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.

Lest you think I'm a corporate shill

I did have to laugh when I read this:

Royal Bank of Scotland boss Stephen Hester refused to give up his £963,000 bonus yesterday as pressure escalated when his own chairman rejected a shares reward.

Hester, 51, sparked fury by accepting a £963,000 payout on top of his £1.2million salary as RBS chief executive – despite the state-owned bank’s share price falling 48 per cent.

But he is facing more calls to give up the bonus after RBS chairman Sir Philip Hampton rejected a£1.4million windfall he was due next month.

Hampton told the bank’s remuneration committee it would not be appropriate for him to receive the 5.17million shares.

So Hester is sticking to taking his cash bonus and Hampton is declining his shares. My immediate thought is that Hester should be taking a bigger share bonus and no cash, but because he insists on taking cash and Hampton is not keen on shares, even though he is contractually entitled to them, they both reckon the shares aren't going to be worth shit.

Hampton is playing a canny game here, because I'm sure someone will slip him a quiet bung somehow. Probably the Chancellor.

My best guess is that the government is planning to intervene massively in the running of RBS within the next year, which will really fuck RBS's value completely. Hampton can't take his shares and dump them without a massive alarm signal going off. Hester is going to rack up the cash while he can.

I am such a fucking cynic sometimes.

Update: Unduly cynical, it seems. (To be fair, I had thought Hester's bonus had been share based, but my Google-fu failed me.)

Tip of the clown wig to @williamhenryson for the correction.

Blatant economic protectionism

Via the Institute for Justice.

Since I can't see my comment making it past moderation...

This post made me snort. My reply:

The only problem with your idea is that it's fucking stupid.

Obama is a Chicago machine politician, ruthless, unprincipled and amoral, who happens to have the talent of reading off a teleprompter well. That doesn't make him a good politician.

And the Rudd thing actually just undermines your whole argument: "look, a politician doing something that any normal human being would do anyway." This deserves so much praise that you actually want to build a fucking website around it?

There is no such thing as a good politician: they are all in it for the gain or the self-aggrandizement, or worse, to make us all live how they think the little people should live.

OK, so there is such a thing as a good politician -- a dead one. But that's not something that deserves a website, is it?

No, no, no!

Meet the new cunts, indistinguishable from the old cunts (emphasis mine):

The Identity Card Scheme and other biometrics work has already cost the taxpayer £292 million. The Act has saved £835 million in planned future investment.

No, you fucking cunts. An investment is spending you make in the hope of future benefits. Here is the definition, for any cunting civil servant who may want to learn that English words already have meanings, so stop fucking destroying our language with bureaucratic bollocks-speak!

There are no fucking benefits to pissing our money away on ID cards. This is more fucking civil servant distortion of the English language to provide cover of useless, inept, wasteful government profligacy.

And it wasn't this government that "invested" the money. So it's perfectly ok to describe it as "spending" or even "pissing away taxpayers' hard-earned on corporatist crap".

Unless, of course, the people who rule us, who's reputation needs salving, are not the useless motherfuckers we elect.

A thought on charity

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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.

Hokeycokeyism

The brilliant Wat Tyler asks a very important question: why the fuck did the Pope's visit cost £12 million, when even Dubya only cost £4.1 million?

And suddenly, I saw the truth of the matter

I don't make a point of reading the Daily Mail, but you can't tell where a bit.ly link like http://bit.ly/agEXHy is taking you.

The article was the usual indignant waffle about the soft criminal justice system and the comments were mainly about how community sentences are a joke and what scum these repeat offenders are. But one comment from "Craig" in Glasgow stopped me dead in my tracks:

These sentences create lots of work for lawyers through the legal aid system and that's the real reason we have these silly sentences. Lawyers know their cash cows will continue to re-offend if they're getting such soft sentences. If criminals got sentences that fitted their crimes, then lawyers would get a lot less work. You see stories in the local paper here of people with 40 odd previous convictions and they've only been in jail for a few months, it's utterly ridiculous.

When you apply Guido's test of cui bono to stuff like why our legal system is such a complete fuckup, it becomes obvious. It creates work for lawyers, and curiously enough, it's lawyers who create the legal system.

The complexity of the legal system also creates massive barriers to entry and allows for endless rent-seeking opportunities.

And it's not like I haven't moaned about lawyers before. I can't see how I missed this one.

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.

Just in case ...

... you haven't seen this yet, please do go and read Timmy's epic fisking of sanctimonious hypocrite and weapons-grade cock end, "Dick" Murphy.

And if you have already read it, go and fucking enjoy it again.

Cunt.

Shocking, I tell you!

Shocking!

Last week, Thames Valley Safer Roads Partnership said a roadside camera on the A44 in Woodstock had seen an 18.3 per cent increase in speed offences since the switch-off compared to the average number caught this year.

At the same time a radar inside a second camera in Watlington Road, Cowley, registered an 88 per cent rise in offences when compared with figures in 2008 and 2009.

The partnership said the figures for 2010 were not available, as the camera had been switched off due to roadworks.

When the Oxford Mail requested 2008-9 data for the Woodstock camera – to make an equal comparison to the Watlington Road camera – the partnership said the figures were not readily to hand.

Now, the Oxford Mail having obtained the information, the figures actually show speed offences fell by four per cent when comparing the figures since the switch-off to offences in 2008-9.

The fucking police and the fucking scamera operators keep trumpeting all these fucking claims about how much scameras save lives and what utter fucking bastards motorists are.

Well, all I can say is: "Fuck off and die painfully, you lying cunts!"

Wow.

Just ... wow.

It comes as quite a shock, I tell you!

Dizzy examines the proposed graduate tax scheme:

The fact is, when you actually look at the graduate tax proposal it's clear who will really gain from it. The Political Class.

It will be the bag carrier greasy pole types, the policy wonks, the NUS presidents and the assortment of other "never done a proper job" politicos on crap money with great quality degrees who'll be subsidised by the graduates from crappy ex-polys with a Desmond, who then work their balls off to earn as much as they can in an area with no relevance to their education.

Well, bugger me! Who would have thought it, eh?

But no, it's all fine, because the increasingly libertarian Tories and hugely "liberal" Democrats are in charge, so they will definitely not be doing anything to buttfuck the ordinary man.

So, not only frightened to death of repealing shit Labour legislation, but also quite happy to introduce new cuntishness for the benefit of the political class. Oh yes, I can definitely see how the new lot are completely different from the old lot.

That campaign to modify the Tory party from the inside is clearly paying benefits.

Oh for the sake of fucking fuck

A cash-strapped council has been criticised after it announced plans to spend nearly £40,000 of taxpayers' money on iPads for every councillor.

Oh, yeah?

One councillor justified the move claiming her laptop was ''heavy'' making it difficult to take to several meetings a day.

Keep digging.

Labour councillor Sarah Russell, who is awaiting delivery of the highest-spec 64 gigabyte model, said: ''We're trying out the iPad to see whether it improves the way we work as councillors.

Dear thieving bastards, you are just trying to give your councillors the latest toy at the taxpayers' expense, as usual. I offer one of many possible alternatives. Note the £600 price difference.

You really are just taking the fucking piss. End of story.

Well, yes you are!

So, the chairman of Ipsa believes every MP who has made a complaint about Ipsa – including all of us who took part in a Westminster Hall debate on the subject on 16 June – is a liar.

-- a rather miffed Tom Harris.

Well, Tom, what happened to that EU Referendum that Labour promised us?

What happened to Cameron's cast-iron guarantee?

What happened to the Lib-Dems' pre-election promises?

Etc., etc., etc.

Every single one of you cunts has stood foursquare behind your parties' policies and reneged on at least one each. Legal sophistry aside, how does that make you fucking paragons of virtue then?

I could go on about it

Or I could just point you at this.

Spot the difference

I've had Tory loyalists tell me all kinds of shit about how David Cameron "can't frighten the horses", and how radically different his ideas really are when compared to Labour's tired shenanigans.

So I was amused to read this over at "Tory loyalist", Dizzy.

Well, at first, anyway.

But when you read the articles, it's abundantly clear that even at the detail level of where the money is going, there really isn't a hair's breadth of difference between the two schemes.

So will Tory tribalists please just stop spouting this bullshit about how much better iDave is and how different Tory policies are? And especially, stop fucking telling me that the Tories are the only way to achieve a more libertarian future. Your esteemed leader has a flagship policy which is identical to something that the fucking one-eyed madman tried on before.

On which planet does stealing money from people's bank accounts constitute fucking libertarianism?

The man is a cunt, and this iteration of the Tories is entirely undistinguishable from Labour and the LibDems. Something I've said since forever, and something which gets proven over and over again.

Hard-working MPs

We've all heard the hand-wringing bleating, mostly from that wittering Glaswegian 'arris about how hard MPs work and how awful the late-night sessions are. However, thanks to twitter, it seems that they're actually a mendacious bunch of boozy cunts (on our dime, of course!):

Last night the PLP was getting pissed and occasionally wandering into the lobbies to vote. Here are a selection of EyeSpy.MP tweets from last night:

4 out of 5 Lab leadership contenders on the terrace taking advantage of rare late night sitting to be matey (or trying to be in case of D & E Miliband).

Last night: Balls, Burnham and Ed Miliband in the Kremlin buying pints for down-market North East Labour MPs

Why aye man, it’s Sharon Hodgson pet! Skulling a vat of white wine. Drunk as a skunk.

0130: Tired and emotional Dennis Macshane stinging drinking companions for expensive glasses of Sancerre on the Terrace

0200: Ed Balls the last Labour leadership contender left on the Terrace – still drinking pints with the NE mafia!

Bear in mind some of these MPs will have been drinking subsidised beer since tea-time. In many cases they will be completely drunk when voting and the whips basically roll them into the lobbies. In how many jobs outside the entertainment industry is acceptable to be completely intoxicated in the workplace?

Of course, it is with no small sense of irony that I read the master of piss artistry, Guido Fawkes, moaning about people being drunk.

But really, he has a point. Why do we listen to these cunts when they bang on about how hard they work for us? They fucking sit in the office, getting pissed on booze that we subsidise for them. I'd be happy to take on a job that allowed me to get paid on subsidised booze.

If your MP is one of these cunts, maybe you'd like to write to him and ask him why he's not taking his fucking job seriously?

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. FUCKING FUCK. FUCKING FUCKING ...

... fuck.

AAAAAAAAARGHHHH!!!!!!!