Courts in Crisis
This is the title of an article in The Times, with the sub-heading “Judges working overtime as cuts and delays put justice at risk”. Read it fully.
Many of my friends are judges, barristers and solicitors and this has been happening for years, but no-one has really stood up to what the Labour government has been doing to justice.
My worry is one that my late wife was very vociferous about. She did a lot of family work, which involved money, child problems and adoptions. She was adopted herself and she never really said, but I suspect it was much more a personal thing, than anybody suspected.
She also did a lot of this work on Legal Aid. Ten years before she died, she was paid more than what she got in her last year of practice. She also got more time for preparation in those far off days and everybody was properly represented by competent solicitors and barristers.
But the cuts in Legal Aid, meant that experienced barristers and solicitors no longer wanted to do this work, as they really didn’t cover their costs and there was more lucrative work available. With the retirement of experienced lawyers, like my late wife, this will all get worse.
And these cases will get handled worse and worse unless the government puts more money in the work.
So should we bother. After all, if people can’t make their marriages work, why should we as taxpayers subsidise their woes?
Yes!
Statistics show that the children of broken marriages are more likely to be the ones that will have problems in the future.
Money-Go-Round
I remembered this term about Rossminster and just out of curiosity I searched the Internet for the term.
I came across this piece on the Bank of England’s web site, with that title. Judging by the picture I think it is about informing children about how banks work.
Banks work because we trust them. We are confident that they will keep our money safe, make it grow and give it back to us when we ask for it. But did you know that as soon as we give the bank our money, it gives it to someone else? This is because a bank is like any other business, the difference being that their product is money. Banks use money to make money.
Make your own conclusions.
Rossminster
Rossminster was a company in the late 1970s and 1980s that were tax consultants. Others thought they were tax avoidance merchants, but as my memory is not that good and it relies on a couple of articles I read thirty years ago in The Sunday Times, I couldn’t possibly comment. But as they got full page articles in The Sunday Times, they were obviously significant or had very good friends.
You have to remember that in those days the top tax rate was eighty percent. Yes! Eighty percent! And therefore there was a massive industry that wasted some of the best brains in the City of London to save people money. Gordon Brown should realise that high tax rates never collect money, as those brains in the City are much better than those at his disposal. And infinitely better than his.
The Sunday Times or some other newspaper christened their methods the “Money-go-Round”, in that if I remember correctly money was moved between accounts and the theory was that if it wasn’t there long enough you couldn’t tax it. I’m probably wrong there, and if anybody knows the real story correct me.
But I know I’m right about lots of accounts and lots of transfers as I was asked to quote for a computer system for the company.
I was introduced to the company by a friend, who was incidentally one of the bank managers to Rossminster. I suspect he saw the potential for revenue for his bank from all those transfers. It would be typical, as he was one of the few bank managers I’ve ever met, who looked upon businesses in a radical way, that was for everyone’s mutual benefit.
In some ways he was a rogue, but a rogue on the side of the angels.
He finally left the bank, as a main board director, to care for his wife who was gravely ill.
One day, I’ll put a book together of the stories he told me. But I’ll wait a few years yet.
The Anonymous Widower 