Is Spain like Greece ? – No …. not quite – 21/11/2011

Some years ago a small rural town in Spain twinned with a similar town in Greece. The Mayor of the Greek town visited the Spanish town. When he saw the palatial mansion belonging to the Spanish mayor he wondered how he could afford such a house. The Spaniard said; “You see that bridge over there? The EU gave us a grant to build a two-lane bridge, but by building a single lane bridge with traffic lights at either end this house could be built”.

The following year the Spaniard visited the Greek town. He was simply amazed at the Greek Mayor’s house, gold taps, marble floors, it was marvellous. When he asked how this could be afforded the Greek said; “You see that bridge over there?” The Spaniard replied; “No.”

Some people are still not listening – 8/11/2011

It would seem that many people in the UK’s Public Sector, and in those of Greece, Italy and Spain, are still not taking on board just exactly how indebted our respective Countries have become.

Our own Public Sector in the UK, and their Unions, seem to think that it would be a good idea to take strike action whilst the Country as whole is desperately trying to survive the previous Government’s massive and indiscriminate overspend. Presumably, their delusion also extends to the belief that strike action will somehow incur public sympathy, and may even force the current Government to change their intentions regarding their massively generous public sector pensions.

There will be little or no sympathy for such industrial action.

What is it that is so complicated, or difficult to understand, about an obvious statement of pure economic fact? – “There is no money left”. Even the last Government left a note to that effect. 

For several years now, here in the UK, there has been a new and growing sense of “class distinction” between those “with” public sector pensions, and their stupidly generous contracts of employment, and those “without” them. The paying public is becoming more and more aware of the vast, unjustifiable and unaffordable cost of it all.

Labour Party leaders and the Trade Unions would have you believe that the solution is to borrow even more money, in order to maintain employment in the public sector. However, borrowing even more money would actually throw our ability to repay it into severe doubt, and therefore cause a several fold increase in interest rates. Indeed, this has already been amply illustrated by Italy, Spain and Greece.

Such a catastrophic increase in borrowing costs in the UK would inevitably increase mortgage payments, and further reduce the amount that we all have available to spend in the high street. As a direct result, even more small businesses would then fail, along with the vital employment which they provide. Ironically, it is precisely those types of small businesses which we desperately need to flourish, not only to develop additional employment, but also to fund the public sector from their tax revenues.

Right now, some statesmanlike honesty from our Labour politicians about the size of our national debt and our borrowing requirements, would be most welcome, and some genuine national leadership from the Public Service Unions concerning their members massively generous employment benefits, would not go amiss either.

Having said all that, most of us do have a great deal of sympathy with public sector employees as individuals, especially those at the point of service provision. After all, nobody likes to lose their job, or have their employee benefits reduced, but there has to be some sort of public realisation, that the private sector does actually pay for the public sector, and at this moment, the truth is that the former cannot afford to pay for the latter.

The Government is absolutely correct in reining in public expenditure, and increasing taxation, assuming we do not want to become a bankrupt economy like Greece. The poor people of Greece have yet to appreciate the full implications of their own politicians refusal, over the last five years, to get their own public spending in order. Now it is too late. Their alternatives are stark to say the least – stay in the Euro and endure massive forced cuts in public expenditure, or leave the Euro and endure a very large dose of inflation in the next few years.

In the UK, those of us who are old enough can remember a similar catastrophe in this country in 1978 and 1979. During those two years we incurred 50% inflation as a direct result of our politicians’ overspending in the late 60s and early 70s. In case that was before your time, it meant that all our personal savings, and all our pensions, as well as many other assets, halved in value in two short years. We certainly paid for the follies of our politicians at that time, and unfortunately, the poor people of Greece will inevitably have to pay for theirs, one way or the other.

Once people in the UK accept that there has been a huge overspend on our public services, then spending cuts, along with some increased taxation, becomes entirely understandable, and inevitable. However, the Government really must give a lead to the managers and administrators of our public services, and clearly point out what has to be cut and who has to go.

I say this because the overspend is almost exclusively at the top of those services. In other words, it is not the numbers of police on the beat, dustmen on their carts, nurses in the wards, teachers in the classrooms, or soldiers on active service, which are the problem. It is the vast array of overly promoted upper management at the top, who have generated managerial roles and functions for themselves which, quite frankly, simply do not exist. At the very least, they are pointless functions which we do not need and cannot afford.

I regularly hear of local Councils who now have a dozen or more Councillors where five or ten years ago they only had half that number. I also remember some statistics a year or two ago which talked about 80,000 administrative staff in the Ministry Of Defence, when we only had 120,000 frontline troops. How on earth can it take one full time person to organise and supply one and half fighting men? Overstaffing at the higher managerial level is a huge problem throughout all our public services.

The Government has handed down the command for expenditure cuts, but the people who are supposed to be administering those cuts are themselves the very problem. Without some leadership from the Government, higher managers and public servants are not going to make each-other redundant rather than cut front line services unless they are told to do so. 

The next step of the recovering UK economy – 8/11/2011

There are quite a number of ways by which a Government can re-ignite it’s economy. The two usual ones are now being utilised in the UK – ignite the housing market by allowing more house building on Green Belt land – and printing more money in exchange for some limited inflation later on. However, the third, the most difficult and yet the most effective method, has yet to be deployed.

The first one is allowing more houses to be built, and it is the traditional way of boosting the economy. However, that begs the assumption that there are sufficient “first time buyers” out there who have well salaried jobs and who want to buy them.

The second is rebuilding the economy from the corporate end by increasing liquidity in the Banks, through printing money. This also works, but it takes quite a long time to work through the system and create increased employment in the private sector. The tragedy is that extended years of increasing unemployment will inevitably result in very large numbers of people, wives, husbands and children, who will be subjected to huge personal suffering along the way.

The only real way of rapidly boosting the economy, and corporate profitability with the resulting increased revenues to the Treasury, and quickly reducing the unemployment register, is by putting money back into the hands of those who are going to spend it in the high street. Increased spending in the high street feeds directly into small businesses, enabling them to develop and expand.

These are the businesses who currently only employ one person, the owner, but they are also the same businesses who, only a year or two ago, used to employ two or three other chaps as well, and occasionally even some temporary staff when business was really good. They are the artisans or our economy, the painters and decorators, the jobbing builders, the roofers, the electricians and plumbers, the small service providers like TV engineers, financial planners, window cleaners, gardeners, car valet services, take away delivery people, ….. solar power installers, wedding party planners, interior designers, taxi services, butchers, bakers and the candlestick makers….. These are the businesses who will take on the unemployed, teach them a trade, and turn them into happy, ambitious citizens.

For the current unemployed, and the many who will join them from the public sector over the next year or so, speed is of the essence. It is far quicker to start the economy through the high street spender, rather than wait for the Banks to pay down their debt and then start lending into business once more.

At this point, there are a couple of other statistical and economic facts about the UK which I think we should consider.

1)     In the next few years, the retired population of this country will become the single biggest voter category, which is a fact that I hope will grab the average politician’s thinking processes.

2)     The amount of the state pension in the UK is a national disgrace at just over £100 week, and we do now have old people starving in their dilapidated homes or even sleeping rough on the street.

At first glance, increasing the state pension to at least £200 per week for everybody over age 65 (yes 65, not 66 or 67), would seem impossible in the current times of national indebtedness and the dire need to reduce public expenditure rather than expand it. However, it most certainly is possible if we consider the huge capital that has been generated inside private pensions, company pensions, and occupational pensions, since 1978 by allowing everybody to contract out of the state second pension (previously known as SERPS). By my calculation there is approximately £800 billion in these schemes, and there is no reason why this money cannot be repatriated to the national state pension fund in exchange for an immediate increase to a “£200 per week state pension”, for everybody over age 65.

I calculate that, as a country, we would then have approximately 8 to 12 years whilst this “repatriated fund” exhausts itself through the new £200 per week state pension payment. During those years we will need to review and then properly fund our state pension for the years thereafter, through realistic national insurance contributions. I also calculate that the immediate increase to the high street spend, across the entire country, would be very nearly £2billion per week. Such a permanent and consistent boost to the local economy would turn it from stagnation into rapid expansion within months. There would then be very large amounts of new employment, at a local level, for anybody who really wants it.

By increasing the state pension to £200 per week, there would also be a large number of substantial savings to be made, right across the entire public sector. For example, there would no longer be any need for, bus passes, council tax rebates, winter fuel allowances, means testing, attendance allowances, mobility allowances, disability allowances or any other form of pension income assessment for additional benefits, and there would be no need for the people who have built managerial careers for themselves in administering them. All of this is before we consider the benefits to the National Health Service budget simply because of our elderly population would be in far better health, as they could then afford to eat properly. There would also be a substantial reduction in the costs of long term care to the state because the elderly would be largely paying for it themselves out of their own pension.

The more one thinks about it the more one realises that the local economy would rapidly become the provision of services and products which the people want to buy. The people would be in command of those services because they would be in command of their own funding to pay for them, rather than the Council. People would either be over age 65 and retired on a proper state pension income, or they would have a proper job in providing those services.

The local swimming pool would be able to charge a realistic entry fee. Parking fees on council car parks would disappear, enabling people to visit town and spend their money in the way they want, rather than the way local government prescribes, and if the supermarket chains were at last made to pay the same business rates as the small high street retailer, the high street and the local community would thrive again.                                                                                                                                                                                    

Speaking as an economist and an investment manager, there is no doubt that the current Government will eventually get our economy right. It is just a matter of whether they want to take the fast but radical route to permanent and enduring economic recovery in the UK, directly through the high street, or whether they want to drag the job out by waiting for the Banks, and large commercial interests to pay down their own debt before they start investing in the economy again. The latter will be a very slow and painful process, especially to those who are thrown out of work and may have to wait for several years before they find new employment.

Today, we may well be living at a unique historical moment. It is a period in time when there is a clear opportunity for our politicians to put the UK economy in order for many years to come, and our society and our communities as well. Let’s hope that David has the courage to do it, and secure his place in our great Nation’s extraordinary history.

I don’t think anybody would argue with the fact that renewable energy sources, and the reduction of pollution is an imperative objective.

Whether one believes in man’s precipitation of Global Warming or not is a complete irrelevance. The fact is that it would be a very good thing indeed to reduce all sorts of pollution, and particularly atmospheric pollution, for all sorts of global reasons.

So let us not get bogged down in a pointless debate about global warming.

To bring the issue into greater perspective, and as a reality check, I saw a statistic the other day which said that if the United Kingdom were to close every single one of it’s gas and coal fired power stations tomorrow, the Chinese will have replaced the pollution output with their own brand new coal fired power stations within eight months.

However, there are also many reasons why we should be looking to become less dependent on oil, if only because of the international terrorist issue. We certainly cannot afford to allow the people of the middle eastern states, traditionally a hot bed of political and religious unrest, to be able to dictate to the Western World on issues of natural resource power (oil, gas, electricity etc).

Moving the scientific world forward into new discoveries of power sources, be it for our own electrical supplies or indeed motor transport, is a difficult and time consuming process.

I am sure wind and tide resources will have a role to play in the production of nationally accessible power, but time is moving on, and we cannot afford to be held to ransom (again?) by the oil producing nations in the Middle East. They nearly destroyed our way of life in the mid-seventies, and as we have seen from recent years in Iraq and Afghanistan, international terrorism can and often does spring from many of those countries, and could very well hold us to ransom again.

Whilst the scientific community tries to discover new sources of future power, we need to protect ourselves, and that must surely mean building a new generation of nuclear power plants.

The French learnt this lesson many years ago, and they now derive over 80% of their electrical power from nuclear energy. They even sell some of it to us. Perhaps that is why they were less concerned about Iraq than we or the Americans were. The point is, we now need to build huge sources of nuclear power.

I believe that we must put nuclear power on the international stage as it is impossible to see how we can deny it to other emerging nations.

They will acquire it eventually anyway, and so they may as well have it now, but with our help, co-operation and guidance. If we think we are going to be able to keep these emerging nations in the dark ages, whilst we languish in the luxury of new power sources which we can keep to ourselves, then we need to look at the emergence of international terrorism, and then rapidly think again.

For us as a nation, and probably for the World itself, in terms of pollution, currently there is no viable alternative to nuclear power. In fact, from the point of view of World pollution, we have probably got to make sure that every nation has access to it as soon as possible.

Bin Laden Threatens USA again 25/1/2010

Bin Laden has offered yet another ultimatum, threatening further violence against the USA, it’s citizens and it’s interests, unless it ceases to support Israel.

However, Bin Laden’s naivety is that he presumes that the Israelis are the bad guys and that the Palestinians are the good guys. He also believes that the Americans can be defeated, just because he holds what he thinks is the one and only correct religion. The Americans believe that they hold the religious high ground, and the Palestinians just want some of their land back.

Such a fundamental misinterpretation of religion, and it’s effects within World powers, could easily make global warming look like a candle lit dinner for two.

I believe that we have all had quite enough of the Israeli arguments for what the Palestinians have done to them in the past, and I am equally sure that we have also had quite enough of the Palestinians arguments concerning what the Israelis have done to them too. All their arguments and justifications, on both sides, for their own barbaric and murderous actions, are extremely well based in fact. They are perfectly true and they are reasonably accurate.

Were it not for the fear of some sort of global escalation of the conflict, most of the rest of us would simply say that both sides richly deserve each other, and then simply let them get on with it.

However, all of this misses the point.

The point is that it is the women and children that are getting maimed and killed, and they are getting maimed and killed because of extreme and intolerant religious believers. Whether that is the extreme religious believer in New York, The Gaza Strip, Tel Aviv, or in some cave in the Pakistani mountains is a complete irrelevance. It could just as easily be in a Synagogue or a Mosque in north London.

The problem is that once you start killing people, you will always leave behind close relatives of the dead who will then want to kill you, and to their minds it is perfectly justifiable if that is also in the name of religion too.

Having said that, religion itself is not always the cause of war, but it is often man’s interpretation of religion that causes wars, or at the very least perpetuates them.

The Israeli / Palestinian crisis has been going on for literally thousands of years. However, from the crusades of the middle ages to the latest atrocity that occurred yesterday, you will not be able to find the individual act which started the problem in the first place. That has long since been forgotten and replaced with subsequent deeply felt injustices, which have then been harnessed by th0se who choose to pervert their religion. They believe that theirs is the only way.

The Palestinians and the Israelis both have their religious perverts, and Bin Laden is no less such a person. But before we become too critical, we should also look to our own religions at home. Northern Ireland is no fluke of modern history, it is a war that has been going on for just about as long as the one in the middle east, and it was ably supported by two of the most respected religions in the World, who even have the same God.

I am a religious man, and I have spoken to my God, and it turned out that he is the same bloke as your God. He told me that if all the religions in the World could speak to their respective Gods, they would discover two things –

ONE – Their Gods are all the same person, it is just the interpretation which is a bit different.

TWO – Their God wants them to stop killing each other.

How do we do this?

Certainly not by killing Bin Laden, That will simply create a vacancy.

One idea might be to get all the heads of all the religions of the World to talk to each other – face to face – perhaps their first meeting should be in the middle east.

Afghanistan

Week after week we are, as a Country, having to deal with the tragedy and the horror of some of our courageous soldiers losing their lives in Afghanistan and coming home to be mourned by their friends and families.

However, the very least that we owe to our troops, is some uniformity of purpose, the truthful purpose, and not the “politically correct” waffle and excuse that we have been fed so often in the past. The British people are well able to cope with the real truth behind such conflicts. Then we can cope with the casualties that tragically occur.

That does not mean that we, as a nation, will all agree unanimously with the reasons for it, any more than we did in any of the past wars, be it the Falklands War, or even the Second World War. There will always be those amongst us who will disagree, regardless of the true purpose. However, we are undoubtedly stronger as a nation if our leaders speak the truth, and we are certainly stronger as a nation because of our freedom of speech.

Indeed, it is a perverse but interesting thought that many of our adversaries in past conflicts, did not allow any form of dissention in their own public or their own press. The Taliban are probably one of the more repulsive examples of such repression, be it through their perverted interpretation of religion, or indeed their subjugation of women, who apparently are not even allowed a formal education.

However, I think if I was one of the unfortunate parents going through that dreadful process of bringing my dead son back from the war, and saying goodbye to him for the last time, the very last thing I would want to be confronted by, is the pseudo grief of a politician trying to score some sort of publicity coup, or even worse, by a politician venturing his doubts in pubic about the purpose of our being in the conflict in the first place.

We need our leaders, the politicians in government, to be clear and united in our determined purpose for being in Afghanistan, or any other such conflict. Either we really do need to be in Afghanistan, or we don’t, but we need the truth.

To me, our reasons for being there are perfectly clear, albeit that they may not be politically acceptable to some people. The fact is that Afghanistan was the training ground for international terrorism, and as soon as that began to impact in London and in New York, resulting in the deaths of our own people on the streets of London, then military action was not only viable with such an under-developed country such as Afghanistan, but it was inevitable and completely and utterly necessary.

Of course, the argument then ranges into “when” should we get out, and “how” should we get out? It seems to me that the answer is – “when” the rise of international terrorism in Afghanistan is unlikely to re-occur; and “how” it can be achieved is by replicating some of our own institutions in Afghanistan, enabling them to govern, and police themselves effectively. Unfortunately – a long time.

It is impossible to qualify or quantify the ultimate gift of one’s life in the pursuit of a dangerous but justifiable task. However, we also need to be very aware of the statistics that we are not given; those of the wounded and the maimed, who will now have to live with their injuries and disabilities for the rest of their lives.

One thing is abundantly clear. At some point, as a nation, we will need to be very generous with our gratitude to them all, the living, the dead, and the injured.

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Why We Did And Why We Will Not

 -          We went into Iraq because World oil supplies, and therefore our economies in the western World, were threatened through international terrorism, which was being nurtured by  a despot called Saddam Hussein.

-          We are in Afghanistan because that is where the international terrorists, who blew up the Twin Towers and our tube stations, were being trained.

-          If Mugabe had the Oil that Iraq had, we would go into Zimbabwe too – but he hasn’t – so we won’t.

-          We will not go into Iran, simply because they would destroy us, probably along with themselves, all at the same time.

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International Terrorism - Iraq and Afghanistan 

 The facts are not in great dispute for those who are not bound by their political party politics and political correctness.

Afghanistan and Iraq, amongst other countries, were harbouring and nurturing international terrorists, whose intent and direct actions were to try and destroy the western World economies, as usual in the name of religion.

Furthermore, Iraq has something in the order of 1/3^rd of the World’s oil reserves, and was in a position to use it to blackmail, control, or destroy, our economies, and therefore our societies and our communities.

The relative military strengths and comparisons between us simply meant that we could attack, and so we did attack. Given the same such circumstances again, we would attack them again, although I am sure that the politicians would think up some other reason for doing so.

The fact is that, on this occasion, we were lucky in as much that we had the military strength, alongside the USA, to attack Iraq with reasonable confidence. Had it been a different country, with that proportion of the World oil reserves, and a country with greater military options than Iraq had, we would now be in the process of being economically destroyed, probably over many decades.

I don’t think many people in this country would be complaining about the issues of war, if they knew that the alternative was watching their way of life, their communities, and their personal wealth being destroyed, and eventually watching their children and grandchildren starve to death on the streets of the United Kingdom.

Of course, for the people of Iraq, it was all dressed up as fundamental religious oppression. The tragedy is that, as in all wars, the ordinary people were sucked into this deception, on the back of their religion, and many thousands of them subsequently gave their lives in vain.

It is worth reflecting on that fact, and that by comparison, very few of our own military personnel lost their lives.

We in the western World, need to learn how to reasonably share our resources, knowledge, technology and general wealth. As a first step, we particularly need to learn how to share our food and power resources.

Of course, alongside these realisations will come some enormous international and social issues that will also need to be resolved, such as social and financial security in families and communities, throughout the entire World, without breeding like rabbits.

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The Lockerbie Bomber Ali Mohamed Al-Megradie – 24/8/2009

I am not sure if Mr MacAskill, the Scottish Justice Secretary, was just showing his inexperience, or if he was just enjoying his own sense of self-importance by putting himself in the public gaze  – and let’s face it, there are plenty of Westminster MPs who do the same – regularly.

I am not sure if there was some other hidden international influence from Westminster, or Gordon Brown, or even if there was an “oil” factor that we are all hitherto unaware of.

I am not even sure if our justice system worked as well as we would have liked in this wretched man’s original case. 

However, I am absolutely sure that he was found guilty in the fair Courts of this land and I am absolutely sure that he was sentenced fairly.

I am told that he had only served eight years of his sentence. Simple mathematics tells me that he served a mere ten days in prison for each individual person that he murdered.

I am also absolutely certain, along with most of the rest of this Country, that he should not have been let out, completely and utterly regardless of whatever reason was being dreamt up by the politicians.

If the justice system was flawed at the time of his sentence – please fix it and then appeal through the proper channels.

Tragedy is heaped upon tragedy in as much that, once again, our politicians prove themselves to be seriously out of touch with pubic feelings and beliefs, and completely at odds with our concept of what is right and what is obviously wrong.

Continental Europe Is Different, And Why The Euro Would Be Bad For Us.

The European Countries on the Continent are quite different to us, by comparison, we have little or nothing in common with them. They have a different culture, they speak very different languages, and their political systems are often born out of socialism, or in extreme cases out of communism.

Economically, they often have little or no desire to create profit. Their financial institutions are small in comparison to our own, and shares in their companies generally do not pay dividends to their shareholders. Therefore their public do not generally invest in their own businesses through share-ownership.  

More so than in our own economy, the national pastime is to work the “black economy” without paying tax, rather than working legally, paying the due tax, and creating wealth through investment.

Continental European Countries themselves often have an infuriating habit of ignoring treaties and the rules contained within them, when it suits their purposes to do so. A classic example of this, involving one of the more cultured European nations, was just a few years ago when France completely failed to adhere to the agreed economic rules for financial convergence.

These rules had been agreed by all EEC states, including the UK, in order to make it easier for countries to converge their financial systems and eventually become part of a single European currency, if they wanted to do so, at some time in the future.

It was particularly important that France adhered to those rules, as they were one of the most powerful advocates of, and are now a principle member of, the single currency system (Euro), along with Germany. Indeed, economic convergence was so important to the future stability of the Euro that the financial penalties for failing to adhere to the agreed rules were quite draconian.

France failed in three successive years to meet the rules of economic convergence and yet at no time have they been obliged to pay the prescribed penalty. In fact, as far as I am aware, they have not paid a single Euro in financial penalty. More to the point their totally dismissive attitude is such that they obviously have absolutely no intention of doing so.

The Germans support France in its’ refusal to pay, simply because if they don’t, and France was obliged to meet its’ dues, the French economy would be severely affected, and the Euro would probably collapse.

Political development in continental Europe has been largely developed through Socialism and Communism, in fact like France, many are in fact Democratic Republics. Whether it is for this, or some other reason, is probably an arguable point, however, what is incontestable is the fact that their social security systems are massively generous to the point of being foolhardy, with the result that their social security systems are fundamentally bankrupt, and represent an enormous drain on their economies, through extraordinarily high taxation.

The result is that there are often dual economies in Continental Europe – the real one in which people pay very high levels of personal taxation, and the other one in which they are paid cash, far more so than in the UK.

A good example of their profligate social security systems is that the German, French, Italian and Spanish state pensions are several times larger than our own. These European state pensions are so generous that they are probably unsustainable and, at some point in the future, they may well result in substantial increases in their domestic inflation, and subsequently, interest rates.

Their preferred way of softening the blow to their own economies, and their already overburdened taxpayers, is to mix in another economy, far stronger than their own, and preferably get all of them to adopt a single currency. In this way, their own massive generosity to themselves, in state pension benefits etc, is ultimately paid for in part by other much stronger economies through inflation and interest rates. I do not believe that we should be that saviour economy.

However, it is also very true to say that, at home, we desperately need to increase our own state pension benefits, but it must be done to a degree and in a way that is totally sustainable, and does not result in an impossible liability for future generations. We can afford it, if we are careful and prioritise our national expenditure.

However, we simply cannot afford to bail out the European state pension systems at the same time, by joining their single currency (Euro), even if we wanted to.

Once again they need us more than we need them…. by a very wide margin indeed.

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Our Fishing Rights.

In the early 1970s the Conservative Government, under Sir Edward Heath, gave away our fishing rights to the Continental Europeans in exchange for EEC Membership.

He did this without telling the general public for fear of losing the referendum at that time. So, Sir Edward achieved his place in history, and in so doing, he committed the UK to an international trading partnership in Europe.

I have no issues with a trading partnership, if only that was all that it was. After all, another trading partnership could be a very good thing.  However, along the way, and without telling the public of this Country, they gave away £ billions and £ billions of pounds of our fishing rights, a national asset that was probably the most prolific and profitable fishery in the World.

Furthermore, we were obliged to sever many of our very valuable business relationships with Commonwealth countries. Just try talking to New Zealand about the damage that we did to their sheep and lamb farming by joining the EEC in the 1970s.

We knighted Sir Edward for losing at least one entire industry (fishing) and giving away a supremely important asset (our fishing grounds), something that even two World Wars had failed to achieve.

After the catastrophic Heath Government of the 1970s, the European Community insisted that we reduce our fishing fleet to its’ current lamentable levels, a shadow of its’ former self, and at the same time, with their own fishing fleets, they have plundered and decimated our fish stocks, all within just 30 years.

I believe that there are clauses within the Treaty, which charge the European Community with managing the fish stocks to all our benefits.

They have patently obviously failed, and therefore the treaty is broken, or certainly that part of it is. We must move very rapidly indeed in order to save something out of this ecological disaster. Our fishing grounds must be repossessed, under international law, and then allowed to recover.

Once our fisheries have recovered, they can then be successfully harvested once more, and it won’t be harvested by anyone other than our own fishermen.

Our politicians are still discussing how to slice up the cake  - there isn’t one – 21/12/2009

I read with interest that our political leaders are still stuck with the argument of how to slice up the cake.

Like adult dysfunctional children, but children none the less, fighting around the Christmas tree for the last chocolate Santa, they negotiate and argue, then discuss and reach accords. Finally as all else has failed, they agree that something should be done, but for the life of them all, they know not what to do. Finally they triumphantly produce some legal political publicity speak drivel that they have agreed that their agreement is that something should be done… and they all agree on that … definitely.

I am not just referring to the Global Warming talks in wherever it was … I just forget where … after all, it was always going to be an irrelevance … but I am referring to that, and all other areas of politics in current times.

Our party politicians, having reached the stage some months ago where there was universal agreement that government expenditure was massively exceeding taxation revenues, primarily because corporate profitability and therefore corporation tax revenues to the treasury had disappeared in a puff of smoke, they agreed that expenditure needed to be cut.

A revelation in cross party political accord.

However, I note that Gordon Brown went somewhere the other day, I think it was the day after the Chancellors budget speech, and promptly announced another 1.5 billion of expenditure on some pet project of his.

In addition, David Cameron wants to ring fence the National Health Service from any financial cuts whatsoever, I guess because he mistakenly thinks it is political suicide not to do so.

Further out, neither political party will talk about defence budget cuts whilst our brave lads are being blown to smithereens because they have got the wrong body armour.

Here are some home truths which broadly speaking the rest of the country knows, but which it would seem that our politicians are blissfully unaware of –

1)      We are not in the least bit interested in Gordon Brown’s pet projects any longer, and we do not believe him anyway

2)      The national health service is the most tragic waster of public expenditure ever devised, and any business manager in the private sector worth his salt would dearly love to have the opportunity to get hold of it

3)      The number of civil servants working in the ministry of defence is 87,000 which is roughly 1 civil servant for every 2 fighting men – an example of truly ridiculous management levels if ever there was one.

The current political discussions are acknowledging the need to holdback public expenditure, whilst they fight over how to slice up the none existent cake.

It is vaguely reminiscent of some time I spent with a company at the end of the 1980s. They too spent  their time discussing how to slice up the cake until I politely pointed out to them that there was no cake, the company was bust, and if the banks and the regulators found out they would be closed down tomorrow.

Now, I am not saying that our company called The United Kingdom Limited is bust, far from it, but until the economy recovers, and taxation revenues recover with it, we have no money to spend. End of story, no negotiation, no pay rises for the public sector, no additional expenditure, nothing … not one little bit.

In other words, there is no cake to slice in any which way what so ever, no matter how long you discuss it.

However, there is a huge amount of public expenditure which is being totally and completely wasted, and that is not restricted to just the public services other than the NHS.

There are huge numbers of people in all our public services swanning around doing … not a lot.

I am not necessarily suggesting that there should be huge numbers of redundancies in public services, but I am suggesting that those who are in public services might like to consider what they did today, and was it really the good value for the money which they were paid.

If you are working in our public services, and you come to the conclusion that the work that you did today was not truly good value for the money that you were paid, then please change your ways, leave immediately, or wait to be fired.

Generally speaking, I am not referring to the lower worker levels of our public services – I am referring to those at the top – the very top levels.

It is perfectly possible to maintain services by taking up the slack in public services, and save the Country billions of pounds in the meantime.

It is just that our politicians are not business managers, they would not know a profit margin if it jumped up and bit them in the face, and they are scarred witless by the public sector and loosing their votes.

 This is a time for statesmanship and firm management.

 A Plan for the UK – Not Just To Survive But To Seriously Prosper! 4/1/2010

In order to understand in full detail, all the issues surrounding the UK’s current economic malaise, one really need do no more than to read the front page of the Sunday Times yesterday.

However, for those who did not see the article concerned, allow me to paraphrase the main issues for you, and bear in mind that throughout these figures, it is the Private Sector which  pays for the Public Sector through income tax and taxation on corporate profits.

Since this Labour government was elected in 1997 –

We now have nearly one million more people employed in the Public Sector (914,000).

That is now 1/5^th or 20% of the entire working population who are funded by the remainder.

Public Sector average earnings are £1,417 per year more than the average earnings in the Private Sector.

Public Sector employees standard working week is 35 hours per week compared to the Private Sector’s 37.5 hours per week.

Public Sector employees have 3 or 4 more days paid holiday per year.

Public Sector employees have 3.3 more days off due to sickness each year.

Public Sector employees have 13.4% more of their total gross salary paid into their pensions by their employer (that means us).

Public sector employees retire at an average age of 58 whereas Private sector employees generally work to age 65.

Let us not be too complicated.

WE SIMPLY CANNOT AFFORD IT.

Certainly, we cannot afford it until Corporate UK Ltd starts making profits again, and paying the levels of corporation tax that they were paying two years ago.

1)      However, if we are going to return to the sort of corporate profits that were producing the level of corporation tax that it yielded to the Treasury two years ago, then quite obviously we need to get people spending in the high street again.

2)      In the meantime, if we are going to reduce the current massive Government overspend on Public services, we need to economise on our public expenditure and make sure that we get seriously good value for our money, and that does not necessarily mean massive redundancies in the Public sector as that would create an even bigger problem through unemployment.

SO HOW CAN WE ACHIEVE THESE TWO GOLDEN OBJECTIVES ?

1)      We immediately increase the State Pension (currently £95 per week) to £200 per week for every person over age 65. We can do this by “repossessing” the SERPS (State Second Pension) benefits that have been transferred into private pensions over the last 30 years, and which amounts to several hundred billion pounds.

2)      We start making our Public Servants behave sensibly with our money, which means cutting out all the ridiculous expenditure items that we are all very well aware of, and it means instilling a sense of personal financial responsibility into every single Public Sector employee in the County.

To Review the following subjects on this website – just click the links –

A living state pension –

HOT TOPICS – “The Economy – There Is A Solution – 23/11/2009”  http://www.rutlandpolitics.co.uk/the-economy-%e2%80%93-there-is-a-solution-23112009/

BIG ISSUES – “The Economy – A Living State Pension” http://www.rutlandpolitics.co.uk/the-domestic-economy/

BIG ISSUES – “Pensions – A Living State Pension – Mr Brown Broke Your Pension” http://www.rutlandpolitics.co.uk/pensions-2/

Government expenditure -

HOT TOPICS  – Our Politicians Are Still Discussing How To Slice UpThe Cake 21/12/2009 http://www.rutlandpolitics.co.uk/our-politicians-are-still-discussing-how-to-slice-upthe-cake/

BIG ISSUES – “People In Public Life – MPs Salaries And Expenses” http://www.rutlandpolitics.co.uk/people-in-public-life-realy-should-know-better/

BIG ISSUES – “Our Armed Forces – MOD Budget Chaos” http://www.rutlandpolitics.co.uk/re-instating-our-armed-forces/

BIG ISSUES – “The Economy – MG Rover Noses In Troughs” http://www.rutlandpolitics.co.uk/the-domestic-economy/

BIG ISSUES – “The Police Force – Scotland Yard Go On A Jolly” http://www.rutlandpolitics.co.uk/respect-for-the-police-force/

BIG ISSUES – “The Economy – Spending Cuts + Common Sense” http://www.rutlandpolitics.co.uk/the-domestic-economy/

BIG ISSUES – “The Economy – City Bankers And Their Bonuses” http://www.rutlandpolitics.co.uk/the-domestic-economy/

So, that is how it can be done.

But now show me a politician that has the courage to say it, and then do it, a politician that still has his/her morals and beliefs intact, a politician who is not bound by the party political line, and above all, a politician who is not besotted with his own self aggrandisement or personal wealth creation.

Because I want to vote for him/her!

These people do exist in our politics, but we need to recognise them, and then give no quarter to the others, regardless of our own preferred party political allegiances.

 The Next Step To Recovery

Regardless of the result in the general election, any incoming new Government, of whatever political persuasion, was always going to have to cut expenditure, and increase taxation. The only question was, in what areas and to what degree.

The Cameron and Clegg team have now produced their emergency budget and we can see precisely where they want to cut and where they want to tax.

However, no matter how you dress it up, if you remove over £40billion from the economy, there is bound to be a knock on effect. It is estimated that there will be approx 700,000 people who will no longer have a job in the Public Sector. That is an awful lot of people who are not earning, and not spending their salaries in the high street.

Is there likely to be a double dip to the recession? Of course there is. Unless the Government can arrange for some large sums of money to be fed into the economy from somewhere, I cannot see how we can avoid further substantial recessionary pressures such as these.

In effect, having done what they need to do in terms of cuts and increased taxation, the Government now urgently need to consider the other side of the equation.

Where, when and how are they going to rebuild the economy?

We certainly cannot do what UK Governments have traditionally done in the past, re-inflate the property market and encourage people to borrow more money again. That was the cause of the problem in the first place, and many people are now facing personal debt that is going to be very difficult for them to redeem over the years ahead.

You may think that it is impossible to find extra money to pour into our economy. After all, we have just agreed that there is no money left. However, this is not the case, there is money available, if you know where to look, and you are prepared to be radical and imaginative.

Since 1978, company and occupational pension schemes, have been encouraged to opt out of the state earning related pension (S2P as it is now known), and people with private personal pensions have been able to do so since 1988. This has been done by “refunding” substantial amounts of individual national insurance contributions directly into peoples private or company pensions.

The amount of money which has been “refunded” from the DSS for each year for each such person obviously varies as it is dependent on their salary at the time of the refund being passed across. However, the average annual refund per person has been of the order of £2,000 per year.

Quite obviously, over the years concerned and for the huge numbers of people involved, the total funds that have now accumulated to private and company pension schemes from the DSS, must now be of the order of several hundred £ billion. 

Step one.

If the Government could gain access to this collective pension pool and use it to provide a proper state pension of say £200pw, immediately, then the money coming into the economy, through increased pensioner high street spending, would probably resolve the recession overnight.

It is rare that the accumulated benefits of this element of a person’s pension will exceed more than £50 or £60 per week in retirement income at retirement, and I am sure that everybody would be happy to exchange this for a non means tested state pension of say £200 per week.

Step Two.

With such a simplified, across the board, state pension, there would be no necessity to create the additional state pension that the Government is currently wrestling with, and which the public simply see as even more taxation. There are a number of government bodies who are currently involved on trying to create a new state pension, and they would cease to be required.

The calculation of, the administration of, and the payment of state pensions would be massively simplified, to the extent that not only would central Government be able to lose large numbers of related  civil service staff, but also local Government would be able to do the same. For instance, we would be able to lose a  large number of local state assisted benefits, such as rent rebates, council tax assistance and even bus passes, along with a large reduction in the civil servant staff who currently administer them. 

Step three.

Making the high street more accessible to the pensioner and more competitive for the retailer will be a huge boost to local employment opportunities. Bringing back the local shop into the high street has long since been an ambition of many a politician.

Obviously making huge sums available to the high street retailer through this sort of substantial across the board state pension increase, will be an enormous advantage. After all, most pensioners will not necessarily be spending their newly increased state pension on new cars, but they are far more likely to buy some proper food, turn the heat back on in the house, get the house repaired, and go to the local pub a bit more often.

If we can take the advantage of these new cash inflows to the local economies and encourage high street development, then employment and local communities will benefit.

Currently there is a huge discrepancy in overhead costs between the chain store grocery retailer and the high street butcher and baker. This is largely because of the unfairly discounted council tax rate that the chain store retailer pays, and the lunacy of the local councils making their previous free car parks into pay and display. Both of these items can be resolved very quickly by some simple legislation.

Step Four.

Even this large pool of pension fund capital will not support a proper state pension of the size that I am inferring (£200 per week at age 65). However, it will certainly last through to ten or fifteen years, possibly longer if it is planned properly.

During that time, we will need to move quickly to a realistic funding system for state pensions, through the existing national insurance scheme.

It is only because successive Governments of the past 30 years have chosen to ignore the longer term demographic pressures, which have always been obvious, that the current state pension system is bust.

Once again, our politicians of the past have failed us catastrophically, because they focused on their own narrow objectives for re-election, and personal wealth. The result has been that the state pension in the UK is one of the lowest in the developed World. There is no reason why that cannot change.

Going forward from here.

Using these funds in the way that I describe is a “one off” opportunity, and it is imperative that we

a)      get it right

b)      get the best value possible out of it in terms of economic savings, simplification of the civil service at all levels of Government and

c)       plan the longer term benefits of a proper state pension at age 65, for everybody in this country.

The Domestic (Macro) Economy - 24/8/2009

It was reported at the weekend that the tax revenue to the Treasury has reduced by approx 20% (recent issue – Sunday Times).

Well, there can hardly be any great surprise at this revelation, especially when you talk to the public at large.

As a small example, and of course there are many thousands of people like this, I know a self-employed roofer who for 20 or more years has always been well employed, with a reasonable order book in front of him. I spoke to him the other day and asked him about his business, and he announced that he had just completed a job that morning, and as of that moment he had absolutely nothing on the books to do at all – zippo – not a thing!

Of course there is a reduction in tax revenues. There is a reduction in all economic activity, throughout the Country. Having said that, a 20% reduction in tax revenue is rather alarming, especially when viewed alongside the massive increase in Government expenditure which they are deploying in order to prop up the economy.

However, any such Government stimulus to the economy will only work if it results in employed people spending that money in the high street again. And, quite frankly, this will only happen when the public, or a large section of it, feels confident enough of their own employment, that they can go shopping again.

The Stock Market is strong, and it has been so for two or three months now, and it is always the first to signal a recovery. It usually starts moving upwards 6 months or more before the macro economy starts to recover.

We do seem to be, almost imperceptibly, turning the corner. However, it will still be 6 or even 12 months before any sense of job security returns to most people, and it is likely to be several months after that before their confidence visibly returns, and they go shopping again. Of course, we shall then have to deal with a large unemployed issue, which will take many more years to resolve.

In the meantime we do need to get “spending money” back into the high street, and preferably as soon as possible. We need to get a large section of the public confidently spending money again.

In previous decades, successive Governments of all persuasions have achieved this by re-inflating the housing market. Unfortunately, this time around it will need to be something quite different, if only because it was the over inflated housing market that precipitated our current economic downfall in the first place.

When solving a problem, I love to try and solve a multiple of other, possibly unrelated problems, all at the same time.

A “Living” State Pension

We have a pathetically low State Pension in this Country (unlike the rest of Continental Europe) which is resulting in massive poverty in our older generations, and a national inability to fund State Healthcare for them. I could go on to talk about the de-motivational effect on the Public, and the huge sense of disappointment, anger and the feeling of deceit and treachery felt by our Pensioners. In other parts of this website I discuss the State Pension problem in more detail.

However, it does seem to me, that if we paid a reasonable State Pension …. tomorrow …. straight away …. then most of that money will be spent on consumables in the high street. A better and healthier standard of living for our pensioners will immediately result in them buying  products and services which will immediately benefit our own domestic economy. Indeed, my friend the roofer might even get some work onto his books as the Pensioners spend their increased pensions on their own housing, which in many cases has been neglected for years anyway.

Indeed, as they say, “what goes around comes around” and any such increased spending power in the hands of our Pensioners, is most surely going to benefit all parts of the economy, gradually returning some confidence to employment, and ultimately improving the tax revenues to the Treasury.

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City Bankers And Their Bonuses – 24/8/2009

I see that our politicians are still casting around for a solution to the apparent problem of financial services city bonuses.

Currently, the biggest problem is one that our politicians have created entirely for themselves by making political comments in the form of half truths in the press and media (don’t they just love to), in their quest to try not to upset the voting populace by revealing the real amounts of a city income.

Finally, they have ventured simplistic solutions to a simplistic analysis of the real problem, in this instance, such as by banning bonuses altogether. Totally unenforceable, totally unrealistic, and should they be daft enough to try it they will completely decimate the city of London and it’s financial institutions.

Our politicians refuse to deal with the real numbers involved in “city pay” for fear that their voting public will not be able to comprehend the need for such high earnings. It is a bit like the issue surrounding MP’s own expenses and salaries, in as much that the reality of what is and what is not a commercial salary rate for the job of being and MP will most certainly have to prevail at some time in the future, and the sooner it happens the better. If we continue to pay £64,000 per year to our MPs we will continue to attract monkeys rather than our accomplished and proven leaders who know how to run a business and make a profit.

Likewise, we need to pay our city people large salaries and bonuses, if we are to continue attracting the best people from around the World. The fact of the matter is that if we want to retain city expertise here in London, because we want London to continue to be the financial capital of the World, and we want to continue receiving the taxation revenue from that source, which incidentally is more than 10% of our total taxation revenue to the Treasury, then we have to pay the going rate for those people … including bonuses.

Banning bonuses will simply have the effect of sending them all abroad, and that in turn will simply serve to substantially reduce the status of London as the premier financial capital of the World, and our taxation revenue to the Treasury will reduce accordingly.

So, where lies the problem? Where was the real problem with city bonuses that apparently caused the near collapse of the banking system?

Sure, there were some people who got paid ridiculously large amounts, in bonuses and salaries, but in relative terms to the financial institution’s turnover, profit, and taxation yield to us all through the Treasury, they were few in number, and the amounts of money involved were relatively insignificant to the institutions involved.

The problem with the city bonus was, and still is, that it creates a conflict of interest between the executive who receives it, and the long term financial health of the institution who employs him.

For instance, when a Bank is involved in take over and merger activity, and it is buying a company, we really do need to make sure that nobody’s bonus is dependent upon that transaction, or the price of the transaction, or the inherent increased turnover that it brings to the group afterwards. In other words, if an executive’s bonus is dependent on increased turnover, we should not be surprised if that executive advocates buying ridiculous companies for ridiculous figures. It is only to increase his bonus.

Likewise, if a Bank executive’s brief is to increase sales of financial products to the public, and his bonus is related to that sales increase rather than to sustainable profit, don’t be surprised if he is then advocating selling every product available to every unsuspecting customer he can lay his hands upon. He will even advocate creating new products to flog to his customer base, even though he himself would never buy them simply because he knows that they are complete and utter rubbish.

It is only in this way that city bonuses have become unrealistic. They were not necessarily unrealistic in the amounts of those bonuses, although I will admit that some have been extraordinary to say the least.

City bonuses have become unrealistic simply because they were not linked to sustainable, repeating, consistent, growing, and permanent profit.

Banning bonuses ….. I don’t think so …. If they do, the baby will definitely go straight out of the window along with the bath water.

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MG Rover – Whose Noses Were In Which Troughs? 14/9/2009

In May 2000, the five top men at MG Rover were appointed with huge triumph and fanfare by this Government (Stephen Byers and Patricia Hewitt), as being the saviours of the company, for which they paid ten quid (!!?).

At the time, many people in the city argued that the company was “dead in the water”, and even if it did turn out to be possible to save it from the receiver, it probably would not be worth the huge sums of money that would be required to save it in the longer term, even if it subsequently saved five or six thousand jobs. This was primarily because the car, the Rover 75, was “old hat” and the cost of designing and tooling up for a new model would be immense.

You may remember that Stephen Byers was the Government Minister who, entirely by his own efforts, master minded the complete collapse of Rail Track, and lost the life savings of very many railway workers in the process. The railway workers had been actively encouraged to put their life savings into the shares of that company when it was privatised. They subsequently lost the lot. Obviously Stephen Byers was just the man to advise the Government about MG Rover.

Anyway, putting the politicians aside for the moment, the top five at MG Rover certainly paid themselves handsomely during the five years that they masterminded the collapse of the company. Apparently they paid themselves something in the order of £40milliion between them, in salaries, pensions and other benefits, over the five years. That is to say approx £1.6milion per year each – nice work if you can get it!

However, when MG Rover finally collapsed in 2005, the question was, what on earth were the Government doing during the five years that the five ran the company, and what were they going to do about it now that it had collapsed?

Bearing in mind that it was patently obvious to everybody, precisely which five noses had been in which trough during those years, to the point that it was commonly reported in the media of the day, the Government took immediate and drastic action. They ordered an immediate Public Inquiry into the financial affairs of the five and the company itself.

That should do it. Now we will all know the truth, except that we already knew the truth. Never-the-less, at least the Public Inquiry would be fairly rapid and straight forward.

It has taken the Public Inquiry a further four years to come up with the answers that we already knew, and more to the point, it has cost the taxpayer a further £16milion to reach that conclusion.

Let me be clearer – £16,000,000 – The Government has spent £89,000 per week, every working week for the last four years since 2005, investigating the matter. That is to say, they have spent £17,800 per day, every working day for the last four years, coming to the same conclusion that we already knew.

Even allowing for city centre office expenses, and huge city salaries, the Public Inquiry itself would have to have had something like five or six of the top city people working on the MG Rover investigation, all day and every day, continuously every week for four years, in order to achieve a bill of that magnitude.

What on this earth were the appointed investigators doing during all that time, and what on earth were the Government doing during the four years that they racked up the expenses?

Throughout the four year investigation, the Government must have known about these absurd, and ever increasing costs. Why didn’t somebody in the Government stop this chronic waste of public money at some point along the way?

Presumably, they will now suggest that we should have a Public Inquiry about the original Public Inquiry.

We can be quite sure of one thing -There was more than one trough in this story, and a damn sight more than five noses in the troughs.

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Spending Cuts – With Some Common Sense Please! – 21/9/2009

This week, the three main political parties have at last reached consensus and agreement, in as much that they are now all saying that we will have to go through a number of years of expenditure cuts in order to redress the balance in our economy. In other words, we are spending more on our Public Services than the Treasury is receiving in tax revenue, probably to the tune of some £90Billion per year.

To the public, there is no great revelation in the need for spending cuts, as it has been much talked about in the press and media, and in my experience in talking to the public, everybody has been very well aware of the pressing need for it for twelve months or more.

The issue, obviously, is that everybody wants the spending cuts to effect someone else rather than themselves. A natural enough reaction. However the sizes of money involved are such that it will obviously effect everyone in some way shape or form.

The real problem is going to come if the Government simply cuts expenditure by strangling the supply of money to the headline departments (health, education, defense, public services etc), without providing some proper governance on precisely how those cuts are to be metered out by those departments.

If, as usual, they do not provide any leadership or management on how the cuts are to be effected, then the people in those departments will simply shovel it off onto someone else, retain their own employment levels and sense of self importance, and gradually slide off towards their own enhanced, index linked, final salary pension at age 60, or earlier if we are stupid enough to let them.

In other words, there must be professional management of the reductions in expenditure, unlike when they gave the extra money to the various departments in the first place.

For years, the Government simply threw extra money at them without any effective management whatsoever of how it should be spent. The result has been that a lot of the massive amounts of extra money, which has been committed in the last ten years, has actually been pocketed by the wrong people. As we can all plainly see, the shambles in public services have not improved anything like proportionately to the massively increased spend of the last ten years. In fact, not even near.

So, what do I mean by management of reduced public spending? In essence, I mean

-          managing the current profligate waste of money in public services first,

-          then managing the unnecessarily complex into simplistic and more cost effective systems, and finally,

-          managing redundancies where appropriate, and specifically NOT early retirements, which in themselves usually involve enhanced numbers of years service and a truly massive increase in pension funding requirements.

There are myriad examples in the press every day of what I am talking about, from MP’s ridiculous expenses claims to the Ministry Of Defense’s £35Billion budget overspend, and Scotland Yard’s 2,247 first class flights around the World last year.

Locally, the councils have been saddled with excessive employment requirements through central Government’s lack of management on most issues, such as the massively complex council tax systems, even more complex benefits and care systems, and administering means tested state pension assessments, to name but a few.

Even the education authorities are bursting with paper reports and assessments that nobody reads, and in most instances are a pointless exercise. In our schools, the classic wastage of all, which people really do not understand, is why we have all these funds being poured into schools, and yet they consistently fail to educate our young ones properly, probably largely to do with the fact that after 3.00pm in the afternoon, nobody is there!

Our Universities cannot even manage to arrange the annual influx of the new, and correctly qualified, students without creating several departments and myriad employees to procrastinate and cogitate on the student results which actually do not even exist because the A levels haven’t even been taken by the student yet. All this, just because the Government has lost sight of what really matters, and is buried in a pointless and massively damaging exercise in social engineering, which is bordering on Stalinist.

So, is it possible to cut expenditure on public services without cutting the service itself?

Of course it is – just ask any accomplished businessman from the private sector and they will be happy to oblige with some truth and reality.

Of course, like any business, that may well mean that we have to prioritise certain expenditure items. It may well mean that public services staff will not be able to access their pensions until the same age as the rest of us. It may well mean that simplifying the application of services, such as pensions and the benefits system, will result in considerably smaller departments. It will certainly mean that the hidden and massive expenses of the state Government machine will have to be thoroughly tided up and given a severe dose of morals and ethics.

It is all perfectly fair and perfectly do-able, but it will need our politicians to concentrate on the Country and what it needs, rather than their own personal financial affairs and their selfish desire to feed party political ambition.

Moving The Country From Collective Excuses To Individual Responsibility – 5/2/2010

There is a concept in many peoples minds that “if others can do it, then so can we”, and over a number of decades it has become monstrously destructive in many aspects of our society, our communities, and our public way of life.

Whilst there is always a great deal of comfort in seeing other people doing wrong, when you are also doing wrong yourself, it is none the less, wrong.

There are many and varied examples.

• Most MPs have claimed false, and some would say fraudulent, expenses, but they take great comfort from the fact that over half of all the other 645 MPs in the House Of Commons are doing precisely the same thing.
• Some people in the higher positions in our Public Services, massage their working circumstances, and in some cases their salaries too, in order to gain higher pension benefits. They know, by all moral judgements, that it is not quite right to do so, but they see others doing the same thing.
• Some surgeons in the NHS take a full NHS salary, with extraordinary pension benefits, whilst not working anything like a full week for the NHS. But, so many are doing the same thing that it makes their own fraud seem less relevant.
• Some Policemen, or any other public servant for that matter, take early retirement on the basis of some spurious and un-diagnosable illness such as a “bad back”. They know it is wrong to do so, but so many have already done it, that it seems OK.
• Some school teachers profess to be working in the long holiday periods, when they are doing nothing of the kind. Some school teachers profess to be taking work home with them, when they really ought to be in school and doing it there.

I could go on considerably further, but perhaps it is too depressing to do so.

Now, please don’t misinterpret me. I am not saying that all these people in all these occupations are all taking advantage of their positions, or being fraudulent. However, what I am saying is that there are far too many people out there who are doing precisely that, and it is very expensive for those of us who have to foot the bill in increased taxation.

The private sector has it’s problems too.

• The other day, I was listening to one of our Bankers, who was bemoaning his fate because his bonus was nothing like as much as was the case in previous years. His concept seemed to be that, as he was spending it in the economy anyway, and being taxed accordingly, then why should he not have the same levels of bonus as before. He had no consideration of whether he had earned it or not. I feel sure that his comments were intended for someone other than me, but goodness knows who exactly he thought might accept this unbelievable twaddle.

Of course the Bankers should certainly have their bonuses, at exactly the same levels as before, but only if he or she has earned it. There lies the real issue.

• At the other end of the scale, I even had an instance of sharp practice the other day concerning my car. The car was running beautifully. It went in for a minor part to be replaced on the suspension, and came out running like a tractor, with the warning lights on the dashboard looking like the main runway at Heathrow during a night landing. What a coincidence.

Anyway, I took the car to another dealer of the same make, and they were glad of the business, and they put the car right again for me. Bloody annoying, and for me it was £700 of … shall we say … a less than happy experience.

My point is that, as a society, we have inadvertently developed and propagated a system of collective irresponsibility, or indeed, criminality. In other words, if someone stretches a point, or takes a little bit of an unfair advantage, then someone else will come along and convince themselves that it is also fair play for them to do the same. They will then push it out a little bit further. The result is that the original stretched point becomes much more than stretched, and the little bit of an unfair advantage does in fact become fraud and criminality.

The result of decades of these attitudes is that we currently have an awful lot of apparently very successful people in our society, who also appear to be perfectly honest and upstanding citizens, people who are the pillars of their communities, people who are well respected and who are supposed to be our leaders, but people who are in fact … ripping the system off for all that they can.

Are they to blame? They would argue that they are not. After all, everyone else is “at it … aren’t they?”

Well … actually … no they are not.

At least a third of our MPs have never claimed an incorrect expense, or worked the system in that way at all.

As is always the case when the pot runs dry, we start looking around at each other and asking ourselves how we got where we are, and more importantly, what exactly are we going to do about it?

The resounding conclusion must surely be that we all need to do a re-appraisal of ourselves, and those around us. We need to achieve a collective realisation that not only is this sort of behaviour unaffordable, but it is in fact basically … dishonest.

I would argue that it is the highest echelons of management that need to put their own houses in order before they attempt to correct those under them, some of whom it would seem are completely out of control. This may not be as easy as you would think, as it is within those very same high echelons of management where the worst miscreants reside.

If you doubt my words, look no further than our own MPs.

After all, if you cannot rely on your MP or your Doctor, or your Surgeon, or your Policeman to do the right thing, who exactly can you rely upon?

We need a change in public attitudes, and all of us, without exception, must reappraise the concept of trust, acceptable behaviour and fundamental honesty, in all the ways in which we do business with each other.

Above all else, we need a true statesman at the very top, to lead by example.

We need a true leader who is not swayed by obscure concepts of how to retain the marginal voter, and how to protect his own popularity and position.  A recent Prime Minister was so besotted with his own popularity that he took us into the Gulf War for entirely the wrong reasons.

We need a leader who is more interested in getting the job right, rather than building his own pedestal as high as he possibly can. Our current Prime Minister was so proud of his “prudence” in successive budgets that he then trashed the economy along with all our pensions.

Unfortunately I do not see any sign of such a statesman like leader at this moment.

Never the less, I am hoping with all my heart, that David Cameron is in fact the man that we are looking for, simply because it seems most likely that we will finish up with him as our Prime Minister, whether we like it or not.

If David Cameron is the man that we are looking for, we should know fairly rapidly. He will clear out all the dishonesty, and all the MPs that have failed us time after time, including all the MPs who have been disgraced and who have then re-invented themselves.

If he keeps Alan Duncan in his cabinet, we shall know that David was not the man that we were hoping for.

The Truth Would Be Good – 22/2/2010

For many years, our political parties have been stuck with a very old concept of electioneering.

They talk about silly little bits of legislation that benefit the minority or placate the majority, and they offer us financial “give aways” in the mistaken belief that we might be swayed by it. They seem to believe that doing these silly little things will lead us to the ballot box with their name in mind.

These days, the voting public is highly intelligent, and very knowledgeable about the Country and how it functions, both financially and politically, and they are not misled by such things.

We are looking for a “statesman”, and I would have to say that offering us “financial inducements” to vote for them, such as a few shares in a half destroyed bank, is hardly what we would call “statesmanlike behaviour”.

We are looking for a consistent statesmanlike leader who will ignore the “vote buying” antics of the past, and simply concentrate on the honest and accurate truth, along with their own beliefs, ideology and principles.

We do not want political electioneering, or political engineering, and we do not want political correctness, or the tortured presentation of party politics.

We really just want the truth.

We really want a leader who is a true statesman.

I have the great and special privilege of knowing a very large number of people, probably because of my professional career. I know and talk to people from literally every walk of life. I mix with the great and good as well as the great and the very hard working. I drink and socialise with every sort of artisan and profession, my friends vary from tax exiles to the local roofers. I count myself lucky and honoured that they share their lives with me in however large or small a way that may be.

These are the real people of this Country, and they :  

• Are not happy that our political leaders continually re-employ disgraced MPs in their cabinet, many of whom have disgraced themselves on more than one occasion.
• Are embarrassed that the Garden Of Remembrance was used as a photo opportunity, and trips to Afghanistan are used as publicity stunts.
• Do not believe that cutting back on malingerers who are fraudulently claiming State Disability Pension is fair, when they propose no such undertaking in the public sector pension system.
• Are not convinced that the NHS should be sacrosanct when it comes to expenditure cuts.
• Do not believe that all school teachers are wonderful, just because they are school teachers.
• Are not happy with the derisory level of the State Pension, and they do not believe that the new one being proposed is going to be anything more than just another form of taxation.
• Are not convinced that man made global warming even exists.
• Do not believe that our public services are good value for money.
• Do not believe that the Police service is good at it’s job, and do not believe that they should be treated as a special case with early retirement.   
• Are not at all happy with the idea of teaching our pre-pubescent children that sex is OK, homosexuality is OK, cross dressing is OK, and any other form of sexual deviation is just fine.

These are the real people, and the real people want real leaders, with real principles and beliefs.

We find it difficult, if not impossible, to believe in the current crop of party political automatons.

We find it difficult, if not impossible, to use our vote.

In the end, we may well vote, but only to keep one party out, and not because we really want a particular party in.  

That, my friends, is the tragedy of modern politics in the United Kingdom, and all because of a lack of truth.

People In Public Life Really Should Know Better

Far too many people in public life, be they politicians, or other people of influence, repeatedly fail to meet the basic moral standards that are required of them.

And yet, even after they have been exposed as frauds, cheats or morally deficient opportunists, often on more than one occasion, we still have to endure their regular appearance in the news and on our television screens, usually purporting to be an authority and an expert on one thing or another.

Personally I do not think we should have to listen to Mr Mandelson, who has been fired, or he has resigned, from political life no less than three times already, and I certainly do not think he should be anywhere near representing this country at anything other than tiddlywinks. Although I am quite sure that even those who regularly play tiddlywinks would be horrified to find themselves sitting opposite him.

Neither am I pleased to have to listen to Piers Morgan every time some sort of game show appears on TV, despite the fact that he was apparently forced to resign his post as Editor of a national news paper. It would seem that he was not required to serve a notice period but was asked to leave instantly because, allegedly, he cheated his readership by pre-buying shares that he knew his newspaper was going to ramp-up the next day – apparently it was pure coincidence. Or indeed, was he actually sacked for publishing fake photographs of British soldiers abusing Iraqis? In either event I really do not want to listen to him ever again.

The previous “speaker of the house”, Michael Martin MP, was forced to remove himself from that privileged position because he failed to recognise his own moral bankruptcy in cheating his expense account, to the tune of many thousands of pounds, notably in taxis for his wife to go into town. Like many people in this country, and abroad for that matter, I am staggered that the Government are now contemplating making him a Pier Of The Realm. He cheated. It is perfectly correct that he should leave public life, and certainly he should never be brought back again, let alone in an even more privileged position. As a businessman, I would not re-employ a person who I had just dismissed for theft, or falsifying his expense account if you prefer, and neither do the people of this country want to re-employ Mr Martin.

In short, I do not believe that we should have to endure politicians, leaders, or public figures who have already amply proven that they are incapable of behaving decently and honestly, when they have betrayed the trust that we put in them, and worse still, when they have taken financial advantage of their privileged position.

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MPs Salaries And Expenses

MP’s “criminal” misappropriation of their “expense accounts” continues apace. Up here in the Shires, we tend to see this particular problem as just one of many such deeply embarrassing and shameful issues that afflict our political system. It would seem that most of the country is heartily sick to death of our MPs and their antics, illusion, fraud, deceit and, and miss placed “political correctness”. The pathetic voter turn-out at our general elections is the result.

There are probably only two fundamental problems within our political system, of which our MPs outrageous fraud on their “expense accounts”, is merely a symptom.

First of all, we need to look very seriously at our MP’s salaries, and to be perfectly frank, £64,000 per year is peanuts in this day and age for a job of such responsibility. It is most certainly not a salary that is likely to attract the high achievers from our businesses and professions after their careers have succeeded. If ever you wanted a good example of “paying peanuts results in the employment of monkeys” then one really needs look no further than the House Of Commons.

 On the face of it there is a fairly simple solution to this first problem. We should of course be paying our MPs a realistic salary, whilst also removing any claims, of any nature, for “expenses”. I would suggest a salary of at least £125,000pa. Then they would be paid appropriately, and they could then spend their salaries entirely as they see fit, be it on junkets to the Far East, or second homes in London. Of course, their outrageous pension benefits should also be brought more into line with everybody else’s as well.

For the taxpayer, the point about increasing their salaries is a very simple one. The fact is that we are already paying this sort of figure to them anyway, through nefarious means called “MPs expenses”. The average expenses claim per MP, in addition to their salary of £64,000pa was actually £60,000 in 2007/8.

Therefore, we may just as well let them have it as non-pensionable salary. Not only would there be no additional costs to the country, there would be large savings to the public purse in not having hordes of civil servants procrastinating over MP’s so called “expense accounts”.

The second problem is that there are increasing numbers of our MPs who have been “found out” and/or “exposed” as cheats and liars. Quite a number of them on repeated occasions.

At the beginning of their political careers, at the point of selection by their chosen political party, it would seem that most MPs hold themselves up to be something which we later discover they quite patently are not.

In Rutland and Melton, our own Alan Duncan is a classic example.

In this country, over a couple of hundred years, we have inadvertently developed a party political system which forces the electorate to vote for a political party, rather than a specific and individual candidate. Unfortunately, this subsequently enables the political party to overrule it’s electorate, and forcibly retain an MP through successive elections, regardless of their crime or dishonesty, and regardless of what the electorate themselves feel.

In most of the examples of their missbehaviour, if the MP was in any other occupation, he/she would have been summarily and instantly dismissed - not early retirement – dismissed. I believe that we must find ways of restricting the relationship between the political parties and our MPs, particularly at election times. Ceasing all financial links could very well be a damn good start.

Resolving these two political problems will take considerable time, and substantial effort from a great number of people. Getting our experienced and successful people, from our businesses and professions, into the House Of Commons, with their morals and ethics intact, and with no financial relationships with political parties, is a national problem.

The three main political parties are only just beginning to contemplate these issues, largely because of their need to find and motivate apathetic voters, who no longer bother to turn up to the ballot box at election time.

The rather frightening fact is that we are running the second largest economy in the World (not the third or fourth – I have done the figures), this cradle of democracy, on a vote that consists of something less than half of the population who bother to vote. Even more worrying is the fact that if only half the eligible people vote in the first place, that means that something less than a quarter of the population supports the government, even at the best of times. This is the stuff that civil wars are built upon.

Of course, the three political parties are unlikely to disturb the status quo, if only for the reason that turkeys do not vote for Christmas.

However, in the meantime, we voters “up here in the sticks” could all make a damn good start by at least trying to vote for someone more like ourselves, rather than the local party political puppets and buffoons that we have been force fed for far too many years.

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David Cameron – Saving Money on MPs salaries – 10/9/2009

This week we have had another unfortunate example of “popularist policies” in politics, which as usual, completely misses the point.

David Cameron wants to limit MPs remuneration, and in so doing save the country some £120m odd.

Generally speaking, people see the issue of MPs salaries much more clearly than David is giving them credit for. I hardly think that the public would be in the least bit concerned what MPs were being paid, if only they would do the job properly, honestly and in the best interests of the Country, instead of fleecing the system and lining their own pockets.

It is not particularly the amount that MPs are paid which rankles with the Public, but it is far more to do with the question of getting the right people as our MPs in the first place, and then getting them to do the right job, to the exclusive benefit of the Country and all of us within it.

For this unique position of trust and power, it is patently obvious that we will have to pay the right amount in order to attract the right people to the job in the first place.

To the Public’s way of thinking, the biggest issue of concern, is the fact that once we have acquired an MP into politics, and it subsequently becomes patently obvious that he/she is either incapable of keeping their fingers out of the till, or in any event they are incapable of doing the job properly and honestly, we cannot seem to get rid of them. We seem to be stuck with them forever – it is infuriating.

In the UK, we desperately need to attract successful businessmen from the private sector into our politics, those who know the difference between profit and loss, the difference between the financially effective and the financially unviable, and those who still have a sense of reality in what is right and what is fundamentally wrong.

Unfortunately, today, the people see an overwhelming number of politicians in Wesminster who have never had a proper job, who apparently do not understand the financial implications of running a home and a family, and who have no experience of life in our communities at any levels of achievement, or indeed, underachievement. Many of them have never come into contact with real day to day life at ordinary levels, at any time.

With regard to the concept of saving a paltry £120m on MPs salaries, when the national deficit is running at £175billion, people are left with yet another example of our MPs being “out of” normal society or community for so long, that they have long since “lost touch” with the reality of day to day living. All too many of our MPs are either “child prodigy” of the political scene who have been in politics since they left school, or they are so wealthy in their own right that they have never been involved in normal day to day life.

Of course, if the Public are not aware that the “going rate” to attract our top people into politics from the Private Sector, with all their experience of truth, honesty and reality, is between £60,000pa and £150,000pa, then we have to provide them with convincing evidence and the hard facts. Perhaps the simplest way to do that is to refer to the appointments pages of the Sunday Times where they can see for themselves what is and what is not a compatible remunerative salary for people from the private business sector, who have the experience and the necessary tried and tested quality of judgment.

So, let’s look at some basic factual reality –

1)      We are not attracting the right people into politics when an MP’s salary is only £64,000pa, and they therefore feel the need to draw spurious and highly suspect expenses of that same amount again in order to make up a realistic salary.

2)      We are fed up with having to listen to disgraced MPs who are then “reborn” as …. the same thing all over again!

3)      We are not misled by some ill-conceived presentation that saving £120m on MPs costs is going to solve any problems at all … especially when the deficit is running at £175billion … just pay MPs the going rate for the job, but then make sure they do the job properly … if not … get rid of them.

4)      If you pay MPs a proper salary of say £125,000 there would be no extra cost to the Country because they are already “paying themselves” that through the addition of spurious expenses in addition to their £64,000pa salary.

5)      If you paid a proper salary of that sort of amount, and left the additional figure above the existing £64,000pa as “non-pensionable”, that would also bring MP’s pension rights more into line as well.

6)      If you gave our MPs a proper salary of these sorts figures you could make the civil servants redundant who currently procrastinate over MPs expenses … and probably save a damn sight more than £120m.

“David – there are quite a few bullets to bite in this subject, but it is the truth, and we need a lot more of that commodity when it comes to politics in the UK, rather than some politically vote motivated fob off”.

As a country, we need to properly understand our position and status in the World, both economically and politically. For many years, people with very different political objectives, both inside and outside our country, have chosen to illustrate their own narrow political points by denigrating The United Kingdom to fourth, fifth, seventh, or even tenth place in the World hierarchy. They presume to do this by utilising some obscure method of measuring economic activity which ignores the reality of real asset values and our real heritage.

A vision for the future or a continuing nightmare – 29/3/2010

Chancellor Darling and the Labour Party have delivered their budget, and many are calling it their last one, but I am not so sure.

 Quite obviously, it was a very difficult budget for any politician to produce, because of the pending General Election and it’s inevitable effect on votes, and because of the dire state of the economy.

 Indeed, as I have said myself in other parts of this website, the current recession is resolvable by one of or, more preferably, a combination of three different solutions. The essence of the problem is simple, but the application of the solution, or solutions, to the problem is fraught with difficulty for any politician or political party if they are also faced with the need to secure votes at a General Election. 

 However, the economic problem itself is actually a simple matter of housekeeping on a national scale.

 The fact is that as a country, we are currently spending considerably more on our Public Services than that which we are producing in tax revenues.

 The solutions -

 1)      Reduce expenditure, which means cutting Public Services, and will probably lose the votes of any public servants, who collectively represent 20%, or one in every five, of the entire working population.

 2)      Increase taxation, which by definition will affect everybody, but mostly those who are providing the wealth and the employment for the rest of us, in which case many of them will then cease to do so.

 3)      Boost the economy by spending lots of money, which they say we do not have, and hope that the economy grows back to previous levels, and taxation revenues catch up with that which we are already spending in expenditure.

 Of course, as with any problem, the final solution will inevitably be a mixture of all three of the available solutions, and will probably be mixed in with a bit of inflation over the years ahead as well.

 However, the politician, and his political party, hoping for election to Government, is terrified of picking up on any of these solutions for fear of antagonising the voters who may be affected by that particular action.

 The statesman, the hero, the honest politician for whom we all search, would by now have made it perfectly clear that the only way forward is in fact a mixture of all three solutions.

 The first solution is reducing expenditure, and it really is not the problem that we envisage. At least, it is not a problem for those who perform a useful and effective function for their salary. We certainly do not need to go through our Public Services with a machete, creating huge arbitrary redundancies and therefore even bigger economic problems for ourselves. However, we do need to manage the economy efficiently and properly, and that means seeking out all the vast and truly massive inefficiencies, wastes and wasters of public money, and all those who choose to rip off the system in which they work, for the billions of pounds that they currently do.

 The old routines and systems of working practices, huge numbers of which are incredibly expensive, inefficient and even dysfunctional, must be brought up to date. Any overstaffing will then find it’s own true level, and even that will need to be done without massive pay offs, and indeed without fictional early retirements. None of this can be achieved by any particular Government of the day, by simply cutting off or restricting the money supply to those services. It cannot be achieved by simply reducing expenditure and then just hoping that the managers of those services will act like efficient managers rather than lining their own pockets, and those of their colleagues.

 In short, as far as expenditure cuts are concerned, we have got to have proper efficient management passed down from Government in the form of specific instructions, rather than simply turning on and, in this case, turning off the money tap. If, as has been the case in the past, that is all that any Government does, then as before, the managers will not act in the best long term interests of their function. Their first instinct will be to take the easiest route, the line of least resistance, and their second instinct will be self-preservation of their own salaries and benefits.

 The second solution is increasing taxation, and that may well have to happen to some degree. However, one of the biggest problems created in taking more and more money off people is simply that they do not understand where it is going, and how it is being spent. They are then left to read the papers and listen to the journalists who find the latest scandal, or revelation to pin it all on. Be it MPs expenses, the fact that the MOD is 23 billion overspent, or simply the fact that they saw a policeman doing “naff all” whilst planning his “bad back” early retirement, the fact is that these are the issues that stick in peoples minds, and these are the types of the myriad issues that need facing and resolving by our politicians.

 People don’t necessarily mind their money being taken off them in taxation, provided that they can see precisely where it is going and why it is being spent.

 For example -

• If people knew that their car tax, petrol and road tax was spent purely on motoring and roads issues,
• if people new that their national insurance was the only thing being used for the national health service and their state pensions,
• if people knew that their income tax was being used solely for central Government and national issues,
• if people knew that the local council taxes were being used purely for local issues and local services,
• if people knew that purchase tax, or VAT if you prefer, was only being used for regulatory issues,

 then people could see, understand and argue the issues, in clarity and knowledge, of precisely how much it is costing them, and why.

 Of course, to take an entirely fictitious example, this may well mean that the pre-tax personal allowance becomes £15,000 and it may be that the national insurance rate becomes 15% with income tax being a flat 20%, and with a higher rate tax band of 40%. However, the people would then know precisely what money is being taken off them, and they would also know precisely why. They would then be able to argue the particular and specific issues, rather than getting exercised about which political party is better than another at managing the current mish-mash chaos that we mistakenly call an economy.

 The third and final solution is how to finance the economy by spending more money, which we are told we do not have. Well, we do have more such money, and it is already in the hands of those people who are very much the best judge on precisely how to spend it. There is £billions and £billions of it.

 Since 1978 the Government has allowed people to transfer their State Earnings Related Pensions (SERPS or S2P) benefits out of the state pension system and into their company or their private pension schemes. For many people this has amounted to between £1,500 and £2,500 transferred out of the state pension system each year. These sums are very rarely producing anything much in pension benefits for the individual person concerned. If everybody was given a fully index linked state pension, of the order of £200 per week, from age 65, in exchange for those sums that have been transferred from the State and into their private and company pensions, I do not believe that  there would be many objectors.

 The effect would be instant – on £200 per week,  per person, regardless of male or female, state pensioners would no longer be living in poverty,

• they would no longer a burden on the state,
• their health care needs would be massively reduced,
• they would no longer need complex and myriad additional state and local benefits,
• hospitals could charge a reasonable sum for overnight stays,

 and most critically important, their new state pension money would flow back into the local economy,

• the retail high street would be revived,
• services would be bought and paid for by the pensioners rather than dispensed by expensive civil servants,

 and all the problems surrounding early or late retirement would disappear overnight.

 So, to go back to the beginning of this piece …

why am I not so sure that these are the last dying days of this Labour Government?

 Simply because they are all the same, be they Conservative, Labour, Lib Dem or any of the other dysfunctional political parties that we have acquired in this Country.

 None of them have a proper business plan, other than to cut expenditure somehow, and increase taxation generally.

 There is no vision, there is no ethic, and there is no statesmanlike intention beyond securing power for themselves.

 Quite frankly, you can vote for whichever one you want, but all you will be doing is picking between, what you hope will be, the best of a very bad bunch.

 Visionary politics, and statesmanlike leadership is rare these days, but boy oh boy do we need it now.

Electoral reform – 10/5/2010

• If the Conservatives had secured just an extra 16,000 votes across the seats which they most narrowly lost – they would have won a majority in the House Of Commons.
• Out of all the Independent Candidates who stood for election, and I personally met more than 100 of them, only one solitary Independent Candidate was elected.
• Out of the entire voting public in the United Kingdom, two in every three people did use their vote, but one in every three people stayed at home and did not vote at all …. that is truly terrible.
• There were a very large number of Conservative voters in Rutland & Melton who refused to vote for Alan Duncan, and they gave a variety of very good reasons for that view.
• In the end, the majority of those who did vote Conservative in Rutland & Melton, simply did so because they could not stand the prospect of another five years under Gordon Brown.
• Across the entire Country, most of the people who actually bothered to vote, simply voted for the party of their choice, even if it meant voting for an individual who they disliked and/or distrusted intensely. 

Perhaps a cry for “Proportional Representation” is a natural reaction to the many strange effects thrown up in the results of this General Election.

There is certainly a cry for electoral reform, and I think most of us can heartily agree with that view. However, we do need to be extremely careful, especially where “Proportional Representation” is concerned.

It definitely does not feel appropriate that the voting public should be forced to vote for a candidate whose morals they despise, and whose honesty and integrity has been proven to be absent – and I would say, shame on those who did so, as they are perpetuating the problem for others to resolve after them.

However, the danger now is that the clamour for electoral reform could easily usher in something that would be even worse.

At first glance, “Proportional Representation” does look and sound rather good, but the more you think about it, the more the implications become absolutely horrendous.

• “Proportional representation” will mean that people in many areas of the country will find that they have lost any form of immediate contact or empathy with their local MP.
• Indeed, in some cases they will also find that they have an MP from a completely different political party to the one that secured the majority vote in their area.
• And who is going to dish out the seats to the individual MPs, once the proportion of the vote is ascertained? On what basis are they going to dish them out? Oh, and are these people, who are doing the dishing out, the very same people who cannot keep their fingers out of till because they do not understand a very straight forward set of house rules?
• If you think that there is confusion now after this election, when we only have three major political parties to contend with, what on earth do you think is going to happen when we have twenty three different parties?

Well, if you really want to know the answer to the last question, look no further than Italy, which is a democratic political basket case.

I think if electoral reform is going to deal with some of the basic and more realistic issues, then I would heartily agree. However, please do not smash up a system that has taken hundreds of years to evolve, is the envy of most of the developing world, and simply needs cleaning up.

 For instance -

1)      How do we get people to use their vote? Give them a £40 tax refund.

2)      How do we reduce the effect of party politics on the candidates and the voters? Restrict the amount of money that can be spent on each candidate and make it centrally funded.

3)      How do we restrict the effect of financial conflicts of interests from party political donors? Ban them, and make party politics centrally funded.

4)      How do we restrict the effect of outside financial interests on our MPs? Pay them properly and take away their expense accounts completely.

5)      How do we stop the party political machine parachuting their handpicked cronies into our areas and forcing them on us as MPs? Make it compulsory that they live in the area for at least five years before they stand for election.

These and one or two other sensible adjustments would be very welcome indeed.

We really do NOT need to smash the whole thing up just yet.

Most of it works, it is just that certain greedy people in positions of responsibility, who also lie to you habitually, have different agendas to the ordinary folks like you and me.

The Historical facts

In terms of our industrial and commercial assets, and jointly owned businesses, we are an enormous and diverse economy on the World stage. All of this was created through the economic success of our Victorian ancestors during the industrial revolution and the creation of the British Empire, or The Commonwealth as we know it today. A hundred or so years ago, The Commonwealth in its’ original form actually covered 2/3rds of the entire World land surface, and therefore it can be easily understood why we now have massive commercial interests overseas, and a political influence in World affairs that is second to none, including the USA. In fact, when you look around the World today you will find many of the major and predominant institutions, especially in the areas of government, finance and banking, were created by the British, and specifically on the British model, to the point that they often still have British names.

The Size Of The UK Economy

The only realistic way of measuring an economy is by a valuation, in hard monetary terms, of its’ businesses, their ability to make profit, and the assets that they own. It is not realistic or accurate to have these businesses and their assets valued any other way, and particularly not by some obscure Government agency or pressure group that probably has entirely different motivations. Rather like your house, no matter what valuation the agent puts on it, you will ultimately get precisely what it is worth, and that is precisely what someone else will pay for it. Likewise, economies and the businesses within those economies are valued all around the world by real people who are buying and selling real shares in those businesses on a daily basis on the stock markets concerned. If you capitalise all the shares on a particular stock market (i.e. multiply the total number of shares in existence by the prices at which they are currently trading) you will indisputably arrive at a reasonably accurate valuation for that publicly accessible economy. The fact of the matter is that the USA is the largest economy in the World, and the United Kingdom is the second largest economy in the World. A long way further down the scale is the third largest economy, which is Japan, and the fourth largest economy, France or Germany, is not even near the valuation for Japan.

Our Unique International Relationships

The political structures and democracies of most Commonwealth Countries have very similar systems of government to our own, with two political houses and two to four major political parties. Obviously, we have little or no direct control of these overseas political institutions these days, and quite rightly so, as they are countries in their own right, and masters of their own destinies. However, it is important to note that their freedoms, self-determination, equalities and beliefs in society, community and their human rights, emanate from the mother of all democracies, namely The United Kingdom. Furthermore, in many instances, English is still the predominant language and the English culture is still the predominant culture for their day-to-day life and society as a whole. As a matter of hard fact, many of these countries still look to the United Kingdom for sanction and confirmation of their international policies. As a simple example, using the most powerful military country in the World, it would have been very difficult indeed, if not impossible, for the USA to have attacked Iraq without the acceptance, and the participation of, The United Kingdom.

Continental Europe Is Different, and why the Euro would be bad for us

The major and most obvious exception to all of this is the entire European Continent. By comparison, we have nothing in common with these countries at all. They have a different culture, they speak very different languages, and their political systems are often born out of socialism, or in extreme cases out of communism. Economically, they often have little or no desire to create profit, and shares in their companies generally do not pay dividends to their shareholders. Therefore their public do not generally invest in their own businesses through share-ownership. Their financial institutions are small in comparison to our own, and often the national pastime is to work the “black economy” without paying tax, rather than working legally, paying the due tax, and creating wealth through investment.

Continental European Countries themselves often have an infuriating habit of ignoring treaties and the rules contained within them, when it suits their purposes to do so. A classic example of this, involving one of the more cultured European nations, was just a few years ago when France completely failed to adhere to the agreed economic rules for financial convergence. These rules had been agreed by all EEC states, including the UK, in order to make it easier for countries to converge their financial systems and eventually become part of a single European currency, if they wanted to do so, at some time in the future. It was particularly important that France adhered to those rules, as they were one of the most powerful advocates of, and are now a principle member of, the single currency system (Euro), along with Germany. Indeed, economic convergence was so important to the future stability of the Euro that the financial penalties for failing to adhere to the agreed rules were quite draconian. France failed in three successive years to meet the rules of economic convergence and yet at no time have they been obliged to pay the prescribed penalty. In fact, as far as I am aware, they have not paid a single Euro in financial penalty. More to the point their totally dismissive attitude is such that they obviously have absolutely no intention of doing so. The Germans support France in its’ refusal to pay, simply because if they don’t, and France was obliged to meet its’ dues, their economy would be severely affected, and the Euro would probably collapse.

Political development in continental Europe has been largely developed through Socialism and Communism, in fact like France, many are in fact Democratic Republics. Whether it is for this, or some other reason, is probably an arguable point, however, what is incontestable is the fact that their social security systems are massively generous to the point of being foolhardy, with the result that their social security systems are fundamentally bankrupt, and represent an enormous drain on their economies, through extraordinarily high taxation. The result is that there are dual economies – the real one on which people pay very high levels of personal taxation, and the other one in which they are paid cash, far more so than in the UK.

A good example of their profligate social security systems is that the German, French, Italian and Spanish state pensions are several times larger than our own. These European state pensions are probably unsustainable and, at some point in the future, they may well result in substantial increases in their domestic inflation, and subsequently their interest rates. Their preferred way of softening the blow to their own economies, and their already overburdened taxpayers, is to mix in another economy, far stronger than their own, and preferably get all of them to adopt a single currency. In this way, their own massive generosity to themselves, in state pension benefits etc, is ultimately paid for in part by other much stronger economies through inflation and interest rates. I do not believe that we should be that saviour economy.

However, it is also very true to say that, at home, we desperately need to increase our own state pension benefits, but it must be done to a degree and in a way that is totally sustainable, and does not result in an impossible liability for future generations. We can afford it, if we are careful and prioritise our national expenditure. However, we simply cannot afford to bail out the European state pension systems at the same time, by joining their single currency (Euro), even if we wanted to. Once again they need us more than we need them…. by a very wide margin indeed.

For Example – The British Rock Of Gibraltar and the British Falkland Islands

Gibraltar has been British for 300 years and, some years ago, the people voted overwhelmingly to remain British.

Contrary to European law, Spain periodically illegally closes the border between themselves and Gibraltar. They even object to us using our own port in Gibraltar to park one of our nuclear submarines. They have tried, on a number of occasions, to influence which government official we can send to Gibraltar, and for which national event or celebration. Of course, there is a time for diplomacy, but there is also a time for being precise and decisive. Personally I would have sent the Queen on a flotilla of Royal Navy warships. However, I would also have invited the Spanish to the Gibraltar celebrations, as guests of honour. It is difficult to imagine them refusing such an invitation, and it would subsequently be difficult to imagine them continuing with their obscure claim over Gibraltar and their impertinent attempts to influence who we should allow to go to what part of our own country, and when.

It is now a known and a well accepted fact that if a similar attitude had been displayed by the United Kingdom concerning the Falkland Islands, the 1982 war with Argentina would probably not have happened. The Argentinean Government genuinely believed that they were being invited into the Falklands through our lack of serious protest or objection. As a direct result of that diplomatic disaster, we are now left with an Argentinean population who are taught in their schools that the islands are actually called The Malvinas, and that they really do belong to them, whereas before 1982 the biggest majority of the Argentinean population did not even know they existed.

Immigration Into The UK

The European Treaties are quite clear about illegal immigration and asylum seekers. They should be returned to the European country in which they first set foot, as that is the only country in which they are eligible to claim asylum.

Continental Europe has space to build houses for these people. We do not. If you are not sure, book a flight over Continental Europe and you will see very large open green spaces between their towns and villages. By comparison with our own islands, there are enormous quantities of spare land in Continental Europe and virtually none in our own country. It must surely be economic lunacy to allow further emigration into the UK. Purely based on a simple physical assessment, we simply have not got the room to build houses for them.

On a mathematical basis it is not cost effective to allow further people to come here and live on our Social Security System, when we have one of the most expensive “costs of living” in the World. Every penny we pay to these people to live on Social Security here, in our extremely expensive UK, is another penny that we cannot pay to our own state pensioners. It would be better for prospective immigrants, better for their own country, and cheaper for us in the UK, to fund them through overseas aid, provided that they stay where they are.

We must encourage people to stay in their own country and help build the security and benefits that are inherent within their own economy, rather than become a drain on ours.

Of course, in common with the rest of the developed World, if people really do want to emigrate to the UK, and we actually want them because they have skills to offer and a job to come to, whereby they are contributing to our tax system, then that would be most welcome.

Our Fishing Rights

In the early 1970s the Conservative Government, under Sir Edward Heath, gave away our fishing rights to the Continental Europeans in exchange for EEC Membership. He did this without telling the general public for fear of losing the referendum at that time. So, Sir Edward achieved his place in history, and in so doing, he committed the UK to an international trading partnership in Europe.

I have no issues with a trading partnership, if only that was all that it was. After all, another trading partnership could be a very good thing.  However, along the way, and without telling the public of this Country, they gave away £ billions and £ billions of pounds of our fishing rights, a national asset that was probably the most prolific and profitable fishery in the World. Furthermore, we were obliged to sever many of our very valuable business relationships with Commonwealth countries. Just try talking to New Zealand about the damage that we did to their sheep and lamb farming by joining the EEC in the 1970s.

We knighted Sir Edward for losing at least one entire industry (fishing) and giving away a supremely important asset (our fishing grounds), something that even two World Wars had failed to achieve.

After the catastrophic Heath Government of the 1970s, the European Community insisted that we reduce our fishing fleet to its’ current lamentable levels, a shadow of its’ former self, and at the same time, with their own fishing fleets, they have plundered and decimated our fish stocks, all within just 30 years.

I believe that there are clauses within the Treaty, which charge the European Community with managing the fish stocks to all our benefits. They have patently obviously failed, and therefore the treaty is broken, or certainly that part of it is. We must move very rapidly indeed in order to save something out of this ecological disaster. Our fishing grounds must be repossessed, under international law, and then allowed to recover. Once our fisheries have recovered, they can then be successfully harvested once more, and it won’t be harvested by anyone other than our own fishermen.

The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP)

A similar mess has been made out of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). I know of no logic to explain why we pay huge sums of money into the European CAP, only for them to spread it around European farmers, including our own, in return for not growing crops on all of the available land. If you add in the fact that only five or six hours flying time from our shores there are little brown babies dying in the streets from starvation and disease, then the whole issue becomes an absolute obscenity.

Don’t think that the poor people in foreign lands do not know what we are doing either. They have radios and they even have televisions. Ask yourself not how people can commit themselves to a martyr’s death under some religious fundamentalist twaddle, when we have everything and they have absolutely nothing, in some cases not even food to live on. We can find a way to grow food on this “spare” land, and we can find a way to ship it to them (drop it on them if you want).

Of course, we will then have to deal with their own lack of security in old age (no state pensions), and therefore their resultant instinct to breed their own pensions by having large numbers of children. However, for the sake of human decency, let us at least make a start by feeding them, rather than watching them die.

The World is undoubtedly becoming full to the brim with humanity, but perhaps we can curb their need to breed a “child-pension” by offering them real pensions funded from and managed in the UK. After all, it won’t cost much because they are already living on virtually nothing even now.

Far better that we try and assist with their development into a sustainable social security system and a national state pension, rather than offering some expensive and obscure building project, most of the money for which gets siphoned off into the Swiss bank accounts of some local warlord or despot.

We Europeans, and especially those of us in the United Kingdom, have a responsibility to the underdeveloped World, which we ignore at our peril, and which has already made 9/11 the beginning of international terrorism rather than the end of it. The Common Agricultural Policy, and its’ effects of keeping many parts of the World poor and starving, is a very substantial sop to international terrorism, and we need re-visit it as soon as possible.

Council Tax And Businesses In The High Street

When I ran my own businesses, I was always concerned about the level of Council Tax that was payable for each of our offices, as indeed I am sure any business owner would be. It certainly rankled with me that I could not even get the office dustbin emptied without paying an extra fee.

However, looking at the actual amounts that my business had to pay for the relatively small second floor office premises that we used, I often wondered if larger organisations were paying a truly proportionate amount.

I suspected that the traditional small high street retailers were probably paying even more council tax than me, and that the chain stores were probably not. My suspicion was simply that the big chain stores were perhaps being given some sort of discount or subsidy, to the detriment of our small high street retailers.

Of course, when running your own business, there are limits on the time that you can afford to spend researching these sorts of things, and even then one must ask what effect you are likely to be able to have to bring about change, assuming that you did discover something untoward.

Well there are websites that you can access to find out such information, and I am pleased to be able to reveal my research to you below.

I should just say that in trawling through the appropriate websites to secure this comparison information, it necessitated trying to understand the incredibly complex and confusing Council Tax systems. This in itself took me several hours. Indeed, the subject of Council Tax calculation is so complex that it is yet another example of Local and National Governments generating careers for civil servants out of a relatively straight forward tax collection issue.

Perhaps the current complexity is something that we have acquired over many decades, but given a fresh start, I can assure you that no businessman that I know of would come up with this crazy, complex and massively time consuming system to resolve such a relatively simple tax collection function. The extent of the complexity in Council Tax assessment and collection means that all Councils will be spending huge time and effort, and employing large numbers of people, completely unnecessarily.

 However, I looked at a small retail premises, at street level, in the high street of Market Harborough in Leicestershire, and compared it with Tesco who have a retail premises on the same street. I shall call one booze and fag shop, and the other Tesco.

Booze and Fag Shop has a tiny sales area in his shop of only 29.4 sq meters for which his ratable value is apparently £5,700.

However, as he is designated a “small Business” he gets a small business relief discount and only (?) pays £2,357 in rates per year.

Tesco has a sales area of 815 sq meters for which it’s ratable value is apparently £64,500.

However, although Tesco does not get a small business relief discount, they do actually pay £31,282 in rates per year.

OR … to put it another way …. If Tesco paid rates at the same level as the Booze and Fag Shop, their rates payable would be £65,338 per year.

OR … to put it another way … if the Booze and Fag Shop paid rates at the same level as Tesco, their rates payable would be £1,128 per year.

Another way of saying the same thing is that the Booze and Fag Shop pays 109% more rates than Tesco, indeed, slightly more than double the rates that Tesco pays.

I think we should also bear in mind that the above example is one where Tesco is actually on the high street. My instinct tells me that if you look at Sainsbury, which is actually located off the high street behind some shops, with its’ own car park, then you will probably find that the Council Tax comparison with our small high street retailer is even more unfair.

When people ask why their high street is closing down, why there are no bakers, butchers or green grocers, especially in comparison to the thriving chain store grocers, then the above is part of the answer.

Of course, one could also ask why the rates system has to be so complicated in the first place?