Snouts in the Trough

Clearly our hopeless Chancellor and his well-paid, useless advisers haven’t a clue about how to get Britain’s economy growing again. So, free of charge, I’ll tell them. The trick is to abolish Corporation Tax completely. Let me explain. Every tax has a limited life because sooner or later those, who should be paying it, find ways of avoiding it. We once had a beard tax – people shaved off their beards. There was a window tax – buildings were built with fewer windows. I think you get the picture. Well, Corporation Tax has also outlived its usefulness. During the Brown boom, Corporation Tax paid by smaller companies went up by about 130%. But tax paid by large companies and banks only went up by about 20%. Why? Because large companies and banks have myriad ways of avoiding this tax. Moreover, Corporation Tax encourages financial speculators to take huge loans to buy up companies, siphon off their profits and pay virtually no tax by setting off the interest payments against their tax bills.

If our poor excuse for a Chancellor scrapped Corporation Tax completely and replaced it with retaining a part of the VAT refunded to companies, a number of things would happen. Firstly, tax evasion would plummet as the Government would already hold the money. Carousel fraud would also fall. Foreign companies operating in Britain and pretending to make no taxable profits would end up paying their fair share of tax. Schemes used by firms like the Water Companies to channel profits into offshore tax havens like Jersey and the Cayman Islands would no longer work as they would now be taxed on the level of their operations in the UK. Plus, thousands of foreign firms would set up their HQs in the UK to benefit from our zero Corporation Tax and this would create hundreds of thousands of well-paid jobs and bring money into the economy.

Our worthless politicians tell us about the ‘tough decisions’ and ‘painful choices’ they supposedly have to make. But all this shows is that they have no imagination. Here’s an easy decision that will boost the economy – so why can’t our leaders just do what I propose?

The Queens’ sixty years of public service are a useful backdrop against which to judge today’s worthless, lying, self-serving politicians, bureaucrats and military leaders. We have a lying PM who is incompetent, out of his depth and floundering in a sea of his own blunders, who has poured our money into the pockets of his friends and cronies and who is too arrogant to do anything that is in Britain’s, rather than in his own, interests. We have a Chancellor whose stupidity is almost breathtaking, yet cannot bring himself to implement a single sensible policy because he wouldn’t want to be seen to ‘lose face’. There’s Ed Balls and Ed Miliband spewing their lies about the recession being due to ‘savage cuts’ when they know that public spending is increasing and that they with Brown are responsible for the current economic disaster. There are 646 MPs and almost 800 lords all fiddling their expenses and feathering their own nests at our expense. There’s the “100,000 club” – the 100,000 bureaucrats, hospital bosses, town hall chiefs and civil servants all earning more than £100,000 a year and who will all retire with taxfree cash payments of over £200,000 each plus getting a six-figure pension for life all paid for by people earning a small fraction of what the “100,000 club” are making. There are our hopeless military leaders, happy to waste the lives of hundreds of their troops in the pointless war propping up an incompetent, corrupt puppet government in Afghanistan while furthering their own careers and who rush off to make their fortunes working as consultants to defence companies as soon as they reach their wonderfully early retirement age.

During this Jubilee weekend, many of these venal, selfish scum will be sucking up to the royal family at the various events, all content with the easy lives they’ve managed to get for themselves living as well-rewarded parasites on taxpayers’ money. It’s a wonder the Queen can stand being anywhere near these self-serving scum without wanting to be sick.

We’ve been pouring so much of our money into our banks (and the pockets of our bankers) for so long, perhaps it’s not surprising that people are forgetting why we did it in the first place. If I remember correctly, we were told by our politicians (most of whom were getting cash from the bankers) that if we didn’t bail out the banks, bank lending to business would collapse and this would lead to a recession. Well, we did bail out the banks, bank lending to business did collapse and we are in a recession. But the only people doing well out of the recession are the bankers, many of whom are troughing in taxpayers’ money.

What our leaders didn’t tell us is that there has been a fundamental change in the nature of banking. It used to be about supporting the economy through loans to businesses and homebuyers. That’s mostly gone. Now banking is about gouging ordinary people through flogging us worthless financial products (HSBC, Barclays); speculative trading to push up the price of essential commodities like fuel and food; and making vast fortunes through spinning our money round and round through ever more complex schemes taking a healthy cut every time our money moves. Some of the banks’ most profitable years are those where they lent the least. It now seems that there was actually no need to bail out the banks. It really wouldn’t have mattered if RBS had gone down the tubes and Fred Goodwin had gone to jail. We’ve been conned. Well and truly taken for a ride. Meanwhile, the bankers probably wake up each day wondering how they got away with it.

But if we think we’ve been had, spare a thought for the Irish. Their whole economy has been wrecked by their government’s decision to save Ireland’s banks. But much of the ‘lending’ made by Ireland’s biggest failed banks wasn’t lending at all. It was just handing billions to bank directors, their families and their business cronies pretending these handouts were loans, when in fact they were just theft. And not one single Irish banker has been prosecuted. And now the same con is about to be played out in Spain. Raping ordinary people to save the hides of a thoroughly corrupt ruling elite. Why oh why didn’t I get a job with a bank?

Osborne was meant to cut public spending to reduce the deficit. But it seems the ‘highly educated’, ‘never had a proper job in his life’ Osborne and his equally ‘highly educated’, ‘never had a proper job’ advisers haven’t a clue how to do this. Instead they keep on increasing taxes and reducing tax thresholds to pay for their Brownian incontinence with our money. The political argument should not be between a supposed conflict between ‘cuts’ and ‘growth’. What we need are drastic public-spending cuts while funnelling the money saved into creating jobs. It’s not complicated, Mr Dumbo Osborne.

How do you do this? Here’s a simple example. Put the 300,000 highest paid civil servants on a 4-day week. That would save about £100m a week – £5bn a year – in real cash. You then take this £100m a week (£5bn a year) and use it for infrastructure projects – building homes, schools, roads etc. Allowing for raw material costs, this would be enough to pay for about 100,000 unemployed people to get jobs. That would reduce benefit payments by over £10m a week (£500m a year). This would also reduce the social costs of unemployment (crime, hopelessness, family break-up, illness, depression etc) and produce something of value – roads, schools, houses and so on – instead of more worthless paperwork from unnecessary, underworked, overpaid bureaucrats. Thus the real benefits for society would be much more than the £500m a year.

That, Mr Osborne, is how you reduce the amount of money wasted on government and reinject it into creating jobs and growth. Even my dog can understand this, though it seems to be way beyond the capabilities of Osborne and his advisers. So we are doomed to decline and recession until we can turf the useless Osborne out of No. 11.

I suppose I should congratulate the BBC. After over eleven years of failure in Afghanistan, more than the First and Second World Wars put together, the BBC has finally realised what the rest of us have known for a decade – that the whole thing is an unmitigated disaster and an utterly pointless loss of British lives. Of course, BBC bosses are too afraid to say this directly. Instead they use the historical two-parter The Great Game to reveal how every foreign intervention in Afghanistan has ended in failure. That probably means that the only people left in Britain, who believe we are achieving something in Afghanistan, are our politicians and worthless, self-serving, money-grabbing military leaders.

But the truth may be worse. Perhaps our politicians have known for years that the Afghan war was a hopelessly mismanaged failure. Perhaps our politicians are so cynical that they didn’t give a toss that hundreds of young British men and women are being killed and maimed for no purpose at all. Rather that, than the politicians having the courage to admit they were wrong and to end the disaster. As for our gutless, incompetent military leaders – while thousands of the troops who obeyed their orders will live the rest of their lives in poverty as cripples, our military top brass will retire with honours and massive pensions and then quickly get well-paid jobs working for private-sector companies selling stuff to the military.

Th Afghan war represents everything that is wrong in Britain today – lying, thieving politicians only out to save their own skins, military leaders feathering their own nests and celebrity-obsessed media that doesn’t dare tackle issues that are actually important.