The First Seat has an 8.4% Swing
Interesting.
The swing to the Tories was higher than expected, but my old school colleague Peter Kellner, said it could be due to a new candidate. The Lib-Dems were down a bit and thankfully so were the BNP.
Does anybody know that Peter was a very good fast bowler at school?
The Binnenhof in Den Haag
The Binnenhof is the complex of buildings in the centre of Den Haag where the Dutch parliament meets.
Note the really high security of two officers in a 4×4.
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?
Stupid Candidates
First we had John Cowan making anti-Muslim comments and today we have Philip Lardner making unacceptable homophobic statements.
Are these prospective parliamentary candidates being stupid or telling the truth?
In my view, there is a fine line between making out-of-step comments and being too-much the party poodle. But then if you want to be different, there are many areas where you can do this without offending anybody with racist or homophobic remarks.
So they’re stupid. And their parties are probably stupid in giving them the chance to stand as candidates.
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.
Are We All Going to Vote Lib Dem?
Possibly!
A poll has shown that people don’t vote for them, as they are unlikely to win. But now some polls show them in the lead, so people want to vote for the winner.
If they got a majority on their own with forty percent of the vote, would they bring in proportional representation?
In some ways, I’d like them to win decisively. We could then join the Euro and the Shengen Zone.
Think Different, Think Plaid
This was the slogan for the Welsh Nationalists today. I thought plaid was Scottish!
Seriously though, the two Nationalist parties can help the removal of this Labour government. If they do, it would make negotiations interesting in a hung parliament.
Zopa and the Election
I am an inveterate analyser of data. After all it’s what I’ve done since I was about seventeen and I successfully explained the shape of the response I got when a small ferrous inclusion in a copper wire passed through an electromagnetic coil.
That was forty-five years ago.
So can all the data I’ve got from Zopa be used to explain how people feel about the election and show how Zopa is affected by what is going to happen on May 6th?
Here’s a graph of my returns since the start of the year.
Zopa Returns - 2010
The four lines on this graph are.
- The rate at which money is lent out in the A* Rate.
- The return on money in Zopa over the last six months. This takes account of any bad debts.
- The return on money over the last year. Bad debts as before.
- The return on money over the last year, adjusted for arrears. Bad debts are accounted for and if arrears are greater than a year ago, they are counted as bad debts.
Taking the last three it would appear that things have changed since the election was announced, as they have all dropped and then recovered slightly. This is solely due to an additional bad debt, caused by the death of the borrower. No system can take care of that very sad event.
Probably the best measure of the return is to look at it in the middle of the month. Today is the 13th, so the return on money over the last year is 5.42%, 5.35%, 5.38% and 5.18% for the last four months. So it has dropped 0.2% because of that bad debt. If that is eliminated then the return for April 13th would actually be 5.37%.
So the election has done what you’d expect and had no affect, as most deals were done whilst the date of the election was not known.
But look at the A* borrowing rate.
If you look at the graph, you’ll see that the rate often drops around the 5th to the 10th of each month. This is probably because most loans are paid around the turn of the month and the effect of that money being reinvested is to drop the loan rate slightly because of the supply of money being increased.
But this month it has dropped further than normal after creeping up slightly for the last month or so. Perhaps the rate has increased because of high demand for money.
Could this be that as reported retail sales have been high this month and people are borrowing at a rate they trust to finance it? Or are they worried about the new government increasing VAT?
But really there is no hard and fast evidence that Zopa is being seriously affected by the election.
I shall return to this as the elction approaches.
David Starkey and the Canadian Solution
I watched the political programme on BBC1 last night, This Week. One of my favourite broadcasters, David Starkey, gave a history lesson about Canada. He has a reputation for being difficult, but I needed to borrow a picture from one of his books for a web site and he was charm personified.
Fifteen years ago, the dominion was in a terrible mess, with massive borrowings and a stagnant economy. The new government cut very deeply and within three years many of the problems had been solved. Now Canada has the strongest growth rate of the countries in the G7.
Whoever wins the election must cut and cut very deeply. But they won’t!
The Anonymous Widower 