An abandoned flip chart in the foyer of a Manchester branch of the Halifax reveals an innovative policy unusual even in the creative world of finance: they don’t want customers. Specifically, they don’t want new businesses, businesses that deal in coinage: taxi-drivers, window-cleaners, market-traders and shopkeepers. Napoleon would surely have approved.
The company might protest that this disinclination is limited to a number of branches, but we doubt it will wash. No business trades on image like a bank, and the Bank That Likes To Say No is splendidly irresistible.Nevertheless, there may well be those who would prefer to bank with a company that refused its facilities to, say, spin doctors, prevaricating politicians, most Antipodean athletes (particularly New Zealand cricketers), anyone associated with the Department of Transport, interior designers on TV, Mike Tyson or Lady Victoria Hervey.We, for our part, however, would like to stress and emphasise our intense delight in having you as a customer and look forward to renewing our most rewarding association tomorrow and for many years to come Thank you Taxi!. There has been enough talk – let the research begin
If you believe their critics, our noble Lords have proved themselves supreme lords of spin.
Yesterday’s report on cloning from the Lords select committee on stem-cell research gives the thumbs-up to a technique that, it says, offers “real and great hope for a range of common diseases”.Yet this was the only possible outcome because it was a “put-up job”, according to the anti-abortion lobby, which says the committee was packed with cloning’s supporters.The conclusion is indeed unsurprising, but for a different reason: it reflects the overwhelming weight of current medical and scientific opinion. The cloning issue has been more thoroughly aired, examined and debated than any other in science and medicine in recent years.Official reports have been published by the Human Genetics Advisory Commission, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) and the Chief Medical Officer. All have backed cloning for stem cells (the body’s master cells) from cloned embryos or cloned adult cells to produce new tissues for body repair.The courts, too, have had their say. The Pro-Life Alliance claimed in a case last year that there was nothing in British law to stop scientists from trying to create cloned human beings in the laboratory – because the only kind of reproduction controlled under the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act was that involving the union of sperm and egg, which is not required in cloning.
The judge agreed and an embarrassed Government was forced to rush through legislation expressly banning reproductive cloning.Yesterday’s decision by the House of Lords select committee adds little to the debate beyond endorsing the existing legislation. By co-incidence, the HFEA was yesterday considering the first applications for licences to conduct embryonic stem-cell research for therapeutic purposes.The coincidence is interesting and the consensus of opinion is clear – there is much to hope for and, now that obvious loopholes have been closed, little to fear from therapeutic cloning. The UK’s regulatory framework is among the most sophisticated in the world and has helped us to avoid the chaotic situation in the US, where the technique is banned in federally funded laboratories but permitted in the private sector Scientists should be given the go-ahead There has been enough talk – let the research begin.. By far the best way of ensuring that Europe is brought closer to its people is to provide for a stronger European Parliament
Today in the European Parliament’s chamber in Brussels, 105 men and women from 28 European nations will gather to begin discussing a constitutional settlement for Europe. Europe has a constitution now, of course, but, in its various official languages, it runs into literally millions of pages of legislation, council decisions and commission directives, known collectively as the “acquis” – not exactly a household term in Europe’s salons and saunas.This tangle of laws and regulations has long cried out to be formulated into a few simple rules, with the paramount aim of bringing Europe closer to its people, as the jargon goes. The question is whether the Constitutional Convention, now assembled under the leadership of the former French president Val? Giscard d’Estaing, is an appropriate vehicle to deliver a new constitutional settlement.Certainly the choice of Mr Giscard to run things doesn’t inspire a great deal of confidence. The fact that he is old should be no obstacle, although his slightly sleazy past (remember the Bokassa diamonds scandal?) detracts a little from his dignity.
The more serious drawback with Mr Giscard is simply the suspicion that he will guide the convention in a direction that reflects the traditional French approach to governance – not so much libert?fraternit?egalit?s ?tisme, dirigisme, technocratie.That trinity was, in fact, very much the foundation of the institutions of the original European Community as set out in the Treaty of Rome of 1957. It was the vision of Jean Monnet and Robert Schumann, the French founding fathers of the community, and of the Comit?’Action pour les Etats-Unis d’Europe that they founded. These arrangements worked well for the small community of the Six, but in a union of 15 they are distinctly creaky. All agree that in a union of 25 or 30 – the position we could easily be in before the decade is out – such arrangements would be unsustainable. The danger is that Mr Giscard, a typical product of the French ?te, will simply want to give us “more of the same”, but with a much stronger centre. That would mean a stronger Commission and a “leadership” role for the big five (France, the UK, Germany, Italy and Spain) to cope with the demands of a 30-state union. Indeed, worries about expansion leading to a wider but looser EU underlay the French government’s past resistance to welcoming new members from Scandinavia and the east.Still, there are reasons to be optimistic.