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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.
By David Craig, on January 26th, 2013 Unless you’re a higher-rate taxpayer or get generous contributions from your employer, it’s probably not worth saving in a pension fund. Some figures:
Like unit trusts, the charges of just 1.5% to 2.5% that we pay to pension fund managers can look quite trivial. But over the longer term, they can have a disastrous effect on our retirement income and a correspondingly wonderful effect on the retirement income of our pension fund managers.
Take a saver who from 25 to 35 puts in £2,000 a year made up of own contributions, money from employer and tax relief. From 35 to 45 this goes up to £5,000 a year and from 45 to 65 to £7,000 a year. By 65, the saver will have put a wonderful £210,000 into their pension fund.
Assuming the money grows by the pension fund industry average of 3.4% a year. If the money is in a low-cost pension scheme with just 1.5% in fees, the saver will have £286,000 left. But the fund manager will have taken a healthy £65,500 for his or her efforts. If, as is more likely, the total charges including high 1st- and 2nd-year commissions, annual fees and dealing costs are actually around 2.5%, then the saver’s £210,000 will have only crept up by a very modest £28,500 to £238,500. But the fund manager won’t be too worried as they’ll pocket £96,600 (see figure)
In Denmark, Holland and Germany, management fees are 0.5% or less. But in Britain they’re 3 to 5 times as high. I believe the only way to save for a pension is with a low-cost SIPP (o.5% charges) and buy shares directly – do not, repeat not, put your SIPP money in a unit trust or other kind of fund otherwise you’ll be paying both your SIPP charges (0.5%) plus fund charges of say 2.5%. Only a madman or fool would do that – but sadly that’s precisely what most SIPP savers do.
By David Craig, on January 25th, 2013 In a desperate attempt to avoid national bankruptcy our work-experience, napkin-folding chancellor is doing everything he can to keep interest rates artificially low – magicking £375bn from nowhere to buy government debt and the appalling Funding For Lending. These have devastated the rates of interest savers are getting to such an extent that there is not a single savings account available that beats inflation.
But this has been wonderful for City insiders as those with savings, desperate to get a real return, are being forced to put their money into risky, stock-market “investments” which pay huge commissions and fees to those who manage our money. About £60bn of savers’ money has gone into “structured products” sold by banks. These promise to pay say 80% of any rise in the stock market and guarantee your money back if the market falls. Unfortunately people putting money in these don’t seem to understand that 80% of the money you make from shares is from the dividends, not from moves in the market. These products don’t pay any dividends.
We have over £500bn in unit trusts. Over a five-year period 75% of unit trusts underperform the market yet their managers cream off a scarcely believable £15bn a year (£59m every working day) in charges, fees, commissions and dealing costs.
In total, we have around £350bn in the hands of people who extract all kinds of fees and charges and we are paying those who sold these to us and who are holding our money an incredible £104bn a year (£411m every working day). That’s why they have bigger houses, swankier cars, more luxurious holidays and a much better lifestyle than those whose money they manage (see diagram below)
By David Craig, on January 24th, 2013 I know Cameron is just a shallow PR spiv. And I know you can’t trust a word his speechwriters give him to say. But yesterday as he came under a barrage of criticism from the usual idiots at the BBC for his EU speech, I was quite impressed. Cameron got the message right. The key issue for all our futures is not just Britain’s relationship with the EU, but the need for the EU to change.
Hopefully the chart below shows why – it’s the IMF growth forecasts for different regions of the world
Although things are tough in Britain, I don’t think we can imagine what it’s like to be in a country (Spain, Greece, Portugal) where pensions and salaries are being slashed and half of young people are unemployed.
Meanwhile as the EU collapses into economic decline around him, utterly corrupt, self-serving, greedy buffoon Barroso, like an extremely overfed version of Oliver Twist, keeps demanding “more more more” – more power to be given to the unelected EU kommissars, more regulation to reduce European competitiveness and more money to waste on useless stifling bureaucracy (see figure below)
By David Craig, on January 23rd, 2013 “Oh what a lovely war” must be the song that our great leader David “Winston” Cameron is singing at the moment. His hero Blair started (but never finished) a couple of pretty impressive wars. Cameron also wants a war or two to show what a great, principled leader he is (and to distract our attention from his mishandling of the economy). He tried to send British troops to Syria. Why? Who knows? Syria belongs to Syrians, not to the Notting Hill elite.
With Mali, “Winston” Cameron has his chance. The worthless fool leading France (also wanting to demonstrate leader-sized cojones) has sent in a few hundred cheese-eating surrender monkeys equipped with white flags into Mali to kill some Muslims and protect France’s mining interests there. Perhaps forgetting that it was the cheese-eating surrender monkeys who gleefully sold Exocet missiles to Argentina to kill British service personnel during the Falklands conflict, “Winston” has rushed to provide British support claiming we are entering a “generational conflict”. Were Britain to invade some Third World shit-hole, it’s rather doubtful that France would be supporting us.
Cameron’s claims of a “generational conflict” are total and utter borrocks. In most countries, radical Islam is just the new Communism – a violent reaction of the dispossessed and those without hope against corrupt, greedy, incompetent, kleptocratic ruling elites. So what does Cameron do? Yes, he sends British troops to kill those fighting against their worthless, greedy, venal leaders. And idiot Cameron does this to protect French economic interests while cutting the British army from 102,000 to 82,000.
The result of Cameron’s warlust will just be to make millions of Muslims hate us even more, increase the risk to British interests abroad and at home and whip up a “generational conflict” that is completely unnecessary. If Cameron and his advisers had any understanding of history, they would realise the radical Islam is just the new Communism and helping corrupt leaders suppress their own people will backfire spectacularly against us.
Oh, and by the way Mr Cameron, starting another “lovely” war won’t help you get re-elected!
By David Craig, on January 22nd, 2013 There’s no need to listen to the streams of excrement pouring from the mouths of Cameron, Osborne, Clegg, Miliband, Balls and so many others. Our leaders are just filling their own pockets while they can before we’re hit by the massive financial disaster that they have caused through their greed and incompetence.
So, ignore what the politicians say. There are only two facts which are important. First is the level of Britain’s debt (see figure below)
Labour increased debt by £380bn from £320bn to £700bn. The Coalition will push our debt up by £700bn to over £1.4trn. There has been no austerity. Public spending and borrowing are completely and deleriously out of control.
Second important fact is the interest we pay on our debt (see figure below)
Because our Government has magicked money out of thin air to buy £375bn of our own debt, interest rates are at historic lows. But what happens when we can no longer buy our own debt and financial markets want say 5% to buy British debt? That’s not high by historic levels. Well, 5% of £1.4trn is £70bn a year. Whoops. That’s more than we spend on defence or education. If Balls pushes borrowing up to £1.6trn, 5% would mean paying £80bn a year in interest.
We’ll have to cut public spending by more than 10% just to pay our interest bill. We’ll have to cut public spending by 25% to pay our interest and eliminate the deficit so our debts stop increasing. And if we could cut public spending by 35%, it would only take 70 years to bring debt down to the level it was when the Coalition took power.
But no government has the courage to make even a 10% cut in spending. So our debts will keep increasing. A disaster is coming our way. If any of you has any ideas of how this will play out, please email me at david.craig54@yahoo.co.uk as I’m struggling to find a positive solution. Then I’ll look at some possible scenarios tomorrow.
By David Craig, on January 21st, 2013 The big lie that Labour pushed on us was that immigation was good for the British economy. During Labour’s 13 years in power, about 2 million new jobs were created and around 1.77 million of these were taken by people who moved to Britain. Nobody has any idea how many hundreds of thousands of others have come to Britain to live off benefits. But does an immigrant in work actually contribute to the British economy?
Firstly there’s the problem that every job taken by an immigrant is one less job available for a Brit. So 1.77 million working immigrants means 1.77 million less jobs for us. But there’s a deeper problem, over 90% of immigrants take more from Britain than they contribute. Here are two examples:
1. A couple with three children earning £16,000 a year will get around £9,000 a year in tax credits and benefits. So we are giving them back much more than they pay in tax.
2. A single parent with one child earning about £12,000 gets £11,800 in tax credits and benefits.
In fact, a single parent with one child would have to earn £32,800 to get no state support and a couple with three children would need £39,500 to no longer qualify for state support. I would humbly suggest that the majority of immigrants earn nothing like these sums and so are being given much more by us than they contribute.
Then you have healthcare costs – about £1,600 per person per year. Education – over £10,000 per child per year. You also have to add the pressure immigration brings on many other services – policing, housing, garbage collection, road maintenance and so on.
So it is beyond laughable to say that immigration is helping the British economy.
From next year we can expect a massive influx from Bulgaria and Romania – at least one million families over ten years will come to Benefits Britain. That will cost us more than £30bn a year – money that we don’t have. This coming horror is something our lying, self-serving, greedy, expenses-fiddling politicians don’t dare mention.
Immigration is good for MPs – it gives them cheap and highly-educated nannies, gardeners, plumbers and builders that they can pay for using our money. Moreover, MPs’ brats don’t go to schools where a minority of children have English as a first language and MPs don’t have to worry about immigration pushing up housing costs as we pay pay for their first, second, third and even fourth homes.
But for the rest of us immigration is an easily-avoidable catastrophe that is going to bankrupt Britain. The easy way to avoid this disaster is to restrict benefits and credits to people who have worked a minimum of ten years in Britain. But that would require our politicians to act in our interests and not their own.
By David Craig, on January 19th, 2013 A little bit of snow once again brings total chaos to Britain’s airports, particularly Heathrow. Strangely, a similar amount of snow hardly affects flights at Scandinavian airports such as Oslo, Stockholm, Helsinki or Copenhagen. So why does it cause so many problems at hopeless, hapless Heathrow?
The problem is debt. Heathrow is owned by BAA and BAA is owned by a consortium led by Spanish company Ferrovial. In the last financial year, BAA made an operating profit of £572m. But this was turned into a loss of £256m by BAA’s increasing interest payments. Last year BAA increased its debt by £3bn yet it managed to pay generous dividends to its Spanish owners.
Like many other British companies (see my book GREED UNLIMITED) BAA’s owners have turned it into a “zombie” company – a company which has so much debt that it’s barely alive. Most of its huge earnings go into interest payments, meanwhile its owners keep increasing debt levels so they can pay themselves massive dividends.
Because of its debt levels (and rising interest payments) BAA doesn’t have the money to pay for sufficient staff or for enough snow-clearing equipment. All the money goes to banks and into the Spanish owners’ pockets.
So, don’t believe BAA’s lies about doing everything possible to get flights leaving on time. If BAA hadn’t been turned into a zombie, it wouldn’t be so badly affected by a bit of snow. BAA’s problem is not snow – it’s the greed of its owners and the debts they have built up to make themselves rich.
By David Craig, on January 18th, 2013 Two of the predictions I made for 2013 are already happening:
1. That the Daily Mail would publish articles every few days saying house prices would rise, fall or remain stable and each article would say the exact opposite of the previous one.
In fact the Tories could still win the next election. But David Liar Cameron can’t. If the Tories slung out Cameron and his utterly useless work-experience chancellor, Boy George Osborne, and replaced them with Boris “the buffoon” Johnson and Philip Hammond, then they might have a real chance in 2015.
Boris may be bonkers, but he stands up for Britain and that will rally the Tory troops (and scupper) UKIP in a way that the greasy slimeball Cameron never could. And in an age of infatuation with superficial celebrity, a “personality” like Bonkers Boris is likely to attract votes just because of his media presence rather than for any policies. The best time to ditch Cameron and Osborne would be after UKIP wipe the floor with the Tories in the 2014 EU elections.
But the hapless Tories look like they’re going to hang on to Cameron and so thoroughly deserve the thrashing they will get in 2015.
The bookmakers currently have the odds of Labour winning in 2015 at 4:1. So that tells us all we need to know about Cameron’s great “victory” in 2015.
By David Craig, on January 17th, 2013 Hopefully I’m not the only person who has noticed a collapse in the quality of TV documentaries. They used to be presented by people with knowledge and enthusiasm for their subject. But now many seem to use pig-ignorant, nobodies who replace the communication of knowledge with constant “wows” and “that’s amaaaazing” and “oh my God, oh my God, oh my God” and suchlike inanities which focus attention on the self-obsessed, idiotic presenter rather than the subject.
However, the BBC seems to have hit a new low with a programme called The polar bear family and me. Given the amount of time the presenter spent talking about himself, perhaps the programme should have been named Me-Me-Me and here are also some shots of some polar bears to justify the huge amount of licence-fee-payers’ money I’m pocketing.
During one scene, when the (IMHO) pig-ignorant, gobshite, self-regarding presenter got close to a hungry polar bear, he “helpfully” informed us “I’m crapping myself”. He could have said, “this is very frightening” or, if he absolutely had to make himself the subject of the programme, “I’ve never been so afraid”. But, no. He felt it necessary to tell us “I’m crapping myself”.
This was a programme aimed at families, so what kind of example does it give when a TV presenter says “I’m crapping myself”? This deliberate descent into the gutter is an indictment of the gobshite presenter, the editor and the whole BBC. After all, of the hundreds of hours of footage they could have used, they felt it necessary to include the “I’m crapping myself” segment. No doubt the presenter, editor and BBC felt they were being modern and edgy and cool by including the “I’m crapping myself”. But then perhaps the BBC felt they were being modern and edgy and cool when they knowingly allowed Jimmy Savile to abuse scores of teenagers on BBC premises.
Perhaps it’s time to cut the BBC’s budget by 5% a year for the next five years, so the BBC can focus on producing public-service broadcasting rather than garbage from foul-mouthed, self-obsessed nobodies?
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