The New Fact-Free Politics

I’ve never unequivocally supported unregulated ‘free market capitalism’. That can only end one way, probably with corporate militias as envisioned in the worst of the 1970s and 80s apocalyptic vision movies such as Rollerball. But full socialism offers no better; a life of dreary mediocrity for all but party officials. Len McClusky was on Radio 4 yesterday, talking about how Corbyn offers hope to end ‘the austerity which is crippling this country’. Really? Not giving away any more free stuff than we can afford is crippling? When, under socialism, your productivity declines and there is simply not enough to go around, who do you decide to save?

The left in Britain has never had a coherent alternative to the actually very successful soft socialism the Conservative Party reside over. The continuing sitcom that is Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour continued over the weekend with both Emily Thornberry and Jezzer himself appearing all over the media to ‘explain’ Labour’s defence review. The message seemed to be, “It’s a review – we don’t know what the outcome will be” but one thing (almost) decided, by Emily & Jezz, if not by the party was no to nukes. What about the submarines, asked the meeja? We could have the bombers without Trident... or Trident without being equipped with nuclear warheads. Well, I suppose we already have aircraft carriers without aircraft, so why not?

What next? Guns without bullets? Troops without guns? A flag without a nationality? Continuing the anti-austerity, save the planet, do no harm agenda we could re-open the mines but not burn coal, build more nuclear power stations but never run them. Saving yet more money, how about having a comprehensive national transport policy but build no roads, or railways? Why not hospitals without doctors, schools without teachers? (Actually, that’s quite a good idea – keep that in.) When you are in opposition you can be creative; it’s easy to have policy without purpose if you’re never going to be in a position to enable it. Labour; a political party but with no intention of ever again being elected – the unilateral disarmament of the workers’ party.

The Labour Party prefers wife-beating to nukes.

So, capitalism gives us stuff but only lets you have it if you earn it. There is no such thing as ‘equality’ in capitalism; it’s winner takes all. On the other hand, Corbynism produces nothing but shares it out equitably. There has to be another way, a third way if you will. Whoops, wasn’t that Tony Blair’s big thing? But seriously the supposed third way is what we’ve practiced in Britain for a very long time. ‘From each’ and ‘to each’... up to a point. And austerity is simply the latest name given to the necessary balancing of the books. Corbyn is against that balance, but it’s okay – if we can have Trident without the nukes, I’m sure he can rustle up an economic policy without the money.

Budget Buggery!

Much talk over the last few days about the prospect of the Chancellor as an out-of-season Santa, giving away the goodies in exchange for votes. And it will work. Whoever is favoured in todays’ budget, however meagrely, will think just a little more kindly of the current administration. Of course there will also be the detractors and Ed Balls will magic up his own version of prizes for all in response, claiming that somehow Labour, who are largely and repeatedly responsible for the hideous debt burden the nation carries, have a solution to provide prosperity and equality for all. And it’s all bollocks; all of it.

We are simply bust. The fact that our national debt has doubled in the last five years is not ameliorated by the knowledge that it would almost certainly have tripled under Labour. Debt/deficit, the difference is simple enough, yet the ‘great’ British public, who are less numerate than they are literate are either too stupid to get it, or too stupefied by sheer terror to contemplate it. Because it’s like this: Imagine you buy a house for £200,000 on a 90% mortgage that costs you every penny you have left after eating and shortly thereafter you lose your job but manage to blag a mortgage top up of £20k to tide you over. But you can’t get a job that pays what you used to earn… and the value of your house falls to £150,000.

You don’t want to sell it and even if you could you’d still owe £50,000 but after a few months you realise you have no choice, bite the bullet, take the shitty job, rent a studio hovel and accept you’ll never own a home again and undertake to repay your outstanding debt at £3,000 a year for 30 years and hope the interest rates stay low. You can’t save, you have no pension plan and short of winning the lottery all that lies between you and the gutter is sucking up to your crappy boss and praying he doesn’t go bust himself. In short, for many people, it’s all a bit grim and likely to stay that way for some time. You just have to suck it up and carry on.

How do you prefer being cut?

No gimmicks, said George Osborne, so why the gimmick of Inheritance Tax reform which affects nobody without significant assets? Why persist with a Minimum Wage strategy that has ended up being a wage ceiling, rather than a floor? Why not, instead of just talking about ‘austerity’, actually start to implement it? And why not, above all, instead of trying to do a Tommy Cooper and pull a comedy rabbit from a battered old top hat, just tell the truth; we’re still broke and the odd little morsel of under-nourishment is going to do little to change that. It’s about time the government did what a hell of a lot of people are already doing and have done before. Why can’t we all just ‘be British’ about it?

Praise Be!

Well the Autumn Statement, as expected, brought news of yet more financial doom and gloom. The weather has taken a sharp turn for the wintry, pushing up petrol bills and making the roads even more treacherous than a Marxist Europhile. And the charging of Stuart Hall for sex offences is a knockout blow for Ho-ho-ho, prompting @davidtristram to deliver the brilliant "It's a Cockout" punchline on Twitter.

What else have we here? Pressure on the UK's AAA credit rating, the loss of the great jazz genius Dave Brubeck, albeit for a magnificent innings of 91, and yet more leaked plans for EU supremacy over national budgets... because the Eurozone is doing so well for all its internees, isn't it? Insane Green levies are going to put further pressure on winter heating bills, we are going to give away yet more billions to countries which don't need it, who squander it on government instead of aid and our deficit is yet to be reined in, without which our debt can only continue to grow.

All of which means it is even more likely that the turkeys will vote for a short-lived Christmas-future by electing back into power the very cause of our indebtedness in two year's time. Ed Balls may have looked a twat yesterday in Parliament, but the good old left-wing press will back his disastrous stances all the way to meltdown and enslavement by the state for all who remain. (Two years to pack your bags, workers.)

It's not all bad news though. A Russian oligarch's Polish builders have bulldozed to the ground a chateau in France, which is internationally hilarious, those cheeky Aussies raised a grin by posing as The Queen and Prince Phil on the telephone all the way from 'dairn-anda' and the grin has been wiped off the face of smug tech giants Apple to the tune of $35bn. We love a bit of schadenfreude, innit?

But I save the best news until last. A bid by a hideous, medieval, ignorant hate machine posing as a pseudo-religious authoritarian sect has had its plans for an enormous Jihadi training centre in the heart of Londonistan turned down by the planning authorities. It's only a matter of time of, course, before appeals based on their ethnic sensitivities mounted by human-wrongs lawyers sensing a fast buck will overturn the ruling and facilitate one more step along the way to an entirely Islamic Britain.

America shows the way...

But - silver lining time - at least the rabid Mussies might just have the balls to tell Europe to go and fuck itself up a camels' backside... after they've robbed it blind, of course.

Nifty Thrifty

It’s the start of the Conservative Party Conference… so I’m steering well clear of that malarkey; for a start it’s not the party I used to know. The real Conservatives would have shored up the borders, water-cannoned last year’s rioters and had Abu Hamza in Guantanamo lickety-spit. “Fuck Europe,” they would have said, “Gerrout…and take your flea-ridden donkey with you.” 

They would have also said “mustn’t grumble” and “it could be worse” and “make do and mend.” Yet the Conservatives of today are indistinguishable from the shit-stirring envious socialists of various turnip-picking workers’ parties of the seventies, their new mottos being “Must grumble.” And “It’s only going to get worse.” and “Hand-me-downs? Fuck off, I want all new stuff!” 

Being poor was never easy, but it was never so stigmatised as it is now. Everybody is entitled to lots of brand-new shiny shit regardless of effort, merit, or need and the very idea of anybody being capable of standing on their own two feet is anathema to the Europhilesucks who want everybody to be forever in the pocket of the Euroviet Union. And the hateful word on everybody’s lips right now? Austerity. 

Austerity? You make me laugh. When the going gets tough, you can go and get stuffed. The population output of the last thirty years or so is no more capable of surviving the downturn (for that is all it really is) than the Leadbetters in The Good Life, as this needle and thread story illustrates. I've been saying it for years; it’s the practical version of ‘spare the rod, spoil the child’. If they never do anything for themselves, how will they survive out there? And what’s so wrong about making do with what you’ve got? 

Thrift; that’s the name of the game and had it been practiced just a little bit by you, me and, oh, let’s say ‘the guvmint’, then the current economic blip would be seen as just that. The good times WILL return and life WILL be roses again, but there’s no point in sitting, waiting for somebody else to do it for you. Practise GOYA - Get Off Your Arse. So, I was delighted when one of my Twitter favourites @rachelradiostar unintentionally alerted me to the mighty @queen-frugal and her penny-pinching blog. Women after my own heart - cheap dates if I’m honest! 

This won't hurt a bit!

I’ve written before about how cheaply you can eat (my current weekly food shop is under £20 for absolutely EVERYTHING) but I'm a single fella, so who’s going to believe they can achieve it for a family? The papers last week were full of stories about Waitrose shoppers turning to Aldi and Marks & Sparks munchers re-using St Michael bags at Lidl’s. Well, why stop there? Don’t just buy cheaper, buy better and buy less. My frugal Kingly gift to you today then – no need to thank me – is to hand you over to Frugal Queen and her #FQstoptober campaign and challenge you to make Tesco's shareholders quake in their boots.

It don't add up!

Hmmm, The Daily Mail headlines the tale of the unemployed accountant. I'm not sure why they felt the need to highlight his plight, or why this story had any merit over and above the thousands of similar tales of financial woe. Or, more pertinently, why anybody would really care; he is an accountant, after all.

According to the article: "...the Timpsons drove two cars [and] enjoyed two foreign holidays a year [and] an affluent life in their four bedroom semi-detached house which they bought 12 years ago for £300,000 [and] felt so financially comfortable they remortgaged their property and took out a £50,000 loan in a bid to build their dream home on a plot of land they bought nearby in 2005..."

‘You assume as an accountant you will always be needed ..."

You would also assume, as an accountant, that he'd understand the fickle nature of money and instead of living high on the hog, would have salted away as much as possible for when times got difficult. Surely, he would never have advised employers or clients to borrow and spend like there was no tomorrow? Silly me - that's exactly what 'leverage' was. The buy-to-let market was all about borrow and spend... and hope.

For years small businesmen have been so terrified of finances and running foul of the taxman that they have paid the hourly rate for a qualified accountant, only to have a junior back-office clerk add up two columns of figures, subtract one from the other and fill in an online tax return. It was only a matter of time before some would wake up and realise an accountant was an unnecessary , non-deductible luxury they could no longer justify

If I and many like me watched in incredulous horror as the thrift model was overtaken by the ever accelerating credit economy and wondered just when that bloated, wobbly bubble was going to burst, surely an accountant should have been much more informed and wary - especially with his own money.

Interesting that this story appears on the same day as Exchequer Secretary David Gauke's rash condemnation that those who both paid and accepted cash-in-hand were just as bad as the bankers. Shame about the today's Daily Telegraph lead story that the cash economy is neither wrong nor immoral. Early polling suggests 75% of the readers also support that view. (Why aren't the government spin doctors stamping heavily on these almost daily ill-thought-out leaks?)

The root cause? Human greed, plain and simple. The possibility of getting something for nothing, or more for less, is a prospect that raises a gleam in the eye of humans rich and poor, big and small, the world over. As for tax avoidance, surely it is one of the principle aims of accountancy? Public servants, private businesses, charities and individuals have always been advised, nay encouraged, to avoid paying more tax than they had to. (SIPPS, ISAs Gift Aid to charity, etc)

Pugh cartoon from the Daily Mail

Our society runs on, promotes and excuses greed at all levels. Consumerism is pure greed. Saving is healthy, responsible greed. Addiction is greed, profiteering is greed. false accounting is greed, market-fixing is greed. Theft is greed and even murder is often motivated by greed. It's there, at the heart of the drive for human survival and advancement. Like it or not, greed gets you out of bed in the morning.

Now, if I put my other fist in there?

In the movie Wall Street, Gordon Gecko said "Greed is good". He was wrong, it's much, much simpler than that, Greed is human.

So, now it's agreed we're greedy fuckers, can we shift the debate back, not to who is to blame (all of us) but how we're going to fix it?