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By  David Craig, on May 6th, 2012 In the aftermath of the local elections drubbing, the three key coalition figures bleat on about how in “difficult times” they must keep on “taking the tough decisions”. The problem for these three lying incompetents is that they’re not “taking the tough decisions”. What are the key bits of legislation for the next parliament? Allowing gay marriage and reforming the Lords (aka more well-paid jobs for their sycophantic, expenses-fiddling cronies). What have these got to do with Britain’s problems? What about dealing with our collapsing economy, foreign-owned utility companies making obscene profits, a welfare system that encourages idleness, an education system that produces illiterate fools, a pointless war in Afghanistan, a corrupt and wasteful EU that is destroying jobs, a public sector that squanders billions mostly on overpaid, self-serving bureaucrats.
So, Liars Cameron, Osborne, Clegg – want to “take some tough decisions”? Well here are some: support British industry and invest in some infrastructure projects; declare all our water, electircity and gas companies strategic national assets that can only be owned by British companies and can’t make more than 10% a year in profits; cut benefits and only give council housing to people over 25 years old – if they have children earlier, they can live with their parents; stop grovelling to the European Court of Human Rights; do not allow any child to progress to the next year in their schooling until they have reached an adequate level on the three Rs; bring all our troops home from Afghanistan within the next three months and put them to work in our failing schools and gang-ridden council estates; demand the EU cuts its budget by 5% a year for the next five years and that all new legislation from the bureaucrats in Brussels be checked for whether it helps create or destroy jobs; put all public-sector managerial staff on a 4-day week; put all central Whitehall government departments on a 3-day week; impose a maximum public-sector pension of average earnings (about £25,000 a year); abolish the worthless £70m a year Equality and Human Rights Commission; cut the BBC’s budget by 10%; set a maximum public-sector salary of £100,000.
There are many more things you three incompetent, self-serving liars could do, Messrs Cameron, Osborne and Clegg. But at least doing what I have listed above would be a start. Oh, and by the way, stop wasting parliamentary time on crap like gay marriage and Lords reform.
By David Craig, on May 5th, 2012 The politically correct BBC creams itself as the pointless Ed Miliband declares a ‘great victory’ in the local elections. But hold on, only about 32% of people could be bothered to vote at all and Labour got 39% of those votes – so about 12% of people voted Labour. As for the supposed crushing defeat for the Tories, well they got 31% of votes – about 10% of the electorate. So, 12% of us voted Labour and 10% Tory – not too impressive really. I remember when Putin got re-elected with, I think, just under 50% of the potential vote in Russia, the BBC and Guardianistas all claimed that Putin wasn’t really democratically elected. So why are the commentariat gushing over Miliband’s 12% of the potential vote? Compare Britain to France where the poison dwarf and his opponent speak at rallies where hundreds of thousands of people attend. Useless Miliband or Liar Cameron would be lucky to find four or five people interested in listening to them.
Our politicians like to claim that the low voter turnout is due to public apathy. It never occurs to them that we are so disgusted by their lies, greed, thieving, stupidity, incompetence and waste that we can’t bring ourselves to vote for any of them – even when, as advised by them, we should hold our noses when voting. The clearest sign of our contempt for the political class was the overwhelming “NO” vote to having mayors in our main cities (except for the idiots in Bristol). Apart from Bristol, people could see that having mayors would just be another case of more useless, greedy, thieving politicians – of more jobs for the boys and girls of the political class – more chances for the elite to rip us off as they pretend to represent our interests while busily filling their own pockets.
My conclusion on this week’s local elections farce is to congratulate the British public for sticking two fingers up to the political classes. Most people did vote this week. But they voted with their feet by staying away from the polling booths and showing our politicians that we loathe them – we loathe their lies, their greed, their thieving, their hypocrisy, their selfishness and their incompetence. So, Cameron, Miliband and Clegg – a plague on all your houses, you no longer have a democratic mandate to rule us.
By David Craig, on May 4th, 2012 If you’re looking for somewhere for your savings, you’ll find a queue of people – banks, financial advisers, Hargreaves Lansdown, Fidelity, St. James’ Place, and many others – all eager to get you to put your cash into unit trusts. Why? Because they care about your wellbeing? Or because they make massive commissions from flogging unit trusts? In Britain we pay an astonishing £59m every working day to unit trust managers and to the people who sold us those unit trusts. That’s £59m a day – £15bn a year – being taken from our savings and pocketed by other people. Unit trusts will make you very rich – but only if you’re a unit trust manager or salesperson. If you’re an ordinary saver, they’ll only make you poorer.
Let’s look at the figures. Say you put £10,000 into a unit trust. You immediately lose about 5% (£500) just for investing. Most of that goes in commission to salespeople. Then you lose about 3% (£300) a year in management and dealing costs. And when you withdraw your money, you lose another 5% (£500) because the price you sell your units is usually about 5% lower than the price you buy them. So, if you hold your units for five years, you generously give 25% (£2,500) of your money to multimillionaire managers and salespeople. (If you had £100,000, you’d be giving away £25,000 – £5,000 a year!) Of course, you hope the fund managers will make your money grow. But remember – 90% of unit trust managers FAIL to beat the overall performance of the markets where they put your money. And almost no unit trust managers ever beat the returns on cash. If you put your £10,000 into a fixed-interest deposit account, you’d get about 4% a year – over five years compounded that’s 21.5%. Due to their high charges, a unit trust would have to grow by 46.5% (9.3% a year) to beat a safe, no-risk cash deposit. Forget it.
Actually you have two rational choices for your money. You could put it in a longer-term 2 years+ fixed-interest deposit account. Or you could do what I tried – I looked at some of the most commonly recommended unit trusts, Googled them to see which were the main shares they held and then bought those shares directly myself reinvesting dividends in the same shares. At the same time as the unit trusts (which I so stupidly bought) lost thousands in fees, my shares went up, a couple by as much as 30%.
So please, please do NOT be conned into putting your savings into the grasping hands of multimillionaire unit trust managers and their unscrupulous, lying salespeople.
By David Craig, on May 3rd, 2012 Most of our water companies (and electricity and gas firms) have foreign owners. Why would this be? Is it because foreigners just want to help the British by supplying our water, gas and electrity? Is it because they’re charitable? Not exactly. It’s because our regulators (Ofwat – water: Ofgem – gas and electricity) are so utterly useless that these foreign utility companies can earn profits of over 30% a year in Britain, while regulators in their home countries restrict them to profits of 5% to 10%. Ofwat is probably our worst regulator as it constantly helps water companies against the interests of their customers. Despite the water companies making extortionate profits while losing about a third of our water due to leaks, Ofwat did not issue a single enforcement order in the first fourteen years of its existence. Instead, it allowed the water companies to repeatedly increase prices (in one case by 21% in a year) while the companies bleated that they couldn’t afford to invest in reducing leaks.
Thames Water, currently claiming we’re having a drought, is one of the best examples of how our expensive regulators are in the pockets of those they are meant to regulate. Previously owned by German RWE, Thames repeatedly failed to take any action to reduce leakage while paying its executives tens of millions of pounds each year after year. Even our thieving MPs realised Ofwat was serving the water companies when the Public Accounts Committee stated “Ofwat has been passive in its regulation of the water industry”. By the way, RWE’s customers in Germany pay about half as much for their water as RWE’s British customers. When Ofwat did suggest to Thames that they should invest just a few of their many millions in repairing leaks, owners RWE sold Thames for a £1bn profit to Australians who have continued to fleece Thames’s customers while investing as little as possible in reducing leakage.
We pay over £50m a year for the useless, greedy, incompetent, self-serving bureaucrats at Ofwat and Ofgem and they do nothing for us. Meanwhile, the owners of our water, gas and electricity companies cannot believe their luck at how much money they’re allowed to make in Britain because our regulators don’t regulate. Moreover, our greedy, thieving politicians don’t give a toss as many of them are paid huge “consultancy” fees by the water, electricity and gas companies so they’re not going to rock the boat. Once again we’re being fleeced by worthless, overpaid, overpensioned bureaucrats and politicians.
By David Craig, on May 2nd, 2012 Most people view our lying PM David Liar Cameron with utter derision and contempt. But we must also give him credit for his many achievements, mustn’t we? There’s his pledge to cut the deficit – oh, dear, the deficit has increased every month since he took office. There’s his promise of a referendum on Europe – wait a minute, we haven’t had that, have we? There’s his commitment to bring honesty back into British politics – woops, constant lies and selling private dinners to the rich for £250,000 a pop doesn’t look too honest. There’s his commitment to work for “hardworking families who play by the rules” – giving our money to his banker mates, failing to prosecute any bankers, reducing taxes on the rich, allowing huge companies to avoid paying taxes, allowing his rich friends to avoid paying taxes, pushing huge numbers of his cronies into the Lords where they can fiddle their expenses till the day they die – is that helping “hardworking families who play by the rules”? He promised to stand up for Britain – but he and Liar Osborne keep on handing tens of billions of our money to propping up the failing eurozone while claiming we can’t afford to look after our own elderly, who have usually paid their taxes and “played by the rules”.
In fact, I can’t really think of a single thing our incompetent, arrogant, corrupt, dishonest, useless PM David Liar Cameron has achieved. Cameron has betrayed us all and he has betrayed Britain. The pointless Ed Miliband must already be measuring up the curtains for Number 10.
By David Craig, on May 1st, 2012 Last year I bought a one-year travel insurance with a company called “insureandgo”. Apparently, somewhere in the small print of the policy it says that “insureandgo” will (“as a service”) automatically renew the policy unless customers contact them to cancel it. So this year, without informing me, “insureandgo” increased the price of my policy by 25%, did not inform me they had done this and then renewed my policy without telling me and without sending me any new policy documentation. The reason they didn’t send the new policy out is that by law we have 21 days to cancel any new insurance if we change our minds. By not informing me of the renewal and not sending any documentation till well after the 21-day period, “insureandgo” plan that I (and many other customers) don’t find out about the automatic policy renewal till well after the cancellation period.
They are (in my opinion) a bunch of crooks. Never, ever buy and travel insurance from “insureandgo”.
By David Craig, on May 1st, 2012 The useless Ed Miliband, aided and abetted by the repulsive Bercow, is trying to get all worked up about Jeremy Hunt supposedly breaking the Ministerial Code by being well and truly in bed with the Murdochs. So what if he was? All our politicians have been grovelling to Murdoch and doing his bidding for years. None more so than Labour. However, we don’t hear Labour ever mention a really serious breach of the Ministerial Code – when Blair lied to Parliament over Iraq’s fictitious weapons of mass destruction which could be launched “in 45 minutes”. Or what about Blair selling peerages? Or what about when the ghastly former Home Secretary Jacqui Smith claimed a small bedroom in her sister’s home was her main residence? Or when Alistair Darling flipped his home four times to get higher expenses? Or When Gordon Brown refurbished his London flat at our expense by splitting the cost over two years so he could claim much more than he should have?
We repeatedly hear political journalists claiming things like ‘most MPs are honest and hard-working’. This is rubbish. They are almost all self-serving, pompous, lazy, greedy liars, cowards and thieves. Ed Miliband’s attack of self-righteousness makes him look a fool. However, Miliband will probably (in spite of his uselessness) be our next PM because Cameron has turned out to be (in my humble opinion) a shallow, arrogant, dishonest, incompetent, lying, corrupt, worthless waste of skin. God help us!
By David Craig, on April 30th, 2012 Recently I’ve been looking to buy a house and found one I really liked – https://www.zoopla.co.uk/for-sale/details/14840280?search_identifier=8d5e51ad040deb6b4f7036d3e0596987 One of the things which attracted me was that the house was newly decorated so I could move straight in without having to do any work. What a naive fool I was. Luckily, I joined my surveyor when he was doing the survey and I learned that generous coatings of paint can hide a lot of horrors. What I think happened with this house was that the seller redecorated and (knowingly or innocently) covered up problems like damp in two of the bedrooms, the fact that insufficient reinforcement had been put in when a living room wall was removed and render plus paint on the outside that was not allowing moisture to pass through. Unfortunately for the seller, he or she put the house on the market in June 2011 at too high a price. The seller dropped the price by £10,000 in July 2011. Still no sale. In January 2012, another £25,000 seems to have been cut. But even then no sale. Then in March 2012, the price went up by £10,000. That’s when I came along and, like the idiot I am, almost fell into the trap of buying.
For the seller, the problem was this: The house probably looked magnificent when it was redecorated prior to being put on the market. But because the sale price was too high, nobody made an offer that was acceptable. Then so much time went past with the house on the market, that the horrors concealed (intentionally or not) by the redecoration began to show through – damp patches in the bedroom ceilings, cracks where the internal wall had been removed and bubbling of the paint on the outside of the building.
So there are two lessons here. For sellers who have splashed paint around covering up defects – sell the property quickly before the defects begin to show through. For buyers – beware any property that has been redecorated shortly before being put on the market – a few layers of paint may be covering up all manner of horrors.
By David Craig, on April 29th, 2012 Our banks’ financial advisers (greedy salespeople), our financial advisers and financial journalists are constantly telling us that, as interest rates are so low (and will be for a few more years), we cannot get a savings account which will protect our money from inflation. So, these good people tell us, we should be putting our money into things like unit trusts, ETFs (Exchange Traded Funds), ‘Growth Bonds’, ‘Kick-out Bonds’ and all kinds of other savings and investment schemes. One mantra they repeat is that ‘shares always outperform cash’. However, we should beware of these people’s motives. HSBC or Barclays or Lloyds salespeople just want to earn commissions and advance their careers – they don’t care what happens to our money. Financial advisers too are commission driven. Just to stay in business, a financial adviser has to earn about £100,000 a year to cover salary and costs. And as for financial journalists, like fashion journalists, they have to find something ‘new’ and ‘exciting’ to write about each week and have to drum up business for the firms advertising in their papers and magazines – they’d be out of a job if all they wrote was “leave your money in a high interest deposit account”.
To get us to move our money from risk-free products (e,g a 2-year fixed interest account) to risky products (unit trusts, ETFs, bonds) financial services insiders will often talk up the potential to earn an ‘inflation-busting’ 4% or 5% or whatever. At first sight this looks tempting and over £20bn a year is flowing out of risk-free bank accounts into riskier products. But when moving their money, many people are making a fatal mistake – they are just looking at the inviting 4% or 5% or whatever, but they are not comparing it to what they could get without any risk at all. A 2-year fixed deposit account will pay about 3.5% at the moment. So, if some salesperson or journalist is touting something that ‘could’ earn say 5%, you’re actually risking your money for just 1.5% (5% minus 3.5%) – not 5%. And that is a risk not worth taking.
Next time some ‘adviser’ or journalist starts gushing about some financial product which ‘could’ earn 4% or 5% or whatever, please compare this to what you would get by placing your money in a risk-free fixed interest account. You’ll usually find the risky product is simply not worth the trouble.
By David Craig, on April 28th, 2012 I’m sure you’re fond of your grandparents, but not as fond of them as our high street banks are. Bank ‘financial advisers’ (salespeople) call the elderly the ‘banana skin and grave brigade’ because they’ve got one foot on a financial banana skin (they don’t understand the overly complex savings products the banks want to sell) and one foot in the grave (they’ll soon be leaving us and so the banks feel there’s no harm relieving them of their money before they go). With interest rates so low at the moment, many elderly are not getting much for their savings, so it’s relatively easy for the banks to convince them to put their money into financial products which (salespeople claim) will give better returns.
The main con the banks are pulling at the moment, especially targeting the elderly, is selling what are called ‘structured products’. Usually these have names like “Growth Bonds” or “Guaranteed Bonds” or “Protected Capital Accounts”. These typically promise to give you about 120% of the growth in a stock market if the market goes up and if the market goes down they guarantee to give you your money back. The problem is that stock markets only go up by about 1% a year. The main benefit of buying shares is from reinvesting the annual dividend in more shares. But buyers of these products don’t get the dividends. So any money put into these products is money down the drain. Salespeople make huge commissions on these products
If granny and grandad don’t want a structured product, banks will often recommend some unit trusts (which pay high commissions to the banks) to their customers. Bob Diamond’s scum at Barclays recently had to repay over £80m for mis-selling mainly two funds – an Aviva ‘balanced’ fund that wasn’t balanced and an Aviva ‘cautious’ fund that was actually high risk. When you put money in a unit trust you really get fleeced. You lose about 5% of your money when you buy units, you lose about 3% a year in management and trading costs and then, when you want your money back, you lose another 5% because the price at which you sell your units is lower than the buying price. So if you keep money in a unit trust for five years, you pay out 25% to the bank and unit trust company. Just for you to break even, the unit truist would have to grow your money by 5% a year – very few achieve that. With interest rates at about 3.5% for a fixed 2- or 3-year savings account, your unit trust (which is a risky investment) would have to return 43% over five years – 8.6% a year – just to equal the return you get from a no-risk savings account. About 99.9% of unit trusts cannot deliver anything like this.
So talk to your grandparents before Barclays and HSBC and Lloyds and Natwest rip them off and warn them about the banks’ worthless investment and savings schemes.
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