Snouts in the Trough

There are articles in the papers about the new tax statements we will be sent. Apparently, there will be two main parts  – a letter laying out our earnings and tax paid (click to see more clearly)

and a page showing how our tax money was spent (click to see more clearly)

At first sight, this looks great. Finally, we’re seeing where our tax money goes. Or are we?

While we should welcome this great leap forward in transparency, I worry that it will give many people the wrong impression about how much our Government really costs us. For example, from this sample letter to the average earner, it looks like they’re ‘only’ paying £842 a year for the NHS, £321 for debt interest, a modest £40 for the EU and a trifling £25 to overseas aid. Seeing this, most people will probably shrug and think something like, ‘well, £40 for the EU and £25 for overseas aid – that isn’t really too much, is it?’

Now, I realise of course that people with above average earnings will have bigger numbers on their new tax statements. But these new “open, transparent” tax statements only cover how our income tax and National Insurance contributions are spent. However, the Government collects and spends an awful lot more than just income tax and National Insurance.

So for example, with a budget of £105bn a year and 30 million taxpayers, the NHS actually costs each taxpayer £3,500 a year (not the £842 per taxpayer on the average earner’s tax statement) which is £1,693 for every man, woman and child in the country. Similarly our debt interest of around £45bn is really costing each taxpayer £1,500 a year (not the £321 on a typical new tax statement) – that’s £726 for every man, woman and child. As for the EU – at £19bn a year, that’s £633 a year from each taxpayer (not the modest £40 on the average tax statement) which comes to £306 for every man, woman and child in the country. And foreign aid – at £11bn a year, that’s £367 per taxpayer per year (not the trifling £25 per taxpayer per year on the average tax statement)  – that’s a massive £177 for every person living in Britain going into the pockets of murderous African kleptocrats and utterly corrupt Indian and Pakistani politicians and bureaucrats.

When you take the total figures per taxpayer or even per person, suddenly things like the EU and foreign aid don’t look so cheap any more.

So, I don’t know. Will the new tax statements really be open and transparent as the Government will claim? Or will they give most ordinary people a completely false and misleading picture of how much our rulers and their free-spending fantasies really cost us?

And remember, my latest book DON’T BUY IT! is now available in paperback and Kindle. So please, show support for this site and DO BUY IT!

Hopefully readers will know that in 2012 George Osborne sold his constituency home, which was been part-funded by his MP’s expenses claims, for an estimated £400,000 profit. Nice work if you can get it! But, of course, everything that Osborne did was “within the rules”. Yet even though he is clearly scrupulously honest with his expenses, has our George been giving a little help to his friends?

You’ve probably seen the news stories about the sell-off of the Royal Mail. The National Audit Office (NAO) issued a report criticising the Government for being “too cautious” and undervaluing the business by around £750m. The minister most under fire was doddery old Vince Cable. The issue was that the shares were 23 times oversubscribed. This meant that anyone who got shares at the very start was guaranteed a massive profit.

So, who were the lucky people who got the shares? Well, Mr Cable explained: “We wanted to make sure that the company started its new life with a core of high quality investors who would be there in good times and bad, interested in Royal Mail and the universal service it provides for consumers over the long term.”

In particular, Mr Cable said he didn’t want any shares going to “spivs and speculators”. However, the NAO said 6 of the 16 “priority investors” selected by Cable had sold all of their allocation within weeks of the float, at a substantial profit.

One of the companies, Vince Cable’s “high quality investors“, that seems to have got in at the beginning of this money-making bonanza was a City hedge fund called Lansdowne Partners. It was reported that Lansdowne Partners got £50m of Royal Mail shares which rose in value to £68m in just the first day of trading.

One of the members of the management committee at Lansdowne Partners was a certain Peter Davies who has been friends with Chancellor George Osborne since they met at Oxford University and who was best man at Osborne’s wedding in 1998.

Normally hedge funds are known for their ruthless speculation and aggressive buying and selling. For example, Lansdowne Partners reportedly made about £100m in the 2007 financial crash by shorting the shares of the collapsing Northern Rock – a practice Mr Cable has repeatedly criticised. So most observers would be pushed to conclude that hedge funds like Lansdowne Partners were really what Cable called “high quality investors who would be there in good times and bad”. Thus it seems extraordinarily fortunate that a company like Lansdowne were judged by Mr Cable to be “high quality investors who would be there in good times and bad“.

Cynics might think the whole thing looks a little fishy. But they would be wrong, totally wrong. After all, a Conservative spokesman said the allegations of Osborne influencing who ‘won the lottery’ by being allocated Royal Mail shares were “completely untrue” and “at no point was George involved in, or even made aware of, the allocations”.

A spokesman for Lansdowne said: ‘To be clear, it is not Lansdowne who directly benefited from these investments, rather British pension funds, charities, universities and others who entrust their money with the firm“.

Oh well, that’s all right then. Nobody is corrupt, nobody is greedy, nobody has expensive dinners (paid for by taxpayers) where dirty little deals are done and hedge funds like Lansdowne Partners are not a bunch of “spivs and speculators”. All is well and we can continue to have complete confidence in the probity of our rulers – politicians, bureaucrats and bankers.

By the way, has anybody noticed a curious resemblance between the lying, cheating, dishonest spiv on the cover of my latest book DON’T BUY IT! and our ever so honest Chancellor George Osborne?

A few days ago, most of the mainstream media went into paroxysms of delight as they announced that the £79m a year Ofgem had asked another regulator – the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) – to investigate the energy market. On this blog, I tried to point out that this was merely a delaying tactic by the useless £79m a year Ofgem as the CMA study would take about 2 to 3 years and that in reality it was the £79m a  year Ofgem’s job to regulate the market.

Finally, one newspaper seems to have realised the truth. Under the title “Pull the plug on Ofgem – nobody will notice” one Sunday Times journalist wrote “The is as abject a capitulation by a regulator as can be imagined”. The article then went on “Ofgem’s job is to police energy companies and look after the public interest”.

On my blog yesterday, I laid out (hopefully clearly) how the Big Six energy companies have repeatedly lied to us and fleeced us for years. Today, I’ll provide a little bit more information to reinforce my argument that the energy companies, ably assisted by the supposed regulator Ofgem, are having a laugh at our expense.

As I explained yesterday, the energy companies claim they have low profit margins of 4% to 5%. But this is just on supplying gas and electricity to households. The companies deliberately keep these profit margins low so they don’t appear to be fleecing us. Where they make the big money is on generating power or extracting gas which they then sell to themselves at vastly inflated prices. Here are just a few 2012 profit margins I managed to find:

And we could also look at the dividends the energy companies paid their owners – often foreign companies. It’s difficult to find good figures as many of the energy companies lend themselves hundreds of millions at artificial rates of interest to hide their profits and reduce their tax liabilities. But here are the significant increases in dividends from 2009 to 2012 for three companies where I could get reasonably reliable figures:

The energy companies are taking us to the cleaners and there’s nothing either our politicians or our regulators are doing about it as they’re in the pockets of the Big Six energy companies.

By the way, my latest book “DON’T BUY IT!” is now available on Amazon in either paperback or Kindle – it would be great if a few people could show some support for this website by buying a few copies for themselves, friends and family.

They seem to be having collective multiple orgasms on BBC news programmes at the moment over the fact that same-sex marriage (SSM) will be legalised this weekend. But the one thing none of our rulers dare mention is the reason why Cameron pushed so hard last year to get SSM (not to be confused with BDSM) legalised – pressure from the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). They don’t mention this because they know there would be a massive surge in support for UKIP if people knew that a European institution was the driving force behind a measure which many find distasteful and/or unnecessary.

In May 2013, you might have noticed an almost unseemly rush in both the British and French parliaments to legalise SSM. What a coincidence that two major EU countries were doing this at almost exactly the same time! So, here’s the real explanation why both countries are hurrying to legalise SSM:

One of the human rights guaranteed by the European Convention on Human Rights is Article 8 – “The right to respect for private and family life”. Just so you know “Private Life “ includes “relationships between homosexuals and their partners with or without children”. Thankfully, for the moment, the Convention makes clear that: “Private life does not extend to the relationship between an owner and his pet”. Though, that could (and probably will) change in the future.

The ECHR had already announced that SSM would be a “human right”, as soon as a few countries had legalised it. By 2013 SSMs were already legal in Belgium, Denmark, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain and Sweden. So the ECHR decided that “the recognition in national law of same-sex relationships had, by our present day, reached a degree that justified a broader understanding of family life as that term is used in Article 8 of the Convention”.

The British Government along with several other governments were committed to “full implementation” of this policy no later than June 2013. That’s why SSM laws were rushed through in several EU countries including Britain and France (click to see more clearly)

If the Government had not passed SSM legislation, then gays could have gone to other EU countries that allowed SSMs and then come back to the UK and demand that their marriage be recognised here. The ensuing legal challenges against the British Government and the resentment against EU interference in our laws that would inevitably follow would have hugely embarrassed our europhiliac politicians – Cameron, Clegg and Miliband.

So, they all supported SSM, but didn’t and still don’t dare mention the real reason why – that this is being forced on them by their EU bosses. And when our leaders claim they’re legalising SSMs because “it’s the right thing to do”, they’re lying.

In France, they were being fed the same lies. President Francois Hollande said “I have taken [the decision]; now it is time to respect the law of the Republic”. But was it “the law of the Republic”? Or was it the law dictated by the wasteful, corrupt, self-serving bureaucrats in Brussels, Strasbourg and Luxembourg?

Sadly, despite my many days’ appeals, none of my readers have been able to find the few pounds necessary to show their support for this website by buying a copy of my recent book GREED UNLIMITED. Perhaps it’s because this website has the poorest readers in Britain? Or perhaps it’s because my readers have generously donated their spare cash to the recent BBC Sport Relief appeal? If you have been handing your hard-earned cash to the BBC’s Sport Relief, I’ve got some baddish news for you.

From what I can see, the two major BBC charity campaigns – Sport Relief and Red Nose Day – are run with a private company registered as Charity Projects (company number 1806414). The supposed aim of this company (which is also a registered charity) is “to seek to spend its money as effectively and professionally as possible. It also aims to raise awareness of its operations both to grant applicants and the public in support of its vision of ‘a just world free from poverty’ and the mission of ‘positive change through the power of entertainment'”.

Charity Projects (better known as Comic Relief) runs Sport Relief and Red Nose Day  on alternate years. Sport Relief raises about £45m to £53m in the years when it runs and Red Nose Day pulls in a much more impressive £70m to £90m in the years when it runs. So, lots of money flowing into this company/charity. But where does this money go? To real charitable works? Or into the bulging pockets of those lucky enough to be living (extremely well) off the British public’s generosity?

Let’s start with how much of the British public’s money is grabbed by those working in Charity Projects. The ‘cost of generating funds’ rose from £9.278m in 2009 to £13.014m in 2010, fell slightly to £12.927m in 2011 before rocketing up to £17.720m in 2012 (I only have the figures up to 2012 as the company’s 2013 accounts have not yet been published by the Charity Commission). So the company has increased the amount of our money it takes for itself by 91% between 2009 to 2012. Yippeee, it’s party time! (click to see more clearly)

And how many “charitable” people work for this great company. This flew up from 180 to 288 between 2009 and 2012

And what about the average employee cost? Again up, up, up!

Remember (see yesterday’s post) the average employee cost at most other major charities is around £25,000 a year. So, employees at Charity Projects get an awful lot of our money compared to employees at other charities.

And what about the salary of the company’s boss Kevin Cahill CBE? Yabba-dabba-doo – up, up up! Up 32% from £99,290 to £130,823 in just 4 years

The BBC’s Comic Relief campaigns (Sport Relief and Red Nose Day) are certainly charitable. But perhaps they’re rather too charitable to the company Charity Projects, its boss and its employees?  Are we being scammed? (IMHO) YES WE ARE!!