1 North Sea oil revenues fall by over 75% (BBC) North
Sea oil revenues in the first three months of 2015 were down 75% on the
previous quarter, the Scottish Conservatives have said. The Scottish
government's quarterly national accounts show that the amount received in tax
receipts between January and March was £168m. This was down from £742m oil
revenues in the final three months of 2014.
Finance Minister John Swinney said oil was a bonus -
not the basis of the economy. The Scottish Conservatives said the figures for
Scotland's geographical share of oil revenues, which they claimed were
"buried" in a table in a report, showed "how wildly wrong"
the SNP's pre-referendum calculations had been.
The Tories said the figures also further
demonstrated the case against full fiscal autonomy for Scotland - an SNP
policy. In its oil and gas bulletin published in May 2014, the Scottish
government estimated that oil revenues would be between £15.8bn and £38.7bn
between 2014/15 and 2018/19.
It latest bulletin, published in June this year,
said revenues could be as low as £2.4bn for 2016/17 to 2019/20, with it highest
estimate at £10.8bn, based on a best-case scenario of the oil price returning
to 100 US dollars per barrel.
2 Airbnb gives Paris luxury hoteliers a fright (Gulf
News) Nowhere in the world has more accommodation available on Airbnb than
Paris. Now the home-sharing website that has transformed budget travel to the
French capital is giving its super-deluxe hotels a fright too.
“The Paris market is going to get very difficult,”
said Didier le Calvez, managing director of The Bristol Hotel. Along with
bosses of the city’s other “palaces”, he denounces Airbnb as a menace that
enjoys an unfair advantage. A trawl of the Paris region’s 50,000 Airbnb
offerings — there were only 7,000 across the whole of France in 2012 -suggests
le Calvez and his colleagues have reason to worry.
Airbnb offers between 380 and 400 Paris properties
at over 500 euros a night. Of those, about 40 charge over 1,000 euros ($1,090).
Add in the attraction of individuality, anonymity and in some cases extra beds,
and that puts them potentially in competition with the 1,000 euro a night
Bristol and half a dozen other high-end Paris hotels, which have about 1,500
rooms to offer in total.
The Paris luxury sector is already worried about a
surge in competition from newly opening hotels. Consultants JLL Hotels &
Hospitality reckon that capacity will be 60 per cent greater in 2018 than a
decade earlier. A downturn in visits from wealthy Russians and Brazilians as the
economies there falter, and fears among US visitors of rising anti-semitism in
France, are also a factor.
2 What black and white people think about one
another (Hugh Muir in The Guardian) There is a degree of truth-telling going
on. The film Dear White People, released in the UK in July, is a satirical look
at the situation of black students at a predominantly white Ivy League
universities. Americans do a good trade in discussing cultural idiosyncrasies. Such
humour works less well in the UK. Yet, it is the contention of my friend Dotun
Adebayo – broadcaster and columnist – that such trading on stereotypes happens
in the UK in private, and he set out to prove it.
He presented two programmes this month on BBC Radio
London, one on what white folks really think about black people, and the other
on what black people really think about white people. The four white Britons he
invited into the studio for the first programme said, without rancour, that
they found black people loud, excessively feisty, excessively ebullient and
oversensitive.
Sample complaints: “When someone calls me ‘white
trash’, I don’t get upset. Why do black people have to take a diss so
personally?” and “Why has everything got to get an ‘Is it because I’m black?’
response?” This suggests that those who took part in the experiment had been
exposed to a good few stereotypes, and principally very negative ones. The lack
of frankness between the races about each other is more a white problem, said
one, “because black people know more about us than we know about them”.
The following week, four black guests cheerily
questioned why their white friends dress down while black people dress up, but
– more seriously – cited an enduring reluctance to discuss what they saw as a
core issue: majority mindsets conditioned still by the imposition of
enslavement and colonialism. “They felt that for all the conversations white
and black people have, they never truly deal with that. They saw it as the
elephant in the room,” says Adebayo.
It wasn’t all just stereotypes, he says. There was a
genuine acceptance among his white guests that black Britons get a raw deal,
but although they felt part of an equation that caused them real concern, they
felt impotent in terms of doing anything about it. Hence, perhaps, some of the
frustrations and resentments expressed in private. Guilt and impotence never
was a good mix.
No comments:
Post a Comment