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?

Radical Fundamentalist Launch Another Attack

What should we do when a radical, fundamentalist group of religious zealots launch a direct attack on our law making bodies, parliament, the democratic process, and our general Western way of life? I speak of course of the Catholic Church which is, at the moment, seeking to do all of the above by launching a media and parliamentary offensive against the proposed Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill.

The Catholic Church has a long and undistinguished history of interfering with the lives of both its adherents and those who choose to live outside its auspice. If you don’t think that the church influences the lives of those who don’t join you should speak to the victims of the Inquisition and those scientists, like Galileo, whose search for truth has brought them into conflict with the church’s perceived wisdom. Okay, so the Catholic Church is not seeking to impose its will by the gun, suicide bombers and other direct terror tactics, it is however just as guilty of trying to impose a theocracy as are the radical Muslims. I also find it interesting that the United States, which initiated the so called “War On Terror” and set itself implacably against Islamic fundamentalism (dragging us by proxy and by Tony Blair along with them) is letting the radical, Evangelical Christian right establish its own theocratic regime.

In what is supposed to be the enlightened times of the twenty first century shouldn’t we completely disavow any religious or ethical system access to the power to impose its will on those who choose not to subscribe to their particular brand of beliefs and ethics?

Are Balls Making A Comeback?

For the first time, in certainly my living memory, a legal divorce settlement has gone in favour of the husband. The judge in the Sir Paul Vs Heather McCartney case clearly and publicly came down on the male side stating in his judgement:

"The husband’s evidence was, in my judgment, balanced. He expressed himself moderately though at times with justifiable irritation, if not anger. He was consistent, accurate and honest.

"But I regret to have to say I cannot say the same about the wife’s evidence. Having watched and listened to her give evidence, having studied the documents, and having given in her favour every allowance for the enormous strain she must have been under (and in conducting her own case) I am driven to the conclusion that much of her evidence, both written and oral, was not just inconsistent and inaccurate but also less than candid. Overall she was a less than impressive witness."

For too long in my opinion, ever since the rampant anti-masculine feminism of the early 1970’s, the main crime in the divorce court appears to be having been found in possession of a pair of testicles. A claim supported by the organisation “Fathers For Justice”.

I hope that the pressures in our society will now swing back toward the middle ground so that the testosterone carrying half of our population can once again approach the sad and stressful break-up of a relationship without the fear of emasculation from an often bitter and vindictive partner.

One other point to make here is that Heather McCartney made a fatal error in not engaging the services of a lawyer. This case not only endorses the old saying “that anyone who represents themselves in court will have a fool for a client”. But also, I think, proves that all lawyers do is gouge as much money (out of both partners) as is possible.

Sir Arthur C Clarke

Yesterday marked the death of Sir Arthur C Clarke the science fiction writer. Many I suppose fail to understand or appreciate the significance of Science Fiction as a genre and, therefore, the impact the loss of such a visionary as Sir Arthur represents.

Clarke co-wrote or edited over 100 books where, in many of which he predicted, with remarkable accuracy, such developments as the moon landings, space travel, communications satellites, compact computers, cloning, commercial hovercraft and a slew of other scientific developments – though sometimes he was also, inevitably, wide of the mark. It is this ability, to shine a light, however dim, into the future that makes Science Fiction such a fascinating area of fiction. When I was first introduce to this type of writing, back in the 1960’s, people often scoffed at me for reading such “rubbish” asking how could I take seriously an imagined world where the hero, in his spaceship, takes an entire meal from the freezer and heats it up, ready to serve, in minutes? How could I believe that anyone would have, in their pocket, a universal communicator that would not only enable them to speak with almost anyone on the planet but would also mean that they were reachable almost anywhere?

Not only does Sci-Fi have this uncanny ability of showing us how future technologies may develop, it is also provides a fantastic ‘futurescope’ for looking at trends in our society. Sir Arthur C Clarke, like many Science Fiction authors, he also investigated the strange new worlds of an almost mystical or metaphysical sort, in which advanced cultures, often benevolent, allow humanity to transcend their Earth-bound beginnings. In this area of its field Science Fiction writers can ask us uncomfortable questions about the world we are creating and the destinations we are, socially, headed towards. In this light George Orwell can also be considered a Science Fiction writer.

So, the next time you are tempted to dismiss that brightly covered paperback with the alien monster on the cover remember it may contain an uncanny and often unsettling picture of what our society could be like if we don’t make a change.

A Cure for Alzheimer’s Disease

Is it possible that someone has found a cure for Alzheimer's disease and just forgotten where they put it??

Taxation and Legislation: It's No Way To Run A Railroad

Alistair Darling delivers his first budget today with one of the most popular ‘leaks’ being that he will defer the 2p petrol tax rise until the autumn. Why are we expected to hail a deferment of a tax hike as some sort of good news? The Central Soviet (which I believe is a more accurate name for our current government) has not cancelled this tax; they are just waiting for a more propitious time to load this extra burden upon us. Let’s face it, this increase in duty on fuel has nothing to do with global warming or attempting to control climate change, it’s about raising revenue but, more importantly, it’s about trying to get us to “change our behaviour”.

Nanny State says that one of the reasons for increasing the costs of private motoring is to encourage us all to abandon our individual motor cars and use public, mass transport instead. (It occurs to me to ask; with over 100 people on every one, why aren’t airplanes considered as 'mass transport' and therefore a ‘Green’ alternative?). This crude attempt at behavioural change, or social engineering to give it its more correct title, is just another example of the fundamentally flawed thinking of a government bent not on ‘management’ of “UK Plc” but on ‘Social Engineering’ on a scale last seen emanating from the depths of The Kremlin during the darkest days of Stalin. Westminster seems to be determined to socially engineer an entire population which obeys only the rules it lays down. Unfortunately for us it has chosen the two bluntest, crudest, most ineffective, and inefficient tools available to it to supposedly achieve its ends; Taxation and Legislation

Why has New Labour, during its ten year tenure, introduced more laws and more taxes than any previous administration in our history? It is because it is trying to make each of us conform to their world view of what a model citizen should be (whether it’s what we want to or not). As an aside; notice that they continually use the word ‘citizen’, implying a faceless drone who is a member of a state or a republic, rather than ‘subject’, who is an individual who owes allegiance through a personal relationship to a monarch.

George Santayana the Spanish philosopher, essayist, poet and novelist famously said in his treaties The Life Of Reason (Vol. 1) “Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” As far as I can see there is no evidence to suggest that taxation or even legislation have every successfully achieved long term social change, except by eventually fermenting violent revolution. Perhaps the ‘Old Labourites’ are trying to generate a climate where Fredric Engel’s doctrine of “Continual Revolution” pertains?