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Give me a break

May 2nd, 2012 by

Somebody on BBC breakfast TV this morning was once again bewailing their lot about the injustice of life and how hard and difficult everything was. I have to say I am getting heartily sick of all this.
By any standards life in the western world carries an enviable lifestyle – way beyond anything dreamt of by our ancestors. In fact from any kind of historical perspective we enjoy an amazing standard of living. One only has to go back to the time of Dicken’s London and life in the rookeries – 20 people living in a single room, no sanitation or running water, virtually no public services and certainly no benefit payments. In the industrial north and down the mines it was as bad if not worse and poverty in the country was endemic.
Look at the trouble spots around the world and much of Africa today to see real poverty and hardship. By comparison with all this we live charmed lives and yet we still seem to want to complain about everything and look on the black side. Truth is we really have never had it so good – despite minor blips such as a recession – and it is time we recognised it.
Time to be happy and enjoy life – and be thankful that fate has been kind to us.

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Depressed, moi?

Apr 29th, 2012 by

I am just so depressed today. Not the weather (although that is not helping) but the state of the Tory party. According to today’s paper they are trailing Labour by some way for reasons that are not difficult to fathom. A series of cock ups handled badly have given the opposition the chance to snipe away at them and even Milliband has been able to score hits. Is Cameron in charge or is it just all a soggy mess?

And we have local government elections in a few days time which will see lots of Councils switching back to Labour followed by lots of disputes between them and the centre. So whilst the Governments policies remain the right ones in many key areas they are being trounced in the media handling stakes.

I just cannot face the idea that we might find ourselves under a Labour Government again in a year or two’s time. It would be an absolute disaster – pretty much like the French will find when they vote in a socialist president who has no idea how to run their economy. There is such a lack of realism in the electorate – not just here in the UK but across Europe which is becoming more uncompetitive by the day. Hey ho…….

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Don’t you just love technology

Apr 19th, 2012 by

OK so what is the problem? Why no blog for so long?

Well by PC died last week and I have only now managed to get my hands on a new one and get it working. I say get it working but that is a bit of a joke. What happened is that we backed up all the files and setting on an external hard drive as the old PC was dying and thought we had been very clever. However when the new one arrived it would not download any of the files we had saved. So tomorrow I am off to see a man who will extract the hard drive from the old machine and by some magic trick extract its contents and download them. Wonderful stuff modern technology.

Meanwhile the bank decided to trigger a fraud alert as I used my business credit card to fund the purchase. They blocked the card and wrote to me asking me to get in touch urgently (they claimed they did not have a phone number to ring even though we have had the account with them for 15 years and are regularly in touch by phone). The letter said they were open 24hrs so I rang in the evening and got a recorded message that they shut at 6.00pm. When I rang the following day and pointed out that they should either extend their opening hours or amend the wording of their letter I was told that I was quite wrong and I could not possibly have got that message! Apology, not a chance – I’m just the customer. In fact they were pretty rude. Oh and this is one of the banks bailed out by the British tax payer. Is it me……….

But never mind at least my faithful reading public will not need to wait so long for the next instalment.

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Foot in mouth

Apr 4th, 2012 by

It has certainly been a bad week or so for the Tories, tripping over gerry cans and the fiasco over private fund raising dinners with Dave. Need to smarten their act up and pull themselves together. Call me Dave needs to take more control and they all must think more carefully before making foot in mouth remarks. Talk about own goals!

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Here’s hoping

Mar 28th, 2012 by

Two things the Government are doing give me cause for hope in this nightmare of bureaucracy and maladministration around us. Firstly the simplification of the planning laws that has just been implemented promises less red tape to tangle us all in (as we suffered when we moved here) with safeguards for the countryside. So I am not behind the cries of doom and gloom coming from the National Trust and others that the countryside is in danger of being concreted over. That I think is unlikely – hopefully we will just suffer fewer public sector jobsworths crawling over what we do.

It also promises to rebalance the ludicrous situation we have of gypsy encampments cynically claiming they are being deprived of their human rights in favour of local communities. Speaking of which our friends in Meriden have now won against the gypsies there (in fact that was one of the stimulants to changing the law) as the High Court have rejected their (the gypsies) appeal – although they have yet to be evicted. So this community suffered two years of disruption to their lives, had to mount a 24hour vigil for the whole of this time and have paid lawyers some £70k from their own pockets to fight the case – and they are the innocent party!

Secondly the reorganisation of the NHS promises less money being spent on layers of administration and more on patient care. Predictably there is a whole lot of whinging from health workers who will not be able to hide behind bureaucracy and GPs who might have to work hard for a change. Yes I have had enough of GPs telling us how difficult it all is. In fact if you look at what has happened over the last 20 years or so they are now paid much more in real terms and do not provide any out of hours cover, so excuse me if they do not get the sympathy vote from me. Just do the job we pay you to do.

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Whinge, whinge

Mar 23rd, 2012 by

A lot of whinging going on about the budget and all presented in BBC soundbytes. All the special interest groups crawl out of the woodwork to say how terrible it is going to be for those they represent – and of course the media gives them loads of air time.

But when you look at it carefully it is a pretty balanced budget. We escaped by the skin of our teeth from a mansion tax but those who have the money to buy one will have to pay higher stamp duty. Fair enough. Better off pensioners will have to make a contribution as their allowances are going to be phased out (but this will not affect those at the bottom of the pile widely featured on the TV complaining about it).

Most of all it is a budget for the working population with no increase in unemployment etc benefits. So at last we may be tipping the scales against the workshy who think they can live off the rest of us. If that is so that will be a great move and long overdue. If we are going to succeed in this world we need to foster hard work, creativity and all the rest. So given the difficult economic circumstances I think Osborne has done well. No really…….

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Off to the Caymen islands

Mar 19th, 2012 by

Well that’s it. We are off to the Caymen islands- well our house is anyway. I am now going to register it with a company there. That way I can avoid the mansion tax and inheritance tax and all the other taxes the Lib Dems want to throw at me. What is it they do not get about attracting the wealth creators to this country rather than trying to get them to leave it? If the top 1% are providing 27% of the tax revenue then why exactly do we keep trying to make life difficult for them?

How about making life difficult for all the people who think it is fine to live off benefit and that they have an ‘entitlement’ to everything when they have contributed nothing? I am not talking about the genuinely disabled, sick and old but the vast army of workshy pond life who seem to be totally resiliant to all attempts by politicians to incentivise them to get off their backsides and contribute to the economy.

We seem determined to find reasons to criticise those creating wealth rather than those consuming it. Even in the banking sector it is about time we reduced the level of vitriol. If investment bankers are genuinely making money for their banks then bonuses are fine. It is the retail banks that are failing us – small businesses, those who want home loans etc – and failing to help restart the economy. That is where we should be concentrating our criticism.

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I’ll have to sack one of the gardeners

Mar 11th, 2012 by

Like the man in the Sunday Times said, I’ll have to sack one of the gardeners if the mansion tax goes ahead. As we have only got one I suppose that means I will have to do it all. Never mind, anything to keep the Lib Dems happy and the Dave & Nick show on the road.

But I really do hate the politics of envy that engulfs the Lib Dems and Labour to such an extent. There is clearly a strong feeling that the rich are not pulling their weight and that they should be doing more – hence all the hysteria for a tycoon tax (whatever that is) or a mansion tax. In fact the top 1% of earners pay over 27% of the tax in the UK which does seem to suggest they are making a bit of an effort. Compare this with all the scroungers on benefit wailing their lot or indeed the middle class couples who are crying because they will lose their child allowance.

Anyway the good news is that the mansion tax would cost more to implement than it would yeild in taxation. Firstly there would be all the revaluation of property necessary before it could be applied and then I am sure there would be many grounds on which it could be challenged in individual cases ( I am counting on it!) But the fundamental point is that people who make a lot of money are usually the jobs/wealth creators for society so instead of trying to punish them we should be giving them incentives to want to work and set up businesses here. That way we all benefit ….. or is that too difficult for left wing politicians to understand?

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To the manor born

Mar 4th, 2012 by

Its been something of a frantic week with maintenance work going on, the (new) mower going wrong again, guests coming and going and wedding viewings amongst all this. So by way of a break yesterday we went to a wedding fayre (very sad) …… but we are now tapped into all the local wedding suppliers who are a friendly lot and we all try to help each other. I see that the idea of putting a tax on all mansions is on again which will hit us. There seems to be this view that we are all super rich and can be soaked to pay the ever higher benefits bill for all the scroungers – sorry, deserving needy. But most of the people with big houses where we are have had to develop money making schemes to keep these listed heritage properties in good order. A lot of them (unlike us) have inherited them and are actually asset rich but cash poor. Hardly the super rich!

Meanwhile a suppressed report by KPMG suggests that the wind turbines desicrating our countryside to achieve stupid ‘green energy’ targets by 2020 will cost £45bn more than achieving these targets in other ways. No wonder the report was suppressed! Not even the mansion tax is going to make much of an impression to find that extra money. So we are all going to have to bear the cost as well as look at these ugly things. Don’t you just love politicians……..

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All about money

Feb 26th, 2012 by

Apparently it is now costing us £100k per week to monitor Abu Quatada  – now that we cannot lock him up or deport him back to Jordan. The reason we cannot deport him is that the poor chap might be subject to torture in his home land to extract information. I have to say why should we worry about this? This is the guy who has/is planning attrocities that will mutilate or kill innocent civilians. Exactly how concerned should we be for his welfare?

But to pay the surveillance costs we can now look to the wealthy – the top 1% pay some 30% of the taxes in the UK – to cough up as they do on everything else. Still we have the politics of envy and people saying we should soak the rich; but clearly we already are. Time some people lower down the pile stepped up to the plate and made a contribution instead of expecting the state (ie the better off) to pay for everything.

The one piece of good news is that the mansion tax is apparently dead – despite the Lib Dems – which is excellent for us. This would have been the thin edge of what could become a very large wedge. In any case most large houses like ours have very high maintenance costs and owners are already working hard to keep them in good shape. The last thing any of us need is an extra tax on the basis of a misguided belief that we are swimming in money!

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