Ten ideas for a crapper Britain

Komment Macht Frei carries a 10-point plan to make the UK even worse than it already is, from the notorious Will Hutton. They are in fairness not all totally wrong, but some of them are truly idiotic.

1. Break up the banks
I can live with this actually, in principle, but it would help if there was an acknowledgement that the ridiculously complicated regulatory environment has forced banks to become larger and larger in order to cover these costs and keep up with it all. Reduce the regulatory bureaucracy and barriers to entry and you would indeed improve the banking sector. Not convinced these are his motives.

2. Build Great Companies.
This is a stinker, and worth quoting in full:

Too few British firms have good owners. Two more important companies – Smith and Nephew, and De La Rue – are fighting to retain their independence from foreign takeovers. Their shareholders do not care about innovation, their staff or customers; their priority, and thus that of the directors, is only next month's share price. Increasingly Britain is a hollowed out economy for hire rather than a centre of business decision-making and wealth generation in its own right. There has to be root-and-branch overhaul of the framework for owning, directing and launching takeovers of Britain's companies.

So basically foreign ownership is bad, Will has no solutions, so we should start with roots and branches. Really, this is 6th-form stuff, blindly blaming shareholders. Shareholders do care about "innovation, their staff or customers" because that is what drives the share price. Shareholders tend to want their companies to be successful and well-run. That is why you invest in a company.

3. Bust the Monopolies
Meh.

4 Abolish Redundancy Payments
Why do I sense in this some sort of increased state intervention coming up?

5 Livelihood Insurance
Whoooomph there it is! Surely this is a bit like National Insurance, except I guess everyone will still pay National Insurance, right?

6 A Citizen Grant of £50'000 for every 21-year-old
Oh no, sorry, whoooooooooooomph THERE it is. Now that is special. And where pray tell might this money come from? Oh, you planted some beans? Should be fine then.

7 Payback time for babyboomers
Some interesting thoughts here actually. Probably the least bad of his ideas.

8 An end to parents-pay education

Private schools should ... be compelled to admit, through competitive examination, children from households with less than £40,000 a year. Their fees would be paid by the government.

Ah yes, the problem is private schools, not the parlous state of the state school system. Why not just bring back grammar schools, if you want competitive examinations?

9 An Honest Media
I agree, but bwahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha good luck with that.

10 A written constitution along with proportional voting
I don't think this would make a blind bit of difference but there you are. This is instructive however:

In particular, there should be an entrenching of local government's power: it should have the constitutional right to raise up to half its revenue from local taxation.

That is the extent of Will's ability to imagine what local government power should look like - how much tax they can raise. Sad.

And to avoid accusations of being negative for the sake of it, here is my 3-point plan for a better Britain.

1. Get the fuck out of our lives, just stop bloody interfering and remember that you work for us.
2. Stop fighting pointless, never-ending wars to distract from what is going on at home.

Actually, that'll do for starters, there you go, a 2-point plan!

Why the cuts won't be enough

This is a superb article from Simon Heffer, on why today's cuts simply won't be sufficient. He picks up on two major problems, namely:

1. Certain budgets are ring-fenced. The NHS and Education, two of the most wasteful black holes, are too sensitive to be touched, showing that the Coalition are indeed pussies. Furthermore, the ludicrous decision to ring-fence overseas aid is truly without merit at a time when the UK debt mountain is piling up by the day.

2. There is no room whatsoever for tax cuts at any stage. If the Chancellor is serious about stimulating the economy, he needs to get people spending, not take money out of the economy in order to reduce its impact with bad decisions by taxing the "wealthy". Angry Teen has posted on this element many time so I direct you to his house for further musings.

However, Mr. Heffer misses the Belgian mammoth in the room. His Grace has eloquently posted on this topic today, borrowing some words from Dan Hannan in the process. Hannan sums it up, so I shall do the same:

Britain’s net contribution to the EU is rising from £6.4 billion this year to £8.3 billion in 2011-12 and £10.3 billion in 2015. But, of course, the net figure is misleading: the EU may spend some of this money in the UK, but rarely does so on things we would have chosen for ourselves. Much of the moolah goes to a privileged class of EU contractors and consultants; some goes on straightforward propaganda. Our gross contribution is rising from £14 billion to £19 billion – enough to cut council tax by half, take fourpence off income tax or pay of our Olympic debt in a single year. Here are some vivid ways of visualising the sum.

The Coalition do not give a shit about you, anymore than Labour did. Until this torrent of money flowing from the UK to the EU stops, you can count on that. This is what happens when Cast-Iron Dave makes a promise.

More HMRC Failure

The rolling, relentlessly ugly car crash that is the HMRC just keeps embarrassing itself more and more.

This, bear in mind, is the same organisation that felt it would be a good idea to collect gross income and distribute the net, post-tax amount, as a way of "simplifying PAYE".

Here are some choice nuggets to feed your ire, emphasis mine:

Millions more people could be caught up in the HMRC tax chaos than first thought, its chief executive admitted yesterday.

Ah yes, the chief executive. Because HMRC is a company accountable to, wait, wait, no sorry I can't find anyone.

Dame Lesley Strathie warned the PAYE problems could continue for at least two years, with hundreds of thousands more people falling victim to mistakes. She revealed the whole fiasco had cost Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs almost £170million.

Clearly not made a Dame for her grasp of simple facts. This hasn't cost HMRC anything, because HMRC do not have any fucking money! It's taxpayer money that you are wasting, losing and fucking up with. Which is why your position of CEO is utterly irrelevant.

Dame Lesley disclosed that the fiasco had lost the HMRC £167million – and she admitted that the organisation had known about the problem before the election but had not said anything.

Why am I not even surprised. It's beyond the tail wagging the dog, it's like the turd wagging the tail wagging the frigging dog.

But she added that it would not be until 2012 that ‘we still see a stable system’ – meaning that wrong codings could still be being sent out two years from now.

No, we won't. No govt department will ever have a stable system because procurement is such a cluster-fuck and everyone working there is so wilfully ignorant.

And why the fuck is it still called Her Majesty's anything? Can we not just be honest and accept that they are the collections agency for the Government and name it more honestly? Any suggestions?

Interesting Facts About Greece

In the light of the bailout package being more or less confirmed, I thought I would share with you some interesting facts about Greece and its economy.

A little reminder about the 110 million Euro bailout package first here

Fact 1: Greece has the lowest retirement age of anywhere in the EU at 61, this will be increased to 63 by 2015 apparently.

Fact 2: Greece imports 13% of the arms exported by Germany. Not a lot of people know this, but after the US and Russia, Germany is the third-largest exporter of arms in the world, at 11%, so that's a pretty massive expenditure. Incidentally, Turkey imports 14% of German's arms exports, so make of that what you will.

Fact 3: 95 percent of taxpayers declare annual income of less than 30,000 Euros. That's tax evasion on an absolutely monstrous scale.

I could go on and on, but you get the idea. The austerity package the Greek Government are forcing through (see here) is both crippling and laughably inadequate. Furthermore, every other austerity package of this nature has been accompanied by a sharp devaluation in the currency, which helps to soften the blow. There are problems with devaluation, most notably the risk of inflation, but it does reduce the debt burden. Greece of course can't do this, so they really will be on the hook for the lot, which is ridiculous.

Either Spain or Portugal will be next, and the EU have set a very dangerous precedent with this bailout. The market is unimpressed, which is why the Euro is below 1.32 against the Dollar, and even falling a bit against the very weak Pound. If the market believed the bailout package was anything more than a finger in the dyke, we'd see the Euro higher, but it doesn't. Neither do I.