The Great Tax Shambles..................

The tax regime in the UK is a complete dog’s breakfast. It lacks logic, order and consistency but with 11,520 pages it is the longest tax code in the world. It is highly desirable but equally unlikely that any Chancellor will ever have the courage to cut it down to size.

 

Of much greater importance than the sheer complexity of the code is that the general tax regime, regardless which party controls the government, is a huge economic handicap. It imposes burdens on business that reduce competitiveness. It creates parasites whose sole function is to find loopholes; they contribute nothing to the economy. Most importantly, it heavily discriminates against the very people who are capable of making the greatest economic contribution – the ambitious, the aspirational, the upwardly-mobile. In short, Mondeo Man.

                        

The entire system requires not so much reform as revolution.

 

Let’s get started with the permanently unpopular council tax.

 

There at least two major defects.                                   

 

The first is that values are not based on reality. They are those laid down in 1991.

 

The second is that it is regressive, one of the criticisms of the older rating system that was abolished by the disastrous poll tax. Because it is assessed on property value and not on ability to pay, its impact falls most heavily on those least able to afford it.

 

One answer is a hypothecated tax whereby the money need for local services is recovered through an income tax precept collected by HMRC and transferred to the local authority. For years the so-called public-sector financial experts have said ‘unworkable’, despite the fact that it works perfectly well in some other countries. People then would be able to see exactly the cost of local authority services.

 

The business rate needs reform at the same time. This is major handicap for small businesses in particular, with the rate often exceeding the rent.

 

Next, income tax.

 

The top rate is 45%, right? Wrong. For those family people earning between £50,000 and £120,000 the rate can be closer to 60% when the progressive withdrawal of child benefit is added to the equation. Add in NI and the top rate now exceeds  70% for a family with four children. (Labour’s proposed 50% top rate is purely class-warfare; it will raise almost no revenue. Someone should explain the Laffer Curve to Ed).

 

There are now 5.3 million higher rate income-tax payers, up from around 2 million.

 

National Insurance is a scam. It was introduced to pay for pensions and other welfare benefits. For years. Like the Road Fund it has been systematically plundered by Chancellors who use it as yet another stealth-tax.

 

Then there is inheritance tax, a deeply unjust levy.

 

It does not hit the seriously wealthy. They can easily hold their assets in trusts, off-shore companies, and other ‘tax efficient vehicles’.  Once again the primary victims are ‘people of the middling sort’ whose principal wealth is their house, an easy catch for the tax-man. And this is tax on tax because the assets have been accumulated out of taxed income.

 

Capital gains tax raises only 1% of total revenues, but it is quite a handy tax-dodge if revenue can be converted into capital.

 

VAT is an absurdity, and it was no more than poetic justice that Osborne was seriously embarrassed by the pasty-tax fiasco.  A chocolate-covered ginger-bread man is loaded with 20% VAT. If only his eyes are chocolate he is VAT-free. It really is that barmy. The serious issue is that the tax-base is very narrow, with rafts of exemptions.  Broadening the base might allow for the total abolition of corporation tax.

 

Stamp duty is an anachronism. It was introduced in 1694. It is a fetter on land transactions, and high time it was pensioned-off.

 

But it will all be a case of plus ca change.

 

The Isle of Man has zero corporation tax, no inheritance tax, a top rate income tax of 20%, 3% GDP growth even in these straitened times, about 2.5% unemployment.

 

I’m alright, Jack!

UKIP misses the point!

There is a critical issue in the EU/immigration debate that has caught fire thanks to UKIP putting it firmly in pole position during their EU election campaign, to the great discomfiture of the main parties. So far UKIP has not exploited this issue.

 

The EU, the Eurozone and immigration are joined at hip and thigh and completely inseparable.

 

The penalty for joining the Eurozone is that members lose control of the monetary system. If an economy hits the  buffers, as it has in virtually the whole of the Club Med, they are disempowered from using the usual remedies; they are unable either to adjust interest rates or devalue. Ireland got into trouble, despite having an exceptionally well-run economic regime, because it was flooded with the Euro deliberately kept cheap by Germany. This set off a manic property boom coupled with criminally risky bank lending and thus to the inevitable crash whilst the Government looked on helplessly.

 

The ECB remedies have been massive public expenditure cuts, austerity and falling incomes. In these circumstances, the only effective course is immigration to other EU countries, and not just within the Eurozone.

 

This tends to worsen the situation in the exporting country because the emigrants will be the economically active. They leave behind the elderly, the sick, lame and incurably lazy. But what they take with them is their purchasing power which reduces domestic demand, for which the solution is to increase exports which can only be achieved through reducing wages still further.

 

What a disastrous merry-go-round!

 

Ø It’s reported that Romanian Roma are responsible for 805 v of street crime in London – pick-pocketing, bag-snatching, ATM fraud, child-begging. Farage should have known that when he got into a pointless ruckus about not wanting Romanians next door.

Get 'on message;, Nigel.............

You have to hand it to UKIP for achieving the nigh-impossible. It has made politics interesting once more.

 

The unwitting allies have been the media. Every time they attack Farage his popularity increases. They mocked UKIP’s posters, smugly saying that people don’t read them anymore; then, to prove their point reproduced them so that they could be seen by millions and read because of the  controversy that was stirred up. UKIP was accused mainly by Labour of ‘racism’ for these posters calling for British jobs for British people. Sounds familiar? Sure; it was first said by Gordon Brown.

 

They tried to rubbish the UKIP candidate for the Newark by-election for something that he said years ago about homosexuality not being a desirable lifestyle-choice but forgot to mention that he made these comments whilst a Tory MEP and the Conservative Party made no comment at the time.

 

We must hand it to UKIP’s spinners. They have done a great job in turning adverse criticisms from the media back on them.

 

Now they have to get on message.

 

There is a problem. UKIP is seen as a two-trick pony. We know that it is against the EU membership and unbridled immigration. But what is it for?

 

It is not getting its message across. It needs a comprehensive manifesto to show that it is a serious contender and is actually for a whole range of policies. Here is how the manifesto might read.

 

·        Health: we are for the decentralisation of the NHS and for its democratic control by elected county boards. We are for the restoration of the Hospital Matron. The NHS is an ungovernable monster, the second biggest employer in the world after Indian Railways. It needs to be localised and accountable.

 

·        The economy: we are for the abolition of corporation tax. The outcome will be business and industry flocking to Britain (and do away with Amazon-style tax dodges).We are for the abolition of NI for the same reason. We are for the abolition of inheritance tax, the most unjust tax of all because it taxes money that has already paid tax. £70 billion can be saved on slimming the still-obese public sector. WE are for a flat rate tax that eliminates both the complexity of the tax code and the army of civil servants that administer it. It will do away with tax evasion, off-shore tax scams, and the tax-avoidance industry.

 

·        Welfare: we are for the abolition of all patronising hand-outs to pensioners, such as winter fuel allowance,  and instead we should return the money to pensioners in the form of increased pensions, allowing them to spend as they wish. The savings on the salaries of the hordes of civil servants who administer these allowances would enable corresponding pension increases. We for stopping benefits to single mothers under 18 thereby discouraging ‘benefits mothers’. Below this age they are their parents’ responsibility.

 

·        Foreign policy: we are for Gladstone’s key principles – no foreign adventures and no lecturing others on how they should govern themselves. The key question always is ‘What vital British interests are involved?’

 

·        Defence: we are for reversing Cameron’s 26% cut in the defence budget at a time when other countries are increasing theirs. He has left us with a navy smaller than at any time since Henry VIII, an army smaller than  before the Napoleonic wars, and a RAF that has grounded many aircraft for want of maintenance.

 

·        Climate change: we are for stopping the erection of more wind turbines. They have done almost nothing to reduce the so-called carbon footprint, produce little power at great cost and exist primarily to provide large subsidies to the operators. A well-concealed fact is that they are a danger to aviation as they interfere with radar transmissions in controlled airspace.

 

·         The EU; we are for total withdrawal from this  monster that is anti-democratic, dictatorial, corrupt, meddling and incompetent. We will save £ billions in the contributions which are a subsidy from the our taxpayers to all other members save Germany. It will  reduce our food-bills that are grossly inflated by the  Common Agricultural Policy that exists mainly to benefit wealthy French landowners. It will greatly reduce the cost of doing business by a bonfire of the mountains of EU regulations. It will allow us to regain control of our own borders. And let’s be clear; UKIP is not anti-immigration per se. We are for the British Government and none other having the power to decide  who comes here. And permanent residence permits will only be granted after an immigrant has been here for 5 years. Benefits will not be payable to immigrants until they have paid tax for 5 years.

 

·        ECHR: we are for ridding ourselves of this interfering body, repeal the HRA, and give full sovereignty back to Parliament and sole jurisdiction to the UK courts.

 

This should just about do it, Nigel.

Those Nigerian school-girls: what's to be done?

It’s time to get a sense of proportion over the Nigerian schoolgirl-abductions.

 

This happened more than a month ago and yet suddenly the story has got legs, with Obama, Mrs O, Cameron and all declaring their shock-horror.

 

To put this episode into perspective, the murderous primitives who call themselves ‘Boko haram’ (books forbidden) have killed more than10,000 people with little reaction from the West. They massacred another 300 at about the same time as snatching the girls; this failed to get equivalent media coverage.

 

What is to be done?

 

BH is apparently demanding a prisoner exchange. If international public opinion forces the Nigerian Government into this, expect many repeat episodes. This is just not going to happen. Neither is force; there will be no Western boots on the ground nor a UN ‘peace-keeping’ force.

 

 

The Nigerian military has already demonstrated that it is totally ineffective. It has the reputation for being very good at ceremonial but not so good at fighting, perhaps because squaddies are reluctant to put themselves in harm’s way when the officers dip their fingers into the soldiers’ pay-packets. The President and political leaders seemed to have been quite relaxed about the episode until the story caught fire in the West.

 

A more likely outcome is that the girls will be sold-off as slaves in Chad, Niger or the Sudan. There are many thousands in these states about which the rest of the world has very little to say.

 

The selective consciences of the West will not admit that much of Africa is a killing-ground. The butcher’s bill in the Congo has been colossal. The West looked on when the Rwandan massacres occurred. The Lords Day mob in Uganda have been at it for years despite the best efforts of the military to defeat a rag-tag of boy-soldiers. Murders and mutilations in Sierra Leone went on for years until a small force of British soldiers put a swift end to it. And so on.

 

The answer is money.

 

Given the Nigerian addiction to the stuff a reward of $10,000  per girl returned and per head of BH should just about do it.

So farewell, then, Lord Fatpang.

 You will not be missed. Your (part) time at the Beeb was an unmitigated disaster that puts the very survival of Auntie in question. Never mind, you can console yourself with your numerous directorships and being lord of all you survey at Oxford University.

 

Sure, you were just out of the egg as a politician when Savile was up to his foul tricks, but you certainly knew all about it way before the mass media got hold of the story. ‘The Oldie’ published months before it broke, and your firm closed its eyes. The BBC was a cesspit in the 60’s and much later but we have heard nothing about action being taken again any BBC staff who were involved. Apart from poor old William De’ath who was under arrest for months before the Old Bill decided that there was ‘insufficient evidence.

 

You completely failed to get a grip on the obscene pay-outs to dead-beats who were given an early bath because of incompetence or because of their mishandling of the various scandals plaguing the BBC.

 

True the BBC is – or should be – a national treasure. But what we, the licence payers, expect is competence, quality, and most of all impartiality and even-handedness especially  in  its treatment of news and current affairs.

 

We are not getting it.

 

For years the BBC has been garnering a reputation for left-wing bias, pro-EU, pro-Palestine, anti-Israel, and other Guardianista causes. Small wonder that the BBC purchases far more copies of The Guardian than of any other newspaper.  BBC TV News wastes money on rolling 24-hour coverage, as if driven to keep up with Ted Turner, and meanwhile haemorrhages viewers to Al Jazeera.

 

Quality seems driven by the lowest common  denominator, that the BBC should chase ratings in competition with the commercial channels. For example, BBC 2 was originally set up to provide for quality programmes of perhaps minority interest.  What is it showing right now? Wall-to-wall snooker! There is endless football, and cooking programmes at peak hours.

 

BBC 3 is aimed at ‘yoof’ who don’t watch much telly these days. It secured a million viewers At least it is for the chop.

 

BBC World was the best news and documentary TV service in the world. CNN International is excellent but lacks the gravitas and intellectual rigour that was once the BBC’s hallmark. (There is one other similarity. Like the BBC, its domestic service is abysmal).

 

Over the last couple of years it has gone down the tubes.

 

It has excellent programmes like Asian Business Report,  Middle East Report, the Doha Debate and many others. Some are still produced but transmitted at GMT so they get to SE Asia at 3 a.m. or other unwatchable hour. It consists of repeated news -16 times in half a day. The Doha Debate was trailed and then we discovered it was a radio broadcast! It still has some of the best presenters such as Zeinab Badawi and George Alagiah who unwittingly show up the poor quality of those on the home service. Even the weather forecast is superior on con competing channels. Take a peak the immaculately dressed and spoken forecasters on CNN International and AJ in comparison with the scruffy mumblers on BBC 1 and you will quickly catch my drift.

 

Now the very survival of the BBC in its present form is in question. It may be forced into becoming a subscription service with the licence fee totally abolished. Technological changes mean that TV will be transmitted in ways that we scarcely understand at this time. The BBC will have to adapt or die. There is scant evidence of this happening at this time; all the energy will probably be concentrated on getting the Charter renewed.

 

The crucial decision is who will replace you. The present line-up seems to consist of geriatrics or insiders. Let’s hope that a big-hitter can be found from outside the metropolitan establishment.

 

One thing is certain. Auntie Beeb is definitely drinking in the Last Chance Saloon.

Nigeria kidnappings: how will the US help?

There is so much going on in Washington and elsewhere that the media is going bonkers in their efforts to carry the stories and fine tune their spin. The mainstream media continues to fawn over Obama's every move while the conservative media is critical to a point of being mean spirited.

 

There is a lot of hate out there which speaks extremely ill of America and Americans. Whatever gains the President may have realized in the area of race relations are gone. Even the smallest racial reference is exploded and expanded by the media seeking to make their point. The entire scene is unpleasant and could well get out of hand with major retrogressions among both whites and blacks.

 

The same applies to our new stand on religious tolerance. We have gone too far which is to say we have moved so fast that the majority of people are having difficulty adjusting to the new realities. We need a period of settling down, cooling off and emphasis on norms.

 

The recent incident with the 100 or 200 or 300 girls taken from their schools in Borno State is a case in point. We are too politically correct to report that the captors were Muslims and the girls were from Christian homes. By the time these facts are reported, the story goes cold.

 

Now, we are debating the US' role in helping Nigeria find the girls and return them home. Fat chance in my opinion as they are undoubtedly scattered all over the place with many already outside the country. I seriously doubt our assistance will extend to our invading Chad or Niger. And why can't Nigeria fend for itself in this matter? Its citizens are all over the free world raising hell through creative scams of every description.

 

It took a good while for President Goodluck Jonathan to even mention the kidnappings.

 

As I recall from my sojourns in Nigeria, its Muslim leaders are most anxious to subdue, quell and even eliminate the Islamic sects that proliferate in the country's northeast region. It was commonly believed during one of the Maiduguri riots that orders were given to the Muslim leaders in Kano by the Saudis that the sect responsible for the riots was to be dispatched as an insult to Islam.

 

This precipitated fast action by all concerned in Nigeria as Saudi money and support were critical to maintaining peaceful tribal relations. Nor did the Nigerian Muslims want to risk having their access to Mecca cut off.

 

 

The UKIP juggernaut rolls on........

‘Be thou  as pure as snow, as chaste as ice thou shall not escape calumny’. This admonition from the Bard is pretty good advice for our present crop of politicians. Muck raking can cut both ways.

 

It is well known that each of the three main parties is spending much time and money on digging up every bit of filth to smear UKIP of Farage or both. And the more they do so, the more UKIP climbs up the polls, profiting from the ‘underdog’ effect that so appeals to the English. It’s the politics of the dung heap.

 

Scarcely a day passes without the ‘outing’ of a UKIP worthy for making some outrageous statement – outrageous, that is, to Guardianistas and PC pundits. But the danger of this is the undoubted fact that all parties attract fruitcakes and weirdoes, some of whom reach the pinnacle of politics. So it is not difficult for Nigel to say ‘And you’re another!’ when charged  with harbouring undesirables.

 

So some examples have been inserted by UKIP into the public domain.

T

hey include a Conservative who stole £150,000 from a pensioner with Alzheimers, a former Conservative councillor found guilty of child sex crimes, a Labour candidate who is a convicted fraudster, and a Liberal Democrat councillor convicted of ‘racially aggravated assault’, a candidate selected to contest a safe Conservative seat in a District Council who was an activist in the BNP, a Labour councillor  who was convicted of lying to the police over a car crash involving her son, a Labour candidate convicted of defrauding the council to which he is seeking election, a Liberal Democrat  councillor convicted of “racially aggravated assault” in a railway station pub.

 

“UKIP thanks to the national media, all other political parties and various trade union- and government-funded lobby groups for the immense amount of work they have put in, to undertake the Stasi-style ‘scrutiny’ of the Facebook pages and Twitter feeds of UKIP’s 2,200 local election candidates – a substantial task which must be costing someone a bundle – and assures them that every offensive remark reported to us will be considered seriously by our National Executive Committee’s disciplinary committee.”

 

Nigel is finessing both the leaders and the media at every turn. It ought to have been abundantly obvious to anyone with three brain cells in working order that Farage had not the slightest intention of standing in the Newark by-election. They all fell for Nigel’s ‘Maybe I will; perhaps not’ dithering. When after several days of media speculation, he finally ducked out, the media were besides themselves with glee; ‘Farage bottles it’ headlines appeared almost  in milliseconds. But they still failed to twig that they had been humbugged.

 

Yet another ‘revelation’ of racist homophobia in the ranks of UKIP was driven quickly off the front pages. Nice one, Nigel!

 

The main party spinmeisters will be far too young to remember Maggie’s telling phrase about the ‘oxygen of publicity’.

 

UKIP has been gulping it down recently. The DT put up no less than three rancorous feature pieces in a single edition last week, including inevitably another vicious rant from Dan Hodges. The Sunday Times had ‘Farage’ in its headline story about Cameron’s take on leaders’ TV debates, an entire page from its political editor spelling out how UKIP is going to carpet-bomb the other parties in the EU elections.

 

Media coverage ranges from unfriendly (Murdoch) to paranoid (DT). And the bigger and nastier the coverage the more UKIP continues on a roll.