Don't Vote Labour

Here’s a great idea for reducing poverty. We’ll employ a load of people to take some money off some other people using some very expensive and unreliable computer software to track the process. The first lot of people will then give some, or all, of that money back to the second lot of people. Whilst we’re at it, we’ll make the rules so complex and hard to interpret, that most of the second lot of people will end up getting the wrong amount back (of the money they had taken off them to start with). That, in essence, is how the tax credit system works.

The UK income tax system is actually quite well put together. It’s designed to extract tax from people after they’ve earned the money with most it collected automatically by employers via pay as you earn and the remainder paid a year or so in arrears. For people who are self-employed, there are separate, well tested arrangements that achieve something similar. Self-assessment is mostly straightforward since there are relatively few allowances and, for most people, the rules are quite clear. It’s not perfect but, compared to the US system for example, it really is pretty damn good. Leaving aside the issue of losing our private data, the inland revenue are, mostly, pleasant enough to deal with too. Separate to this, we also have a fairly well run benefits system. I’m told by friends and family that have dealt with the DSS that, so long as you’re polite and don’t smell too badly of booze, they’re also, mostly, pleasant to deal with.

So far so good, we have two arms of the state that, whilst not perfect, seem to do a good job. Then, along came Gordon. For some reason, probably because he felt that, as chancellor, he had more control over the inland revenue than he did over the DSS (which was a Prescott fiefdom at the time all this got invented), he decided that, in order to give more money to lower earners, he’d re-arrange the tax system and make it into a sort of pseudo social security system. Instead of the department that knew how to pay out benefits without, for the most part, messing up being told to, well, do more of the same, the revenue - an organisation very good at doing things 1 year or more in arrears - was told to do it instead. The result was predictable – although none of the army of management consultants employed by the treasury seemed to spot this (or maybe they did and Brown ignored them anyway) – and too much money was paid out, usually because people’s situation changed quickly but the revenue’s systems were all designed to sort things out after the fact. A process that worked well for tax, was a disaster when applied to benefits. So, they tried to fix it by buying a new computer system. To date, Capgemeni have been paid somewhere around 8 billion pounds to build and run this new system and the scheme itself has been writing off 1.2 billion pounds a year in overpayments. To put that into perspective, that’s somewhere around 500 pounds for every single tax payer in the country or several percent off the basic rate of income tax.

Anyway, to get to the point, I have a much better idea for reducing poverty. Instead of taking money off people in the first place, just let them keep it. Then, for those that don’t have enough money to begin with, even without paying any tax at all, use the existing, relatively well run, albeit still too complex, benefits system to get them what they need, no more and no less. In addition, as an added benefit, give them half of the money saved by not having to administer the tax credits system. Labour won’t be doing this though as they’re pathologically opposed to allowing people to keep their own money and, in any case, can’t afford to lose the votes of any more public sector workers (who must, surely, be the only people left voting for them by this point).

I know, I used the same structure for a previous title, but I couldn’t think of anything more appropriate.

The population of the country is growing - no-one knows by how much exactly, but it’s definitely on the way up, at least in the South East - mostly because of net immigration. The results are fairly obvious to see in a number of areas and in housing in particular. Pretty much everyone can give examples of houses near to where they live with groups of young Eastern Europeans living in them where previously there were none. Less obvious is the rise in immigration from outside of the EU - there is apparently more of it in total but, since we already have large minority populations from the main countries involved, it’s no so easy to spot.

Add to this demographic changes (more single people of all ages), the movement of people from the North of England down to the South and a higher than expected birth rate and the result is that we need more housing. Whilst the suicidally loose credit terms of the last few years are mostly to blame for rapid house price rises, it’s hard to believe that a material increase in the number of people needing somewhere to live hasn’t had some real impact also. Not unreasonably, the government wants more houses and flats to be built.

But where are we going to build these extra homes? The strategy of building on brown field sites within towns (which includes former gardens and small pieces of park land as well as more obvious old industrial sites) can only get us so far - and mostly what it gets us is lots of flats, not family houses with gardens and the rest. Building on the edges of existing towns and villages is enormously unpopular for obvious reasons (no-one who bought a house on the edge of a nice village overlooking farmland is going to be overjoyed when they see the farmer planting a crop of Barratt-boxes after all). The government’s solution then is to build Eco Towns on green field sites. The name conjures up images of ecologically friendly green nirvanas generating all of their own electricity, treating all of their own sewage and with a well balanced mix of residential and commercial development arranged in such a way as to, more or less, obviate the need for cars. Given all of this, the government is clearly hoping that they’ll be able to overcome peoples’ objections to building in the open countryside.

Perhaps if what was being planned was what is being described then they might. There’s always going to be people who object to any building at all but most of us realise that people have to live somewhere and that it’s to everyone’s advantage to make that somewhere as nice and low-impact as possible. But that’s not what’s being planned. What we’re actually going to get is more places like Cambourne where the only shop (literally) is a branch of Morrison’s and there is one pub serving a population of several thousand people. Most people living there will end up commuting to work elsewhere by car since the proposed sites are not, mostly, anywhere near existing railway lines. How is that ‘eco’ exactly? It’s beyond me but New Labour seem to think it is in some magical way.

Why can’t they just stop lying about things? Saying “we need more housing so that your children have some hope of being able to afford to move away from home before they’re 40 so we’re going to build some sprawling new towns which won’t be very nice but will, at least, be cheap” would be honest and might get them some respect for straight talking. Which point of Gordon’s moral compass is it that points to ‘mendacity’ do you suppose? All of them maybe?

11 years of a government which is tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime and here we are. There’s no shortage of “decent, normal person tries to defend themselves against a bunch of yobs and ends up being the one the police go for” stories around but this one is about the most egregious I can recall reading. So how did we get here?

Well, here’s a theory which is, I think, as good as any I’ve heard. In the past, some policemen (and women no doubt too) were guilty of prejudice of various sorts – I mean this in the literal sense of pre-judging situations not in the vacuous, lazy, PC way as a synonym for racist. They’d turn up at a crime scene and arrest the black guy without bothering to ask enough (or any) questions to figure out if that was the most reasonable course of action. Similarly, they’d turn up at a domestic incident and assume that the woman was, if not the one causing the trouble, at least over-exaggerating things. This was a bad thing and resulted in some nasty miscarriages of justice not dissimilar from the one experienced by Mr. McCourt (e.g. in the Stephen Lawrence case, the police nicked Stephen’s friend simply because he was there and he was black). Call me stupid, but I don’t actually think this is a very hard problem to solve. I haven’t been on police basic training but I’m prepared to bet that it contains a section on “what to do when you turn up at a crime scene” – someone will no doubt write to tell me that course got cancelled to make way for ‘how to fill out stop and search forms’ instead but I’ll proceed on the assumption it’s still in there. I’ll also bet that the standard instructions are to ignore all the shouting – most people, law abiding ones too, don’t behave entirely rationally at a crime scene I’ll bet – and to ask enough questions to form some reasonable view as to what’s happened then proceed from there. Extending this somewhat to add “and don’t assume that the black guy, or teenager etc is the guilty party until after you’ve asked enough questions to be reasonably sure otherwise, when your commanding officer spots your record of being a rubbish copper who keeps arresting innocent people, you’ll get into serious trouble” doesn’t seem that hard. Admittedly, changing the culture of an organization takes a bit of time, but it’s not impossible – just ask Tony Blair.

Anyway, back to the point: I think we got where we are because the Labour government substituted audit for management. Looking for the quick PR fix and not caring about the downside (I don’t think the Labour party has ever really forgiven the police for its part in the miner’s strike anyway) it instituted a whole series of form filling and box ticking forms of measurement. Instead of saying “don’t assume the black guy is guilty without the same evidence you’d need for anyone else otherwise your management will come down on you like a ton of bricks” it said “if you fill in the wrong things on the forms then the police equivalent of the Spanish Inquisition will descend upon you”. The result was predictable – the police changed their behaviour to allow them to fill in the forms in such a way as to avoid the Inquisition. The law abiding majority are the collateral damage. I suppose this isn’t surprising given that almost none of our glorious leaders have ever done any real management and that most of commercial companies that they have any contact with are consultancies who like nothing better than selling expensive and, more importantly, unmeasureable audit projects.

Recently, some idiot police chief or other said something along the lines of ‘society is breaking apart because people walk on by when the see trouble’. Deep breath: I’ve got some news for you mate, it doesn’t take a PhD in anthropology from Oxford, which I’m sure you don’t have anyway, to figure out why this is the case. Why would I, or anyone else for that matter, risk intervening in a situation involving people I don’t know when there is, literally, nothing but downside for me? If I don’t get knifed in the process, I risk getting arrested instead. The numpty policeman might well reply, “that’s ok, it’ll all get sorted out later and there’s very little chance of you actually being charged with anything”. Well, again, I’ve got some more news for you: you are completely and utterly wrong about this. By the time I’ve been arrested, finger printed, DNA tested and held in the cells overnight with an assorted bunch of crack addicts, binge drinkers, wife beaters and heaven-knows which other categories of miscreant, it is, most decidedly, not ok. Got it? No, I suspect not. Let me try some more then: try explaining to your boss that the reason you didn’t turn up for work was because you’d been arrested for kidnap, what impact do you think that’s going to have on your future promotion prospects? Try getting a visa to visit the US on holiday or business after being arrested (you’ll need to apply in advance since, once you’ve been arrested for something, going on the visa waiver program is foolish at best). Try applying for any number of jobs that require criminal background checks and see how far you get – declaring that you were once arrested for something won’t necessarily disbar you but you can bet it won’t help you get onto the short list. The list is endless as, indeed, is the length of time the police will keep your DNA on their database regardless of what you were arrested for and whether or not you were ever found guilty of anything. Get this message into your thick skulls: the system is so far stacked against the ordinary law abiding individual that they’d have to be deluded or, possibly, stupid to get involved.

Clearly, there are still some people left in the police and CPS with the kind of common sense you’d hope they all had since, once Mr. McCourt’s local MP became involved, the case was dropped very quickly. Of course, the real cynic in me says that the only reason the case was finally dropped was down to a fear of bad publicity rather than the details finally making it to someone high enough up in one or other organisation to still be allowed some discretion in applying the rules.

And, finally, before someone points out that Mr. McCourt’s MP is from the Labour party: take a look at her voting record and you’ll see that she’s voted with unswerving loyalty for all the legislation that got us into this mess in the first place. The least she could have done in the circumstances was to rescue one of her constituents from the box ticking, target setting and, ultimately, amoral system she helped create. Looking at her majority (a few hundred at most), the chances of her keeping her seat at the next election is about 0 – good riddance in advance and don’t forget to shut the door on your way out.

Which, unlike the Schleswig-Holstein question, any fool - me included - can understand. Since devolution, there are certain powers in Scotland that have passed entirely from the national parliament in Westminster to the Scottish parliament in Holy Rood. For example, the Westminster parliament no longer has any authority over education in Scotland. So far so good, power to the people of Scotland etc. Now for the rubbish bit. Scottish MPs sitting in Westminster still get to vote on all English issues. So, the people of Scotland get to vote for MPs that introduce university top-up fees in England, and another set of MSPs that don’t introduce them in Scotland. Us poor Sassenachs don’t, of course, get to return the compliment but we do get to share the bill.

The answer to why this is the case is simple enough – without the votes of Scottish and, to a lesser extent, Welsh MPs, Labour would no longer have a functioning majority on matters relating solely to England (e.g. health, education, large parts of the legal system and one or two other bits). Remove those MPs from votes pertaining to England and the Tories would have a majority. You might think that would fix an obvious injustice and enhance the cause of democracy and you’d be right. New Labour couldn’t give a fig for democracy of course so you can be absolutely certain they won’t be proposing a change until such time it’s to their electoral advantage to do so.

(1 + r)^n. That’s 1 plus the rate of interest raised to the power of n. What this formula tells you is how much your money is worth if you reinvest all of the interest you earn and then continue to be paid interest on the total sum. For example, if you put 100 pounds in the bank at 5% interest per year and kept it there for 10 years, you’d end up with 163 pounds give or take a few pence. Over long periods of time, say the typical 40 years or so people spend working, small differences in interest rates add up.

If you have a UK company or private pension, the chances are that most of your money is invested in UK equities. People tend to concentrate on the price when thinking about how well equity investments perform but that’s a mistake since a large chunk of the returns actually come from dividends. One of Brown’s first stealth taxes was to abolish advanced corporation tax. I won’t go into the details but the end result was that the treasury got a lot more of the dividend money that pension schemes used to collect. The total effect was to reduce dividend returns - just like interest on a bank account although with fewer guarantees - on money invested in a pension by around 1%.

By the way of an example. Someone contributing around 400 pounds per month into a pension scheme in total over 40 years, will be around 123,000 pounds worse off as a result of this change, in percentage terms around 15% less than they would otherwise have had. Yep, you’ve got it, Brown stole more than 100 grand from whole swathes of the population and no-one even seemed to notice. Nice.