At the Eleventh Hour of the Eleventh Day of the Eleventh Month

Poppies

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning,
We will remember them.

In the last 12 months the following have died in the service of their country:

  • Thomas, Oliver
  • Walters, James
  • ulkner, Spencer
  • Chauhan, Rakesh
  • Clarke, Thomas
  • Moralee, Adam
  • Holloway, Richard
Image taken from Clear Inner Vision

List of British military deaths in Afghanistan since 2013-11-11 courtesy of the BBC

National Minimum Wage v’s Living Wage (2015 Edition)

So the Living Wage folks yesterday told us that for 2015 the Living Wage (outside of London) is £7.85/hour.

Running the numbers and comparing them to the National Minimum Wage (NMW) of £6.50/hour we get the following:

NMW LW
Gross Pay (£) 12,675.00 15,307.50
Income Tax (£) 535.00 1,061.50
Employee’s National Insurance (£) 566.28 882.18
Employer’s National Insurance (£) 651.22 1014.51
Nett Pay (£) 11,573.72 13,363.82

The difference between the Nett LW and the Gross NMW is £688.82 per annum. Over a year (52 x 37.5 hour weeks = 1950 hours) that is an extra 35p per hour – or £1 less than the LW.

Raise the NMW wage to £6.85/hour, the starting rates of Income Tax and National Insurance to £12,675 and, hey presto, we have the so-called Living Wage.

Simples.

Bill Oddie the Statist

British families should be “contained” to stop them having too many children, Bill Oddie has said.

The Springwatch presenter claimed the answer to over-population was not curbing immigration, but restricting the size of families.

Bill Oddie has three children. I wonder if he thinks he would have been allowed the second, let alone the third, under such a policy?

The Causes of the Cost of Living Crisis

MG shall be in attendance at this debate organised by Libertarian Home:

Date: 23rd October
Time: 1900 – 2200
Location: The Drama Studio, Institute of Education, 20 Bedford Way, London WC1H 0AL

The left has sought to make the Cost of Living a part of its intellectual territory. Market liberals have thus far failed to claim it, but not for the want of trying.

While it is the lower and middle classes that feel the pinch of inflation and stagnant wages, all classes have to pay prices for essentials that sometimes seem unjustifiable. What makes the Cost of Living so high in the first place?

Libertarian Home is assembling a balanced panel of speakers who will consider each of several causes in turn. Expert witnesses will bring their perspectives and answer questions from the panel and the audience.

Is the Cost of Living rightfully and exclusively an issue for the left? Do free market reformers really care? Who is to blame and what can be done about it?

Confirmed Speakers
Kristian Niemietz – Institute of Economic Affairs
Yaron Brook – Ayn Rand Institute
James Bloodworth – Editor of Left Foot Forward
Christopher Snowdon – Institute of Economic Affairs
Chris Mounsey – Libertarian blogger and activist
Duncan Stott – Liberal Democrat and activist for Priced Out
Lee Rotherham – EU expert and TPA research fellow
Ben Etheridge – Assistant professor at the University of Essex

Brief profiles of all speakers are available at Libertarian Home.

Further details and tickets

Poe’s Law conundrums (Millipede Jr’s 2014 Conference Speech edition)

Is this a typical Gruniad sub-editing fail or have they just repeated the briefing notes verbatim:

The Labour leader’s big six goals are designed to restore a lost faith in the future. They are:

  • Ensuring as many school leavers go on to apprenticeships as go to university.
  • Help working families share fairly in the UK’s wealth.
  • Meet the demand for new homes by doubling the number of first-time buyers from the current 200,000 a year to 400,000.
  • Halve the number of low paid – defined as those earning two-thirds of median earnings – from 5 million to 2.5 million.
  • Create a million more hi-tech green jobs in a bid to overhaul the number of Germans and Japan.
  • Restore the NHS by integrating health and care services, ensuring joined up preventive care to keep the healthy out of hospital.

Whither Scotland

The campaigning is done, the pollsters have retired and the people of Scotland are voting. We shall know the outcome tomorrow.

Personally I think they should go for it. Accept that they will suffer some short-term pain whilst telling two levels of politicians to take a very long walk off a very short pier.

However, if we are to believe the opinion polls, the outcome is too close to call. Are they accurate though? We all know that people lie and/or change their mind and my gut feeling is that, in the end, they will opt for the devil they know rather than uncertainty.

Whatever the result, unless it is a resounding ‘no’, the UK is going to have to make some changes across the course of the 2015-2020 parliament – whether that is negotiating the break-up of the union or substantial changes to how the UK is run.

I don’t though trust politicians or civil servants to do either very well. If it is to be independence, I foresee 18 months of blazing rows between Westminster and Holyrood as each side argues over who gets the CD collection. If not then I expect them to fudge the issue of federalising the UK as much as possible to ensure that all power remains in the centre.

If they do fudge then all they will have done is kicked the can down the road – and I’m not sure the electorate will stand for it, not this time. English nationalism, a generally dormant thing, seems to be stirring and I suspect things could get ugly if it is felt that the politicians have got it wrong. That is not something I want to see.

What I would like to see (but realise won’t happen) is for one of the main parties to grit their teeth and vote for Christmas by promising in their 2015 election manifesto that pretty much everything bar foreign policy and defence will be devolved down to at least the city or regional/county level. Let the major population centres take control. Let county hall or the parish council be more than a glorified talking shop. Decentralise everything.

Sure, there will still be far too many politicians for my liking but it is a step on the road to each person being their own independent nation rather than citizens of an arbitrary set of lines on a map.

Whether the Scots vote for their freedom or not, change is coming. These are truly interesting times.

HMRC Direct Recovery Powers – sign the petition

You may have heard that there are proposals out from Government / HMRC to grant HMRC a so-called “direct recovery” power.

In essence this would allow HMRC to debit a tax payers bank account for any unpaid tax arrears, without oversight or prior notice. There would be a stipulation that the bank balance must remain at a minimum £5,000 after the debit so as not to dip into people’s business working capital or immediate household funds, but that’s more or less the only safeguard.

These proposals cover business and personal tax debts.

Many people are very worried about these proposals. HMRC already have powers to achieve the same end via the Courts, Direct Recovery cuts out that element of oversight and due process. It could be argued its “efficiency” for HMRC, or from an opposite perspective laziness.

The accounting profession has major concerns over HMRCs administrative capability – simply there are too many erroneous assessments, mistakes and misallocations – and the bottom line is many feel this is a step to far with HMRCs powers.

There is a longer article about some of the problems on the Taxation web site (you should be able to read this without a login) and a petition on the Government e-petitions web site.

Can I urge people to consider their response to this issue and

  1. Sign the petition
  2. Highlight the issue to colleagues, family and friends (feel free to share this post)
  3. Consider a letter of objection to your MP

This post first appeared at Whitefield Tax on August 21st.

A visit to the Cornershop

It wouldn’t be unfair to say that I am a cultural philistine. I can look at the works of the great artists such as Constanble, Turner et al and appreciate that they have something but they do nothing for me. On the other hand something like Tracey Emin’s unmade bed just makes me think WTF? In short I don’t bother going to art galleries because I’d be bored senseless and just want to leave very quickly.

As anyone who follows Mark Sparrow on twitter (or read this post by Anna – or any of the other publicity) will know by now, his daughter, Lucy, has, for the month of August, been manning a cornershop in East London stuffed full of things you might find in any other cornershop. But with one small difference: all the items on display are made of felt and put together by Lucy herself.

I first found about this when, having asked Mark if he’d like to meet for lunch on my way back from the West Country on August 1st, he blew me off having realised it co-incided with the grand opening. (No, Mark, I won’t tell Lucy you initially agreed and then had to back out once you’d remembered. :D)

My curisoity peaked, I finally found some time to walk over there after work one day nd have a nose around. As you do, I took some pictures as well.

All the news that is fit to felt

If you looked at the pictures, I expect you can realise that Lucy has certainly put in a lot of effort to produce this. Something like 6 months or so I believe and the end result is certainly a testiment to this. Philistine that I am, I can appreciate this even if I’m baffled as to why. 🙂

Just do(n’t record) it

UK Law:

Legal: Consensual sex between people aged 16 and over.
Illegal: Taking pictures of people aged 16 and 17 that can be considered sexual in nature as, because they are under 18, the pictures are, by law, child pornography.

Yes, I’m aware this situation isn’t new. I just wanted to point out, for posterity, how blitheringly stupid the situation is.

Wanted: An England Cricket Captain

For anyone who follows the England cricket team, the talk about their current captain, Alastair Cook, is pretty much unavoidable.

The successor to the pretty successful Andrew Strauss, he was always going to have to tough act to follow but, initially, it seemed to be going well. He avoided a potential banana skin in Bangladesh in Feb/Mar 2010 (scoring plenty of runs in the process) whilst deputising for the rested Strauss and started well by leading the side to 2-1 series win in India (again scoring heavily) in 1012/13 in the first series after Strauss retired.

Sadly for both Cook and England that has proved to be the high point of his reign (a 3-0 win in the Ashes in 2013 not withstanding). Since the end of the 2013 Ashes series England have lost 5-0 to Australia in Australia*, 1-0 to Sri Lanka and look likely to finish second in the current India series. His personal stats with the bat are no less grim: 277 runs @ 27.70 in Ashes 2013, 246 @ 24.60 in Ashes 2013/14, 78 @ 19.50 against Sri Lanka and, so far, 15 @ 7.50 against India.

Against this there is also the continuing fallout of the 2013/14 Ashes whitewash to consider. Those who know the full story aren’t telling which leaves everyone else speculating. All we know for sure is that the England management called time on Kevin Pietersen’s international career shortly after the team returned from Australia. There is no doubt that KP, on his day, was a brilliantly destructive batsman. However it is also not in doubt that he has fallen out with many of the teams he has played for (Nottinghamshire, Hampshire and England being three obvious examples). Strauss may have been an idiot for calling him a complete c*** on an open microphone but that doesn’t make the description any less true.

All of this leaves us where we are today: a rudderless team lead by a man who is, to put it very bluntly, horribly out of form with the bat, looking clueless in the field (even compared MS Dhoni – hardly a great skipper himself!) – as the third session of the first day of the current game ably demonstrated – and increasingly forlorn (as this picture after his dismissal on Friday shows).

Also, just to add to the woes, the current wicket keeper (Matt Prior), is also out of form, dropping relatively simply chances, and is, possibly, several games past what should have been the end of his international career.

My reading of the current dilemma is that Cook won’t quit (but he’d probably be quite happy right now if he was sacked) whilst the ECB won’t sack him (but would be quite relieved if he quit).

However I think there is a solution – one that will kill two birds with one stone.

If the ECB won’t sack him then the face-saving answer will be to say that he has picked up an injury and will be unavailable for a month or so thus ruling him out of the rest of the series (first day of the last test is 15th August). Conveniently Essex (Cook’s domestic team) do not have another First Class game until 15th August and certainly wouldn’t miss him in the shorter stuff between now and then. This gives him time to take a complete break from the game and perhaps clear his head.

In the meantime, England will need a new skipper and a new opening batsman. Given that nobody in the current side is pushing their captaincy credentials (Ian Bell is a foot soldier, not a leader; Stuart Broad’s attempts to do the T20 job have been poor and James Anderson seems unable to lead the bowling attack for any length of time) the selectors need to look outside of the team.

My suggestion would be to select either James Foster or Chris Read. Both captain their counties and both are wicket keepers. Pick either of them (I’d prefer Foster but I am biased**), tell them that the job is theirs come what may until the end of the 2015/16 season just so long as they get the players functioning as a unit and take that time to identify where the leadership group amongst the current (or near-future) group of players is. Add in an opener (Carberry or Compton probably) and then see how it goes. A new spearhead will be needed to replace Anderson (probably after Ashes 2015) and there is the lingering problem of a spinner but those are not decisions for the captain.

Give the ODI and T20 captaincy to Eoin Morgan (he’s unlikely to figure in the test side again) and tell Broad to pick no more than two formats (hopefully Tests only) to play.

In the meantime Cook can, if he wants, return to Essex colours for some of their last 4 First Class games this season. If he starts scoring runs then consider him for the 2014/15 season. If not then he gets a winter off and starts again in 2015 and gets picked for England (as a batsman only) when he is back in nick and scoring without difficulty domestically.

* A stupidly timed series that owes everything to the ECB chasing money. A more sensible approach to ensuring that the away (for the English) Ashes series doesn’t fall in the same season as the Cricket World Cup would have been to push the away series back a year rather than bringing it forward a year. The end result of this is that there will be 3 Ashes series in 2 years.

** Foster on test duty allows Ben Foakes to keep wicket regularly for Essex thus keeping him with the county before he wanders off like Adam Wheater did and we end up scrabbling for a new ‘keeper once Foster retires.