Although London exceeds WHO guidelines, it’s nothing like cities in China, which are around 90+ for PM10 (some well over 100) and 50+ for PM2.5. It’s good that air pollution in the UK has not increased in line with massive increases in the number of homes and motor vehicles; this was due to the development of much cleaner combustion technologies and in some part, I assume, to the shift of much of our manufacturing industry to China.
But while local pollution controls are a good thing, air moves freely around the globe, so background pollution is increasing.
Appx 10 - Agriculture in the UK
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture_in_the_United_Kingdom#1945_to_present
Agriculture uses some 69% of total land area.
The total area of agricultural holdings is about 171,000 km2 (43 million acres), or 183,000 km2 including rough grazing land.
Arable land is 25% of land area, compared to 30% in the 1960’s.
The UK produces less than 60% of the food it eats (although some is exported). This dependency on imports isn’t new: it was just as high before WWII but those imports of food supplies were specifically targeted by our enemies,forcing the post-war government to decrease that reliance via the Agricultural Act of 1947.
Accordingly, since then, yields have increased fourfold, due to increases in size of fields (removal of hedgerows), a huge increase in mechanisation and greater use of fertilisers and pesticides/ herbicides. This degree of mechanisation produces some 9% of the UK’s emission of greenhouse gases and has had significant effects on biodiversity and soil health (see below). It also reinforces our dependence on imported energy, to power agricultural machines.
Modern high-yield agricultural methods have had a very negative effect on wildlife. Read the separate section Wildlife Decline
The intensive use of fertilisers also degrades rivers. See reference to the Environmental Agency report in the separate section Water Quality.
For more statistics:
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/arable-land-hectares-wb-data.html
https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1046/j.1365-2664.2002.00695.x
https://www.populationmatters.org/documents/britain_feeds.pdf
Appx 11 - Abuse of Human Rights laws
An internet trawl will reveal many cases in which foreign migrants have abused EU Human Rights laws to stay in the UK. This is a report by Dominic Raab MP in 2013 regarding abuse of Article 8 of the ECHR by foreign criminals in order to avoid deportation from the UK.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/immigration/10037825/Dominic-Raab-Time-for-us-to-reset-skewed-human-rights.html
And another from 2015:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/terrorism-in-the-uk/11381944/Human-Rights-Act-has-helped-28-terrorists-to-stay-in-UK.html
Appx 12 - Failures of centralised economies
Failures of centralised economies - China
Read Franz Dikotter’s book ‘Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-62 (Peoples Trilogy 1). This synopsis copied from amazon.co.uk:
“Between 1958 and 1962, 45 million Chinese people were worked, starved or beaten to death.
Mao Zedong threw his country into a frenzy with the Great Leap Forward, an attempt to catch up with and overtake the Western world in less than fifteen years. It led to one of the greatest catastrophes the world has ever known.
Dikotter's extraordinary research within Chinese archives brings together for the first time what happened in the corridors of power with the everyday experiences of ordinary people, giving voice to the dead and disenfranchised. This groundbreaking account definitively recasts the history of the People's Republic of China.”
The 3rd book in Franz Dikotter’s trilogy is “The Cultural Revolution: A People's History, 1962―1976 (Peoples Trilogy 3)” . This synopsis is also copied from amazon.co.uk:
“After the economic disaster of the Great Leap Forward that claimed tens of millions of lives between 1958 and 1962, an ageing Mao launched an ambitious scheme to shore up his reputation and eliminate those he viewed as a threat to his legacy. The stated goal of the Cultural Revolution was to purge the country of bourgeois, capitalist elements he claimed were threatening genuine communist ideology. But the Chairman also used the Cultural Revolution to turn on his colleagues, some of them longstanding comrades-in-arms, subjecting them to public humiliation, imprisonment and torture.
Young students formed Red Guards, vowing to defend the Chairman to the death, but soon rival factions started fighting each other in the streets with semi-automatic weapons in the name of revolutionary purity. As the country descended into chaos, the military intervened, turning China into a garrison state marked by bloody purges that crushed as many as one in fifty people.”
Appx 13 - Failures of societies through overpopulation
Read the book ‘Collapse - How Societies Choose To Fail Or Survive’ by Jared Diamond, a professor of geography at the University of California, and a well-respected author. This synopsis is extracted from Wikipedia:
“Diamond identifies five factors that contribute to collapse: climate change, hostile neighbours, collapse of essential trading partners, environmental problems, and the society's response to the forgoing four factors.
The root problem in all but one of Diamond's factors leading to collapse is overpopulation relative to the practicable (as opposed to the ideal theoretical) carrying capacity of the environment. One environmental problem not related to overpopulation is the harmful effect of accidental or intentional introduction of non-native species to a region.
Diamond also writes about cultural factors (values), such as the apparent reluctance of the Greenland Norse to eat fish. Diamond also states that "it would be absurd to claim that environmental damage must be a major factor in all collapses: the collapse of the Soviet Union is a modern counter-example, and the destruction of Carthage by Rome in 146 BC is an ancient one. It's obviously true that military or economic factors alone may suffice.”
This longer synopsis is more thorough: http://www.supersummary.com/collapse/summary/
Appx 14 - Failures of societies through economic mismanagement
Venezuela is perhaps the most topical of numerous countries that have failed through political and economic mismanagement.
In 1970, Venezuela was one of the richest countries in Latin America. It had oil reserves twice those of Iraq and seven times those of the USA, and lots of natural gas, iron ore and bauxite (the world's main source of aluminium) and gold.
But corruption, political and economic mismanagement have destroyed it. Staples and basic commodities are unaffordable and inflation rages; economists are predicting that it could reach 1,000,000% this year.
This summary by Kim Iskyan, of Stansberry Churchouse Research, is informative:
https://www.quora.com/What-caused-Venezuela-to-become-a-failed-state
Appx 15 - Environmental degradation
Wildlife Decline in the UK
The State of Nature 2016 report painted a bleak picture:
“Between 1970 and 2013, 56 per cent of species declined, with 40 per cent showing strong or moderate declines,” it said.
“Of the nearly 8,000 species assessed using modern Red List criteria, 15 per cent are threatened with extinction from Great Britain.
“A new measure that assesses how intact a country’s biodiversity is, suggests that the UK has lost significantly more nature over the long-term than the global average. The index suggests that we are among the most nature-depleted countries in the world.”
Read also Mark Cocker’s book Our Place - Can we save Britain’s wildlife before it’s too late’
This is an excerpt from Christopher Hart’s review in The Sunday Times:
“In a field near Peterborough stands an iron column, hammered into the peaty fenland soil in 1851 to mark the ground level. “Today it stands 13ft above it.” Thanks to “improvement” and drainage, some of the richest soil on Earth is being lost at the rate of more than half an inch a year, blown away into dust.
Mark Cocker is an eminent ornithologist and prizewinning nature writer, whose Birds & People is one of the great naturalist books of our time. In Our Place, he has written a fierce polemic, as he admits, about how the British people regard themselves as lovers of nature, yet live in one of the most denatured and wildlife-impoverished countries on Earth.
He has no time for the rational optimists who blithely insist that such observations are mere ecopanic. They must be walking around with their eyes closed. The most detailed and rigorous science tells us that our native wildlife is in free fall. As with the planet’s general health, best documented by the World Wildlife Fund’s Living Planet Report, the ecological crisis is not something potentially approaching us from afar. We are living through it. We have lost 44m pairs of breeding birds in the past 50 years.”
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/our-place-can-we-save-britain-s-wildlife-mark-cocker-review-90lz0dswl
Appx 16 - Water quality in the UK
People consume water and produce waste, as does the agricultural industry that feeds us. Obviously, the more people in a given landmass, the more consumption and waste.
In a report (Flushed Away) released in October 2017, the World Wildlife Fund observed that
“55% of our failing rivers are polluted with sewage. That’s about 40% of all our rivers in England and Wales”.
https://www.wwf.org.uk/updates/40-rivers-england-and-wales-polluted-sewage
Against a background of generally improving water cleanliness, The Environment Agency issued a report in Feb 2018 which asserts that are still ‘far too many serious pollution incidents’ from agriculture. And that “Agriculture is now the largest sector responsible for water pollution, while the number of serious incidents by water companies has remained at around 60 per year for the past decade – more than one a week.”
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/far-too-many-serious-pollution-incidents-says-environment-agency-water-quality-report
Key findings of the EA report:
- In 2016, 86% of river water bodies had not reached good ecological status. The main reasons for this are agriculture and rural land management, the water industry, and urban and transport pressures.
- Water quality issues were the cause of 38% of all fish test failures, and 61% of invertebrate test failures in rivers in 2015.
- Pollutant loads to rivers from water industry discharges have declined in recent years, with reductions of up to 70% since 1995.
- Over the last decade the number of serious water pollution incidents from water companies has remained broadly the same, with about 60 incidents each year. That is more than one a week.
- For assessed river water bodies in England, 55% were at less than good status for phosphorus in 2016.
- Nearly half of groundwater bodies will not reach good chemical status by 2021. For groundwaters protected for drinking water, nitrate levels were responsible for 65% of failures to achieve good chemical status.
- Bathing water quality has improved over the last 30 years with 98% passing minimum standards and 65% at excellent status in 2017.
- Population growth, climate change, emerging chemicals, plastic pollution, nano-particles and fracking all present potential future threats to water quality.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/709493/State_of_the_environment_water_quality_report.pdf
Appx 17 - Energy consumption
I highly recommend the book ‘Sustainable Energy - Without The Hot Air’
written in 2009 by Professor David JC MacKay, FRS, Professor of natural Philosophy, University Of Cambridge and former Chief Scientific Advisor to the Department of Energy and Climate Change. It is still highly relevant.
This book, completely devoid of bias, cant and hypocrisy, attempts to measure our total consumption of energy, identify its various sources (gas, coal, oil, wind etc) and visualise both where we might obtain our future energy supplies and how we might reduce our consumption of them.
Prof MacKay converts all various forms of energy into kilowatt-hours (kWh) for ease of comparison and reveals some stark differences in consumption levels between countries. In the UK (at the time of study) consumption per person was 125kWh per day, per person. In the US it was about twice that level and in Africa around 20kWh or less. Consumption statistics are for the total of all its forms, e.g. for heating, transport, lighting, manufacturing etc., divided by the population.
Essentially, Prof MacKay says that there simply aren’t enough conventional energy sources to provide Western levels of consumption to the developing nations and that, in attempting to do so by burning the remaining fossil fuels, we risk catastrophic climate change.
The book is available online for free at https://www.withouthotair.com
This summary is useful: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8014484.stm
Appx 18 - Incompetent government spending
The government has a Major Projects Portfolio of more than 140 projects, to a value of at least £450bn. That’s a lot of taxpayers’ money, and it’s morally and practically mandatory for the government to spend it responsibly and efficiently. But there are too many examples of it failing to do that.
https://www.softwareadvisoryservice.com/blog/biggest-uk-government-project-failures/
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/07/18/onequarter_of_gov_it_projects_at_high_risk_of_failure_ipa/
Here are some of the more stand-out problems:
HS2.
A leaked assessment by the Government’s Infrastructure and Projects Authority in 2016 describes the HS2 rail scheme as ‘fundamentally flawed’ and ‘in a precarious position’. The project, with an original costing of £56bn is ‘highly likely to significantly overspend’, with the likely cost increasing to £80bn. It’s notable that there was no popular mandate for this project, and credible analyses of its supposed benefits are hard to find.
Private Finance Initiative (PFI)
The Private Finance Initiative was a means of securing private funding for national infrastructure and services, where private investors’ rewards come from long-dated capital repayments, finance costs, maintenance and operation. It was introduced as a means of keeping capital expenditure off the government’s books, but heavy financial obligations remain.
As of Jan 2018, the National Audit Office reported that “There are currently over 700 operational PFI and PF2 deals, with a capital value of around £60 billion. Annual charges for these deals amounted to £10.3 billion in 2016-17. Even if no new deals are entered into, future charges which continue until the 2040s amount to £199 billion”.
It also reported that “The government reduced its use of PFI after the 2008 financial crisis, as the cost of private finance increased. Parliament also became increasingly critical of the model”.
Many of the PFI contracts were awarded to Carillon, whose dramatic failure indicates poor procurement and contractor management skills by government. Other large PFI contractors are also thought to be at risk of failure.
The NAO’s full report is here: https://www.nao.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/PFI-and-PF2.pdf
Automation of medical records
The National Programme for IT (NPfIT) in the NHS was implemented in 2002 to make the NHS more technologically advanced, but after 10 years and almost £10bn the project was scrapped and labelled as the biggest IT failure ever seen.
2012 Olympics
This admittedly enjoyable event was widely lauded in political circles as a great success, but it was conveniently forgotten that the final cost of some £12bn was way in excess of the initial estimate of £2bn, the figure which was used to obtain parliamentary approval.
The following website is also informative:
https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/sites/default/files/publications/Infrastructure%20report%20%28final%29r.pdf
Appx 19 - Anti-social corporate behaviour
“Did you ever expect a corporation to have a conscience, when it has no soul to be damned and no body to be kicked? (And by God, it ought to have both!)”.
First Baron Thurlow (1731-1806) Lord Chancellor of England
Modern corporations are the powerful bodies through which most of us are organised into useful productivity, and suppliers of most of the goods and services we value. Most of them are of noble intent but all powerful forces can be either used or misused, and there are some corporations who behave badly. There are almost too many to list, but here are a few examples:
Financial Services
Wells Fargo bank in the USA - this text from fortune.com:
“After losing the trust of consumers in 2016 for creating millions of fake accounts, Wells Fargo struggled mightily to win back its customer base with promises of transparency and reform.
But Wells Fargo’s woes only deepened in 2017, when the company admitted that it had charged as many as 570,000 consumers for auto insurance that they did not need. Additionally, some 20,000 of those borrowers may have had their cars repossessed as a result. Wells Fargo said it would pay $80 million in remediation. Wells Fargo’s head of consumer banking and some 70 senior managers in the bank’s retail banking segment were also cut as a result.
In the same year, Wells Fargo also revealed that it had uncovered an additional 1.4 million fake accounts on top of the 2.1 million the bank previously disclosed had been created without consumer permission.
JP Morgan bank
Before the sub-prime mortgage collapse in 2006, banks and mortgage lenders could see that a bubble was about to burst. They misled their investors about the state of the market and they were even selling mortgage products they knew to be risky. This behaviour exacerbated the subsequent crash. Afterwards, JP Morgan paid a $13 billion settlement to stop investigations. Other banks including Citigroup and RBS were also fined.
Tobacco companies
As depicted in the movie The Insider, American ‘big tobacco’ firms were subjected in 1998 by the US government to the biggest civil settlement in US history. Using statistics showing that the tobacco industry were putting an immense strain on the US healthcare system, the US government took them to court where they were penalised $200 billion in compensation. The tobacco companies also agreed to change the way they marketed their products.
Pharmaceutical companies
In 2009, US pharmaceutical giant Pfizer agreed to pay £45 million in an out-of-court settlement over the deaths of 11 Nigerian children during drug trials. The country's northern Kano state had accused the company of causing the deaths of the children, and injuring 181 more, during tests of an antibiotic during a meningitis outbreak in 1996.
Pfizer was also hit with the biggest criminal fine in US history as part of a $2.3bn settlement with federal prosecutors for mis-promoting medicines and for paying kickbacks to compliant doctors.
The company pleaded guilty to misbranding the painkiller Bextra, withdrawn from the market in 2004, by promoting the drug for uses that were not approved by medical regulators.
Motor manufacturers
The VW Group were found to have installed software in engine management systems that detected when they were being tested, and temporarily modified engine behaviour to reduce emissions. Some 11m cars were so equipped. US authorities have extracted $25 billion in fines, penalties and restitution from VW for the 580,000 tainted diesels it sold in the US. German prosecutors fined VW Euros 1bn.
Appx 20 - Misuse of international aid
Some £100bn is spent annually on development assistance by members of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
It’s very difficult to find out which development assistance provides lasting material benefit and which is wasted. Perhaps the absence of such data is revealing in itself.
Bu there are many authors critical of misplaced foreign aid.
Most failed expenditure is that which doesn’t address the fundamental problems of social and political disorder in the receiving countries. Sometimes, the money ends up in the hands of despots and prolongs conflict.
An internet search will reveal many examples. Here is one based upon their book ‘Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty’ by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson:
https://www.spectator.co.uk/2014/01/why-aid-fails/
And a report via the National Audit Office on UK foreign aid expenditure:
https://www.taxpayersalliance.com/new_report_confirms_that_aid_money_is_wasted_we_told_you_so
