Everyone will have their own opinion of the Greek farce/tragedy currently being played out in Europe.
On one side: Many will feel the Greeks should pay back what they’re borrowed and then stolen or wasted. Plus they’ll feel that the Greeks need to transform their economy from a corrupt, Third-World kleptocracy run in the interests of a tiny rich elite into something more resembling a modern European country.
On the other side: People will recognise that Greece is bankrupt and has no chance of repaying its debts; that the Greeks – with the connivance of the empire-building eurocrats and the help of bankers from Goldman Sachs – fiddled its figures so it could join the Eurozone and feel that the French and German banks which made huge loans to Greece should suffer for their mistakes and that it’s time to put together an economic recovery plan for Greece’s collapsed economy and suffering population
I normally like to write my own blogs. But this article from the Torygraph about the EU’s attempts to crush the Greek rebellion against the EU’s failing policies is so good, that I recommend it to readers as I could never write anything so accurate and so filled with righteous anger at our EU rulers’ stupidity:
Here’s an odd coincidence. There are probably around 4 million people in Britain over the age of 75 and about 4 million M*sl*ms.
Many of those over 75 will have worked and paid taxes most of their lives. Some will have fought against our German friends to preserve Britain as an independent country. But sadly, due to the state of our national finances, we can’t afford to give our elderly decent lives and decent pensions. In fact, we’re forever being told that our ageing population is a ‘burden on the NHS and social services‘.
Now let’s look at our 4 million M*sl*ms. According to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), around half our dear M*sl*m friends don’t work, don’t make an economic contribution to our country and even admit they don’t want to work and don’t want to make an economic contribution to our country (click to see more clearly)
But then why should Britain’s M*sl*ms lift a finger when they can get everything for free? Benefits, housing, healthcare, education – they can have what they want. And oddly, we’re never told that the huge number of M*sl*m babies are a ‘burden on the NHS’ and it’s never suggested that the large number of workless M*sl*m households are a ‘burden on social services‘.
Now, just imagine if we could get the level of M*sl*m economic inactivity down to the level of other ethnic groups. That would mean at least one million more people in employment and would save us at a guess about £20bn in benefits a year. Now divide that £20bn by the 4 million grannies and grandads aged over 75 and that would give around £5,000 a year extra for each of them for increased pensions and better care. Of course, many of them wouldn’t need this. So we’re probably looking at £10,000 each for the 2 million pensioners who are considered to be living in ‘pension poverty’.
But, of course, our Government’s policy is to take from those who have given and give to those who take. So we’ll carry on being bombarded with messages about how our increasing numbers of elderly are a ‘burden’ and nobody will ever mention that our increasing numbers of M*sl*ms may be the real burden that we cannot afford as to dare to suggest that would be politically incorrect and even waaaccciiiisssttttt!
(Just a small but significant aside which shows how political correctness is perverting any discussion of the problems of multi-culturalism. When the ONS produced the chart above, they titled it “Around a third of Bangladeshis and Pakistanis…..”. Here’s the original ONS chart with the original headline:
Sorry, but if you look at the chart it’s not “around a third” it’s quite clearly “almost half”. That’s why I had to replace the ONS headline with my own, more accurate headline. So, why did the ONS write “around a third”? Because “around a third” wouldn’t make much of a newspaper story, whereas “almost half” really would give journalists something to get their teeth into. Given that most journalists are lazy and mathematically-illiterate, it’s clear the ONS got away with “around a third” as no journalist made the effort to actually look at the chart and see it was “almost half”)
An interesting event in tiny Denmark. Just like in Britain, the opinion polls failed to predict an election victory by centrist parties who actually dare to be against mass immigration and the *sl*misation of Europe.
Why did the opinion polls fail yet again? Because we’ve all been so cowed by the politically correct in the media (BBC, Channel 4 etc) and all the supposedly ‘progressive’ opinion leaders, that we’re afraid to admit our real feelings about the M*sl*m invasion of Europe and the destruction of our countries and our identities. But when we get into the privacy of the voting booth, that’s the only chance we have to express our real anxieties about what our rulers are doing to our countries
Here’s the brilliant Pat Condell on YouTube ( 5 mins video) lamenting how we are giving up our right to free speech because of our fear of upsetting the lunatics and fanatics from the increasingly oppressive, fascist and triumphalist Religion of Peace:
Yesterday Osborne was crowing over the fact that 43,000 more people found jobs last month as the economy continues to grow. And looking at the economic devastation crushing socialist Southern Europe, we should be very glad indeed that the British electorate stepped back from the brink of disaster last month and rejected mad Ed MiniBrand’s plan for bankrupting our country.
This week I was in London and the amount of money being spent in shops, restaurants and on property is truly staggering. But there’s a chart (which I hope readers will find interesting) which suggests that beneath the headline good news, quite a lot of people are people are not eating out every day in expensive restaurants, buying designer clothes and purchasing multimillion pound homes:
The chart shows both employment and earnings. The blue line, measured against the left hand axis in millions of people, shows the total number of people aged 16 and over in employment over the preceding three months. The red line, measured against the right hand axis in pounds, shows the average weekly earnings adjusted for inflation (so they are in today’s prices), excluding bonuses and arrears.
What does the chart show? Employment growth since we passed the pre-crisis peak in late 2012 has been at a faster pace than before the crisis, leading to new employment records being set almost every month. Although the April figures were slightly worse than March, this is unlikely to be anything more than a temporary blip. However, many of the new jobs must be poorly paid as real average earnings are still well below the peak in 2009 (by almost £30 per week), although they have been growing strongly since June last year.
So, some good news on employment. Moreover, this will hopefully lead to reduced spending on benefits. But when you consider that the top earners have managed to hugely increase their earnings in spite of the financial collapse and recession, there must be a lot of people out there who are really struggling.
Oh, and in the Times today there’s a story that’s so absurd you couldn’t have made it up. Apparently the economically-illiterate, financially-incontinent Ed Balls – the man who helped the useless sociopath Broon waste £1.5trn of our money and almost bankrupt Britain – is heading off to Harvard for a year to research “financial stability”.
Well, Charles Dickens’ Mr Micawber has already taught us all Ed Balls ever needs to learn about financial stability:
So now there’s no need for Ed to go to Harvard for his important research after all.
One underlying theme of my books like SQUANDERED, FLEECED, PILLAGED and GREED UNLIMITED is that, whatever our governments (of whichever party) say, what we’ve actually had in Britain over the last 30 years has been a massive redistribution of wealth away from from those on lower and middle-range earnings and into the bank accounts of the well-off and the seriously wealthy:
Perhaps this is most apparent in housing:
House prices have shot up much faster than wages (click to see more clearly):
In 1985, the average house price was around 3.5 times the average wage, now it’s around 10 times the average wage. But then what else would you expect when successive governments have allowed 46,000 people a month to flood into Benefits Britain for the last 15 years?
The house-price rise has resulted in a massive drop in the percentage of younger people owning a home, while the percentage of older homeowners has remained fairly stable:
While rising prices may have kept the young out of the market, they have, of course, led to huge growth in the buy-to-let market:
The rush into owning buy-to-let properties has put further upward pressure on house prices making it more difficult for the young to buy, thus giving more to those who have and making the chance of owning a home ever more remote for those who have not.
In just the last 10 years, the number of buy-to-let properties has almost doubled from just over 2 million to over 4 million:
Many of the people purchasing buy-to-let properties are doing so in desperation as their savings get little to no interest and their pensions are being looted by pension fund managers. But that rise of over 2 million buy-to-let properties means about 2 million younger people are renting now whereas just 10 years ago they could have been owners.
Some buy-to-letter have made fortunes, others are probably just keeping their heads above water. But now many older parents find they are having to use their savings, cash in their pensions, downsize or take out usurious equity release loans to get their offspring into the home ownership game.
But all may not be sun, light, money and laughter for the happy buy-to-letters. Tax changes tend to follow social changes. A big social change has been the rapid growth of buy-to-let. While owner-occupiers no longer get tax relief on their interest payments, the Treasury would be able to squeeze another £14bn a year out of us if it removed tax relief on buy-to-let mortgages.
I wonder how much longer our cash-strapped, financially-incontinent, overspending Chancellor will allow that lovely £14bn to slip through his fingers?
If I was a buy-to-let landlord (which sadly I’m not) I’d be looking at what would happen to my profitable little buy-to-let empire if I (and all the other landlords like me) suddenly found our mortgage tax relief were to disappear.
Officially there are around 2.8 million M*sl*ms in Britain making up 4.4% of the population. So, taking account of illegal immigrants and the fact that several hundred thousand ‘Dutch’ Somalis may have moved here because benefits in the UK are much better than in the Netherlands, there are probably at least 3.5 million. But that’s still only around 5.5% of the population.
However, has anyone else noticed that despite being only around 5.5% of Britain’s population, stories about Britain’s M*slims make up 30% to 50% of each day’s news? The big story today – some M*sl*m women and their children have left Britain and probably gone to join ISIL. This is being reported as some kind of great tragedy for our nation – here’s a typical politically correct newspaper headline Nine British children in grave peril amid fears mothers took them to Syria to join ISIL – and hundreds of thousands of pounds of our money will be wasted on the police trying to find out what happened.
But I suspect most people in Britain will be relieved that these idiots have gone and will be hoping they never come back.
Then yesterday the big story was the British moron who became the youngest UK suicide bomber. Again his death was reported as some great loss for our country and little mention was made of the real victims – the eleven people killed by this murdering psychopath. I suspect most people in Britain will be delighted that this bearded a***hole is now f**king virgins in Paradise and will feel our country is a much better place without him.
Every day there are more stories about the 60,000 migrants (mostly M*sl*ms) who have been ferried across the Med by European navies eager to help people smugglers and our leaders are telling us how enriched our country would be if we allow thousands of them to come to Benefits Britain. I suspect most Brits will view their inevitable arrival here with fear and horror.
There are estimated to be 1.8 billion M*sl*ms in the world making up about 25% of the population. But though M*sl*ms are just 25% of the world population, they seem to account for about 80% to 90% of world conflicts.
In Thailand, M*sl*ms have been fighting the majority Buddhists for decades. In India there’s regular trouble between M*sl*ms and the majority Hindus. M*sl*m Pakistan is at daggers drawn with Hindu India and within Pakistan M*sl*ms are eagerly slaughtering each other. Across the border in Afghanistan there’s a very uncivil war between M*sl*ms. In China, there have been years of problems with their M*sl*ms. In Myanmar, the majority Buddhists are so fed up with M*sl*m violence that they’re throwing them out and sending them to M*sl*m Malaysia and Indonesia. In the Middle East, we’ve had more then half a century of M*sl*ms trying to destroy tiny Israel. And now across the Middle East, M*slims are both slaughtering the few remaining Christians they can find and also busily slaughtering each other.
Meanwhile M*sl*m terror attacks are increasing across Europe and in the USA.
In fact, the only current conflicts I can think of not involving M*sl*ms is the small fracas between Russia and the EU in the Ukraine and the occasional low-level guerrilla warfare in some impoverished South American country.
And when there are ‘good news’ stories – scientific advances, acts of courage, artistic achievements – they seldom if ever involve M*sl*ms.
Faced with this torrent of news about the problems being caused by M*sl*ms across the world, if one was a stupid waaacccciiiissssttt like me, one might begin to wonder whether M*sl*ms are always ‘bad news’.
The charity NSPCC (National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children) is running a TV campaign asking for money. I wasn’t paying attention yesterday evening, but as far as remember, they were requesting people send a text donating ‘just £3’ each to help the charity with all the wonderful things it does.
But before I send any money, I like to look at how charities actually use our money.
The chief executive of the NSPCC earns (sorry, I meant ‘gets paid’) between £130,000 and £140,000 a year. The NSPCC is apparently reluctant to reveal his actual salary. But let’s say he’s on ‘only’ £130,000 a year, then 43,333 people would have to donate £3 each just to pay this gentleman’s rather generous salary.
Then there are another 5 NSPCC bigwigs earning (sorry, I meant ‘getting paid’) over £100,000 a year (2 on £120,000 to £130,000, 2 on over £110,000 to £120,000 and 1 on £100,000 to £110,000). You get a fair pile of money from working in what’s mistakenly called the ‘voluntary sector’!!
If we assume these other lucky folk are earning (sorry, I meant ‘getting paid’) a total of £560,000, then with donations of £3 per donor, the NSPCC would need 186,666 donations just to pay these executive salaries. So, in all the NSPCC would require about 230,000 donations of £3 a time to pay for the no doubt excellent work of these good people.
As for the NSPCC’s staff. Well they don’t seem to be doing too badly either. The NSPCC’s 1,810 employees cost donors £70,801,000 last year. That’s an average cost per employee of a pretty healthy £39,116. In comparison, the average employee cost at other large charities is significantly lower than the NSPCC’s £39,116:
Moreover, I suspect the ‘please text just £3’ wheeze is just a scam to get people’s phone numbers. The same scam is often used by street chuggers (charity muggers). Then once the charity has your phone number, they give it to a professional fund-raising company with a tele-sales operation and they then phone up all the £3 donors and try to convince them to set up a direct debit to the charity. The sales pitch used by the tele-sales fundraisers is usually something like ‘we know you’re interested in supporting this charity as you’ve already donated, so wouldn’t you like to blah blah blah direct debit blah blah for just £10 a month blah blah…..’
For each mug who does set up a direct debit, the fundraising company will probably get around the first £100 of that mug’s donations as its cut for convincing the mug to sign up. So if you were to agree to a pretty generous £10 per month, then almost all your first year’s donations would go into the bank accounts of the multi-millionaire owners of the fundraising company. If you only gave £5 a month, then almost your first two years’ donations wouldn’t go anywhere near the charity of your choice.
And anyway, some people might wonder why, when Britain already has 87,442 social workers costing taxpayers over £3bn a year, we even need the NSPCC’s highly-paid executives and 1,810 well-rewarded staff at all.
So, will I be donating £3 and (in the process) handing over my phone number to these (IMHO) over-paid, dishonest shysters? Nope.
Here’s the NSPCC commercial in case you want to send a text donating ‘just £3’ and give them your mobile phone number so they can harass you for more money https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gr-UPt54AlM
Here they come. The hordes from the worst hell-holes of Africa and the Middle East. They’ve destroyed their own countries through their stupidity, ignorance, laziness, tribalism and religious bigotry and now they’re heading for Europe so they can destroy our countries too:
How many will come? Maybe 500,000 this year? Maybe a million next year? Maybe more? Who knows? Once the word gets out that European countries are providing free ferry services with food and medical care, millions more migrants will be heading our way.
It’s astonishing how Britain, while firing 20,000 troops to save money, can afford to send ships and helicopters to help people smugglers get very rich indeed.
Soon the bleeding-heart liberal lefties and courageous Guardianistas will be filling our TV screens claiming that it’s our duty to take in thousands of these people. We’re already being softened up by politically-correct TV news broadcasts. Every time they interview someone from the Middle East, the person claims to be a highly-qualified engineer. Odd how they turn out so many engineers in countries that don’t even teach science in their schools because they’re too busy teaching religious intolerance. And if it’s an African, they always claim to be an oppressed refugee and are never asked how many thousands they have paid people smugglers for their trip to the benefits paradise of Europe and especially Benefits Britain.
Well, I’ve got an idea. If the lefties want us to take these people in, why don’t they pay for them? Let’s set up a charity to resettle African and Middle East migrants in Britain. First, like so many charities, this charity will need expensive offices in the centre of London and a bunch of highly-paid, highly-pensioned executives and pen-pushers. That’ll cost a few million a year.
Then we have the cost of resettlement. Let’s assume each migrant will cost us about £20,000 a year in housing, benefits and other public services and let’s assume it will take about five years for each migrant to be contributing to our economy, then that’s £100,000 needed for each migrant.
Thus anyone who wants to bring these migrants to Britain can contribute from their own salaries to the resettlement charity and, after the costs of the fine central London offices and the generous salaries of the charity’s executives and pen-pushers are paid, for every £100,000 collected the charity should be allowed to bring one migrant to Britain.
Doing this would give the lefties the opportunity to put their own money where their big mouths are. It would be interesting to see how much money this new charity would actually collect.
So come on lefties and Guardianistas, set up your charity, contribute your own money and pay for these migrants yourself. The rest of us don’t want the migrants here and we can’t afford to pay for them.
Plus we don’t see the point of filling our country with people who hate us:
and want to reduce our country to the primitive Third World hell-holes that they’ve just come from:
Just continuing yesterday’s theme about how the recession has led to probably the greatest shift in money from the poor to the rich in British history.
Figures have just come out showing that the ratio of the pay of the bosses of Britain’s top 100 companies to the pay of their average employee has reached 149 times. At the beginning of the recession in 2009, the ratio was only 120 times and about 10 years earlier, in 1998, it was a mere 47 times:
There has been a massive explosion in executive rewards, while the pay of their workers has moved up much more slowly. Over the last 30 years, the pay of the average worker rose by a factor of four from around £6,500 to £25,900. Over the same period, pay packages for directors of our top 100 companies rose by a factor of more than 60 from an average of £77,000 to today’s average of about £4.8m
Many of these CEOs will claim they only earn just under £1m a year. But with all kinds of bonuses and share rewards, the average taken home by CEOs at £4.8m is more than four times their basic salary:
CEOs and their cheerleaders will, of course claim that they deserve all that money because of the wonderful results they produce for their shareholders. But in the 15 years since 2000, the value of Britain’s top 100 companies has dropped by about 31% (after taking account of inflation) while the average pay of their bosses has shot up over 300%:
We’re seeing a perfect example of what’s called the ‘principal-agent problem’. The ‘principals’ of any public company are the owners – the shareholders. The ‘agents’ are the executives employed to run the company, supposedly on behalf of the owners. But too often there can be a conflict of interest. The principals want the agents to produce good dividends year after year and to increase the company’s share price. But executhieves may see their positions as once-in-a-lifetime opportunities to enrich themselves as fast as possible and to hell with the shareholders.
So, my message to you is:“Work harder! Your bosses clearly desperately need ever more money and you clearly don’t!”
(By the way, I’ve just reissued my book GREED UNLIMITED slightly updated to reflect the fact that the Coalition has been replaced by a Tory government. If you’ve already bought the original version, don’t buy the new one as so little has changed between the Coalition and Cameron’s new government that the changes in the book are minor. After all whether you look at business, politics or the public sector, all you’ll see is unlimited greed, unlimited snouts in the trough of our money. But if you haven’t bought the original, I’ve dropped the price of the new book as paperback or ebook, so maybe now is the time to buy it?)
I don’t know how the recession has affected you. It could be negatively. You might have lost your job or else know people who have. You might have seen prices rise much faster than your earnings. You might have found you get little to no interest on your savings. You, or people you know, may have felt themselves forced by low interest rates on savings to move money out of safe savings accounts into risky stock-market investments or unit trusts. You might have bought an annuity at pathetically low interest rates. You, your children or grandchildren may be getting milked by usurious university fees.
Or you might not even be aware of the effects of the recession as they’ll have affected you indirectly through fewer public services – police, doctors, hospitals, social services all being squeezed – due to lack of money as billions of your taxes were handed over to over-paid, over-bonused, incompetent, greedy bankers.
If you want to share your experiences, just click on the title and leave a comment.
Alternatively, you might have had a wonderful recession – your mortgage payments may have dropped sharply; your home may have shot up in value due to the housing crisis caused by 46,000 immigrants coming to Britain every single month for the last 15 years; you might even have built up your own little buy-to-let empire to profit from the housing crisis; your shares may have risen if you bought any time during 2008 to 2015; or you might have got a better-paid job in the post-2012 recovery.
If you’re very rich indeed, you’d have had an excellent recession.
In 1990, you needed just £50 million to make it into the top two hundred in the Sunday Times Rich List. By 2008, you had to have £430 million to join this august group. By 2012, in spite of the recession, the entry level into the top two hundred had crept a little higher to £450 million. And by 2015, you’d need closer to £550 million to be in the top two hundred.
Even the comfortably rich seem to have nonchalantly shrugged off the economic chaos engulfing the rest of us. In the last ten years, take-home packages of FTSE100 executives trebled from an average of £1.5 million to around £4.8 million. Yet in the same period, the value of most of the companies they managed declined.
And if you’re a politician, you’d have earned so much from thieving your expenses and doing second, third and fourth jobs on the side, while pretending to represent your constituents, that you’d be pretty stupid if you weren’t a multimillionaire.
In fact the rich, the super-rich, the mega rich and the hyper rich have never had it so good. The share of British national income taken by the top one per cent of earners was a little under twenty per cent just after the First World War. This fell to just above six per cent by the mid-1970s as the economy grew, more people became more prosperous and successive governments sought to reduce inequality by taxing the rich more and distributing more of national income to the deserving and undeserving less well-off. But over the last thirty years, the share of income taken by the top one per cent shot rapidly upwards. By the 2007 economic collapse it had reached 1918 levels. Since the crash, it has gone even higher:
If you want to find out if you’re amongst Britain’s super-rich, rich, comfortably off or struggling poor, the Institute for Fiscal Studies has an on-line tool you can use. All you need to input are your annual household income, your council tax and the number of people in your household. You don’t need to input your name or any personal details. Here’s the link if you want to have a look https://www.ifs.org.uk/wheredoyoufitin/
David Craig, on June 21st, 2015
