Barometer | 16 April 2011

Prince of cars

It was revealed that Audi has been enticing royal customers with 60 per cent discounts. It is not the first car company to target royalty to build its image.

— In 1898 the Daimler Motor Company of Coventry offered the Prince of Wales the use of five cars on a visit to Warwick Castle.

— The generosity was richly rewarded: in 1902, as King Edward VII, he ordered a 22 HP model from the company and bestowed a royal warrant.

— Daimler remained the sole supplier of vehicles to the Royal Family until 1949 when, after a gearbox failure in a Daimler given to him as a wedding present, Prince Philip ordered a Rolls-Royce instead.

Behind the veil

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Tom Bower

Labour is destroying London’s nightlife

A ban on wearing burqas came into effect in France. Some estimates for the number of burqa-wearers in European countries:

France 367–2000
Holland 400
Belgium 215
Sweden 100
Denmark 3

There is no published estimate for the UK, but at least three girls’ schools specify a burqa or niqab as uniform, enough to take the number of wearers above that of any other western European country.

Black mark

Oxford University accused David Cameron of quoting misleading statistics when he claimed that only one black student was admitted to Oxford last year. These are the ethnic origins of successful

British-based applicants in 2009:

Students admitted		Success rate of applications
2316 77 49 23 16 1	White Indian Chinese Black African Pakistani Black Caribbean	28% 17% 22% 13% 11% 3%

Bank withdrawals

The value of the support given to the banks by the UK taxpayer is £512 billion. How readily could they leave Britain if they chose to? Analysis by the Independent Commission on Banking suggested this week that the most mobile banking operations pay the least tax:

Ease of moving work abroad in 2009/10

‘Hard to impossible’ £30-36bn

‘Sticky but not immovable’ £15-£20bn

‘Lowest hurdles to departure’ £3bn

Source: Interim Report, Independent Commission on Banking