Tax Credits & Welfare: A bite-sized recent history

Osbo yesterday, as a bobby looks on with envy at him showing off his massive crayola box set.

Blair, 1997: we've got some ideas about welfare, thats more than those clowns in the bory's have in any case.

Public, 1997: Let's hear them. 

Public, 2003: we are still waiting; why not raise the threshold in line with inflation?

Brown, 2003: oh right...naw won't do that; I'm gonna take ever increasing piles of your cash and give some back to labour voters in deprived areas who have the time to fill out a convoluted multi-page form stating why you deserve it. I'm also going to increase the budget of HMRC past that of our standing army. I'm sure they'll manage it with the same focus and efficiency they do collecting debts from big business on money owed.

Public, 2003: that sounds like a shit idea. We'll take it.

Brown, May 2010: do you know that increase in tax threshold thing? Let's talk about it...

Public, May 2010: too late. bye now.

Brown, May 2010: awe...

Osbo t'Clown, first budget: right then, under duress from my Lib Dumb colleagues who I'm obliged to listen to due to the coalition agreement, here is some more of your money not being taken away in the first place (or as I used to dub it: "my mate Lord Fondleboys champers fund").

Public: YES! GET IN!

Osbo T'Clown, 2015 GE: YES! GET IN! Lib Dumbs get in the sea with ya!

Lib Dumbs, 2015 GE: Awe...

Public: yeah; Milliband? Really? Urgh...

Osbo, t'Clown, post-2015 GE: BTW public, I'm taking your tax credits. Peace out (2-fingered victory salute follows as he backs in to heavily fortified #11.)

Public: like f**k you are.

Osbo t'Clown: pretty much am, but it's OK I'll be raising your tax threshold to meet less than half the drop, so long as you aren't on minimum wage or unemployed or anything you'll be fine.

Public: like. f**k...

Cameron: 'hm hum...'

Osbo t'Clown: apparently I'm not doing that...for now...

Adam Smith Institute, Oct 2015(and me, pretty much for a decade or longer): why not a negative income tax? That way you can abolish your massively convoluted welfare system, abolish the DWP and recognise true hard work and determination in the tax system while remaining a progressive force for good?

Osbo t'Clown: sounds complicated, and I heard reducing government departments somewhere in there, so naw.

Me: but, but, you could abolish an entire government department: the admin savings alone for the DWP's £170Bn budget would be enough to give everyone a massive tax break; with all benefits folded into a simplified tax system the poorest would get a great deal too, all with fewer wage-takers needed!

Obso t'Clown: yeah. still no.

Me, pretty much continually: cretins, the lot of ye'.

The Derpuous Circle

...and then there's this cleft. (Raheem, not Bahar, who has been summarily dealt with elsewhere)

No one is for a minute saying this daft bint shouldn't be hoisted upon her own petard (a term historically related to the misfiring of seige munitions used to destroy rampart defences in revolutionary France, killing the ordinance man in the process), only that the banal, asinine assertions of her ilk are really starting to be shown for what they are: banal, asinine assertions, espoused by losers and maybe the rules designed to protect us all from incendiary calls to arms are a little overzealous.

I would rather have hate speach, racism and unsavoury types espousing all kinds of things in plain site so that we can easily tag and manage them, either through intelligence or through...intelligence. The number of losers on the web following this kind of idiot are VANISHINGLY small and mainly promoted by an echochamber of idiocy on social media designed to echo sentiments of such losers (I'm looking at you Twitter); we never see the very quick and powerful dispatch of their stupid ideas post-utterance but they are there, convincing the likes of joe-public to do the right thing, ditch their twitter ribbons and unfollow these cretins.

No Little Man

This was not a hatchet job of Farage - Sarah Montague quite fairly asked if Suzanne Evans was right in her belief that Farage was viewed as a divisive figure in politics; he then went on to moan about the landslide european election win in which UKIP convinced less than 1 in 10 of the available voting public to back his party in milking the eurestablishment teat for another 5 years and just how horrible the Bory's really area.

Having wrong-footed the entirety of the last election and the concomitant public opinion and with a little under 2 years to go he now goes on to claim that UKIP are planning on doing...."something, something, something...migrants are bad...we will wholeheartedly support...one of the candidate organisation to lead the #EUNo campaign" (or the "leave" campaign as it will now be known). Could he be more specific about who he wants to lead the leave campaign? "I haven't the foggiest"... I'm not convinced and I doubt anymore than the 1 in 10 will be too.

Now Master Kassam is now wrong-footing what needs to happen to "thwart" bad press with a BBC "watchdog" and a "bias hotline"; rather than address reasonable criticism yet again proving that the only thing worth reading on Not-so-Breitbart is Nero. His entire rhetoric is akin to my 6 year old daughter complaining that her cheeky 3 year old sister punched her then ran off; there is little that can be done to prevent a toddler being a sociopathic asshole and less so about thwarting it again in the future when there will inevitably be another ruckus; moaning at your enemies and the hand you are dealt won't solve anything and certainly not win you sympathy where you need it - the voting public. It just enforces the view of a bully picking on a whinging child, and by the time it is dealt with, if it ever is, the campaign will be long over,

As has been pointed out elsewhere, ad nauseum, the winning strategy will be to take the high ground; to appear less crazy than the opposition and laugh off their criticism and their overzealous focus on the minutiae of boring statistical and fiscal arguments; you aren't marching to New Jerusalem, you are marching to the door of a customs union and a place on stage of a wider global world. A strategy of whinging and voyeuristic obsession with bias in an organisation known for it's bias will help not one jot; laughing your ass off when the "stay" opponents for a seat at the kiddies table of Little Europe when you point out you want your rightful place with the adults as Global Britain is a winning strategy; looking conciliatory when they warm up the tired old 80s trope about "fax democracy" Britain and you point out that as one of the biggest economies in the world we would be doing the faxing, if we weren't already on email having thrown the fax machine along with all the spice girls CDs and global technicolor tshirts in the shed.

So can we please stop this?

I don't quite, really get this, no sirree.

I fail to see what has actually happened here but I'm willing to believe it is my naivety:

Nonsense to say schools 'must teach gay rights'. We want schools to teach broad curric based on British values

— DfE (@educationgovuk) November 2, 2014

The Department for Education has sought to ‘clarify’ its tweet which appears to brand school lessons in gay rights ‘nonsense’.

The bizarre tweet was posted on the DfE’s official account this afternoon and reads: ‘Nonsense to say schools “must teach gay rights”. We want schools to teach broad curric based on British values.’"

So my reading of this is:

• Gay rights aren't a thing because...
• ...British Values (patent pending) enshrine tolerance of ones own proclivities as long as they don't infringe on another persons...
• And British Values (pp) are a required aspect of the curriculum.

This doesn't seem to me to be that controversial; it all appears to have spilt over from this rank nonsense currently shat out by cast-iron dave and his bunch of chuckleheads.

There is something very wrong with this current tranche of political correctness and I think it comes down to the poor use of words and phrases; perhaps the most important one being "equality" - this appears to have been in place of "inequality" as it is one thing to respect ones proclivities, a/religion or ideology and quite another to claim your own set of proclivities are better.

What is being promoted here is intolerance and inequality before the law.

I really feel sorry for the mighty midget

"Ask the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner to investigate an MP’s pre-2010 expenses and here is the answer you get:
“All records relating to expenses claims before 2010 have now been destroyed. No unredacted information is now available here…”
A committee headed by the Bercow has authorised the shredding of all the evidence..."

The poor guy can't catch a break can he?

I mean if only there were some way to keep copies of these documents in a non-corporeal form which would only take up a byte-sized (sorry I slipped - I mean "bitesized", stupid typing-me) amount of space in his office - you know, like an extremely portable document format (lets call it a "pdf" for short), which he could keep on a tiny filing cabinet, perhaps disk shaped that you just need to put some electricity through to open, or "drive" it to open (lets abbreviate that to a "hard disk drive" for short).

The worst of it is that this would almost certainly be illegal for a business to do:

You must keep a record of all expenses and benefits you provide to your employees.

Your records need to show that you’ve reported accurately and your end-of-year forms are correct.

Now HMRC are vague on how long they need businesses to keep the records for (or at least don't explicitly state it on the top shelf) which to me means you should keep it indefinitely, particularly with all the tough talk we keep seeing about tax dodging and fiddling. And how about the shareholders, i.e. us? When it became apparent the vast majority of mps' were on the fiddle were we not told this would be investigated? Who investigated it? If this were a business this would be done by an external audit service who wouldn't sign off on the accounts unless they were kosher.

We clearly never got that; and I think we should start seeing the accounts ourselves.

Angel Eagle, yesterday

This is hilarious; never liked Angela Eagle; she has all the charisma of a particularly snotty head mistress or carry-on Matron without the mirth.

I'm certain people will realise my position on this but here it goes for clarities sake; Lord Freud was clumsily making the point that wages are a *cost* to employers and that cost has to be met by the value of that persons production and, sad as it is, with productivity improvements brought about by innovation and an increasingly sophisticated workplace people who can't grasp this struggle, being severely disabled more so.

What Lord Freud was alluding to was making it easier for disabled people to get into work by making their hiring cheaper for employers; personally given the sheer scale of the problem with NEETs in this country and chronic unemployment we should abolish the minimum wage altogether and change welfare to a 2-tier negative income tax system: first tier to prevent anyone starving in the streets (say welfare risings to £13k in line with the cost of living calculations the Joseph Rowntree calculations) and  the second working tier where guaranteed income rises to £16k depending on hours worked (say £16k window at 30 hours/week) before further income is taxable. You could make work more profitable and worklessness bearable and you could quickly give people the life skills they are(/were) so critically under prepared by schools for.

This actually underlines the different between the statist and liberal left here and which camp most of New Labourious' useful idiots are in; they are happy to mutter about what should happen ("employers should pay the minimum wage") rather than what could happen ("employers struggle to pay minimum wage, but the state could top it up and redistribute the cost"). I'm more in the could camp.

Yes, but is it a swing?

I have a lot of respect for Dougy Carswell; many moons ago he took me to task for challenging Bory policy before I had thoroughly read through the proposals, teaching me to be humble and try to get a rounded view on subjects outside of my normal sphere of knowledge. Its good to see a man returned to power and not a party.

But how big a swing is this to UKIP? A cursory glance at the wiki page for Clacton as a parliamentary constituency shows that Dougy Carswells' victory in 2010 as a bory candidate on a turnout of 64.2% of the electorate meant that a little under 1 in 3 people actively wanted him in power: 34% to be exact with Labour trailing at over half that at 16%; almost certainly a decisive vote against the Brown Gorgon.

This by-election however, assuming turnout numbers are roughly comparative, saw only 52.6%, meaning his win of 59.7% of this number amounts to 31.4%, a drop in the numbers actively voting.

I don't think we are seeing a dramatic turning on the Bory's or ship jumping to UKIP; I think we are ultimately seeing a good man returned to Parliament in spite of his party and not because, as many UKIPpers and the MSM believe; on this I think I concur with the good Dr. North.

Elderly Careless

A colleague on fb writes about the following issue and I can't help but have mixed feelings about it, namely:

• Having had years to plan all this why have the elderly not been planning for retirement? I'm willing to believe this is down to innumerable socialist governments writing cheques with their mouth that the electorate refused to cash or that they simply felt they would be dead before they lived to need their arse wiping by someone else.
• Is this the last 2-fingered victory salute of the post-war babyboomers? Having picked the cupboard clean for future generations are they now trying to bloc-vote a government into sticking us for more cash? In which case I have little sympathy for their "plight".

But all that aside their is an element of sympathy; having paid in for years and had the rug pulled out from under them and the deal changed on retirement funding and resources I can't help but feel for their upset and that of future generations who won't be treated quite so well, given the young to old ratio is dropping, prices are rising and sympathy for the elderly is dropping. 

But why is elderly care so expensive?

My mother, after her divorce and not young herself (bad side of 50), got a job as an estate manager of a private, high-end retirement home; one where a small flat in sheltered accomadation went to rich southerners for £100k or more with top up "fees" for "care" services of around £10k a year, and that was before nursing costs and similar, which was all bought in externally.

These flats were state of the art; solar panelling, hyper-efficient ground boilers and similar to reduce the overall cost of these flats to practically nothing, at least in comparison to the other fees levied.

And this is what bothers me: the company that ran these flats went bust; about 18 months before my mother left they went into administration and were bought up by another company - the reason my mum left was because this company cut services to the bone (not prices though, of course) and tried to put her in charge of 3 sites across Leeds; a 50 year old woman traversing Leeds, putting site wheelie bins out because they've cut the janitorial staff and fixing blockages because the company plumber is on reduced hours resulted in her being injured and bounced out.

Myself I temped as an admin at a home management centre for people with learning and physical disabilities; my boss ran the centre and was nearly in tears by the end of it due to the complete ineptitude of staff and there complete lack of dedication, their constant calling in sick and complete lack of concern for their charges.

So this is what I know: care, no matter which way you play it, public or private, care is badly managed or badly resourced or both; you can't square this circle in this country for some reason and perhaps this is down to our panic at frailty and vulnerability. Who knows.

What to do? I have a cunning plan: outsource the whole lot; I reckon there would be an awful lot of money to be made and jobs to be offered just simply moving elderly care to Portugal, Greece or Spain in sheltered, guarded estates given how cheap properly and how high unemployment is currently; a few years on a med diet to see out your twilight years and happy relatives using the opportunity to get a few grappas and relax in the sun while visiting their granny. Heck I reckon you could leverage greek or spanish debt to annex a coastal island for them.

Addressing the constitutional clusterf**k to come

A friend on facebook decries a turkey objecting to Christmas:

Ed Miliband has rejected David Cameron’s call to prevent Scottish MPs voting on English-only issues in Parliament, despite appearing to accept that the current system is unfair.

That friend describes this call for an English parliament and the erosion of responsibilities to English-only MEPs as a thing we should celebrate as it will mean fewer Labour governments and that this is the means to that end.

On this point I disagree with the principle.

Elsewhere Norman Tebbit, a man who is coming into his credit more and and more each year in my opinion writes the following:

It is extraordinary that after 300 years of successful constitutional political development during which the United Kingdom achieved unparallelled military, scientific, industrial, social and political progress (including the world's finest civil service), it has almost all been vandalised in a few decades of "progressive" politics and modernisation.

Which, again, I disagree with on principle, for similar reasons.

Following 11 years of Margaret Thatcher and tory government we had the odious Major years which were, lets call it what is was, a generation-busting event for the Bory party, ultimately responsible for Blair's "popularity" - less Blair being popular (not as much as his ego led him to believe) but about the Bory's being more unpopular; the giant douche being a better option to an increasingly stinky and corn-filled turd sandwich as Southpark so expertly put it (I think any political cheerleader of any colour needs to watch this episode before making any kind of defence of the current establishment).

In the latter years of the Brown government we saw just how potent this effect was when a blair-lite Cameron failed to win a majority against the worst prime minister in history (couldn't win on "popular" terms, couldn't win on "cuddly-Bory" ones either).

Any constitutional convention can be bent to the will of the strongest political pressure or mob rule; what separates the better ones is how labile and flexible they are and how irresistibly even-handed they are; doing unto others as the constitution says you'd have done to yourself is difficult to argue against.

So no I don't believe this is a means to a Labour government-end in England - Lord knows the Major years and our current "Bory" lot are proof that it largely doesn't matter which turd is in charge; putting this down as a way of installing a conservative autocracy is wrong headed in the highest and will probably mean whatever constitutional convention we ultimately get will be skewed.

We need to reassert the kracy (power) of the demos (people) as a whole through this and that means ignoring such calls for Bory english rule.

Why not try pushing our representatives to adopt this?

And it comes to pass; the wife is back.

So the choice is made and the wife is back on her terms and the husband is left a hollow version of himself.

And the commentary is  palpably vitriolic.

" Gordon Brown, who has never ceased to regard himself as the rightful Prime Minister of Britain, scribbled a revolution on the back of a fag packet and decreed its implementation. How many people voted No because of the seductive dog's dinner of half-baked pledges offered as "The Vow"? Perhaps 100,000? Be generous and suppose it was 200,000. Possibly it was hardly anyone."

None of which I can disagree with; sadly, none of this matters and I'll tell you why.

We are a country served by minority government, returned on a minority mandate in league with a foreign invasionary force from Brussels; it does not care about the electorates thoughts or concerns, only for whatever its focus groups and the media tells it, insulated in its own little bubble and protected against a defanged and divided public by an increasingly unresponsive but violent police state.

And noone you select at the next GE will do anything about this state of affairs.

The choice is between:
- A turd with a blue rosette,
- A turd with a red rosette,
- A turd with a yellow rosette,
- The narky teaboy farage who couldn't find his are with both hands and will be establishmentised before the end of his first week in power.

Any way you play it you are voting for the continuity party of the civil service; an EU Corp. Puppet organisation with a now transparently thin veneer of democracy covering it.

Come the general election the only logical choice on the ballot is to spoil it; we won't get real change by selecting the anachronistic bubble dwellers repeatedly.

Then, with any luck, we can push for real change for the better.