Being Quango’ed into a Soviet State

 

The reason why western democracies have the highest standards of living in the world and why the Soviet Union and its satellites collapsed in economic ruin is that wealth creation is driven by private enterprise.

 

When the state owns and controls most of the economy the generation of new ideas and products withers. This causes public discontent because they are deprived of the things they need and which they can see being enjoyed in freer societies. The government which cannot face letting go of the control that it has grabbed from its own citizens can only respond by ever more interference in personal choice.

 

When the Labour Government came to power in 1997 about 33% to 35% of the British economy was owned and controlled by the government. That was an unacceptably high proportion and very damaging to the efficient development of wealth creating companies. The laws we have to control monopolies and to try to stop large corporations from completely dominating a market define an unacceptable monopoly as control of one third or more of a market. On this basis the British Government had a monopoly grip on our economy even in 1997. Since then the government stake in gross domestic product (GDP) has risen to nearly 45% and it is growing at an increasing rate.

 

According to Dominic Lawson in the Sunday Times there were almost 1,200 quango’s in 2001 costing £20 billion a year to run. By last year the cost of quango’s had risen to £34.5 billion a year. In just seven years the quango bill has risen by 75% at a time when inflation has only been around 2.5% and at the moment it is close to zero.

 

This government has taken the country into near bankruptcy. We have a national debt so huge that our grandchildren we be left with trying to pay it off and it is still increasing at a rate of £200 billion a year.

 

Desperate all the time to find more money to finance their lust for control, the government continually increases taxes. The recent increase in top rate income tax from 40% to 50% will actually produce almost nothing if not even reduce the tax take because high earners will move away, but an even more damaging consequence is that the decline of the wealth producing sector will accelerate. This is the road to collapse that killed off European communism twenty years ago.

 

We need to call a halt before we are all ground into destitution and subservience. A good start is to kill off the quangos.

Childcare Vouchers

 

Two parents who are both higher rate tax payers can receive up to £2,400 per year of public money towards their child care. Who is paying for these wealthy families to bring up their children while they follow their fulfilling lives? All of the rest of us of course, but the burden falls hardest on people with low incomes who still have to buy clothes, furniture and all the other necessities of life and for whom VAT is a bigger proportion of their commitments than it is for the wealthy.

 

In a cynical attempt to buy middle class votes the Labour Government introduced this mad scheme and now he has bankrupted the economy Gordon Brown is trying to stop it. His big problem is that he doesn’t command any authority in his own party and the Labour MP’s who are scared of losing their seats are threatening to vote against him.

 

Face up to it Gordon, you do not have the remotest chance of winning a general election whenever you call it. Having wrecked the economy, crippled business and swamped us with a multitude of idiot laws in your periods as Chancellor and PM you must spend your last months making sure that the debt burden you pass on to our children and grandchildren does not get any worse.

 

You must scrap the childcare vouchers. It will go through parliament because the Tories will have to support it. You have to ignore Caroline Flint and her mates, the country cannot afford to feather bed the wealthy. If they threaten to throw you out as PM just say thank you. Months of misery from the revolting Sun followed by a humiliating defeat at the polls will do your family and health no good. Better to go down now by doing the right thing.

Poverty, Welfare & Big Government

 

The Labour Government set an impossible target to reduce child poverty and then it damaged the economy so badly by its excessive spending, enormous debt creation and crippling burden of bureaucracy on business that it made every one of us poorer than we should be.

 

David Cameron is quite right in saying that there needs to be smaller government and that individuals and voluntary organisations should be encouraged to take more responsibility improving their own life opportunities and assisting people close to them when they face difficult times. Our interfering state has made it increasingly difficult for people to help out with child care, volunteer in a youth group or do any kind of constructive community activity. The bureaucratic systems set up by local government and some of the huge charities have no ability to build genuine relationships with the people they are supposed to serve. Although usually well intentioned to begin with, they become self serving empires for their managers and the staff get reduced to box ticking target hunters rather than genuine carers.

 

The problem with the Tories is that they have not put forward any concrete proposals to show how they would cut the interfering state and we know that in government they will be hard to distinguish from the appalling Labour government they hope to replace.

 

The welfare dependency that has been built up over decades, including such deceptions as the incapacity system introduced by Thatcher to try to hide unemployment, cannot be wiped out overnight, but real progress must be made immediately.

 

Cameron says that people should not be worse off when they go off benefit into work. Of course not. He will not achieve that by fiddling with tax credits. The tax credit system is a costly, over complex, bureaucratic monster that needs to be scrapped. Incapacity benefit must be ended and the benefits for all people without work frozen at their current level.

 

As wages increase and benefits stay fixed the incentive to find work and not be penalised for taking it increases.

No Council Tax Increase

 This week it has been reported that many London boroughs will freeze Council Tax and some will probably reduce it. The leader of Wirral Council has said that he wants a 5.2% increase in April and then around 4% every year for the next four years.

Steve Foulkes and his colleagues have got to wake up. Thousands of people have lost their jobs, public sector workers pay is being frozen and inflation is so low that there will be no increase in pensions in April. No increase in Council Tax is tolerable or acceptable.

Politicians, bankers and others have responsibility for the bankrupt state of our economy, but the guilty ones are not Council Tax payers and certainly not pensioners or low earners with frozen incomes. Instead of punishing the most vulnerable the Council must put an end to its own waste and excess.

Voters should be saying to all our elected representatives that they will not get a vote next May unless they can show that they have worked to keep taxes down and not supported any tax rise.

Drugs and the Law

The Home Secretary has sacked Professor David Nutt from his position as Chairman of the supposedly independent Drug Advisory Committee. The alleged reason was that Nutt was lobbying for a change in government policy when the reality is that the government insisted on re-classifying cannabis against the evidence presented by the experts and refuses to accept the expert advice on the proper handling of ecstasy.

The simple truth is that the government has no interest at all in professional advice. What it really wants is to be able to use the experts to justify the decisions that it is determined to take irrespective of where the truth may lie.

When cannabis was reduced from a class B to a class C drug in accordance with expert advice and with the support of police who wanted to concentrate on real crime there was not an increase in cannabis use as anti drug campaigners predicted. There was actually a reduction in cannabis use when it was regarded as a less serious offence. This should not be too much of a surprise. Forbidden things always have an attraction and if it is recognised as not being such a big deal, the excitement and pull reduces.

It is not sensible risk mental and physical wellbeing by harmful drug use. That applies to alcohol and tobacco as much as it does to the misuse of medicines or taking illegal, recreational drugs. The point is that humans have always done these things and no amount of laws will stop them. Masking it illegal to take certain drugs causes death, injury and serious ill health because the drug users do dangerous things like sharing needles and taking contaminated products supplied by the criminals who are the only source of the drug they want.

Illegailty also creates a vast amount of crime. This ranges from the international multi millionaires who produce the drugs to the street corner gangs who murder and maim to protect their territory. Very few societies have had the courage to leave drug users alone, but those who have tried, such as Holland and Portugal, have found enormous benefit from it.

It is impossible to stop people from trying to use escapist substances. The best way to minimise the harm and risk is to provide the free and prosperous society from which people do not need to try to escape. Our police should also be left to stop rape, violence, burglary and terrorism.

We should throw out a government that sacks people for telling the truth.

Royal Mail and The Government

  With another round of strikes announced we are all having to use other ways to communicate than the post. Of course that was happening anyway, but Royal Mail bosses and Unions have shown themselves incapable of dealing with that change and are simply making it faster.

The Government wanted to part privatise the mail, but Gordon Brown is incapable of leading his own party so he got scared and ran away from that decision as he has done with the Territorial Army, the Ghurkas, calling an election and so much else. The truth is that part privatisation would not have been a solution anyway. It was just another fudge that could not get to the heart of the problem.

That problem is that delivery of letters and parcels is now a competitive industry and no state run organisation can ever survive against the efficiency of the market. Email, texting, Skype and instant messaging are virtually free at the point of use and available to the vast majority of people. Package delivery by DHL, TNT and the host of other carriers is fast, efficient and in many cases lower cost than Parcel Force as well as providing superior tracking information and time guarantees.

While the communications union try to do a King Canute job of hanging on to the past the bosses thrash about employing casual staff and having no solutions. Soon there will be nothing left for the government to sell and the poor postal workers will all be out of a job instead of just some of them.

The legitimate job of government is to protect the safety and property of its citizens and nothing else. The state should not run businesses and it has no right to waste taxes, our money, on organisations that have been bypassed by change.

Centuries ago the King commanded that his word should be transported throughout the realm without hindrance by highwaymen and a Royal Mail might then have made some sense. If we are to have a universal postal service in the twenty first century it has got to compete effectively with the other commercial carriers. Whichever way you look at it that can only be done if it is privately owned and freed from interference by Brown, Mandelson & Co. That is the only way that any postal worker has a future.

Hospital Chaplains

The National Secular Society has calculated that hospital chaplains cost the National Health Service (NHS) £40 million each year.

About 35 years ago I spent a long time in hospital. It wasn’t a pleasant time and one of the things that made it worse was that each Sunday a christian priest came along with a helper. They handed out prayer books and service sheets then conducted a religious service at the end of a multi-bed ward. Being unwell I was not in the best of spirits and having this sectarian religion forced on me was most unpleasant. The fact that I was an atheist and refused their religion did not inhibit them in any way from forcing it on me and as far as I could see there was absolutely no regards to whether anybody in the ward was a follower of any non-christian religion or would not be happy with their particular brand of christianity. In short it was a completely arrogant imposition without regard for the views of others.

Some people may want religious support when they are in hospital and I certainly would not want to deny it to them, but if they have those religious elements in their lives they will probably be able to arrange to have the support continued while they are in hospital.

What is absolutely certain is that there will never be enough money to meet all of the medical needs of patients and the £40 million being spent on chaplains could, and most definitely should, be spent on the legitimate medical purposes of the NHS. Religion is a private matter. Its followers should practice their beliefs discreetly and above all any costs of so doing should be borne entirely by the religions concerned and their members. It is grossly offensive and immoral that taxes collected to provide health care should be misused on religious facilities.

My concern at this issue was aggravated even further when I discovered that there was a Parliamentary Group of 40 MP’s (members of Parliament) campaigning to make it a legal requirement for all hospitals to have chaplains at public expense.

The National Secular Society says:

“these chaplains are parasites on a service that is there first and foremost to provide medical treatment and health care.”

They are absolutely right. We should find out who these MP’s are and make it absolutely clear to them that we will not support them in any way unless they get out of this group immediately.

There are 20 members of this group shown on the Register of All Party Groups. They are:

Lindsay　Hoyle

Jim　Dobbin

Geraldine　Smith

Frank　Field

Jim　Devine

Sarah　McCarthy-Fry

Alan　Simpson

Keith　Hill

Jim　Cunningham

Kevan　Jones

Mike　Penning

David　Burrowes

Iain　Duncan　Smith

David　Gauke

Tim　Boswell

Greg　Clark

Stephen　Crabb

David　Amess

Shailesh　Vara

James　Brokenshire

G20, tax havens and global regulation

The achievements of the G20 summit seem very limited. Little has been done to give confidence that world leaders understand, let alone agree on, what is required to avoid a repeat of the great depression of the 1930’s. An extra trillion dollars for the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank may be of some use to tide over struggling countries, but it will not provide the increase in demand that is necessary to revive economic activity. A great deal of emphasis is being placed on agreement to deal with the problems caused by tax havens. This is really a bit of a ’so what’ development rather than the revolution that they pretend. It is a good thing that a handful of tiny countries will find it harder to hide away the money of organised criminals and third world tyrants, but it is not going to bring an end to the world economic crisis. Anybody who believes that new controls will be adopted by everybody or that they will work very well is deluding themselves. Following the failure of the banks who had brought about the most ridiculous financial bubble in history through creating new financial instruments that were traded without their purchasers having any knowledge of the underlying value, there is now a need to revive demand in the face of consumer nervousness and insufficient credit. There is a very simple way to do this and deal with tax havens at the same time. Tax havens are only of interest because taxes are far too high in the overblown interfering states of the developed world. The legitimate role of government is to protect its citizens so that they can freely go about organising their lives and providing for their families themselves. Vast welfare systems, and the dependency that they produce, must be dismantled. This will allow radical reductions and simplification of taxation. Raising the threshold at which people start to pay tax on their incomes puts money into the pockets of poorer people. These are the very people who spend rather than hoard their cash because they need to spend to feed, clothe and house their families. This provides the demand necessary for economic recovery. Taxes above the threshold should be at a flat rate so that they are easy to collect and there is no longer any incentive for honest people to look for tax avoidance in havens. Protectionist actions will be named and shamed we are told. Well so they should be, but we need to go much further than that. There are still masses of duties, quotas and anti competitive specifications which restrict international trade and the G20 states which account for more than 80% of world trade are just as guilty of these protections as the countries outside the group. We need complete freedom of international trade. Not only is this the most efficient way for people to obtain the goods they want at the optimum price, but it also allows the poorest people in the world to break free from their tyrant governments and raise themselves by their own efforts. Best of all, freedom of trade is the sure way out of economic depression. In advocating free trade it should be understood that I am not supporting such a completely laissez faire approach as to permit criminal behaviour to flourish. Wherever there is money to be made there will be a temptation for some to try to cheat. Regulation must exist to prevent crime in trade while allowing the most possible freedom to bring goods to market.

Rise in UK teenager pregnancies

Teenage preganancies in the UK have risen for the first time in five years. Britain has the worst record in Europe although it is not as bad as the USA where Bush’s capitulation to the Christian lobby has placed emphasis on abstention from sex before marriage while removing support from anybody helping with contraception or abortion.

Here, the government is asking whether there needs to be an improvement in sex education in schools or classes for girls to show the burdens of motherhood.

I am not sure whether the idiots who suggest this stuff believe any of it or not, but either way it doesn’t matter. They are still going to throw away vast amounts of taxpayers money doing it and building their empires while the misery caused by immature, inadequates becoming parents will continue.

One thing that these children and their families do understand is the benefit and welfare system. Some of them have been living on it for generations and they share their experiences with all their mates. Kids who do not get on at school, have miserable experiences at home and do not see any prospect of doing well in the working world just don’t care about exams or putting effort into anything which is not pleasurable in their eyes.

When a young girl gets pregnant, the state rewards her with loads of attention, a support network, financial benefits and the prospect of a home for her and her baby. Even if she does not get pregnant deliberately to escape her own disfunctional parents or to create another living thing that loves her, she might be happy if it happens for completely rational economic reasons.

These kids are perfectly well aware of the facts of sex and no amount of education is going to make any difference. Still less will there be any point in telling them to save themselves for marriage.

It is really fairly simple. Stop rewarding children for producing more children. The welfare system needs to be dismantled, but a very good start would be to say that there will be no child benefit, no housing provision, in fact no benefits of any kind whatever for parents below the age of eighteen.

That will not stop under eighteens from having sex and it will certainly not stop all of them from becoming pregnant, but it will definitely make them much more interested in using contraception and for many girls, for whom motherhood would be a very bad thing, they will choose a termination rather than going on to face the full reality of what they have done.

I know this will be repugnant to many people. So be it. Let us discuss the issue and consider the consequences of our respective opinions.

Deprivation

 

When you could see the ribs of the poor

and the fat man watered their beer.

You knew who got exploited

You knew who to pity or fear.

 

The waif who was wan with rickety knees,

the rich man deaf to his desperate pleas,

died of consumption or killed at the loom.

Nothing marked his pauper tomb.

 

Now we have underprivileged

who are fat and spotty and rude.

While the super rich are toned and trim,

helping the starving grow food.

 

An oil rich man with a yacht or two

and a football club for fun

is an easy shot for the feckless lot

who think they have been hard done.

 

The fat cats they say are parasites

bloated on ill earned gains,

but who is tied to their Blackberry

and who on a couch just lays?

 

A thirty stone woman

wheezes and pants

the fifty hard yards

to the pub.

 

There she labours through

five portions a day

of alcohol, burger, nicotine, pizza

and pure, pure ecstasy.

 

Her loutish lover leers

through smack wracked, bloodshot eyes

at the writhing teenage arse

framed by a thin black thong.

 

A blotchy beau with spike pierced cheeks

leaps to honour’s cause.

He and Mr Stanley

will carve respect on cheeky jaws.

 

Through blood and screams the medics work

to save these wasted lives.

Their patients kick and shout abuse

at those who treat their wounds.

 

Like education, that they valued,

free health care is their right.

They use it every weekend

after drinking through the night.

 

The woman lurches homeward

to her seven dadless kids.

They have their chips and Gameboy

and the freedom of the streets.

 

Just a normal family

struggling through life.

The fat cats are just ignorant

of the poor who have such strife.