Tax is theft

This is a guest post from @VendettaBeretta

Tax is theft.

Don't believe me? Read on....

The following is taken from an email sent to me by a poster on Twitter.

I first took an interest due to a tweet that read

"grrrrr now I will go for a cold shower, as the Inland Revenue have taken my bathtub (really)"

Now, you can probably see what caught my attention. The Inland Revenue wouldn't actually remove someone's bathtub, surely? Guess again. And her underwear. Not sure what the resale value is in worn pants these days, but I'm sure there's probably a market for it in the office of HMRC anyway.

Anyway, to the email.

"they suddenly gave me a tax bill of £125.000.00 - yes £125k and it was outrageous given that I mormally paid about £10-12k a year. my accountant told me to ignore it as it was wrong - so I did but I telephoned them to say so. they changed the bill from 125k down to 88k then 55k then 35k but all the while they had my bank accounts frozen and they had out liens on my property - i had 2 properties, they took one property and i went ballistic - then 18 months later they took my mnain business property - I owned both these buildings with no mortgage. I am now living in a flat with a mortgage but since they bankrupted me I have been on the dole and now the mortgage company are repossesing this flat - and they have kindly agreed to wait till after I have had 2 knee operations. but my time is running out I will be evicted soon - god help me - I have lived here for 10 years. the main reason why they took all my property is that they kept me bankrupt for over 3 years and (you might not know this but) every single week the IR keep you bankrupt they charge you (or me) £1000.00 administration costs - so I didnt have a leg to stand on. every time I filled in forms or went for an interview - they told me they would have to look into in it - it took them 6 months to get my bank statements (they would not asccept them off my accountant or me) so in that 6 months - I was billed for 26k in admin costs - thats the way trhey play and its DIRTY and very very unfair - i fought like hell but i had no credit cards and no cheque books and - after 3 years they had accunilated almost £200k in administration costs -thats when the bill was brought down to 33k but with the admin costs - they seized my property and contents - and left me with nothing - not even any clothes - its a bad story. I NEVER thought my country could do this to me."

The highlights are mine.

The point I'm raising is not just against the clearly incompetent accountant, who should have advised against ignoring HMRC demands, but of the conduct of HMRC throughout this affair.

How does a demand for £125 grand turn into £35 grand? On what formula is this based? Does this sound like a professional government agency, or gangsters demanding protection money? The taking of two properties? The admin charges of £1000 per week would make Wonga blush.

Tax is theft. You can keep your bullshit about fair shares and tax avoidance. You can claim it to be part of a social contract if you like that sort of statist newspeak. You try not paying the tax man, and he'll be riflling through your knicker drawer like your babysitters 15 year old boyfriend.

Here's a little addition to this story.

The lady in question employed 21 members of staff. All of whom lost their jobs. She is about to be evicted from her flat. She's also now unemployed. The irony in the state stealing from her, and making her reliant upon the welfare system hasn't been lost on me. This is the new way comrades. Turnips for all.

Cyprus

I don't really have coherent words to describe this.

I cannot believe that anyone can still think of the EU as any kind of force for good if they are prepared to take this kind of action to protect their precious, impractical, insane, vanity project currency.

What's worse is the Pandora's box that's been opened. Now, any government in need of money will simply hit your bank accounts, your pension any fucking thing they want and can with a "one off stability levy" that doesn't even need discussing in parliament.

Just so they can piss it up against the wall of their incompetence and interference.

Nice going Urophiles.

Well, I'm fucking stunned

According to this piece of genius journalism, Europe's carmakers are yearning for the Obama touch.

As bailed-out US manufacturers recover their poise and markets at the Detroit motor show, jobs and plants across the EU are vanishing due to falling demand

O RLY?

Just guess* which of the lines above represents the company that got the biggest bailout?

All the bailout has done is postponed the inevitable. In much the same way as Gordon Brown's desperate reinflation of our bubble led to a massive economic collapse, in much the same way as QE has failed completely to fix anything, Obama's "touch" is just another politician's "Reverse Midas".

Government wealth transfer from bottom-of-the-pile taxpayers to failing multi-billion dollar corporations: how does this make sense? What can possibly go wrong? Why do lefties shout for more tax on companies while simultaneously demanding that the same useless fuckers who can't actually make stuff that people want to buy MUST be propped up by people who can't afford to feed their kids?

Is there some kind of special medication that these people take or what?

Cunts.

Shock! Horror!

I'm afraid my appalling lack of British modern history has once again let me down. However, Andy Bolton has come to the rescue:

It was recently the 70th anniversary of William Beveridge’s famous report on the welfare of the UK people (‘Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee on Social Insurance and Allied Services’).

In it he identified five ‘Giant Evils’ in society: squalor, ignorance, want, idleness and disease. After seven decades the United Kingdom now has a ‘welfare state’ based loosely on the recommendations within this report. On all sides of political debate, from ‘left’ to ‘right’, from statist to libertarian, the welfare state can be seen to have fallen short of the ideals for which it was established. This article focuses on the changes to the welfare ‘benefits’ system that were proposed, implemented and subsequently evolved in the interim period.

Right, so this is the Beveridge report, that lefties always wibble on about as the source of the infinite kindness of the state in Britain.

The report’s initial objective was to “survey … the existing national schemes of social insurance” that were available at the time and “to make recommendations”. Existing schemes, surely not? Weren’t people left to die in the streets before the founding of the welfare state, that’s what I was taught at school? Well, surprisingly not; the survey documents considerable legislation. Over the preceding 45 years, beginning with the Workmen’s Compensation Act of 1897, there was a plethora of legislation designed to make certain insurances compulsory. The above act was initially limited to a small number of occupations but was extended in 1906 to cover all, with compulsory health insurance beginning in 1912. Similarly unemployment insurance began for a small number of industries in 1912 but extended in 1920. The Pensions Act came into force in 1908 giving a non-contributory pension to all over 70; this was added to in 1925 by contributory pensions, which also covered widows and orphans. The Unemployment Act of 1934 replaced several earlier unemployment insurance schemes and introduced a national Unemployment Assistance service. Adding to this huge growth in social insurance were medical services, disability assistance, child welfare services (including pre-school), death and ‘other contingencies’. These services were mainly funded by life assurance companies, friendly societies and trade unions.

The report’s authors found the existing landscape “impressive”: it showed “that provision for most of the many varieties of need through interruption of earnings and other causes that may arise in modern industrial communities has already been made in Britain on a scale not surpassed and hardly rivalled in any other country of the world“. The only areas of social care that the committee could fault were healthcare, funerals and maternity. However where they did rail against the existing array of systems was its organisation: “a complex of disconnected administrative organs, proceeding on different principles, found invaluable service but at a cost in money and trouble and anomalous treatment of identical problems for which there is no justification” (as if voluntary interaction needs ‘justification’). They concluded: “It is not open to question that, by closer co-ordination, the existing social services could be made at once more beneficial and more intelligible to those whom they serve and more economical in their administration.” Anyone who has dealt with the Department for Work and Pensions, with its lack of communication and coordination, would question that we’ve made that much progress under a state-centralised system in 70 years. The claim of improved efficiency by providing insurance services through the state is laughable; you don’t need to know about Friedman’s Law to recognise this.

So, in essence, the state saw a thriving area where the market was providing everyone with all the cover they needed and decided they could do it better and more cost-effectively than the market could. Much like British Rail. Or British Airways. Or British Leyland. (The latter not technically nationalised, but utterly fucked by Tony fucking Benn coercing a functioning business to absorb one that should have gone under but was deemed to big to fail. Why does that fucking ring bells?)

If you look back at anything that the British state has done, it has inevitably taken functioning, competing businesses that delivered good services, nationalised them, let them become an overgrown complicated bureaucratic mess with utterly shitty service and a jobsworth corporate culture and then outsourced it equally badly.

Why the bastarding cunting fuck do lefties always think that the state is the only way to provide anything? British Rail was a nationalised industry, it didn't spring out fully formed. British Airways was a nationalised industry, it didn't spring out fully formed. The welfare state was a nationalised industry, it didn't spring out fully formed.

Get to fuck, lefties, with your crazy fucking idea that the state ever does anything useful. Just get to fuck.

Benefit reform

I see everyone is up in arms about "benefit reform". The latest numbers show that apparently, 97% of benefits don't go to people who don't contribute to benefits, whether they be severely disabled, orphans, third-generation benefit scroungers or whatever.

So actually, most benefits go to people who work.

Just think about that for a moment. You work to stay alive, you're a productive member of society, but you're still not earning enough to make ends meet. And what is the government's answer? A massively complicated and unreliable system of tax credits to give you some of your money back if you jump through a bazillion hoops.

Surely, SURELY, no-one can dispute that it would be much easier for all concerned if the the worse-off were simply taxed less in the first place?

Why exactly is it that we can't just stop tax credits and replace them with lower taxes for poorer people?

And why exactly was that great hero of the people, Gordon Brown, not vilified for the monster he created?

Could it be the blindness of statists to the many failings of state?

Lower taxes mean more money in pocket without the stress of proving you need it to some interfering busybody who is sponging off your work.

Everybody thinks about "good taxes", where rich, arrogant bankers pay for the upkeep of the needy. Nobody thinks about the fact that minimum wage workers help to subsidise train fares for Surrey stockbrokers or pay for overloaded European vehicles to destroy our roads, etc. Nobody worries unduly about people struggling to clothe and feed their kids when they demand that we subsidise EU boondoggles.

Tax ISN'T just a "good thing". Think about that the next time you demand more of it.

Hak Nam and the costs of low tax (for @jearle)

I had one of those tiresome twitter debates a while ago with a leftie about the value we get from paying our "fair share" of taxes. Specifically, Hong Kong's famously low income taxes led to the slum of Hak Nam.

Apparently, the cost of not paying enough tax is that 0.5% of the population of one of the most densely populated places on earth live aside from normal society. But reading about the town itself, I wonder whether it was not rather a case of a group of like-minded people who wanted to live outside the regimentation of "normal" Hong Kong life?

And how many people in the UK live outside the norm? I'd be surprised if our massive, benevolent, all-encompassing state didn't massively fail at least 0.5% of the population.

Anyway, the upshot of the debate was apparently we don't pay that much more tax in the UK than they do in Hong Kong.

But I'm not sure that's true. First of all, the rate of tax in Hong Kong is not 15%, it's 17%. Well, the top rate of tax is. There's actually a progressive tax system where the the first $100K isn't taxed (unless you're married, when it's $200K).

That sounds great, but HK$100K is actually only about £8000. Thereafter you pay 2% on the first $40K (£3000), 7% on the next $40K, 12% on the next $40K, then 17% thereafter. A bit of poking around on salary websites shows that it's not unreasonable to assume that the average wage is about $220K, so actually most people would be earning about £16000 and paying about £670 of that in tax.

However, in the UK, you have a personal allowance of £8100, thereafter you pay 20% of the rest, which is £1580, more than twice what you would pay in Hong Kong.

In addition, the other taxes and duties on normal life are either non-existent or trivial compared to us. Hong Kong has no VAT or Sales Tax, no Estate Duties, no Witholding Taxes. Duty on fuel is a risible 50p a litre, and duty on 1000 cigarettes is £135, compared to £155 PLUS 16.5% of the price. Beer and wine carry no duty and spirits stronger than 30% ABV are taxed at a flat 100% of the import price. So if you can import a bottle of whisky for less than £26 (and you definitely can), you pay less duty than you would in the UK.

I don't think it's unreasonable to say that taxes in Hong Kong are overall much less of a burden, especially on the less well-off. And given that a large portion of the residents of Hak Nam chose to live that lifestyle, and our massively more burdensome state still lets people fall through the cracks in large numbers, are we really getting value for our tax bill?

Funny

So I see from the Grauniad that Jimmy Carr, unfunnyman and banker-basher has been outed as paying large sums of money into an off-shore scheme to avoid tax. I can scarcely face the irony of a newspaper that is based off-shore to avoid paying tax ragging on a lefty wibbler doing the same thing, while that lefty wibbler bangs on about other people avoiding tax. The thing is, all these tax avoidance schemes are legal. They are morally equivalent to putting money into an ISA, something that I don't think even the Graun has had the hypocrisy to attack. And the reason they exist and are legal is precisely because the laws have closed so many loopholes. Every time they close a loophole, they introduce dozens more ways for tax lawyers to dance angels on the head of a pin. The funniest thing of all was the amoral, unprincipled, dishfaced, bandwagon-jumping twat that is our Prime Minister, standing in judgment of Jimmy Carr's amorality. Do none of these people ever look at themselves in the mirror?

Dick Murphy falls straight in

Oh, how I laughed:

£1.8bn is to be spent on monitoring Facebook and Twitter. That’s exactly the same as is being taken out of care for the elderly and disabled
-- Dick "The Weapons-Grade Cock End" Murphy

Well, that's the thing, Dick: there's always going to be some disagreement about how our taxes are spent. You're quite happy with pissing it away on Diversity Outreach Co-ordinators and so on, I'm not. On the other hand, some people are quite happy with the government pissing it away on Protecting The Cheeeeeldren, and you're not.

But you're the fucking idiot telling us we should happily render unto Caesar so that he can piss it away on whatever he deems important.

The truth is, there isn't one person in the whole country who can honestly proclaim himself or herself 100% happy with the way every single penny of tax money is spent. The only way to achieve happiness in that respect is to not tax anyone and let everyone decide for themselves how their money should be spent.

Thanks for proving me right and yourself wrong.

Dick.

Thoughts on a beknighted man

So, it's finally happened: Fred "the Shred" Goodwin has been stripped of his knighthood, to cheers and further vituperation from "the left". Some of the stuff I've read on twitter has been at least as offensive as any dole-bludger bashing I've ever read. Or indeed, written.

But let's have a look at the chronology of all this. Back in 2007, when RBS beat Barclays to the takeover of ABN Amro (which was effectively the deal that fucked RBS so hard that it will limp for the rest of its life) financial analysts were full of praise for Fred's hardball strategy. Even the notoriously milquetoast BBC said:

Barclays' failure to pull off the deal will inevitably raise question marks about its future strategy.

It was shortly after this that everything turned to shit, but at the time, everybody was impressed with Fred's perspicacity. He had made RBS the world's largest bank (by asset value) during his tenure. Now, you might well argue with the benefit of hindsight, but at the time, everybody was impressed.

He was knighted in 2004, by the Labour government, starring Ed Miliband, who is currently stroking himself into a coma at having convinced the dishfaced social democrat into revoking said knighthood. If he was that fucking outraged, why didn't the mongtarded fuckwit do something when he was actually in government?

Secondly, Fred's pension, which is now the target of such opprobrium from "the left" was agreed by Labour as part of getting him sacked and replaced by Stephen Hester, another name some of you might recognise as a bloke who is getting royally fucked over thanks to chiselling whingeing from "the left".

So, Labour, having agreed that Fred was a hero, knighted him, agreed to his pension to get rid of him and struck a deal with his replacement. Immediately they were out of power, they started using both of these people that they had been so generous to while in power, as whipping boys and ways to froth up public resentment (that didn't exist among Labour voters when they were in power, obviously!)

If the massively-foreheaded douchebag actually was a Tory, he would have turned around in the face of all this public fauxtrage and said: "These deals were agreed by Labour when they were in government and I can't understand why they're complaining now." And continued to honour the deals.

If he was an astute politician, he would have said: "These deals were a bad deal done by Labour and I'm calling time on them behalf of the hard-working taxpayer." At least that way, he would have still been a massive cunt, but he would have been able to garner some plaudits for his actions.

But because he's a slippery social democrat weasel who has nothing more in mind than to one day be able to say "I was Prime Minister, you know!" he has opted for the weakest possible option: to bow to manufactured outrage and use it as a diversion for some of his other unprincipled actions. It speaks volumes that the only thieving shit who is claiming any victory over this is Ed fucking Miliband!

If this sorry saga doesn't make you question your party allegiances and doesn't make you see why I can't tell the difference between any of the major political parties, then you are definitely part of the problem.

And if this little fiasco doesn't prevent any future businessman from running a state-owned business, then they really are stupid enough to deserve everything they get.

School punishment (for @danoprey )

Earlier this week I had one of those frustrating conversations on Twitter where I wasn't expressing myself clearly but I also came to realise that I was maybe holding on to some lazy assumptions.

The discussion revolved around whether it was necessary to beat children at school or not. I grew up in an environment where getting beaten by a teacher was nothing exceptional. Daniel felt that this was going to teach children that violence was a valid way of life.

My gut reaction was "for fuck's sake, it's not violence", but actually, of course, it is.

The whole situation in which I was educated was completely different: parents were much stricter and there was a general consensus that parents expected teachers to maintain strict discipline and that if you got punished, you deserved it. In fact, if you got punished at school, you'd almost certainly wind up getting punished again at home.

But there's more than one aspect to this violence. Firstly, it was not dished out casually. You had to explicitly transgress a fundamental rule. Teachers would always give ample warning. I never once got a beating or saw anyone else get a beating where I thought "that was patently unfair."*

Female teachers were obviously not going to administer corporal punishment, so you got sent to the headmaster, which was another level of scary.

It all took place in a spirit of respect and fairness. The teachers knew that the school was populated by testosterone-charged teenagers and that sometimes things would happen. Discipline was appallingly strict compared to what my daughter sees today, but I never felt like it got in the way of my education or my development as a person. (Maybe it did, but I didn't feel like it did, and that's what mattered to me.)

And the teachers respected us as much as we respected them. I don't for a moment imagine that beating someone inspires respect, but I respected my teachers as teachers, not because of their ability to beat me. I still remember them fondly, and regard them as inspirational, amazing people and I wish that all children could experience teachers like that.

But they don't, as we now have an environment where teachers feel it's appropriate to be "down wiv da yoof" and banter with the kids as equals.

You may well argue that we are all equal, and that's a valid perspective, but why the hell would you pay the blindest bit of attention to your "mate" when he tries to chastise you for your inappropriate behaviour?

So, as much as it's discriminatory, I can definitely see the logic in teachers being aloof, rather than trying to be all matey-matey. But aloofness, a strict (if commonsense) code of conduct and respect from teachers can only do so much to maintain discipline.

If a student is being disruptive, there is a need to restore order. If you reason with them, or point out that they are disruptive and they still carry on, the teacher has to have an effective sanction.

And here I get a bit lost as a libertarian. Currently, it seems like a student can be sent out of the class. That's great, but it means that the student misses the lesson.

@danoprey would rather see the disruptive student excluded from the lesson, and it being upgraded to excluded from the school if necessary. This will mean the student being sent to the office (which they may or may not do, unless accompanied, which means more disruption). Then there has to be some sort of appeals process to ensure that teachers are being reasonable. Then there has to be some sort of reasonable escalation process before someone is completely excluded to make sure that someone is given sufficient chance. And somebody has to keep completely accurate track of this.

This is all possible, I suppose, but I can see it becoming a lot more disruptive and time consuming overall.

I would rather see a swift punishment administered that means that focus can be regained and the class can continue with a minimum of disruption and that the offender is not prevented from learning.

And assuming all the other things are in place, like the code of conduct and mutual respect and all the rest, I can't really see what, other than a couple of smacks with a cane, will fulfil that role.

*I did once get a beating that was completely undeserved. But even at the time, as the "crime" was happening, I could see why the teachers thought I had transgressed, plus, I'd have had to snitch on a classmate to protect my arse. And that was beyond the pale.

Won't somebody think of the children?

All this talk about cuts really makes me laugh. Last week it was all about the children and the fact that Osborne's plan for means-testing appears to have been drafted by an innumerate, illiterate, demented fuckwit with the common sense of a rabid vole.

This week, it's been all about the spazzers, flids, spackers, crips and mongtards. Apparently, they're going to be savaged and people are up in arms.

But as usual, the discussions with the clitterati have been an exercise in futility. "The state should provide more!" "Tax the bankers more!" "Why should the disabled suffer while the bankers get bailed out?"

And everyone's talking about the "savagery" of the cuts. And who knows, they may actually be savage -- as far as the ostensible beneficiaries are concerned.

But the reality of it is that the state's spending on non-jobs, on quangos, on other absolute cuntery grows apace. The nett effect of these "cuts" will not actually be to reduce the state in any way, shape or form, all that will happen is that the rate of growth of the state will not be quite as much under the Tories, it will still be growing all the time.

Quite often I get chastised as "uncaring" by asking for the state to be starved. "Think of the children / crips / flids / whatever! They'll all be left to die on the street without tax! British people are proud to be a caring society."

The last statement really did make me laugh. If British people are so caring, why do you believe that they need to have the threat of prison levelled against them before they'll actually fund all this care? If I am so uncaring, why do I believe that people will not need to be threatened with prison to take care of the needy?

Anyway: the government may be cutting what it gives us back in exchange for the money it extorts with menaces, but it's not actually cutting back on the money it spends. So it's taking more and giving less back, which can only mean that either the state is growing despite delivering less or that it's pissing away money with even less care than usual.

And yet, the very same people who are bitching about the cuts to "front line services" are the exact same fucking people who want everyone else to give more money to the government so that "front line services" can be "protected".

I have a better idea: fuck the state, fuck the government. Let people spend their own money on what they want. I bet that nobody will fucking starve.

Yes, I do believe you're right!

Timmy, over at the ASI has news of a tax rise "we can all support".

Now, Timmy is a neo-liberal, which is pretty much to say "he never met a tax cut he didn't like." So I was curious and rather skeptical about any such likeable tax rise. But bugger my toe if he isn't right:

For each £10,000 of wages public sector workers are getting an extra £2,000 untaxed compensation. Tax (income and the two NIs) would be about 40% of that extra £2,000, £800, or 8% of the original £10,000 in cash wages.

Thus all public sector workers should have to pay an extra 8% of their wages in tax.

Total public sector wages are in the range of £160 billion a year (that might be a little out of date) and this will raise some £13 billion a year.

As I said, a tax that we can all support. The TUC, unions and Labour Party will, of course, quite naturally support taxing those who currently are not paying their full whack on the compensation they get through working and the rest of us, well, we can just all gurgle in pleasure as we see that petard being hoisted high. Oh, and of course, as we see the tax burden on us reduced as the public sector workers pay what they should have been paying all along. But we'll be nice, eh? No asking for the back taxes from the last 20 years.

Unlike some (for @jackofkent )

I am, unlike Iain Dale, not ashamed to be a fucking political blogger today.

Guido is a muckraker, that's what he does. He has poked the lefty community in the eye today by muckraking a Tory, something that they all said he wouldn't do when the Tories were in power.

Frankly, I don't care what a fucking politician does, as long as I'm not fucking paying for it. And what has been burning my arse about this is that the actual employment of whatever his name is does sound a bit suspect, because a poisonous muckraker claims:

The appointment of Hague’s former driver to his private office is controversial because 25-year old Myers has no expertise for the job, no relevant experience and his only qualification for the position is his closeness to the Foreign Secretary.

And that, my dear reader, is what fucks me off. In a manner that is completely indistinguishable from those fucking Labour cunts, this minister has basically given a mate a fucking job. Whether it's a mate as in beer-drinking-buddy or mate as in anal fisting when you're away from the missus, the thing that makes me steam is that I'M FUCKING FUNDING SOME CUNT'S WHIM!

Frankly, I think Hague should fucking resign and go kill himself in a fucking field somewhere. Not for any potential sexual misdemeanour, but for pissing away my money.

And if you can't understand the difference between someone's private life and misuse of public money, then you're as much of a cunt as he is.

Wow.

Just ... wow.

TV Licensing cunts

Rab has a deconstruction of how these bullying thieves work:

For those of you that may be unaware, the job of forcing us all to pay the TV licence is not done by the BBC nor 'TV Licensing'.

Auntie Beeb employs enforcers who pretend to be the BBC/TV licensing when engaging with those who cannot or will not pay for the privilege of subsidising Leftist propaganda which is pumped into the airwaves regardless if we want it or not.

Well worth a read. And fuck the BBC.

Cunts.

In which I wholeheartedly endorse one of Tom Harris's idea

Yep:

THERE really isn’t a decent excuse not to support Eric Pickles’ initiative in publishing details of his own department’s spending on every item worth £500 or more.

The opportunity it gives the media to run sensationalist stories about massages and trips to Blackpool Pleasure Beach on the public purse is less important than the far more positive consequence: it will make everyone in the public sector think twice before authorising spending.

So my friend and colleague, Tom Watson, is right to call on all parties to applaud Eric’s judgment on this one.

I would go further, however.

Presumably, in time, every department – not just Eric’s – will adopt this policy. At least, I hope so. But what about local authorities? What about hospital trusts and quangos? It’s unlikely that they will voluntarily open their books to public inspection. But if they were forced to, then every local government officer in the land would know that they would have to justify buying any item or service to the public and the to media – as well as to their bosses.

Now, come on! Anyone out there think that’s a bad idea?

I reckon this would be a fucking brilliant idea. Every bit of taxpayer-funded expenditure should be put up on the web for anyone to look at. Including salaries. And attached to it, should be the name, email address and phone number of the person who signed it off.

I can promise you that money would be spent much more wisely in a very fucking short order.

Some thoughts on road pricing (for @mr_ceebs )

In yesterday's twatfest inspired by Sunny Hundal's mongnitive dissonance over the state's use of force, there was some discussion between me and @Mr_Ceebs about taxes and paying for roads. He made a couple of points which I just wanted to probe a little further:

The costs of traveling would be enormous. Equivalent of petrol nearly £7 per gallon.

Now, I'm not merely trying to be argumentative, but I seriously question this. It's a widely-held view that the so-called Road Tax (actually the Vehicle Excise Duty, so it doesn't have to be hypothecated) is a nett contributor to the Exchequer. In other words, the government does not spend as much on roads as it collects in "road tax". So it's not entirely clear to me why free market road pricing would cause such an extraordinary rise in travel costs.

But even if it did, does that not tell you something about the value of the road network which is being hidden by its subsidy? People are abusing the roads because they're "free".

I would make the counter-argument:

• road costs, especially maintenance, are predominantly as a result of HGV usage.
• HGV owners are currently subsidised by other road users
• by implementing free market* road pricing, I believe that road use for lesser vehicles, such as cars and motorcycles could actually become cheaper as the costs they imply for the operator are much lower
• free market road pricing would also lead to better surfaces, fewer coned-off areas and possibly even improved road safety

He then went on to say:

Well I've looked at a variety of other funding options, but don't see any that don't result in a large drop in road users and so result in spiralling costs for drivers as they have to pay for a larger share of costs.

What this implies to me is that there are a significant number of "free riders", something that isn't supposed to happen in our overly taxed society. but as I said above, I actually believe that proper market pricing would lead to cars paying less than they currently do and other road users getting seriously fucked over, because they are currently shifting the externalities of their road use onto the motorist.

This in turn implies that the cost of road transport could increase quite dramatically. It could potentially even lead to an evisceration of the highly subsidised road transport business. I would expect foreign road transport users to be hit equally hard, something they largely escape now.

Who knows, it might even lead to a massive revitalisation of Britain's rail transport industry, or even canals or something totally new?

*You'll notice I've used the term "market" or "free market", rather than "privatised". This is because no "privatised" business in the UK is actually a free market.

What's the catch?

I read this with baffled confusion:

David Miliband and Tessa Jowell have come up with an idea to reconnect the licence payer with the BBC.

In a joint blog today, they will say*:

“The mutual principle could play a role in strengthening the democratic accountability of the BBC, as one of most treasured and important public institutions"

“Owned by the British public and paid for directly through each household’s TV licence, it is only right that ordinary members of the public should have a real say in how it is run”.

"Under a mutual model, membership of the BBC could be open to everyone who pays the licence fee. Members could have the right to elect representatives to a Member’s Council that would elect a majority of members of the BBC Trust. This would give licence fee payers a way to democratic voice in the priorities of the BBC.

“Greater public engagement with members could also take place via the website, to ensure the BBC was providing responsive services. With those running the BBC directly accountable to their members, they would have a clear mandate to canvas license fee payers on all major policy decisions.”

Fuck me. Bananaman and the arrogant, boot-faced cunt have come with an idea I support entirely.

If you pay the license fee, you get a better say in how the BBC is run. Increased accountability and transparency. Fucking genius, brilliant idea. So, apart from the near-breakdown in cognitive function caused by reading something quite sensible from a pair of power-crazed, dysfunctional buttmunches, I wondered how I might be misinterpreting this.

And then it dawned on me: this wouldn't be a voluntary co-op. We'd all still be forced with menaces to spunk our money out on twattish BBC cuntishness, the ability to vote and "participate" would just be an additional sweetener to help us accept the tax by another name. And because it would be driven by the BBC, the mutuality and co-operativeness would be about as much use as Network Rail is to rail commuters.

So, once again, Labour fail.

Epically.

*How the fucking fuck do they do this? I never know what my blog posts are going to say when I sit down to write them.

Fuck off!

Apparently, when Jacqui Smith was asked what she would bring to the BBC that merited £77,000 a year for two-and-a-half days a week, she replied: "Fuck off!"

Jacqui, dear, on behalf of the entire country, I think I'd like to point out that you are the one who should fuck off. And, preferably, die.

Painfully.

I could go on about it

Or I could just point you at this.