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By  David Craig, on October 23rd, 2012 Our useless, part-time, work experience chancellor has come up with another blitheringly stupid idea which will increase public spending. Apparently this economic genius (a man who knows as much about economics as the lying buffoon Brown) has decided that child benefit should be paid to middle-income families and then taken back from them via the tax system.
This means that over 500,000 people will have to fill in some extra self-assessment form for HMRC. Now let’s imagine that the cost of bureaucracy to process, check and sort out any problems with these 500,000 extra self-assment forms is £100 each. That’s another £50m in bureaucracy. If, as is likely, there is a lot of confusion about the new forms and they cost £200 each in bureaucracy, then Osborne has wasted about £100m.
The only job Osborne ever had before going into politics was folding napkins in Selfridges. So he’s hardly likely to understand one of the most basic principles of organisational life – that increasing complexity increases cost. Liar Brown was the same. With all his tax credits and pensioner credits and other credits, he made the tax and benefits system so complex that he must have wasted several billions on extra bureaucracy during his 13 years destroying the British economy.
Laughably, idiot Osborne is wasting a few million more of our money with his worthless new quango – the Office of Tax Simplification (OTS). What has the OTS achieved? The disastrous 2012 budget where supposed “simplifications” caused the pasty tax row, the static caravan row, the granny tax row and a series of u-turns and backward somersaults that could have earned Osborne a place in the British Olympics gymnastics team. And now the cretinous OTS has come up with this ludicrous new idea of paying child credits through the benefits system only to claw them back through the tax system.
A couple of years ago on Radio 4’s Today programme, I was slapped down by John Humphrys when I suggested that most top civil servants were incompetent and out of their depth. Come on, Mr Humphrys – we’ve had the Millenium Dome disaster: the NHS computer system (£6bn down the drain): Nimrod (£4bn down the drain): the new NHS contracts for doctors paying them more to work less: the PFI catastrophe which is bankrupting hospitals and schools: the West Coast Mainline cock-up and many many more listed in my book FLEECED.
The sad truth is – we really are ruled by a bunch of liars, buffoons, fools and incompetents.
By David Craig, on October 22nd, 2012 The on-the ropes BBC is making much of the fact that it is boldly screening a Panorama investigation into why a Newsnight investigation into Jimmy Savile was dropped. But there’s hardly any point watching this great new investigation as we already know the result. Panorama will conclude that there is no evidence the Newsnight investigation was dropped because the BBC had planned two tribute programmes to their favourite paedophile and rapist Jimmy Savile. Surprised?
When confronted with evidence of Savile’s paedophilia, BBC bosses first claimed that nobody knew nothing. When it was discovered that BBC’s Newsnight had actually started an investigation, the BBC implausibly claimed that the Newsnight piece was only about whether the police should have dropped an investigation into Savile’s paedophilia and not (honest guv) at all into Savile’s paedophilia itself. Only some PR idiot could have come up with such a ludicrous explanation.
And now Panorama will conclude that there is no evidence of anybody ever covering up anything. Yeah, right.
Yesterday I had a rather bruising encounter on LBC radio with someone called Iain Dale. Dale is a Tory and very successful blogger and now radio presenter. The piece was about whether MPs should travel first class. I widened the issue to my belief that MPs are engaged in a massive series of scams to enrich themselves at our expense. First I said that MPs had hugely increased the amount they claim in expenses. Mr Dale said this was not true. Yet House of Commons figures show that the amounts claimed rose from £118m in the 11 months before the last election to almost £165m in the following 11 months. To me, that’s an increase.
Then I said that MPs had watered down the rules on expenses by putting pressure on IPSA (Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority) and that Cameron had even threatened to abolish IPSA. Mr Dale said this was not true. I suggest Mr Dale looks at the statements made by John Bercow, Tom Harris, Adam Afriyie (page 72-74 of GREED UNLIMITED) and of course Cameron himself “it is anti-family and it is unacceptable”.
I also claimed that many MPs earned over £100,000 a year from second, third and fourth jobs. Mr Dale said there was only one Tory who did this – Tim Yeo. So I suggested Mr Dale looked at the earnings of MP and barrister Simon Reevell. Despite being a Tory and political expert, Mr Dale claimed he hadn’t ever heard of someone called Simon Reevell.
Most of us can argue with someone who has a different point of view to ourselves – but it’s quite difficult when that person seems to be deliberately denying the facts.
By David Craig, on October 21st, 2012 Here is a selection of quotes by more intelligent people than myself which I’ve used in PILLAGED
Financial journalists “Personal finance is corrupt..Financial institutions and PR companies target millions of pounds from marketing budgets at a few dozen business journalists..Some journalists boast of lifestyles that are little more than perpetual junkets”
Unit trusts “Investors have become victims as the charges they have to pay have risen and risen while the returns they get have been consistently below par and the actual cost of managing their money has fallen”
Unit trusts which invest in other unit trusts: “Probably one of the biggest scams I have witnessed in my lifetime is the concept of fund of funds”
Investment managers “Within the City you find many who are greedy and talented, many who are greedy but untalented, but few who are talented but not greedy”
Regulators “At a time when millions of people have lost their jobs, generally by no fault of their own, protecting the jobs of failed bank regulators only adds insult to injury”
Banks and accountants “All distressed banks received a clean bill of health from their auditors and within days some were asking the Government to bail them out”
Financial advisers “It’s just 99% of financial advisers who give the rest of us a bad name”
New savings products “Most so-called financial innovations are just new ways to fleece customers or hide risk”
ISAs “Cash ISAs have been turned into a systematic swindle. Sniffing an easy profit banks and building societies have, from day one, undermined and perverted what should have been a clean and simple product”
Spread betting “The spread betting leverage means that you can get rich, which is a wonderfully appealing idea. But it also means you can get poor, which most people ignore”
Equity release “The only winners in equity release are the companies and elderly people who die just a few years after taking out the policy”
Financial services “Taxpayers must protect themselves against two things: the corrupting influence of bureaucratic self-interest amongst regulators and the political clout wielded by the large institutions they are supposed to police”
Financial ignorance “It is hard to overestimate the extent of financial illiteracy amongst some consumers…Many pension policy holders did not realise their money was invested in the stock market”
By David Craig, on October 20th, 2012 Up to and during the banking crisis, we were constantly subjected to the British Banking Association’s Angela Knight appearing on TV to defend the banks. Whatever the banks did – aggressive tax avoidance, money laundering, mis-selling, profiteering, paying massive undeserved bonuses to failed executives, defrauding customers and shareholders, bribing politicians, fleecing taxpayers – the “repulsive” (in my opinion) Angela Knight could be relied on (in my opinion) to deny that the banks had ever done anything wrong.
Now our Angela has a new, presumably extremely well-paid job – defending our rip-off energy companies. So, if Angela tries to paint a picture of our energy companies being caring and customer-focused (as I believe she did for our banks) here are just a few facts.
1. Our often foreign-owned energy companies make four to five times as much profit in the UK than they are allowed to make in their properly regulated home markets.
2. They are so profitable in the UK that Scottish Power’s Spanish owner Iberdrola recently lent its American subsidiary £800m leeched from its UK customers, as the American subsidiary needed the money to meet investment commitments it had made to US regulators
3. Since 2006-7, the useless UK regulator Ofgem’s budget increased from £18.6m to £32.6m and yet due to Ofgem’s pathetic efforts, the UK is one of the most profitable energy markets in the world.
4. As you’ll see in the diagram below (I apologise that I have used this before), our energy companies keep pushing up prices whether the wholesale prices they pay rise or fall.
Angela Knight really seems to have found the perfect job for someone of her admirable talents and high moral values.
By David Craig, on October 19th, 2012 Day after day after day, journalists in the main newspapers make a very good living (£1 or more a word) writing about whether Cameron can win the next election and what he needs to do to win the next election and so forth ad nauseam. But does liar Cameron really give a toss? Or is it all just a well-paid game which keeps gullible readers believing they are “informed”?
Let’s look at it from Cameron’s point of view. He’s a multimillionaire who has never done a stroke of real work in his life. He fancied being PM because he thought he’d be “quite good at it”. As there wasn’t a single Tory MP with the intelligence or leadership skills to oppose him (David Davies is considered by many to be barking mad), Cameron eased into leading the party. He couldn’t even win an election against the appalling, incompetent, financially-incontinent liar Brown. As PM, Cameron has been such a spineless failure that people are seriously considering Boris the Buffoon to replace him.
Then there’s the money. He’s already rich. When he leaves Number 10, he can claim £115,000 a year taxfree for the rest of his life. Plus he’ll probably go to the Lords – that’s another £50,000 taxfree we”ll have to give him every year. Then there are all the City directorships he’ll be given for handing over so much of our taxes to the banks – say another £500,000 a year.
If liar Cameron really wanted to win the next election, he’d have replaced his work-experience, part-time, incompetent chancellor Osborne with somebody competent and he’d have fired the repulsive Andrew Mitchell. Instead he’s protected his chums, he’s made 117 of his cronies and best mates into Lords, he’s helped MPs steal ever more of our money by threatening to abolish the largely toothless IPSA and he’s protected our thieving banks from public anger and effective regulation.
Maybe being PM has just been a bit of a laugh for Cameron: something to do for a few years: a stepping stone to even greater wealth.
In fact, if you ever visit Parliament and attend for example a session of the Public Accounts Committee, you’ll see that all our politicians and journalists are just playing a well-paid game, pretending to be fighting for their policies when all they’re doing is stuffing their own pockets with our money and using their positions to further enrich themselves and boost their own egos.
By David Craig, on October 18th, 2012 Journalists make a living out of knowingly and cynically exaggerating, sensationalising and doom-mongering. I’m not in that business. But I’m finding it difficult to believe that we’re not heading for a massive financial crash and collapse in the value of the pound. You probably thought that was what happened in 2007/8. But the 2007/8 meltdown may just be foreplay compared to what’s going to happen in the next 2 to 3 years.
The problem is UK government debt. In 2000 this was about £320bn. By the 2010 election this had reached over £700bn. It’s now about £1trn. And by the 2015 election, we will owe close to £1.6trn. At the moment we pay about £50bn (0.5%) in interest each year. But that’s because the Bank of England (BoE) is using our money to buy our own debt. If the BoE wasn’t buying our debt, we’d probably be paying at least 1.5% – £150bn a year – in interest. That would mean having to make another £100bn cuts in public spending.
But at some point, the BoE will no longer be able to buy our debt and we’ll have to start paying real market (rather than BoE artificially-depressed) interest rates. Say we have to pay 1% – that’s £160bn a year by the next election. If rates were to rise to 1.5% – that would be £240bn a year. So a third of the government’s tax revenues would go to paying just the interest on our debt, never mind the capital. If this happens, we’re finished. The government would have to impose such draconian cuts that we would plunge into a massive recession, the value of the pound would collapse and we’d fall into a vicious self-reinforcing downward spiral where a lack of confidence led to higher interest rates, leading to a further lack of confidence and thus further rises in interest rates.
When will this happen? The most likely time is a few months after Labour get into power in 2015. Markets will see that in spite of horrendous levels of debt, Miliband’s and Balls’s only policy is to borrow more money to waste on higher salaries for Labour’s public-sector union paymasters. The interest we pay on our borrowing will start to rise, the value of the pound will go through the floor and we will be forced into asking the IMF to bail us out.
We are sleep-walking into this disaster because none of our politicians has the courage or leadership to tell us how much of a mess we’re in. All our politicians are interested in is keeping their jobs, thieving our money, and finding as many extra jobs as they can to feather their own nests. As Bachman Turner Overdrive sang, “b-b-b-b-baby you ain’t seen nothing yet, here’s something you’ll never forget, you just ain’t been around.”
By David Craig, on October 17th, 2012 Over the past few days, several newspapers have had headlines claiming MPs were about to lose their gold-plated pensions. But when you read the articles, it became clear that actually MPs were planning a massive 30% salary increase from £65,738 to £85,000. However, to throw up a smokescreen to dilute public fury at their greed, they would also take a minimal change in the terms of their pensions. In fact, yesterday a Torygraph writer even did a preposterous article claiming MPs were underpaid and that they were receiving less in expenses than previously. Lies, lies and more lies. So, as our MPs plan to screw us yet again to fill their own pockets with our money, here are a few things worth remembering about these greedy scum.
1. We now have 129 members of the Scottish Parliament, 108 MPs in Northern Ireland and 60 in the Welsh Assembly. Plus, the EU now makes over 70% of our laws. So we don’t need 650 MPs any more. The US has 435 members of Congress for over 250 million people. In the UK, 200 MPs would be quite enough.
2. Over 90 MPs are government ministers – twice as many as in other European countries. This gives them salaries of around £100,000 a year. Civil servants often complain that it’s difficult to find work for all these supposed ministers and an MPs’ committee even wrote a report titled “What do government ministers do?”
3. MPs have recently had a huge increase in the money they supposedly pay for staff from £115,000 to £137,200 outside London and £144,000 inside London. Much of this money, our money, goes straight into the pockets of MPs’ family and friends.
4. By watering down the rules on their expenses, MPs are now claiming on average £40,000 a year each more in taxfree expenses than they did before the expenses scandal broke.
5. Most MPs have second, third and even fourth jobs earning some of them hundreds of thousands of pounds a year.
6. MPs do very little and get over 90 days holiday a year. Some years they get even more than that because, as most of our laws are made by the EU or regional assemblies, Parliament runs out of things to occupy MPs and so goes into early recess.
7. Each MP actually costs us about £615,000 a year. Assuming they work for us for 180 days a year (and most do much less than this because they’re so busy doing all their other jobs), that’s about £3,400 a day each.
So, as our MPs bleat and moan about “how little” of our money they get for the “incredibly difficult” job they do in “public service” and as sycophantic journalists write grovelling articles in support of MPs, please remember this is all just a bunch of lies put out by greedy, thieving, dishonest, self-serving scum.
By David Craig, on October 16th, 2012 During the economic and social catastrophe of New Labour’s 13 years in power, almost all our major institutions became corrupted by greed and incompetence – expenses-thieving MPs and Lords, our politically-correct police, the biased paedophile-protecting BBC, the useless Home Office, the bloated, wasteful NHS, our dumbed-down schools, financially-incontinent local councils and our ever-increasing profligate central government bureaucracies. All these became polluted and rotten under Blair and Brown’s baleful leadership.
But one institution seemed to retain our respect – our military. Whatever criticisms the media made of our other institutions, they usually left the military and its leadership alone. Now thanks to the alleged, but not proven, behaviour of a group of retired military leaders, it seems the gloves are off and our military top brass may also come under scrutiny.
We all know that during the First World War and much of the Second World War, our troops rightfully earned the reputation of being “lions led by donkeys”. But how much better are today’s military leaders? How much better were people like Dannatt, Stirrup and Jackson? In both Iraq and Afghanistan, overwhelming force meant rapid victories. But what followed these victories seems to have been an almost endless series of blunders, stupidity and incompetence. We were fighting in Iraq for longer than either of the World Wars and in Afghanistan for longer than the First and Second World Wars together. It’s almost beyind belief – under the leadership of people like Dannatt, Stirrup and Jackson, we’ve been fighting in the dirty litte hell-hole Afghanistan for longer than it took to win both the First and Second World Wars – and we’ve achieved virtually nothing.
In Afghanistan our military bosses apparently learnt nothing from the British debacle in 1838-1842 and nothing from the failed Soviet nine-year occupation from 1979-1988. Ordinary soldiers must do what they are told. But it should be the duty of their leaders to learn from the past.
As for looking after their troops’ well-being – we had endless stories of our troops lacking vital equipment like body armour: of the SA80 rifle being inferior to the cheaper American M16: of soldiers being maimed and dying unnecessarily because there weren’t enough helicopters, even though military bosses in the UK had helicopters to ferry them around. Meanwhile, military leaders wasted tens of billions on incompetently-managed, hugely over-budget prestige projects like Nimrod (scrapped after wasting £3.4bn) and aircraft carriers without any aircraft to fly from them.
Perhaps it’s time to ask whether today’s troops are also “lions led by donkeys” – but today could it be that our donkeys are not only incompetent, but also self-serving, greedy and corrupt? I know what I think.
By David Craig, on October 15th, 2012 Congratulations to the Sunday Times Insight Team for another great investigation. As ordinary soldiers get maimed and killed in the pointless Afghan war, retired officers have been making fortunes using their connections to flog weapons to the military. Most retiring top brass will get one-off taxfree payments of around £300,000 plus £100,000 a year pensions for life paid for by British taxpayers. But this is apparently not enough money for these puffed-up, corrupt, greedy scum. They want more and will sink to any depths to get it. Apparently one felt that £100,000 a year for about two days’ work a month selling weapons was just “reasonable” for prostituting himself.
As for those still “serving”, they do pretty well from taxpayers’ generosity too. Thirty two top officers get an amazing £156,000 taxfree a year each to help with their “household expenses”. Yes, you read that right – £156,000 a year taxfree each. That’s more than most squaddies’ homes cost to buy. Another 381 officers get £81,000 of our money taxfree each a year to help them with their “household expenses”.
The father of one soldier killed in Iraq was quoted as saying: “My son was not given a battery for his radio or a £1.50 distress flare, so he was not able to signal for help when he was attacked. Yet the MoD seems to be able to find ridiculous amounts of money so the top brass has someone to mow their lawns and water their plants.”
Not only are we paying our corrupt, money-obsessed military bosses too much, both before and after retirement, but we also have too many of them. In the Navy we have 2 Admirals, 6 Vice Admirals, 33 Rear Admirals, 80 Commodores and 300 Captains for less than 40 fighting ships and submarines. I wonder what they do all day as very few of have them have big boys’ toys to play with. In the RAF we pay 26 Air Vice Marshalls, 90 Air Commodores and 330 Group Captains, yet we only have 820 planes.
Ordinary soldiers may be putting their lives at risk, but the top brass must love our seemingly endless wars as they are all making an absolute killing. If you know anyone serving in Afghanistan, please send them a link to this blog so they can see how cynically they are being exploited by their corrupt, overpaid, overpensioned military bosses.
By David Craig, on October 14th, 2012 In Asia and South America, many countries are trying to drag themselves out of their corrupt, misruled past and improve the lives of their citizens. Britain sadly seems to be going in the other direction.
CORRUPTION: Our military leaders – happy to let the Afghan war continue indefinitely as this gave them the opportunity to become rich by lobbying for arms firms. The BBC – utterly corrupt with hundreds of employees knowing about Savile’s paedophilia but saying nothing and a few even joining in. Our MPs earning hundreds of thousands a year ‘working’ for companies eager to get government contracts. Our Lords changing to a SOSO (Sign On Sod Off) expenses system (like the European Parliament) so they never have to show any recepits when claiming their generous expenses. Our MPs watering down their expenses system so they are now claiming on average £40,000 a year taxfree more than before the expenses scandal.
CORRUPTION AND INCOMPETENCE:The Financial Services Authority – increased its budget from £25m to £500m and did absolutely nothing to regulate the banks. Ofgem – budget up from £18.6m in 2007 to £32.6m in 2011 – but allows foreign energy companies to earn up to five times the profit in Britain that they can earn in their properly regulated home markets. Ofwat – budget up from £11.5m in 2007 to about £18m now – permits our mostly foreign-owned, tax-haven-based water companies to earn up to five times the profit in Britain that they can earn in their properly regulated home markets.
MISRULE: Cameron and Clegg promised to cut the cost of politics, then both wasted millions getting their cronies onto the public-sector payroll. Osborne – a chancellor without a clue, only keeping his job because he’s a chum of our lying PM. The Government wasting hundreds of billions bailing out banks that continue to pay their bosses massive bonuses for failure. The Government handing the banks billions more to supposedly lend to us while knowing the banks were just using the cheap taxpayers’ money to pad out their own profit margins. Government spending spiralling out of control because of the stupidity and incompetence of an arrogant, out-of-touch ruling class all busy feathering their own nests at our expense.
I could go on, but if you’d buy my new book GREED UNLIMITED (only the cost of a couple of drinks) you’d get a better idea of the extent of Britain’s decline from being a world leader to becoming a corrupt, misruled Third World backwater.
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