Misanthrope Girl

My timeline was, on Thursday evening, chuckling about the fact that Margaret Hodge had run into a little difficulty when being asked by Krishnan Guru-Murthy of Channel 4 News about her own tax arrangements.

Whilst it was certainly quite amusing to watch her use the same answer about her affairs that she has publicly derided the likes of Google, Amazon and Starbucks for, my attention was caught by the clip which proceeded it.

I am not an accountant nor an economist – let alone a business reporter – but so far as I can see Siobhan Kennedy made two glaring errors in that piece.

The first is one same one which everybody seems to make these days: confusing sales with profits. Whether this is deliberate or due to ignorance I leave up to you, dear reader, and your personal prejudices.

It was the second one though which had me, to use the modern parlance, facepalming. Indeed I even went back and listened to it again just to make sure I was hearing correctly:

…making sales which could be subject to income tax under UK law.

Frankly, I’d expect better from a business journalist.

As I have mentioned before, I have never tortured my eyeballs by subjecting them to a Dan Brown novel. This was a personal choice and Geoffrey K. Pullum’s The Dan Brown Code simply further entrenched my desire never to do so.

However it is because of Pullum’s piece that I am able to appreciate Michael Deacon’s excellent skewering of Brown in the Telegraph on Friday:

The critics said his writing was clumsy, ungrammatical, repetitive and repetitive. They said it was full of unnecessary tautology. They said his prose was swamped in a sea of mixed metaphors. For some reason they found something funny in sentences such as “His eyes went white, like a shark about to attack.” They even say my books are packed with banal and superfluous description, thought the 5ft 9in man. He particularly hated it when they said his imagery was nonsensical. It made his insect eyes flash like a rocket.

If you haven’t already, do please go and read the whole thing. If, like me, you have chosen to avoid Brown’s oeuvre then read Pullum first.

On Sunday Barack Obama gave the commencement address to the graduating class of The Ohio State University at Ohio Stadium in Columbus, Ohio…

Ronald Reagan who?

h/t Maggie McNeill for re-tweeting it into my timeline.

Self-styled ‘Child Protection Expert’ and teller of tall tales about Jimmy Savile and Duncroft, Mark Williams-Thomas (MWT), has – I assume in order to be able to pontificate in great detail via any media outlet which will let him – been keeping a beady eye on the trials of Mark Bridger and Stuart Hazell, and today came out with these words of wisdom…

Anyone in any doubt just how important it is to prosecute those with child abuse material should follow the #AprilJones & #tiasharp trials

— Mark Williams-Thomas (@mwilliamsthomas) May 7, 2013

MWT’s argument here is that if you do, watch or indulge in X then Y will happen as night follows day. By the same logic the following statements are true:

• All cannabis users will take harder drugs such as crack cocaine, heroin etc.
• Anyone who has watched pornography will become a rapist.
• Owning a firearm means that one day you will walk into a school and massacre a classroom full of children.

But, since we know that they aren’t, you really do have to be a complete cretin to assert that possessing an image of child abuse (as distasteful as it is) means that you will automatically become a killer of children for kicks.

A man was fined for racism after he branded Welsh people “sheep shaggers”

They’ll be fining us for calling the French ‘frogs’ and the Germans ‘krauts’ next…

Born at the fag-end of Callaghan’s Premiership I, unlike some who have recently been emoting vehemently, lived through the Winter of Discontent and all of Baroness Thatcher’s time as Prime Minister. Not being a child prodigy, I cannot though claim to have memories of seeing and experiencing much of the events of the time first hand. As for those born after she left office who apparently know so much of what life was like under her, I can only say that I am in awe.

My knowledge of her time – and the events leading up to her 1979 election victory – is the result of what my parents have said and what I have read over the last 20 or so years. I do however know that there is a lot of difference between words on the page and first hand experience.

She was not perfect – no person, especially a politician, ever will be and anyone who seriously claims that they are should be referred to the nearest loony bin ASAP – but so far as my interpretation of her time goes, she left this country in a far better shape economically than it was when she started.

My memories of events in the world around me go back to the mid/late 1980s. I recall my mum watching the wedding of Prince Andrew, I saw Challenger explode on the news and I loved some of the privatisation adverts but I have little memory of almost all of the politics of the day.

Politically the first thing I remember is the Poll Tax and the brouhaha which surrounded it. Although a political disaster for the Conservatives and the policy which triggered Lady Thatcher’s downfall, it is perhaps ironic that my contempt for the hypocrisy of socialism can probably be dated to this time.

Whilst my dislike (and eventual hatred) of tax didn’t begin until I had to start paying it in its most obvious forms (Income, NI, Council) I became aware of its existence as a result of the Community Charge. A flat rate tax with every adult paying the same, my young mind couldn’t, initially, work out why socialists, with their commitment to everyone being treated equally, would object to being taxed equally. It was the eventual realisation that people don’t always mean what they say which allowed me to understand that perhaps socialists don’t like the idea equality in practice – let alone when it applies to them.

RIP Baroness Margaret Hilda Thatcher, 1925 – 2013.

Here we have two pieces of prose, one (on the left) from Iain Martin, journalist and political commentator writing for the Telegraph and the second (on the right) from Patrick Warner, Conservative Councillor for Sovereign Ward, Eastbourne.

They look identical, no?

Both were published yesterday (April 5th) with Iain’s showing up at approximately 0700 (the earliest comment appears at 0713) and Patrick’s at 1503.

The obvious thought is that Cllr Warner has copied the entire thing without attribution and is passing it off as his own work.

Cllr Warner has been asked (via twitter) why his piece looks uncannily like Iain Martin’s but he has yet to respond.

Given that every rise in the personal allowance these days is met with an equivalent drop in the level at which the 40% rate kicks in (can’t have the rich benefiting, can we?), the logical extension of this policy is that the two will meet at around the £25,500 mark and the 20% band will completely disappear.

Family flowers only. Donations instead of flowers, if desired, to Hacked Off.

At this moment politicians in Nicosia are (assuming it hasn’t been postponed again) giving up their bank holiday to discuss the false choice presented to them by the Eurozone finance ministers: accept a deeply damaging bailout agreement or face bankruptcy.

In a statement released on Saturday, the Cypriot President was optimistic that the bailout “would put a definitive end to the uncertainty and restart our economy.”

I think it is safe to say that his optimism is not shared by the Cypriot people – nor many others not on the Greek half of the island.

Much, if not all, of the anger is focused on the decision that bank deposits in the country – previously thought to be safe because of deposit insurance – are to be subjected to a 6.75% levy whilst all amounts above the protection level of €100,00 are to be decimated*. The immediate (and not unsurprising) result of this was that the Cypriots tried to trigger a bank run – only to find that their government had introduced restrictions on the movement of capital. Can’t have people deliberately evading superstate-sponsored theft, can they?

However, as Frances points out, it isn’t quite that cut-and-dried…

The description of this as a “tax” or levy is a bit of a fudge. Under what type of taxation scheme are people provided with shares to compensate them for the taxes they have paid? But that is what is happening here. Depositors will be provided with bank shares to the value of their losses. They are being “bailed in” in the same way as junior bond holders: a percentage of their deposits are being converted to equity. The money taken from the depositors will go to the sovereign to compensate it for the cost of bailing out the banks. At the end of the process, the sovereign will be left with a manageable amount of debt, and the banks will be owned by their depositors and junior bondholders. In effect they will have become mutuals.

…before going on to explain the flaws in the plan.

Olli Rehn, European Commissioner for Economic and Monetary Affairs and the Euro, has said that this will be a one-off but given the number of one-off’s the Eurozone has seen in the last few years, it is unlikely that he will be taken as seriously as he might like – especially given the situation in Greece, Portugal and Spain. I imagine that the Italians are suddenly looking over their shoulders as well. How much money is going to flow out of those countries in the next few days?

Further Reading:
Frances Coppola: Reaping the Whirlwind
Tim Worstall: Welcome to another Great Depression
Tom Paine: Governments, gangsters… Same thing, different name
Richard North: A massive own goal