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By  David Craig, on February 5th, 2013 I’ve written previously about how our taxes are set to increase by over 33%:
But another way the government is planning to impoverish us in order to reduce its debt levels is by letting inflation rise to 4%-5%. At just 4%, the spending power of our money is halved in only 15 years. For example, someone retiring at 65 on a reasonably comfortable £20,000 a year, will get the equivalent of only £10,800 by the time they’re 80 (see figure)
This also means the government can halve its debt in real terms in 15 years.
Then there’s the financial services industry. With all their dud savings products, they’ll be pocketing about 30% of your savings every ten years. If you’ve got a mortgage, you’ll pay around twice the value of your home in repayments over 25 years – so if you buy a £250,000 house, you’ll hand over almost £500,000.
When you come to retire and buy an annuity, you’ll lose another third of your money in fees, commissions and charges. And finally, should you find yourself a little strapped for cash in retirement, you might be tempted into taking an equity release loan. But beware, because of their high interest rates (typically close to 7%) a small loan of say £50,000 taken out at age 65 will leave you owing almost 4 times your original loan (£193,000) by the time you’re 85 – so there probably won’t be too much money left in your home for care home fees or to pass on to your children (see figure)
By David Craig, on February 4th, 2013 Below is a chart which possibly casts an interesting light on the current recession – it has gone on much longer than the three previous recessions
This rather suggests that our work-experience, part-time chancellor’s pathetic attempts to manage the country’s finances aren’t working.
Buffoon Osborne has made too many mistakes to list them all here. But probably the worst one was to slash capital spending (that is spending which creates jobs) while increasing current spending – more bureaucrats, bigger salaries for bureaucrats, six-figure redundancy packages for bureaucrats who immediately take up new jobs in the public sector, more quangos, more money for quangos and so on – which, of course, doesn’t create jobs. That’s a really dumb thing to do.
Meanwhile, that great international statesman David “Tony Blair” Cameron flies around the world posing for the cameras while handing out billions of pounds, which will increase our borrowing, to the leaders of some of the most corrupt countries in the world (Mali, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Algeria, Syria). No wonder these leaders are smiling so broadly in the photos as Cameron showers them with our money which will soon find its way into their already bulging offshore bank accounts.
What a shambles.
By David Craig, on February 3rd, 2013 You might have read the story. In the recent Conservative Party political broadcast our great leader claimed ““Though this government has had to make some difficult decisions, we are making progress. We’re paying down Britain’s debts.”
As you probably know, Labour increased our debt from around £320bn to just over £700bn. The Coalition have already pushed it up by about £400bn to over £1.1trn. And by the 2015 election, we will owe over £1.4trn. In fact, Cameron and Clegg have probably taken on more debt than all British governments for the last 100 years.
So Cameron’s claim is a lie – a great big bare-faced, shameless lie. But with 94% of voters not understanding that running a deficit increases debt, no doubt Cameron and his cronies were hoping they would get away with such a gut-bursting, eye-popping whopper. Mr Cameron, you are a liar – now sue me if you’ve got any backbone.
Anyway, to cheer us up here’s a Not The Nine O’Clock News spoof on a Conservative Party broadcast from maybe 20 to 30 years ago https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzPJSuAQnbE
It’s surprising how little has changed since then.
Oh, and as I’ve got a bit of room left, here’s a Rowan Atkinson sketch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZMoB6ms2mE
Btw, it would be greatly appreciated if just a few of you would splash out a few quid to buy copies of either of my recent books GREED UNLIMITED or PILLAGED as I need the money to pay for running this website.
By David Craig, on February 2nd, 2013 It’s easy to criticise the two posh-boy buffoons who somehow ended up in Downing Street. But it’s also necessary to propose some alternatives to their failing excuses for policies:
1. Change the public-sector culture of greed and waste – put all central government departments and all managerial and administrative staff not directly delivering front-line services on a 4-day week. Who would notice if government departments only worked Monday to Thursday? The £100m a week saved could be used for housing and other infrastructure projects creating 100,000 jobs
2. Increase tax revenue from businesses – like the Beard Tax (1535) and the Wig Tax (1795) Corporation Tax is past its useful shelf-life as a way of raising revenue when so much business is done on the Internet and by multi-national tax-avoiding companies. It’s also an unfair tax which pensalises British SMEs that cannot avoid it like their larger competitors and so it destroys jobs in Britain. Corporation Tax should be scrapped and replaced by a retention of part of VAT. This would make all companies pay tax whether they claim to be based in Jersey, Cayman Islands or on the Moon
3. Stop benefits being a lifestyle – no housing benefits should be payable to anyone under 25: benefits should be paid onto a card that cannot be used to buy alcohol and cigarettes: all benefits should be frozen for 5 years: nobody from outside Britain should be able to claim any form of benefits till they have worked full-time for 10 years: there is no reason why Britain has three times as many supposedly “disabled” people as other European copuntries – clamp down on this scam
4. Stop Britain being a “destination of choice” – extend the restrictions on Bulgarians and Romanians coming to Britain for another 7 years: make the granting of right to remain and citizenship a legal contract whereby any criminal conviction results in the immediate withdrawal of right to remain or citizenship and leads to deportation: no benefits to be paid till someone has worked in the UK for 10 years: withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights and deportation of all foreign criminals and those who are a threat to our country
5. Turn key business sectors into “strategic national assets” – businesses like water, power and airports should be classed as “strategic national assets” that can only be owned by companies based in and paying full taxes in Britain. Their foreign owners should be given 5 years to dispose of their British holdings
6. Tell the truth about Britain’s finances – put up a large screen in Central London showing the level of the deficit and the level of national debt as it increases by £3,841 per second, £230,476 per minute, £13.8m per hour, £331m per day
By David Craig, on February 1st, 2013 David “Winston” Cameron is on a trip to teach Johnny Foreigner how to fight Islamic terrorism (as Britain has been doing so “successfully” in Afghanistan for ten years) and to give Johnny Foreigner lots more of our money – money that we don’t have and which we’ll have to borrow. Meanwhile, Johnny Foreigner must be laughing his sandals off as he funnels our money into his offshore bank accounts.
But back at home, things aren’t looking terribly tickety boo. In the last couple of months, the value of the pounds we’ll be shovelling into Johnny Foreigner’s bank accounts has fallen by almost a third compared to the euro. How can this be? Cameron and Osborne tell us they have a plan to sort out the mess caused by the useless, deluded incompetents Brown and Balls. Yet international investors seem unconvinced and are ditching pounds as they hurry to get as far from sterling as they can.
Part of the problem may be that Britain’s deficit (horizontal axis on the chart) is higher than many other European countries – higher than economic disaster zones like Portugal, Italy, Belgium, Cyprus and France:
And we have a similar level of debt (vertical axis) to totally bankrupt Spain and even more bankrupt Cyprus. Moreover, although we have lower debt than economic farces like Portugal, Belgium and Italy, as our deficit is higher than theirs, we’ll soon be catching up with them.
By 2014 our debt will be 104% of GDP, just above Belgium. By 2015 our debt will be 111% of GDP getting closer to Portugal. And by 2016 our debt will be 119% of GDP – on a par with Portugal and Ireland – and well be into the red area (unsustainable) of the chart. Dear oh dear Mr Cameron, these are the kinds of numbers that are terrifying international investors. Perhaps, you should come home Mr Cameron and instead of handing ever more billions to Johnny Foreigner, try fixing the UK public finances instead?
Tomorrow Mr Cameron, I’ll tell you what you should do.
By David Craig, on January 31st, 2013 For a spot of light relief, here are three examples of what happens to our useless, ugly, oversubsidised wind turbines when the wind actually blows, enjoy:
First Youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u14tBwO5QVQ
And an article from yesterday’s Daily Torygraph https://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/energy/windpower/9837026/Wind-turbine-collapses-in-high-wind.html Some of the readers’ comments are absolutely priceless.
And a few hundred more wind turd-bines that don’t really like the wind to blow https://www.windaction.org/news/c48/
Meanwhile China’s massive use of polluting coal rises by another 10% this year making a mockery of our Government’s pathetic “green energy” plans which are just pushing up electricity prices, making our businesses uncompetitive and destroying British jobs.
This situation would be laughable if it wasn’t so tragic.
By David Craig, on January 30th, 2013 As the Government tries to turn our education system into one that actually teaches something, it’s perhaps worth remembering how Labour ruined our schools. Under Labour, education spending shot up from £38bn to £73bn. But where did all the money go? Did the quality of our schools almost double?
Looking at the number of initiatives launched by Labour, one can see how our money was spent. For children starting school there were Early Learning Partnerships, Transition Information Sessions, Parent Support Advisers and Parenting Early Intervention Pathfinders.
At primary school level there were the Primary Leadership Programme and Primary Strategy Consultant Leaders.
For secondary schools we had Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning Resources (SEALS), School Improvement Partners, Reading Recovery Teachers, the Secondary National Strategy, Learning Agreements and Excellence Hubs.
We were also blessed with the September Guarantee, School Sport Partnerships, Pathfinder Partnerships, Education Improvement Partnerships, Extended Schools, the Every Child Matters (ECM) programme, the Cross-Government Safeguarding Programme Board, Local Safeguarding Children Boards, Activity Agreements, the Apprentice Ambassador Network, Care to Learn, Aimhigher, Safer School Partnerships, the London Challenge, Chartered London Teachers, the 6th Form Presumption, the Early Adopters Programme, Making Mathematics Count, the Train to Gain Service, Youth Matters, Sector Skills Councils, National Skills Academies, the Trust Schools Toolkit, the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust, the Numeracy Taskforce, Safer Sector Partnerships, the Framework for Personal Learning and Thinking Skills, Diploma Gateway, Every Child a Reader and the School Attendance Strategy to name just a few. Moreover, there was Personalised Learning – but as the Department for Education and Skills explained this is ‘not a new initiative, it is a philosophy’.
In a 2007 report, the Department for Education and Skills claimed all these initiatives were part of “the Government’s commitment to removing unnecessary administrative burdens and giving schools greater freedom and autonomy”. However, an ignorant outsider might think Labour created a vast, Byzantine empire of specialists and advisers – many with good salaries, expense accounts and index-linked pensions – all there to wander round the country, attend thousands of meetings, produce hundreds of thousands of documents, all to tell our teachers how to teach without ever actually having to endure the daily struggle of facing a class of schoolchildren themselves.
By David Craig, on January 29th, 2013 I think we can agree that when a government borrows money, there are two pernicious results. Firstly, tens of billions of pounds get diverted into yearly interest payments, when they could be used to create jobs and growth. Secondly, massive debts are built up which have to be paid some day in the future and which will cripple the economy for generations to come.
So there is an old-fashioned economic theory that governments should only borrow during times of national emergency – the First and Second World Wars for example (not the pointless Iraq and Afghan invasions).
With this in mind, let’s look at some of the reasons our government borrows money: 1. So multi-national companies (often Internet-based) which make hundreds of billions of profit in the UK each year don’t have to pay taxes. 2. So 2 million Brits who can’t be arsed to work, can live in comfort while 2 million East Europeans do the jobs the Brits don’t want to do. 3. So Brits can keep breeding even though many of them can’t afford the children they produce. 4. So we can give £12.6bn a year in foreign aid to the world’s most corrupt countries and so that over £10bn of this gets stolen by Third World politicians and bureaucrats. 5. So the left-wing BBC can pay over 360 managers more than £100,000 a year each and can give hundreds of thousands of pounds in payoffs to anyone who leaves either due to incompetence or just because they’re off to take another job.
6. To support 650 overpaid, expenses-fiddling MPs when we only need about 200. 7. So that almost 900 Lords can SOSO (Sign On and Sod Off) claiming huge expenses in the process. 8. So we can spend £30bn on housing, education, healthcare and benefits for the one million Romanian and Bulgarian families that will move to Benefits Britain over the next few years. 9. So more than 100,000 public-sector managers can earn more than £100,000 a year each making them members of the “100,000 Club” 10. So more than 100,000 public-sector employees can have pension pots worth over £1m each when they retire
I could go on. But I willl spare you more laughable reasons why our government keeps adding to our debt levels in a kamikaze policy of borrowing that will crush any chance of economic growth, but which keeps the rich getting richer at our expense.
By David Craig, on January 28th, 2013 Most people probably aren’t feeling too perky about their finances at the moment as we face yet another year of frozen salaries and rising prices. But the real “Big Squeeze” on our money is just about to get a whole lot worse.
For example, hidden away in the detail of Osborne’s last budget are figures on the increases in tax revenues the Government is planning for the next few years (see figure)
These are going to hurt most households.
Then we have to take account of the rising interest costs of our ever-increasing Government debt. Brown and Balls “only” increased debt by about £400bn (from £320bn to £720bn) in 13 years wrecking our economy – the Coalition will push it up by another £700bn to over £1.4trn by the 2015 election. That will, of course double interest payments leaving over £30bn a year less to spend on public services (see figure)
If you think you’re being squeezed now, then in the words of Bachman Turner Overdrive “b-b-b-b-baby you ain’t seen nothing yet..here’s something you’ll never forget”.
By David Craig, on January 27th, 2013 Another week, another scandal of poor care in the NHS. And once again it’s the dreadful Staffordshire hospital where around 1,200 patients died unnecessarily from poor care. The chief executive was allowed to retire early with a huge pay-off and full pension and to avoid answering any questions at an enquiry by claiming ill health. Meanwhile the head of the health authority responsible, Cynthia Bower, was promoted to run the Care Quality Commission – the body that should be ensuring good care throughout the NHS. This could only happen in the bureaucrats’ paradise that Britain has become.
There will be many more NHS scandals in the months to come and the usual handwringers at the BBC and Guardian will bleat and moan about ‘budget cuts’ and the NHS needing more money. Yet the NHS budget has doubled over the last 12 years – but quality of care hasn’t improved. Instead, most of the extra money has been wasted on things like a doubling in the number of managers from about 20,000 to over 40,000 and a doubling in managers’ salaries. Meanwhile the number of hospital beds has been slashed. In 1997, there were about 8 hospital beds per manager, now there are less then 4.
In spite of the vast amounts we spend on the NHS, we now have fewer hospital beds per 100,000 people than almost any other European country. So don’t listen to the NHS’s excuses – it is responsible for its own pathetic failure.
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