Forget #indyref; what does this mean for the EU?

Why are people surprised at our political establishment and it's army of civil servants failing to create a Plan Y? Accounting for every eventuality and possible outcome requires a certain finesse and creativity that is sorely lacking in the Bubble.

Still it is fun to see this all play out, with an almost chronic failing of attention on the EU implications.

Taking the lead from this Breitbart article we see a potentially devastating vision presented on a scale of soviet disintegration - but this isn't just of the UK but of the EU.

Say Scotland does leave and immediately applies to join the EU; that whole process takes several years of worming through the bureaucratic miasma in Brussels.

Then in the interim we see Catalonia and Basque regions in Spain opt for independence.

Then parts of Germany.

And Hungary.

And Islamic State(tm) annexes part of Turkey, scuppering further integration completely.

Then it becomes necessary to set up border controls with a non-covered Shengen-agreement non-EU state on our northern border.

Then in the offshoot Spanish territories.

This all rolls into an even bigger trade miasma with non-EU or even EEC-recognised states within central Europe.

Let's assume Cameron is still there (ha!)- do you really think his "renegotiation" ploy will get very far?

Me neither.

Scotland marks the beginning of the end for the EU as is; events are rapidly out-competing procedure and crisis management for it to survive.

Interesting days.

Forget A Minimum Alcohol Price, Let's Put A Minimum Price On Paid-for Tupping

Yorkshires finest sex workers of Spencer Place

I've been thinking a lot about this minimum pricing lark and I've reached a conclusion; I like it. I fact I like it so much I can think of a number of other area we could apply it to:

- Receding hairline matt varnish.
- Vaseline intensive care eye-lid moisturiser.
- Cocaine and related products.
- Samuri swords.

For as you know a minimum price will have the following effects:

- it dissuades frivolous uses of those products it's applied to, leading to a much snazzier kind of user.
- it leads to better quality product as providers of poorer versions quickly go under.

Examples:

Receding hairline matt varnish

Ye gods the light! It burns!

VIC eye-lid moisturiser

Moisture. SO MUCH MOISTURE!

And clearly the last 2 examples never saw anything crop up as a consequence of raising the minimum price to, say, ooh 5 years in jail minimum.







Oh.

Well never mind that I have a rather elegant proposal we could apply minimum pricing too which would kill 2 (fat) birds with one stone.

We legalise prostitution and apply a minimum price for services rendered by sex workers; I can see it now (or hypothesise on the impact as my wife doesn't let me out after dark; it's scary out there) - beautiful, scantily clad maidens fair wandering the darker reaches of Leeds' Red Light District scanning for work, Roxanne will put on her red light tonight.

But wait Tom it just won't be that way you say? Why not - surely higher quality poontang will be in the offing if we raise the minimum price Bertha charges versus some lithe eastern European competition; it'll be safer too - the bottom-dwelling echelons of the market for sex will no longer have the cash to partake, prostitutes will be cleaner and safer as their violent cheapo-stinko punters disappear.

What do you mean that will put Bertha on the dole? She was on there already - why does it matter if she can't afford that Sky TV anymore? She was already finding it difficult to attract punters as it was, particularly since you banned smoking in her work place.

And wait your telling me those violent, dirty disease riddled punters just found other ways of getting rowdy, assaulting folks, drinking alcohol hand gel and sniffing glue? What - they managed to shack up with one another?

Then,

For what reason do you think pricing the violent, unwashed masses out of the drinking market will have an impact on their behaviour?

And even if it did why would you allow the purveyors of alcohol to keep the artificially raised profit from this activity?

There is no economic justification for creating a minimum price; there is no legitimate moral argument ultimately - your just spreading the misery on the lowest earners from the top.

But, by forcing the revenue onto the industry, which will see some companies who went for premium product not affected by minimum pricing, whilst killing other groups who sold alcohol to the lowest paid (and I believe we would be lucky to see this be neutral in aggregate on the alcohol industry) you create the least good, most destructive justification of them all: a political one.

Raising taxes is always unpopular, artificially raising prices further along the supply chain (whether it be money, booze, fags...) mitigates the effects of that unpopularity, moving it onto other groups (read big alcohol/tobacco/finance etc.)

Time we started focusing blame where due.

Gah!!!

At work I now enter the period of the year when I'm trying to make sense of the ongoing chaos: what has been spent, what has been ordered and what has been requested and present it to all the people who pay my wages and decide if the whole thing is worth doing next year or not.

And I just had my laptop stolen from my car.

And as a security measure I've had IT account access suspended until a new one arrives; I've got to request desktop access in the interim.

My Christian patience is being tested this morning.

Those Scoundrels? Or Blaming The Wrong Schlebs

Profit margins at the ‘big six’ energy firms have leapt more than 700 per cent as millions worry about keeping warm this winter.

 Those fiends! they are casting our elderly, our infirm and our poor into the oblivion of an icy, cold winter freeze, doomed to die.

The average amount of profit per  customer has risen from £15 a year to £125 in just a few months, according  to the industry regulator Ofgem.

Wait wait wait - so before a few months ago the blood, sweat and tears of business men in the energy sector only roped them £15 profit for every piece of business? Wait - it was even worse before?

via The Daily Mail - why are we getting so mad at this?

Up to Aug 2009 the margin on energy prices were negative; energy companies were losing money versus rising costs, particularly in wholesale energy costs and "other" costs.


"Other" costs is a little disengenuous - if wholesale costs are approx 45%, then we add in the costs that you cannot drop - i.e. operating and network costs - this comes in at 29% (74%) then you add in the net margin for the company: 9%. 9. per. cent.; so 83% of the bill isn't up for negotiation and is intrinsic to the cost (and let's be fair if you know a plumber who would work on a margin at 9% give me his number - I have a few jobs I'd like him to do around Tomrat Towers) then 17%, or ~£230 of the highest domestic bill recorded, is going to these guys:

That's right; you are giving a collective £6.7Bn of your energy bills to these smoes.


It is only right that the energy companies should be hitting back; it is long overdue (and not just for the energy companies) - it is not an unfair that a company providing a service should expect a decent profit; when you consider that 9% of the bill goes to the company in profit is paltry compared to double that figure taken in taxation/government and "green" initiatives, not to mention the very likely additional efficiency losses due to the monopoly on transmission that the National Grid, a de facto state monopoly, has.


We really need to shut this particular shit down.

The Terrifying Reason I'm Saying #Yes2AV Today

In my post yesterday I discussed how PJ Byrne's views on the AV referendum today were only partly right: i.e. it is a question nobody wanted to ask that has replaced several we were all asking, and how he was wrong that an AV system would largely be an irrelevance - let's illustrate the pros and cons of AV; I'll start with con:-

Con
1. It is complicated.
2. It will be expensive; additional layers of complexity always are.
3. It does reward the most "useless" votes/voters the most: you could effectively give multiple votes to a voter intent on the most insane and unelectable of candidate choices.
4. It will lead to more coalitions: this could be viewed as a bad or good thing - in one way endless coalitions mean nothing much can be changed without enormous amounts of horse trading and compromise; however, ultimately the good is that they cannot introduce too many laws straight out of parliament - it will become fast apparent that much of our laws come from the EU which is something a Bory/UKIP caucus is likely to get a referendum on more than a Bory or UKIP minority government.

Pros
1. It does require a great deal more focus of the candidate on their electorate; how likely that will last when the whip comes in to play is debateable.
2. It will be more representable of what voters actually want: 3 in 4 voted against New Labour in 1997, likely a government will come in in 2015 that the electorate will grudgingly accept under AV.
3. .
Pro 3. I believe weighs out all the cons above.
3. There is now a credible link to a desire for the majority of the electorate to select one candidate: any candidate will need 50% of the total number of voters at least agreeing to their representative; for example, look at Ed Balls fiercely contested 2010 constituency of Morley & Outwood:




Let's assume under AV that UKIP vote for the Bory's as a second, the Watermelons vote for Labour and the Lib Dumbs split between Bory and New Labour and the BNP vote for a single preference; my fag packet calculations indicate that no one will win and the election will void; where any candidate to pander for secondaries from the BNP will surely result in alienating other voters leading to the same problem.

This has been portrayed as a bad thing, but think about it for a second - the problem lies in the fact that we are presented with candidates who wield absolute power over the electorate and in most cases we wouldn't be willing to pee on them if they were on fire.

We have abrogated responsibility for our lives to incompetents and fools and wonder why things are going wrong - the least we can do is thwart the system, make it clear that we are not consenting to their rule, as often as possible until they actually start listening; to dictate to as their role demands rather than us being dictated at.

And I think AV gives us a powerful weapon in being able to void elections which in the absence of a recall or NOTA vote we desperately need to restrain the legislature.

My yes vote is not an endorsement of the #Yes2AV camp; it is a statement that the status quo, and of having a firm None Of The Above vote summarily ignored year on year.

And anything likely to deprive Ed Balls of his seat can only be a good thing.

Presumed Value

First a quote (emphasis mine):

The real message of the conservative pro-life position is that we're in favor of living. We consider people--with a few obvious exceptions--to be assets. Liberals consider people to be nuisances. People are always needing more government resources to feed, house, and clothe them and to pick up the trash around their FEMA trailers and to make sure their self-esteem is high enough to join community organizers lobbying for more government resources.

- P J O'Rourke

The above quote not only illustrates part of my own beliefs in the pro-life debate but also links in to the next bit below.

I had a tweet exchange with Mr. Murphy on the subject of the minimum wage that went something a little like this (*cues piano*):

Today's announced increase in the minimum wage of 2.5% to 608p is considerably less than current rate of inflation. bit.ly/f1a0H7 (Retweeted by Mssr Murphy)

ME: @RichardJMurphy @Peston yes - where are employer[s] supposed to find the extra money to pay their employees?


@tjerubbaal @Peston if u r paying min wage your staff costs r already state subsidised massively - how much state sub do u need?

This comment came as odd, alien even; on top of enforcing higher rates of pay from employers was the government also subsidising this? How?

To this day I still await an answer from Mr. Murphy, accountant extraordinaire; but, using the magic of twitter, stream of consciousness that it is, I delved into the vast knowledge and "wisdom" of my "zealous" following to invite an answer from further afield.

It appears that being on minimum wage attracts additional "subsidies" in the form of housing benefit and tax credits to make up the shortfall; like Gordon Brown's splurge of tax credits for the middle classes down this seems to me like robbing Peter to pay Peter and Paul a moderate sum back the difference going to paying Humphrey's wage and giving him paper to shuffle, the effect here being to raise the amount of income to an "acceptable" level for those on minimum wage; below is the breakdown of what is available to the average singleton on the new £6.08 minimum wage:

So on a 37.5 hour week at minimum wage of £11856, £483.30 is added as the bare minimum, making their wage up to £12339.30.

Course you then have to take of the tax for that first:

So on an after tax income of £10,424.44 they add £483.30, making the amount those hard-pressed minimum wage earners working under the jack-boot of a top-hat wearing capitalist is £10907.74.

This gets to you by first taking off £876.20 from your wage annually only for you to get a fraction back from the state.

A few things.

Lets accept that we can (not should) guarantee a minimum wage - lets ignore the fact that the labour theory of value has almost certainly been proved a nonsense since it was first mooted (a one word answer as to why it is a nonsense: eBay) - are we really going about it the right way when we tax the pay of those we consider to require subsidy?

Further if we are admitting that the minimum wage doesn't cover the basics, something I'm naive to think if we are going to have should be a pre-requisite, then why bother with it in the first place? Why would you tax any of it? I means that like admitting it should be lower isn't it?

In fact if we are going to buy in full time to the charade that is the state subsidy of workers wages then why not abolish all benefits and fold them into one benefit system?

In a negative income tax system, people earning a certain income level would owe no taxes; those earning more than that would pay a proportion of their income above that level; and those below that level would receive a payment of a proportion of their shortfall, which is the amount their income falls below that level.

Now it could be said that eliminating minimum wage legislation and initiating a Negative Income Tax benefit system doesn't eliminate the possibility that employers will attempt to milk the subsidy for all its worth in order to reduce pay below what they would offer for that role, and you would be right; if employers can reduce wages at another's expense then they will (look at how health and safety legislation and regulations favours the incumbent, larger established businesses, dissuading new entrants to the market); likewise what is to stop someone from doing no work at all and just collecting their pay whilst staying at home? This is of course a dilemma that we face today but with the myriad benefits system, albeit currently the system dissuades people from entering work altogether

One model was proposed by Milton Friedman, as part of his flat tax proposals. In this version, a specified proportion of unused deductions or allowances would be refunded to the taxpayer. If, for a family of four the amount of allowances came out to $10,000, and the subsidy rate was 50% (the rate recommended by Friedman), and the family earned $6,000, the family would receive $2,000, because it left $4,000 of allowances unused, and therefore qualifies for $2,000, half that amount. Friedman feared that subsidy rates as high as those would lessen the incentive to obtain employment. He also warned that the negative income tax, as an addition to the "ragbag" of welfare and assistance programs, would only worsen the problem of bureaucracy and waste. Instead, he argued, the negative income tax should immediately replace all other welfare and assistance programs on the way to a completely laissez-faire society where all welfare is privately administered. The negative income tax has come up in one form or another in Congress, but Friedman opposed it because it came packaged with other undesirable elements antithetical to the efficacy of the negative income tax. Friedman preferred to have no income tax at all, but said he did not think it was politically feasible at that time to eliminate it, so he suggested this as a less harmful income tax scheme.

I would perhaps make it less restrictive on how you retain the advantage offered by your tax-free income, as I laid out here.

And can anyone really claim this would be more expensive to implement? Switching from 50+ benefit systems to one would save money in the long run.

That is of course unless you are a civil servant intent on a little empire building, less interested in what actually works rather than what gets you more unbridled power over the people you deign to serve.

There Is A Relatively Simple Solution To This

Whitehall departments are still recruiting thousands of staff, official figures revealed yesterday – despite a Government pledge to slash the number of civil servants.

The figures, obtained by former Tory Cabinet minister John Redwood, show that Coalition efforts to cut the civil service payroll are being undermined by continuing recruitment drives in Whitehall.
...
But they have also decided to recruit more than 4,100 new staff – cutting the reduction in overall headcount to just two per cent.

Leviathan is still leviathan, even in it's current vulnerable, flaccid, porcine state; it is unlikely to relinquish all that NuLabour cash easily.

This is, of course, only possible because the civil service, abetted by lazy, profligate mps, have wrapped their incoherent babble (let's call it mandarinese for posterity) around what should be some pretty simple public service roles to the effect that they are no longer simple and no longer a service; bins go un-emptied but are searched for rogue bits of recycling by council jobsworths; chronic, entrenched welfarism is trapping generations in poverty, while the newly unemployed are starving for want of benefits.

Good managers are first and foremost accountable to those they serve; brilliant managers understand this and make their staff likewise upwardly accountable but not proscriptive enough to stifle innovation. If Cambo wants to alter things for the better and put pay to this sort of fannying around he couldn't go much worse than this: ask each minister what their department should be doing and what it is actually doing in plain English; if he doesn't know fire him. Once he knows what they should be doing they should have their mandarins look through their whole budget and wind down any area not pertaining directly to those goals laid out by the minister. Once this has been done the report should be looked over by the minister, clearly stating the costs and price tag; The treasury should scrutinise the budget at this point too.

Once this is done we come to the final stage: the whole budget should be ratified by parliament with objections noted. The report and ratification notes should then be made available online for public scrutiny.

This should be the basis of what we vote for our mps on; how they insist they spend our money and what goals they do and do not support, and whether they are whipped by party politicos or if they bow to their constituents mores.

Carrying on in the vague way we are going isn't helping anyone.

The Whole #Yes2AV/#No2AV Debate In a Nutshell

Really, this is all any electoral arguement boils down to.

A lot has been said about the Alternate Voting system and no doubt more will be said in the near future; there are many pros and cons to changing the electoral system so that everyones votes' counted in a more effective way (not withstanding the fact that the type of people who vote for the Monster Raving Loony party or the Free-Banana party would effectively get multiple votes in AV, but lets not split hairs over this).

But really, when all the choice available to you boils down to a giant douche or a turd sandwich, then it really doesn't matter how you vote for them, but how you unvote for them; currently the only way this happens is if the MP in question:

• Goes to jail for a year or more.
• Resigns of his own accord.
• Dies.

So you catch them in the act of committing crime, you appeal to their conscience or sense of honour or you will them to keel over with all your might.

In no other job in the UK can you earn in excess of a quarter of a million pounds (topped up by a generous expense system and ridiculously long holiday period with no accountability other than a box ticking, glad-handing exercise once every 4-5 years, tickling the bellies of a few, dedicated but ultimately ill-informed and potentially delusional activists in their constituents, the remaining votes coming from people who see it as a tradition for vote for the giant douche or the turd sandwich party's their parents and their parent's parent's voted for, because, you know, "that's democracy an' that".

Our political masters are happy as larry that the only opinion you hold is who has the prettier rosette - arguement over policy never gets to more than the token strawman stage nor is discussing how your selected politico will achieve his aims ever called into question; if they say they will build a mountain of cheese to the moon to set up a space gun to kill martians invading from mars then the cost is not to be mentioned or considered - it just is something no doubt the other party will put a stop to.

No.

Truth is all we do with our current electoral democracy is abrogate responsibility for some pretty crucial aspects of our life: how we will fund our old age, how we will fund our education and that of our children or who we will contract with to take of us if we get sick/have an accident/lose our means of making money. The ones we palm this off to have royally screwed us all over and no AV system will change this.

Nothing short of a revolution in ideology, a veritable waking the f**k up from the comprehensive welfarism we inherited from the past will be enough.

Otherwise someone is going to get stuck holding the cheque for this debacle. People need to learn to be masters of their own destiny, again, and not mere appointees to either a giant douche or turd sandwich to rule over it.

Atlas Shrugged Part 1: Abridged & Anglofied

"If this was a microcosm of the true state of this nation, God help us. It was clear to me that the majority of people paid to run things efficiently weren't bothered, while a stream of useless or patronising information was constantly relayed over tannoy systems to frustrated passengers. In spite of being entangled in a nightmare of regulations, warnings and idiotic announcements, most people remained robust and resilient, laughing at officials who, bound by more rules and regulations, were unable to adapt flexibly to a bad situation."

Discovered today via the good Dr. North is this gentleman Jim Greenhalf. You could almost see an annoying British director putting Hugh Grant in as the lead and have all the train staff making merry about the decline of the rail network.

Ye gods.

BB is Txting U

Reality has most certainly left the building; the creep towards totalitarianism seems to have stopped outright; but only to put on its running shoes for a much more rapid journey down the road to serfdom.

Plans are underway to protect us even more from the Eevil teworwists & dwug dealers by creating a compulsory national register for all unregistered Pay'n'Go phones:

"A compulsory national register for the owners of all 72m mobile phones in Britain would be part of a much bigger database to combat terrorism and crime. Whitehall officials have raised the idea of a register containing the names and addresses of everyone who buys a phone in recent talks with Vodafone and other telephone companies, insiders say."

I'm not with Vodafone and if this goes ahead I will most certainly not consider them in the future; if the push in the future is to incorporate more mobile phone networksI will continually move away from that network; if all British networks are "incorporated" I will move to these guys.

Its been a few years since I had to change my sim card; as I recall I had to provide my details to my mobile service operator in order to get some of the better offers and other stuff; fine, I said - it was to both our benefits - they sell me more stuff which I want. If I were a terrorist the security services could, with some necessary difficulty, get a wiretap in order for them to monitor a potential criminal: You do not need this for any legitimate reason.

I am not a terrorist and I am not a thug. I am a normal guy who does normal things; I go to church, have a loving family and I help run a youth group (filled to the rafters with kids who's homelives have been given the once over with NuLabour's decade of social engineering) . I drink fancy beer in expensive irish themed bars, have the odd cigar over a poker game with friends and play way too much Wii; I will not be made to feel a criminal because the chimps in power feel a little insecure.

That said I offer a suggestion; this is the head of GCHQ, David Pepper:

He will be the one in charge of putting this database together. May I suggest you make his job a tiny bit harder by visiting a site like this, registering for as many free sim cards as is humanly possible then registering every last one. If every person in the UK did this with the 12+ sim cards they would pretty soon get the message that we dont like being unnecessarily monitored.

And in case anyone is curious I got the idea from a TV show...

For even greater emphasis why not take part in the following activity? Mines heading to this happy camper, John Battle, my local MP. You may not know him but like George Forman he puts his name to some interesting stuff...