We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
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The BBC is reporting that the British film industry – however defined – cut its total payroll by about 20 percent in 2004, caused in part by uncertainties over the future tax treatment of said industry. It is a familiar tale.
British governments, especially the current Labour one, liked to attract the plaudits of the film-buff classes by promising to shower grants and tax breaks on the film business, but the returns on all this activity have been mixed at best. I am not sure whether tax is the prime reason for choosing to avoid Britain or not. Surely the availability of top talent, on both sides of the camera; good locations, ease of access and relatively decent labour market conditions also play a big part in all this. The latter point gets overlooked, particularly given the still-severe armlock on the industry by the acting union Equity, which operates a closed shop system on the industry.
Another thing – far too many British films try to go for the “quirky” or period-piece route and I suspect that the industry is now saddled with a fairly set image. Brits continue to ply their trade around the world – some of the best movie directors, special effects artists and so forth are Brits – so maybe some concerns are misplaced. Film-making is a global industry anyway and I would not be at all surprised if a lot of work is getting outsourced to cheaper locales like India.
I do not believe the government should dangle even bigger tax breaks under the noses of our would-be Spielbergs or Ridley Scotts to get them to make movies here. Cutting taxes overall and keeping labour costs free of regulatory red tape would be a better long-term bet. The film industry is a nice thing to have but it does not deserve and should not get, special treatment from the State.
Charles Moore on the lamentable Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone:
This man is the Mayor of our greatest city. He condemns the bombing of that city (because it was an attack on “working-class Londoners”, not on “the mighty and the powerful”). But he is friends with our enemies. New York had Mayor Giuliani at its darkest moment. We have Mayor Livingstone. We are in trouble.
We are. The time has long gone when Livingstone and all that he represents could be dismissed as fringe Moonbattery. But he remains in power because he is such a cheeky chappy. Well, I am not laughing.
Thanks to regular commenter Julian Taylor for pointing out the Moore article. Read it all.
And that would be the law of unintended consequences.
The urge to alleviate the woes of the world can cause people to do great things. However when that urge is coupled to the power of a state, it is a dangerous mixture which can have the opposite effect to the one intended.
The think-tank Civitas has made no friends in Whitehall with its latest release titled Blair government causes child poverty and the UK Treasury is clearly incandescent at the suggestion that big government is actually the problem rarther than the solution.
But then the truth often hurts.
The Tory party has been an ideology-free zone for quite some time now, defying any but the more internally focused Tory activist to really have any notion of what the Tory Party truly stands for. Not that the Labour Party actually wears its ideological heart on its sleeve any more, but at least the Labour Party clearly still believes in the Labour Party. The Tories on the other hand, well…
There is a very strange article by Peter Osborne in The Spectator in which he marvels that Tories cannot see that Ken Clarke is the solution to their woes, by which presumably he means that what the Tories need is a leader who wants to give more power to European Union institutions and run the economy pretty much as Tony Blair has. He also marvels at the ‘lurch to the right’ that the Tory Party has taken…
Yeah, that notion had me rather puzzled too. In short, Osborne seems to think that rather than search for ideological purity (!), the Tory Party need to just throw their lot in with Ken Clarke’s favour of regulatory statism.
So I guess I must have missed the Tory Party advocating scrapping the NHS and coming up with a non-rationing based healthcare system. I must have missed the plans to end inheritance tax completely, the bold decision to scrap entire government departments and reduce the state take by 15% in the first term…
If the Tories had quixotically adopted meaningful ‘right wing’ (whatever that actually means) policies, that would indicate the Tory Party actually believed in something. Yet even flirting with a moderate and rather inconsequential idea like the flat tax apparently makes you ‘right wing’ in Osborn’s universe. I guess departing materially from the post-Thatcher Labour world view seen as weird extremism, which of course means only the CINOs like that clapped out old milker Ken Clarke actually seem ‘sensible’ to someone for whom politics only ever means arguing over the rate at which the state should grow.
But the Tory party as a whole have not seriously even had that discussion and unless David Davis actually gets into the hotseat, it probably never will. I think Peter Osborn must have had a Tory Party from some alternate reality in mind…
For all that I am sometimes bemused about the views of the assorted rock stars, media wannabes and other folk gathered around Sir Bob Geldof’s “Make Poverty History” campaign, I was a bit taken aback at this story. A UK regulatory body has banned the group from making any television or radio advertising on the grounds that it is a political group.
It would surely take the wisdom of Solomon to figure out the fine boundaries defining what is and what is not a “political” organisation. So many charities nowadays seem to stray into territory that one might construe as political. Many think tanks, which describe themselves as education or research institutes for the purpose of getting charitable tax status, are often highly political, if not in the simple party sense.
In my view, if a charity is deemed unfit to broadcast its views on the telly, it should be banned, full stop. For example, a radical Islamist or neo-Nazi group claiming to be a charity which is banned from spreading its message should also be banned as such (although some libertarians might argue that even such groups should be tolerated unless their members advocate violent acts with a reasonable chance of carrying them out).
The state has no business trying to define the boundaries of what is and what is not a charity. Ultimately, of course, the way to cut through the problem might be to end the tax breaks that charitable status brings and cut taxes across the board so that the designation of “charitable status” no longer is something decided by the Great and the Good but left up to we mortals to decide for ourselves.
I am not the only one calling for a sense of proportion. The Security Minister for Northern Ireland, Sean Woodward, told Radio 4’s Broadcasting House this morning that despite these disorders most people in Northern Ireland were able to go about their normal lives without disturbance yesterday, and we should not get these things out of proportion.
While I am inclined to agree this is not Armageddon, I would suggest that the Government’s sense of proportion is a touch selective. Had riots with firearms, incendiaries, and home-made grenades broken out in Blackburn at some march by a Moslem sect, would we expect such a calming response? Not on your nelly.
We might have woken up to martial law imposed on Lancashire and Yorkshire. At the very least Charles Clarke would be appearing on all channels advocating internment, massively increased police powers and speeding-up the Home Office’s beloved ID card scheme. There would certainly be nothing else on the news.
Is it that 40 miles of water makes the difference? Is it colour or nominal religion? Or does the security establishment (despite being in a scrap with them on this occasion), still think of Unionist extremists as being somehow on ‘our’ side.
This fascinating factoid courtesy of The Times’s Gabriel Rozenberg:
Tolley’s Yellow Tax Handbook is the standard professional reference on UK direct taxation. Its format has changed little for many years.
1996-1997 edition: 4,555 pages.
2005-2006 edition: 9,050 pages.
As Rozenberg points out, for income tax law to get to the size that a summary filled 4,555 pages took nearly 200 years. Boy, has the present government been busy.
Close observers of the Treasury will know that this has happened at the same time as the Inland Revenue has been piloting a glorious project that could only happen in Whitehall, the Comprehensive Tax Law rewrite. This, the first part of which is about to be enacted, is allegedly designed–this is not a joke–to simplify UK tax law without changing it.
It does serve to emphasise something that is often neglected, even by our friends at the ASI, who calculate Tax Freedom Day on the basis of the tax take. Tax burden, the cost of tax to the payer, is always greater than the actual tax he has to pay. The difference, the compliance cost, is hard to measure. But it is utterly invisible to the Civil Service, to most politicians, and most employees. To them it is someone else’s problem, if they notice at all.
But when bureaucratic treacle is poured into society’s gearboxes, everyone suffers indirectly. Compliance costs are still costs. Leaving aside the moral case against tax, they produce all the baneful economic effects of higher taxation (a split economy, advantages for tax-planners and those who can afford them, disincentive to work or invest, regulatory distortions), without putting more money into the public purse.
It is not just complication. Many of the more recent reforms (and this started under the Tories) move administrative and collection responsibilities from the government to the taxpayer or his employer, so Tolley’s doubling may well be an underestimate of the increase in compliance costs. Taxation has risen fast in Britain. But tax burden has risen, and continues to rise much faster.
There is an article in The Spectator which perfectly sums up the expression “The state is not your friend” that described the nightmarish encounter someone had with the officious little shits that are employed to police our borders and protect us from middle class Australian women.
It should be only under the most extraordinary circumstances in which an agent of the state should be able to legally refuse to give you their name and thereby avoid personal responsibility for their actions. Read the article and then ponder the thesis that the reason many people take jobs in places like the Immigration service is to satisfy a psychological need to exert arbitrary power over others. This is your tax money at work.
If the UN says something should or should not be done, it is a safe bet that doing the opposite is most likely the correct course of action. Thus when the UN says Britain must not expel Muslim clerics who incite terrorism, clearly this is indeed the best policy.
It does not matter if a compass always points south, as long as you know that you can use it to find your way just as effectively as with one which always points north.
So the CCTV camera tapes which would have shown the facts pertaining to tragic shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes were blank. Right. But the IPCC says they have the vital CCTV footage. Ooookay, that is sorted then.
What the hell is going on?
A truly vile act by animal ‘rights’ thugs has had the effect they wanted: a farm will stop breeding guinea pigs for research experiments in the hope that the corpse of the owner’s grandmother, dug up and stolen by these ‘heroes’, will now be returned to her grave. In their considerable history of despicable behaviour, this was a new low.
I hope the state does its job and tracks down those responsible (I have my doubts) but there are some insults so dire that were I in the position of the Hall family, I would feel justified doing quite literally anything to find those responsible. I for one would not be prepared to share a planet with them. These animal rights thugs have shown that the courts are not the only way to compel people to do things against their will and courts are also not the only way to get justice. A truly dreadful affair and a reminder of the contempt with which these ‘activists’ should be treated.
The Muslim Council of Britain has demanded a public apology from the BBC over the broadcasting of a Panorama programme last night which they have castigated as a “travesty“. A quick glance at their statement throws light upon their concerns, namely, that the programme aims to undermine the Islamic faith by presenting imams as extremists and that it is designed to “sabotage” the political participation of Muslims in the British mainstream. The most telling quote is,
It seems that to qualify as so-called ‘moderates’ Muslims are required to remain silent about Israeli crimes in Palestine, otherwise they are automatically labelled as ‘extremists’.
The refutation of the MCB’s position is clear. In a society which values free debate, the Muslim Council of Britain should engage with the issues raised. Instead, they have imported the arguments prevalent in the Middle East, which damns all criticism as a Zionist conspiracy designed to undermine Islam. Muslims do not have to remain quiet about Israeli actions that they perceive as criminal. The problem lies with those who justify terror and the deaths of innocents by referring to Israeli actions and tarring every Jew and Israeli Arab with ‘collective guilt’.
This rhetoric is not new, but the platform that Muslim political institutions are gaining in the mainstream media provides a testament to the paradox that they are increasingly confident and increasingly defensive. The popular demonstrations of the anti-war movement and the dividends reaped from the flanking alliance that Muslim organisations arranged with the hard left has gained the political wing of Islam legislative promises such as the outlawing of statements that are deemed offensive. By rubbishing the Panorama programme, the Muslim Council of Britain wishes to build upon these achievements by narrowing the public discussion of Islam in the mainstream media and excising a ‘critical school’ that does not accept their arguments or values.
The terrorist attacks of July 7th have proved to be an opportunity for Muslim organisations regarded as ‘mainstream’. Their spokesmen have been co-opted into government programmes providing channels of communication and extra sources of patronage. However, the terrorist attacks have also raised the profile of these spokesmen. Buoyed by the popularity of the anti-war movement, they have overestimated the depth of support for their views in Middle Britain, confusing the liberals who marched against the Iraqi war with the hard left. That is why we hear the overconfidence of Muslim anti-Zionists in our midst and a growing realisation in certain parts of the Labour Party that members of the Muslim Council of Britain hold illiberal views.
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