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By  David Craig, on December 22nd, 2013 My thanks to the readers who have put up with my ranting and raving over the past year. But now is the time to relax with family (however weird and wonderful they are) and friends (hopefully less weird and wonderful). It’s not the time for my Cassandra-like prophecies of impending doom and gloom. So I propose to take a break and start up again on 3 January 2014.
In the meantime, there’s one favour you could do for me. Over the holiday break, be intrusive, be controversial, be unbritish and talk to your family about “money“.
If anyone you know is planning to:
1. Put any money into an “investment” sold by their bank (like some kind of supposedly “guaranteed” growth bond) tell them not to. They’re rubbish for reasons I’ve explained on my blog
2. Put money into unit trusts. Tell them not to and instead to just buy a few shares in a few “blue chip” companies (Shell, GSK etc) reinvesting the dividends in more shares. Their money will perform much better than in a lousy, expensive unit trust
3. Put money in a SIPP. Tell them to buy shares in “blue chip” companies with their SIPP money and do NOT, repeat NOT put their SIPP money into an overcharging, underperforming fund to make their fund manager richer and themselves poorer
4. Buy an annuity. First tell them to make sure they get an enhanced annuity – giving them more money each year due to their medical condition. Secondly, to delay buying an annuity as long as possible as they will certainly develop a medical condition entitling them to an enhanced annuity between the ages of 65 and 75. And they may even pop their clogs – better their money goes to their heirs than to a greedy annuity provider. And thirdly, tell them to make sure they use OMO (the Open Market Option) and buy their annuity from the company offering the best rates, not the company where they have their pension savings
5. Take money from an equity release. Tell them no, no, no! Let them beg, borrow or steal. But don’t take out an equity release loan. If they borrow £53,000 (the average equity release loan) at 65, they’ll owe about £200,000 by the time they reach 85. But if their children added this £53,000 to their mortgage, over 20 years they’d only pay about £90,000, leaving the family as a whole £110,000 better off.
And if anyone you know is amongst the 11 million people who pay from £13 to £15 or more a month for their bank current account – because they believe they’re getting lots of useful extra insurance and other bits and bobs – are they sure they’re really getting value, when many banks will run their current accounts for free?
One thing you could do, as a New Year’s present, is to buy the people you know and care about a copy of my book PILLAGED! How they’re looting £413 million a day from your savings and pensions. I only get about £0.10 for every book sold. So I don’t really care if I sell 1 or 10 or 100. But if people read PILLAGED and understand how they’re being fleeced by financial services insiders, they could save themselves and their families thousands and even tens of thousands of pounds – not a bad return on a six or seven quid book!
Reading Pillaged may help those you know have a more prosperous New Year.
By David Craig, on December 20th, 2013 Anyone who claims that Britain can cope with the current rate of immigration of almost 400,000 people a year is either a liar, a fool or both. Britain’s population is growing too fast (click to see more clearly)
But a key indicator of our quality of life is not just the population density of the country, but what happens in our major cities. A typical Asian mega-city has around 40,000 to 60,000 people per km2. And this is what daily life looks like:
Yes, it looks like Hell!
A typical British city has “only” around 4,000 to 6,000 people per km2. Though I suspect there are areas of London and Birmingham that are fast approaching Asian mega-city population densities:
Britain is already full and our cities are full.
Being in Asia for a couple of months makes you realise the hell that awaits our children – noise 24 hours a day (screaming, shouting, car alarms, car horns, lorries, constant loud music), streets where swarms of people and cars can hardly move, pollution, rubbish that piles up, homeless people sleeping rough, beggars on every corner, people urinating and defecating and utter filth everywhere. We’ve already got a small foretaste of this from the Roma gypsies sleeping rough in London.
This is going to get worse, not better.
The EU wants to flood Britain with Europe’s unemployed and unemployable and get us to pay for the EU’s widespread corruption and economic collapse. We can’t afford to take in millions of the EU’s unemployed – whether decent people or (more likely) benefits-scrounging and criminal trash – and we’ve no room for them.
And Human Rights laws mean that anyone from any Third World hell-hole can stay here and bring their extended families who can then bring their extended families who can then bring their extended families and so on whether they work and obey our laws or whether they are criminal scumbags who are a threat to our society.
Is this really the kind of teeming, overcrowded, fetid, foul-smelling Dystopia we want for our children and their children? We need to save Britain! We need to reclaim control of our borders! We need to vote UKIP!
By David Craig, on December 20th, 2013 Not every Westerner in the L*nd of Sm*les is having fun, fun, fun.
Here in the J*mtien/P*tt*y* area (or “Moscow-on-Sea” as it is called due to the huge number of Russians) there are two Farang (Westerners) who don’t seem to be having an enormous amount of happy, happy, happy. They spend all day, every day, walking around the main streets rummaging through stinking piles of garbage and fetid rubbish bins collecting glass and plastic bottles. I guess they then sell these to a recycling company – probably for a pittance.
Here’s one of the men hard at work: (click to see more clearly)
I don’t have a photo of the other one. I’ve seen them both for the last 8 years, though they probably were already hard at work before I came here for my first diving holiday.
I often wonder how they ended up on the lowest possible social rung in what is still a Third World country. I suppose they came here and started to party. Then they partied and partied and partied. Many Farang seem to get carried away by the fact that they can spend every day and night surrounded by adoring, attractive girls (or boys or ladyboys or whatever takes their fancy). Perhaps it’s because they never managed to get this kind of attention in their home countries? Gradually these men lose control and become “walking wallets” for the ever-smiling but cash-hungry locals. As they say here “money number one”.
Anyway, eventually the money runs out and it’s a case of “no money, no honey”. Then the Farang has three possible choices. He could go home and admit to friends and family that he’s made a fool of himself and, although he has made a generous contribution to the local economy, he is skint. Or he could find a convenient balcony (sixth floor and above recommended for best results) and join the P*tt*y* Flying Club. Or he could try to earn a pittance rummaging through piles of foul-smelling, fly-ridden garbage full of rotting food, used nappies and many other unmentionables as, being a very hot humid country, the L*nd of Sm*les is also very much the L*nd of Sm*lls.
I did briefly talk to one of these men (not the one in the photo) and asked him why he did it as his pension (even if very small) should be enough to live on – the cost of living here is less than a fifth of that in Europe or the USA with rent for a small flat about £15 a week and a meal at a street café about £0.60. The guy looked at me with surprise and replied, “pension, what pension? I’m fifty four”. Ooopps. I guess 8 hours a day going through other people’s garbage in burning sunshine or pouring rain doesn’t do wonders for your skin tone and complexion.
I also wonder how these two men explain to their friends and families back in their countries of origin what they’re up to. Perhaps they say they’re “running a successful recycling business“?
Oh, I’ve just met the guy in the photo. He’s a really nice guy. He’s originally from Holland but lives in the L*nd of Sm*l*s with his wife and young baby. He collects bottles for 5 to 6 hours a day and earns around 100 baht a day – that’s £2 or $3.
By David Craig, on December 19th, 2013 You may have noticed a story in the last couple of days about the (IMHO) fat, greasy, worthless, parasitical scumbag Tory Lord Hanningfield. Apparently a newspaper followed him and found that he had been turning up at the Lords to sign in for his £300 per day taxfree expenses then leaving after being there less than an hour.
After the MPs’ expenses scandal, in which 4 lords also got caught, the Lords promised that they were going to “modernise” their expenses system to cut out fraud. Most people are too busy to have time to look behind what the House of Lords actually did to “modernise” its expenses system, so I’ll explain.
MPs have always had to submit receipts for some of their expenses. But prior to the expenses scandal, the House of Lords didn’t require receipts. As all members were “honourable”, it was considered sufficient that if a member said they had incurred expenses, then those expenses were reimbursed. Of course, many of the Lords’ members’ expenses were entirely fictitious allowing the almost 900 greedy, thieving scum to steal millions of our money year after year after year.
The main way the lords stole our money was by claiming to have incurred hotel and other expenses for staying in London when they were actually nowhere near the place, already had a home in London or else were staying free of charge with friends. Three members were sentenced to prison, but all got out after serving laughably small parts of their original sentences.
However, the Crown Prosecution Service decided there was no basis to prosecute one of the four – Baroness Udin. The Baroness, who had a housing association home in London, claimed that her “main home” was a house in Kent that neighbours said she seldom if ever visited. But she managed to get off because the House of Lords authorities “clarified the rules” on what constituted a “main home” by conveniently (for the honest baroness) deciding that a peer could nominate any property as their main home even if they only “visit” it once a month.
Anyway, the House of Lords promised to clean up their expenses so the thieving stopped. But what they did wasn’t to clamp down on abuse. Instead they loosened the rules so that it became much easier for members to take our cash. The system whereby members of the Lords had to say they had come to London was replaced by the expenses system used in that den of thieves – the European Parliament. This is what British MEPs laughingly call the “SOSO system” – “Sign On Sod Off”.
Now, to get their £300 per day, members of the Lords just have to turn up for about 5 minutes to sign a register, then they can sod off to go to their other jobs or to do whatever they want confident that their £300 per day will soon hit their bank accounts.
In the European Parliament in Brussels, the SOSO system leads to a large queue forming every Friday morning as MEPs rush to sign in to get their daily allowance for supposedly working for us on their way to the airport for their journeys home.
Of course, many lords stay longer then the 5 minutes or so it takes to sign in. After all, with its many agreeable taxpayer-funded bars, cafes and restaurants, the House of Lords is a very pleasant place to spend a few hours chatting with other like-minded, greedy, self-serving, thieving scum. (click to see picture more clearly)
Since being released from prison after only serving 9 weeks of a 9-month sentence, Hanningfield has reportedly been claiming about £3,200 a month in taxfree expenses, often for only turning up for a few minutes a day. He claims there are about another 50 peers doing the same as him – Signing On and Sodding Off – so the real number is probably several hundred a day.
Baroness Udin was ordered to repay about £125,349 and has since been claiming expenses at a rate of up to £40,000 a year. I wonder how often she visits her “main home” now?
The House of Lords is just a House of Thieves. In the US, there are just 435 members of Congress and 100 members of the Senate for over 330 million people. In Britain we have 650 MPs and almost 900 lords for about 67 million people. Yet the USA makes its own laws, while about 80% of our laws are made in Brussels. It’s time for clean out of the Augean Stables that are the House of Commons and the House of Lords.
How about 200 MPs and 50 elected Lords? That sounds about right for a small administrative region of the EU superstate.
By David Craig, on December 17th, 2013 Who really runs the EU? Could it be Malta – population. 0.5 million and GDP $0.01trn? Or Ireland – population 4.6 million and GDP $0.2trn? Or Denmark – population 5.6 million and GDP $0.3trn? Or France – population 64 million and GDP $2.6trn? And Germany – population 80 million and GDP $3.4trn? Right, so it’s France and Germany.
Well, France and Germany are up in arms. Not literally, of course. If the French were ‘up in arms’ everyone would just laugh. It’s the Germans you have to worry about. Anyway, the escargot- and sauerkraut-eaters are metaphorically up in arms at the thought of Britain developing a successful fracking industry.
The French are against it because they sell us over 12 billion kWh of electricity from their nuclear power stations each year – a figure that is set to hugely increase as we ludicrously close down many perfectly good coal-fired power stations in the “fight against Global Warming” (thanks to future PM Ed Miliband’s deranged Climate Change Act 2008), while we also decommission 15 of our 16 nuclear reactors by 2023.
The Germans are against it because they are committing economic suicide to satisfy the fictitious god of Global Warming by going from 23% of their energy from renewable sources to 80% by 2050. Moreover, following the Fukushima tsunami and nuclear reactor problems, Germany decided to shut down its nuclear industry – 8 out of 17 reactors have already been switched off with the remaining 9 to go by 2019. Perhaps the Germans forgot that almost all their nuclear reactors are hundreds of miles from the sea and that it’s been a while (a few million years or more?) since a major tsunami or earthquake hit Germany. So, with Germany’s power costs rocketing due to the commitment to unaffordably-expensive renewable energy, the Germans can’t bear the thought of Britain’s energy costs falling making our industry more competitive than theirs.
So how are our “friends” going to crush our fracking? They can’t just bomb us or invade us – that’s against EU rules. What they’re going to do is use EU rules to stop us fracking. The EU Commissioner for the Environment has just decided that the EU should set out a new set of regulations for the fracking industry. And nobody can start fracking till we have these regulations (click on picture to see more clearly)
To work out what these regulations will be, the EU will set up an “expert committee”. In addition to the EU’s 42,548 full-time employees, there are over 2,200 “expert committees” with more than 50,000 supposed “experts” all advising the EU on new regulations.
What will happen will be something like this. A decision is taken to set up an expert committee to investigate fracking. Most EU countries will want at least one (if not more) of their supposed “experts” on the committee. But the people chosen will mostly be political cronies or chums of those in power in each country, not experts in geology or anything especially relevant. The “experts” will all fly to Brussels (business class of course) where they will enjoy the best food and finest wine and champagne at our expense. They’ll then decide a plan of action (or inaction?). This will include “fact-finding” missions to many countries around the world (first or business class travel, best hotels, best restaurants, pleasant female company and so on). Many “experts may find it “necessary” to take along attractive young “research assistants”. The “experts” will also hold regular meetings – many will be in Brussels. But a few may be in places like Bali (very popular with the meeting brigade). Or perhaps they’ll choose Brazil during the World Cup so they can demand free VIP tickets at the best games?
As the members of the fracking expert committee settle into the good life of luxury travel, wonderful hotels, the best food and booze in the world, they’re hardly likely to be in a hurry to end their “important” deliberations. So, it might take one or two or even three years before they come up with their recommendations. Then there will be lots more meetings and discussions. And during this time, the firms that could have been investing in UK fracking creating tens of thousands of jobs, reducing our energy costs to make us more competitive than Germany and freeing us from dependence of French electricity will lose interest due to the uncertainty.
And anyway, we know the result will be such stringent regulation that fracking in Britain will be virtually impossible. Yippeee, they’ve done it. The French and Germans have strangled Britain’s fracking industry at birth.
This is just yet another reason we have to leave the corrupt, wasteful, bureaucratic horror that is the EU and regain our status as an independent country.
By David Craig, on December 16th, 2013 I know you’ve all been lying awake at night fretting over what you should buy PM David Cameron for Christmas to thank him for being such a great leader for the last wasted three and a half years. Well, here are a couple of suggestions:
After the catastrophe of New Labour – 13 years spent wrecking the country – ruining our education system, bankrupting the economy, allowing in over 7 million (mostly benefits-scrounging, Britain-hating) immigrants, destroying our armed forces, creating an obese public sector of overpaid, over-pensioned self-serving fools – we needed vision and leadership to sort out the mess. But sadly, that’s not what we got. We got the cowardly, u-turning, liar Cameron.
The man didn’t even have the backbone to stand up to that schoolboy in long trousers Nick “Barroso’s Bitch” Clegg over electoral boundary reform.
And as the year comes to a close, the prospect of a McCluskey/Serwotka (sorry, I meant Miliband/Balls) government is less than 18 months away. Lord help us!
So how can we escape this impending disaster? By following these six simple steps:
Step 1 – UKIP comes first in the 2014 EU elections. Labour second and the Tories a miserable third
Step 2 – The Tories dump Gay Dave and choose a real leader
Step 3 – The Tories and UKIP do an electoral deal whereby the Tories agree not field candidates in 50 “safe” seats and in another 50 seats that Labour should win. UKIP in return agree not to field candidates in the other 550 seats and to get their supporters to vote Tory
Step 4 – A Tory/UKIP coalition wins the May 2015 General Election
Step 5 – The Tory/UKIP coalition presents the EU with a non-negotiable list of Britain’s demands for staying in the EU. No grovelling to corrupt, greedy. unelected bureaucrats from countries that are economically and morally bankrupt – just an ultimatum.
Step 6 – Either the EU agrees to the Tory/UKIP list of demands in full or else Britain holds an immediate referendum on continued membership.
Now, that would give us a great Christmas and wonderful New Year.
By David Craig, on December 16th, 2013 For years Th*il*nd has successfully sold itself to foreign tourists as “The L*nd of Sm*l*s”. And if you come here for a few weeks holiday, you’ll probably have a wonderful time. The food is incredible and cheap, the booze is cheap, the hotels are luxurious and the beaches can be fantastic provided you don’t go on them after dark when they tend to get invaded by packs of quite unfriendly wild dogs and swarms of rats who (perhaps surprisingly) live up in the palm trees. And if you are after the pleasures of Sodom and/or Gomorrah – they’re plentiful and relatively inexpensive. But not all tourists emerge from their vacation unscathed.
Last week a British tourist Satpal Singh Binag, 35, joined the P*tt*ya Flying Club – the group of F*r*ng (foreigners) who go to meet their Maker after falling, jumping, being pushed or being thrown from their hotel or condo balcony. Apparently the 6th floor and above are recommended for best results. The curious thing about this case was that the victim fell from a third floor balcony. As what we call the “ground floor” is called the “first floor” here, this meant the guy probably only fell about 6 to 8 metres. I don’t know much about flying and gravity and so on, but I imagine Mr Binag had a few helpful thumps with a heavy object by his local girlfriend and a few mates in order to ensure his demise before being launched into space. The police will no doubt class this incident as a “suicide”, though here, if you died after “jumping” from a ground floor window, the police would always say it was suicide too.
Another problem is F*r*ng getting killed over arguments about petty sums of money. A month ago, an American started arguing with a B*ngk*k taxi driver who tried to overcharge him by about $2. The taxi driver stabbed him to death. I wouldn’t be surprised if the B*ngk*k police also decided that was a “suicide”
Scams against tourists are on the rise with the motor bike and jet ski scams being the most common. With these, when you rent a motor bike or jet ski and return it, the renter decides that you are responsible for damaging his property and with a few accomplices marches you of to the ATM so that you can make a sizeable contribution to the owner’s pension fund. Here’s a Youtube video of the jet ski scam https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsPuoaktoAw Just 3 hours ago I saw a young Arab tourist being chased along the main beach road by 3 jet ski operators. I imagine that they’d tried to scam him and he’d made a run for it. Anyway, they caught him and I imagine he’s now either lying bleeding in a gutter or a lot poorer or both.
You probably know that the drink R*d B*ll originated in Th*l*nd. Here it’s very popular with people like coach and lorry drivers to keep them awake during 20-hour shifts. The trouble is that when the effect wears off, they quickly fall asleep. A few Russian tourists got killed a couple of weeks ago when their sleeping coach driver rammed into a lorry.
There’s not a great emphasis of Health and Safety here. There’s a ridiculous old wooden boat that takes people out to some islands where the beaches are less polluted than on the mainland. This joke of a boat can supposedly carry over 100 people. Three weeks ago, it started the trip back from the islands with over 200 passengers on board. Perhaps it was lucky that the captain was both high on Yabba tablets (a local delicacy you should not try) while also drunk on cheap whisky. This meant that he rammed his overloaded boat into a reef just off the island where fortunately a nearby diving boat was able to start rescuing passengers (most of whom had no life jackets). Had the captain not been both high and drunk, he might have made it further from the island before his boat sank and the losses would probably have been higher than the 7 who were killed, including a 12-year-old Russian boy. But don’t worry – the families of those killed will each receive the equivalent of about $2,000 in compensation. That’s the price of a life here. (click to see pictures more clearly)
And I mustn’t forget the young Indian lady who came here on her honeymoon and got decapitated when she went parasailing, fell into the water and got dragged into the speedboat’s propeller
Then last week, there was the experienced Russian diver who went missing. I’ve been diving here and before they take you out, you have to sign a document absolving the diving firm of all responsibility if anything happens to you even if it was due to their faulty equipment and/or negligence.
And there seems to be a small problem with exploding tourist minibuses. Most are powered by LPG. I may be wrong, but if they were powered by diesel and involved in a crash, then passengers get a few cuts and bruises. The problem with LPG is that it often explodes in an accident and that means barbecue time for the passengers.
Oh, and if you travel to the troubled south of the country, you might get killed by someone from the Religion of Peace.
And finally, never ever buy a suit or shirts from an Indian tailor here. They might be cheap and look good when you try them on. But after they’re been to the dry cleaner (suits) or been washed (shirts) a couple of times, you might as well throw them away.
But if you avoid joining a flying club, being stabbed in an argument about money, being killed in a coach or minibus crash, being scammed or being drowned – you’ll have a great and memorable holiday.
By David Craig, on December 14th, 2013 Once again some readers have challenged me to explain how to fix Britain’s woeful finances. I did something like this about 6 months ago. But at the risk of alienating regular readers, I’ll use today’s blog to show that a government with leadership and backbone could turn the country round rather rapidly.
Hopefully all my readers (unlike over 80% of the British population) understand the difference between deficit and debt. Then they understand that with the useless spending-increasing Coalition we’re borrowing over £100bn a year and our national debt will go from £700bn in 2010 to £1.4trn by the 2015 election. We are rapidly heading for national bankruptcy. So, what to do?
1. Declare a state of “national economic emergency” and put all public-sector and council managers and administrators on a 4-day week and all quangos on a 3-day week. After all, who would notice if the Department of Health only worked Monday to Thursday and the Equality and Human Rights Commission only did Monday to Wednesday? Saving £150m a week – £7.5bn a year (Many people might think we should scrap a lot of quangos – but that would lead to yet another expensive public-sector redundancy feeding frenzy. Much better to gradually throttle them)
2. Set a maximum public-sector pension of twice the average wage and abolish the 3-year taxfree payments made to bureaucrats, military bosses and top civil servants. Saving maybe £2bn a year
3. Stop all foreign aid till Britain eliminates its budget deficit and reduces its debt to 30% of GDP. Saving £10.5bn a year
4. Leave the EU – we can’t afford the cost of membership. No more prevaricating, no more grovelling to the corrupt, wasteful, unelected scum in Brussels. Just leave and stop all payments. Saving £21bn a year
5. Stop all subsidies to “green energy” and stop closing coal-fired power stations. Saving maybe £1bn a year. Resurrect Britain’s coal mines – extra tax revenues maybe £500m a year
6. Scrap Corporation Tax and replace it with a retention of part of the VAT charged by companies so that all companies operating in Britain pay tax whether they claim to be based in Jersey, Cayman Islands or on The Moon. (Financial institutions would pay a tax based on their assets). Increase in tax revenues maybe £13bn a year. This would also result in many foreign firms moving their HQs to Britain creating say 10,000 well-paid jobs and generating say £3bn in extra income tax and NI
7. Declare as “strategic national assets” activity sectors like energy, water, airports and ports that can only be owned by British companies fully based in Britain for tax purposes. Increase in tax revenues, perhaps £3bn a year
8. Bring in a False Claims Act (like they have in the USA) whereby whistleblowers who reveal that government departments are being overcharged when buying goods and services receive a % of all money saved. Saving of say 1% on the government’s procurement bill of £170bn = £1.7bn
9. Bring in a suggestions scheme whereby public-sector, frontline workers (not managers) get paid a % of any money saved up to a maximum of £50,000 per worker. Saving perhaps 1% of government spending of £500bn = £5bn
10. Set a mandatory improvement target for all public-sector managers of a very modest 2% a year. Saving in 1st year = £10bn: in 2nd year £20bn and so on
11. Cut the BBC’s budget by 10% a year for 3 years and restrict the BBC to making public-service programmes, not junk entertainment that belongs on the increasing number of commercial channels. Saving in 1st year = £300m: 2nd year = £600m: 3rd year = £900m
12. Lower housing benefit by 3% a year and the cap by 5% a year for 5 years to force down rents across the private rented sector. Saving maybe £500m in 1st year: £1bn in 2nd year and so on
13. Cut the number of MPs, MSPs, members of the Welsh and Northern Ireland Assemblies and their staff by 50%. Reduce the Lords to 100 members from over 850. Saving maybe £500m a year. Sell off Portcullis House earning maybe £300m
14. End the culture of breeding at taxpayers’ expense – only give child benefits to the first 2 children: restrict social housing and housing benefit to people over 25: house anyone, who cannot live with their parents, in army-like barracks where they have to work (cleaning, cooking and so on) to earn privileges like TV and make parents lose privileges if their children are disruptive in schools. Saving maybe £3bn
15. Stop us being bankrupted by immigration – withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights: extend restrictions on Romanians and Bulgarians for 20 more years: tighten habitual residency rules: deport all foreign criminals: no benefits to be paid to anyone who is not a British citizen or who has not worked full-time in Britain for 10 years: benefits to be paid in the form of a “food stamp” card that cannot be used to buy cigarettes or alcohol.English language tests for all benefits claimants. Saving maybe £5bn a year
16. Restrict citizenship – make the right remain and granting of British citizenship signed legal agreements between the government and the person, whereby it is agreed that any breach of the law by that person or any dependent results in automatic withdrawal of the right to remain in Britain and immediate deportation at the person’s expense. Saving maybe £2bn a year
17. Give student grants to anyone aged 16 to 24 who goes on a vocational course to become a plumber, electrician, car mechanic, carpenter, bricklayer etc. Cost maybe £1bn
18. Impose a land tax on any development land that has been held for more than 3 years by a developer who has not built anything. Launch a programme to build 100,000 housing association homes a year on brownfield sites. Cost perhaps £4bn, but increases in revenue from income tax and NI and reduction in unemployment payments saving perhaps £1bn
We’re getting close to £90bn saved. Then hopefully economic growth would increase tax revenues by say 5% (£30bn) and that gives us the £120bn we need to eliminate the £100bn deficit and start paying off our debt.
Yippee, if we pay off our debt at a rate of £20bn a year it will “only” take us 70 years to become debt-free like successful economies.
Some of these may be possible and some not. And there are certainly many other things that could be added to this list saving tens of billions more. But what’s really important is not just the numbers. It’s that measures such as those proposed above would dramatically change the culture of the country. Instead of being a pathetic, benefits-focused, EU-subservient magnet for the world’s garbage where criminals, the idle and the feckless get an easy life while working people get fleeced, we’d become a country that promotes work, education, self-reliance and success. Now, that’s what we really should be aiming at.
By David Craig, on December 14th, 2013 Apologies – but today’s blog is not very “Christmassy”.
One of the most sensitive issues in the Second World War was how much the Allies knew about the Germans’ plans to exterminate over six million Jews and whether the Allies could have done more to reduce the slaughter. Certainly many of the Allied leaders were deeply anti-semitic. US General Patton, for example said that Jews “are lower than animals”. And a senior Foreign Office official when hearing about the death camps noted, “Familiar stuff. The Jews have spoilt their case by laying it on too thick for years”. While another dismissed the reports as just “wailing Jews”.
But perhaps the more significant reason the Allies did nothing was that people from civilised countries were simply not able to comprehend that any human being could behave in such a barbaric depraved manner as the Germans.
Probably similar reasoning was behind the British surrender of Singapore in February 1942 by 85,000 British troops who outnumbered the Japanese by more than 2 to 1 and had more guns and ammunition than the 30,000 Japanese attackers. Had the British, Australian and Indian troops understood the Japanese would rape and murder all the nurses, bayonet any soldiers in hospital, use thousands of their 138,000 prisoners captured in Malaysia and Singapore for bayonet and target practice for their soldiers, the Japanese officers use prisoners for beheading competitions and most of those who were not killed for sadistic pleasure would be worked and starved to death, then they might have been more inclined to fight rather than give in at the first sound of gunfire. As one officer noted, “the troops just turned tail, became a rabble and let the Japs walk in unopposed”.
I fear we may be in a similar situation today with regard the Islamic fundamentalist threat to our well-being. As we live in civilised countries that respect human life, we are simply unable to comprehend the barbaric hatred of those who are obsessed with our destruction. I’ve written before about beheadings www.snouts-in-the-trough.com/archives/7279. There was the indiscriminate slaughter at the Kenyan shopping centre. A few days ago in Yemen, Al Qaeda militants attacked a hospital complex and started shooting and beheading doctors and nurses – over 50 died. Then in Britain, we had the murder and attempted beheading of an unarmed British soldier by two members of our wonderful Somali community.
Most people, if they even know about these stories probably see them as regrettable but isolated incidents. Yet they may be part of a largely hidden but increasing war. Al Qaeda are taking over large parts of Iraq and they will probably take parts of Syria. Egypt is vulnerable, the Yemen is a disaster and many other Arab countries are at risk. And the greatest dangers for us is that the dominance of the bien-pensant, politically-correct prevent us from finding out what is really happening while we (like the Allies in the Second World War) are simply unable to comprehend the barbarity, depravity and obsessive hatred of those who have dedicated their lives to our destruction.
By David Craig, on December 12th, 2013 You’ve probably seen stories about the Roma gypsies living on Park Lane in London. A few months ago, we stupid British taxpayers paid for their plane fares so they could go home with all the money they’d begged and stolen over the summer. Now apparently they’re back in time to benefit from the Christmas shopping and post-Christmas sale crowds.
There are two possibly interesting issues with this story:
1. Police pretending to be doing something – apparently a couple of times a week, the local politically-correct police go along and ” move the gypsies”. This usually happens around 08.00 or 09.00 in the morning. So it’s very convenient for the gypsies – they don’t have to steal alarm clocks as they know the police will kindly wake them up. I wonder what the useless police say as they perform this invaluable public service? “Morning all. Time to get up. You’ve got a busy day of aggressive begging, pickpocketing, ATM robberies and burglaries ahead of you. So let’s be moving along. Take care and have a good day”.
It seems not to have occurred to the police that they should wake the gypsies up and move them along at 01.00 in the morning and then again at about 02.30 and then again at about 04.00 and so on. This might make the gypsies less inclined to make their homes in the centre of London.
2. The lying police claim the Roma gypsies are not committing any crime – A Scotland Yard spokesman said: ‘If they are legally here and are not actually doing something criminal, and they are on public land, it’s quite difficult. We are aware it must be frustrating for people and we are trying to address the issue.”
But hold on a minute. We have the Vagrancy Act 1824. It has been amended several times since then, but is still on the statute books. Until the 1990s it was believed that the Vagrancy Act 1824 had largely withered away in England through lack of use. However, as the number of homeless people sleeping out rose in the 1990s, the use of the Act increased dramatically, especially in the Metropolitan Police district (most of Greater London).
In 1988, in England and Wales, some 573 people were prosecuted and convicted under the Act. In May 1990, the National Association of Probation Officers carried out a survey of the prosecutions under the Act. That survey revealed that 1,250 prosecutions had been dealt with in 14 central London magistrates courts in that year, which represented an enormous leap in the number of prosecutions under the Act, especially in London.
So we have a law which the Roma gypsies are breaking, that law can be used and has been used against some Brits sleeping rough in London. But for some more than mysterious reason our useless, lying, politically-correct PC Plods claim they cannot act against the gypsies.
Yet another story the Europhiliac BBC didn’t tell us. Apparently at a anti-EU protest in Italy a couple of days ago, the Italian riot police took off their helmets and joined the protesters. Here’s a 1.07 minute Youtube video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jqzUX8fkMk I wonder why this important story didn’t appear on the Europhiliac BBC
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