Mark Serwotka Talks Sense
He doesn’t very often, but his views in this report are absolutely correct. Lord North must be turning in his grave.
Blair on Fox Hunting
This is in the Guardian’s report on Tony Blair’s new book.
He regrets the hunting sort-of ban, incidentally. He hadn’t understood how important it was to many people. Careless Tony; he should have known. But banning hunting is a class issue of great totemic importance for parts of the Labour tribe and he went along with it. Typical Tony in his early years: inexperienced, ill-read and eager to please.
In other words he didn’t let the truth get in the wayof his gut feelings. How many other decisions he took would have been different, if he’d properly researched the subject and also listened to those with alternative views?
Sarah Brown is an Optional Extra at £12,800
I do find it very tasteless when former useless Prime Ministers tote their services as speakers on the after-dinner circuit. Books are one thing, as you have the choice about buying them and they may contain some interesting nuggets, but who’d pay Prudence about £64,000 for a speech. Perhaps, an arse-licker of the first level might, but I prefer to kick arses rather than lick them.
What however got me about this story, was that Sarah Brown is an optional extra at £12,800 and she will present a prize for that! Most of the women, I know would consider this a supreme insult. C would be laughing like a drain at the ludicrous nature of it all!
Would a Private Firm Ever Buy Anything with Something Like PFI?
It’s grim reading about the problems the NHS is facing over bloated PFI deals.
No-one with any sense would ever have locked themsaelves into such deals. I’m sure people like Tesco have probably used design, build and maintain for stores and depots, but they wouldn’t have ended up paying six times the cost of the building. They’d have also used standard designs to save building costs. I bet each hospital is very different.
The problem is not with PFI, but with the politicians, civil servants and administrators, who pushed these deal through. In a banana republic, I would be smelling the pungent smell of bungs, bribery and favours. But here it’s just bad economics and incompetence. And who was in charge of the country’s finance at the time? So add this to a list of his big mistakes, like pensions, banks, renewing Trident etc. Gordon Brown must rank as the worst Prime Minister any country in Europe has ever had. let lone the UK!
The Shambles of the Regional Fire Control Centres
NuLabor wanted to bring in a set of nine reginal control centres for the fire services across the country to replace 46 control rooms. That was the theory, but read this article in The Daily Telegraph, which details the shambles. The buildings are ready, but the software is not, so they are just standing idle and costing about £1.5 million a month.
I was alerted to this by an article on the BBC local news about the unused centre at Waterbeach. The new government is now saying that councils can opt out of the new centres. In a way, that is compounding the problem.
Surely, one of the main reasons for having a network of identical centres, is that this woulds mean that if say an operator had to move say to another part of the country, they could then be reemployed if necessary at another centre without retraining. I once met a doctor, whose wife was an ambulance controller. When he had moved to Cambridge, she had taken a year to be retrained because all the systems were different. That is rediculous, as we need standard systems for fire, police and ambulance all over the UK. I have heard reliable reports of Chief Constables, who want the best system money can buy, as long as no other force has it.
It should be one size that fits all! As an aside here, when we designed Artemis, there was essentially one system, that could manage projects ofd all sizes. You just specified it with bigger discs and more terminals for larger projects. But then we knew how to design systems properly so they worked. When I see the words government and computer system, because of my bad eyesight, I always read it as a gravy train to disaster.
So these fire control centres should be got up and running as soon as possible and if they are late then the contractors should be liable for the losses. I suspect though, that that is impossible, as the idiot who specified the system and wrote the contract forgot to put in a penalty clause. He or she should be fired! But they won’t be!
That’s a Fine Mess You’ve Got Us In!
I knew the NuLabor project would all end in tears with us footing the bill and the report on the front page of today’s Times, says it all. Why don’t all these failed politicians crawl away into some hole somewhere and not bother us. But once they have tasted power, I suppose they want to keep it!
Coalition of all the C’s
Will it work? Perhaps!
A bit of history should be injected here. My father was very much a left-wing Tory and there are quite a few of them still about; Kenneth Clarke for one.
They have always been pro-welfare and the NHS and Cameron has been saying this all along. They are usually for small government with less state control. I don’t think that the Clegg would object to that.
But Cameron is pro-Trident, pro-business, anti-PR, anti-Euro and anti-Shengen.
I voted for my local Tory candidate, but I’m anti-Trident, pro-Euro and pro-Shengen. John Gummer once described me as a classic libertarian, who should read Hayek. I never have. Perhaps I should.
The problem lies with business and the economy. Here they may well have a lot in common, in that one of the real business problems in this country is all of the regulations that envelop small businesses and stop them growing. And where do eighty percent of all private sector jobs come from? The small to medium business sector. Get this right and this would create their place in history.
They may differ on how much to cut the economy, but perhaps two new brains, Osborne and Cable, may well find that the common-ground they must find actually works.
I wish them well! On the other hand anything will be better than NuLabor.
Remember too, that Vince Cable is a widow, although he has now remarried. He understands pain more than most.
Prudence does Stupidity
We’ve all come out of disastrous meetings and thought about saying something derogatory about the person or persons we have just met. But we all know you might give a colleague a knowing look, that can’t be overseen, but you never say anything that might be overheard.
So when Gordon Brown accuses Gillan Duffy of being a bigot, he was being stupid. Not for saying what he said, but for saying it when he did. After all, he had been miked up by the media, so to forget that he was, perhaps showed that he is not the sharpest knife in the NuLabor box.
Well! Perhaps he might be, judging by the daft policies they keep trying to implement.
Bigot is perhaps a strong word to call Gillian Duffy, but then she may be typical of many who resent the number of East Europeans who have come to the UK in recent years.
But has it ever been thus?
I am descended from Jews on my father’s side and Huguenots on my mother’s. We absorbed a very large six figure number of Poles after the Second World War and countless immigrants from the Commonwealth since.
Some come, some go home, some settle and some move on.
Remember too, that some of the largest inflow in recent years to the UK have been from countries like France and Spain.
Do we complain about them?
Cloud Cuckoo Politics
I listened to Chris Giles of the Financial Times last night on BBC Radio5’s Drive programme. He said that the various parties promises on the deficit don’t add up. They have promised saving in the order of ten billion or so, when documents from the Treasury show that we need to save around three times that much.
I’ve been in Newcastle over the weekend as you have seen and up there, they are worried about losing jobs when the new government cuts and cuts hard. After all large numbers of jobs in the North East are either directly with the government or strongly supported. Many too, are in-line for savage cuts because of new technology.
So would NuLabor tell the truth in the North East? No! But the Tories and the Lib Dems have nothing to lose there, so they would at least do the dirty deed after the election.
So what can be cut, what can be improved and how can we raise more revenue?
There are government programmes that can go like Trident, ID Cards, the two aircraft carriers, the Joint Strike Fighter and some other defence projects. Most though will not show up until about 2017.
I have one bitch on what can be improved in the NHS. Every time I go between my GP and Addenbrooke’s I have to tell the other doctor what the previous one, as the two doctors do not have access to the same database. How much does that cost the NHS? And how many other systems show a total lack of joined up thinking?
When we talk about efficiency savings, that is what we’re talking about and it will cost jobs in the NHS and agencies like the Police. But these will mainly be in back-office clerical areas. Well! They should be, but will government really bite the bullet.
Most taxes don’t raise more than about five billion.
So if you want to raise large amounts of taxes, then you increase the big ones like Income Tax, National Insurance, VAT, Corporation Tax and energy taxes.
Income Tax needs to be restructured with perhaps a 50% top rate and very much higher thresholds at the bottom. But I would allow tax relief on any salary you pay to others. So if you employed a nanny or a gardener, then this would be allowed. This may seem something for the well off, but it would also enable anybody to investigate ideas without having to go to the expense of setting up companies and finding loopholes in the tax system.
In other words you restructure Income Tax so that it is basically tax neutral for individuals but creates more jobs, which therefor will increase the tax take and also decrease the benefit take.
I’d also abolish National Insurance and combine it with Income Tax, as that is what it is, a secondary Income Tax.
At the same time, I’d also abolish Inheritance Tax and put three pence on the top rates of Income Tax. This would mean that a lot of rich people would move here and they would create employment. It would also have other employment benefits as people would do what was best at the time, rather than spend fortune avoiding Inheritance Tax.
I’m afraid VAT will probably have to go up. There is no other way to raise significant revenue. As VAT is generally only paid by consumers, as companies offset it, I would prefer that the tax rises were here, than before people got their money.
Corporation Tax is already high compared to other countries in Europe. If it is raised we are in danger of losing companies abroad. So raising it is a no-no, but lowering it may well raise more revenue as other companies would move here.
Now we come to energy taxes. They should be raised substantially. If coupled with increases in Income Tax thresholds they would publish the profligate. I would abolish Vehicle Excise Duty and just have a Vehicle Registration Fee for every time a vehicle changes hands.
Now, I am a control engineer by training and a lot of this is standard control theory, where you do something and you get lots of secondary effects. You just have to make sure that the secondary effects create jobs and thus raise Income Tax take and reduce benefits.
NuLabor has dug us into a big hole. We will only get out by being radical. Correct that; very radical.
The Anonymous Widower 