Don’t annoy a dragon, for you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup
When the political parties agree it usually means you should look out for your wallet. - John Redwood.
Too true. The only thing political parties seem to have in common is a desire to get hold of our money.
via Matt Wardman:
From 1st September 2008, the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust Ltd has generously agreed to match, pound for pound, any *new* income that NO2ID receives. Which means that for every pound you give from 1st September NO2ID will receive TWO pounds to spend campaigning against the ID scheme and database state.
Please send your donation by cheque to our office (please mark your envelope ‘JRRT’):
The NO2ID Campaign
Box 412
19-21 Crawford Street
London W1H 1PJOr you can donate by credit card or via PayPal using the ‘Donate’ button on our website, http://www.no2id.net (left hand column)
Definitely something worthwhile. Please pass it on.
Just a few days ago I wrote about the rules under which donations are made to political parties, and now the amounts that parties received in donations in the last quarter has been revealed.
Between them they received £10.7m, split down as follows:
This is up from £8.1m last quarter, with the Lib Dems having the largest percentage increase, doubling their previous income, and the Conservatives increasing their income by £1.4m.
However, all parties have huge debts:
The Lib Dems seem in by far the best financial health, but this is probably because they aren’t required to piss away money in the same way as the other parties as they aren’t considered serious contenders for forming a government.
But none of the parties are particularly financially secure, though Labour is by far the weakest with their massive debt and comparatively low incomings. So we as individuals must ensure that we donate to our political party of choice to keep democracy going.
This income, however, does not include Short money - which is provided from the State coffers primarily to allow opposition parties to examine and oppose government policy. Of Short money, the parties received:
Which, to be honest, is pennies in comparison with other governmental spending and waste.
We do get our politics on a shoestring in comparison with other countries, really. But we must ensure that it continues, through disallowing further State party funding and promoting voluntary donations.
Just imagine: You are Gordon Brown. You have spent £167 million on advertising, £29 million on PR and sponsorship and £12 million on “strategic consultancy”, totalling nearly £400m on spin in the past year.
What would you expect to be getting for it?
A positive personal rating? A poll boost? A donations rise?
Instead you get terrible poll results, called an electoral liability by a senior member of your own party, and have 76% of the electorate thiking that your government is being run badly.
Wouldn’t you think that you had got more than slightly fleeced? And you’d be right.
At times like this, I almost feel sorry for Gorden Brown. But then I remember that it’s our money he’s throwing away on spin.
The Electoral Commission wants to close a loophole that allows donations to political parties without declaring their name - by doing it under a corporate guise. The new proposals would make organisations such as the Midlands Industrial Council list their donors and the amounts given by them.
To be honest, the proposals seems pretty fair. If people want to donate to political parties, they should do so under their own name, and certainly not someone elses.
However, this proposal should also apply to trade unions, who receive funds and pass them on in pretty much the same way. Except these are not purely voluntary, as trade unions are not advertising the fact that members can opt out of paying a political levy, and are made up of a much larger number of smaller amounts. But apart from that, what is the difference? Both do exactly the same thing, in exactly the same way.
Personally, I think the best way to reform party funding would be to allow anyone on the electoral roll to donate as much as they like, but their name has to be recorded publically however much they donate - rather than allowing anyone who donates less than £5,000 to hide their names. If we are to have a truly transparent system, this is the only way to do it.
Infertility is, I am sure, an absolutely horrible thing to experience. A terrible infliction to be affected by, to want to conceive a child and not being able to for whatever reason. However, I can’t help but think that this not something that should be an NHS priority.
The NHS is there primarily to deal with injuries and illness that affect that person’s ability to live their own life, not to dedicate scarce resources to something that ‘only’ prevents them creating another life. IVF is certainly not a treatment that should be ignored, but there are far more important and vital treatments that should be put first.
Until the NHS can cope with providing the standard services, something like IVF should not be a priority for a taxpayer-funded National Health Service to provide. It definitely should be provided, but not to the detriment of other services.
But if this level of infertility treatment can be provided without adverse effect on the core services of the NHS, it should be.
Government Minister Ivan Lewis believes that Britain should tax the wealthy more, and spend that money to “help hard-pressed middle-class families” who are suffering in the credit crunch.
It is strange to hear a Labour minister talking about taxing the rich and using the money to help the middle classes rather than wasting it on more bureaucracy or on “the poor” - defined primarily by whether or not they are dependent on the State.
Unfortunately, Ivan Lewis’ reasons for wanting to help the middle classes is transparent - because he wants their votes in the next general election.
Besides, taxing the rich - especially if the [relatively speaking] small sum of £250,000 is considered the amount for this “supertax” to be applied from - won’t help the economy recover from its current malaise. Rather, it will slow down economic recovery.
If Ivan Lewis is serious about helping out those in economic trouble, he would do far better to advocate a tax cut for everyone - or at least those who he claims to want to help - than a tax increase for anyone. But Labour’s legacy since 1997 has been of tax increases for everyone. Even for the poorest and most vulnerable in society with the abolition of the 10p tax rate.
How much is a life worth?
The National Institute for Health and Clinical Guidelines (Nice) has ruled for the first time that saving a life cannot be justified at any cost, in a review of its ethical guidelines.
The ruling - made by the board of the controversial organisation - contradicts advice it received from its own ‘Citizens Council’ which offers advice from a representative sample of the general public…
It has now rejected the so-called “rule of rescue” which stipulates that people facing death should be treated regardless of the costs. The rule is based on the natural impulse to aid individuals in trouble. (The Telegraph)
WTF are they on? The NHS is there to save people. It is there to provide healthcare to those who need it. Everyone who needs it. Only prohibitive cost for minimal benefit should be denied.
If it will not spend our money on saving our lives, what is the point of the NHS?! If I get ill, I want to know that the NHS will do everything it can to make me better - no matter the cost. Otherwise why do we pay taxes for it?!
I’m not at all surprised by this:
The errors were caused by a time lag between HM Revenue and Customs recognising that a loan has been repaid and informing the Student Loans Company to stop deducting money from a graduate’s monthly salary.
It means 72,000 people have been deprived of thousands of pounds until the money wrongly taken is repaid since the first students to borrow money under the system paid off their loans in 2001. (The Telegraph)
The Student Loans Company are completely useless. This I know first hand. This is just more proof.
The whole SLC system is just appallingly badly run.
I’m seriously impressed. This something that I called for just over a month ago, and they have produced it.
However, I do have some criticisms:
To start with, there is no summary of the full amount that each MP has claimed from the taxpayer under expenses. This makes a real comparison harder, though I’m sure that there are plenty of junior people at various national newspapers frantically adding the figures that they have together. Each section - staff, office, communication, additional costs alliance, and travel - should also really have their own total cost as well.
In the “Other” section, the level at which specific items are required to be reported must be lower - any individual item of over £100 should have to be declared.
Whilst the area for “additional notes” is good, it would instead be far better to require a more detailed breakdown of expenditures as the use of that area varies massively between MPs.
Also, I can see no reason for the names of every staff member employed by an MP to be declared in this return. All we need to know is how many employees they have and whether any of these are family members [and a definition of "family" would be helpful, too], and the total cost of all staff members.
Finally, this return should be a three-whipped activity. No Conservative MP should be allowed to not declare their expenses. If they miss two returns, they should lose the whip until they have made a full delcrartion. If this takes more than three months, they should be automatcially and formally deselected by the party. This seven should be ashamed of themselves.
This shows that the Conservatives truly are determined to tackle the expenses issue, and I am absolutely certain that this is the only way to go - but they definitively still have further to go. One thing that they should do now is produce an ethics manual for Tory MPs to abide by, firmly establishing the principles and specifics - and the Conservative party as determined to actually wipe out sleaze rather than just claim to be “whiter than white” without any evidence.
David Cameron’s statement that
Politicians need to do everything they can to regain the trust of the British people, and transparency has a key part to play in that process. We must show that we’re spending taxpayers money sensibly and correctly.
We are the first party to demand this information from our members, and our MPs are voluntarily revealing a much more detailed breakdown of their expenses than official rules require them to. I’m glad that we’re leading the way.
shows that he know the way forward. By making these declarations public, the Conservatives have shamed Labour and the Lib Dems. Labour’s response just highlights the difference.
Note: My day job is in compliance and dealing with this sort of return.
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