I'm sorry, what??

Sometimes, it's the little things in big stories that make you stop:

Bimlenbra Jha, chief executive of Tata Steel UK, told the Business select committee that the UK had "structural weaknesses" that made the UK steel industry uncompetitive.

Business rates and high energy costs were top of the list.

On energy, he said that if Tata was operating in Germany, its energy bill would be £40m a year lower. The Tata chief defended the company's decision to put the business up for sale saying that the company and its shareholders could not continue to bleed. The business is estimated to be losing £1m a day.

OK, let's break this down. The civil service think man-made climate change is a big thing, therefore the government has instituted massive energy taxes to discourage people from making stuff that needs a lot of energy. Making steel takes a fucktonne of energy. Closing down Port Talbot will be a non-trivial step towards meeting our civil service approved emission reduction targets.

In other words, whether or not you agree with climate change being a thing, and our fault, and something that we can fix, and are fixing in the right way, the fact of the matter is that saying "tata to Tata" is exactly the the kind of outcome you would expect and want from our climate change policies.

However, despite the fact that it's only Morlocks losing their jobs, of course, there are votes to be had here, so now everyone has to panic and pretend to care. It's the usual fiasco of a planned economy.

Hidden away further down, though, was this little nugget:

Mr Javid said steps had already been taken to help on energy costs with £130m paid out since 2013 to compensate high energy users who incur environmental surcharges.

Just think about that: the glorious state has decided that we need saving from ourselves, so let's make energy more expensive. We start to get saved from ourselves, but suddenly we need to compensate businesses who have to pay the environmental surcharge.

What the actual fucking fuck is that all about? Make someone pay a tax and then give them a fucking handout to say sorry? I'm really dying to know which fucking retarded spastic cunt thought this was a remotely sensible fucking idea.

Plus ça change, etc.

Good Lord, it's not the first time I've used that as a blog post title, is it?

Well, here's some good stuff from the Tories:

Diabetes remains one of the largest challenges to our healthcare system, with around 3.7 million sufferers in the UK and almost a million more estimated to have the condition but who do not know it. This is likely to get worse. Unhealthy lifestyles in the UK put a further 7 million people at risk of developing type 2 diabetes and in ten years’ time we may see the number of patients pass the 5 million mark.

All this places a significant burden on the NHS, with an estimated spend of £10 billion per year on diabetes related treatments. A great deal of this spend is unnecessary. Diabetics far too often suffer from late diagnosis, preventable complications and variations in care. They are often overlooked for specialist care when being treated for other conditions, particularly in hospitals, and they can be prevented from accessing treatment by the short term financial ethos embedded in far too many Care Trusts across the country.

Some studies have found that around 80 per cent of the spend on diabetes is avoidable so the main focus the Government needs to take is how to deploy resources effectively to help people manage their diabetes and even more importantly, prevent people from developing type 2 diabetes-the type related to lifestyle-in the first place.

This is being made more challenging by the NHS reforms, which, even if they were perfect, would cause disruption, and the fear that the new commissioners will take something of a short term approach to managing budgets in light of the priority for deficit reduction.

Wow, this is all good stuff, isn't it? Stuff we've been saying all along: you can get the same or better results without spending as much money, too much is wasted. And why is it wasted? Because of insane bureaucratic procedures which explain all too well why visiting a GP in this cuntry feels like you're interacting with a call centre operator in a foreign land who'd like nothing more than to tell you to switch it off, wait five minutes and then switch it on again.

But given that the problem is a massive surfeit of bad guidance that causes people to waste money in a bureaucratic, checkbox manner, guess what the solution proposed to this is?

Go on, guess.

The problem is too much bureaucratic guidance, what solution could you propose that would guaranteed to make me want to strangle myself with my own testicles?

Yes:

The Government can rectify some of these problems through national leadership. The National Service Framework, which has guided diabetes care since 2001 is due for renewal and it is a very appropriate time for Ministers to look at how to spend wisely now, and disseminate best practice across the NHS to reduce long term costs. Achieving this would have the happy coincidence of better patient outcomes; arguably what the priority should always be for Ministers and officials.

Kill me now.

Roadworks

Really, what is the point of cunting up FIVE FUCKING MILES of road as a speed-restricted, single lane, so that two indolent fucks can trim some fucking trees? It's going to take them a fucking year to trim that lot, are the roads going to be cunted all fucking year for this shit?

On yer bike!

Haven't got a bike? The police will give you someone else's.

There is a catch, obviously.

Jesus fucking FUCKING Christ.

More Tory twattery

Francis Maude this time:

Francis Maude has come up with a genius money-saving wheeze. The only tiny downside is that it won’t kick in for another 10 years.

As the Telegraph reveals in Saturday morning’s splash, the Cabinet Office minister hopes to scrap the census - Britain’s official population count - in an attempt to save its £480m cost.

However, he admitted that next year’s census would still have to go ahead. He vowed instead to cancel the next official headcount - which will not occur until 2021.

To get to that point the Tories (or coalition) have to win the 2015 election and then the 2020 election. And still be in a cost-cutting mood. That’s a whole pyramid of ifs.

Now who does that remind you of?

Cunt.

The arrest of Brian Haw

Not the obvious "oh, why was he arrested, it's obviously some attempt to shut him up" point, but this:

In 2007, he won a legal battle to remain in place due to a drafting error in a new law banning unauthorised protests in Westminster.

A drafting error? Fuck Labour and their fucking useless blanket of pointless flawed laws. Dick Cleggeron should just fucking repeal EVERYTHING they introduced.

End of.

Even for a government, this is bad

99p out of every £1 spent on the railways is wasted.

Is it really impossible to cut spending without affecting "the front line"?

Is Tarantino a paedo pornographer now?

I'm fairly sure Kill Bill has an animated sequence showing a Japanese gang boss indulging in pederasty. And now the Coroners and Justice Act is in force:

Henceforth, you will be committing an offence if you possess non-real, non-photographic images that are pornographic, "grossly offensive, disgusting or otherwise of an obscene character" and focus on a child’s genitals or anal region, or portray a range of sexual acts "with or in the presence of a child".

I have a copy of Kill Bill in my DVD collection. It's been on Sky Movies. Am I breaking the law? Probably.

As I've said before, none of Labour's new laws have anything to do with protecting people or children or any such thing. It's all about creating swathes of new offences that can be used to cow people into a state of perpetual fearfulness about whether or not they might be breaking the law. It used to be simple not to break the law, and this allowed a precedent to be set: ignorance of the law is no excuse.

But as Barrenness Scuntland showed us, even the people who define the laws can't keep on top of them all, with their highly-trained legal minds and all. What chance do the little people have? Do you really know you've made it through the day without breaking some law or contravening some regulation somewhere?

I never do, and I lead a very unremarkable life.

Luckily, we have high hopes that the Tories will sweep to power and do away with all this nannying and bullying and ...

Oh.

Just. Fuck. Off.

OK?

A BRIT chemist who helped flood the UK with meow meow has warned of an even DEADLIER legal high about to hit us.

Worried Dave Llewellyn told The Sun that the new drug NRG-1 will be "Britain's worst nightmare" leading to mass brain damage and death.

And:

The chemical make-up of both mephedrone and naphyrone are only slightly different - and BOTH are terrifyingly similar to ecstasy.

Look, I'm the least drug-addled person out there. I've never, ever even taken a puff of weed, let alone disco biscuits or any such crap. But this just reeks of made-up bollocks to me. Half the fucking stuff in the world will have some sort of upper or downer effect on you and kill you if you OD on it. Fuck, you can even OD on water (it's called "drowning", look it up) ... so why the fuck are people getting so piss-arsed about something that costs 25p a hit? It's unlikely to lead to a major crime surge at that price.

And people are always going to try and get squiffy. Why the fuck are you trying to stop them? You may as well try and stop the tide from coming in, like that other King Cunt.

Fucking morons.

To lose one adviser is careless ...

... but really, if you lose SEVEN do you not maybe need to rethink your strategy a little?

Eric Carlin has become the seventh government drugs advisor to resign, causing further embarrassment to ministers over their handling of drugs policy.

Mr Carlin said that the ban on the “miaow-miaow” party drug this week was rushed through as a politically motivated attempt to make the Government look tough prior to the election.

In a letter to Alan Johnson, the home secretary, Mr Carlin said the decision was "unduly based on media and political pressure".

He added that he was “extremely unhappy” with the way the drugs council operates.

The resignation will not stop mephedrone – linked to 26 deaths in Britain – being added to the list of illegal drugs within a fortnight, classified as a Class B drug.

However the Government’s key relationship with the ACMD is in tatters, and several other advisors are also understood to be considering their positions.

Mr Carlin is the seventh expert to resign from the committee since October, when the controversial chairman Professor David Nutt was sacked.

Two members, Les King and Marion Walker, quit immediately in protest.

Mr Johnson met the ACMD a month later to reassure the expert panel of its independence, but was faced with three more resignations from council members who were not convinced.

Dr Polly Taylor, a consultant veterinary surgeon and long-standing member of the council, then offered her resignation to the home secretary on the eve of mephedrone being banned.

Lest, however, you think that the Tories will be even millimetrically better on this shit, you may wish to reconsider:

Chris Grayling, the shadow home secretary, said: “The relationship between the government and its drugs advisory council has become utterly shambolic.

"The decision on Mephedrone was the right one, but this latest resignation suggests pretty clearly that the Home Secretary has been completely unable to restore his relationship with the experts who advise him.”

No, Mr Grayling, you utter cockspanner, it's precisely because the fucking experts that are so fucking vaunted in this fucking shit hole of a cuntry were completely ignored and run roughshod over, that they're resigning in fucking droves.

As you will find out yourself in the unlikely event of a fucking Tory victory.

You useless fucking oxygen thief.

Same old Tories? Or Caring, Understanding New Tories?

Lately, I'm starting to feel sympathetic to some of the charges levied by Labour against the Tories. For one thing, the Tories have historically had a whiff of the jackboot about them. And while Labour are not immune from this charge by any means, anyone voting Tory in the hopes of getting a slightly less nasty government will be unamused by this:

Since 1997, Labour has, true to its roots, concentrated on building big government. Gordon Brown’s unremitting control-freakery has peppered public services with targets and processes, regulation and paperwork. The result has been a bigger state.

So, the first thing that is hypocritical of the Caring Understanding New Tories is that their control-freakery means they wouldn't publish a polite criticism of their blog post. LabourList Mk II, anyone?

Since the Tories are really just pink-frilly-knickers with no fucking balls and can't face criticism on their own blog, I guess I'll just have to criticise the useless motherfuckers here, won't I?

But really, given an intro like that, what could I possibly find to criticise? Well:

We want to make it easier for people to contribute to the lives of their communities in the ways they see best. We want a bigger society.

Is that "society" as in "social justice", "social care", "social services"? You'll excuse me if I say that the last fucking thing we need is more of that fucking shit, you utter cunt.

This mentality drives one of our most exciting proposals for young people – the National Citizen Service. This will offer all 16-year olds the opportunity to take part in a three-week social project in the summer after they’ve finished their GCSEs. First and foremost we want young people to experience a challenge – we’ll take them out of their comfort zones on a residential team-building course of a week or more.

Ah yes. Moving them out of their comfort zone for a week. What harm can that do? Not much, I suppose. But I suspect this week will become two, then three, then six, then twelve weeks -- which is roughly what the Soviet military reckoned was enough to take well over 95% of the population and mould them into compliant little drones. just 12 weeks of "being out of your comfort zone" ... and that comfort zone would get gradually less and less comfortable, with increasingly strict discipline, less freedom, earlier wakeup calls, more physical activities and less time to think. Groupthink and "communal values" would be encouraged.

And certainly, the "no-comfort zone" would not allow in any but state-approved media and state-approved reading material.

After that they will be sent back to their own communities to consider what they think they can do to help meet their area’s needs. They will then draw up plans for social action projects which they will set up and keep going with volunteer work in the following year. This will be inspirational hard work giving every young person the opportunity to rub shoulders with others from very different walks of life and work with them to build better societies and communities.

If that paragraph doesn't give you an involuntary shudder of horror and revulsion, you're probably better off dead.

Just think, once you have been moulded into a useful little drone, they will send you back to meet with king and queen bees, who will guide you in the paths of righteousness.

So, after the true spine-chilling horror, we move back into the fatuous uselessness we have come to expect of iDave's Caring Understanding New Tories:

Equally we need to build better rites of passage for young people in this country. At the moment too many of the perceived markers for adulthood are negative – getting drunk, smoking, having underage sex – NCS is an opportunity for us to offer the youth of today an indication that society will value them by what they put in, not what they take out.

Which just goes to fucking show what a completely unaware poltroon wrote this shit. Listen, you nasty little aspiring-fascist bowl of rancid monkey spunk, by the time kids are 16, they're either OK or they're already fucked. This creepy, horrible and appalling idea of yours is the wrong thing and far too fucking late to fix the ostensible problem anyway.

Cuntservatives: striving to be every single bit as bullying, nasty and awful as Labour. Oh, and "Tim Loughton"? You're definitely a CUNT.

New Government Department: DOGW

Look, can we just shitcan this Keynesian crap now?

Timmy has an excellent dissection here:

The car scrappage scheme has protected about 4,000 jobs in the UK auto industry, Government estimates have claimed.

At a cost of £400 million.

As stimulus measures go this isn’t all that effective. The number of jobs saved is of course at the high end of estimates: no, don’t be silly about this, this is the people who spent that money defending the decision to have done so. Of course they’ve put the best gloss on it.

So £100,000 per job saved. Given median incomes of around £25,000 saving a job for a year costs four times what that job pays for a year. So we have a multiplier of 0.25…..which really, really, isn’t the sort of number which gives one confidence in the merits of Keynesian spending. For that we want a multiplier of over 1.

And as for the idea that such Keynesian spending pays for itself….well, the tax take on £25,000 is something like £8,000 (income tax plus NI) so we’re spending £100,000 to get £8,000 back in tax……which again doesn’t look like such spending pays for itself.

This shit just never works. No government spending has ever been shown to "pay for itself", let alone magically create more wealth. In the example above, it would have been scads cheaper to just let businesses go to the wall and give everyone two years' pay. And in two years, anyone can find a job if they want it. I also bet that not all of the businesses would have folded or that all those 4000 jobs would have gone, either.

I know it's appealing to think that the government is trying to help. But for fuck's sake, when it's making everyone worse off, how the cunting fuck is it helping?

Tax and spend just doesn't work. End of.

Who can steal your money?

The government can!



Tip of the clown wig to Longmanx.

Yeah, yeah, meh, meh, facepalm

I read the Tories' tax pledges. Half-assed but generally a step in the right direction.

Right up until the end:

Tax simplification. Conservatives will create an Office of Tax Simplification. It will become an independent and permanent voice on tax law, operating in a similar way to the National Audit Office, which will create a sustained and powerful institutional pressure for the simplification of the tax system.

Yes! The bonfire of the quangos rules!

Way to fucking go, Dave. You fucking simpering moron. We look to the Tories to reduce the size of government. You don't need a fucking quango to "create a sustained and powerful institutional pressure for the simplification of the tax system." Fuck, I'll do it for you now. For free.

Look:

1. No tax is payable on the first £12,500 of individual earnings (including Citizens Income).
2. Individual tax is 20% above £12,500. No deductions, no expenses, no shit.
   
3. Corporation tax is 1% of income earned in the UK, no exemptions, no allowances, no deductible expenses, no fucking incentives, no shit.
4. National Insurance is 5% on employers, 5% on employees, also above £12,500.*
5. There are no personal tax credits. There is no dole. There is no income support.
6. Every UK citizen above 16 gets an income of £50 a week. Pensioners get an extra £50 a week per "family" i.e., single pensioners get a total of £100 a week, married pensioners get a total of £150 a week (until they've been rolled off the ponzi scheme, anyway - the state pension scheme will be closed to new entrants.)
   
7. The first child in a family gets the family an allowance of £50 a week until their 16th birthday, when the kid get the money. Subsequent children get fuck all until they are 16.

See, iDave, it fits on a fucking page. Small words. Anyone can understand it.

And if that means we can't afford diversity outreach co-ordinators and massive state advertising campaigns, well, that's tough.

Update: Someone's finally had a proper good idea in CCHQ.

*NI would go down as the ponzi commitment goes down. People who live through the transition are a bit screwed, but frankly, we're so fucking screwed anyway, who's going to notice it? Happy to hear any suggestions for compensation for these unlucky folks. Perhaps an equivalent government contribution to their private pension plans made out of reserves.

If there are any.

Message to iDave

Even the Tory faithful are beginning to say that you're a useless fucking cunt. Never mind the rest of us.

Debt Reduction?

My arse!

Welcome to the UKSSR!

It's official:

Britain's government sector is now bigger than its private sector. It accounts for 52.1% of Gross Domestic Product according to the OECD – the highest since the organisation's records began. Sure, government was even bigger in the early 1940s, but then at least we were fighting a war to save Europe from Nazi dictatorship. There is no such excuse this time.

In 1900, the government was a mere 15% of the economy. It was given a boost by World War I, but for most of the interwar years it remained in the 20%-30% range. After World War II it stayed below 40% until Harold Wilson's 1964-70 Labour government broke that barrier, and now Gordon Brown has taken it through the next.

There's fucked. There's really fucked. There's Gordon Brown fucked.

And then there's this.

Like the man says:

The trouble is that governments spend other people's money.

And the government is now spending more than we earn.

We are so fucked.

Jesus fucking wept again!

What? The? Fuck?

INCREASE IN PUBLIC SPENDING NEXT YEAR OF 2.2%!!! Labour will never cut, if they win the election its IMF time for sure now. Fantasy of pretending that after next year there will be huge spending cuts which are not being announced or even mentioned yet.

What utter fucking cunts rule us?

Quote of the septonanosecond

Shows what a poor condition our economy is in that an overspend of £160bn - 12% of GDP, unprecedented in our peacetime history - is regarded as some kind of triumph.

-- Fraser Nelson