I love it.

Unseasonally cold weather in North Western Europe has created a load of potholes across the streets of the old continent but a town in the Ex-Communist East Germany, Niderzimmern, has hit upon a way of makling money from this driver’s blight.

Niederzimmern, not far from Weimar,  and an area I know quite well (and appreciate much more) having spent some time in Jena in my fairly sensible youth – reckons that people will pay to have potholes filled in if they can stamp it with their intials or I love my wife, dog, mistress etc.

Meet the Niederzimmern pothole . . .

(That is a toy car for scale btw !)

I’ve often thought that the problem wth local governnment in the UK is that it is not free to innovate and raise (and cut) funds as it thinks fit. Such an action would probably be unthinkable here. Taxes really do need to be localised and innovative. What’s special about this is that they could potentially raise tax from all over the world to solve a local problem.

According to the local website, they’ve only sold 52 so far.  So seeing as East Germany is emptying of people and the massive transfer of funds from West Germany is finally petering out, this is a really good idea. Three cheers for Niederzimmern !

I keep thinking about this trip I went on last weekend – a tour of micro-hydro plants organised by the South Somerset Hydropower Group. It was a good deal – for £60, we got lunch, coffee x 3 and bussed around 6 quite different micro-hydro sites, with plenty of expert commentary, not least by some very proud owners – full details here. At this time of year as well, these plants are working nearly flat out,  because there has been so much rain (and lots of mud too – I’m such a townie!). Load factors of 70+% are right now about the norm.

Anyway, here’s one of my favourites of the day, Hainbury Mill which has an archimedes screw. The benefits of this technology are that it is; very fish-friendly, virtually no filtering out of river debris required and it’s really quite unusual to look at.

With feed-in-tariffs coming in from the 1st April, it’s anticipated that a mini-boom might come about for micro-hydro. Let’s see – I wouldn’t hold my breath for any government scheme scaling up quickly and efficienctly. For all that, this is different to the pre wind rush of just over a decade ago. Back then, complex regional monitoring of windspeeds was required to get an idea of where the best locations were. This time, the UK already knows where its long-retired 30,000 mills are located and technology has come a long way in the last few years, to enable the extraction of power from low head sites. And micro-hydro has much higher availability, works at a higher load factor – even contributing baseload power than those poster childs of the micro-generation sector – wind and solar.

One more picture – I thought this mill won the beauty prize – Hewletts Mill.

Very thoughtful piece by Sean O’Grady in the Independent this morning – So where on earth have all the proper jobs gone?

He observes that while full-time jobs are going down, part-time jobs are increasing. I remember 20 odd years ago some futurist forecasting that in the future, we would all have 3 or 4 jobs and I just couldn’t imagine it, less still than that would be happening to me now.

On one level, it’s great that not everyone has to become conformist corporate wage slaves anymore.  But the self-employed, portfolio jobber requires a surplus of work to make it work for him and must generate higher savings because cash flow is much less predictable and work much less secure.  Benefits are in short supply.

On that last point, I was at an excellent seminar at Civitas with Dr Irwin Stelzer this lunchtime. I was very taken during the discussion about China, that the savings rate there was as high as 50%, because there was absolutely no welfare to fall back on, which is why – even after years of growth – the Chinese consumer is still something of an oxymoron.

There’s been a lot of policy chatter  over the last year in the UK about the lessons the Britain can learn from Canada and Sweden-  at least a decade or more ago – on cutting government expenditure harder and faster than anyone really wants. That’s all fine, but why not look across the Irish Sea and watch it happen  in real time?

Almost exactly one year ago, spreads on Ireland’s five-year credit default swaps rose to a record 377 basis points – about where Greece is now.Today, they are nothing like that. The difference is, Ireland got ruthless with the public sector and Greece almost certainly won’t.

Of the PIIGs, the markets have far more confidence in Ireland’s ability to recover at a sustainably higher rate, because they chose the roughest medicine early on and swallowed it whole.  The PIIGs (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain) are becoming the PIGs without Ireland.

No one is talking about an Irish default any more.  Go figure.

So three cheers for Ireland for showing Britain not only what can be done with ultra-competitive low taxes to attract investment and generate exceptional growth in the good times. And more cheers for demonstrating how to deal with a severe financial crisis like we have now – tackling it head-on.

The other day, we had our inaugural private EPC dinner with politicians, thought-leaders and leading members of the business community – it was terrific. And we had a real treat, because Dr Eamonn Butler of the Adam Smith Institute agreed to step in at the last moment to speak about his new book;

The Alternative Manifesto – a 12 step programme to remake Britain

I haven’t yet read the whole book, but having read the chapter on tax, I can tell you, it’s very fluently written and cogently argued in a non-technical, accessible way. I’m sure it will do well. I’m also quite into the can-do, will-succeed ethos that pervades this oeuvre. And, more than that, as well as being without ego, I’m very struck by the way Eamonn goes out of his way to give credit to other people – all too rare in today’s plagiaristic copy and past world. In my view, those two character traits show true intellectual class.

The good doctor is also pretty nifty with an iphone – he was asked to speak for 10 minutes and did so to the second, timing himself, as I noticed out of the corner of my eye, with some slick countdown app !

Everyone is getting pretty worked up about Greece. Now it’s heading for a bailout, some of us think it’s pretty ridiculous that as non-members of the Euro, the UK may have to contribute to the bailout package. Others like Hamish McRae on the Independent argue that helping Greece is akin to helping Northern Rock because it represents a systemic risk to the entire European Banking system just as Northern Rock was to the UK.

Well, I’m not so sure. My gut feeling is that we should hold on to as much capital as we’ve got – especially if you think as Prof. David Blanchflower does, deflation remains a serious risk two years out from now.

However, there is one long overdue action that will create an enormous amount of intangible goodwill between Britain and Greece – returning the Elgin Marbles.

So get on and do it !