The Poor, Accountability & Responsibility

A snap exchange on Twitter drew my focus to the following Daily Filler article about "the poverty premium":

POOR families are being charged almost £1,300 a year more for basic goods and services, a report reveals today.

Power bills are nearly 30% higher because the less well-off tend to use prepayment meters instead of direct debit.

They pay up to three times the real price for items such as cookers by getting them on hire purchase. And insurance is also dearer as they live in high-crime areas, Save the Children found.

Financial expert Martin Lewis, who helped compile the study, said: 'It is ridiculous but true - it costs more to be poor.'

He runs the website MoneySavingExpert.com but said needy people often lacked the access to the web, bank accounts and credit facilities to take proper advantage of his financial tips.

As a frequent user of Mr. Lewis' website I can honestly say it has proven a boon in the past; it has made life cheaper & enriched mine and Mrs. Tomrat's experience.

It is saddening that such a thing exists as a poor premium but it should be pointed out that these are not actually poor premiums at all; these are risk/administrative premiums.

Take the power meter premium; it costs a large amount of capital expenditure to simply install and run a prepayment scheme; capital which must be recovered somehow & sadly that comes down to the user of that service, & with everyone being hard pressed in their power bills by government premiums on power usage and the general mismanagement of our power grid it would be balked at to even consider mitigating the cost of these meters against other bill payers.

Look at hire purchases: we have one of these shops close by to us that I stepped foot into once when my wife and I saw a couch we liked at a decent price...only to find they wouldn't sell us it outright bit instead tried to pull us into a purchase agreement; I can imagine as a user of credit what the conversation must be like:

"I'd like to hire/purchase this cooker"

"certainly; do you have any credit history?"

"yes; all bad."

"do you have evidence that you regularly pay bills or are responsible for managing a household budget?"

"no...does having 12 kids by different fathers, living on handouts count as household management?"

Now let's try a thought experiment; would you give either person above access to your goods and services? Astonishingly some businesses have managed just this because they mitigate all the risk against higher costs for all their items: couple 1 get that new cooker but pay partially for couple 2's inability to keep paying for that 50in plasma they laughably thought they could afford on minimum wage.

Save The Children's Sally Copley said households on less than £12,700 a year were having their health jeopardised by being charged more for essentials such as heating.

She said: 'There is a clear link between living in cold, damp conditions for long periods and children's health being put at risk.

'We believe the poverty premium is totally unfair and is ripping off low-income families already struggling to make ends meet.' The charity's report, The UK Poverty Rip-Off, revealed that almost 700,000 low-income households do not have bank accounts.

Sally has actually identified a wonderful thing here: where exactly the tax free bracket should be - £12700, enabling all of that persons take home pay to go towards paying towards that money.

As for the second point there can be no excuse for not having a bank account with the expansion in financial services we have seen in recent years; you can pop into Tesco and pick one up with your milk so there really is no excuse for the majority.

As for the vanishing minority who lack the faculties to open a bank account as a youth group leader I come across such vulnerable individuals all the time and where private charity fails there is a vast network if public services that pick it up.

I must ask the obvious though: if Save The Children are so worried about access to financial advice for the poorest and sound then why are they not setting up financial institutions to help people? Why not provide non-profit services to enable the poorest in society to lower this "poverty premium"?

Probably because the answer may lead them to the same point; the dealing with some groups carry additional risk which simply cannot be absorbed.

The Attack on Gabby Giffords in Context

This is not an apologist article for Jared Loughner; a cursory glance at Google, his YouTube page (reproduced elsewhere) or even The Guardian all give an indication that this was one seriously disturbed individual.

What this article is is a reply to this article, in many ways not dissimilar to Dr. North's article for the Sunday Fail this week:

Naturally the BBC is drawing it's own nudged-left conclusion; that politicians of all stripes need to be put out of harms reach to get on with the busy job of running our lives for us. But, as the good Dr. North points out it is exactly this mentality, this elitist protectionism that sees our own politicians hide behind barricades of concrete and armed police officers, that leads to this disconnect from
what voters actually want.

I don't think Mrs. Gifford could give Mr. Loughner what he wanted; I doubt anyone outside of the mental health profession could; but we need to look at the numbers.

Taking a rough guestimate the number of assassinations based on the figures in the Beebs article leads to ~0.2 murders per year over the last 33 years - adjusted crudely for the number of politicians in the US Congress (upper & lower houses: 541) you have a 0.036% chance of being murdered in your duties as a professional politician*.

Now compare this to the US civilian murder rate of 0.054% and we find that for sticking your head above the parapet and proclaiming your views to the chattering, agreeing masses you therefore increase your chances sevenfold: 0.036/0.0054 = ~7x increase in your death as a professional mouth.

Is this that great an increase? I cannot hope to judge but there is another figure this should be compared to: US Soldier deaths in combat.

Taking the value for US KIAs for Iraq compared to the volume of troops at it's peak we find there yearly chance of death is 0.36%**; a whole ~70-fold increased chance of being killed walking down a US street and 10-fold chance than the ones who put you in harms way.

These events, though terrible, are rare; we shouldn't seek to insulate our political leaders anymore as that will merely exacerbate problems which should not be insurmountable but quickly become vitriolic when they are ignored.

Here in the UK we should start by reducing what the state is responsible for, making them guardians of our laws again and not their arbiters; they might find less need for armed guards then.

* = it should be noted that this figure dies not include local political officers, city councilmen and town mayors despite them receiving the brunt of assassination attempts in the Beebs noted cases; factoring in these groups would take too long to tally but would likely lower the percentage chance massively.

** = Iraq war casualties since efforts began: 4404 (to may last year) therefore (4404/~7 years)/176000 troops serving the peak of Iraq war = ~0.36%

Is Unite Calling For Spending Cuts?

Via the Daily Fail it seems I'm not alone in my dislike, nay hatred, in the profligate nipple-twisting going on with fuel prices and VAT:

It also emerged that thousands of militant tanker drivers are plotting a national strike which could bring the country to a standstill.
The strike, co-ordinated by the giant Unite union which bankrolls Labour, could begin as early as next month.

Now let's set aside the obvious tribalist snipe by t'Fail to get anger raised at genuinely hard-pressed people who's haulage businesses, in no small part responsible for much of our prosperity and riches in this country, are getting all uppity about being further ripped off by fuel taxes, no; lets look at it this way.

The money to pay for the blackhole in the public coffers has to come from somewhere; am I to take it from the sentiments expressed by Unite this should come from reductions in public spending?

Cos if so sign me up right now.

Quote of the Day

When Labour work out that a) their voters don't use the web for anything other than checking the lottery results and looking at porn and b) people like to be amused, then let me know. As I said, no chance. A circle jerk of fabian geeks, absorbed by iPhones and Obama (who won because American white democrats are savvy Macbook using Liberals. Labour voters still eat with their fucking hands and think electricity is black magic).

Via Old Holborn.

Why Should David Chaytor Get A Lighter Sentence?

Widely reported this morning is the fact that we will see the first MP sentenced for his taxpayer-money-grubbing ways.

He faces a maximum of seven years in jail, although his guilty plea will be taken into account by the sentencing judge.
..
He had denied the charges but appeared at the Old Bailey in December to change his plea, having failed in a court bid to argue that expenses cases should be heard by Parliament, not the courts.

Now, as Guido points out anything less than a custodial sentence should have baying mobs (rightly) calling for Mr. Justice Saunders head on a pike, but why should it be a short custodial sentence?

Having failed to get his case insulated from prosecution by parliamentary privilege, all the while claiming "accounting errors, nothing to see her etc.", Mr. Chaytor went on to plead guilty when it was fast apparent he wasn't above the law.

Almost makes you wonder if the BBC knows something we don't about the case and is preparing us for the narrative.

More Moonbat-inspired Guano

It seems George Monbiot is trying to find a muse while his old one is slowly beaten to death in a snow covered alley with the metal bar of factual evidence behind the theatre of reality:

The issue is surplus housing – the remarkable growth of space that people don't need. Between 2003 and 2008 (the latest available figures), there was a 45% increase in the number of under-occupied homes in England. The definition of under-occupied varies, but it usually means that households have at least two bedrooms more than they require. This category now accounts for over half the homes in which single people live, and almost a quarter of those used by larger households. Nearly 8m homes – 37% of the total housing stock – are officially under-occupied.

The only occasions on which you'll hear politicians talk about this is when they're referring to public housing. Many local authorities are trying to encourage their tenants to move into smaller homes. But public and social housing account for only 11% of the problem. The government reports that the rise in under-occupation "is entirely due to a large increase within the owner-occupied sector". Nearly half of England's private homeowners are now knocking around in more space than they need.

Greedy inconsiderate bastards getting all uppity, demanding more room than poor Moonbat deems "they need".

This appears to leave just one likely explanation: money. My guess, though I can find no research or figures either to support or disprove it, is that the richest third of the population has discovered that it can spread its wings. A report by the International Longevity Centre comes to the same conclusion: "Wealth … is the key factor in whether or not we choose to occupy more housing space than is essential."

I can't believe it either George - that despite the state's ongoing attempts to fleece us liberally since time immemorial some people have managed to break out of the state ordained (and taxpayer paid) rabbit hutches and into a slightly larger one in which you can enjoy slightly more space for that pool table you always wanted or just enough room so you don't smack your hands or feet against your cupboard-width walls whilst playing Kinect.

While most houses are privately owned, the total housing stock is a common resource. Either we ensure that it is used wisely and fairly, or we allow its distribution to become the starkest expression of inequality. The UK appears to have chosen the second option. We have allowed the market, and the market alone, to decide who gets what – which means that families in desperate need of bigger homes are crammed together in squalid conditions, while those who have more space than they know what to do with face neither economic nor social pressure to downsize.

No George, just no; housing is not a common resource - hence why the bank can take enormous amounts of money out of mine and my wife's account every month to pay for our house. What you are actually diagnosing is that there are people in this land who's belief in an all providing state, with housing, jobs and money for all, is being subjected to reality.

That said I believe from personal experience that this is bunkum; my wife and I live in a 3-bedroom house with just enough room for us, an office/spare room and the baby's room and we are already considering moving when (if?) baby no.2 comes along. Our church features one single mum with 3 kids occupying one half of a semi-detached with the other half containing her mother, who raised her and over 7 brothers and sisters in that house; there is now only one child from that original household who doesn't have a child or four and occupies social housing, how when both me and my wife work paying for their "right" to these benefits can we even think about it ourselves.

Yet that is not what annoys me about Moonbats asinine comments; as Old Holborn points out:

Planning laws - 160,000 families own 37 million acres of the UK whilst 16 million homeowners manage on just 2.8 million acres. £5000 an acre for land, £1 MILLION an acre for land with planning consent from the state.

We are not full. There is plenty of land but all of it is held captive by the State to maintain an artificial wealth that most will use to fund their own pensions, even though having paid the state to provide one for them.

I can build a house for £20,000, the sum most first time buyers will need to raise before they can now obtain a mortgage of £180,000 to purchase their first property. In all, they will repay close to £400,000 to banks to buy a house worth £20,000. they will have to pay income tax on that money, so in all, a £20K house will end up costing them £600,000 and a lifetimes debt to achieve. that is truly indentured labour to the banks and the State. Paying through the nose, a lifetime long to the plantation owner for the privilege of being a slave.

Not mentioning the fact that once you die any of your life-long possessions will immediately have 50% taxes on it; I knew of one poor young lady on my wife's teacher-training course who had to withdraw after her mother, her soul remaining family, had the hall to die midway through the course, resulting in the then exchequer Gordon Brown bombarding her with menaces to pay a near half-million pound death-tax bill on her childhood home; George might see that as someone inheriting a fairly massive fortune and that being a good thing, but I doubt the pain of losing your Mum plus the feel of Brown's metaphorical hot breath on your neck were a particularly pleasant entrance to the land of the newly rich and unemployed but I digress.

I wonder if, in the interests of reducing our housing, ecological, carbon or whatever footprint we are supposed to be afraid of this week, George would support a campaign to repeal the vast swathes of planning laws that over-inflate the cost of housing thus creating the unnatural scarcity that he mentions briefly?

Or is it more likely that he will pursue this obvious bridging bandwagon till the government can get suitably scared about "biodiversity" to start turning on that funding fawcet just as the global warming one dries up?

Quote Of The Year

Totalitarianism is the invention (by which I mean the betrayal) of reality.

From the excellent NickM at Counting Cats; put another way the acceptance of the acceptance of unreality, like the one presented to us by politicians and the media, is manifestly evil - to notionally and continually accept their bilge when events and reality start to bite and tell you differently is not only idiocy but also inherently evil by this measure.

Cable's To The Metro

Zippy, yesterday.

An email I wrote to the Metro this morning on the peasant wagon to work, saved here for posterity:

It is heartening to hear that Vince Cable has been censured from the enquiry and business case of Rupert Murdoch's desired takeover of BSkyB, a company his group has effectively revived from it's pre-Murdoch state; it is repugnant that so much can be made of other established competing media groups complaining of monopoly when at best this will give him a 25% share of the UK media market; in context the BBC enjoys over a 40% share of the market backed up by it's licence fee we are forced to pay like it or not; an advantage Rupert Murdoch's group doesn't enjoy.

What has garnered less attention though is still as incredible is some of Mr. Cable's other activities as business secretary, namely to do with my own political party, The Libertarian Party.

At our last Annual General Meeting we elected a new party leader, Andrew Withers; he has been pursuing a legal battle with the BIS for some time now; the content of which he is documenting in his blog and a book.

His official recognition in the role (something which needs to be registered by the state) was challenged by the BIS with a legal injunction direct from Mr. Cable's office before being thrown out by a court judge as outside of the BIS's remit.

In case this needs laying out more clearly: Mr. Cable used his political position to try and stop legitimate election proceedings for a minor political party who targets the liberal base of their party; are these the benign actions of a secretary of state or that of a politically motivated electioneer?

So Cable 2 words: zip it.

Getting NHS, Heck, Any Service Reform, On Peoples Minds

Why didn't I think/remember/bleat about this before?

Reading this on the peasant wagon home I've stopped to mention one surefire, simple way of getting people talking about real reform of the NHS.

First what are the main wildly wrong views people have of the NHS?

- That it is free.

- That it is fair.

- That it is the envy of the world.

Now I won't try to fisk these particular points about the NHS; they have all been done better elsewhere and by smarter people, and I'm sure that, for it's faults, it does still do it's job as good as it can, however all the points made above do not address one aspect; that the current free at the point of entry scheme need be collected as it currently is.

So my suggestion is this: National Insurance should be collected in the same way any private insurance policy is: by going direct to the consumer with an invoice/bill*.

Would you really be as disinterested in how much your national insurance premiums were value for money if you had a bill came through your door or a debit left your account at month end?

People forget where they should look on their pay slip; it's not the "Net" box at the bottom right highlighted but the "Gross" pay amount normally hidden above.

Can you imagine what would happen if they did this to income tax?

* = Taking it further why not have a part-fund mechanism for NICs? Your unemployment and pension become linked with a minimum annuity guarantee on the pension- if your unemployed the fund kicks in to pay for it until you find work whereby it fills back up again; if you drain the fund it defaults to your pension pot - if you live a life on benefits you drain your pension pot to it's insurance backed minimum which provides a lower annuity threshold than would be got for paying in normally - if the unemployment pot fills you pay a lower rate of national insurance than you would filling it.

Forest, Trees.

Been reports over the last few days of this sorry individual and the Hooman Roits crowds success in keeping him in this country and how this is, apparently, a. bad. thing.

Me? I can't but help thinking that the focus on deporting him is a little perverse; what angers me about the whole case is that for painfully ending the life of a twelve year old whilst banned from driving, without insurance or a licence, a life that would hopefully had had several more decades sadly cut short, this equated to 4 months in jail:

Lifetime of Amy Houston = 4 months locked in here:

One long playstation/hooker/drug holiday at her majesty's pleasure.

If that doesn't anger you- that you can be put away longer for smoking in a pub than for running someone over- more than whether we should send him back or whether we need a piece of legislation from Brussels you really need your head examined.

Course, the prescription in either case is the same; we need to democratise the judiciary and elect our officials in all fields we consent to be governed by - it is a lack of this assent to be governed that is causing this disenfranchisement and sadly there are few people who are successfully advocating this.

Until this changes, that the judiciary's minds are concentrated on the justice we want as a people, everything else is just window dressing and will change little.

Judicial activism needs to be destroyed.