Rescuing Democracy in the United Kingdom from our current Elected Dictatorship
|
Spin,
not face-to-face confrontations with the voters, is the Government's
chosen method of communication. Ordinary people are dangerous. Ordinary
people might ask a question which throws a politician 'off message';
the Cabinet member might reveal himself or herself to be a human being
like us, and not a programmed android. Worse still, he or she might
tell the truth.
Ann Leslie - Daily Mail, September 16, 2004
Blair wants to leave his
mark on history - looks more like a stain to me.
Peter Thorndyke, Diss,
Norfolk - Daily Mail, May 23, 2005
I know I'm me - why do I
need an ID card?
"Sorry, officers, I
don't have an ID card. I never applied for one. It seemed a bit steep
at 300 quid. I do have my free passport, my driving licence and my
London freedom travel pass, each with my photograph. I have my NHS
medical card, with its lengthy number, given me at birth, my RAF
service book with my Armed Forces number, and a chit authorising me to
wear a few gongs -including a General Service Medal with Malaya bar,
for fighting communist terrorists on behalf of my country, or so they
told me.
"I've also got various credit
cards and store cards, all with my signature on the back, generally
good for buying the everyday requrements for life as well as the odd
luxury. If you decide to arrest me, I suppose I'll have to be
photographed and given another number, besides my PINs.
"I'm afraid I haven't got a
pension book; it was taken away."
"By thieves, sir?"
"No ... well, not exactly. By the
Government. By the way, may I see your warrant cards please, gentlemen?"
Oh dear, they've disappeared. E.
Harry Gumer, Romford, ESSEX - Daily Mail, June 1, 2005
NO means NO
When does NO mean MAYBE?
When it's not the answer the EU wants. With the courageous French
NON resounding in their ears, shabby, undemocratic self-interested
leaders of Europe propose ignoring the part of their precious
constitution that requires ratification by all members and
continuing without one of the biggest founder members to
prevent derailing the gravy train.
As in Ireland,
they refuse to accept any NO votes, ignoring the will of the people,
and re-stage votes until they can engineer the 'correct' answer. Sadly,
Foreign Secretary Jack Straw dances to their tune like a puppet on a
string. With tactics such as these, how can anyone really believe the
EU has our interests at heart. Letter from Steve Penny, Kingsnorth, Kent - Daily
Mail, June1, 2005
Surely
the French result makes the £1million the EU recently spent on a
treaty signing ceremony seem a trifle premature and extravagant. Letter from Keith Wiseman, Bury, Lancs. - Daily Mail,
June1, 2005
|
Britain has
traditionally been one of the biggest net contributors to the EU
because we do not get as much money back from Brussels in farm and
regional subsidies as our rivals.
According to
Treasury figures, between 1995-2002, Britain's average contribution
taking the rebate into account, was £2.6billion, or £43.55
per head of population.
The French -
the biggest recipient of farm subsidies - contributed £1billion a
year or £16.08 per head of their population.
|
|
Tony
Blair should know that respect comes by example - from the
top. If a country's leader has no respect for the rule of
international law and no respect for the truth, how can
he expect anyone to have respect. Letter
from P.J.Atkinson, Ashford, Kent - Daily Mail, January 12,
2006
The
Chancellor's single greatest act of vandalism in almost
nine years in office has been his wanton destruction of
Britain's private retirement industry. By slapping a massive
tax on pension funds, now worth
£7.3billion a year, he has helped to turn
the best private retirement industry in Europe into a basket-case
in perpetual crisis. Together with the adoption of European
accounting rules - which make it much riskier to operate
a company pension scheme - hundreds of firms have shut their
final salary plans to new employees and slashed benefits
to existing staff. From
Allister Heath: "I've seen the future and its grey"
in THE SPECTATOR - April 15, 2006
Nine
years ago the British people were sold a fantasy of clean
and competent government of principle and honesty. Its shiny
wrappings stripped away, the product now reveals its true
nature: Personal greed, arrogance, incompetence, shamelessness,
rash warmongering and an inability to accept - as is clear
to almost everyone else - that it is time to go. Editorial
- The Mail on Sunday, May 28, 2006
|
October
9, 2006 (1262 days since war ended)
Death
Toll: 2744 US - 119 UK - >300,000? civilians - 25 media
October
17, 2006 (1268 days since war ended)
Death
Toll: 2771 US - 119 UK - >300,000? civilians - 25 media
Taxed
till the pips squeak!
The
middle classes squeezed as never before. British businesses less
able to compete. A £100billion raid on our pensions. So
why won't ANY party speak up for lower taxes?
By
Martin Vander Weyer - Business Editor of THE SPECTATOR
Daily
Mail, October 18, 2006
'Within
two years,' I wrote in this paper in August 2003, 'we will be
more heavily taxed than the Germans.' Well, it took a few months
longer than I predicted, but according to the Organisation for
Economic Cooperation and Development, that dismal milestone has
now been passed.
Good
riddance, Tony
As
we joyfully approach the political demise of Tony Blair,
might I offer a special valediction?
I'd
like to say good-bye 45,000,000,000 times, once for every
pound he and the fellow next door have taken in an underhand
fashion from our pension funds: once the pride of Europe,
now utter shambles.
By
ignoring the elderly and the hardworking they have eclipsed
that other smash-and-grab Labourite Robert Maxwell. Compared
with today's tax-mad twosome, the Czech cheat was a paragon
of fiscal virtue.
And
please, Tony, no Sinatra-style comebacks. We have had
enough of Your Way.
Letter
from Ken Letouze, Littleover, Derbyshire
DailyMail,
Ocober. 18. 2006
|
Our
tax burden has been increasing faster than that of any other EU
nation, and it has been doing so thanks to the two parallel exercises
in deceit that will go down in history as the distinguishing features
of Gordon Brown's chancellorship.
The
first of these is his notorious habit - while sermonising about
his love of enterprise and his urge to help hard-working families
make a better life for themselves - of taxing us by stealth.
Whether
in big bites (such as his damaging £5billion a year raid
on pension funds which yesterday was revealed to have cut the
value of retirement funds by at least £100billion), or in
painful nibbles (such as his tax on private health insurance benefits
for company pensioners - which took effect this year, to the bafflement
of those who suddenly found themselves £800 a year worse
off, after it was 'announced' in the small print of the 2004 Budget),,
these measures have added relentlessly to the tax worries of the
middle-classes while throwing more and more grit into the workings
of the productive economy.
Shameless
At
the same time, the second insidious prong of Gordon's tax fork
has been busy at work. This is his habit of refusing to raise
tax thresholds in line with appropriate measures of inflation,
while pointing out smugly that headline rates of income and other
taxes remain, as promised, unchanged.
The
truth is that an extra 1.2million people have been caught in the
top 40% income tax bracket since Labour came to power: Brown's
devotees claim that this is because his economic policies have
fuelled new levels of prosperity all round, by the reality is
that he has refused to raise the top-rate threshold in line with
pay inflation expressly in order to catch more of us in it.
Many
top-rate payers are now public-sector workers and junior managers
with young families for whom the extra slice of tax is a disincentive
they can never have expected from a Chancellor who proclaims himself
their champion.
Inheritance
Tax - which sensible people argue should not exist at all, or
should be applied only at a minimal flat rate to all estates -
is a particularly shameless example of the threshold trick. This
was invented as a tax on the rich, which would leave the modest
possessions of ordinary folk to be passed on to their nearest
and dearest untouched by the taxman.
Soaring
house prices have made a mockery of the idea that anyone with
£285,000 worth of assets is seriously wealthy - but that
is still the level at which inheritance tax cuts in, catching
more than a third of all detached houses in Britain, according
to Halifax.
To
have kept pace with house-price inflation, that threshold would
now have to be upwards of £430,000, so Brown's proposal
to increase it to £325,000 over the next four years is no
more than a mean little socialist reminder that he disapproves
utterly of the notion of inheritance.
Meanwhile,
companies, too, feel the stultifying effects of operating in what
is now internationally seen as a high-tax country - companies
that are much more at liberty than individual citizens to shift
their domiciles to lower tax regimes if they choose to do so.
HSBC,
one of the biggest international businesses based in Britain,
was talking this week about the possibility of doing just that
- and if it does, many others will follow, taking talent, investment
and jobs with them. UK businessmen now look with envy at their
Irish counterparts, whose profits are taxed at only 12.5% compared
to 30% here - and who have produced spectacularly positive results
in terms of overall Irish economic growth and renewal.
Fallen
CBI
director-general Richard Lambert has spoken recently of Britain's
corporate tax regime as being 'unsustainable' if we don't want
to see what remains of British industry destroyed. We
have already fallen from fourth in the global competitive league
in 1998 to tenth in 2005 and the days have long gone since Asian
and American entrepreneurs thought of Britain first as the most
attractive place to put their European base.
But
what is so remarkable about this situation is how few voices in
the public arena are actually making the moral and economic arguments
for lower taxes. David Cameron certainly isn't, though his Shadow
Chancellor, George Osborne, is at least prepared to say in principle
that low taxes would be better than high ones - if he hurriedly
adds, the nation could afford them without compromising the NHS>
Clearly
focus groups have been telling Cameron's speech-writers that his
target floating voters are the sort of people who care more about
hospitals and schools and their self-image as responsible citizens
than they care to be seen as tax-whingers.
But
we are, after all, three years away from a General Election, and
it is not until election time that the real connection between
disposable income expectations and voting intentions make itself
felt.
In
the meantime, those of us who are not at the mercy of tomorrow's
opinion polls should take it upon ourselves to remind the floating
voter pool, in plain terms, that paying less tax and being a responsible
citizen are not mutually exclusive concepts - that the argument
for lower taxes is about bigger and more admirable things than
self-interest and spending power.
Stealthy
We
learned in the Eighties, on both sides of the Atlantic, that lower
taxes can actually generate a higher overall tax revenue to fund
public services, because they can generate higher economic growth
which translates into higher company profits and personal incomes.
More
than that, a sensible simple tax system - transparent rather then
stealthy and set at rates which genuinely promote hard work and
enterprise - is actually good for the national soul as well as
its pocket. It encourages honesty in tax declarations, rather
than evasion. It encourages financial stability within families,
from one generation to the next. It leaves people with more resources
and inclination for the conversion of the exciting scientific
research for which British Universities are justly famous into
promising new businesses.
And
it would do away with the most perverse effect of the overcomplicated
Gordon Brown approach to taxation, which is to give an unfair
advantage to the very rich who can afford expensive avoidance
advice over the hard-pressed law-abiding middle-classes, who just
pay up every time.
Somehow,
in today's overcautious, soft-focussed political consensus, these
arguments have become almost unsayable. But they are morally sound
and economically proven. As Britain rises in the international
tax tables and falls in the competitiveness leagues, we ignore
them at our peril. We should declare them loud and clear.
If you have
suggestions for additional subjects, or material to include in the
pages linked to the subjects listed, please contact the webmaster.
