When I first heard Gordon Brown trotting out his new slogan about helping the many, not the few, I naturally dismissed it as meaningless tribal rhetoric.  Then, over the weekend, I read Charles Moore’s thoughtful piece in The Spectator on the same subject.

Moore rightly points out that virtually all progress has come from those people who have dared to challenge the consensus of the majority.  Whether it is in science (think Galileo), economics (Milton Friedman), politics (Winston Churchill), warfare (David Stirling) or virtually any area of life, we owe a huge debt to those few individuals who had the courage to be the odd ones out.

As someone who is instinctively iconoclastic, I am naturally suspicious of most so-called orthodoxy and, while I usually lack the originality of thought that might enable me to develop an alternative hypothesis, I rejoice when I find someone willing to do just that.

So let’s celebrate the few and be wary of cheap political slogans.

There is no pleasure quite so satisfying as seeing one of your arch-opponents admitting you were right all along.  In this case, it is Peter Mandelson who is the unlikely achiever of the spectacular volte-face.

Most people will remember Lord Mandelson as the cheerleader-in-chief of New Labour’s campaign to take Britain into the Eurozone.  At the time, I was closely involved in the “No” campaign to keep us out.  One of our key arguments was that Britain needed to keep control of its own economy, by retaining the power to adjust fiscal and monetary policy.  We pointed out that our economic cycle – and indeed our trading relationships - was totally different to that of Germany, France and Italy, the three largest Eurozone economies. 

This was demonstrably true at the time and has been proved to be so ever since.  Yesterday, in the Sunday Telegraph, Lord Mandelson admitted it.  He said that, if Britain had been in the Eurozone, we would not have been able to devalue sterling against the euro – which has given our exporters a significant competitive advantage and we not have been able to introduce quantitive easing either.  While the jury is still out on the results of QE, the fact remains that we still have the right to undertake whatever measures that the Government deems necessary to control our economy.

Thank you Mandy for seeing the light at last.

So the recession is over?  Statistically that is true, but whether we will notice much difference remains to be seen.  I rather doubt it – certainly not in the short term.

The problem as I see it is that so much money has been thrown at the economy that some improvement was inevitable.  But it was money that we didn’t have and which will have to be paid back.  Much of the money has gone to the least productive part of the economy – the public sector, which has continued to grow throughout the recession, while everyone else has had to cut back.

This state of affairs will not last beyond the General Election. We all know that, whichever party wins, massive spending cuts are inevitable – as are higher taxes.  Not an attractive outlook.

In addition, the recent rise in inflation is unlikely to be just a blip.  The unprecedented increase in the money supply over the past year or so must inevitably be reflected in the inflation figures. And that means higher interest rates on top of all the other burdens. Oh dear.

The decision by the Variety Club to honour Gordon Linacre with a lifetime achievement award is long overdue.   As Chairman of Yorkshire Post Newspapers, he was a pleasure to work with – not least because of his own superb network in the region.  This meant, for instance, that he was frequently able to give me a steer on a story when I was Business Editor.

I recall on one occasion picking up the phone and being told by Gordon that I was wasting my time on a particular line of inquiry which I was then pursuing in connection with a Scarborough businessman.   He was right.  As I found out after making a few more calls of my own.

Gordon presided over a very different media environment.  The Yorkshire Post was then one of the Big Beasts in regional journalism and not just a subsidiary of an over-geared Scottish newspaper chain.  He believed in having fun and had no objection to his employees having fun – provided that they also did the job they were being paid to do.  Accordingly, a key element of his hospitality involved a liberal supply of alcohol – in traditional journalistic manner.  It’s definitely a different world today.

Tockwith residents are doubtless still celebrating North Yorkshire County Council’s decision yesterday to reject BCB Environmental’s proposed £24m energy-from-waste plant at Marston Business Park, just outside the village near York.  But other North Yorkshire taxpayers should be feeling very angry. For two reasons.

First, the Government has imposed on all local authorities the obligation to reduce dramatically the amount of waste it sends to landfill.  Failure to meet these targets will result in huge fines – quite apart from the soaring cost of landfill tax.  At present, the best councils manage to recycle about 40 per cent of household waste.  That leaves a huge shortfall, which the proposed BCB plant – which would have been capable of processing 60,000 tonnes of waste a year – would have significantly reduced. 

Second,  BCB is now likely to appeal against this decision and, given that it meets all the criteria laid down by the Environment Agency and will produce 10,000KWh of sustainable electricity (hello? has anyone noticed that this is an issue?), stands a good chance of being ultimately approved. At which point, North Yorkshire taxpayers will have to foot the bill for costs.

So the poor, long-suffering mugs who pay their council taxes to North Yorkshire County Council will face a huge bill one way or the other – either for failure to reduce the amount of waste landfilled or for the costs of fighting the appeal.  And all because councillors were running scared of a few hundred residents who mounted an irresponsible over-hyped campaign.

Incidentally, I’m happy to declare an interest in this, having handled the media relations for BCB’s proposal for the past couple of years.   And I look forward to announcing the result of a successful appeal, if that is what BCB’s board decides to do.

Has the economic recovery begun? And, if so, will it be sustained? These are the big questions that everybody in business is asking. 

Earlier this week I attended a “question-time”-style meeting in York organised by The Alternative Board in the rather grand offices of Dickinson Dees.  In answer to the above questions, one member of the panel said he thought the recovery would be “W”-shaped while another member thought it would be “U”-shaped.  Either way, there was general agreement that recovery was not likely to feel much better than recession.  My own view, for what it’s worth, is that the recovery in stock markets and other asset prices is unlikely to last, driven in large part as it has been by the billons – £200 bn in the UK alone – that have been pumped into the financial system.  Confidence is closely linked to rising asset values.  But prices (and confidence) will surely fall once the tap is turned off.  As an eminent former banker told me recently “watch out for when quantitive easing becomes quantitive squeezing.”

One of the reasons why the recovery is going to be difficult for businesses is that banks do not have the capacity to meet the appetite for money by small and medium-sized enterprises.  The York meeting was told that banks were now much more risk-averse and no longer wanted to fund property-based transactions.  SMEs are advised to explore other sources of finance.

While this is grim news for SMEs, it bodes very ill for the UK as a whole.  SMEs account for more than 95% of all UK businesses.  They are the engine of growth in the economy and are likely to provide the lion’s share of the new jobs that are needed.  The FTSE-100 companies and big mult-national corporations may grab the headlines, but it is smaller firms that will have to deliver the recovery. I wonder if the Government appreciates that.

Banks, apparently, are not waiting for new legislation to curb bonuses.  While I was at BusinessDesk’s birthday party in Leeds last week, I was told by a reliable source that state-controlled Royal Bank of Scotland was already discreetly doubling the salaries of those bankers it was most keen to retain.

Following my post on November 16, it should come as no surprise to anyone that banks are looking at ways to continue paying huge rewards to their star players.  But it should be left to shareholders – not governments – to determine (or at least endorse) what those rewards should be.  In the case of RBS, of course, we are the shareholders, so one wonders what Alistair Darling is doing about Royal Bank’s new remneration policy, or whether he even knows about it.  I suspect the answers to these questions are, respectively, nothing and no.

News that Gordon Brown is planning legislation to empower the Financial Services Authority (FSA) to control bankers’ bonuses typifies so much that is wrong with this Government.

First, the use of legislation to achieve its objective.  I’ve lost count of the number of new laws that New Labour has introduced since 1997, but it’s a staggering amount, compared with the number enacted by previous regimes.   It wouldn’t matter so much if they were wise, thought-through statutes, which achieved their objectives.  But invariably they aren’t and they don’t.  Too often it’s the law of unintended consequences that prevails.   But then the real objective – as opposed to the stated purpose – is often simply to send a message to the electorate.

And that’s what’s behind the fuss about bankers’ bonuses.  It has suited the Government to pin the blame for the sub-prime debacle and the subsequent recession on greedy bankers.  This has successfully deflected attention and blame from politicians in general and Gordon Brown in particular.  People forget that governments (in the US as well as the UK) were very happy for economic growth to be fuelled by unsustainable levels of Government spending and consumer debt.    It was Gordon Brown who created the (failed) tripartite regulatory regime for financial services.  It was Gordon Brown who justified the  obscene bonuses paid to bankers on the grounds that they boosted tax revenues. 

But that  was then.  Now the Government needs a scapegoat.  And bankers fit the bill.  Regardless of whether the bonuses are justified (and I strongly suspect they are not), legislation is not likely to stop them.  You have only to look back to the pay policies of the early ’70s to see that Government attempts to control wages ultimately fail.  The only real beneficiaries of this exercise in canutism will be the tax lawyers and accountants, who will devise any number of clever schemes to circumvent the proposed curbs.

There are, of course, ways in which excessive remuneration can be controlled.  These are in the hands of shareholders, the ultimate owners of every bank.  And, as it is the major shareholder in at least four of our largest banks, the Government already has the power it needs to veto big bonuses.   But that wouldn’t send the same message to the electorate – would it?

Why are we Brits so complacent about being mugged – especially when it happpens day in and day out, 365 days a year?

I’m prompted to ask because of the news that the European Court of Auditors has refused to sign off the EU’s accounts for the 15th year running.  Can you imagine the row in Parliament if the UK Government’s accounts were regularly rejected in this way?

And it’s not as if the sums are chickenfeed.  According to the Treasury, the UK contributes almost £10bn a year to the EU’s budget (after the rebate)  Of this, we get back about £5.2bn on average.  However, our net contribution is projected to rise to £6.4bn in 2011-12.  I reckon this works out at something like £105m per year for each man, woman and child. More money than most of us are likely to spend in our lifetime.

Nobody enjoys paying taxes, but we endure it if we believe the money is being spent on worthwhile causes, such as hospitals, schools, pensions etc. But much of the money we pay to the EU is clearly being wasted.

Open Europe has produced a list of examples of EU waste. These include 2,500 euros spent on the chairman of Porsche’s hunting lodge, 850,000 euros on a “gender equal” wood design centre in Sweden, 198,000 euros for a puppet theatre network in the Baltics and a bizarre art education project called Donkeypedia in which a donkey travels through the Netherlands and is met at various locations by primary school children.  Incredible.

Having been part of last year’s ultimately unsuccessful campaign (although we won the argument) to persuade the Government to honour its manifesto promise to hold a referendum on the European Constitution (aka Lisbon Treaty), I dread to think what further pointless schemes we are now going to find ourselves paying for. 

If we really have to belong to the EU, then let’s find a way to make it accountable.