Who Takes The Risk?

I never thought I would say this but today is the day to applaud a bank.

The Royal Bank of Scotland is making the radical move of announcing that it intends raising additional capital it needs from its SHAREHOLDERS rather than gouging the money from its CUSTOMERS by raising charges. If only they would go on to cut the bonuses paid to the bosses and perhaps reduce the dividend paid to shareholders they wouldn’t need to raise charges ever again?

Maybe the water companies and other privatised industries could remember that it is shareholders who should provide “Risk Capital”; they shouldn’t just impose price rises on their monopoly customers every time they need more money.

Don't Send The Buggers Back - Make 'Em Pay!

A report by the upper parliamentary house's Economic Affairs Committee rejected the government's argument that current record immigration levels provide economic advantages and said ministers have used "irrelevant and misleading criteria".

Ah, so, The Central Soviet’s spin doctors have once again been “economical with the actualité” – Quelle Surprise!!

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think that I’m xenophobic and I’m not going to argue for totally closed borders, or a “send the buggers back” policy. What I would argue for though is that we had a government that actually had and implemented a real, actual, Immigration Policy.

The problem, at one level anyway, appears to be that Comrades Blair and Brown have implemented their totalitarian, total control policy over the decent hard working, tax paying people of this country to the point where anyone with half a brain and a reasonable amount of cash are, increasingly rapidly, choosing to abandon ship. This means that, because we have no way of regulating who comes here, even with the mass exodus of the middle classes the flood of economic migrants arriving on our shore there is a nett increase in our overall population. Many (possibly the majority) of these people simply disappear into the 'Black Economy' emerging only to burden over pressured services like the NHS and the education system.

Those who are leaving are not necessarily the wealth producers of our nation but "the hewers of wood and the drawers of water"; the 'ordinary' bulk of our population who, in times past, actually made the country work by their labour and their taxable contributions. What will we then be left with when they're all gone and the flow of migrants goes on unchecked? At one extreme, a disconnected, non-tax paying, benefit dependant; lawless ‘Underclass’, while at the other we will have a tax avoiding ‘Uberclass’ separated from the rest in cocooned gated community luxury. Those people who have not managed to realise the capital from the economic good times brought about from the sound fiscal management of the last Tory government and fled will increasingly be squeezed by Chairman Gordon's 'Tax & Spend', 'Boom & (increasingly) Bust' approach. The Iron Chancellor has an Iron Grip when it comes to squeezing taxes from the middle class.

I can see that immigration is one alternative if we want those practical jobs done, the ones that are essential to making our society function. If however we had a government which had a proper immigration policy then those coming here would be registered and integrated into the tax system so that they actually contribute to the economy rather than, as most people perceive, being a burden on it. We don’t need so called sociological multiculturalism, we do though need integration into the tax system. If, also, we did not tax and regulate the middle classes with such a communistic zeal maybe more of them would stay?

Call me simple but if those illegal immigrants living within the ‘Black Economy’ were actually contributing then maybe the rest of us wouldn’t have to pay as much?