Archive
Unwanted
I read today that the President of the Government of Spain has chosen to chip in to the referendum debate by offering his opinion that an independent Scotland would have to negotiate EU membership from the outside. The right-wing Sr Mariano Rajoy is notorious and deeply unpopular within his own country. He is beset by crisis and personal scandal that would have driven him out of office were it not for the fact that nobody wants his job, and in those circumstances he is seizing each and every opportunity to deflect attention from his own troubles. We have had the Gibraltar harassment for months, and now it seems he wants a piece of Scotland’s action. Of course his interest is driven in part by the Catalan situation, with Spain’s richest province demanding its own independence referendum, having been driven beyond the point of tolerance by Rajoy’s refusal to grant it the same degree of fiscal economy enjoyed by other parts of the country. That being the case he may have shot himself in both feet.
El Presidente has a reputation for being intransigent and authoritarian; he also has a reputation for being wrong. As the pigmies on the Scottish opposition benches were told when they attempted to cash in on Rajoy’s intervention, the Scottish Government has firm advice from authoritative sources that the Scottish state’s future relationship with the EU will be negotiated from within in the event of a Yes vote. But what of England, Wales and Northern Ireland? What would their position within the EU, since the present EU member state will no longer exist as such? That might be a tricky one, since Westminster has damn few friends within Europe at this moment.
At last
Finally, it’s out. Scotland’s Future was published this morning, and now the debate can begin. My copy is downloaded already, but I see from Twitter that the Fearties have produced their initial considered reaction. I’ve studied their ten reasons why we’re ‘Better Together’. I don’t see a single one that can’t be countered, and I’m still laughing at them trotting out the old Tory ‘Keep the £’ nonsense. Of course we will; it’s ours today so why not?
Stamp it out
I’ve just read that in the calendar month of October, people buying homes paid the Exchequer a total of £852,000,000 in Stamp Duty. Annualised, that works out at over £10 billion a year; total revenue for the current fiscal year won’t hit that but a figure of £8.5 billion is expected. I don’t know about you but that’s a staggering sum to me, money seized by the Treasury from British families for the privilege of putting a roof over their heads.
What is Stamp Duty? Actually the full title is Stamp Duty Land Tax, but the Government tend to leave out the last two words, probably for fear of stirring up public protest. It has a slab structure, with rates applied rigidly to price bands. For example if you buy a house for £250,000, you will have to give nice Mr Osborne £2500, 1% of the price. But if you pay £250,001, the greedy bastard will grab a few pence over £7500, that being 3%. Property transactions below £125,000 are exempt, but house buyers in that bracket are still required to report the transaction to HMRC within four weeks. Failure to comply may lead to a fine and will prevent the sale being recorded in the land register.
From 2015, there will be changes to the regime in Scotland. The threshold will rise to £180,000, above the current average Scottish house price, and the slab principle will be abolished. That’s fine as far as it goes, but the principle will remain, that people must pay the government for their legitimate aspirations. To me that’s plain wrong, so why the hell do we put up with it?
Marker
Every day I receive an email that tells me how the £ is doing agains the €. For the last year or so it has moved only marginally, but this week’s unemployment figures have pushed it quite significantly in Sterling’s favour. A cheaper Euro will be good news for a couple of million ex-pats, but not so good for the Leader of the Opposition, as it is a reasonable indicator that the present government, for all its imperfections and internal backbiting, is actually getting things right.
Ethical issue
There’s a fine line between legitimate reporting and entrapment; I’m not sure which side this story is on.
Oh dear
Brand X
Like many people of my generation who’ve actually heard of Russell Brand (probably a minority) I’ve always considered him to be an irrelevance, a complete prat. Until now.
In fact, Russell is a demagogue in disguise; like many of that breed, there is a core of sense in some of his outpourings, and for me that makes him dangerous
Roy and Peter
Roy Hodgson is probably one of those guys who shouldn’t tell jokes, anytime, anywhere. But he chose to at half-time, in the most important football match of his life, probably to ease the tension that must have been filling the room at the time. The gag he pulled was an old one, told a million times before and never, I’ll bet, has it been construed as racist. Thanks to a treacherous member of his squad who ran to the press, that label was hung round Mr Hodgson’s neck, briefly, until it was laughed out of court by every other person in the room at the time, and firmly squashed by the FA.
Yet there are people who still won’t let it lie. A complaint has been made to the FA by something called Race for Sport, which has been described as an offshoot of the Society of Black Lawyers, which is run by a man named Peter Herbert. ‘You’re kidding, QJ’ I hear you gasp. Well no, I’m not; it really does exist and it is given credence and airtime by our media in its endless search for headlines. Here’s what I believe: any organisation that is based in ethnicity alone is potentially racist in its outlook and should be prohibited. Anyone who thinks that’s extreme should imagine the reaction if a few barristers . . . I resist the urge to call them ‘baristas’ . . . were to get together and establish the Association of White Lawyers.
There are people, possibly Mr Herbert among them, who will brand me as racist for committing that thought to print. I can assure them that I’m not. All I want is a level playing field; I want Martin Luther King’s dream world, where we are judged not by the colour of our skin but by the content of our character. Those who foster and play upon ethnic distinctions are blocking the road to that goal.
A welcome history
He didn’t send me a review copy, (I had to buy one!) but I’ll plug Kenneth Roy’s new book, ‘The Invisible Spirit’, anyway.
Who, exactly?
So, the increasingly pathetic organ that used to be the Daily Telegraph has decided that it’s against Scottish independence. If this is the best counter-argument it can offer up, Alastair Darling will be begging its editor to shut up. Since the UK has never been a member of OPEC, why should the view of its Secretary General on the future of Scotland have any relevance to the debate? Yet according to the Torygraph, it’s a ‘serious blow’. Not half as serious as that newspaper’s current Scottish sales figures, which are likely to slump even further in the light of its apparent Westminster bias.
‘He would say that, wouldn’t he.’
From the days when journalism was journalism, and news was news, this resumé of one of the greatest stories, and greatest personal tragedies of the 20th century:
‘Nuff said
Further to ‘Please explain’;
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/01/ny-daily-news-shutdown-house-of-turds_n_4021642.html
Quote for those with a 35 year memory
‘Recession is when your neighbor loses his job. Depression is when you lose yours. And recovery is when Jimmy Carter loses his.’
Ronald Reagan
Please explain
Here in Great Britain we go on at Great Length about our politicians. Their stock has never been lower, in the wake of decades of sleaze stories capped off by the MPs’ expenses scandal. But there’s one thing they have never done, and that is close the country down because of their political strife.
As I read the story this morning, as of midnight around 700,000 federal employees in the USA are effectively out of a job, and many others may be expected to work without pay. National parks will be closed today and for the foreseeable, as will the Smithsonian and other federal institutions, all because the folks on Capitol Hill are having a pissing contest over health care. If they don’t sort it out by mid-month, America might default on its debts, with untold effect on global financial markets.
My one question this morning, as an outside observer is: having managed to step over the line that lads to melt-down, will the senators and congresspeople, and all their staffers, continue to be paid? If the answer to that is ‘Yes’, perhaps the President could use his executive power to ensure that they share the pain, personally. If the answer is ‘No’, then maybe they too should be told to stay at home.
Danger, Kenny at work
“Corroboration in our legal system is a barrier to obtaining justice for the victims of crime committed in private or where no-one else was there.”
Q. Who said that?
A. Kenny MacAskill, Scotland’s Justice Secretary.
Sometimes I worry about Kenny. No, that’s wrong: often, I worry about Kenny. Corroboration in our legal system is also a barrier against wrongful conviction of the innocent on the word of one person, who may be malicious, may have misinterpreted what he or she saw, or may be just plain wrong. It is one of the cornerstones of a system that is admired around the world, but our man Kenny wants to sweep it away. His thinking is that this dangerous step will increase the number of convictions for rape and sexual assault cases. That may be so, but will it always be the guilty who are convicted? And what will be the effect when it is applied to other crimes?
The proposal is a charter for miscarriages of justice across the board.
Dickensian
This morning’s big story in all UK media concerns the Chancellor’s intention that welfare claimants will have to work for their benefits . . . or ‘dole money’ as the deeply unlovely Daily Telegraph calls them.
In fact, there is nothing new about that concept. It used to be called The Workhouse. There’s progress, George!
LOL
Those who wish to study a classic demonstration of how to lose an election two years before it is scheduled to take place need only cast an eye over Ed Milipede’s pronouncements at his party conference this week.
Yesterday he proposed an overtly populist two year freeze on energy prices, a move that is likely to trigger a raft of precautionary increases in the months leading up to election 2015, and which signals Labour’s intention to interfere with the running of our free market economy. The energy companies are predictably outraged, but their card has been marked. It is an absolute racing certainty that before eighteen months are out, they will have agreed a pricing structure with the coalition, and that Cameron and Clegg will be wearing Ed’s clothes
Today, Ed says that there is no place for topless women on the pages of British newspapers. Morally, he may be right about that, but as the leader of a party that relies on the red-top vote to have any chance of electoral success, he may have committed a very unusual kind of suicide.
I used to think that the hapless old windbag that was Michael Foot was the most inept leader that any major UK party has had in my lifetime. Now, I’m not so sure.
Quintin Jardine's blog 