Paying more tax, a lettuce and Banksy

24 August 2024

We have a new government and many people will be paying more tax.  One of the new Chancellor’s first decisions was that the Winter Fuel Payment of up to £300 to pensioners who don’t receive pension credit or other means-tested benefits is being scrapped for all.  (I hope its withdrawal will be subject to ‘marginal’ adjustments so that somebody who gets, say, £10 more than the means-tested limit doesn’t suddenly lose the £300.)

However, I must admit that I applaud the principle.  We have received this in the past but didn’t really need it ourselves so we gave ours to friends who needed it more and to a charity such as The Trussell Trust (who, incidentally, give a list on their website of household goods most welcomed by foodbanks, and where your nearest collection point is.)

Other hopeful signs that our new leaders realise that, once the family silver has all gone, you need to cut unnecessary costs and find another source of income.  Limiting winter fuel payments is a positive step towards the former, as is the decision to write off the £700m already spent by the last government and cut the £10bn they had planned to spend over 6 years sending asylum seekers to Rwanda.

Rachel Reeves has also indicated that the autumn budget is likely to be tough but at least some of us are hoping she’ll feel able to unfreeze the ‘personal allowance’, which people can receive before they have to pay tax;  the Tories thought this was a brilliant wheeze because it was worst for those who didn’t earn very much – which is exactly why I hope she will unfreeze it so people on the borderline do start to get some help meeting the ever-increasing costs of life’s little luxuries, like food and heating.

Spain’s socialist government tried an interesting experiment in 2022 when it introduced a “temporary” solidarity wealth tax to be collected in 2023 and 2024 from those whose net wealth exceeds €3m (£2.6m).  It’s estimated that it will only apply to 0.5% of the households in Spain.

The Tax Justice Network is a British group of researchers and activists, founded in 2003 which “believes our tax and financial systems are our most powerful tools for creating a just society that gives equal weight to the needs of everyone.”  It focuses on tax avoidance and tax havens and has calculated that a similar tax imposed worldwide would free up trillions of dollars to give help where it’s most needed, from relieving those suffering from starvation and ill-health to helping slow climate change.  If it were introduced just in the UK (which Reeves has sadly ruled out), it could raise some £25bn a year …

This is of course a dream, but what a wonderful one!  Let’s start with small steps and, full disclosure, I’d be happy to pay more tax despite not being in the top 0.5% of Britain’s wealthiest people, but nor am I in the bottom 0.5%.  There’s enough wealth in this country for everyone to be able to live comfortably so why don’t we spread it around more evenly?

Reeves has said she is inheriting the worst financial position in 80 years and has accused the Conservatives of being economical with the truth about a forecast overspend of £22bn in government departments.  While nobody really believes her predecessor was the sharpest pencil in the box, it is traditional for the incoming Chancellor of a new government to make things look as bleak as possible to throw the blame onto the previous government so we must expect some over-reaction in her first budget.

She’s already said she’s planning to raise more revenue from inheritance tax and capital gains tax and to cut public expenditure.

She’s likely to face the usual threats from the very rich to leave the country if they have to pay more tax but, despite similar threats when three Scandinavian countries introduced wealth taxes, only 0.01% of the richest households did actually move out.  That’s one in ten thousand of them.  Pessimistic estimates of similar migration rates from the UK in similar circumstances reckon that 0.02% (one in five thousand) of the richest families might leave the country.

Bon voyage!

(At this point, I realise that I can now expect an outraged email from my Conservative friend who believes that entrepreneurs should be allowed to grow businesses from scratch and build them up into huge corporations, becoming unconscionably rich in the process.  Of course his opinion is valid, I just disagree because I don’t think it’s in the best interests of the greatest number of people.  Nor do I believe that everybody receiving state benefits is milking the system and should just get on their bikes and get a job.)

Luckily, some people retain a sense of the absurd and the satirical artists’ collective ‘Led by Donkeys’ recently lowered a banner behind Liz Truss while she was giving a speech supporting Donald Trump’s attempts to get re-elected, showing a lettuce over the words “I crashed the economy.”  (Remember The Daily Star newspaper featured a lettuce while she was prime minister to see if it would still be alive when she had to resign as prime minister, and it was?)

Led by Donkeys had predicted she’d say “That’s not funny” and storm off the stage.  In fact, she said “That’s not funny” and stormed off the stage, adding that the group were “far left activists” and “I won’t stand for it”.  Sit, lady, sit.

Another iconoclast is Banksy who has been active for longer than most of us realised.  He’s done thousands of pictures, many of which just raise a smile but some of his works make clear social comment which is then endlessly analysed by critics who want his work to have deeper meanings.  He remains anonymous, he doesn’t obviously do his work for money, and he seems to accept the transience of all graffiti.

Carers abused, Sure Start and revenge

21 April 2024

There are some 5 million carers in the UK, about 1 million of whom claim carer’s allowance. Carers generally have had a lot of coverage in the press recently, encouraged by the revelation that the Department for Work and Pensions has been fining tens of thousands of people who have been claiming the £81.90 per week carer’s allowance (for a full-time carer, that’s just under 50p an hour with no holidays) while inadvertently earning more than the permitted maximum in part-time work. 

Even if the limit is exceeded by only £1, the entire benefit is disallowed (with no marginal or tapering relief, huge penalties build up very quickly)

The problem is that, even if the earnings limit is exceeded by as little as £1, claimants automatically lose the entire carer’s allowance. This results in a “cliff edge” repayment penalty unmatched in its severity in the benefits system despite an estimated 44% of its claimants classified as being ‘in poverty’.

The regulations that define how much a carer can earn without having to forfeit some or all of their allowance are labyrinthine and the benefit is means-tested so even a minimal infringement leads to the DWP imposing fines of thousands of pounds, with the risk of a prison sentence if the carer can’t afford to pay the fine. 

Brilliant isn’t it!  Somebody is giving care that would otherwise have to be funded by the state but they’re willing to imprison ‘offenders’ and put the cost of caring back onto the state.

(I must here disclose a personal interest:  I am a 24/7 carer for a severely disabled person but I do not claim the carer’s allowance.)

In July 2019, the House of Commons Work and Pensions Committee, looked into overpayments of carer’s allowance and concluded that the vast majority of earnings-related overpayments were the result of “honest mistakes” by carers and that administrative failures by DWP allowed the overpayments to spiral, often a long time and many thousands of pounds later, before they told carers they wanted their money back.

The 2019 report said “The Department could, and should, have got to grips with the problems in Carer’s Allowance much more quickly” and urged the government to take action to limit the risk to claimants.

In the 5 years since the report was published, the Conservatives haven’t yet acted on the recommendations but, even though they’ve proved themselves highly skilled at choosing the wrong leaders and then replacing them, this is little comfort to poorer carers.

Earlier this week, the Institute for Fiscal Studies published new research into the long-term effectiveness of the Sure Start programme, set up by the Labour government in 1998 and regarded as one of its most successful policies.  Sure Start linked early years, health and family support services for poor children in disadvantaged areas.

The follow-up study showed that the scheme had significantly improved the life chances of children who had been eligible for free school meals and had access to a Sure Start centre:  they did three grades better at GCSE – like getting five Cs instead of two Cs and three Ds – when compared with similar poor children without access to Sure Start.

The study also showed that younger children with special educational needs were identified much sooner and their problems were identified when they were younger, thereby reducing the need for education, health and care plans later.

The Tories closed Sure Start down to save money.

If you believe the Guardian is written by the spawn of the devil, skip this paragraph because it’s just won a diversity award at the Press Awards after researching and publishing its founders’ links to the transatlantic slave trade in what the judges called “breathtakingly honest mea culpa”, adding that it was “a hugely thoughtful and comprehensive project that provides a groundbreaking example of how an organisation addresses historical links to slavery”.  How many other publications would dare to be this honest?

Certainly not Liz Truss’s book (Remember her?  Record-breaking prime minister?) which should have been called ‘Mea non culpa’ or ‘I was the only one in step’.  I’m ashamed to admit that I almost feel sorry for somebody who is so deluded.

Truss’s credo seems to have extended into the police force.  We’re being invited to elect a new police commissioner locally on the basis of their politics;  there’s no mention of experience of policing or justice.  How long before the police ask how you vote before deciding whether to arrest you?  I’m tempted to spoil my ballot paper.

Talking of delusion, Donald Trump, former president of the most powerful country of the world, a man with whom you’d feel as safe as you would if a two-year old had a tantrum while carrying a machine gun, you remember him, orange make up, starched and dyed combover, pouty little mouth, fancies his daughter, unfaithful husband and serial groper … anyway, he’s been in court while jurors are selected for his trial on criminal charges and he keeps been falling asleep.  His eyes shut, his head dropped forward and he drooled but he said he wasn’t asleep, he was thinking.  When he actually was awake, his expression was a sight to see:  Trump the Grump.

Dubai had 18 months’ rain in 24 hours earlier this week, which was described by a meteorologist as a “very rare rainfall event”.  We’ve had quite a few rainfall events here over the last 3 months but we call them showers or storms.

In the Middle East, Israel is still trying to kill all Palestinians in Gaza and, as a side show, recently arranged to launch a rocket attack on Iran so Iran naturally had to retaliate by attacking Israel with over 100 rockets and Israel promised to get their revenge with another attack on Iran, and so on.  When does revenge stop?

This is the way the world ends, not with a whimper but with a “he started it, no he started it, no he started it, no he started it … Ma, he’s throwing bombs at me.”

NHS, strikes, governmental BS, Twitter hack and two American brainwaves

7 January 2023

What a joyful start to 2023!  There is no crisis in the NHS.  And there was I thinking nurses are striking because there is one.  But no, our cuddly prime minister has assured us that, even though the NHS is under “extreme pressure”, it has the money to needs to cope with the winter surge in demands for their services.

Dr Vishal Sharma, the chair of the consultants’ committee at the British Medical Association, responded with amazement to this, saying “No 10’s refusal to admit that the NHS is in crisis will seem simply delusional … [and] is taking the public for fools.” 

One of Rishi Sunak’s spokespeople produced the rather feeble claim that “We are confident we are providing the NHS with the funding it needs, as we did throughout the pandemic”, carefully refraining from making any reference to the repeated reductions in the real value of funding for the NHS in the previous 10 years since the Conservatives came to power and believed austerity would cure all ills.

So, with the ever increasing number of staff vacancies, they’ve been able to close cottage hospitals and reduce the number of rehab beds.  This means that patients who no longer need acute care but aren’t yet well enough to go home have to block beds in acute units instead of being transferred into rehab units which can have just two staff on overnight, and a GP on call.  Austerity also meant they had to reduce the costs of maintaining buildings and equipment by not bothering to do any and relying on strategically placed buckets to collect water dripping through the ceilings.

How lucky we all are to have the option of getting private healthcare without having to wait.  All we have to do is marry a billionaire or rob a bank or two.  The only problem private patients have to overcome is emergency care – if a scalpel slips, or the anaesthetist gets stuck on 12 across, while you’re having an operation in a private hospital, they will usually transfer you to the nearest NHS emergency unit, knowing that they’ll still get paid even if you die.

Sunak’s attempt to distract people from the not-crisis was to make maths lessons compulsory until A level.  Why?  I took A level maths (and, naturally, failed) and have since used the basic skills of multiplication / long division, geometry and trigonometry that I did in the earlier years but I’ve never once needed calculus.

And nurses are going on strike because the government refuses to discuss how much the real value of their pay has been whittled down over the last 12 years.  Despite the government’s frantically blaming the strikers, nobody’s fooled and several recent polls show the majority of people realise the strike is the government’s fault, not the nurses’.

The government’s response seems unlikely to improve things (but when has this ever stopped any government doing something stupid?):  they’re going to limit unions’ powers to hold strikes.  Sheer brilliance.  Anything to avoid dealing with the problems that cause strikes.

The anti-strike law will define “minimum service levels” in key sectors including health, education, fire and rail.  They plan to allow bosses to fire staff if minimum service levels aren’t met and to sue unions former damages.  Tougher thresholds originally wanted by Jacob Rees-Mogg have apparently been taken out for fear of challenges to their legality. 

I could perhaps understand their wish to do this if they limited the powers to essential services provided by the state but so many of these services are no longer state-owned but are run by, or contracted to, companies which, under established ‘rules’ of capitalism, provide their ‘customers’ (forget old-fashioned words like ‘patients’ or ‘passengers’) with the minimum levels of service necessary to maximise what they pay to their shareholders and directors.

I’ve mentioned one of the more heinous breaches of faith before, when the Conservative peer Michelle Mone pressurised the Department of Health and Social Care to award PPE Medpro, a company with close ties to her family, a £122m contract in June 2020. They duly supplied 25 million sterile surgical gowns which were rejected because their technical labelling was “invalid” and “improper”, and they “cannot be used within the NHS for any purpose”.  The Department is now seeking a return of the full £122m in public money plus £11.6m for storing and disposing of the gowns, plus interest.

Mone, founder of the lingerie brand Ultimo, was appointed to the House of Lords by David Cameron in 2015.  I wonder if Cameron was been gifted a lifetime supply of crotchless Y-fronts.

This inevitably (well, it seems inevitable to me) reminds me that more than 200m email addresses have been hacked out of Twitter and posted on an online hacking forum.  According to a LinkedIn post on 24 December by the Israeli cybersecurity monitoring firm Hudson Rock, the breach is likely to lead to a lot of hacking, targeted phishing and dox(x)ing (no, me neither, but it means releasing identifiable personal information to people who aren’t entitled to it – a gift to stalkers and others with equally dubious motives.) 

Twitter (aka Elon Musk) hasn’t yet commented.

Musk has lots of money and lots of idea, some brighter than others, but seems to have the attention span of a gnat.  While I’d love to go into space, I’m not sure I’d want to go up in one of his rockets because the Which? magazine award for the least reliable used car is currently held by Musk’s hugely expensive Tesla Model S.

As food inflation in the UK jumped from 12.4% in November to 13.3% in December and the Government thinks a 2% pay increase is ample, a Citizens’ Advice survey showed more than a third of UK adults would find it difficult or impossible to cope if their monthly costs increased by £20.

Recession?  What recession?

While homeless people in America are facing similar problems to those in Britain and many states are passing anti-homeless laws, Missouri has come up with a novel scheme to help them by making it a crime to sleep on state property.  This means that homeless people can sleep on the steps of the local courthouse, get arrested and, if they’re persistent offenders, they’ll be fined up to $750 or, if they haven’t got it (and how many homeless people have?), they’ll get 15 days in prison where the state will provide them with a roof over their heads, a warm bed and free meals for a fortnight.  Recidivists unite!

It’s not clear whether the law will also penalise people dozing off in senate meetings, school classes or libraries.

However, there are more than 2,500 community-supported agriculture schemes in America which support both the farmers and the consumers.  Customers make regular payments in return for fresh produce but the clever bit is that the price they pay is based on their finances so people who rent their homes or are on benefits or have large debts, pay less.  We should start something like this to supplement foodbanks.  I’d join.

While I was scanning the website of a large supermarket (which I won’t name to save Waitrose’s blushes), I saw an offer on minced lamb which said “Our fresh lamb is always British and kept happy with room to frolic and graze”.  Until somebody hits them on the head with a hammer and cuts them up into little pieces.

J&P Holidays, ROI duty-free, press freedom, guns and assisted dying

19 June 2022

Let’s celebrate:  all good news this week.  Well, nearly all.

The European Court of Human Rights overruled the Boris Johnson / Priti Patel plot to deport asylum seekers 4,000 miles to Ruanda, a country with a dubious human rights history.  J&P Holidays had organised a charter flight costing £500,000 to deport up to seven people who’d been stupid enough to believe Britain was a safe place to live.  The (huge) plane then sat on the tarmac in the sweltering heat until the ECHR ruled one of the deportations was illegal and other appeals should be awaited, so the flight never took off.

The icing on the cake was that a whole bunch of faith leaders had publicly condemned the decision to deport asylum seekers to another country without even a trial.  J&P’s response was to claim faith leaders shouldn’t get involved in politics.  Absolute bollocks of course but exactly what we expect from those two.  Where would Christianity be if Jesus hadn’t got involved in politics?

Johnson immediately suggested that Britain should withdraw from the ECHR to avoid similar interference in human rights as misinterpreted by him and Patel.  After all, after he’d intentionally infringed bits of the ministerial code of conduct, Johnson rewrote the code to ‘legalise’ his actions retrospectively, and that seemed to work.

So he’s now applying the same blasé approach to international law to his attempts to renege on his own agreement with the EU even though his own government publicly accepts its proposed Northern Ireland protocol bill doesn’t meet its obligations under international law.

And then we can have duty-free shops somewhere between the UK and the Republic of Ireland. 

We can only hope that people voting in next week’s by-elections ignore the no-confidence vote that so discredited and enfeebled Johnson.  He deserves a 58^th chance to show he can do the job – be fair, he’s only had 3 years to get it right so far.

One slight niggle about his chancellor:  isn’t a ‘household’ a bunch of people, not a building?  If so, why does the chancellor seem to be contributing £400 to all houses even if they’re second (or third etc) homes which aren’t occupied for most of the time?  Wouldn’t one payment per family be better wherever they say they live?  Or couldn’t it be means-tested so the money that would have gone to richer households can be used to increase the payments to poorer households?

But back to more good news:  the journalist Carole Cadwallader won a victory for the free press.  She’d been sued for libel by Arron Banks, a multi-millionaire who bankrolled Brexit, but the judge decided Cadwallader “had reasonable grounds to believe that her intended meaning was true”.

However, Julian Assange is still up for grabs and Priti Patel has decided he can be extradited to America.

I find myself rather conflicted about Assange.  I’m in favour of a free press able to publish everything but I could be convinced that some things should be restricted if people’s lives are put at risk.  It’s just that America has been unable to actually find even one person who died as a result of the Wikileaks revelations … 

However, just imagine if all countries knew everything about what every other country was doing, from the number of nuclear weapons they have to the mental health of their leader.  Mightn’t life actually be much safer for us all?

(I don’t feel at all ambivalent about the accusations of sexual impropriety in Sweden which should, however long ago it was, be given a fair hearing in court, but nobody seems to care about this anymore.)

On 4 July, parliament will debate a proposal to legalise assisted dying for terminally ill, mentally competent adults, a small step in the right direction.  I’m hoping enough MPs are bright enough to understand that this wouldn’t make it compulsory and it would just allow people to make decisions about their own lives for themselves, instead of suffering under laws made by people who have no experience of situations when this could improve dying for those that wanted to

America, of course, takes a radically different approach to ending life.  A lot of them are terribly keen to preserve what might be ‘life’ in utero but equally enthusiastic about letting everyone have guns with which they can end their own (and other people’s) lives.  At least death by chemicals just leaves a peaceful body while guns can scatter blood, guts and brains over the furniture.

Actually, a bi-partisan group of US senators are looking at how gun laws could be tightened.  It’s only another a small step but again it’s in the right direction.  The National Rifle Association, which represents gun makers and sellers whose profits will be reduced if guns are banned, has aired its entirely objective view and said it will “oppose  … initiatives that override due constitutional process … and deprive law-abiding citizens of the fundamental right to protect themselves …”.  Note that even the NRA doesn’t actually claim Americans have an unrestricted constitutional right to bear arms, though it does its best to imply this without actually lying. 

And a House select committee seems to be closing in on their own liar while Jason Selvig and Davram Stiefler, aka the Good Liars have gained a well-earned reputation for taking the piss.  In one recent event, they told Donald Trump he was “boring” and, at an NRA conference, they were applauded for saying “the NRA … has provided thoughts and prayers to the victims and their families. And maybe these mass shootings would stop happening if we all thought a little bit more and we prayed a little bit more.”  The satire was, perhaps unsurprisingly, lost on the audience, but not on Twitter where it has now had more than 10m views.

Still on lying, Johnson has just lost his second ethics adviser in a year and headlines in the Times, the Telegraph and the Guardian all referred to the additional pressure this puts on his position.  Happily, with typical Johnsonian defensiveness, he seems to have drawn the obvious conclusion that, if ethics advisers keep telling him he’s being unethical, he obviously doesn’t need one so he’s not immediately going to appoint a new one.  How lucky we are to have such a positive-thinking prime minister, even if he does still believe Ethics is thomewhere between Middlethex and Thuffolk.

And there’s an organisation called Henley & Partners that claims to have invented “the concept of residence and citizenship by investment” in the 1990s?  In other words, it enables (for a huge fee) millionaires to buy citizenships of other countries (such as St Lucia and Montenegro) that, for a suitably excessive payment, sell their passports.  Some of them even offer a “golden passport” giving visa-free travel to 145 countries, including the UK and the EU’s Schengen Area. 

It’s been estimated that more than 15,000 Russian millionaires will be leaving their fatherland following Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.  Perhaps Ukraine could talk to Henley & Partners and raise money for its defence against Russia and for the care of people rendered homeless by Putin’s murderous attacks on civilians.  If I were very rich, I’d be happy with a Ukrainian passport that gave me free access to the EU even without the war.

The closing piece of good news this week is that some gentians, attractive plants with small trumpet-shaped flowers, can feel things and respond to certain touches.  A recent study showed that they can suddenly close shortly after being touched, opening again within a fairly short period. 

It’s been known for years that some plants can count, and remember things:  insectivorous plants such as Venus fly traps don’t move if their trigger hairs are touched once but, if they’re touched again shortly afterwards, they snap shut to trap what is, with luck, a digestible insect and not a researcher with a pencil.

Which means they can count to two; which means they also have a memory because they can remember they’ve already counted one.