Snouts in the Trough

Today the great British Olympian Mo Farah OBE will be running the London Marathon. Oh, how the enthusiastic crowds will cheer him on. And how TV reporters will blether on about how much we all love Mo, with his cheeky smile and his ‘Mobot’ gesture. But does Mo love us quite as much as we love him?

I’ve already written about the glaring scandal of Britain’s 250,000+ Somali community of which over 80% are what we politely call ‘economically inactive’ – figures from the Guardian and the ONS (click to see more clearly)

Actually, there are probably a lot more than 250,000 Somalis here because a few years ago the Dutch government clamped down on benefits-scrounging by Somalis. So, many thousands moved to Britain for an easier and more lucrative life here doing nothing at someone else’s expense. Most will be classed as EU citizens as they hold Dutch passports.

Britain’s Somalis probably cost us well over £2.5bn a year in benefits, housing education, healthcare and policing. This is something that the media (especially the BBC) and politicians don’t often mention when telling us how good immigration is for Britain. If they do mention the Somalis, usually the story is about how Britain’s generous Somalis send around £100m a year to their extended families back in Somalia. Though given how few Somalis actually work, one might wonder where (benefits? crime?) that £100m comes from.

But there is one bright light in this costly multicultural disaster – Mo Farah OBE. Mo was born in war-torn Somalia, but moved to Britain aged eight. And Britain has been good for Mo. I don’t know how much he’s cost us for his trainers and physiotherapists and sports psychologists and all the other things that have enabled him to achieve 2 Olympic gold medals.

A few million pounds? Probably. But wasn’t it worth it when we saw Mo proudly running along after his victories holding the British flag?

And anyway, with Mo Farah projected to earn over £10m in the next few years, we’ll surely get some of that money back in taxes from Mo to show his gratitude about how well Britain has treated him? Umm, well, maybe not. You see our Mo has reportedly recently applied to HMRC to change his place of residence from Britain to the US and this will save him millions in tax.

The athlete, who lives in Teddington, London, has continually spoken of his pride at representing Britain. He once said: “It’s where I grew up. I don’t know nothing but England.” But his non-residency ­application names Portland, Oregon – where he trains – as his main home with wife Tania, her daughter Rihanna and their 17-month-old twins Aisha and Amani.

He has sponsorship deals with Virgin Media, Quorn, Lucozade and Nike, earning him millions and gets about £250,000 a time for running in exhibition events. Mo was paid £250,000 for running only half last year’s London Marathon. I imagine he’ll be getting as much, if not more, for running the full London Marathon today. But if his claim to live in the US is accepted by HMRC, not much of Mo Farah’s huge income will go to the British taxman.

Run, Mo, run! Away from the British taxman!

Hopefully readers will have noticed the frequency with which our masters are using the words “transform” and “transformation”. The latest person to announce he would transform something is Simon Stevens, the new boss of NHS England who replaces Sir David Nicholson, the man responsible for but who never took responsibility for the Mid-Staffs hospital disaster. Simon Stevens has said “only by radically transforming services will the NHS continue to thrive“.

I have a confession to make. In the 1990s, I worked at the management consultancy Gemini Consulting which was part of the Capgemini group

At the time, Gemini Consulting was getting slaughtered in the marketplace by the big accountancies’ growing consultancy businesses. The problem was that the accountancies could deliver the trendy product of that time – BPR (Business Process Reengineering) – for often less than £5,000 per consultant per week. This was much cheaper than the £7,000 plus expenses per consultant per week that we at Gemini charged. The accountancies could undercut Gemini’s prices because they used armies of ‘billing fodder’ (cheap, inexperienced consultants) while Gemini tended to have more experienced and thus more highly-paid staff.

In order to fight back against the lower-priced competition, Gemini tried to find a smart new way of dressing up its services to make them look different and more valuable than those of our competitors. After a few real turkeys, they came up with the idea of ‘Business Transformation’. Gemini’s big chiefs even wrote a book called Transforming the Organization and, if I remember correctly, Gemini tried unsuccessfully to trade-mark the phrase ‘Business Transformation’ as a product only its consultants could deliver.

Reviewing the book at the time, the respected magazine The Economist wrote with great prescience that a true transformation ‘would employ an army of consultants for a century – and cause endless disruption’. (click to see picture clearly)

Most organisations can be improved, but very few need to be ‘transformed’. The great thing about ‘transformation’ was that it enabled us consultants to sell massive consulting contracts where we lucratively, and possibly sometimes unnecessarily, totally restructured our clients’ organisations and also put in huge new computer systems, again lucratively but perhaps unnecessarily.

Eventually, even governments caught the transformation bug. When he was PM, Tony Blair was forever using ‘transform’ and ‘transformation’. He promised us a ‘transformation’ of the NHS, a ‘transformation’ of secondary education, ‘transformations’ of all our public services and even had a meeting with top civil servants where he explained the ‘Seven Keys to Transformation’ which would lead to a ‘transformed civil service’.

Alistair Campbell said history would judge Blair as a ‘great transforming Prime Minister’. Blair’s government helpfully produced a chunky report called The Transformational Government Annual Report in which it detailed the many successes of its Transformational Government programme. The aim of the Transformational Government programme was: ‘Delivering better, more efficient services for everyone’. The programme seemed to be central to the government’s ambitions for improving public services as it explained in typical consultant gobbledegook: ‘Government is committed to a range of citizen-focused activities designed to optimise service design and delivery, and is proud that the United Kingdom is held up as providing some world-class examples of Transformational Government’.

The only thing that transformation has ever transformed are the ever healthier bank balances of the consultants who fool politicians, bureaucrats and business bosses into launching their massive, deluded transformation programmes.

Today I’d like to introduce Mr Otto Thoresen to those readers who may not have heard of him. Otto is head of the Association of British Insurers (ABI). So what? You might think. Well, just as the (IMHO) ghastly, self-serving, greedy, bullying creature Angela Knight defended our corrupt, lying, thieving banks, Otto is (IMHO) doing the same for our rip-off insurance companies (click to see more clearly)

Otto is helping insurance companies (IMHO) defraud us in two ways:

Annuities

About 325,000 people buy an annuity each year. Of these 325,000 well over 260,000 are sold the wrong annuity and so will lose thousands, and sometimes tens of thousands of pounds, during their retirement due to the greed and dishonesty of Otto’s members. There are two main areas of mis-selling:

1. OMO (Open Market Option)  Around 85% of annuitants would be better off buying their annuity on the open market and not from the company that holds their pension savings, yet only about 40% do. So 45% of annuitants are being fleeced.

2. Enhanced annuities About 65% of annuitants should qualify for what’s called an ‘enhanced annuity’ – they have a medical condition which means they’ll have a shorter than average lifespan in retirement and so should get more money. Yet only 24% of annuitants actually get enhanced annuities

This mis-selling costs retirees with annuities several billion pounds a year and thus makes several billion in possibly fraudulent profits for Otto’s lucky members. Yet, in spite of these terrible figures, Otto (in true Angela Knight style) claims there is absolutely no evidence of any mis-selling in the annuities market.

Thankfully, Osborne’s recent budget will hopefully decimate the dreadful annuities market and Otto’s members will have to find some new way to screw us to maintain their multi-millionaire lifestyles. As one financial journalist wrote “repeated criticism of industry practices has failed to budge insurers, the ABI prefers to ignore the problem despite evidence of massive financial harm being caused to millions of policyholders“.

Zombie Pensions

At least £150bn of the £850bn we have saved up in our pensions is stuck in what are called ‘zombie funds’. These are pension funds which are closed and so are no longer taking contributions. There are companies which specialise in buying up these closed pension funds and then, because they have no interest in making our savings grow, they just shove our money into dud investments while siphoning off as much as they dare in supposed ‘management fees’.

But if your money is in a zombie pension, it’s often difficult to get it out as many zombie funds charge massive penalties if you try to move your money to a properly managed pension fund. About two years ago, Otto the Insurer promised his organisation “will look into the impact that exit fees are having on old pension plans”. I think we’re still waiting for the results of Otto the Insurer’s great investigation.

A week or so ago there was a huge furore when the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) announced a review of about 30 million people with poorly-performing or zombie pensions were being treated by Otto’s members. This time Otto the Insurer was pretty quick off the mark making angry phonecalls to the regulator and threatening to write to the Chancellor.

The FCA then seemed to back down. A journalist described the situation “despite the FCA’s attempts to mollify Thoresen and his ABI mates – allowing his members to keep bleeding their policyholders dry by imposing massive charges on older policies – he is still not a happy man” and concluded “meanwhile, for policyholders still facing debilitating pension charges and unable to transfer their funds out because of huge exit penalties, life carries on as before. Truly, the ABI has done itself proud again”

Angela the Banker, Otto the Insurer – are they in any way related? I think we should be told.

In case you don’t know this one, here’s a warning from former Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky (I’ve made just one small change).

“It is really puzzling to me that having just buried one monster – the Soviet Union – another remarkably similar one – the European Union – is being built.

The Soviet Union was governed by 15 unelected people who appointed each other and who were not accountable to anyone. The EU is governed by 28 people who also appoint each
other, meet in secret and are not accountable to anyone and whom we cannot sack.

One might say the EU has an elected parliament; well the
Soviet Union had a sort of parliament too. 
The Supreme Soviet who just rubber-stamped Politbureau decisions pretty
much like the EU does and where speaking time is restricted to political
groupings and with a time limit of just one minute per speaker.

In the EU there are 100,000’s of Eurocrats with their huge
salaries, pensions, servants, privileges and lifelong immunity from
prosecution, simply shuffling from one position to another, no matter what they
do or fail to do. Is this not exactly what life in the Soviet Union used to be
too?

The Soviet Union was created by coercion and very often by
military occupation; the EU is being created, admittedly not by armed force,
but by coercion and economic bullying.

In order to continue to exist the Soviet Union spread itself
further and further. The moment it
stopped spreading it started to collapse and I suspect the same is true of the
EU.

We were told that the purpose of the Soviet Union was to
create a new historic entity the Soviet peoples and we must forget our
nationality, our ethnic traditions and customs. The same thing appears to be true of the EU as they don’t
want you to be British or French, but want you to be a new historic entity, a
European, to suppress all your national feelings and live as a multi-nation
community.

After 73 years the same system in the Soviet Union resulted 
in more ethnic conflict than anywhere in the whole world. In the Soviet Union one of the grand purposes
was the destruction of the nation state and that is exactly what I observe
 Europe is doing today. Brussels intends
to absorb national states so they should cease to exist.

Corruption was built into the Soviet Union system from the
 top down and so it is in the EU. The
very same endemic corruption activity that destroyed the old Soviet Union
thrives now in the EU. Those who oppose it or expose it are silenced or punished –
nothing changes.

In the Soviet Union we have a gulag. I think we have a gulag in the EU as
well – political correctness. When anyone tries to speak their
mind or air views that differ from those approved on race or gender they are
 ostracised. This is the beginning of the gulag, the beginning of your loss of your freedom.

In the Soviet Union they told us we needed a federal state to
avoid war. In the EU they are telling us
exactly the same thing. In short the
same ideology underpins both systems.

The EU is an old-style soviet model presented in western
guise. But again like the Soviet Union,
 the EU has within itself the very seed to its own demise. Unfortunately when it collapses, and it will,
we will be left with mass destruction bringing huge ethnic and economic
problems.

The old Soviet Union system was incapable of reform. So is the EU. But there is an alternative to
being ruled by these two dozen self-appointed officials in Brussels ……… it is called independence.

You don’t have to accept what they have planned for you. After
all, you have not asked if you wanted to join.

Remember I have already lived in your future and it didn’t work.”

Vladimir Bukovsky

You’ve probably all seen the story about the “Right Honourable” Maria Miller – our Culture Secretary. She claimed about £90,000 in expenses to pay the mortgage for a home in Wimbledon south London where her parents lived in a blatant breach of the rules which are clear that expenses are for homes exclusively used by MPs. She also rented a smaller property in Basingstoke which she said was her main home.

The Standards Commissioner recommended that Miller repay around £45,000. But Miller’s fellow MPs over-ruled the Standards Commissioner and Miller only had to repay £5,800 and make a 32 second apology thus pocketing £1,225 for every second of her supposed ‘apology’. But surely if she really was sorry, she’d repay all the money she had stolen from us? As they say, “they’re all in it together”. In addition Miller and her minions are accused of obfuscation, lying and attempting to bully both newspaper editors and the Standards Commissioner.

It’s clear that our thieving MPs have learnt nothing from the expenses scandal and at Westminster it’s “Carry On Thieving“. In today’s blog, I’ll try to expose just a few of the many other ways our MPs are enriching themselves at our expense:

1. Massive increase in expenses MPs are claiming around £30m a year more now than before the expenses scandal broke – that’s equivalent to a lovely £46,000 tax-free a year per MP

2. Rise in staff allowances In 2012, our MPs gave themselves a huge increase in the amount they could claim for paying staff from £115,000 a year to £137,200 for non-London MPs and £144,000 for MPs with constituencies in the capital. A goodly portion of this money, of course, is paid to MPs’ partners, children, friends, lovers and various others with close connections to our MPs. Why MPs should need ever more money to supposedly pay staff, when the EU makes ever more of our laws and MPs have so little to do that Parliament frequently runs out of legislation to fill parliamentary time, is unclear

3. Wonderful pay rise While insisting that public-sector pay should only rise by 1%, our MPs gave themselves an 11% pay rise from £66,396 to £74,000. Yippeee!

4. The ‘government minister’ scam Britain has over 105 supposed government ministers. That’s over twice as many as Germany, Spain, Italy or France. Civil servants have repeatedly complained that they can’t find enough work to keep all these “government ministers” busy. Being a government minister means a salary of around £100,000 (click to see pictures more clearly)

5. Second, third and fourth jobs Many MPs have so little work that they have time for extremely lucrative second, third and even fourth jobs in addition to supposedly representing their constituents. Here’s a brief extract from Tory Tim Yeo’s busy schedule:

A reader has just pointed out that on 9 May 2011, Tim Yeo worked for 17 hours for two different companies, in addition to representing his constituents. What incredible sacrifices our MPs make to enrich themselves. 

6. Most MPs are unnecessary We have 650 MPs at Westminster – one for every 100,000 people. Yet the US has just 435 Members of Congress – one for every 680,000 citizens. With the EU now responsible for agriculture, fisheries, trade, business, social policy, immigration and much more, it’s hard to see why we need so many MPs any more.

So, that’s just a brief look at how our MPs are having a very lucrative laugh – at our expense. Are we being scammed? Yes we are!

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