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By  David Craig, on March 28th, 2012 David Miliband is, I believe, a very greedy and ambitious man. Such a self-serving person would, I believe, have a plan to become both a multimillionaire and PM. His plan might go like this. 1. Spend the few years up to the next general election filling his pockets with as much money as he can – he is estimated to have earned £500,000 last year. 2. Let brother Ed fight and lose the next election. 3. After the election loss, the Labour party will throw Ed out and come crawling to David Miliband begging him to take over leadership. 4. David will humbly agree, in the interest of the Labour party and the country, to become the new Labour leader. 5. Win the following election and become PM.
If David Miliband has such a plan, there is only one problem – David Cameron has turned out to be such an incompetent, sleaze-ridden liar that he might well lose the next election to the hopeless Ed Miliband. If that happens, then brother Ed becomes PM and brother David’s great plan will be well and truly buggered.
By David Craig, on March 27th, 2012 Yet again there are even more completely pointless deaths of British troops in the disaster that is Afghanistan. No doubt our lying PM David Liar Cameron will stand up in the Commons, read out the names of those killed and say some platitude like “they shall not be forgotten”. Then our hundreds of thieving, self-serving MPs will all nod their heads and grunt in agreement. But not one of these gutless creatures will dare question why our troops are being killed to support an utterly corrupt, incompetent, drug-dealing puppet government that will all scarper to their luxury multimillion pound mansions in Dubai the moment UK and US troops leave. And as for claiming our soldiers’ sacrifice will never be forgotten. What rubbish! It would be interesting if any interviewer had the courage to ask Liar Cameron or any other MP to name say ten soldiers killed in Afghanistan. I doubt most could even name one.
Our MPs are too busy filling their own pockets to give a toss about our troops in Afghanistan and Liar Cameron is occupied having jolly, intimate dinners with rich donors to the Tory party. As for our dead soldiers – they shall be quickly forgotten by the thieving, gutless, greedy scum who sent them to be killed for nothing and who haven’t got the courage to admit the whole thing has been a disaster and it’s time to bring our troops home. At the current rate, we can expect another 40-50 British troops to be killed for absolutely no purpose.
By David Craig, on March 26th, 2012 There are probably more than 100,000 people in Britain who claim to be financial advisers. Most are just salespeople employed by banks and other financial companies. there job is to sell you whatever product their bosses have decided gives them the most profit. As their earnings are mostly made up of commission, they will do or say anything to get hold of your money.
In Britain there are about 28,000 registered IFAs (Independent Financial Advisers). These should supposedly give you unbiased financial advice. But there are four main dangers. 1. Commission bias – many advisers will recommend the products that pay them most commission, not those which are best for you. For example, you can usually save about 5% by buying unit trusts through a funds supermarket. Most financial advisers will not mention this as then they would not get their commission. Similarly, they will tend not to mention cheap ‘index-tracker’ unit trusts as again these do not pay commission. 2. The organ grinder takes your money, the monkey manages it – in many IFA firms, the senior people can spend much of their time ,eeting new potential clients to convince them to use the IFA’s services. This means you will often be persuaded to part with your cash by a senior figure (the organ grinder) but that it will actually be managed by a much more junior employee (the monkey). 3. Switch and Get Rich – a scam many advisers are running at the moment is to convince their clients to move their savings from older, poor-performing pensions into newer ones and SIPPs. If you’ve 15 to 20 years to go before retiring a financial adviser can pocket about a quarter of your savings in commission by convincing you to switch. You switch, they get rich. 4. Most are not fully qualified – of the 28,000 registered IFAs. only about 1,500 are actually fully qualified to give financial advice.
From next year, IFAs are supposed to give you full details of their fees and no longer work on a commission basis. But as we have so often seen in the past, the finance industry has always found ways of getting past any new regulations. I have no doubt that IFAs will. I think I already know how they are going to do it.
By David Craig, on March 24th, 2012 It seems like every day, some mournful politically-correct BBC newsreader reports that some Iraqis have blown some other Iraqis up. But does anyone really care anymore? I believe (like most people) the the Iraq invasion was a war crime based (I believe) on a bunch of blatant lies cobbled together (I believe) by that nice group of chaps – Blair, Campbell, Scarlett and Mandelson. But what’s done is done, though I think most people would love to see that smarmy scumbag Blair prosecuted as a war criminal. Anyway, once Saddam was deposed, the Iraqis had a choice. They could either behave like civilised people and use their huge oil income to build hospitals, schools, roads, electricity plants, water treatment and so on. They could have built a bright future. Or they could have behaved like a bunch of pig-ignorant savages and spent the next ten years gleefully killing each other while incompetent, corrupt politicians stole most of their oil revenues. They chose the latter course. Well good luck to them. May they happily enjoy slaughtering each other for the next hundred years if they want. But it’s not our problem and Iraqis killing each other shouldn’t even be in the news.
Iraq can at least serve as a shining example to other countries of how a nation can destroy its own future through stupidity, intolerance and corruption. All quite sad really.
By David Craig, on March 23rd, 2012 If you have any friends or relatives who are about to retire and may be thinking about buying an annuity, please please talk to them and help them avoid making the worst financial decision of their lives. People already receiving annuities are losing around £8 million a day from being sold the wrong products at the wrong time. This gives insurance companies about £2 billion a year in extra but undeserved profits. There are two major mistakes you can make with annuities. 1. Buying too early – when pension savers reach 65 they’ll be contacted by their pension company or financial adviser suggesting they buy an annuity with their savings. They want you to buy immediately as this gives them your money. But you’re much better off waiting for at least 5 to 10 years because the older you are when you take an annuity the more money you’ll get. Plus you’re likely to get ill sometime around your seventies. Then you can get more money from an ‘impaired’ or ‘enhanced’ annuity. And your situation might change – your partner might die – but if you’ve already taken a joint annuity (where you get much less than a single-person annuity), you can’t change this. 2. Not using the OMO – by law your pension company has to tell you about the Open Market Option (OMO). The OMO means you can buy your annuity from any provider, not just the company that has your pension savings. Often, pension companies will hide this in the small print so that you don’t notice it. Or else your financial adviser will push you to take the annuity which gives them the greatest commission, but is not necessarily best for you. Yet there are plenty of comparison websites (e.g.moneysupermarket.com) where you can find the best-paying annuity for your circumstances.
Remember, with most other financial decisions, if things go bad, you can usually get out with some of your money. But once you’ve signed away your life savings for an annuity, that’s it – they have your money and you can never change your mind. So you must avoid these two mistakes that too many people make unless you really want to make yourself poor and financial services insiders rich at your expense.
By David Craig, on March 22nd, 2012 One thing that strikes you when you go to any Australian or NZ city is the extraordinary number of Chinese. They only make up about 5% of the population, but may own as much as 20% of businesses. Having ruined their own country through pollution, rape of natural resources, deforestation and over-farming, the Chinese need new sources of food and natural resources. They are buying up huge tracts of Africa, but much closer to home are the almost unlimited food of NZ and natural resources of Australia. China has become such a major customer for both countries, that a decision from Beijing could ruin either country whenever China wanted. This power was demonstrated a couple of months ago. A Chinese company (a front for the Chinese government) wanted to buy a NZ dairy farming business. The attempt was blocked by NZ officials. A Chinese foreign ministry official then “advised” the NZ government that their decision was wrong and should be changed.
To become a colony nowadays, you don’t have to be invaded. You just have to get into a situation where your domestic policies are dictated by another government. At the moment the Aussies and Kiwis are as happy as pigs in the proverbial with all the Chinese money flowing into their countries. But there is a much more sinister side to the Chinese takeover and one day the Aussies and Kiwis will stop laughing at their good fortune and start weeping as their masters in Beijing increasingly pull the strings.
By David Craig, on March 21st, 2012 Anyone with more than half a brain knows that the earth goes through cycles of warming and cooling driven by the sun’s activity. Furthermore they know that most of the carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere comes from the seas warming (not human activity) and this will be reversed in the next cooling phase. So when the incompetent, corrupt Barroso and his corrupt, wasteful, lying eurocrats tried to get more money to fill their pockets by taxing non-EU airlines flying into and from EU airspace supposedly to reduce emissions, the Chinese and Indians politely told Barroso the Corrupt and his cronies that they could stick their new tax somewhere where the sun doesn’t shine.
But now we have a problem. If Barroso and his corrupt, thieving cronies back down, they’ll lose face. Yet if they don’t back down, thousands of Airbus employees will lose their jobs as China and India cancel orders for their planes. So what is more important – saving European jobs or saving face for the corrupt, thieving, wasteful eurocrats? You guessed it – Barroso and his eurocrats couldn’t give a toss about saving jobs as long as they save face. So they’re refusing to back down on their new tax. What scum, what absolute and utter scum – and they rule us.
By David Craig, on March 21st, 2012 Here we are again. Another budget day. Millions of words will be written and spoken by vacuous journalists as they try to create news out of thin air. Does it really matter if, say the average family of four is £3.25 a week or whatever better off after the budget? I mean what’s £3.25 going to buy? Not a lot.
If Osborne had brains and balls and a spine, he would take some radical action – put all Whitehall departments on a four-day week; scrap the worthless Equality and Human Rights Commission; get rid of the sycophants at the laughable Office for Budget Responsibility; set a maximum public-sector pension of average salary (£25,000 a year); scrap Corporation Tax completely replacing it with retention of some VAT; set a maximum public-sector salary of £100,000 a year. Oh to have a chancellor who had some ideas rather than one who surrounds himself with arselicking nodding dogs as advisers.
By David Craig, on March 20th, 2012 Every few months the PR departments at companies like Tesco, Asda and Morrisons put out some blurb that these companies have “created” so many thousand new jobs or are about to create thousands of new jobs. Then stupid journalists write gushing articles about how these “wonderful” companies are “creating” new jobs and helping the economy recover. This is, of course, rubbish. Car manufacturers, electronics firms and anyone making products for export actually create new jobs. All the likes of Tesco and Asda do is destroy jobs, because money spent in a supermarket is money not spent at a local shop. Our high streets are beginning to resemble war zones with empty, abandoned and vandalised shops as we increasingly shop at out-of-town supermarkets that have supposedly “created” new jobs. Moreover, the increasing power of supermarkets allows them to force suppliers to reduce prices, further destroying jobs.
So, stupid lazy journalists – please get it right. Tesco destroys jobs. Asda destroys jobs. Morrisons destroys jobs.
By David Craig, on March 19th, 2012 The word on the street in Westminster is that Andrew “Useless” Lansley will be pushed out of the cabinet in the next reshuffle. But why was he ever there in the first place? About four years ago, long before the last elections, several Tory MPs told me Lansley was ineffective, incompetent and a general waste of skin – their words, not mine. Yet David Liar Cameron put this buffoon in charge of reforming the NHS. Lansley did what all incompetent politicians do, he called in possibly the world’s most predatory management consultants, McKinseys. Now I have copies of McKinseys’ plans to reform the NHS produced for New Labur. As far as I can see, McKinseys just dusted these off, changed the dates and then presented these plans to “Useless” Lansley as works of pure genius. He in turn gave them many millions of our money. If McKinseys’ plans for the NHS are ever implemented, they will earn millions more for guess who – McKinseys.
From what I can gather, the only “proper” job Lansley has ever had was working at the DTI – affectionately known as the Department for Total Incompetence. How Liar Cameron made him a key minister is almost beyond belief. The sooner Lansley goes, the better. Then he can get a job supposedly advising McKinsey as a reward for the millions of our money he has given them.
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