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By  David Craig, on July 12th, 2013 This is a link to a YouTube video. Its about 12 minutes long (but just a couple of minutes will give you a flavour of what’s happening) and the sound quality is not perfect. But it’s quite moving. It shows some homeowners in Ireland disrupting an auction where their properties (which have been repossessed by their banks) are being sold off to speculators https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6rbBiY3A6g&feature=player_embedded
Before the 2007/8 financial crash the Irish economy was pretty healthy. Wolfgang Schauble, the German finance minister, claimed: “It is an indisputable fact that excessive state spending has led to unsustainable levels of debt and deficits that now threaten our economic welfare.” But, in fact, Ireland and Spain were running a budget surplus – unlike Germany (click on chart to see more clearly)
What wrecked Ireland’s economy was the catastrophic decision by the utterly corrupt Irish government to bail out Ireland’s utterly corrupt banks.
Ireland has always been run by a small Mafia-like group of politicians, bankers and their business cronies. And the Allied Irish Bank (AIB), where I have worked, was the largest and most corrupt bank in Ireland.
As we now know from the release of taped conversations, the directors at the AIB realised in 2008 that the game was up, the AIB was finished and all their crooked loans to themselves, politicians and their business cronies would be exposed. They realised they could never get the money needed to save their own skins. So they deliberately lied about the scale of their problems to get about €7bn in aid from their friends in the Irish Parliament. Their idea was that once the Irish Government had handed over an initial €7bn, it would be impossible for the Government to refuse further help as any refusal would expose the Government as being incompetent and wasting €7bn if the AIB crashed despite the first €7bn in help. Once the first €7bn of Irish taxpayers’ money was handed over, the AIB then demanded more and then more and then even more. As one Irish journalist explained: “this meant that the government was putting, directly or indirectly, at least €30bn into a bank with an appalling history of cooking its books, manipulating its share price and giving vast secret loans to its own directors and executives. To put this sum into perspective, it is about the same as the total tax revenues of the Irish state in 2009”.
The Irish, perhaps more than any other European people, were robbed by their corrupt politicians, business bosses, bureaucrats and bankers. And while the Irish economy has been devastated by the collapse and then rescue of its banking system, many of the main culprits (politicians, bureaucrats, businesspeople and bankers) have walked away from the wreckage tens of millions and, in some cases, hundreds of millions of euros richer. They should be prosecuted and sent to prison, but never will be.
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By David Craig, on July 11th, 2013 The government spends around £2bn a day. Of this, about £330m is borrowed (who knows how we’re ever going to pay it back). But our Government has a cunning plan – it’s going to raise tons of money by selling us shares in a company we already own – the Royal Mail. Pretty smart, huh?
So, how much money will the Government get for the Royal Mail? A paltry £3bn at most. This £3bn is enough to cover 36 hours of Government spending or about 9 days of Government borrowing. So, what’s the point? And what will be the result?
One reason the Government was so keen to flog off the Royal Mail was so that it could take the £28bn in assets from the Royal Mail’s pension fund onto the Government’s books thus miraculously appearing to reduce the Government’s debt by £28bn. Unfortunately, the Royal Mail’s pension fund adds £37.5bn of liabilities onto taxpayers – which works out at the equivalent of £365 of new debt for every household in Britain. But these liabilities (which far exceed the £28bn assets) will not be paid until well into the future, by which time today’s politicians will be enjoying their luxurious taxpayer-funded retirements. So why should they care?
What will be the result of the privatisation? Assuming union opposition doesn’t scare away any potential investors, the Royal Mail will probably suffer the same fate as thousands of other British companies – it will be turned into a “zombie company”.
The process goes like this:
1. Venture capitalists and private equity firms and others of their ilk will buy the Royal Mail, load it with massive debts while taking out “special dividends” of hundreds of millions for themselves. They may even set up their own special offshore companies to lend money to the Royal Mail at usurious rates so they can make massive, untaxed profits on the loans from themselves to themselves.
2. The interest payments on the debts will be so huge that the Royal Mail’s profits will be wiped out and it will stop paying Corporation Tax. Moreover, because so much money is going in interest payments, there’s little to nothing left to reinvest into the Royal Mail. It becomes a zombie – still just moving, but paying so much in endless “special dividends” and interest that it cannot invest to grow.
This is what has happened to many of our water companies, electricity suppliers and firms like Saga, the AA, Findus, Travelodge, Thomas Cook, Punch Taverns, Birds Eye, Fitness First and many many others. Financial speculators move in, buy up the companies, load them up with debt (often lending them the money from offshore shell companies), pay themselves hundreds of millions in special dividends and reduce the companies to zombies – not quite dead, but not really alive either.
But, no doubt many of these financial speculators will continue to contribute generously to Tory Party funds. So, once again ordinary people get fleeced, while politicians and their business cronies get rich. This was all predicted in pages 41-44 of my latest book GREED UNLIMITED. How sad that it’s actually happening.
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By David Craig, on July 10th, 2013 In 1979, 43.1% of total households received more in benefits (including state spending on benefits in kind, such as the NHS and state education) than they paid in taxes (including direct taxes such as income tax and indirect taxes such as VAT, fuel and alcohol duties). In 2000/01, this figure was 43.8% and by 2010/11, this had reached 53.4%
So, what’s happening? One reason for the increasing reliance on benefits is the behaviour of many large companies. Claiming that they’re competing in a global race or something like that, many companies pay low wages, the minimum wage or even “zero hours contracts”. Then taxpayers have to subsidise these jobs with tax credits and other benefits so workers and their families can afford to eat and have somewhere to live (usually enriching buy-to-let landlords).
The Government’s need for money to pay so much in benefits to low-paid workers, of course, forces the Government to borrow more and tax more. But many large companies, who supposedly can’t afford to pay their workers decent wages, seem to be allergic to paying tax. So they set up complex arrangements using offshore tax havens to reduce or completely eliminate their tax liabilities. In the economic boom from 1997 to 2007, tax revenues from smaller companies (which can’t afford smart, expensive accountants) went up by 132%. But taxes paid by financial services firms increased by only 27% and taxes from large companies by a pathetic 5% (see chart)
There are many factors causing our rush to national bankruptcy. One is the greed, incompetence and profligacy of our over-paid, over-pensioned political and bureaucratic classes. Another is the supposedly efficient private sector sucking the lifeblood out the UK by siphoning off our money into their foreign bank accounts. But it’s not the soldiers, sailors, nurses and firemen who are now losing their jobs that are bankrupting Britain.
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By David Craig, on July 9th, 2013 About 3 weeks ago, when our hopeless Met Office predicted yet another “washout summer”, one reader of a national newspaper cynically commented: “then I’ll be getting out the barbecue”. And how right he was. No sooner had the papers reported the Met Office’s confident prediction than the weather changed completely and the “washout summer” seems to have disappeared for the time being.
We all know the expression “when all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail”. The Met Office only has a hammer – that hammer is its almost religious belief that the earth is getting hotter due to man-made (Anthropogenic) Global Warming (AGW). So, whatever happens to the weather, the Met Office tries to explain it away as an inevitable result of AGW.
When it’s hot, the Met Office’s job is easy – it just smugly claims that this is undeniable proof of AGW. When it’s unseasonably cold, the Met Office’s job is a bit more difficult. But inevitably, the Met Office also claims cold weather is a result of AGW. I think their explanation goes something along the lines of – AGW is heating the planet warming the oceans and causing melting of the Arctic ice caps (the Met Office doesn’t mention record amounts of ice in the Antarctic): this warming causes more moisture to gather in the atmosphere and pushes the Jetstream south: and this southwards movement of the Jetstream will give us colder winters and wetter summers.
Incidentally, the Met Office’s hopeless predictions are damaging for the British economy as their forecasts of dismal summers encourage more people to take holidays abroad and this can be disastrous for Britain’s seaside towns.
Anyway, embarrassingly for the Met Office and its £200,000 per year boss, no sooner had the Met Office come up with this convoluted, but creative explanation for our cold winter and spring, than the Jetstream promptly moved northwards to give us the glorious weather we are enjoying now.
Like so many other public-sector organisations – the NHS, the police, social services, IPSA, the BBC etc – the Met Office seems to be staffed by incompetent, self-serving, politically-correct, overpaid, over-pensioned, lying buffoons and maybe it’s time we scrapped the £187m a year Met Office and handed a contract for producing short-term weather forecasts – 5 to 10 days – to a private-sector company that wasn’t obsessed by the myth of AGW?
Here’s a comment from a reader that I liked: “The Met Office couldn’t predict their own birthdays, let alone the weather“.
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By David Craig, on July 8th, 2013 First, congratulations to Andy Murray for his superb win at Wimbledon yesterday. And congratulations to his family for the way they have supported his career. But while the newspapers gush about yesterday being a great day for British tennis, the opposite is true. It was a day of shame for the overpaid, expenses-guzzling bureaucrats that live the high life mismanaging tennis in Britain.
The Lawn Tennis Association (LTA) has an annual budget of about £60m. Around £35m of this comes from Wimbledon, about £10m comes from us taxpayers and the rest comes from other sources. But where does this £60m go? It certainly hasn’t gone into helping any of Britain’s last 3 tennis champions – Greg Rusedski, Tim Henman and Andy Murray all developed outside the LTA coaching system.
A few years ago, the Government increased the amount of taxpayers money going to the LTA. In return, the LTA set some goals such as the average ranking of the top 5 British men being 101 – the LTA only achieved 204. 2010 marked a low point for British tennis when a British team (funding £60m) lost to Lithuania – population 3.2 million and total annual tennis spend £100,000. In fact, the dire state of British tennis was so bad, that in 2012, Sports England withheld around £10m in funding for the next 5-year period.
An awful lot of the LTA’s money seems to go into providing a very comfortable living for its bureaucrats. The boss of the LTA earns an almost unbelievable £640,000 a year plus reportedly has massive expenses junketing around the world to attend all the best tournaments.
The LTA has long been criticised for having too many committees with too many people creaming off substantial amounts of money from being on these committees (click on chart to see a little more clearly)
It is believed that many of these committee members also enjoy a jet-setting life thanks in part to the generosity of British taxpayers.
The LTA gets an awful lot of money and spends an awful lot of money – much of it on the comfort of its own panjandrums. But the LTA seems to have done little to nothing for tennis in Britain. As one commentator wrote: “The LTA has mismanaged its huge budget, failed to grow the game and at times seems intent on managing decline hidden by the annual splendour of the Wimbledon Championships“
By David Craig, on July 7th, 2013 Hopefully you’ll be enjoying the sun and/or the tennis today, so I’ll keep this short.
A few days ago, I wrote about how anyone who pays NI and has a partner who doesn’t work (or else who works but doesn’t earn enough to pay NI) will be losing £100,000 following the Government’s decision to scrap paying 60% of the state pension to partners of people who have paid full NI for 35 years https://www.snouts-in-the-trough.com/archives/5736
If anyone out there is a lawyer (or knows a lawyer), on behalf of myself and millions of others, I have a question – Is the Government in breach of implied contract by taking away the pensions of the partners of people who have paid full NI?
Apparently, there’s something in law called an “implied contract”. An implied contract is an agreement created by actions of the parties involved, but it is not written or spoken. This is a contract assumed to have been drawn. In this case, there is no written record nor any actual verbal agreement.
My question for any lawyers is in 2 parts:
1. If people have paid NI for 35 years while the rules were that their partner would receive 60% of the state pension based on their NI contributions, could it be argued that these people had an “implied contract” with the Government and therefore the Government would be in breach of this implied contract by completely scrapping the 60% state pension for their partners?
I suspect that for part 1 of the question, the Government would argue that NI contributions are a compulsory tax and that the Government is under no obligation at all to provide anything in return for those contributions.
However, there is an aspect of this issue which may put the Government in breach of implied contract:
2. If people have made Class 3 voluntary NI payments in order to secure a full state pension for themselves and a 60% pension for their partners, could it be argued that these people had an “implied contract” with the Government and therefore the Government would be in breach of this implied contract by completely scrapping the 60% state pension for their partners?
By David Craig, on July 6th, 2013 The new head of the CBI (Confederation for British Industry) has popped up in the media blethering on about why we need to stay in the EU otherwise a catastrophe of biblical proportions will destroy what’s left of the British economy. You remember the CBI? They were the bunch who told us that we’d be left behind if we didn’t join the euro. As Greece, Portugal, Spain and Italy implode, the CBI don’t mention joining the euro much nowadays.
So, what are the Europhiliacs’ main lies to justify remaining in the corrupt, wasteful, bureaucratic, undemocratic EU?
1. About 3.5 million jobs will be lost if we leave (this lie is a Nick Clegg favourite):
But if we left, we would continue to trade with Europe in a similar way to Norway, Switzerland, Mexico and China. Moreover, as the EU sells more to us than we sell to them, then many more jobs would be lost in the EU if it tried imposing tariff barriers on the UK
2. Britain’s net contribution is only £5bn to £6bn a year:
The Europhiliacs usually use out-of-date figures. Since Mr Blair gave away a large chunk of our rebate, the actual net contribution is at least £10bn a year and our gross contribution is £19bn a year and increasing every year.
3. The EU is a key market for British exports:
This is still true. But the EU is in decline and diminishing as a % of world trade. In 1991, the EU accounted for about 30% of world trade, now it’s around 20% and forecast to fall further. This has led to our sales to the EU falling every year, while the amount we sell to non-EU countries is increasing (see chart)
4. Britain will lose its car manufacturing, as many producers will leave the country:
But 70% of UK car production is for domestic and global non-EU consumption, only 30% goes to the EU.
Moreover, Germany exports 10% of all its car production to Britain – half a million cars a year more than we export to Germany. So Germany would never accept a 10% tariff on its UK exports if we exited. Anyway, the EU car market is declining with global car markets the place to be.
5. We will lose trade if we exit:
But we have a £70bn annual trade deficit with the EU. The EU sells much more to us than we sell to them. They are not going to throw away the huge UK market just to satisfy the spite of a few Brussels bureaucrats.
6. We need to be in the EU to influence decision-making:
With most EU decisions based on “qualified majority voting”, we have little to no influence. For a start, the 17 Eurozone members are always able to out-vote the 11 non-members. Moreover, the number of countries that get more from the EU than they put in – the so-called “Friends of Cohesion” – will always vote for more spending as the more the EU spends (and wastes), the more money they get.
8. They used to claim that the EU had been an economic success:
We don’t hear this lie so much nowadays. When they do talk up the EU, they tend to ignore the EU’s massive unemployment – around half of all young people in the Club Med countries. They don’t mention that Eurozone growth over 2012 to 2019 will be 8% v 33% global growth. And they like to gloss over the loss of our fishing grounds, the consequences of open borders on uncontrolled immigration and the fact that we need to go grovelling to Brussels to get permission for most of our laws.
By David Craig, on July 5th, 2013 The BBC, once known as the “British Broadcasting Corporation” which then became the “Blair Broadcasting Corporation” and has now turned into the “Burka Broadcasting Corporation”, has worked itself up to a state of absolute apoplexy over the military takeover in Egypt. This seemed to culminate on Newsnight last night when Kirsty Wark (a favourite of Guardian journalists) tried to defend the Muslim Brotherhood and almost screamed at a former US Secretary of State she was meant to be interviewing “but this was a democratically elected government”.
Clearly the Islamophiliacs who run the Burka Broadcasting Corporation are furious that anyone should dare make any criticism of their beloved Islamic friends around the world.
Now, I don’t know much about Egyptian politics. But my understanding of the situation is as follows:
1. After Mubarak was thrown out, the Muslim Brotherhood was the only party with the resources and organisation to run an effective election campaign and managed to win about 51% of the vote
2. Morsi and his band of Muslim brothers had an historic opportunity to show the world that an Islamic government could work for the good of the country as a whole and promote tolerance, good governance and economic growth
3. But Morsi and his wild-eyed fanatical followers spent their first year in power promoting corruption, stupidity, managerial incompetence and the murder of Coptic Christians while changing the law and the constitution and the courts system to give themselves an absolute grip on power
4. There have been huge protests against Morsi’s Islamist government with about 22 million people signing a petition demanding Morsi’s resignation.
5. The army demanded that the Muslim Brotherhood meet with the protesters to restore some kind of order. Morsi, of course, refused to compromise
6. The army was forced to intervene to calm the situation and prepare the way for new elections.
This, of course, is not the Burka Broadcasting Corporation’s version of events. For them, the benign, highly competent, pristine-clean, tolerant, peace-loving, democratic Muslim Brotherhood government was the best thing since sliced bread and it’s a crime that anyone dared question what their Islamic friends were actually up to.
When will the world learn the lessons of history and realise that, unfortunately, Islamic governments will always work on the principle of “one man, one vote, one time” and then when elected will use any tricks they can to keep power?
(Oh, and when will a few people support this website by buying copies of my latest book GREED UNLIMITED? It only costs about six quid)
By David Craig, on July 4th, 2013 As we get nearer to the 2015 General Election, a constant message we’ll be getting from the panicking Tories is that voting for UKIP will just allow Labour to win. But should we believe this? Or are the Tories lying to frighten us in the hope of saving their own incompetent, expenses-fiddling, financially-incontinent, economically-illiterate skins?
A psephologist (I forget which one) has been psephologising (or whatever it is that psephologists do). Anyway, by analysing the split of votes across constituencies, this psephologist has come up with the following chart (click on chart to see more clearly):
In the left-hand four columns, the chart suggests various percentages of the vote that might be achieved by the four main parties. In the right-hand four columns it shows how many seats each party would win.
If UKIP get around 16% of the vote, then they’ll only get one or maybe two seats at Westminster. This is, of course, because we have a first-past-the-post electoral system rather than proportional representation.
But were UKIP’s vote to go above 22%, almost miraculous things start to happen. At 24% of the vote, UKIP could win 38 seats: with 26% they’d win about 70 seats: and if they could achieve 28% of the vote, UKIP could capture around 117 seats – meaning that no party could govern without UKIP’s help.
Most political journalists and polling companies like YouGov (run by the IMHO pro-Labour Peter Kellner whose wife is Baroness “the pig” Ashton) are keen to put UKIP down and suggest that voting for UKIP is wasting your vote.
But there is another scenario. UKIP are already polling around 16% of the vote. In the 2014 EU elections, UKIP will probably emerge as the winning party. This will give them a huge boost in time for the 2015 General Election. If UKIP can just push their share of the vote up to above 25%, they’ll be the new power-brokers at Westminster.
No wonder the useless Tories, waste-of-skin LibDems and union glove-puppet Labour are running scared.
By David Craig, on July 3rd, 2013 One of the readers of this blog (I think it was one of the few who was kind enough to show support by buying a copy of my latest book GREED UNLIMITED) sent me this chart of how we British taxpayers generously gave £2,873,572 to the East London Mosque in the years 2006 to 2011 (click on picture to see more clearly)
No doubt this lucky mosque has received lots more of our money since then.
So, what sort of people spread the word of God about love peace and tolerance at this mosque?
Well, according to another blog www.hurryupharry.org, if you’d gone along to a recent Friday prayers, you might have heard from a man who believes:
– Apostates must be killed: “As long as they have been Muslim, once they reject it, their divine punishment is execution”
– Christians and Jews should be executed in an Islamic state for ‘talking against Mohammed’: “The Muslim ruler has to after consulting with the Islamic judge execute them after they are tried and convicted in a court of Islamic law”.
– “Homosexuality is an illness and something that Allah despises. The Prophet has cursed those who have intercourse with their wives through the anus. The punishment and the consequences of having it with another man is even greater”.
– “It is not permissible for a wife to refuse fulfilling her husband’s desire. You should answer his calls as this is not physically hurting you. If you can’t do that for no legitimate reason, you are sinful. You should ask him to marry another woman or to divorce you”
The gentleman also seems to be a bit of a Female Genital Mutilation fan.
Now, I don’t know if the two people who allegedly murdered an off-duty soldier in East London ever attended the East London Mosque or if they were influenced by anything they heard there:
But then I’m a trusting sort of person. So, if our leaders tell me that the good folk at the East London Mosque are paragons of understanding, tolerance and good inter-community relations, who thoroughly deserve millions of pounds of our money, who am I to question that?
Looking at our extraordinary generosity to the East London Mosque, I wonder how much taxpayers’ cash goes to the average Church of England vicar – probably not as much as to this money-spinning mosque.
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