By Dark Politricks
I have just watched the Andrew Marr show with his interview with David Cameron which covered an number of interesting matters such as the influence of lobbying and lobbyist especially his closeness betweeen the government and Rupert Murdoch, the economic crisis which has seen the UK enter a double dip recession.
Thinking of this interview and the state our country is in at the moment and with a bit of previous thought that has always remained in my consisouncess I believe we need to come up with a basic plan of steps that can help to restore our country.
These steps should not be ideologically bound and should be considered in a “what works, works” conceptiuial basis. Whether you are a Tory, Liberal or Socialist we all are suffering under the same problems and a solution that works should be considered whether or not it neatly fits inside your ideological view box or not.
The Economy
1. The private sector has not rushed into fill all the public sector jobs that are being lost. People are being put on the dole which increases government payments for jobseeker allowance and housing benefit and in turn increases the amount we need to borrow and therefore increases national debt. Therefore the question needs to be asked whether or not in makes more logical sense (and in turn basic mathematical sense) to keep on this track.
Many people might blame our tax rates and they might be right. If it can be proven that lower company taxes or a flat tax rate system will bring in more actual revenue to the governments coffers then I have no problem with it.
However corporation tax has already been dropped, our tax free allowance raised twice already, the higher rate of tax dropped from 50% to 45% and no influx of private sector jobs has occurred yet.
Here is something that ought not to be just a thought experiment. I would love to know if some university professor with too much time on his well paid hands has tried workig this out or not and please if anyone knows the answer let me in on it.
In the 1980’s our PM of the time Maggie Thatcher went to war with the miners. Many mines were unprofitable but they supported whole villages and towns and were often the only place for people in the local area to work.
Therefore when the mines were closed whole swathes of the country were made unemployed and in time due to the 3 million unemployed people on the dole the government told the employment agency to shift people onto disability allowance if there were eve the slightest thing wrong with them so that the figures were reduced and they could claim success in the war against unemployment.
This is the same government (although a different generation) that is now trying to get people off the disability allowance they had put them on to help win elections. Hypocrisy?
There were no private companies in these places for the people to go to work in and most of the miners were unskilled manual labourers with little other skills. The only “fix” given by the government of the time was from Norman Tebit who said “Get on your bike” and look for work.
Many of these miners are still jobless and many of the towns and villages that were based around the mines are now desolate wastelands full of empty or broken houses, drugs, drink and other social problems.
Now if someone at the time of this massive descission could have done the maths and worked out whether over the next 20-30 years the amount of money spent in dole money, sickness and housing benefit, extra police, court and prison costs and all the other long term costs that come with massive social deprivation and compared it with the subsidies or lost money from the mines which would come out on top?
Is it better to have a town full of people all working, all feeding their familes, all with a sense of pride in their community living in a town with lower social deprivation at the cost of a government subsidy?
Put aside your libertarian or socialist views and consider it from a basic mathematical point of view. Which do you think costs more?
This is the question we should be asking now with the current public sector cuts. Without knowing the actual true cost of the massive mine closure over 30 years I would surmise that it is cheaper to keep people working and off multiple government subsidies (dole, housing etc) and keeping a loss making mine open – another government subsidy.
So it comes down to a simple question of which subsidy is more benefiial for society? The ones handed out in dole and police wages or the one keeping open the mine and along with it the town that works there.
Remember that the higher cost of current government subsidies for unemployed people has brought our borrowing levels up NOT down and it is only our low interest rates that have kept our heads above water and not turned the UK into a permanent London riot all year long like Greece and Spain.
Stimulating the Economy
Just a few off the top of my head.
- Tax breaks for UK companies that make their products within the UK and don’t offshore them to slave labour camps like China.
- Tax breaks for companies who hire long unemployed people – e.g if you have been unemployed for over 1 year or even 6 months.
- More emphasis on ensuring companies are not hiring illegal migrants and keeping UK citizens out of jobs through the use of slave labour. A National Insurance card must be provided, photocopied and saved for every employee and provided on demand by people who’s actual job is to prevent slave labour from occurring.
- Closing all tax loopholes and ensuring any international company who wants to sell their goods in one of the biggest markets in the world has a UK company setup on these shores and all relevant corporation tax paid to our treasury from that company.
- Setting up a UK PLC company that is owned by all the taxpayers of the country who will recieve dividends from the company each year – used to stimulate the company. They would battle in the economy like any other company for private work but for government contracts they should get first dibs – and why not I ask? The Labour government has shown us through PPI how much money was (and still will be for the next 20 odd years at least) on these private public investment schemes. The UK PLC company would be filled with UK workers with valid national insurance cards, the long term unemployed, ex prisoners, other people struggling to get work AND any other workers who apply to vacacnies when required. The only benefits this company would have compared to others is in the non private workspace e.g government contracts.
- It gets first refusal on any government contract whether it be an IT system or new Hospital building or even just a maintenance role at a school. Why pay a private company hundreds of pounds to change a light bulb when we should be able to do it cheaply? Believe me through Gordon Browns PPI system we do pay hundreds of pounds to change light bulbs in hospitals and schools all around the country.
- If it makes a profit the profit is divided between expanding the company and paying dividends to us taxpayers who will then use that money stimulating the economy in the private marketplace.
- It is a first port of call for the long term unemployed and others seeking work to find a job working for their country.
Banking.
- We need to create a national bank that has proper interest rates for savers and encourage people to save money again at a rate that makes it worthwhile.
- We need a bank that is owned by the people of the country and is willing to loan out money to small businesses who are the companies who give people jobs.
- We need a bank that is owned by the people that’s job isn’t to make money purely from money e.g gambling, as we know all the big players do with their high frequency trading and front running.
- We need s bank that is owned by the people where the profit is given out to the shareholders of the company each year (the taxpayers of the country) and not in million pound bonuses to a few of their best AND most of their worst gamblers.
- We already have huge stake-holds in more than one bank. We should take the whole thing over and turn it into a bank run for the people of the nation for the benefit of the nation.
Can you imagine as a working tax payer being given a yearly cheque for a few thousand pounds to spend as you wish because you as a taxpayer are also a shareholder in a national bank?
This is one way to stimulate the economy as well as incentivise people without jobs to get jobs and to start paying tax.
The European Union
We should leave the European Union as soon as possible. We should give them an ulimatium either make the whole shaky house of cards what is should have been a free trading zone, with free movement of people and goods and not a semi quasil supra government in which unelected people can weild enormous power and the elected EU government can weild little.
The Euro should never have gone ahead as it was clear to many people at the time that the North and South European countries were two totally different systems that would never mesh together and it was only with the help of the criminals at Goldman Sachs that allowed countries like Greece to hide their huge debts and get on board the Titanic with no-one noticing.
We will save money and keep our own embassies and seats at the UN instead of what is surely on the EU’s roadmap a huge polical union like the USA in which the EU is the only embassy in each country and the EU Foreign Minister makes descisions for all European nations.
Whilst there are some good things in the EU there are plenty of bad and I cannot see the balance being tilted the other way anytime soon.
The case of Abu Qatada has shown our weakness in the face of unelected European judges and whilst I am happy
to know that an appeal lodged at the European Court of Human Rights will take up to 7 years to be heard and maybe prevent Gary McKinnon from being deported to the USA the flipside is also true and it prevents us from deporting dangerous criminals like Abu Qatadar.
Law, Equality and Liberty
The case of Abu Qatadar brings me onto the legal system in the UK.
We should create our own Bill of Rights on the same lines as the US Bill of Rights and that every single person wether they be a policeman or royal is covered by the Bill and everyone in the UK is equal under the law.
I want to know 100% that I will be given the same treatment by the judiciary as the Queen if she let her pack of Corgi’s maul a child to death or drink drive into a bus stop full of people killing many of them. Only when we are all equal under the same law – a British made law and one that is the highest law in the land can we call ourselves free and equal.
Alongside this the true “Freedom Bill” should be implemented post haste not the weak and feeble cut down version making its way through parliament at the moment. It is a disgusting stain on the Lib Dem’s character that they allowed the Tories to rip out everything good about the bill and turn it into a wheel clampers justice bill.
These reforms will rebalance our extradition treaty with the USA, restore our right to silence under police interview, give back our right to protest near parliament and many more important laws the pro-surveillence governent of Labour (and now seemingly the coallition) had brought in.
The English should have their own parliament to solve the West Lothian question and to prevent Scottish MP’s voting to raise UK students tuition fees whilst they can keep University free in their own country.
We should do away with this mismash of devolution which Tony Blair started and go the full hog. We should have full devolution for all 4 parts of the UK in which citizens of those countries vote for their local MP to sit in their countries parliament on matters that affect their country alone and then sit within the Westminister parliament when the matter is UK wide e.g whether to go to war, to sign treaties with other nations and other important UK matters.
The English parliament can sit in the Houses of Parliament in Westminster and matters covering the whole UK will involve members of parliament from the Scottish parliament, the Welsh parliament and the Northern Irish one.
Immigration
I live in a town that due to Joanna Lumley is no longer recoognisable due to the ex Gurka veterans (who I have no problem with at all) bringing their whole families over to live in this country. This would be fine if:
- They could speak English.
- They were not all given houses straight away, houses some of us have waited decades on the housing list for.
- They were not overloading our already strained and mercilessly cut public services.
- They would at least try and learn our culture and fit in. A thank you wave when you let someone through at a junction is not too much to ask – I know a little thing that many other people don’t do but it’s little things like this that really grind my gears (quote Peter Griffin)
People come to the UK from Africa with HIV and turn up at the nearest hospital and then given the best treatment around for free whilst someone who has live in this country their whole life and can trace their history back hundreds of years is treated contentably by the NHS when they have a serious illness.
I am not against immigration as it was badly needed after World War II and when English people won’t take the jobs someone needs to do them.
- What I am against is the fact that whole swathes of the UK are now ghettos where a white person would feel threatened to walk at night.
- Where on a bus ride in certain towns you can hear a myriad of conversations, that is apart from English.
- Where if you open a door to a woman in a head scarf or let her pass in the street she won’t even look at you in the eye let alone say thank you. I know their culture forbids it but this is Britain not Saudi Arabia and we treat women as equals not slaves therefore we should expect some modicum of “fitting in” if we are going to allow tens of millions of people all from various cultures into our country.
I feel that we should have tigther border controls and that anyone wishing to migrate to this country should be able to pass an entrace exam on our history as well as basic English before being allowed on our soil.
Once they have completed there exams they should be given a citenship ceremony in which they are presented their national insurance card. A card by the way which should be mandatory display at any doctors, hostpital or benefits agency. We all got them when we were 16 and any new immigrant should be proud to achieve the right to hold one. They are not national ID cards but they are a sign you are entitled to work, pay tax, claim benefits and this should include health care.
Not only will this help social cohesion it will install a sense of pride at achieving British Citizenship. We should abolish the stupid tests Labour brought in which were more about how to claim benefits than history and our existing culture. Labour ruined this country in more ways than can be counted.
We want people who want to live here and accept our way our life. I don’t want our government sending troops to foreign lands so that they can say that “we fight them over there so we don’t fight them over here” whilst at the same time we have thousands of men and women within our shores looking at our culture in disgust and planning payback for all that “collateral damage” we do across the world. It goes both ways and I definitely don’t agree with the wars we are in.
There are so many other things I could go on about including stopping the wars, ending the surveillence state, removing our tongue from the USA’s ass and much more but I think I have said enough for one morning. Lets cross our fingers and pray to the great big Spaghetti monster in the sky that some of it becomes true.
Dark Politics 