ThunderDragon Blog

Alistair Darling is considering printing more money.

Yeah, because that worked just so well for the Weimar Republic…

James Purnell, Works and Pensions Secretary, signed a paper proposing to charge interest on emergency state loans, which is a disgusting thing to do.

Surely these emergency state loans are given only to those who are in dire need of the money - currently including 1.2 million benefit claimants, many of whom are elderly or disabled - and simply cannot afford to get one from a bank or credit union. There can be no justification for charging interest, especially the level of interest that they proposed, on these emergency loans.

The government have since denied that they want to do, instead effectively saying that the paper was poorly worded. In that case, why did James Purnell sign it? Does he not even read the papers to which he puts his name?

The paper does not explicitly state the emergency state loans would remain interest free, but rather implies the very opposite:

To fund the cost of these extra services [such as savings accounts and financial advice], we are proposing that the credit offered under these arrangements could attract an interest charge of 1-2% per month - the same criterion which applies to credit unions…

In 2007-08 the average initial budgeting loan award was £433.30. The estimated average loan repayment for all loans was £10.54 a week. If interest were charged at 2 per cent a month it would take 46 weeks instead of 42 to repay such a loan at such a repayment rate with a total interest paid of £47.80.

If they were not considering charging interest on these loans - amounting to an annual rate of between 12.68% and 26.8% - why did not they not just say so?

There are only two reasons that I can think of for this paper getting signed. Either the government really wanted to penalise the poorest or James Purnell doesn’t even bother reading the papers he signs. Neither exactly inspire confidence.

“It seems a little bit like the addict returning to the drug” - Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, on Gordon Brown’s “fiscal stimulus” national debt-raising plans.

What’s the point when no action is ever taken? Both Jack Straw and Peter Hain have been “cleared”, despite obviously breaking the rules by declaring donations extremely late.

Jack Straw declared a £3,000 donation four years late, yet the Electoral Commission said that it would not be “appropriate nor proportionate” to take further action, which is plainly ridiculous since Straw has blatantly breached the rules. He should be required to forfeit the money he was given.

Peter Hain was not charged over the late declaration of £103,000 - not an easy amount to lose down the back of the couch - purely because the police couldn’t establish with “certainty… where responsibility for reporting donations lies in such circumstances”. So he’s got off the hook because his deputy leadsership campaign team was poorly organised - that’s not really an acceptable excuse on Hain’s part.

Some action should have been taken against both of these politicians. If no action is going to be taken, why do they bother investigating political donations at all? And why do they even bother having rules on declaring donations within 30 days and on whom they can be given by? What’s the point of having rules if they’re not going to be enforced?

Sometimes it really is hard to believe the gall of MPs sometimes:

A “cash-in-hand culture” could be costing the government more than £2bn a year in lost taxes, MPs have said. (BBC)

They prefer cash-in-their-back-pockets. After all, they can decide their own pay and perks, take on high-paid outside roles - and how much tax we all pay. Not that they actually do anything other than roll over and have their tummy tickled whenever a finance bill is proposed.

MPs complaining about others lining their pockets at the taxpayer’s expense? “Hypocrites” is the word that springs to mind.

The credit crunch/recession/”downturn”, whatever you want to call it, is now directly affecting politics. More than 10% of the staff at CCHQ is to be made redundant and a pay and hiring freeze is to be introduced as the income stream slows down.

What has happened is that the Conservatives failed to use the donations they were being given in the good times most efficiently, but instead needlessly wasted money. And the Conservatives are affected more than Labour because they rely on individuals donating money, rather than bankrolling by the unions.

It is disappointing that they have not used the money party members, including myself, have donated more effectively. But hopefully they have now woken up to this and will do more so in the future.

I am going to make a donation of as much as I can afford to the Conservative Party so that they can continue to fight Labour and hopefully achieve our aim of a Conservative government after the next election, whenever that may be held.

And I urge you to as well. Donate!

BBC Headline: Poverty chief ‘paid nearly £1m’

The head of a government-owned body which helps to tackle poverty in developing countries earned £970,000 last year, it has emerged…

Established as the Colonial Development Corporation in 1948, CDC is responsible for channelling investment into many of the world’s poorest countries by supporting promising and growing businesses there…

Pay and levels had been compared with those of other senior staff in development finance institutions, pension funds and private equity “fund of funds” - but that was changed to a comparison with the private equity firms only, where pay was significantly higher.

Mr Laing’s pay went up from £383,000 in 2004 to £970,000 last year while average remuneration for senior executives was £435,000 in 2007.

So the head of a government-owned body whose aim to help poor countries develop is earning nearly £1 million per annum. However much of an “exceptional” performance they may or may not have acheived, that is a pay cheque several magnitudes too high.

Especially since their development philosophy is basically persuading other fund managers to be ‘ethical’ and invest in poor countries. And it has £1.4 billion in the cash in the UK, which is actually [just about] more than it actually disperses, with net assets of £2.7 billion. Of which a lot of only goes to countries such as China, India and South Africa, which really aren’t that poor but are well on the way to becoming major economic powers in their own rights.

Were this a private company with the same aims, it would be no worse than a severe case of hypocrisy. But as it really is not much short of an insult that the CEO of a publicly-owned company is getting paid so much doing a job that is supposed to be helping the porrest of the poor.

Patients are using private hospitals at the expense of the NHS. However, this is a good thing. Despite the claims by doctors this is “losing” public money to the private sector:

This is money that is being lost from the NHS.

That can compromise services and patients should be told that by going private in this way they are potentially putting care they may need in the future under pressure.

They really aren’t understanding the issue, are they? This money isn’t being “lost”, it’s being spent in a more efficient way.

When they go to these private hospitals for care paid for by the NHS, the hospital are paid at NHS cost. This means that the private hospital is providing the service at no more cost to the public purse than if the operation had been carried out by the NHS. And at the same time freeing up space in NHS hospitals and operation theatres for other patients. Thus meaning we are treating more patients. Surely this is a good thing?

Yes. Except for the NHS trusts.

What this shows is that 147 private hospitals are able to provide health services at NHS costs and make money doing it. So why are NHS trusts compeltely unable to meet the levels of efficiency of the private sector?

As patients have the choice of hospitals, including private ones, then they can get their treatment in a location best suited to them and in the fastest time possible without costing the NHS any more money. It has introduced a form of market into the NHS which encourages efficiency and puts the patient first. I’d mark this as rather a Good Thing.

However, what it does do is rather suggest hat the NHS isn’t really working. Why not change the entire existing system and have the NHS just provide pricing schemes rather than specifically running hospitals? This certainly shows that it is possible for at least a good amount of the work to be done in this way.

The Conservatives are beginning to really start pushing the online battle back towards Labour. I commented a while back on the Labour’s far more web-orientated economic propaganda - even though it was pretty useless, as it was too large to be embedded in a blog, even in the main post!

But since then, the Conservatives have really been developing a far better approachm with the landing page being turned into a national debt counter, depicting Alistair Darling and a elongated red box.

And now they’ve developed a real time widget showing our personal share of the national debt created by Brown and Darling. Which, unlike the Labour embeddable tool, can actually fit in a blog sidebar, or in a header like I have.

Alongside this, they have also developed the iconic poster a bit further, with the tax bombshell now unwrapped [click to enlarge]:

However, what they haven’t done is put a dedicated page on their website to deal with the economic crisis or tax bombshell. There is nothing to develop these points further, to explain what they mean to us. Yes, there are speeches, news articles and the like, but they really need to be together in one place and part of a developed/developing narrative. And a repository of propaganda, so we don’t have to rely to emails and newspapers to get it, and so that they don’t have to rely on blogs to publicise it. This page - or pages - should also linked to from the tax bombshell header, so it’s more than just a pretty picture on the site.

So the Conservatives are on the way to using the internet a bit better, but there’s still a looong way to go.

Tax cuts is the current political football, it seems. Each of the political parties are promising tax cuts, supposedly funded and competely unfunded - and the indeterminate.

It is amusing how times change. Not so long ago, calling for a tax cut, however funded [or not], was viewed as tantamount to taking food from the mouths of babes. But now it is all the rage.

Tax cuts are good for us all. There is only so much money that the State should take from us, and it already takes too much. Cutting taxes would enable us, the people, to spend more and thus lift the economy out of its current malaise.

Tax cuts should be significant enbough to actually make a difference, but also funded - unfunded tax cuts don’t really help in the long term, as they would soon be replaced by tax hikes, which knowing government would take the tax burden above what it was beforehand.

Whilst David Cameron’s tax cut to get the rising number of unemployed back into work is a good one, what we need most in a cut in either (a) income tax or (b) VAT/sales tax. Then we will have more money to spend and hopefully prevent the economy going into the meltdown predicted by Ken Clarke.