Nice of J.P. Morgan's boss to threaten the British with job cuts if they disobey the elite and vote for Brexit

Yesterday, Jamie Dimon, the boss of J.P. Morgan - who is known as the "King of Wall Street" (as opposed to, say, the "Wanker of Wall Street") - welcomed David Cameron to an event in Bournemouth, where his bank employs 4,000 staff. Dave probably didn't have to face any of the sort of impertinent questions from the assembled "workers" he was subjected to by members of the audience during his enormously successful Sky News appearance on Thursday night (well, not unless any J.P. Morgan employee was particularly keen on ending up in a tank filled with ravenous piranha fish).

The deranged new vaping/tobacco rules could only make sense to EU bureaucrats. Help Tory peer Lord Callanan fight them!

JAC Vapour Series E vaporiser and Vapemate Key Lime Pie eliquid

Unless I've misunderstood the latest EU Tobacco Products Directives, we will no longer be allowed to buy packets containing 10 or fewer cigarettes. This (we're told) is because smaller packets aren't big enough to carry the obligatory new "Smoke this and die in pain" warnings. Of course, they could redesign the warnings so they would fit on smaller packets - but that would obviously be far too difficult: far simpler to make people buy more cigarettes than they wanted to, because that will undoubtedly encourage them to smoke less. Or something. Meanwhile, as of last week, e-cigarette companies will no longer be allowed to sell e-juice (the vaping equivalent of tobacco) in large 30ml bottles: from now on, we vapers will only be allowed to buy our e-liquid in 10ml bottles, because... well, just because.

Good grief! It’s 20 years since a British Chancellor was given the heave-ho for being useless

Yes, I know – I could hardly believe it myself, but the last Chancellor to have the epaulets officially ripped from his shoulders was Norman Lamont, who was reshuffled/sacked on 23rd May 1993. If the government were a private sector business, this would signal 20 years of steady-to-spectacular success – it would mean that the economy had been in such continuous rude health that four chancellors in a row got to hold on to their jobs until either the electors turfed their party out of power, or a vacancy materialised at No. 10.

The only thing Starbucks has done wrong is offering to pay more tax than it needs to

Starbucks purveys mildly overpriced hot beverages and sweetmeats to middle class folk in fairly pleasant surroundings. In order to do this, it has opened over 760 coffee shops in UK high streets at a time when the high street is dying on its feet, while employing thousands of staff at a time of high unemployment. Like any successful business, it employs an A-team of psycho-nutter-bastard accountants whose job is to make sure that the company pays as little tax as possible while not breaking the law.

The government shouldn’t waste our money behaving like a Silicon valley start-up

Fellow blogger David Moss has zeroed in recently on government proposals to store all our personal details inside a vast, fluffy, digital informational nimbus known as a G-Cloud (you can reach his site via the Blogfeed section to the right of this post - or here). As any fule kno, any such scheme will, without any doubt whatsoever, turn into a fantastically expensive disaster, like most grand government technology projects (well, like most government projects of any kind, actually).

We need bankers to trust their instincts again – or it’s all over

Blogger DMossEsq informs us that Goldman Sachs made a loss during the last financial quarter. This surprises me. Even given the parlous state of the global economy I should have thought it was almost impossible to make a loss in banking – unless, of course, they’re still investing our money in the sort of hare-brained schemes that brought capitalism to its pin-striped knees in the first place.