Given my extremely low expectations, it takes a lot for a British government to actually amaze me.
Well they have managed to do exactly that. The people who rule us are not misguided, they are actually evil.
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It is a very nervous time for those of us in Britain stupid enough to be self-employed, in this age of grasping government. Because Gordon Brown is desperately short of cash and he is also desperately scared of raising any more income tax from voters employed by large organisations. So where does that leave him? It leaves him staring at me and a few other hardy self-employed souls standing out here in living-on-our-own-wits land, ready to take the hit to fill his £10 billion black hole of unfunded borrowing. Gordon Brown is a great fat sweating thieving spurt of the devil and I hate him with every twisted fibre of my being. But I think I am going to hate him even more on Thursday morning, after his UK government budget statement on Wednesday, because the small print is almost certainly going to show me owing Her Majesty’s Government up to 70% of my direct ill-gotten income, which I currently exploit out of the oppressed banks and City corporations of England. If he does do this, by making me pay all sorts of national insurances on dividend income, for benefits I am ineligible to claim, to try to effectively turn me into an employee of the state, he may be clever enough to remove all of the wheezes we use out here in self-employed land, to get ourselves off the hook. March 15th, 2004 | 35 comments - (Comments are closed)
 There is something very Georgian and 18th Century about this but I suppose it qualifies as entrepreneurialism of sorts:
Tax-free cash as well I should think.
A reaction to the ‘risk aversion’ culture, perhaps?
Also they might get the crap beaten out of them.
So is he trying to tell us that overregulation has spawned a thriving ‘underground’ industry?
Surely it cannot be that painful? March 14th, 2004 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
Equitable Life is a mess, that is for sure. The responsibility of making sure the people who look after your money can be trusted ultimately lies with the owner of the money… the pensioners, the beneficiaries of what Equitable Life actually does. However if fraud or other gross misrepresentation is involved, and not just incompetence, ineptitude or misfortune, then things do change somewhat as it becomes a criminal matter. However Equitable Life is massively regulated, so many of its weird business decisions must be seen within the context of the weird distorted environment within which it operates… So yes, there is an argument that as the state should therefore also be liable for the mess. But then if you accept that, given that the British economy grows more regulated by the day, that would suggest investors should be lining up to claim tax money from the state every time anything goes bust. After all, what makes Equitable Life’s casualties any different from the casualties of any other business cock up? March 8th, 2004 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
What happens when idiotarian values, movements or policies collide? When EU clashes with animal rights activists…
Or when “environment-friendly” energy sources meet conservationists…
Both of these articles in one day. More and faster, please. March 7th, 2004 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
This sounds promising:
And so on. Basically it is education vouchers, but not called that. There is even a good soundbite on offer:
Nice one. I was going to put this posting on my Education Blog, for obvious reasons. But thinking about it, I think the real significance of this announcement may be more what it says about the general attitude of the Conservatives. Much as I dislike Tories because of the way they talk, dress, are, etc., this sounds very promising. Their problem for the last decade or so has been that they have simply stood up in the House of Commons and read out all the complaints everyone has had about what the government has done, is doing, or is about to do, regardless of whether the criticisms add up to a coherent alternative attitude to government. This tax increase is bad, but so is that spending cut. This attack on freedom is bad, yet this other attack on freedom is insufficiently ferocious. And their handling of the Iraq war has been a mess, I think. We aren’t sure about the war as a whole, but this … (fill in the detail of the week that they happen to be moaning about) … is terrible. But this education announcement actually suggests a bunch of people who think that they might one day be the government. Three of four more announcements of this substantial sort, and the public might start to think of the Conservatives with a modicum of respect. This is not what everyone would ideally like for education. That would be for everyone’s child to become a genius, with no effort, as a result of an infinitely powerful and infinitely nice Prime Minister with an infinitely nice smile waving an infinitely magic wand over each child’s head, causing all children everywhere to get ahead of all the other children everywhere else. But people are starting to get that a wish list is not necessarily a workable policy. The Conservatives are never going to be liked. But people are starting to despise this government, for announcing rather too many wish lists – each one headed “dramatic new policy”, “radical shake-up”, etc. So even if people still quite like Tony Blair, they are starting to lose respect for him. If they ever start respecting the Conservatives more, then that will be a new phase of British politics, and a potentially Conservative phase. March 6th, 2004 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
Simple really. Give them a vested interest to do so, a financial interest in fact. Create vast numbers of public sector jobs funded from the disloyal private sector and then what do you have? You have 7.4 million people (plus their families) who owe their ‘jobs’ to an expanding state and whilst the Tories are hardly the party of small government, it will hardly have escaped the notice of state employed workers that the number of public sector jobs from Maggie Thatcher onwards had been falling for 15 years… and under Labour they are growing at an astonishing rate. However the real ‘loyalty lock-in’ comes not from merely giving people a job but rather from providing them with not just a lavish pension but an unfunded one at that! This means that only tax money can redeem these pension plans in the future because, unlike a private sector pension which is backed by investments (investments the state regularly raids for their own uses), there is nothing other than a government promise to pay with other people’s money underpinning what Mr. Buggins from Whitehall intends to retire on. As this is of course economic madness, only someone with a direct vested interest would vote to perpetuate such a giant ponzi scheme. Alas, people directly effected by something like that are far more likely to be dependable focused voters, whereas a private sector employee may well not see the direct causal link between their declining purchasing power and their public sector neighbour’s pension plan. Labour’s strategy is multi-election political genius. And of course by the time the economy implodes, people will have either largely forgotten what caused the problem or when faced with cutting pensions in fiat money to telegenic old grannies, will find someone else to blame (Capitalists, Jews, White People, Black People, Arabs, Americans, etc. etc.). But then as the high priest of amorality once said, in the long run we are all dead anyway. March 5th, 2004 | 26 comments - (Comments are closed)
One of the many perils associated with declining birthrates is that it makes it much easier for the social-working classes to nationalise children:
Only they don’t call it ‘nationalisation’ any more. Now they call it ‘protection’ but it amounts to same thing. Sometimes, just occasionally mind, I actually quite miss the old-style firebrand lefties and their revolutionary rhetoric. At least they were honest and open about their ambitions and, in many ways, that made it a lot easier to tackle them head-on. March 4th, 2004 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
One of the very few benefits of Tony Blair being Prime Minister is that he and his supporters are hollowing out the Labour Party :
To watch a time-honoured institution like the British Labour Party rip itself asunder is tragic. Just tragic. March 3rd, 2004 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
It will come as no surprise to anyone with a 100+ IQ and a modicum of knowledge about how the world works that Robert Mugabe and his murderous kleptocrats have appropriated more that £100 million (US $190 million) in aid sent to Zimbabwe by Britain and the EU. As that was only to be expected, I cannot say it adds significantly to my loathing of the Mugabe regime. What does fill me with utter contempt is that the people responsible for this utterly predictable outcome still allowed the money to be sent in the first place. As I have previously argued many times before about foreign aid, to send money for ostensibly humanitarian aims to a nation governed by a tyranny is to become the logistic support arm of that tyranny: insulating the regime from the economic (and hence political) consequences of its actions and thereby indirectly, but in a very real sense, making the regime more likely to survive than would otherwise be the case. That is true even if the humanitarian aid does indeed reach the people and projects it is targeted at. This however is even worse than that. To send aid to Zimbabwe is to underwrite the tyrannical Mugabe regime directly as according to the latest report, 89% ends up in the pockets of Zimbabwe’s rulers rather than being spent on the humanitarian objectives for which it is intended. Thus not only can the people who sent the money not bask in their delusions that they have at least done good for those who benefit from the worthy projects, they might as well be buying weapons for Mugabe’s police and paramilitaries, not to mention making the bankers and shopkeepers in Zürich rather happy. They are directly supporting the tyrants with large cash injections. As I disinclined to believe that the people in charge of the governments and agencies in question do not know full well where the money is going to end up, that makes them knowingly supporters of the regime. Which means they are supporting this:
If all that was happening was that the Guardian reading classes were getting a warm fuzzy glow because they were supporting British tax money going to ‘help stamp out poverty in the third world’, then that would be bad enough, given the reality of what this distorting flow of cash really does. But as Zimbabwe slowly morphs into an inept ‘North Korea Lite’, the platitudes and wilful ignorance of some are now directly funding truly monstrous horrors and misery because they are too damn lazy to think the whole issue through. Of course if our political masters did not know this was going to happen when they decided to send huge chunks cash to a place like Zimbabwe, then they are naive to the point of idiocy and have no business being in charge of vast amounts of other people’s money to begin with. So which is it? February 29th, 2004 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
There are several things which annoy the hell out of me regarding the ongoing ruckus over whether or not the British intelligence services have been spying on Kofi Annan and the UN generally, as alleged by Claire Short. Firstly, the UN is nothing less than a logistics agency for tyrants around the world, insulating them from the economic consequences of their policies and ostensibly giving them equal standing with liberal human rights respecting regimes. Thus the notion that this institution’s leader, Kofi Annan, is some sainted figure beyond reproach (and beyond espionage) is both bizarre and repugnant. If we are to get any value from our pilfered tax money at all, I would hope some of it is spent spying on the corrupt functionaries at the United Nations. Secondly, whilst I will defer to our in-house lawyer David Carr as to whether Claire Short’s actions constitute treason, at the very least I can only marvel how she was not immediately charged under the Official Secrets Act and thrown in jail… but silly me, I forgot there is one rule for the political, establishment and another everyone else.  February 29th, 2004 | 78 comments - (Comments are closed)
That’s it, I’ve had enough. I just could not believe my ears, last night, listening to some po-voiced BBC reporter agreeing with some equally pompous do-gooding UK doctor that British people simply cannot be trusted to look after their own health. They also agreed that Wanless Chinder’s HM Treasury proposal, to introduce yet more tax-funded social engineering into British health care, was a desperately needed breath of fresh air. Jesus H. Christ. Just when will you people get it? When will you get it into your thick skulls that it is your damned social engineering policies, over the last sixty years, which have created all of your alleged problems in the first place? When you take away people’s responsibilities for their own health care, by providing them with an MRSA-infested paid-for-by-everybody-else National Health Service, the obvious response is for many of them to start abusing their own bodies, or at the very least to start taking less care of themselves. Why? Because someone else will be forced to pick up the pieces afterwards, that’s why. So what the hell, let’s eat another cream cake, let’s drink another bottle of whisky. Because the NHS will pay for any liposuction I may need, afterwards, and the NHS will always supply me with a new liver, should I need one. And if they refuse to, then I’ll sue them for a loss of human dignity. → Continue reading: Death to the chocolate smugglers February 26th, 2004 | 24 comments - (Comments are closed)
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