_{Halifax head office in Trinity Road, Halifax, 200 yards from the Old Cock Inn where the building society was founded in 1853. Photograph:SpaceMonkey 2005}

Andrew Rosthorn reveals how a Yorkshire institution was at the centre of the banking crisis that has crippled Britain’s economy

The head of risk at HBOS left the warmth of the headquarters of the Halifax Building Society and walked out into windy Trinity Road to telephone his wife. He was in tears.

The chief executive of the bank had just sacked him on the spot, overruling his warnings that the bank was taking excessive risks with a sales force that was ‘a serious risk to financial stability and consumer protection’.

As head of risk, Paul Moore was a barrister with seven years experience in financial regulation and a former partner at accountants KPMG in London. The bank replaced him with a retail sales manager. When he sued for wrongful dismissal, they paid him off with half a million and silenced him with a gagging agreement.

Returning that cold November day in 2004 to his devout Roman Catholic wife Maureen at their home in the Ryedale village of Ampleforth, Moore was expected to stay silent.

It would be nearly five years before it was legally safe for him to tell his story. He revealed to the Catholic weekly review The Tablet: ‘When I was fired I went out into the street and I was crying. I felt so awful about the whole thing. It really did crush me for a long time.

‘I had been trying to do what was right and was being treated shabbily. I phoned up my wife and she said, “It’s all part of God’s plan.” I didn’t understand that then, but I do now.’

 
Paul Moore. Photgraphs copyright of Moore, Carter & Associates

Paul Moore’s silence lasted until the HBOS behemoth, one of the ten biggest borrowers on earth, contrived to lose £10.8 billion pre-tax in 2008 before a crisis merger with Lloyds that had to be personally brokered by the British Prime Minister and financed 43 per cent by the British state.

The crash triggered a House of Commons Treasury Select Committee investigation, under parliamentary privilege, that would allow Paul Moore to break his silence.

On February 10, 2009, the Treasury Select Committee examined his personal statement.

‘When I was Head of Group Regulatory Risk at HBOS, I certainly knew that the bank was going too fast (and told them), had a cultural indisposition to challenge (and told them) and was a serious risk to financial stability (what the Financial Services Authority call "Maintaining Market Confidence") and consumer protection (and told them).

‘I told the Board they ought to slow down but was prevented from having this properly minuted by the chief finance officer. I told them that their sales culture was significantly out of balance with their systems and controls.

‘After I was dismissed, and to prove just how seriously HBOS took risk management, I was replaced by a new group risk director who had never carried out a role as a risk manager of any type before.’

'I knew what was going to happen to the banking economy. Ordinary people were over-extending themselves with loans they should never have been given. To add to the folly of the herd instinct we had a government addicted to the growth of banks.

'I don't see myself as prophet, and in a way I believe the world needed this crisis to bring it to its senses because it was gripped by a kind of blindness. What we need now is capitalism with a conscience.

'Anyone whose eyes were not blinded by money, power and pride (hubris) who really looked carefully knew there was something wrong and that economic growth based almost solely on excessive consumer spending, based on excessive consumer credit based on massively

increasing property prices which were caused by the very same excessively easy credit could only ultimately lead to disaster.

_{Paul Moore amid the ruins of Byland Abbey near where he lives (photographs copyright Moore, Carter & Associates)}

‘But sadly, no one wanted or felt able to speak up for fear of stepping out of line with the rest of the lemmings who were busy organising themselves to run over the edge of the cliff behind the pied piper CEOs and executive teams that were being paid so much to play that tune and take them in that direction.’

Moore’s report to the committee was heard on the day the committee chairman John McFall MP singled out the former chairman of the failed Royal Bank of Scotland, Sir Tom McKillop saying: ‘I looked up the Oxford English Dictionary definition of a "bank". It says: "an organisation offering financial services, especially the safe keeping of customers' money until required and making loans at interest". Does that definition need updating? Do we need to contact the Oxford English Dictionary again?’

On the following day, Sir James Crosby, the man who had fired Paul Moore at HBOS in 2004, resigned from the Financial Services Authority.

The Halifax had been founded in 1853, at a meeting in an upstairs room at the Old Cock Inn, 200 yards from the windy street corner where Paul Moore had telephoned his wife in 2004.

A solicitor’s clerk called Jonas Dearnley Taylor took the minutes of the first meeting and eventually served as secretary for 49 years, displaying ‘minute attention to detail, as straight as an arrow in all his dealings’ always ‘above that too common spirit of pushing others to the wall’.

By 1913 the Halifax was the biggest mutual building society in the world, remaining on top of the tree until the fateful year of 1997, when its 17.5 million customers were bribed with cash and shares into a stock exchange flotation.

James Crosby, born in Leeds, educated at Lancaster Grammar and Brasenose College, Oxford, had been trained as a clear-thinking, fast-talking actuary. He took over as chief executive in 1999 and by 2001 he had merged Halifax plc with the Bank of Scotland, chasing market share.

HBOS was the fourth biggest bank in the world when Sir James Crosby handed management over to his 39 year old protégé Andy Hornby in 2006.

Hornby, born in Scarborough, educated at Oxford and the Harvard Business School had been trained in big scale retailing by Archie Norman at Asda.

It was therefore Andy Hornby who was doomed to find himself before the Commons committee in the now notorious line-up with Lord Stevenson [HBOS], Sir Fred Goodwin [RBS] and Sir Tom McKillop [RBS] assembled on the fateful day that Paul Moore’s report was revealed to the public under Commons privilege.

Lord Stevenson said, ‘We are profoundly and unreservedly sorry.’

The Labour MP George Mudie lectured: ‘At the end of the day you sacked your group risk fellow. Now, four years later, it turns out he was right and you were wrong.’

Lord Stevenson’s answer, that KPMG had investigated and rejected Moore’s complaints, was lost in the outrage caused by TV pictures of the four bankers lined up, looking more like a drumhead court-martial than a House of Commons committee.

The humiliation of the British bankers was just one of the awful facts. Where would the world’s taxpayers find the money to bail out the banks?

• The United States government owes the central banks of China, Japan, Britain and Brazil 4.45 trillion dollars. The USA can no longer offer its children a better life expectancy at birth than the children of poor and blockaded Cuba.

•  Goldman Sachs of New York made two billion dollars profit in 2008 but by using 29 foreign tax havens reduced their federal tax bill to
  • 14 million.

  
  

  • In one of those tax havens, the United Kingdom’s permanent secretary for tax, Dave Hartnett, personally negotiated a special deal for Goldman Sachs in 2010, waiving 20 million pounds in interest payments that fell due after Goldman lost a 5-year legal battle over their 12 years old National Insurance tax-avoidance dispute.

  
  

  • General Electric, the biggest firm in America, paid no federal income taxes in 2010, despite making US profits of 5.1 billion and laying off one in every five of its American workers since 2002.

  
  

  • The British National Audit Office calculated that one third of Britain’s biggest businesses paid no tax at all in the boom year of 2006.

  
  

  • Three UK banana importers, Del Monte, Dole and Chiquita, had total sales of 750 million dollars in Britain in that year yet paid only 235,000 dollars in tax between them.

  
  

  • Rupert Murdoch, controller of 40 per cent of the national newspapers in the United Kingdom and the ‘first senior figure to visit Mr Cameron after he became prime minister’ had so arranged the News International tax affairs in ‘a complex structure involving 60 incorporated tax havens, like the British Virgin Islands and the Cayman Islands’ that The Economist concluded in 1999 that it had paid no UK tax for 11 years;

  
  

  • In the heat of the UK banking crisis, Mr Cameron’s new government demanded a cut of 7 billion pounds in welfare payments from its poorest citizens, planned to make half a million public servants redundant, including some tax collectors, yet allowed the senior taxman, Dave Hartnett, to give Vodafone a special deal to cut 4.8 billions off tax due on the interest payments the firm had banked virtually tax-free in Luxembourg;

  
  

  • The same British government allowed a junior transport minister to spend £15 million on City consultants for a report that told her ‘value for money’ would dictate her decision to buy new trains for London from a German firm, even though the decision would trigger redundancy payments to 1,400 British train builders in Derby;

  
  

  • While Luca Di Montezemolo, chairman of Ferrari, Warren Buffet, the richest man in America, and Liliane Bettencourt, the L'Oréal heiress, all called for the rich to pay more tax, the British chancellor risked the future of his coalition government by talking about a tax rate cut for those earning more than £150,000 a year;

  
  

  • In 2011 the same British government, owning by misadventure 63 per cent of RBS, the second biggest bank in the world, failed to persuade the RBS managers to start lending to British manufacturers or to reduce the £7 in bonuses paid to their investment bankers in 2010.

  
  

  The value of those bankers was described by Lord Turner, Chairman of the Financial Services Authority in the following terms: ‘What is clear is that banks are making profits from activities with no social or economic value. However we do it, now is the time to increase tax on these activities for the benefit of society as a whole.’

  So what really wrecked the Halifax? Was it a conspiracy or a cock-up? Was it the greed of the bankers or the lack of any controls on their money markets? Was it inevitable or just bad luck?

  We asked an expert in political conspiracy, Robin Ramsay, editor since 1983 of the unusual Hull-based magazine Lobster, [http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk], for some answers, and to give us the back-story.

  
  

  How did we get into such a mess?

  Robin Ramsay on the political decisions that led to the financial crisis

   Billions in bonuses are still being paid to people gambling with our savings and livelihoods.
  
  

  At the end of December 2010 Her Majesty’s Treasury announced that bailing out the British banks since 2008 had resulted in the addition of £1,433 billion to the British public debt (or government borrowing), which then totalled £23,22.7 billion. Added to total debt of individuals in the UK, including mortgages, of £1,451 billion, we have a total of £3,773 billion. With the British economy’s total annual output at around £1,400 billion, UK total private and public debt is equivalent to more than two and half year’s output of the economy. This is going to take some time to reduce! No wonder the high streets of British cities are in decline, unemployment is rising and government services for its citizens are being cut!

  How did we get here? By which I don’t mean the recent events starting with the international crash of 2008. I mean the older and specifically British back story. For while some of the elements of the crash, notably the use of computers, are relatively recent, many of the key pieces were in place long before the Internet created the global casino in which the international banks gamble with our savings.

  Essentially the story is simple: we got here because governments removed the controls placed on the financial sector. Ever since the end of the Second World War, the British financial sector sought to escape the constraints imposed on them by wider society. And as it overcame each obstacle it created more debt. (The ‘product’ of the financial sector is debt.) The bankers did this to make themselves (and their shareholders) rich.

  In 1971, during the Heath government, London’s bankers got the Bank of England to run some legislation through the House of Commons tacked onto that year’s budget. Called Competition and Credit Control, it was presented as mere technical details. C&CC as it was known, replaced the existing lending limits for banks with the ‘control’ of lending by raising interest rates. In other words, C&CC set the banks free to create unlimited debt. Edward du Cann, banker and MP, was at a meeting of the backbench 1922 Committee of the parliamentary Conservative Party at which the C&CC proposals were described:

  ‘I looked round the room and wondered how many of the MPs present fully comprehended what he was talking about. I doubt whether more than half a dozen had the least idea.’

  C&CC was passed by the Commons without discussion. (Prime Minister Heath does not refer to it in his account of the period and seems to have had no idea what C&CC meant.)

  Under the new system the banks could lend what they liked and, when the government or the Bank of England decided that they had lent too much, they would put the interest rates up. It was a truly wonderful racket for the moneylenders; but raising interest rates had the unfortunate side-effect of depressing the rest of the economy. Thus was the old regime, the bankers’ two-step of boom-slump, reinstated.

  Having persuaded the Conservative government to reintroduce ‘freedom’ into the banking business, the big four British ‘clearing’ banks of the day, Barclays, Lloyds, Midland and NatWest, began generating credit, but not lending it to British manufacturing, as Prime Minister Heath seems to have hoped they would, but to domestic consumers, the property markets and the so-called ‘fringe’ or secondary banks; and they, in turn lent it on again, largely to property speculators.

  Prime Minister Heath, who was bent on Britain entering the EEC, wanted the economy running at full tilt when it did so. Personal taxes were cut, and the interest on some bank loans, including those for the purchase of homes, second homes and shares, was made offsetable against tax. This generated what The Observer’s William Keegan called ‘the biggest credit binge in British post-war history.’ Heath’s government also tripled the amount borrowed by the state to pay for its activities between 1971/2 and 1972/3.

  The property bubble these changes created duly popped in 1973 when the interest rates were raised to ‘control’ the increase in lending (debt creation). Several of the smaller ‘fringe’ banks threatened to go under and the Bank of England had to bail them out. By March 1974, when the Conservatives lost the general election, the combination of the tax cuts and changes by the government and increasing debt creation by the banks pushed inflation up to 20% per annum. In the official British political story that inflation is blamed on greedy British trade unions’ making big pay demands; but much of it was the inflationary result of what became known as ‘the Barber boom’ (after Chancellor the Exchequer Anthony Barber, though the blame was Heath’s) and the banks’ new freedom to lend as much as they liked.

  Inflation at 20% and rising in 1974/5 became the dominant economic problem for the political system. The Conservative Party, led by Mrs Thatcher after 1975, decided that controlling inflation meant that they had to ‘control the money supply’. Which was close but won no cigar. What they had to control was the creation of credit. But that would have meant restricting the activities of the Conservative Party’s friends in the financial sector, which was not appealing. So they decided to try and control the

  money supply instead; and would do so with the old method of raising interest rates (making bankers rich and raising unemployment). Which they duly did on taking office in 1979.

  However, in direct conflict with the notion of controlling the money supply, between 1979 and 1982 the Thatcher government:

  * ended some restrictions on building society lending, – starting them off on the road to becoming banks;

  * abolished hire-purchase restrictions;

  * abolished exchange controls on the export of British capital;

  * and abolished the requirement that banks retained 12.5% of their assets as a safety margin.

  With these changes, British bankers had finally shed almost all state restrictions on their activities. How much of this was understood by Prime Minister Thatcher and Chancellor Geoffrey Howe, both of whom had been tax lawyers before becoming politicians, is unclear. Not very much would be my guess. The bankers’ front man in the cabinet was Nigel Lawson, who had been a financial journalist.

  The result of high interest rates (to ‘control’ the money supply), was a high or ‘strong’ pound: high interest rates made the pound attractive to foreign speculators. A highly valued (‘strong’) pound made British exports expensive and imports cheap; and thus began the destruction of about a quarter of the British manufacturing economy between 1980 and 1985. As the manufacturing was mostly in seats held by the Labour Party, and the booming financial sector was entirely in seats held by the Conservatives, the rising unemployment was of little political concern to the government (and the dole could be paid for by North Sea oil revenues which had started coming ashore in substantial quantities in 1980).

  In his pre-election budget in 1987 the chancellor of the exchequer, Nigel Lawson, cut personal taxes and kept interest rates low when the government’s money supply theories said they should rise. Cue the ‘Lawson boom’: house prices doubled in a year and ‘gazumping’ was added to the crossword setters’ repertoire. Credit cards began arriving, unbidden, in the post of British citizens. Cue the growing practice of borrowing against the rising values of houses. Lawson’s boom duly raised inflation and, after another Conservative election victory in 1992, interest rates were finally raised, triggering the second big recession since 1979 –boom-slump, the old bankers’ two-step.

  Along the way a new story was being told as industrial Britain was priced out of international markets by the high value of the pound. It didn’t matter: Britain was on a natural evolutionary path towards a post-manufacturing, service economy. It didn’t matter that Britain was making fewer and fewer products: they would be replaced by ‘financial products’.

  The arrival of New Labour in 1997 changed nothing. Following his American economic mentors, Chancellor Gordon Brown believed in a new economic theory – widely known as ‘the Washington consensus’ – and propagated by the American bankers, at whose core was the belief that the only proper role for government in economic policy was to keep inflation under control. Everything else could be left to the magic of the market. Brown believed that economic globalisation, the City of London’s role in the world economy and the absence of government regulation, was Britain’s future.

  Chancellor Brown surrendered the power to set interest rates to a committee under the control of the Bank of England on his first day in office and instructed it to keep inflation at 2.5%, using interest rates (the old banker’s two-step). Financial regulation would be ‘light touch’. How any of this was going to benefit – say – Brown’s unemployed constituents in Fife was never explained. Somehow the service economy – renamed the knowledge economy – would come to the rescue. Interest rates and the value of the pound rose. The champagne flowed in the City. Manufacturing, which was still more than 20% of the economy in 1997, was down to 13% after ten years of New Labour.

  British banks had worked to get rid of state supervision from 1945 to Brown‘s final surrender of the control of interest rates in 1997. But the game had changed. By 1997 very few of the glittering tower blocks going up in the booming City of London were to house British-owned financial institutions. The City had been sold off, mostly to American banks, during the so-called ‘big bang’ in 1986. London had become the location of choice for corporations and individuals seeking to avoid taxes and regulation in their home jurisdictions, an offshore tax haven for international bankers, lawyers and accountants.

  Like Britain, America had spent the 1980s and 90s de-industrialising: corporations moved abroad where labour was cheaper, increasingly to the far East. By 2001 the British and American economies, with their much reduced manufacturing sectors, were running huge trade deficits and facing recession. The Americans tried to stimulate their economy by cutting interest rates, which encouraged more borrowing. Much of the extra (borrowed) money in the pocket of American consumers flowed into houses (putting up house prices) and home owners were encouraged to borrow money (have

  more debt) against rising house values. Mortgages were offered to almost anyone. So-called Ninja mortgages – given to people with no income, no job, no assets – appeared. Between 2000 and 2008 mortgage debt in America rose from $6.9 trillion to $14.6 trillion, an increase of 110%. New Labour presided over another wave of house price increases. But it didn’t matter: housing costs were not included in the official measures of inflation.

  The enormous expansion of debt on both sides of the Atlantic brought great times for the debt-creators, followed by the collapse which began in 2007/8. (Boom-slump, the old bankers’ two-step.) The governor of the Bank of England at the time, Eddie George, later told the House of Commons Treasury Committee of this period:

  ‘But we knew that we were having to stimulate consumer spending; we knew we had pushed it up to levels which couldn’t possibly be sustained into the medium and long term. But for the time being, if we had not done that the UK economy would have gone into recession just as had the United States. That pushed up house prices, it increased household debt.’

  
  

  Like his American counterparts, Eddie George thought he was postponing a recession. Like his American counterparts, George had not grasped that the clever people in the globalised finance world, sitting at their computers, were creating another, immeasurably enormous pile of debts, financial speculation and gambling with all this new credit. With these new financial ‘products’ – derivatives and speculation on the future price of everything from beans to currencies – came a reassuring theory: though these millions of deals and trades, involving trillions of dollars, might look risky, in fact the world-wide spread of financial risk entailed by such gambling and speculation meant that the risk was diluted and diminished. This view was endorsed in 2006 by no less an authority than the International Monetary Fund:

  ‘There is growing recognition that the dispersion of credit risk by banks to a broader and more diverse group of investors, rather than warehousing such risk on their balance sheets, has helped to make the banking and overall financial system more resilient.....’

  
  

  In fact it meant that the entire rickety structure was only as strong as its weakest part. And that turned out to be all that new mortgage debt thrust on Americans who couldn’t repay it. When these loans went bad and house repossessions rose, the housing market in America turned down; banks all over the world had bought chunks of this enormous new mortgage debt, large parts of which were turning out to be worthless, repackaged as financial instruments called collateralized debt obligations (CDOs); and the entire intricate edifice began to unravel.

  
  

  It was the same old story: give the bankers freedom and they will lend too much (enriching themselves and their shareholders) and screw things up. The new factors this time were (a) the enormous power of modern computers which enabled them to foul things up on a truly epic scale and (b) the willingness of political parties nominally on the left - Democrats in America and Labour in the UK – to swallow the financial sector’s ridiculous claims that all the world needed was to let bankers do their thing unhindered.

  As British economic commentators surveyed the wreckage of the world economy in 2009, those who had formerly seen financial services as the future of the British economy discovered that this was the delusion the likes of commentators Dan Atkinson and Larry Elliott and manufacturer James Dyson had said it was. They also discovered that even after thirty years of economic policies hostile to it, manufacturing was still a bigger part of the British economy than the financial sector: manufacturing is 13% and financial services 7% of the UK’s economy.

  The size of the hole the bankers have dug for us is still not known. The banks refuse to tell outsiders what the real state of their accounts is and it seems unlikely that they are concealing good news. (On the other it may be that they simply do not know, that the millions of speculative deals and trades they are all engaged in is simply unquantifiable.)

  The banks are also resisting attempts by the British government to regulate them more closely and have failed to meet the lending targets they agreed as the condition for the public money which bailed them out. Having lent too much for so long they have overcompensated and are not lending enough for the investment needs of the domestic economy. (The obvious solution, that if the current banks will not provide enough credit for the economy, the state should create its own bank to do the job, is way beyond the comprehension and courage of our major political parties.)

  Meanwhile the banks are rebuilding their balance sheets by dint of devaluing our savings with interest rates lower than the rate of inflation and charging enormous rates on credit cards. Three million households in Britain have mortgages they can only just afford to pay and the prospect of mass default on mortgages is the main reason interest rates are being kept so low and savers are being penalised to support those with borrowing they cannot

  afford. The global casino continues; and the billions of pounds in bonuses are still being paid to the people based in London gambling with our savings and livelihoods.

  Another great crash is predicted every week by some economic expert or other and it is still possible that it will all implode again. Will the British taxpayer will take on another huge debt to bail them out a second time? Perhaps if we reach that point the political system will find the courage to put the bankers back in their box. But I am not holding my breath. The global gambling continues because the financial sector – bankers and hedge fund operators, chiefly – believe that they are too big to fail, and the state will be forced to bail them out come what may. I have seen nothing in the events since the crash of 2008 to suggest that the financial sector has underestimated the courage or intelligence of our political leaders.

  
  

  
  

  • Robin Ramsay has edited the magazine ‘Lobster’ from Hull since 1983, investigating contemporary history and conspiracy subjects like the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the death of Lord Mountbatten, the shooting down of flight KAL902, the Iraq War and the plot to smear Harold Wilson.

  
  

  Recent books by Robin Ramsay include ‘Conspiracy Theories: Almost Everything You Need to Know in One Essential Guide’; ‘Who Shot JFK?’; ‘The Rise of New Labour’; ‘Politics and Paranoia’ [Picnic Books 2008].

  
  

  Lobster is at http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk.

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  The Yorkshire chancellors

   

  Robin Ramsay blames Prime Minister Edward Heath, rather than his Chancellor, Anthony Barber, for the disastrous ‘Barber Boom’ of 1972.

  Nevertheless, the Doncaster-born former fighter pilot Tony Barber has often been paired with Cowling-born Philip Snowden as the worst 20th century chancellors.

   

  Snowden 1864 – 1937 was the son of a humble Yorkshire weaver, a Methodist and a teetotaller. He was MP for Colne Valley when he became Labour’s first ever chancellor in 1924. He came back to 11, Downing Street between 1929 and 1931, during the Great Slump and the crisis governments of Ramsay McDonald.

   

  ‘Snowden's rigidity of doctrine was otherwise impenetrable’, Winston Churchill, who knew Snowden well. ‘Free imports, no matter what the foreigner may do to us; the Gold Standard, no matter how short we run of gold; austere repayment of debt, no matter how we have to borrow the money; high progressive direct taxation, even if it brings creative energies to a standstill; the “Free breakfast-table”, even if it is entirely supplied from outside the British jurisdiction!’

   

  As a Christian Socialist in Keighley he had been ‘raised in an atmosphere which regarded borrowing as an evil and free trade as an essential ingredient of prosperity’. He supported shocking cuts in unemployment benefit and in the early years of the Great Slump opposed the reforming economic policies of John Maynard Keynes, although later supporting Keynes, when out of power in the House of Lords in 1935.

   

  Tony Barber’s father was company secretary of a Doncaster confectionery works when he was sacked in the 1930s without compensation for reporting his boss to the Inland Revenue. At 19, his son escaped capture with the British army at Dunkirk, then in 1943, as a photo-reconaissance pilot, fell into German hands after bailing out over France. He escaped several times from POW camps, once getting as far as his mother’s native Denmark, after breaking out of the Stalag Luft 3 camp, in present day Poland.

   

  When Lord Barber died in 2005 an obituary described his chancellorship: ‘It all ended sadly, with a sudden steep increase in Arab oil prices, accelerating inflation, the miners' strike, election defeat, and the loss of the Conservative Party's reputation for economic competence. Most assessments of the records of post-1945 Chancellors have placed Barber near the bottom of the list.’

   

  Not all Yorkshire chancellors were failures. Two of them, one Labour and one Tory, are now seen as successful.

   

  Denis Healey, Labour MP for Leeds East, had warned, ‘There are going to be howls of anguish from those rich enough to pay over 75% on their last slice of earnings.’ 

   

  But Healey’s 1974 promise to ‘squeeze property speculators until the pips squeak’ had to chime with the fact that by 1976 the International Monetary Fund was supervising British economic policy. Nevertheless, despite the IMF, his policies have been deemed ‘progressive’, with increased benefits for the poor, food subsidies and pensions.

   

  Sir Howard Kingsley Wood, born in Hull, the son of a Wesleyan Methodist minister, was a Tory expert on industrial insurance and served as Winston Churchill’s wartime chancellor. He had to collect, in Churchill’s words, ‘the most severe taxation ever imposed by a Government or loyally accepted by the taxpayers.’ Kingsley Wood recruited John Maynard Keynes as a full-time Treasury adviser in July 1940 and designed Britain’s popular Pay As You Earn tax scheme. At 62, on the morning in 1943 when he was due to announce PAYE to the House of Commons, he collapsed and died at his London home.

This year York is celebrating one of its most remarkable Roman rulers. Christina Surdhar tells the story of Septimius Severus

It is 1,800 years since Septimius Severus died in York but his legacy remains to this day. He was the first Roman Emperor born in Africa and ruled between AD 193 and 211, ruling the empire from York for three years: AD 208-211.

Severus was an accomplished general and was the first of the soldier emperors, rising through the ranks of the military under the reigns of Marcus Aurelius and his son Commodus. He seized power after the death of Emperor Pertinax in 193. After deposing and killing the incumbent emperor, Didius Julianus, Severus fought his rival claimants and after having defeated his internal enemies in a series of civil wars, went on to victories further afield of the Empire, all the way from Mesopotamia to Britain, where he strengthened Hadrian’s Wall and took his seat at York.

To read the full interesting story see the June 2011 issue of Yorkshire ridings magazine.

Whitby's celebrated fossil business began as an on-line marketplace for fossils and was founded by Keith Blessed when Byron Blessed was still at university studying the first of two degrees.

When Byron completed his studies with a B.Sc. in Geology and a M.Sc. in Palaeontology, he took over the running and design of the website. Soon after this the opportunity arose to open a retail outlet in the seaside fishing port of Whitby, world famous for its fossils. So Byron opened Natural Wonders in the summer of 1999. The shop is open 7 days a week (even in winter) and the business has expanded to incorporate guided fossil hunting trips that have proved extremely popular.

Says Byron, "We leave the shop and walk up the abbey steps along the cliff top path to a place called Saltwick Bay where i give a talk about how to find fossils and what to look for. Then we look for fossils and slowly walk back to Whitby along the foreshore as the tide retreats. At various places i show people dinosaur footprints and geological features. Fossils of some description are always found. I also take group and school parties but alternative dates are arranged for these and are dependant upon the right set of tides."

You can visit the Natural Wonders on-line store by clicking www.fossils-uk.com ... and then why not visit Whitby and pop into the shop to meet Byron and his team?

You will find Natural Wonders at 20 Grape Lane, Whitby, North Yorkshire YO22 4BA.

The telephone number is 01947 821363 you can send an e-mail to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Martin Limon tells the story of the notorious highwayman Dick Turpin who was executed at York 270 years ago

The Castle Museum is one of the many attractions York has to offer visitors. Housed in 18th century buildings that were once a gloomy prison for some of the county’s most infamous and dangerous criminals a recent £200,000 refurbishment tells the story of the people who were once incarcerated there. Probably the most celebrated was Dick Turpin, although when he was first brought there his true identity was unknown as he was masquerading as someone called John Palmer.

Howard M. Beck reports on the momentous event that made the Yorkshire Wolds the centre of world attention

Coloured lights and strange fireballs in the sky, accompanied by wooshing noises or sonic booms. No, we are not talking about UFO sightings nor the start of an alien invasion of earth, but more probably the appearance of another mysterious interstellar traveller - the meteorite. We now know these stony messengers from deep space have collided with our planet and struck the surface of the moon (hence its cratered appearance), on a regular basis for billions of years since the creation of the Solar System.