The Coalition Takes A(nother) Leaf Right Out Of The NuLabour Playbook

The Post Office increased the sales tax for its 500,000 telephone customers to 20 per cent from early October, the Daily Mail has discovered.
...
By contrast, Chancellor George Osborne will have reason to smile, because all the extra cash, which is likely to run to several million pounds, will not go to the phone companies, but straight into Government coffers.

The decision to bring forward the rise – which the taxman insists is up to the companies’ discretion – has been described as ‘lazy billing’, as it is an easier and cheaper option for the firms than changing computer software to reflect a change part-way through a billing cycle.

Whilst I understand this is at the companies discretion doesn't this just smack of Gordon Brown's attempts in 2009 to retroactively tax companies to shore up his falling tax revenues?

Will we be seeing a consummate drop in the deficit or current debt mountain with this money? I won't be holding my breath.

My advice to those people stung by this is to punish the companies greatly by getting on Uswitch and finding someone else; likely won't be cheaper but at least they'll know not to mess with your cash?

If You Can Afford To Be Discriminating Beyond Red, Purple & Yellow What Business Is That Of The Courts?

If you feel your business can afford to look beyond the reddies, purplies & yellowies, then what business is that of the courts?

A gay couple are suing a Christian bed and breakfast owner after she told them it was 'against her convictions' for them to share a bed, it emerged yesterday.

Michael Black, 63, and John Morgan, 58, are claiming sexual discrimination after being turned away from Swiss B&B in Cookham, Berkshire, last March.

Their case follows that of Martyn Hall and Steven Preddy, who won £3,600 damages from the owners of a Cornish guesthouse last week for refusing them a double room.

Now I am a Christian - sometimes I lapse; my language can be atrocious, I drink far too heavily and frequently get vitriolic when discussing the turds of any rosette (to coin that acronym: TOARs.)

But I love God and all he's done in my life; I would be in a much darker place right now where it not for him.

All that said my God is a God of liberty and freedom; his kingdom is open to everyone who chooses to follow him but he doesn't persecute those who adopt a different lifestyle in this world* - that is the very essence of free will after: to live and let live.

This has honed my libertarianism; a belief in individual freedom and the pursuit of it up to the limit of another's freedom: gay marriage, adoption** and a right to dispense with property as the owner sees fit all come with this.

What also comes with this is the right to discriminate; how you conduct your business and who you conduct it with is sacrosanct and is at the very core of our natural rights.

And all this case represents is an encroachment on the right to do business and conduct oneself as you want.

By saying you have a right to do business with someone who doesn't want to do business with you, you disenfranchise them of their freedoms.

Yes this does mean that racists and a whole assortment of other bigots would be able to wear their prejudices on their sleeve, but is this really any worse than the unintended consequences this type of law making will have? Will it kill bigotry and prejudice or just push it into more subtle, faux-intellectual ways of handling business with people you don't like? Will it encourage friendship and trust or a pervasive atmosphere of distrust and intergenerational irrationality?

My guess is that this will only make the problems associated with it more ingrained, and put hardliners in positions of power over sheeple.

* = please note this is saying what God does, not what established churches do or people do, as is made in my point about free will.

** = yes, as a Christian Youthworker I see the problem caused by, quite frankly, shitty heterosexual "parenting" (if you can call it that); parents who gladly choose smokes and cider over new shoes and clothes for their beer voucher subsidy progeny.

However, this is not the same as saying adoption agencies must consider all patrons irrespective of deeply held convictions; the true answer to this problem perhaps lies in parental choice and a liberalising of adoption providers.

Prediction For Economic "Growth" In The Next Quarter: Someone Should Slap George Osbourne. Hard.

With the economy shrinking in the last quarter, and many Labourite apologists claiming this as a victory for #ukuncut and other bunkum, I felt obliged to try my hand at predicting the economic movements in the net quarter.

This downturn has, in my opinion, quite lazily been blamed on the horrific snow we had over Christmas, which, if so, Lays firmly at the door of the MET office; logic dictates that if the MET office couldn't find their arse with both hands today then how can they effectively predict it's location in 20-50 years time?

Judging from the continued support of this laughable woo-QuANGO by the big wigs in Whitehall I think that they don't even believe that is the full sort.

So, that said let's try my theory.

I work for a large company; in order for it to survive in the good times it's needs to plan effectively and release new products encouraging innovation and growth; new products are planned years in advance with a view to material ordering and customer needs, but with enough wiggle room to adapt to changes in demand and culture.

All good business, businesses that survive downturns, do this.

Now Georgie boy pre-announced the increase in VAT; a good thing (the announcement, that is) - as a result manufacturers thought "demand for our product will drop with rising prices, therefore we cut production, staff and sell up unnecessary capital", banks thought "lots of additional capital on the market; let's sell it to foreign nationals, then rinse our savers so we can get a bonus and retire to our portugese villa. Job done." whilst our politicians engage in a lot of mutual back slapping that they are saving public sector jobs and the EU project with our money.

However, companies would have encoded the VAT rise into their calculations months before; more than likely before even George knew about it- the result? Fewer goods produced locally, fewer jobs, exports and thus a drop in the growth of the economy.

Thus as this has been encoded into good businesses plans now my prediction is that growth will continue to be negative until it bottoms out to meet internal and external demand; in all likelihood the next time this will be a 1% contraction rather than 0.5 (if were lucky.

This is not a call for faux-Keynesian pump-priming of the economy - if anything it prove what geniuses, or as most people will choose to remember them, a devious shit Gordon Brown and Ed Balls truly were was; his strategy of QE and bank bailouts pumped money into the economy when it was in free fall just in time to see Labour coast to a mild loss at the 2010 General Election and put a damp squib on the Tory's already touchy-feely squibishness and chances at a stable Bory-only majority, all in time for the other big two in their happy clappy coalition to reap the rewards of the dead cat bounce.

No if anything it is a call for Osbourne to lead where Euroslime Dave is sore to follow; bringing about real reform to the public sector starting with drawing a line in where it is stable, and currently at over 50% of the economy, stable it aint.

Best economic advice you could give George if you see him in the street? A cold hard slap, telling him to set departmental budget rather than let the cabinet fanny around with them to electoral oblivion.

I'll See Your Friedman, @Obotheclown...

...and raise you a well constructed smack down of Naomi Klein from beyond the grave (woooohhh!!!):


here*.

*apologies - can't embed YouTube with the app I blog with.

Benefits Whom?

If Only It Were So Easy

Via Aunty Beeb:

Little progress has been made in reducing losses caused by benefit recipients making errors in their claims, a report has said.

Some £800m was not paid to people in 2009-10 who were entitled to the money because of errors on forms, the National Audit Office (NAO) said.

Another £1.1bn was lost to the taxpayer owing to overpayments of benefits.

The NAO report found "no discernable decrease" in losses after three years of a five-year plan to cut errors.

The spending watchdog said that overpayments caused substantial unrecovered losses to the taxpayer, and underpayments could cause hardship for individuals.

First off: giving people too much OPM* my be a loss to taxpayers and too little may mean they lose out? And we need a quango to tell us this?

Buffrat, my idiot brother, is currently unemployed through a mixture new career entry delays (he's joining the RAF), old work-colleague sabotage (his old boss has tried to scupper his new role by spreading discourse & having his final salary/commission fall victim to "administration errors") & outright personal stupidity (a month before he was due to enter the RAF he went out, got blind drunk, fell over and chipped his elbow, resulting in several weeks of additional observation & delays). As a result of not having had a wage since September he has lived in veritable poverty and handouts.

I say handouts in the sense of myself, my sister and assorted family bankrolling him; only now is he starting to see benefits kicking in - it has taken several flaming weeks to get anything money out of the system to which he has committed substantially all through his working life.

As a libertarian I would love to see an individualist approach to benefits and welfare, but I am solidly aware that this is unlikely to happen in mine or my children's lifetime; what could and should happen this year is drastic welfare reform to stop this kind of faff, first and foremost, but the only way to do that is to make the benefits system less complicated and about hoop jumping.

I suggest trying this might be a good place to start.

Theft Is Not A Source Of Income

Danny Alexander: "Might as well leave your wallet on the table and piss off, prole."

Yet again we have our assumed lords and masters getting this accountability thing all mixed up again:

Families were warned last night there was little prospect of a lifeline on fuel prices – despite repeated pledges from David Cameron.
Treasury Chief Secretary Danny Alexander said his department would not ‘sacrifice income willy nilly’ to help out motorists.

Words really do fail me they do; "sacrifice income"? WTF did you do to deserve it?

He did reveal, however, that the Treasury was pushing ahead with a pilot scheme to offer discounted fuel to rural communities in the Scottish Highlands, which could extend to his own constituency of Inverness.

So yes we are all about to be nipple-twisted till they're blue, just as long as those mp's with their mitts closest to the till (or should that be swag bag?) swipe a little extra for their own vested jockanese interests.

The Liberal Democrat minister said: ‘The biggest economic problem facing every household is the deficit. If we come off that deficit reduction plan, the risk to the country would be truly huge, so that has to be the first priority.’

This governments predilection for scapegoats is no less hungry than the previous ones; it us very easy to blame New Labour for the deficit but let's review:

• Does Osbourne's plan see a reduction in public spending? What? Spending increases over this parliament? Moving on-

• Did Cameron, or any other Bory leader for that matter, mount a credible offence against these insane spending sprees in opposition? What? They said they'd match Labour's spending? so no then.

None of the big three parties offered any credible alternative to Labour's spending spree; tapering off the deficit over several years is the equivalent of skinning a man with a potato peeler; better just to cut the damn limb off ad cauterise the wound.

His comments came as Energy Secretary Chris Huhne acknowledged that rising fuel prices could ‘potentially have devastating effects on employment’ – but said fuel duty should be kept high in the long term for environmental reasons.

So when there not responsible for drowning people, destroying their homes & livestock, they are intent on taking extortionate amounts of money with menaces from us in homage to the widely discredited green religion.

Let me be frank: Dave and his merry band of political thieves are stealing your money; if they are not keeping interest rates intentionally low resulting in a transfer of wealth from savers to bankers bonuses and spenders they are dallying around real issues which are quickly destroying their credibility dealing with making life easier (preferably by pissing off out of ours).

Tax should be a means of accounting for negative externalities; if polluting the air from burning fossil fuels is bad then yes charge us, but can you honestly say this externality accounts for 60% of the price?

I can even, grudgingly, accept budget deficit costs being internalized; I'd like that to happen so our generation pays for it's mistakes, then we could see Red Milliband try to weasel out of that and explain why it should be our children.

Actually yeah - I want that tax emblazoned on everyones pay slip monthly in luminous yellow script just to drill the point home.

Just stop taking money for no better reason than because it's a good source of revenue; we don't expect that rationale to apply to burglars and thieves when they get put in prison.

That There Oldham By-Election

So 1 in 5 people* hand power for Old and Sad to the previous corrupt guys secretary-bag carrier (who obviously had nothing to do with the libellous smear campaign again his lib dumb opponent) and Labour chalk this up as a win? That this somehow "sending the coalition a message"?

The only message this really sends is that Oldham IS as big a dosshole as it looks.

* = 42% to Generic Labour Candidate X times 48% Turnout = 20% of this capable of voting. QED

Proof Free Markets Are Better At Stuff For Everyone

If they lived in London they could all be slinging their hook come February.

In my weak fumbling around in the economic wilderness trying to understand the meat & bones of it I do come across many interesting terms- one such term I've heard of late that sadly has entered the collective consciousness of the masses is monopsony.

I think this might be regarded as an example of such a phenomena at play - the state being the sole buyer of the firefighters services is ultimately to it's detriment.

Don't get me wrong - union strong-arming of Labour policy while in power bears a lot of the blame for the problems we are experiencing now and the firefighters, like every other public sector body, needs to feel the pinch as much as the private sector has; it just amuses me that whilst socialised call for the usurpation of private business and the means of production we have an example right here of the consequences of centralising a service then finding you don't like the terms of the agreement.

Let's hope noone tries this in the NHS eh? That'd be a shock.

Banker Bonuses: The Wrong Trousers

This arguement & incessant moaning is really getting to me now; am I alone?

Bob Diamond is right - bonuses should be paid and he shouldn't have to argue the toss with MPs who's major concern is pleasing a few bulgar wheat eating sandalistas rather than addressing the real issues surrounding the crash.

But, were it not for The BoE's and New Labour's and now the New Coalitions policy of keeping interest rates at near-zero banks would almost certainly have not been nearly as profitable and wouldn't warrant the bonuses received (BTW: the blog for the linked article will be added to my list soon as I sit down at a computer; would recommend to all having found it yesterday.)

So were it not for Brown jumping the balloon maker, most Banker would now be signing on, not coining in - and the blame rests firmly at the door of our lords and masters at Whitehall.

Words Fail Me

Pint of best love & a spritzer for the wife- that? Nothing to concern you prole.

The three ‘professional witnesses’, two men and a woman, were hired from a private surveillance company to play the fake drunks.

The trio worked for nine nights from 8pm to 3am over three weekends, costing a total of £4,200, Roly Schwarz, the community safety enforcement manager for Conwy and Denbighshire, confirmed last night.

Their ‘tactics’ to maintain their cover included ‘telling person serving them they were drunk’, ‘slurred speech’, ‘being dressed in dishevelled and stained clothing’ and ‘falling over’, the report says.

They might not be able to empty our bins for weeks on end or ensures roads are gritted, but thank God the councils are saving us from ourselves.