Labour's fixed that for you

According to the Daily Wail, George Osborne (amongst others) lobbied hard against the Tories' EU referendum pledge.

George Osborne pleaded with David Cameron not to hold an in/out referendum on the European Union, it emerged last night.
Senior Tory sources revealed the Chancellor had repeatedly warned against the move in the run-up to the Prime Minister’s referendum pledge in 2013.

He is said to have warned Mr Cameron that a referendum would not resolve the tensions within the Tory party over the issue, and risked an accidental British exit from the EU.

If we exit the EU, Georgie-boy, it won't be "accidental": it will be the quite deliberate will of the British people—a people who would rather make their own laws and articulate their own priorities (for better or for worse).

But why, George? Why would you do this thing: why campaign against an EU referendum...?

[Osborne] also warned that holding an in/out vote risked putting the Conservatives on the wrong side of mainstream business opinion…

Well, if by "mainstream business" you mean big corporates, yes: if, on the other hand, you mean "the vast majority of British businesses that have to implement a bunch of regulations even though they don't actually trade abroad"—the ones that make up 80% of our trade and commerce—then not so much.

But Georgie is a sneaky little tyke: surely he can just be cuddling up to businesses? Is there, perhaps, some kind of political side to this?

... handing a political gift to Labour.

Ah. I did wonder.

Still, that shouldn't be a problem after September 12.

The Tories will have to worry far less about the opinion of businesses (or, indeed, voters) when the main opposition party is about to elect a terrorist-appeasing Communist, pushing a generally fascist manifesto—the financials of which are cobbled together by an economic illiterate.

George & Co. must be delighted.

Michael O'Leary on innovation

I am, I know, a little late on this—having seen it at numerous places, including Old Holborn's—but I very much enjoyed RyanAir's Michael O'Leary roundly insulting the European Commission, repeatedly, whilst speaking at the laughable European Union Innovation Conference.



Do watch it—and I only wish that our government would heed O'Leary's advice to "get the hell out of Brussels as fast as you can"...

The Blog Society

Your humble Devil doesn't know where Anna Raccoon has gone: right now her domain is showing a placeholder, and it may be that she has simply forgotten to renew it. Or something else may have happened. (Grumpy Old Twat writes a eulogy, but seems to have no more idea than I: all we know is that her online presence has been entirely obliterated.)

However, I had meant to find time to write a comment on her superb article entitled The Blog Society and, as such, it was still in my Dock—waiting for some attention. However, whilst Anna is not around (and until we find out what has happened), I have chosen to re-publish the article, because it is such an important and excellent example of how we pimply, single, cauliflower-nosed loners can help ordinary people.

Let us hope that Anna returns in short order to complain about me hijacking her work—in the meantime, however, read and enjoy...

+++

The Blog Society

Did you hear it? Friday night, around tea-time? The crunch of gears engaging, the whine of engines turning over. Perhaps you smelt the noxious diesel fumes as Sandwell Borough Council revved up their engines, lowered their gun turrets and reversed their tanks off the front lawn they have been parked on for the past 136 days?

Sheila Martin’s front lawn. Sandwell Borough Council have blinked. Backed down. Taken their ball and gone home.

Sheila Martin, a frail 70 year old widow, in severe ill health, who had committed the dastardly offence of nibbing her cigarette and letting the lighted end fall to the floor, whilst dutifully stowing the ‘butt’ end in her handbag, is no longer to be prosecuted.

In the eyes of the apparatchiks employed by Sandwell Borough council as ‘enforcement wardens’, that millimetre of lit and sterile cigarette ash constituted ‘the discarded end of a cigarette’ within the meaning of section 98 of the Environmental Act 1990 as amended by Section 18 of the Clean Neighbourhoods and Environment Act 2005, and Sheila was to pay £75 for the crime of not putting burning cigarette ash into her handbag like a good little girl.

Adam Aspinall of the Sunday Mercury, Sheila’s local Sunday paper, was incredulous when he heard this news. He wrote a small piece for his paper that Sunday describing the subsequent events, detailing how Sheila had been threatened with a £2,500 fine for not paying the original fine.

I happened to read it; I wanted to speak to Sheila, I wanted to know more. I spent the better part of a day methodically telephoning everyone in the Oldbury area with the name of Martin. There are an awful lot of them—none of them turned out to be Sheila.

It didn’t occur to me initially to contact the paper—journalists and bloggers, they’re like oil and water aren’t they? At permanent war with each other, hurling insults with vicious abandon. I came from the ‘stench of the blogosphere’; that famed sewer; one of the pajamahadeen that journalists delight in looking down on. Some 40 phone calls later, in desperation, I thought it might be worth a call to the high moral ground of the newspaper.

I was in for a surprise. I had carefully marshalled my credentials; I had been instrumental in getting Nick Hogan out of jail when he had been an unfair victim of the anti-smoking legislation, I had a respectable readership, I was sure I could help Sheila Martin fight this iniquitous penalty; pumped up with self righteous adrenaline I was all ready for them to put me down.

They didn’t. Adam Aspinall was delighted that someone could help Sheila, he had been affected by her story too, and he was not a heartless hack thinking only of his next by-line. His problem, one shared with every other regional paper, was lack of resources. Newspaper no longer have spare lawyers sitting around their offices with nothing better to do than advise on legal technicalities; journalists are driven by deadlines, and the requirements of their advertising departments. His Editor couldn’t spare him to spend hours researching similar stories, writing letters, reading legal cases, phoning local councillors—but the Blogosphere could do all that and more!

We verbally shook hands on a deal. Adam would give me all the information he had—including the precious phone number of Sheila’s neighbour, if I would agree to publish nothing ahead of his Sunday deadline and share everything I had with him.

It was a deal that was to come under severe pressure when a major Sunday National became aware of one of the earlier stories I had written on Sheila. They contacted me; could I put them in touch with Sheila? Whyfore? Oh, you know, this was just a story in the Blogosphere and they had to check it out for themselves. My response was to say sorry, no can do. Half an hour later they phoned again. Was she Sheila Martin of ‘X’ Road. No, I said she wasn’t. Why was I being so awkward, they asked? They were intending to make a big story out of this; they might even mention my name—whoo hoo! The information simply wasn’t mine to give away, I said. Another half hour and they were back—they’d pay me, a not insignificant sum, and by the way, was she Sheila Martin of ‘Y’ Road? No she wasn’t! They were welcome to use what I had written already—I could hardly stop them, it was out there on the internet—but I wasn’t at liberty to give them any more than that.

Another half hour of that Saturday night rolled by—closer to their deadline, as I’d realised by now. The phone rang once more – they could double their offer. Wow! Why, I asked, were they so keen on gaining her phone number? Well, they had a photographer standing by in Birmingham—at 10pm at night, and thought they might just call round to this elderly lady’s house and surprise her in her nightgown and get a picture of her smoking to go with their story. They thought they might even get it on their front page. They’d ‘give me a name check’ and if I ever wanted to get into journalism it would be useful for me...

That entire exchange encapsulates why I would never want to get into journalism, why I am happy to be a ‘semi-literate blogger’—I would never want to be subjected to the pressures that see Sheila’s distress and fragility as fodder to fill a late night deadline on a slow news day. Her dignity and privacy invaded for a handful of tenners.

The following morning the Sunday Mercury and I both published our new stories on Sheila. The response of the Blogosphere was extraordinary—within a couple of hours I had more e-mails than I had comments—and the comments were at that time running around the 50 mark, a figure now way out of date. I had e-mails from Barristers and Academics, Solicitors and Local Authority Legal Advisors—all willing and able to pitch up with their specialist knowledge on Sheila’s behalf—free of charge. Detailed information on the legal technicalities behind her offence positively poured out of them. By the end of that first night we had a legal team that would not have disgraced the defence team for a major conspiracy trial at the Old Bailey.

We also had e-mail addresses and mobile phone numbers for virtually everyone on the staff at Sandwell Council, home addresses, photographs of their houses for heavens sake, even, in one case, a photograph of the aluminium wheels on their BMW that were for sale on e-bay—the cuttings library at the Old Mirror building was famed for the ability with which it could come up with a cornucopia of information on any obscure subject; I would pitch the wit and wisdom of the Blogosphere against their sleuthing skills any day.

That was the network that the Sunday Mercury was able to engage with, and by putting their trust in the energy, expertise and exchange of information that the Blogosphere with its predominantly Libertarian ethos is so good at, and combining it with their on the ground knowledge, and contacts, together we have achieved a remarkable result.

Sandwell Borough Council has finally decided, after 136 days, that ‘it is not in the public interest’—decode that as you will!—to persecute Sheila Martin any longer. She was not just a frail elderly widow who would bow to their demands; behind her there was a mighty powerhouse, the combined forces of their local paper and the blogosphere that was marking their every footstep, dogging their every incompetence, detailing their every inaction, and Sheila didn’t look such an attractive ‘mark’ any longer.

Sheila is delighted; she has said:

“This whole process has been one long nightmare and my health is suffering as a result.

“The stress of everything has caused me to collapse twice and end up in hospital; I don’t know how much more I can take.

“If I was guilty it wouldn’t be a problem but I’m not so while there is breath left in me I will fight but I have to admit it is taking its toll now.

“What I cannot understand is why it is taking so long, surely it is costing the taxpayer lots of money to deal with this and it is a load of nonsense.

“It is funny how I haven’t seen one single enforcement officer since this came out and when you walk outside the council building the streets are full of cigarette butts and fag ends – where were they when that happened or do they belong to council employees?

“I am just so glad that I have had support from the Sunday Mercury and the internet bloggers because otherwise I would have felt so alone.”

I am delighted too. Not just for Sheila, but for a new era. One where the main stream media and the Internet can learn to work together. There are strengths and weaknesses on both sides, together we are more than the sum of our respective parts. Together we form the Blog Society—an Internet based version of the Big Society, which has the expertise and initiative to force back the cold, dead, hand of the State, and right the petty wrongs it imposes on decent men and women like Sheila.

+++

It used to be that no person could be fined or have their property seized in any way without a court order; it used to be that going to court meant being judged by a jury of one's peers. This is no longer the case.

We endure fines and confiscations at the whim of a mindless bureaucracy who then use our money to further constrict our freedoms.

And regardless of whether this is "the will of the population" (and I very much doubt that it is), this must stop.

A massive thanks must go to Anna and the others who have made a stand in this case. And I hope that Sandwell Council's officers, officials and councillors all burn in hell—along with any others who try the same.

Unfortunately, they won't, because the British people have exchanged their freedoms for security—and we all know how that ends up.

I wouldn't mind but, thanks to the wonder of the world that is democracy the tyranny of the majority, they have taken all of us with them...

They're coming to get you, fatty!

Now, we all know that the Japanese are a race with their own customs and values. Frankly, I find aspects of their culture more than a little odd. But this is just appalling.


Japanese Fatbusters

As Dick Puddlecote says, if companies are going to face massive fines—19 million in the case of NEC, the company featured in the video—because their employees do not meet entirely arbitrary government-mandated waist sizes, then fat people are going to find it pretty damn difficult to get a job.

As a business owner, if forced to pay fines for overweight staff, I wouldn't see any other option but to not employ them at all.

It might be in the interest of porky Breckland Council employees—who this week voted for smokers to be singled out for punishment—to re-think their attitude towards overweening health bullies, doncha think?

Unfortunately, I am sure that they won't. So cowed are the British people, that they will mutter miserably about how it's probably for our own good, and that the government is doing it to make us all fitter and happier.

That's if the idiots don't actively vote for it themselves, of course...

The taxman cometh...

I know that I am somewhat late to this party (because, as usual, real life has been intruding on my blogging time), but there are a few pertinent points that I would like to make about the monumental tax fuck-up that has been doing the rounds over the last few weeks.

Almost 1.5 million workers face demands to pay back an average of £1,400 in tax after an error was found in calculations over the past two years.

HMRC has admitted that 5.7 million people have paid the wrong amount of tax due to errors in the tax code system.
The figure includes 1.4 million who have paid too little and will face demands for repayment as well as 4.3 million who paid too much and should receive rebates.

None of this is a surprise, really; many of us have been banging on for ages about the complexity of the tax system and, given that HMRC are a bunch of complete numpties, it was only a matter of time before something like this happened.

The Coalition blamed the last government for the fiasco. A senior Tory source said: “This happened because the last government failed to comprehensively reform the PAYE system. We are now dealing with that mess.”
...

A Treasury source said: “A decade of meddling and intervening made the tax affairs of millions of families and businesses across the UK extremely complicated.”

Yes, yes: so what are you going to do about it?

George Osborne, the Chancellor, has said he will introduce a fairer and simpler tax system. He is certain to use the meltdown at HMRC to push for further and swifter reforms to the way tax is calculated and collected.

Good. Just for the record, because it bears repeating yet again, here is how I would like to see the tax system operate (given a similar paradigm to the current one. Naturally enough, my preferred system is rather different, and involves consumption taxes as the primary tax source):

• A Personal Tax Allowance of around £12,000. Not only is it deeply immoral to tax the poor and then make them beg for a few nuggets of their money back, twelve grand is roughly the earnings of a full-time minimum wage earner. Further, the Rowntree Foundation have, oddly enough, calculated that the absolute poverty line is about £12,000 minus tax: if we don't tax low-earners, then we have raised thousands of people out of absolute poverty—result!


• A Flat Tax of around 22% on all personal earnings. Rather than worry about the source of the earnings (there are different rates of tax for salaries and dividends, for example: for more details, ask Richard Murphy), let's just tax what people receive—it's much easier to administer and we can remove some of the distortions from the market. And, for the record, Timmy agrees with me.
  

  Better by far to abolish corporation tax altogether and simply tax the income/returns when they arrive with people.
  
  After all, companies don’t pay tax, only people do: and we also know that 70% or so of the corporation tax burden is carried by the workers in the form of lower wages.

  
  There should be no exemptions (except possibly for pension, healthcare and unemployment contributions. Let's get people used to paying into these as soon as possible, in order to soften the blow when we finally abolish the National Insurance Ponzi Scheme).

All of this will make life far simpler. It will also make collecting tax far more efficient, reducing fiscal churn and enabling the money that is collected to have far more purchasing power.

However, I don't expect George Osbourne to be anything like this radical because he's a weaselly little bastard with no balls—and the same applies to his massively-foreheaded twat of an organ-grinder.

Although, there are a couple of rays of hope that maybe—just maybe—George is thinking of something slightly radical. The first is the fact that, only a few days after the news of the mistakes were reported, the Treasury came out with this utter toss.

HM Revenue and Customs could take direct control of every worker’s monthly pay cheque under plans to overhaul the error-prone income tax system.

Instead of employers deducting income tax then paying gross salaries to employees, the gross monthly payment would go to an HMRC-run tax “calculator”, which would then pass the net salary to the worker.

So, let me get this straight: HMRC—which has proven its colossal incompetence by not only fucking up the PAYE tax assessments of millions of people but was also, lest we forget, responsible for one of the biggest data losses of all time—thinks that it can make things better by taking on the monthly (or weekly) pay assessments of every single worker in the country.

Are these bastards insane?

Not only that, of course, but it undermines the fundamental point that it is our fucking money—earned by our hard work. It doesn't belong to the fucking state, and these absolute cunts should be absolutely fucking ashamed that anyone—anyone—could seriously suggest this measure (even were these incompetent bastards actually capable of administering such a mammoth system with any degree of competence).

Brian Stenhouse of Armstrong Watson, which runs payroll services for more than 2,000 companies, said people should have “deep concerns” about the central deductions plan.

He said: “Are people going to be happy to give HMRC their bank details and trust HMRC to make the right deductions and pass on their salary every month?

“Given they’re not going to have a complete monthly payslip any more, people are going to be in dark about what’s been deducted. And if there is an error, they’d be reliant on HMRC to correct it.”

Anyone confident in HMRC's willingness to correct mistakes in a timely manner? No, I didn't think so.

Oh, and don't forget it has been ruled that HMRC are not responsible or liable for any errors that they make—so good luck trying to pursue any damages claims against them.

My rage, contempt and indignation is, of course, shared by Timmy...

Concentrate instead upon the moral logic of this. All of our money isn’t really our money. It’s the State’s, all must be reliant upon that beneficient State for every penny of whatever dribble of income they might allow us.

Err, no. “Treasury ministers” who are advocating this can fuck off and die: and the Coalition they rode in on.

... and my impecunious Greek friend (whose peripatetic ways mean that he would not be currently affected—a fact that does little to dampen his ire).

You have to be fucking yanking my baws. Giving the state all my money and then petitioning them to tell me how much they took? No, no, I think not, you dickless fucking cretins. You've just demonstrated that you can't even add up correctly; I'm certainly not giving you my wallet while you count off the tenners you plan to leech off me. I'd be better off throwing it into the fucking sea.

Indeed, the angry baby describes a tax system that would, I feel, be rather better than the current one.

No, I propose the exact opposite. Every year, I propose that each taxpayer receive an itemised statement from HMRC, providing a detailed breakdown of how every penny of your taxes has been spent—£431.20 on the NHS, £193.31 on the police, 59p subsidising MPs' booze, 2p on duck houses, etc. etc.—and countersigned, for good measure, by your local MP. Is it value for money? Does it reflect my priorities to some minimal degree? Am I happy with the political representative that nodded it through? If so, then I may - generously, if through gritted teeth—cut you a cheque; and yes, you can just fucking wait three days for the money to clear like the rest of us, you fucking bastards.

You work for us, you unspeakable cunts, not the other way round. Don't forget it.

So, given the predictable outrage, either this is a bunch of disgruntled Treasury Civil Servants attempting to direct some fire at their Coalition masters, or something rather more subtle is going on.

And this brings me to the second point—one which was rather well articulated, over a beer, by Simon Goldie (the kind of libertarian LibDem that I could see myself working with, by the way).

Simon's contention, and it is one that I was mulling myself, was that all of this was softening up the various vested interests for a massive simplification of the tax structure by Our New Coalition Overlords™. Tax simplification has been opposed by many barking fucking loonies, arrogant and ignorant ne'er-do-wells, and evil arseholes (both of them); however, it would be difficult for even those tits to oppose something with a massive groundswell of public opinion.

So, the announcement of the balls-up in PAYE taxes plus the absolutely insane solution proposed above might get people thinking that maybe HMRC is not people by fluffy bunnies and do-gooders and that, just possibly, there might be a better way of handling this whole tax thing.

With Osbourne's Spending Report coming up soon, now is the time to start agitating for a simpler system that doesn't involve us begging the state for our money.

Let us hope that George has something good for us—frankly, Our New Coalition Overlords™ have not impressed me yet (and they certainly haven't made my life better by even one iota) and I'm getting slightly tired of waiting...

There is another option

Apparently councils are being told that they aren't going to get so much money from central government.

Now, when funding is being cut, there are two routes that organisations could take:

1. raise more money
2. stop spending so much money

Which route do you think that our local councils are going to take...?

That's right: they are going for the raise more money route. And one of the ideas that they have come up with is that private businesses should pay for any free parking that they supply to their employees.

Initially, the parking levy was seen as a way to tackle congestion and cut carbon emissions. Now, there is growing evidence it is also being seen as a source of extra cash. Nottingham City Council will be the first council to impose a £250 levy on local employers, from 2012. Within two years, the bill will rise to £350 and will target all companies with 11 or more parking spaces.

A Daily Telegraph investigation found many other councils are now preparing to follow suit.
Bristol City Council, for example, in its draft strategy, describes the levy as a "revenue stream" to help fund other transport initiatives.

Under proposals being considered by York City Council, the charge would be paid "by the employer or charged to the employee".

I absolutely cannot see how York City Council could possibly charge employees for parking on their employers' private land; sure, they could charge the employers, and the employers could pass that charge onto their employees, but that's not quite the same. But again, I don't really see how any council can be allowed to dictate the uses to which anyone puts their own, private land.

Hampshire County Council, meanwhile, is considering a "modest"—but unspecified—charge for the south of the region, including Southampton and Portsmouth, to, says a consultation document, "redress the imbalance between free commuter parking for some staff at office complexes" and "parking for other staff in public spaces where payment is required".

Yeah, well, the public spaces can be charged for by the council because the council owns the public spaces. It does not own private land.

Further, if Hampshire County Council really wanted to "redress the imbalance between free commuter parking for some staff at office complexes" and "parking for other staff in public spaces where payment is required", then it could simply stop charging for the public spaces, couldn't they?

But no, that wouldn't work, would it? For how else would councils be able to employ people to sit around on their arses all day, or go off sick for six months at a time?

Here, one employee for a large inner London authority lifts the lid on the culture of inertia and incompetence at his workplace. The Mail knows the true identity of the man - a graduate who has been a planning officer for eight years. But to protect his job, he is writing under an assumed name.

Monday morning, it's 10am and I'm late for work - but there's no point hurrying because even though I should have been at my desk 30 minutes ago, I know I'll be the first to arrive at the office.
...

Our department has 60 employees and—until last Tuesday—a budget of £22million.

I've been there for two years and in that period the only time I've ever seen every employee present and correct was at the Christmas party.

At least ten people will be off sick on any one day. The departmental record holder is Doreen - she has worked a grand total of eight days in 14 months.

Doreen must be the unluckiest woman in the country.

In the past year and a half she claims she has: fallen victim to frostbite; been hit by a car; and accidentally set herself on fire.
But she's really pulled out all the stops with her latest excuse: witchcraft. That's right, Doreen believes somebody in Nigeria has cast a spell on her and that it would be unprofessional of her to attempt to do the job she is paid £56k a year for while under the influence of the spell.

She has already been off for four months on full pay. I've no idea how long this spell lasts, but my guessing would be six months to the day - the exact amount of time council employees can take off on full pay before their money is reduced.
But having just eight weeks of full pay left won't be a problem for Doreen and the rest of the council's sickly staff - they'll simply return to work when the six months is up, put in a day or two's work and then go off sick for another six months on full pay again. Easy.
...

All credit to the bright-eyed young HR manager who, last year, wanted to dismiss a senior employee who had been off sick for three months.

The employee had still been using his company mobile phone, from Marbella.

However, the employee was able (with a little help from the mighty Unison union) to argue that there's no reason why 'sick' people can't rent villas in the Costa Del Sol.
...

Back to the day's business. Jerry is the next to arrive at 10.25am - before he takes his jacket off he performs his morning ritual of taking both his phones off the hook.

God forbid that any resident and council tax payer should be able to speak to him and get some of the advice he's paid £64k a year to dispense.

Jerry is 63 and two years from retirement. He is what is known in the civil service and local government as an 'untouchable' - he's been at the council for more than 40 years, does no work, but would cost an absolute fortune to get rid of.

So he's left alone to play online poker, Skype his daughter in Florida and take his two-hour daily snooze at his desk, no doubt dreaming of the day when his gold-plated public sector pension will kick in.

If you think Jerry's pay is generous, consider this: the head of my department is on an annual salary of £170k plus bonuses, his deputy nets £99k and even the office PAs are on a very respectable £38k - just two thousand less than I get.
...

Although it's two years since I started working for this authority I've also worked for two other London boroughs in various capacities over a period of 12 years. In that time I've never known anybody be sacked, no matter how inept and unprofessional they may be.
...

Next week there is a two-day course on 'letter writing skills' - I dearly hope that Jackie, our departmental PA, will attend this one. I've given up using her and now type my own correspondence and reports.

The last time she typed a letter for me (to an architect) she misspelt 'accommodation' and 'environment' throughout.

I gently pointed this out to her and asked her to redo the document. But she went sick for two weeks with stress, complaining that she was being bullied.

When my boss called me in to discuss this I, jokingly, said: 'Well I'll just let her misspell everything in future, shall I?' To which he replied: 'Yes, I think that's best for now.'
...

The cuts and pay freezes are desperately needed, but the one thing Mr Osborne will never be able to control is the culture of inertia and inefficiency that is rife throughout the public sector.

Of course, when I tell my friends in the private sector about my working conditions, they can scarcely believe it. As the recession bites, they consider themselves lucky to be holding on to their jobs, and are willing to work extra hours or take a pay freeze to ensure their firm's survival.

In the public sector, though, there is no competitive edge; no incentive to cuts costs or improve efficiency. Few genuinely fear for their job security, protected as they are by threats of union action every time the axe looks likely to fall.
...

In my authority's borough, the average householder pays £1,330 a year in council tax. I'm sure they'd be thrilled to know that they're funding Jerry's internet gambling and Doreen's never-ending sick pay.

Indeed. And now anyone who parks at work will be paying extra for council workers to sit about and do fuck all.

I defy anyone to read the above-linked article (of which I have only quoted the highlights) and declare that councils have no room to cut budgets; they do and they could do so, if the people at the top were not just as corrupt, venal, lazy and stupid as their overpaid, ignorant, work-shy underlings.

And supporting all of this waste and venality, of course, are the trade unions—most especially Unison. Who are, it seems, are continuing to be paid millions of pounds in "re-structuring" funds. This is, in itself, a very bad move for the Coalition: you don't make pacts with crooks, or try to buy off these devils—their power needs to be strangled and their funds destroyed.

Then, if anyone has the will, we can start going through these public bodies and sack 90% of the staff and whittle their responsibilities down to the bare essentials and nothing more.

Something, as they say, has got to be done. And that something does not involve levying yet more taxes on an already over-burdened population in order to piss it away on useless, feckless wastes of space.

The poor and choices

Shuggy is up in arms about Our New Coalition Overlords' proposal to pay benefits in the form of food vouchers.

The obvious solution to poverty, which is simply to give the poor more money, is unacceptable to our new 'progressive' coalition overlords. They understand that money gives people choices and in the case of the poor, this would never do because they would just make the 'wrong' choices.

Yeah, sure. And yet no.

The government has no money of its own: it only has what it takes from its people through tax.

As such, the government cannot simply "give the poor more money" without first taking it from other people; the people that they take it from then become poorer.

(Many, in fact, are pushed below the poverty line (as estimated by, say, the Rowntree Foundation) after this money is taken from them.)

But the money given to the poor is supposed to serve a certain purpose—that is, to allow them to stay alive. Even Beveridge maintained that benefits should only be at a "subsistance level".

If there is a social contract, it is that those of us who work agree to be taxed to ensure that those who have no work are not lying about, starving in the streets. This is a cost of living in a society, and it also answers the demands of basic humanity.

But the money does not belong to the poor to do what they want with it, it is not provided to give them "choices": it is there for a specific purpose—to ensure that they can stay alive. If they want "choices" then they must go out and earn their own cash.

In other words, the government aren't proposing taking "choices" away from people because they are poor; they are proposing to do so because the money does not belong to those in receipt of it—it is not theirs to do as they will with.

Imagine if a friend of yours asked to borrow £50 off you because he was starving; it's £50 that you cannot really afford (and you're pretty sure that you won't get it back any time soon), but you give it to help him in extremis.

You'd be pretty annoyed if, a few hours later, you found him buying rounds for his mates in the pub, would you not?

Of course, none of this means that I subscribe to the idea of vouchers. No.

If, for instance, a family on benefits chooses to go without food so that they can afford the bus fare to send their child to the best school that they can, then that is a choice that I applaud. And, unless the bus driver takes food vouchers, then such instruments will, indeed, take away choice. It will even take away the choice of a dole claimant to travel to a job interview—and that is hardly desirable, is it?

Given that, I must also allow people the freedom to make choices that I would not condone too.

But, as a general rule, if the poor have enough money to have "choices" then we are giving them too much of other people's money; where is the morality in removing "choices" from a group of people who have earned them, so that you can give "choices" to another (who have not)?

If the poor want choices, then they must either earn their own money to make it with, or apply to a charitable organisation to help them. The money that is extorted from other people should be used to ensure that people stay alive—not live.

Quite simply, if you want to live, then you must earn your own living, not steal it from others.

Eggs by the kilo

The poor little Greek boy points me to this piece of idiocy from the EU.

British shoppers will no longer be able to buy eggs by the dozen under new regulations approved by the European Parliament. For the first time, eggs and other products including oranges and bread rolls—will be sold by weight instead of by the number contained in a packet.
...

Eggs have traditionally been sold by the dozen or half-dozen because the old imperial measurements such as inches or pennies were calculated in groups of 12. But the new rules, to be introduced next year, mean that instead of packaging telling shoppers a box contains six eggs, it will show the weight in grams of the eggs inside.
...

An FSA [Food Standards Agency] spokeswoman said: "This proposal would disallow selling by numbers. Retailers would not be allowed to put "Six eggs" on the front of the box. If it was a bag of rolls, it would say "500g" instead of six rolls."

This is utter idiocy: who gives a crap what weight the eggs are? I want six eggs, not the exact bloody weight.

Apart from anything else, this has no benefit to the consumer: does it give me more information about the eggs? Not really—some might have thicker shells than others, thus ensuring that I have no real information about the quality or otherwise of the eggs.

Does it take information away from me? Yes: because now I cannot know, without opening the box, how many eggs are in it.

Does this measure have any benefit to the consumer at all? No. It's just harmonisation for the sake of it.

In fact, it actively harms the consumer because the eggs will cost more. Why?

Well, I would imagine that selling a 500g box of eggs that does not, in fact, contain 500g of produce is illegal under Trading Standards. So now the egg producers are going to have to weigh each and every box, and stamp the exact weight on each box. Not only will they have to buy the stamping equipment (because you can bet your bottom dollar that just writing the weight on is not legal: they even have to stamp each individual egg now, for fuck's sake) but it is also labour-intensive.

To adapt a classic Daily Mail phrase, it's bureaucracy gone mad.

To be fair to that paper (much as I hate to do so), whilst it confirms the Scotsman's story, the Mail does point out that these laws are very far from being decided.

‘It is important that information is provided in a way that is meaningful and beneficial to consumers. This issue is still being considered by EU member states and it will be some time before the regulation is finalised.’

... says the woman from the FSA. However...

Experts say it will be next year before the EU is able to pass the controversial measure, which bureaucrats say is designed to help consumers make an informed choice when buying their food because it will require suppliers to provide more comprehensive information.

But last night, food industry experts said the EU plan was ‘bonkers’ and ‘absolute madness’.

Federation of Bakers director Gordon Polson warned that it may be too late to change the rules, even though they will be debated further in the European Parliament.

He revealed that lobbyists had already tried to rectify the regulations, discovered in the 174 pages of amendments to the initial 75-page proposal, but there was not enough time to convince MEPs before the crucial vote.

The fact that one would need to lobby MEPs in order to convince them of the idiocy of this law is, in itself, a damning indictment of the sheer, brutal stupidity of our representatives. However, the EU voting system—in which legislation is voted on in "blocks"—also won't help. This law will go through.

Unless, of course, this is all a cunning plan by the Tories, to feed newspapers a story about an utterly ridiculous EU law which was never going to pass anyway, and then paint themselves as "tough on the EU" when it is voted down. Or am I crediting Dave with too Machiavellian a mind?

Probably not.

In any case, there is a wider point to be emphasised here, and we may as well use a snippet from The Mail's article to lead us into it.

The move could cost retailers millions of pounds because of changes they will have to make to packaging and labelling, as well as the extra burden of weighing each box of food before it is put on sale.

The cost is likely to be passed on to shoppers through higher grocery bills.

The cost is "likely" to be passed on through higher bills? No, the cost will be passed on through higher bills, just as all of the costs of EU regulations are passed onto consumers through higher bills.

And this is, of course, the problem—a problem which I have decided to illustrate pictorially.

1. The first graph shows the proportion of our exports that go to the EU, and to the rest of the world. Whoa! 50% of our exports are to the EU? That's a pretty big chunk.
   
   
   
   
2. The next graph shows the proportion of UK businesses that must abide by all EU laws, whether they trade with the EU or not.
   
   
   
   All of these regulations cost time, money and effort to implement—and so the costs are passed onto the consumer. Not only that, the costs of ensuring that these regulations are being followed—all of those inspectors and suchlike—are undertaken by the UK government, so we consumers pay again in tax.
   
   But why should 100% of businesses have to obey these EU regulations—after all, only 50% of British businesses actually deal with the EU. Isn't that right?


3. Well, no—that's wrong. Only 50% of our exports are to the EU: the vast majority of trade within the UK is internal. In other words, the vast majority of businesses never trade abroad at all.
   
   
   
   This final graph shows the rough breakdown of the UK economy. As you can see, trade to the EU accounts for only 10% of the total, 80% of the trade is internal and trade to the rest of the world is another 10%.
   
   And yet, as you'll remember from the pretty graphs, 100% of businesses must comply with EU rules—with all of the associated regulatory costs that that entails.

Now, to be fair to the EU, our own Ministries are very good at "gold-plating" (that is, adding in their own little madnesses to) EU Directives. But, if the EU did not force this crap on us, then our snivelling, cowardly civil servants wouldn't be able to hide behind the EU fig-leaf: their own pusillanimous, interfering, cost-inducing evil would be plain to see.

I believe that this, as much as anything, is one of the reasons why government is so pro-EU: it allows them to conceal their own petty vindictiveness and mismanagement by pointing the finger at the EU.

Anyway, all of this has a cost—it's difficult to know how much of a cost, but it is certainly in the range of tens of billions of pounds. All of which gets passed onto us in the form of higher prices and higher taxes.

Not only that, of course, but the EU stops us doing more trade with the rest of the world—through two main mechanisms.

First, the EU controls all trade beyond its borders and it has a tendency to put tariff barriers up against other nations—usually to protect EU-based firms (the big firms, the ones that can afford to lobby the EU bureaucrats). A classic example of this is the fact that there is a 66% import tax on energy-saving lightbulbs from China: this was imposed (and renewed last year) after heavy lobbying by German Siemens and Dutch Philips.

Now, this makes us poorer again—we are having to pay 66% more for an energy-saving lightbulb than we might.

However, in retaliation, non-EU countries then tend to put up tariff barriers against EU goods (and point out to their workers that the reason that they aren't selling more light-bulbs in the Eu is because the EU has erected tariff barriers).

The result? Everyone is poorer.

Second, of course, the high costs of regulation mean that British (and EU) businesses cannot compete so well abroad, as our products have an even higher cost than they otherwise would.

Now, Timmy would maintain that it is the imports that make us rich, and that exporting is just the tedious stuff we need to do in order to be able to afford the imports. And he'd be right.

But the point is that we do still need to export of we cannot afford the imports. If we export less, we end up owing other people a lot of money.

Plus, of course, all of this crap offends the sensibilities of a man like myself, who maintains that it is free trade that makes us rich and, as a result, that tariff-wielding organisations like the EU make everyone poorer—and ensuring that people are poorer means that you ensure that more people die unnecessarily.

So, whether or not this eggs and rolls story is true or not, can I join both my peripatetic Athenian friend and Timmy in saying "can we fucking well leave yet"?

Unio Europaea delenda est.

UPDATE: John Band has a good comment on this, as usual. It doesn't alter the main thrust of my argument though, which is that this is not free trade and the EU should be dismantled.

UPDATE 2: Nosemonkey also debunks some of the myths surrounding this matter, illustrating how this particular measure is actually about deregulation.

As a matter of fact, it is a result of reading Nosemonkey for some years that made me express some scepticism about this law; however, I believe that my wider points still stand.

"Labour is not the opposition... The civil service is."

Via Dick Puddlecote, this NewScientist blog entry welcomes Our New Coalition Overlords' "astonishingly libertarian agenda" as regards civil liberties, but also warns that the civil service may well try to block many of the changes.

Facebook's Richard Allan, a former Liberal Democrat MP steeped in the traditions of Westminster, predicts the real challenge to the surveillance state rollback will be national security-related pressure from civil servants:

"In meetings with ministers, they will always say they need to keep a record of everything that anyone has ever said on the internet because they once caught somebody that no-one knew about that way."

"Labour is not the opposition," agrees [Privacy International's policy director, Gus] Hosein. "The civil service is."

I have no doubt that this is true: the civil service have long since ceased to serve anyone—it views itself as master of both politicos and citizens.

Which is why I have maintained for some time that, were I in government, my very first act would be to sack every, single civil servant in at least the top three grades. Not only would this make it much easier to get a radical agenda through, it would provide a massive shock for those who think that a civil service job is for life, and would also save large amounts of money. Plus, of course, it would be thoroughly hilarious to see the looks of shock and outrage on the once-smug faces of the assorted Sir Humphreys.

Sounds like a winner to me...

Licensing life

Via Obnoxio the Clown (who is typically scathing), I see that the Labour campaign has fallen foul of its own laws again.

He was hailed by Alastair Campbell as the "megastar" who would boost Gordon Brown's flagging election campaign, but an Elvis impersonator has left Labour feeling all shook up.

Mandrake learns that Corby borough council is investigating whether the performance at the weekend breached the Licensing Act.

Lodge Park Technology College, where Mark Wright sang for the Prime Minister, is not allowed to permit performances of live music before 6pm.

Why? For what possible reason? One could understand if they weren't allowed to hold massive open-air live rock concerts at 3 in the morning—why on earth should nothing be allowed before 6pm. No one's sleep is going to be disturbed, is it?

And does this mean that Lodge Park Technology College is not allowed to teach music, since any practising of an instrument would, presumably, count as a live performance? What the hell?

Damian Wilkins, the health protection manager at Corby council, has contacted Tom Waterworth, the head teacher, to demand an explanation.

Under the Act, Campbell, the organiser of the event, and Waterworth, the licence holder, could face criminal prosecution resulting in six months in prison or a £20,000 fine.

What on earth happened to the concept that any punishment should be proportional to the crime committed? Sure, that is probably the upper limit, but where is the victim in this crime? If there is no victim, it should not be a criminal offence.

The college was unable to get a Temporary Event Notice authorising the performance of music, as plans to allow last-minute event notices were withdrawn by the Government this month.

I have been meaning to comment on this kind of crap for some time, although I think that Timmy did so with aplomb some time ago, when commenting on another iniquity of this same licensing law. [Emphasis mine.]

What I do regard as vastly more important than this is the basic deal that we British made over the centuries. Yes, of course, there must be laws, there must be government, there must be taxes to pay for it all. But in terms of daily life, the liberties and freedoms to follow that path from cradle to grave in our own sweet manner, we’d pretty much be left alone.

Sure, we might be asked to cough up the taxes to pay for some socialist wet dream like nationalising the commanding heights of the economy. But we didn’t have, unlike many other countries, the man with the clipboard looming over the minutiae of the everyday. Few and simple rules, rules that were largely agreed were reasonable, the rest of it left to consenting adults to muddle through with.

The government of recent years has changed all of that. Not, you’ll understand, for the better in my opinion. And I don’t see any of the likely combinations of parties elected on May 6th changing that.

Look, we all know that, economically, we are completely screwed. But as Timmy points out, this is of lesser importance. The government will have to stop spending so much of our money: either it will do so of its own volition or—as is looking far more likely—because the IMF insists that it must.

There will be some hard years, many people will lose their jobs, and their houses and their careers: some of those people will suffer unjustly (having not voted for such profligacy)—the rest will have deserved it.

Ultimately, however, the economy will right itself—if only because there are still men and women of talent and drive in this country (although many of them have already left). It will be hard, and the government will not—and should not—help except to lower taxes in order that businesses will flourish.

Yes, we all know that the government will have no money except for the bare essentials.

And yet it would cost David Cameron nothing—not one solitary penny of our money—to promise to cancel all of these petty rules and regulations that make living (and making a living) in this country such a desperate, miserable experience for so many people. Simply to remove the pettifogging bureaucracy and paper-pushing would cost society nothing—indeed it would boost business and make us considerably more free.

Indeed, it would help to rebalance our entire political life too. David Cameron maintains that we need to establish that politicians are servants of the people: I agree. And yet how will we do that when people must beg (and pay) for permission from the politicians and the bureaucrats in order to go about their daily lives.

If you think that I overstate the case—after all, you may not be a circus owner or a pub manager or a headmaster—then why not try IanPJ's little exercise?

Totalitarian? If you don’t believe that Britain is governed totally by political rules, regulations, orders and diktats, please name me 6 everyday activities, yes, just six, that you undertake that does not require a. permission, b. licence, c. regulated action, d. regulated packaging, materials, ingredients, tools etc.

i.e. 6 activities that never touch the state or a regulator.

Anyone? Feel free to have a go in the comments...

Now, there are some—many, in fact—who would argue that these rules and regulations make our lives better, safer, easier. I would agree to a certain degree, but I disagree that laws are the only way to achieve these aims (even if we believe the aims to be desirable). And when those laws amount to us begging for permission to indulge ourselves at no cost to others, they are utterly wrong.

I have consistently maintained that there should only be one, single criminal law:

You shall not initiate force or fraud against someone's life, liberty or property.

A court—composed of a judge and a jury—should then decide whether you have, in fact, done so. This would make the law accessible and understandable to everyone (with the commensurate benefit that lawyers would become a luxury rather than a necessity) and—since only the gravest crimes would come before a criminal court—cheaper for society to administer.

All other circumstances should be dealt with by a civil court upon application by a complainant. This is how the system of Common Law used to operate. And it is why I asked "who is the victim?" in the Elvis case above. If there is no complainant, then there is no case to be heard.

In that case, there is no complainant, so there should be no case. However, in this world of licences and permissions, it requires only a council worker to notice that a form has not been filled correctly to initiate a frivolous prosecution over an action that has harmed no one.

To adopt this attitude would not only make us more free—it would aid Call Me Dave in his bid to cut the costs of the state. Without the need for constant approvals and scrutinising of the most petty of permissions, there would be no need for state workers to administer them. They could be sacked—set free to do something productive.

With fewer costs—in both time and money—on businesses, there would be more businesses. With more businesses, there would be more jobs—jobs that our ex-council jobsworth could now do. Indeed, our jobsworth might be happier—for we know that sick leave in the public sector (especially for stress) far outweighs that of the private—knowing that she is producing something worthwhile, rather than giving and refusing people permission to deal with the minutiae of their own lives.

This is what libertarianism is truly about—and it is why I totally believe in it. I could articulate it—and have been known to—but, once again, Charlotte Gore has done it as well as anyone. [Emphasis mine.]

The reason I love my libertarian politics is because I see it as the opposite of that, something that allows adults to be adult, to experience the full spectrum of human emotion whilst understanding the incalculable value of overcoming obstacles and what that does for people’s confidence, self worth and ability to truly appreciate what they have.

It’s about using liberal economics to fix the underlying failures at the heart of our economy, to create real wealth and crucially leave people with enough money in their pockets that they can stand on their own two feet. It’s about embracing social liberalism, too, to simply let people live their lives as they see fit so long as they’re not stopping others doing the same. Let adults be adults.

We’d still be us, but more amazing. More confident. More self-assured. More alive, somehow. And that’s why I do all this writing, why I care about all this. For me there’s something real and tangible to get excited about…

And I feel the same way: I genuinely believe that people have the capacity to be amazing, to produce great works, to achieve amazing feats and to find joy in both the sublime and the everyday. I believe that people are fundamentally good; that most people would wish to do no harm to others, if not actively to help them; that people want to do a job of work that they can be proud of and take joy in (as Charlotte saw that I do); to work for their essentials and to save for their luxuries, and know that they have earned the lot.

When those on the Right complain about "all these chavs, living off benefits", those on the Left often retort that living off benefits is no joy; that it is hard financially and that it wears the soul too. "No one," they maintain, "really wants to spend their lives living off benefits. They just have no other choice."

This may well be true—certainly the idea has never appealed to me. But how then do we enable them to get jobs? Those jobs must be created, and the state cannot truly create jobs. Every job that the state "creates" is paid for by the destruction of a job in the productive sector. Every "free" service that the state sets up ensures that private enterprise can never create jobs by providing that service instead. And every job that is not created condemns another person to a life on benefits, to a life without point, to a life without advancement or achievement or pride.

Ultimately, that is why I believe that the state is wrong and, ultimately, it is why I helped to form the Libertarian Party. I have no interest in going into politics—apart from anything else, I have no interest in trying to tell other people what to do. And I want to carry on producing amazing things, and that is not something that I can do in politics.

But what I might be able to achieve, what I might be able to bring about—whether through my writing, or my speaking or my party—is a place in which everyone can fulfill their potential, where everyone can create, where every person can have the joy in their work that I do, where every person can stand up and be proud of what they do, of how they live, where they're heading.

Yes, we as a party need to address on what people consider to be the "big issues"—welfare, health, education, etc.—and they are important. But more important still is allowing the people to go about their daily lives without state (or corporate) interference.

And we should do so because it is this that enables people to live without having to obtain a licence to do so; to feel that they must beg permission from some faceless bureaucrat in order to be their best; and it removes the constant knawing fear that maybe they cannot be who they are because their may be another form to fill in, another unsympathetic pe-pusher to persuade.

All of these aspirations can be summed up in a single word: "freedom".

And freedom allows people to be who they are—but more amazing.