In the sweet FFFA the skyline will be dominated by mobile phone masts.
Apparently in Labour’s sweet FFFA it is so dangerous on the streets that policemen don’t just go around in pairs, they steam the streets in packs of eight on bicycles.
The Shaun Bailey campaign in Hammersmith continues to do good work in hammering the awful “Andy” Slaughter. Hear him here on LBC Radio today totally failing to justify the £6 billion loss made by Gordon “Get the big decisions right” Brown.
Earlier this week the same team put out this poster:
The excellent Iain Martin at The Wall Street Journal points out that it was all a bit slow today. So much so that Sky was reduced to covering the Plaid Cymru press conference. I heard this being covered on BBC radio too and was profoundly depressed by it. It seems that the main plank of Plaid’s campaign is that the Welsh should clamp their jaws on the teat of state spending and grimly hang on. See their press release here.
Plaid’s Leader Ieuan Wyn Jones AM told the news conference at Plaid HQ in Cardiff:
With the prospect of a hung parliament becoming increasingly more likely, Plaid can and would secure the best deal for Wales and our communities. In a situation where no party has overall control we will be in a very strong position to fight for a fairer funding deal for Wales to protect jobs, schools and hospitals. Who else is going to stand up for Wales and for our communities? Think about it. The greater the vote for Plaid – the better the deal for Wales. This is an opportunity to make a real difference.
What a depressing prescription? No ambition beyond keep on taking from the English. Some kind of nationalist.
Brown has just got back from the palace. Thank heavens Gordon Brown’s prime ministership is over.
Good bye.
The letter below (from me) was published in the Telegraph today, follow link.
Tax on employment
SIR – I was pleased to see Britain’s business leaders come out in favour of the Conservatives’ plan to mitigate Labour’s disastrous National Insurance increases (Letters, April 1).
Business leaders might do their staff, and the country, a further service if they spelt out the difference between what they pay for labour and what each individual actually receives in pay and benefits.
Some years ago the P60 form made clear both the employee’s and the employer’s NI contributions; it even had a box showing the total NI outlay for each employee. Over time this box was hatched out and then vanished altogether. Reference to the employer’s NI was removed as the state sought to obfuscate the onerous levy it extracts from even the lowliest worker’s pay.
Might employers provide their staff with a simple statement showing total staff cost and the proportion passed to the state and the proportion passed to the employee? Most people would be shocked at how big the state’s slice of the pie is.
Phil Taylor
London W13
The Conservatives have put out this hilarious spoof website as an April Fool’s joke. One of the key waste points they raise is the size of centralised government comms spending going through the Central Office of Information which I have been consistently highlighting for a few years now, see here. The total bill was £540 million last year. It is good to see that the Tories have worked out that all of this spending is obscene, not just the £232 million of ad spending, which is where they were at in January. The graph below tells the whole sick making story.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/player/emp/external/player.swf
I saw the budget live yesterday and have been following the coverage but I have had trouble raising myself to comment on it all. There was lots of Brownite twiddling with inconsequential details. For instance, it is lovely that Darling has made £100 million available to fix the roads. Apparently £4 million of this is going to London (why so little?). Our council alone has allocated £689,700 from contingency so you can see that £4 million across 33 boroughs and the City of London is a joke. The whole £100 million is 0.06% of the deficit so, so what? Our government will spend £167 billion more than it raises in taxes this year. We are truly, horribly screwed.
The Telegraph reckons that Darling has raised taxes by £19 billion. At the same time Darling talks about £11 billion of savings to be made in the next financial year to start in April. Only an analysis by the TaxPayers’ Alliance shows that more than half of this is “unspecified”.
We have just had yet another tax and spend budget from a government that refuses to acknowledge that it has blown the public finances. Although the deficit for this year year will apparently only be £167 billion rather than £178 billion we are in big trouble and Darling and Brown refuse to be honest about it. Darling admits that the next government will have to be harsher than Thatcher. Do you trust Brown/Darling to deliver the medicine? Still less Clegg/Cable?
Today the News of the World has a shock, horror piece about a £17K lift attendant at Parliament. They say:
Incredibly, our pampered politicians are looking for a hired flunky to actually push the buttons for them in the House of Commons elevator.
And the fact they’ll pay £17,277 a year, plus perks, out of taxpayers’ money to do it last night sparked an almighty row.
You can see the job ad here.
Apparently there are four “lift attendants”. I think the News of the Screws may have hit the wrong target though – apparently these guys have a role escorting visitors around for security reasons. It would be strange to have Parliament unattended given the security you might want to see there. But, the problem with Parliament is that it is unscrutinised. Seeing itself as sovereign it thinks it can do what it likes and does not need to weigh priorities and cut its cloth like the rest of us.
A much more dodgy job as is this one one for a House of Lords press person – £30K for a 20 hour week with 35 days paid holiday. Where do you get that kind of gig in the private sector? The only way the House of Lords is ever going to look good is if the lords stop stealing from us (Uddin & co you know who you are). No number of overpaid fluffy comms people are going to trump that kind of behaviour. This is a total waste of money.
The total bill for Parliament last year was £516 million or, to put it another way the cost of running five district general hospitals the size of Ealing. See House of Commons figures here and house of Lords figures here. MPs direct pay and allowances are £242K per head and they cost £633K per head all in.
The Tories are talking about shaving this bill 10%, see here. I reckon you could take 40% out, see here. The figure of 40% is a bit arbitary but if you run an organisation with no real cost control pressures for many decades halving its spending should be a doddle. I figured 40% gave me some room for error! If you are reading David I would do the job for free. Give me two years max.
This photo appeared on Facebook in the last few days. The poster the child is carrying is a lie. Has the Labour government closed down any of its own childrens’ centres? I don’t think so. It seems rather unnecessary to use a child to point out that a future Conservative government is going to be looking very hard at all areas of government expenditure.
We know who posted this photo. It was Gail Gallie. Her biog is posted on her own PR company’s website:
Gallie was the account director on BMP DDB’s 1997 New Labour election campaign, which helped bring Tony Blair to power, and later as a head of marketing at the BBC she led the launch campaigns for Cbeebies and BBC Three and strategic overhauls of the core BBC brand as well as Radio 1 and BBC News.
I wrote to Gallie to challenge her about who the kid was and she admitted that it was her own son. This seems very unwise to me and I will remove the photo as soon as she removes the one she posted on Facebook. In her mail Gallie said:
He’s my son, it is my photo, and I did it to support the campaign to keep Sure Start Centres open and available to people like me who use them.
This Facebook page is supposed to look all homespun but is in reality just an extension of Labour’s press release from yesterday that repeats their lie that the Tories will take £200 million out of Sure Start and close one fifth of the childrens’ centres. Even Channel 4’s Cathy Newman is not convinced and demolishes Labour’s lies quite satisfactorily here. The Tories will look at the effectiveness of Sure Start and refocus resources on the most needy. The evidence so far is that the money on Sure Start has not made a measurable difference to attainment, see here.
You can’t help thinking that the Tories are right to ask if the SureStart money couldn’t be better spent if high powered PR types like Gallie are hogging the places. If Gallie and her mates use up all the Sure Start places it will not be a surprise if the service does not reach the “hard to reach”. Doh!
The British left wrote a collective letter to the Guardian today to tell the government to keep digging. We have the biggest deficit in the whole OECD and these morons say we should keep making it worse. The chart above is taken from the excellent Burning our Money blog who took it in turn from the OECD.
Phil Taylor 