![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
peterbirksI went for a walk into Greenwich on Saturday. As I said on Facebook, I was saddened to see a version of the three-card-trick being played in Greenwich Park. I was more saddened that there was not a single policeman "on the ground" in all of Greenwich. This, after all, is perhaps one of the busiest parts of London for a concentration of tourists at the weekend. For there to be no police presence at all is little short of a disgrace -- if only to give people directions. I presume that they were all on a detail to guard the Pope.
On my way back I used my Google Maps on the Dell Streak to full advantage, wandering down side streets that went I knew not where. It's incredible how there are some extremely poor council flats (think, nearly all first-generation immigrants, because the second-generation immigrants have moved upmarket) not 300 yards from the centre of Greenwich.
After crossing the railway to the Blackheath side of the tracks I went on another little diversion, off Point Hill, and came across a path between two houses that led up to Blackheath via an unmapped route (unmapped on Google Maps, that is). Very pleasant, and a clear sign that I was in an upmarket area by a predominance of signs attached to lampposts: "Maximum of four dogs per walker". In Wansted Flats one would take this to mean no more than four pit-bull terriers per British National Party supporter, but here it was clearly a sign that people are rich enough to pay other people to walk their dogs.
+++++++
I slept for 10 hours last night, albeit with a couple of interruptions, and, for the first time in months, woke up feeling awake. So this is what it feels like, I thought. I suspect that I have spent much of this year in some kind of sleep-deprived muzzy haze -- to such an extent that I simply took it as the natural way of being.
++++++
I was thinking of applying to be a speechwriter for any of the current crop of politicians. To this end, I have been researching the speeches given at the time of the Salem witch trials, since these would appear to be the most useful when referring to bond traders and bankers.
I mean, there really has been some rich stuff flying around. Clegg says that using an accountant to reduce your tax bill is "unethical". God, I don't want to pay too little tax, but I would quite like to pay the right amount of tax, TYVM. It's not my fault the tax system is so hideously complicated that I need an accountant to work out what the correct amount of tax is.
And then Vince Cable seems to go, well, mad. "The markets are often irrational, or rigged", he said, but in a fashion that implied that the second word was synonymous with the first, not an alternative. Hell, of course markets are irrational. Anyone still believing in perfect markets would have been carted off to the LTCM Funny Farm years ago. But to call them "rigged" in the same sentence -- something which happens far more rarely -- is misleading at best and downright inflammatory at worst.
But, hell, inflammatory is what it's all about, isn't it? All that money which people borrowed for 10 years in times of easy credit -- all of that was the fault of some nameless banker, who grabbed people in off the street and forced them to borrow thousands of pounds. "But they didn't tell us that it would have to be repaid!!!!" people scream. Well, er, duh. And so they go in search of scapegoats.
The banks are no angels in this. They are mendacious cunts who even now are trying to persuade me how beneficial it would be to (a) take out a new bank account that is spectacularly bad value and (b) have a chat with a "mortgage adviser" who would doubtless try to arrange a switch for me to an unsuitable product that would pocket him a few hundred quid in commission. But the point here is that I know that there is no such thing as a free lunch. If something pays a seller commission, then that commission (and more besides) is coming out of my pocket. Should people be let off because they were "stupid" or, in current parlance, "unsophisticated"? If the rules as they existed at the time were broken then, yes. But if both parties were operating within the rules as they existed at the time, well, I would say, that's a good lesson in life that you learnt there, son.
++++++++
The Radio 4 programme on "The Brown Years", an illustration of the unseemly haste with which histories are put together these days, covered the early months of the 2007-10 administration, leading up to the disastrous sequence of events whereby election fever mounted, and then Labour bottled it. The justification for bottling it -- that the focus groups drifted rapidly away as a result of Osborne's Inheritance Tax promise (it was a million quid, btw....) ---- seems a fairly pathetic excuse that is generally accepted, even by the "impartial" commentator. The point being made was that it was right to abandon the election plans because it was no longer certain that Brown would win. The relevant point (that none of the participants addressed) was that it didn't matter whether he would be certain to win; all that mattered was that going in October 2007 was just about the best chance Brown would ever have.
But that is by the by. What was most interesting was the revelation that Ed Balls was the man behind the "blame game" that followed within about 15 minutes of the announcement that there would be no Autumn 2007 election. As a result of this a couple of Brown's old hatchet men at the Treasury, plus Ed Milliband, became the "fall guys" for the fiasco of raised and then dashed expectations.
Balls denies that he was the guilty party, but I'm afraid that the words of Mandy Rice-Davies travel through history here. "He would, wouldn't he".
__________
On my way back I used my Google Maps on the Dell Streak to full advantage, wandering down side streets that went I knew not where. It's incredible how there are some extremely poor council flats (think, nearly all first-generation immigrants, because the second-generation immigrants have moved upmarket) not 300 yards from the centre of Greenwich.
After crossing the railway to the Blackheath side of the tracks I went on another little diversion, off Point Hill, and came across a path between two houses that led up to Blackheath via an unmapped route (unmapped on Google Maps, that is). Very pleasant, and a clear sign that I was in an upmarket area by a predominance of signs attached to lampposts: "Maximum of four dogs per walker". In Wansted Flats one would take this to mean no more than four pit-bull terriers per British National Party supporter, but here it was clearly a sign that people are rich enough to pay other people to walk their dogs.
+++++++
I slept for 10 hours last night, albeit with a couple of interruptions, and, for the first time in months, woke up feeling awake. So this is what it feels like, I thought. I suspect that I have spent much of this year in some kind of sleep-deprived muzzy haze -- to such an extent that I simply took it as the natural way of being.
++++++
I was thinking of applying to be a speechwriter for any of the current crop of politicians. To this end, I have been researching the speeches given at the time of the Salem witch trials, since these would appear to be the most useful when referring to bond traders and bankers.
I mean, there really has been some rich stuff flying around. Clegg says that using an accountant to reduce your tax bill is "unethical". God, I don't want to pay too little tax, but I would quite like to pay the right amount of tax, TYVM. It's not my fault the tax system is so hideously complicated that I need an accountant to work out what the correct amount of tax is.
And then Vince Cable seems to go, well, mad. "The markets are often irrational, or rigged", he said, but in a fashion that implied that the second word was synonymous with the first, not an alternative. Hell, of course markets are irrational. Anyone still believing in perfect markets would have been carted off to the LTCM Funny Farm years ago. But to call them "rigged" in the same sentence -- something which happens far more rarely -- is misleading at best and downright inflammatory at worst.
But, hell, inflammatory is what it's all about, isn't it? All that money which people borrowed for 10 years in times of easy credit -- all of that was the fault of some nameless banker, who grabbed people in off the street and forced them to borrow thousands of pounds. "But they didn't tell us that it would have to be repaid!!!!" people scream. Well, er, duh. And so they go in search of scapegoats.
The banks are no angels in this. They are mendacious cunts who even now are trying to persuade me how beneficial it would be to (a) take out a new bank account that is spectacularly bad value and (b) have a chat with a "mortgage adviser" who would doubtless try to arrange a switch for me to an unsuitable product that would pocket him a few hundred quid in commission. But the point here is that I know that there is no such thing as a free lunch. If something pays a seller commission, then that commission (and more besides) is coming out of my pocket. Should people be let off because they were "stupid" or, in current parlance, "unsophisticated"? If the rules as they existed at the time were broken then, yes. But if both parties were operating within the rules as they existed at the time, well, I would say, that's a good lesson in life that you learnt there, son.
++++++++
The Radio 4 programme on "The Brown Years", an illustration of the unseemly haste with which histories are put together these days, covered the early months of the 2007-10 administration, leading up to the disastrous sequence of events whereby election fever mounted, and then Labour bottled it. The justification for bottling it -- that the focus groups drifted rapidly away as a result of Osborne's Inheritance Tax promise (it was a million quid, btw....) ---- seems a fairly pathetic excuse that is generally accepted, even by the "impartial" commentator. The point being made was that it was right to abandon the election plans because it was no longer certain that Brown would win. The relevant point (that none of the participants addressed) was that it didn't matter whether he would be certain to win; all that mattered was that going in October 2007 was just about the best chance Brown would ever have.
But that is by the by. What was most interesting was the revelation that Ed Balls was the man behind the "blame game" that followed within about 15 minutes of the announcement that there would be no Autumn 2007 election. As a result of this a couple of Brown's old hatchet men at the Treasury, plus Ed Milliband, became the "fall guys" for the fiasco of raised and then dashed expectations.
Balls denies that he was the guilty party, but I'm afraid that the words of Mandy Rice-Davies travel through history here. "He would, wouldn't he".
__________
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
Dogs, Grannies & Dropped Catches
Date: 2010-09-22 08:42 pm (UTC)Liked your comment on bank misselling. I worked for years with people who complained about endowment mortgages and many ended up entering claims successfully. I have to say that when we took out ours it was made very clear that the potential best case scenario might not materialise and also what the downside was. As someone with a (poor) Economics degree I could not possibly complain about being misled. The thing wasnt a total disaster and with appropriate remedial action it worked out ok. Perhaps there were dodgy salesmen out there, but most of the bigger building societies were quite clear about the risks. Caveat emptor, no free lunches and all that.
Finally, just following the tail end of the cricket whereby England look on to win the one-day series. Must be a long and dispiriting tour for Pakistan. They cant play at home, players under scrutiny (although I expect they will be more or less cleared due to inconclusive evidence) and evidently getting even more friendless in the world of cricket. I cant help thinking this will have knock ons in the political sphere. Pakistanis will feel increasingly unloved, discriminated against and generally snubbed by the Western world. Their only ray of light is India's embarrassment over the New Delhi games.
Funny old world. Richard
Re: Dogs, Grannies & Dropped Catches
Date: 2010-09-23 10:35 am (UTC)Re: Dogs, Grannies & Dropped Catches
Date: 2010-09-26 03:45 pm (UTC)Made up for, in part, by large wedges of illegally obtained cash though.
Remind me why they are friendless again?
Titmus
SE London and taxes
Date: 2010-09-22 08:56 pm (UTC)But I suppose I should chip in concerning the LibDem's interesting comments, which if anyone didn't hear it said that basically benefit fraud, tax evasion and tax avoidance were morally equivalent. I must admit I have some sympathy for this line. The distinction is that evasion is illegal (knock the VAT off for cash, guv) whilst avoidance is the use of the tax code to reduce a person's tax bills. I have to say that it's part of our job to do the best we can for clients to arrange things so as to keep the tax liability to a minimum.
There's a pre-war tax case in which a distinguished judge said "No man in this country is under the least obligation, moral or otherwise, so as to arrange his legal relations to his business or to his property as to enable the Inland Revenue to put the largest possible shovel into his store.” Now that's all very well but tax avoidance ranges from legitimate and justifiable (stick money into a pension scheme to reduce your tax bill), through things intended to address special interests (invest in that film and get some extra tax relief) to the downright naughty (non-working wives being paid the tax-free allowance for their secretarial help when it amounted to making a cup of coffee).
There is a lot of mileage still in forming a Limited Company and instead of receing self-employed income or employee wages, you take the money out as dividends, on which no National Insurance is charged. I do it because I'm supposed to be minimising the tax bills of our clients, but I do feel guilty about it. There is a chunk of anti-avoidance legislation which says that if you create a rearranged financial structure that is there entirely to save tax, the Revenue can ignore the rearrangement. However it's quite easy to show that there is some commercial logic to a particular structure.
The stupid thing is that if the government wish to alter things so that tax avoidance becomes a thing of the past, they have the tools in their hands. The reasons we have loopholes is because the tax system is so complicated, so if you want to remove loopholes, make it simpler, nearly everybody would be grateful and I'd be out of a job.
Re: SE London and taxes
Date: 2010-09-23 08:23 am (UTC)The wife-making-coffee-for-tax-allowance thing is, I think, beyond the likely ethical boundary of avoidance, but I can't see that it's actually worth enforcing from a cost-benefit point-of-view.
I agree 100% that we need a straightforward, comprensible (and comprehensive) and fair tax system. Of course, we have to define what we mean by "fair" - one of my major gripes with politicians just now, btw. And it's no practical good going after the "rich": there aren't enough of them in the first place and they have the resources to minimise their liabilities.
The thing is, it's not really about "fairness", it's about appeasing the voter groups whose support you need to retain/secure. All the public rhetoric is just politics and we're much worse-off for it. It's not even half-past nine and I'm already angry...
IR35
Date: 2010-09-23 09:05 am (UTC)It's different if you have an income-source that is self-employed for tax, but an employment for NI, but that case will be up in court soon.
The wife-making-coffee thing and saving 6,000 x 40% is exactly what Clegg is on about. Some avoidance is legitimate (sometimes questionably so) but immoral. But a promised white paper on the whole area of income-shifting and 'establishing a level playing field for SMEs' has been put off for about the last 5 years.
It could and should be simpler - the first thing to go would be the whole idea of National Insurance. Get real, raise tax to 31% instead of 20%+11% and scrap the whole damned apparatus. We're going to provide a piss-poor pension or means-tested wrinklies benefit to everyone so why make the pretence that there's any kind of funding going on. Require everyone to do a Tax Return every year - it'll provide additional employment on both sides of the fence and it'll avoid this whole nonsense of under and overpayments that's recently arisen, and it will make people take responsibility for their own taxes instead of failing to understand it.
Scrap every little bit of special allowances for films, electric cars, small workshops, blind people and on and on. Tax capital gains as income without exception, ignoring the bollocks talked about concessions to people who want to enjoy the fruits of their building up a business to pass on to the next generation. If your snot-nosed brats get handed 75% of a business instead of 100%, they're still fortunate bastards.
You need tax rates that rise gently and incrementally. There's no need for a system that takes either 0%, 20% or 40%. First 8K tax-free, next 10K at 10%, next 10K at 20% etc etc.
Root and branch change is required by a political party that is geared up to do it at the beginning of a parliament. Nope - not in our lifetimes.
Re: IR35
Date: 2010-09-23 12:55 pm (UTC)Disingenuity aside - we can argue about the numbers later - I'm not sure that We're going to provide a piss-poor pension or means-tested wrinklies benefit to everyone would be popular. I think it's the right thing to do, possibly with the exception of a bit of twiddling to provide fair treatment for people who live and work in one country and retire in another (NB this is not a bluddy foreigners rant, not least because I have an ignorant gut feeling that we have more emigrant than immigrant retirees, and I care more about reciprocal protection for our emigrants than about screwing the immigrants) but I can imagine the usual suspects being up in arms about it. This is probably another reason in its favour.
On the other hand, what do I know? I think inheritance tax is the best tax of them all. I wouldn't want it to kick in at 100% over £0, but I would rather see it moving in the opposite direction to the one in which it is doing - and wouldn't mind at all if it did so before I stand to (possibly) inherit, albeit at a level well under that which is set to be taxed, though at a level at which I think it probably should be.
Re: IR35
Date: 2010-09-26 03:50 pm (UTC)Titmus
Re: IR35
Date: 2010-11-05 10:35 pm (UTC)I was so taken with your suggestion that I have proposed your idea in a discussion elsewhere. It was pointed out to me that while the employee contribution due to NI is indeed 11%, for certain rates of income, there is also an employer contribution element to NI as well. Accordingly, while you could get rid of the employee NI apparatus, you'd still need the employer NI apparatus. This would result in a considerable loss of the benefits otherwise to be had.
A fix suggested for this was, and I quote, "to add 20% to income tax rates, to replace NI, and make it mandatory for employers to give everyone a 9% pay rise using the money they're no longer paying in NI contributions. This does shaft a few people. It's a big tax rise for people earning over the employees' NI ceiling, and an even bigger tax rise on investments and other unearned income which isn't liable to NI at all. It also makes capital gains look very very attractive instead of income, because the tax rate is less than half as high."
(Edited to remove a typo.)
Re: IR35
Date: 2010-11-08 09:33 am (UTC)The trickiest thing to handle with the tax/NI merger is the status of pensioners. You stop paying NI when you're 65 and if you merged the two then you'd have to do something to redress the fact that they would now be paying 31% where they were previously paying 20% and increasing their tax payments by half isn't politically very good. You cure it with making changes to the pension/benefits system. Of course you could argue that the old bastards got the best out of the system and ought to be made to bear their share of the suffering but it doesn't look good in the papers if you want to be re-elected.
Re: IR35
Date: 2010-11-08 09:20 pm (UTC)Since the UK's future was in the service sector, that particular prejudice probably set back the current UK economy a good couple of years.
Payroll tax has other unfortunate implications -- an almost inherent bias against part-time workers is one.
I'm not defending NI here, which I agree is a joke.
But the major problem for all governments these days is how to raise revenue effectively as well as 'fairly'. And when it's a choice of one or the other, then fairness goes out of the window.
At the moment the NI system works even more against the under-65s -- surely an artificial age-divide these days when people who reach that age can expect to live another 23 years or so. Scrap NI, lump much of it onto Income Tax, a bit of it onto Corporation Tax, and give a sop to the elderly by gradually increasing the age allowance before income tax is paid. Something like a grand a year, perhaps.
PJ
Re: IR35
Date: 2010-11-09 12:15 am (UTC)No return to the original bias of SET but you could use the Selectivity to slant things. Small employers (not that I'm biased you understand), could be favoured, institutions that say, paid bonuses that the government disapproved of, could be kicked in the balls. Just a revamped Employers' NI.
The Revenue have seriously looked at this as part of their concerns over having a level playing field for small businesses, so that it doesn't matter if you're a limited company, a partnership or a sole trader. Their other horse in that particular race is to charge NI on dividend income, maybe indiscriminately and maybe on shareholdings which represent more than 5% of the ownership of the company. Research continues.
no subject
Date: 2010-09-22 11:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-09-23 07:33 am (UTC)PJ
no subject
Date: 2010-09-23 06:17 am (UTC)But couldn't you argue the same about the three-card trick?
no subject
Date: 2010-09-23 07:31 am (UTC)PJ
no subject
Date: 2010-09-23 05:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-09-23 08:48 am (UTC)He's in a funny place, isn't he: moved to the Libdems when they were shifting leftward (as New Labour claimed the middle ground) then finds himself in a Tory-dominated government with a business brief.
I've just signed up to move my mortgage - a surprisingly painless project, facilitated by the taxpayer's very own (70+% at least) ank. No fee, no commission. How times have changed - not least in that my bank manager is now younger and less well-paid than me. Got more hair, too.
Did you know that car salesmen are now regulated by the FSA? Well, some at least. I just bought a second-hand car and had to undergo a series of (low-key, admittedly) pitches for ancillary insurance-based products, then sign a document confirming that they'd been explained to me and that I didn't actually want them. Makes me wonder if we're heading for a world where any financially significant decision, however slight, will be accompanied by a requirement for a similar confirmation. Like the Post Office needing you to confirm before they sell you a stamp that they've explained the risks associated with First Class delivery and that you still don't want to go Special/Registered (or whatever they call it these days). Maybe it'll all be streamlined and we'll be able to confirm using Bluetooth or something.
no subject
Date: 2010-09-23 11:45 am (UTC)Some of this can be blamed not on FSA regulations (although most of it, including anti money-laundering and "know-your-customer" rules can) but on the recent growth in compensation culture and insurers' own demands when they write liability policies.
To ensure that a professional indemnity or other liability policy is enforceable by the claimant, a general indication that certain prescribed procedures were followed is demanded by the insurers. To be on the safe side, the compliance officer and risk management officer add on a bit of slack for safe-keeping. The net effect is to waste millions of man-hours as people have to say crap and others have to listen to it, wasting time when something more productive could be done.
PJ
PJ
Gurning irrelevancy
Date: 2010-09-26 08:27 pm (UTC)(But since it's faintly flavoured with politics, I think I should point out that everybody knew that Brown would win a snap election in 2007. Hell, even Blair might have won a snap election in 2007. Add in the relief of not having to vote Blair in again, plus the perfectly justifiable "I can only lead this country forward if the people of Great Britain elect me as their leader," plus the "tough times ahead, but as the greatest Chancellor since Bismarck" (shome mishtake, shurely?) argument, then footling over a millionaire inheritance task is just pissing up the wall.
(Brown bottled it badly; no-one else. The interesting thing (politically interesting, but otherwise devastatingly boring) is who got blamed for bottling it afterwards. The interesting thing from an executive point of view -- would you really want somebody who bottles the big decisions so disastrously in charge of your country? Fuck, no.)
Anyway, just in case you didn't notice Steve Bell's analysis of the future of political cartooning vis-as-vis-a-banana Ed Milliband: http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/sep/26/ed-miliband-cartoonist-steve-bell. I know how fond you are of the great and savage art of political caricature.
Re: Gurning irrelevancy
Date: 2010-09-26 08:37 pm (UTC)There are so many things you can do if you're actually in charge of the agenda, provided that you're not Attlee in 1951 or MacMillan in 1963 or ... well, I guess you have to be in charge of the agenda, which Brown was.
Any sane political operator would have stuck a finger in the wind and realised that, maybe, 2% or upwards of the vote depended upon frustration with the EU. Perfect opportunity! Promise a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. (Which he signed two months later in December.)
I'm not saying that a referendum would have made any difference to the Lisbon Treaty; far from it. Popular consent, or the lack of it, made no difference in France or Holland, and even Ireland needed to double-check. Actual democracy is not the point here.
Is there any good reason why Brown decided not to make a pointless and florid gesture like this in the full knowledge that it made no difference but might bring him temporary acclaim?
Is he utterly thick, or is he perhaps a politician of genuine principle and conviction?
Well, sooner or later there has to be one of those, if only as a genetic sport.