Archive for January, 2009
Posted by michael on January 31, 2009
I quite often hear people saying that there is no point voting, either the party they support in their constituency cannot get in or they see all the parties as the same.
But it is worth getting involved and voting for what you want or even voting against what you don’t like!
Your opinion does matter, but not if you are the only person in the world who knows what it is!
And you can influence or even change things by speaking out, writing letters, going to your MP and your local councillors.
Many of the government announcements are attempts to see how people react before they go ahead with legislation. New Labour are scared of people’s reactions – that is why so much stuff is announced quietly or hidden away in some other legislation. For example recently hiding the law changes to allow local councils to charge for recycling and bin collection charges. We are in a democracy (!) but New Labour hide law changes and sneak them in without us knowing.
Another example recently was the vehicle excise duty changes for new cars. They announce changes that most people would have thought were quite reasonable. And then once people had accepted these ideas, they quietly changed the legislation to cover cars up to 10 years old!. What a mess ensued, lots of people lost a lot of money on the value of their cars!
If a government upsets you greatly then vote it out of power as soon as you can. Do the same with your local council. Stand for your local council if you really want to oppose what they are doing.
Join a political party that you feel that you can support. Do what you can to change things. And if the wrong people still get into power then that is democracy in action. As a last straw you can always emigrate!
Posted in Blogroll, Conservatives, economy, Euopean Union, Europe, labour, Lib Dems, tax, UK Economy | Tagged: benefits, cost of living, council, councils, families, government, green, green tax, household, local council | Leave a Comment »
Posted by michael on January 31, 2009
In Europe all the barriers are down between the European states.
ha, ha, that was a joke although it is not that funny!
The UK is one of the most expensive places in Europe in which to live. Everything seems cheaper in Europe compared to the UK. I don’t think that people in the rest of Europe pay as much of their earning in tax, whether direct or indirect (but I am happy to be corrected on this)
We recently saw the builders flocking in from Europe, in particular Poland, to work for much less than the British builders. It put a lot of builders out of work!
Of course companies who tender for private and government building contracts will use cheaper labour if they can. It reduces their costs and they can therefore submit tenders for work at lower prices than the British companies can. It is not a level playing field!
And also, the companies and the workers will probably be paying their taxes in Europe. The workers will be only spending a small amount of money in the UK, most will go to their families in Europe.
The UK loses in every way and it may also have to pay benefits to those British workers who are unable to get work.
No companies should be allowed to bring workers from Europe just because it is cheaper than employing British workers. Surely this goes against everything that Europe should stand for. Or is Europe really just a sham, lots of ideals but very little actually gets done!
Posted in Blogroll, Conservatives, credit crunch, debt, economy, Euopean Union, Europe, labour, Lib Dems, recession, tax, UK Economy | Tagged: building project, cheap, cost of living, credit crunch, foreign worker, labour, low cost, recession, tax, uk, UK Economy | Leave a Comment »
Posted by michael on January 28, 2009
The independent Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) is saying that it expects that the UK government will need to raise taxes or cut spending by an extra £20bn to repair the public finances. It also says that it could be 2030 before the UK gets back to pre crisis levels.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has also predicted that the UK will have the worst fall in economic growth among advanced nations this year. Gordon Brown has rejected this claim by the IMF but this is the man who did not see the recession coming, so why should he be in any position to know what will happen next!
The IMF report also says that taxes are likely to go up more than has been said by the government.
Even if everything goes according to plan, the IFS points out that it will be “the early 2030s before debt returns below the ceiling of 40% of national income” that Gordon Brown set as one of his key fiscal rules in 1997.
We are clearly in a big mess, and it is a mess that is going to go on for a long time. Even once the recession has lifted, people will be paying, through their taxes, for the huge borrowings for a long time. In addition any taxes required to actually do anything new will also have to be levied (unless the country borrows yet more money!)
Posted in Blogroll, credit crunch, debt, economy, financial, recession, UK Economy | Tagged: gordon brown, ifs, imf, recession debt | 4 Comments »
Posted by michael on January 26, 2009
Suburban bail hostels are a success
So says the Justice Minister David Hanson about the government scheme to establish bail hostels in housing estates and residential streets.
But his measure of success is :
the scheme is a success because it has reduced prison numbers.
It ignores everything else about the scheme. The fact that the government has to establish bail hostels in secret and only tell the neighbours after it has been set up, speaks more of the actions of a dictatorship rather than that of an elected government.
What contempt it shows towards the ordinary people (the electorate) who happen to live in the area of the bail hostel! The government obviously doesn’t care about the consequences to the neighbours (the electorate)!
But why are bail hostels needed anyway? New Labour has refused to build prisons. They have left it until the existing prisons were totally full before doing anything about building new prisons and detention centres.
So to cover their obvious failure to plan ahead and have the appropriate prisons and remand centers ready for when they would be ready, New Labour is now in some sort of panic mode, one which involves secretely buying normal houses in residential areas and filling them with remand prisoners so that they can make some room in the real prisons!
Do you have a nice house , in a nice area? Yes, well watch out – you might wake up tomorrow and discover that your neigbour is a bail hostel!
Posted in Blogroll, UK Economy | Tagged: bail, hostel, prison, prisoner, prisoners, prisons, remand | Leave a Comment »
Posted by michael on January 24, 2009
There was a story in the press this week regarding a World War 2 veteran and his problems with his electricity supplier. It highlights a real problem in our society today with how we treat vulnerable people.
If someone has a problem paying their electricity bills the power supply companies install a pre-payment meter, sometimes without the permission of the customer!
On face value this may seem to be the answer, and it may well be so for a few people, but take a moment to consider the ramifications of doing this for the elderly and the vulnerable people in our modern society.
The first point is that the customer will not be able to go into debt to the power supplier. OK I hear you say! But what happens if the customers, mostly people on low incomes who are often vulnerable people through age or illness, have no money to put in the meter?
They will have no electricity. They will have no lights, they may not be able to cook food or have a hot drink, they will not be able to listen to a radio or watch television (if they have one). It could be days before a visitor turns up and discovers what has happened.
A hell of a way to treat a vulnerable person in a so-called civilized society!
What is clear is that pre-payment meters exist solely for the benefit of the power supply companies. It means that they won’t have to sort out debt problems from customers who simply cannot go into debt if they have had a pre-payment meter installed.
Unfortunately the customers are often elderly, sick or vulnerable people who often cannot cope with what is going on around them.
Another aspect of having pre-payment meters installed, and one that I find really appalling, is that the unit cost of electricity is higher than the unit cost normally paid by consumers!
So we have elderly, sick or vulnarable people, who are mostly on fixed incomes, forced to pay more per unit out of their limited incomes on their electricity, and we still cut them off the moment they run out of money!
It is time that prepayment meters were banned where elderly, sick or vulnerable people are involved. Their lives are at risk if they have no power, especially in winter. But the quality of their lives is made so much worse if they are unable to use electricity for basic things like cooking, reading and keeping warm.
Society seems to care so much for people’s rights. There is such a fuss about ‘equality’, we mustn’t hurt people’s feelings, etc. etc. But we don’t mind treating our elderly, sick or vulnerable people in a worse way than we would ever be allowed to treat an animal!
Does the government understand this? Of course it does! If I do then they do. Since they allow pre-payment meters for electricity then they presumably don’t care! Perhaps they have worked out that there are not enough votes in sorting this out to make it worth the effort.
Posted in Blogroll, credit crunch, energy, energy bills, UK Economy | Tagged: electricity, meter, pre-payment, rights | Leave a Comment »
Posted by michael on January 23, 2009
Between July and September over 13 thousand families were evicted. That is one family being repossessed every 10 minutes!
So what happened to Gordon Brown’s claims that he would reduce repossessions and take steps to ensure that people stayed in their houses for now whilst the economy recovered? There has been all sorts of talk about preventing people from losing their homes and being evicted from them. But it does seem to be just talk!
I am sure that there must be some people who were helped but for the reposessions figure to be so high they would seem to be a minority!
One fact that really damages the integrity of this government is that, as owners of Northern Rock, they were actively repossessing homes of people who got into trouble with their payments.
One would have thought that if this government had any influence in the financial markets then they should be able to dictate the activities of Northern Rock when it is owned by the UK and they run it!
Posted in Blogroll, credit crunch, UK Economy, Uncategorized | Tagged: banks, borrowing, credit, credit crunch, debt, families, family, mortgage, recession, repossession, uk, UK Economy | 1 Comment »
Posted by michael on January 20, 2009
I heard an interview on radio 5 this morning which greatly concerned me.
The interview was with the person who was in charge of the department from where the leaks seem to have originated. They said that they called the police because of the leaks. They described the person who leaked this information as ‘disloyal’.
What sort of thinking is this? We are not talking about state secrets or matters of national security. No, the information was only damaging to the government. It was information that should have been in the public domain but Labour chose not to release it because it was embarrassing to them.
So who is being disloyal? The person who leaked the information by passing it to Damian Green, or the officials who chose to suppress it? And what about any more senior people who may have ordered that this information was not released to the public?
If the governing bodies, political or officialdom, choose to suppress information that should be in the public domain, or choose to present information in a way that is misleading to the public, then in my view they are the ones being disloyal to the people of the United Kingdom.
This is the sort of behaviour that I would expect from controlling governments and it is not what should happen in a democracy!
Posted in Blogroll, UK Economy | Tagged: conservative, damien, government, green, labour, leak, leaks | Leave a Comment »
Posted by michael on January 19, 2009
The government is borrowing a lot of money to ‘rescue’ us from the Credit Crunch. The conservatives are not happy with borrowing these huge amounts and propose to cut costs and borrow less to reduce future UK debt levels.
Whatever the politics of these different approaches, people need to understand the consequences of massive debt levels for the future.
All this borrowing has to be paid back. It is the taxpayer who will pay it back and we are already a very heavily taxed country!
We are not just paying back the money that has been borrowed, we are paying back the interest as well!
The amount of money being taken from us as taxes could be four or five times the amount being borrowed. There is always the interest to consider!
We can see this from the PFI debt (the money borrowed to pay for the new hospitals and schools which we still have to pay back). According to a council report a £60 million hospital will cost £300 million by the time all the interest is paid!
We could be repaying the debts incurred by Brown and Darling as a result of the ‘credit crunch’ for the next 30 years!
Posted in Blogroll, credit crunch, debt, economy, tax, UK Economy | Tagged: borrowing, credit crunch, debt, debt mountain, future | Leave a Comment »
Posted by michael on January 18, 2009
Gordon Brown appears to be due to announce a new banks rescue package aimed at encouraging them to restart lending.
It is thought to include a bank insurance scheme which protects the banks against future bad loans.
It would appear that the people in the UK are now expected to have to pay, through their taxes, to ensure that the commercial banks do not lose money from what is now seen as their reckless lending motivated by greed.
It is becoming more and more obvious that the banks should be nationalised in order that the public money being used to rescue the banks would be used to benefit the public and not the directors and the shareholders of the banks.
The banks should not be allowed to keep any profits that they may make in the next few years. All profits (and bonuses) should be paid back to the public purse until the credit crunch and recession is finally over. And attempts to spend all their profits expanding the banks should not be allowed if it is an attempt to spend money that should be declared as profit!
Posted in Blogroll, credit crunch, debt, economy, recession | Tagged: bail out, bank, banks, rescue package | 2 Comments »
Posted by michael on January 17, 2009
The proposed new credit card security checks will detect more fraud, which of course would be a good thing. But I was under the impression that the new ‘chip and pin’ credit cards would prevent credit card fraud altogether!
But apparantly these new security checks will detect more card fraud (so what was the ‘chip and pin’ for then?) , but it will also cause some valid transactions to fail and the payment request to be rejected.
Are these banks and credit card companies living in the real world or do they simply have no concern whatsoever about the problems that they seem happy to give to their genuine customers?
Apart from being extremely embarrassing to have a credit card payment rejected, what on earth is the customer going to do next? They may have purchased petrol or need a ticket to travel or even be paying for a meal that they had just eaten.
If they haven’t got enough cash on them then they are really left in the lurch; they may even risk being arrested for non-payment of goods!
Of course we all want all sorts of unpleasant scenarios to happen to those who are deliberately being fraudulent!
A credit card payment has to fail if the person doesn’t have enough credit, there is not much else that can be done.
But for these problems to happen to people who do have sufficient funds to pay their bills is simply not acceptable!
There is of course a very simple way of resolving the problem. I suggest that people no longer rely on using their credit or debit cards.
Instead they should have enough cash on them to pay their bills and then they would not have to use their cards. In an ideal world people may be able to dispense of their credit cards altogether!
Banks and credit card companies need to understand that their job is to provide a service to their customers!
Posted in Blogroll, economy | Tagged: bank, banks, card, credit, credit card, fraud, security | Leave a Comment »
