It seems a pity to cast a dampener on the public’s festivities as they watch Britain’s olympic flops flop. But once the Games are over, reality will return and bite us all very painfully in the a–e. It’s a reality that neither Labour’s Ed Balls nor our work experience Chancellor Osborne like to mention. In 2000, we paid about £24bn a year to service our government’s borrowing. By 2005, this had reached £35bn a year. By 2010, I think it was about £45bn a year. In 2011 it was £48.5bn. This year it should be comfortably above £50bn. And by 2015, we really hit the jackpot – we’ll be paying over £70bn a year in interest. We’ll be paying the same in interest as we now pay for education and defence. And this is based on the Coalition’s deficit reduction plans working. Should the economy not grow (seems more than likely) our debt payments will be even higher. We are bankrupt! Kaput! Finito! Game over! Have a good olympics.
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By  David Craig, on July 29th, 2012By David Craig, on July 27th, 2012Let’s look at some very simple figures. Britain has about 4.5 million small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs). If just a quarter of these took on just one extra person, unemployment would fall by 1,125,000, benefits claimants would fall by 1,125,000 and taxpayers would increase by 1,125,000. Recovery? The economy would be booming. What’s stopping this happening? Two things – corporation tax and employment law. Corporation tax. During the Brown Boom, SMEs paid 130% more in tax, while banks and larger companies only paid about 15% more. Why? Because banks and larger companies see corporation tax as a joke they can easily avoid. So corporation tax penalizes SMEs who can create the jobs we need and helps large companies who spend most of their time firing workers to increase bosses’ bonuses. If we scrap corporation tax and replace it with a tax on all business activity in Britain – basically witholding some VAT – banks and large international companies would pay more, SMEs would pay less and SMEs would have the money to invest and grow. Labour laws – any company employing less than fifty people should be exempt from 90% of our useless, crushing, politically-correct equality and labour laws, which prevent companies getting rid of people who are rubbish. Then SMEs would not be afraid to employ new staff. By putting all central government departments on a 4-day week, you’d generate enough money to subsidise any SME that takes on extra staff. Over the last few days, for some reason, Daily Telegraph journalists have been claiming that Osborne is a great Chancellor and that there is no alternative to his ‘austerity’ policies. This is rubbish. Utter and total rubbish written by journalists who have never had a proper job in their lives. All that is needed is for one in four SMEs to hire one person each and we’re out of recession. How hard is that, Mr Osborne? Oh, and say hello to loudmouthed former Osborne adviser and now boorish Tory MP Claire Perry. I tried to explain all this to her a couple of years ago when I met her at Portcullis House, but evidently she was too self-centered to listen to any opinions apart from her own! By David Craig, on July 27th, 2012There’s a wonderful book “Ship of Fools” which describes the corruption, cronyism and incompetence of the Republic of Ireland’s mafia-like ruling elite. Best part of the book is when he reveals how Ireland’s top bankers made hundreds of millions in loans to themselves and their close friends. Now, even the thoroughly corrupt Irish (the Italians of Northern Europe) are starting police investigations and prosecutions. But in Britain, bankers’ criminality is still rewarded by massive payoffs and pensions. The problem for Britain is that our politicians of all parties are doing everything they can to protect their banking paymasters. After all, one in eight lords is already on the banks’ payroll and think how many MPs are hoping to get nice, highly-paid sinecures with a bank or two when they leave Parliament. Yet there seem to be strong grounds for bringing prosecutions for things like obtaining money by deception, conspiracy to defraud, issuing false prospectuses and knowingly trading while insolvent. In case our useless Serious Fraud Office and pointless, politically-correct police don’t know where to look, here are a few ideas – Fred Goodwin, Sir Tom McKillop, Andy Hornby, Adam Applegarth, Lord Stevenson, Lord Green of ‘Moneylaundering on Sea’, Peter Cummings, Sir James Crosby, Bob Diamond, Jerry del Missier. By David Craig, on July 26th, 2012On the one side, our ‘work experience’ Chancellor, the incompetent Osborne, is right – with national debt heading towards £1.3trn we can’t afford to borrow any more to boost economic growth. On the other side, the worthless Ed Balls, who helped Liar Brown bankrupt Britain, is right, we can’t go on with an economic strategy with no growth stimulus. But they are also both depressingly wrong. What is needed is not the Tories’ more austerity or Labour’s more borrowing. What is needed is a transfer of taxpayers’ money from unproductive spending (public-sector bureaucracy) to productive spending (building housing and infrastructure). There is only one way to achieve this quickly. Step 1. Put all public-sector bureaucrats on a 4-day week – so they work Monday to Thursday with all administrative government offices closed Friday, Saturday, Sunday. This includes central government departments, NHS hospital bosses and administators, local council bosses and administrators and all our 900 largely pointless quangos. Step 2. Use the £200m a week – £800m a month – in real cash savings to invest in new house and road building with generous subsidies for companies taking on long-term unemployed (not new Polish and Spanish economic migrants just arrived in the UK) Step 3. Watch with delight as benefits payments fall and as tax revenues rise. This is so simple. But the worthless, arrogant little turd Osborne and the spendthrift, economic incompetent Balls are so transfixed by their out-of-date economic theories that they can’t accept that they should change their minds. Keynes once said that when the facts change, he changed his opinions. But worthless Osborne and even more worthless Balls are men who stick to the same opinions even when the facts change. God help us all! By David Craig, on July 25th, 2012Tory MP David Gauke has laughably claimed that it is wrong for ordinary people to pay tradesmen cash in hand. Let’s have a look at this great beacon of morality. David Gauke is one of our 646 MPs. In the US, for a population over five times ours, they have just 435 members of Congress. With the EU making most of our laws, we don’t need 646 MPs any more – 200 to 300 would be quite enough, so Mr Gauke may just be a parasite who has a job because the political elite protect their own. Mr Gauke is also some kind of government minister. We have 109 supposed government ministers in Britain – about twice as many as they have in France , Germany or Italy. Why so many? It’s just a way for lazy, useless, greedy MPs to earn £100,000+ a year because they’re not satisfied with their £65,000 salaries. Civil servants often complain we have so many minsisters that it’s difficult to find enough for them to do. And what about Mr Gauke’s expenses? In the three years before Mr Gauke entered government, his expenses shot up by over 30% from £94,392 to £125,783. In the Telegraph expose of MPs’ expenses, Mr Gauke was found to have claimed £10,248 in moving expenses when he bought a flat in South London. This included £8,550 in stamp duty. Of course, I’m sure all Mr Gauke’s claims were ‘within the rules’. But his increasing pocketing of our money does suggest Mr Gauke is good at one thing – playing the MPs’ expenses game. And finally, Mr ‘Treasury Minister’ Gauke, why is the cost of the UK Treasury going up from £182m to £197m while you’re a Treasury minister? I thought we were meant to be reducing spending, but you’re increasing it. So, even if we paid more tax, you’d just waste it on more pointless bureaucracy. All this leads me to believe that Mr Gauke is a parasitical, hypocritical, expenses-grabbing little shit. Could I be right? By David Craig, on July 24th, 2012As the arrogant, shallow fools running the Coalition flounder helplessly in a mire of their own incompetence, it looks like Labour are on course to win a massive majority at the next election. That would mean the repulsive Ed “Tax and Waste” Balls would become the next chancellor. What a disaster for Britain – even more disastrous than the useless little prick Osborne. So as we await Balls’ return to power, I’m planning a few posts to remind us of the utter economic catastrophe which the last Labour government caused. First up, I looked at some of the claims made by Gordon “Liar” Brown and Bernie “Fraudster” Madoff – they look awfully similar:
By David Craig, on July 23rd, 2012Last week our overpaid, overpensioned, expenses-fiddling MPs headed off for a couple of months summer holidays. After the expenses-fiddling scandal, you might have thought that our MPs would show a little more caution when stealing our money. You’d have been wrong – in the last couple of years, the amount our MPs have claimed in expenses has gone up by about 30%. So, as our thieving MP’s fly to their holiday homes in France and Italy, it’s perhaps worth remembering that we really aren’t in this together. The graph below shows the percentage of national wages taken by the top 1% – money-laundering bankers, underperforming FTSE bosses and multimillionaire expenses-fiddling MPs. Their share of the pie keeps on going up and up and up.
By David Craig, on July 22nd, 2012Yesterday, I tried to show how many FTSE100 company bosses are pocketing close to £5m a year, even though their basic salaries are often less than £1m a year. Today I wanted to show the dismal performance that our multimillionaire company bosses have achieved. While the salaries of FTSE350 bosses have gone up by 75% over the last decade, the share prices and value of the companies they have managed and mismanaged have both fallen. This affects us all, as the savings we have in unit trusts and our pensions are usually invested in the FTSE350 companies. Why do we pay so much to our FTSE350 failures?
By David Craig, on July 21st, 2012With public anger growing over bankers’ bonuses and executive pay in general, many CEOs claim that they only earn around £800,000 to £1,000,000 a year. But in fact most are pocketing almost five times their basic salary in all kinds of share options and bonuises however dismal their performance: By David Craig, on July 20th, 2012Yesterday was a sad day for our useless, politically-correct BBC reporters. They had to announce through gritted teeth that crime figures were falling. Imagine if crime had risen. We’d have had reporters braying about government cuts in police numbers putting us all in danger, there would have been loads of crime victims telling their horrific stories, government ministers would have been pilloried about their cuts harming ordinary people, Ed Miliband would have had a field day and so on. But instead we just got a very brief announcement and no government ministers were interviewed. Good old biased BBC. Talking of government ministers – one wheeze our MPs keep quiet about is that we have 109 supposed government ministers – that’s almost a third of Coalition MPs who are getting six-figure salaries because they’re supposedly ministers. This gives us a much higher percent of MPs who are ministers (and so get lots more of our money) than most other European countries (see graph)
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