Bel is thinking

So Gordon Brown is now lecturing us to stop wasting food?

This from a man who, as Chancellor, threw away almost £2bn of taxpayer money every year on overpaid tax credits (see here and here). A man whose Government continues every day to create new ways to waste our money. (For a recent example, see the £2.7bn Crewe and Nantwich byelection bribe - a last-minute, unbudgeted expense, done for little more than political expediency.)

After all that he has done to our public finances, I am astounded that this man can stand there, and without shame, presume to lecture the British people about thrift.

This is even more galling in view of last week’s vote by MPs to continue, among other things, having their meals paid for by the taxpayer. We pay for their food and wine, and then they turn around to us, and, in between mouthfuls of the choicest fare, give us tips on how to make our food last longer. “Package it properly, put it in the fridge, plan your meals properly. Do all this and you will save £8 a week.” All this they tell us, while feeding themselves fat on the good of the land.

This is beyond ridiculous. What makes it worse is that these people seem not to realise the level of contempt in which they are held. Or maybe even more worrying, they do realise, but are past caring. They have been afflicted with that condition often seen among people who have held power for too long. They have become blind to all but themselves. Oblivious to every warning, they plough on in the single-minded pursuit of self-interest. In this regard, I am reminded of a verse in the Bible. It was used in a different context, but would be apt here:

“That seeing they may see, and not perceive; and hearing they may hear, and not understand.”

Blindness in part has come upon our “leaders”. How much longer until they fall into their self-appointed ditch?

According to the Daily Telegraph, Gordon Brown has appointed his eighth spin doctor of the year.

I wonder if Gordon Brown remembers the following words; he uttered them during PMQs on 11 July 2007, in reference to David Cameron:

“He can go for his PR—I will go for being PM, and we will get on with the job.”

Just to refresh his his memory, the Hansard transcript is here.

On the news that the Government faces a revolt on the 10p tax issue, a ‘Treasury source’ attempts to explain that compensation for those hardest hit may not be that straightforward.

Saith he:

“The Chancellor hasn’t any money,” … “There is no secret stash up his sleeve.”

Isn’t that part of the problem? The idea that the money belongs to the Chancellor in the first place, and if ‘his’ stash is running out, then ‘he’ can’t help.

Only when they grasp that the money belongs to the taxpayer will we begin to see any real change. For starters, if they recognised that basic fact (i.e that our money is our own), they wouldn’t take so much of it from the poor, and then force them to jump through hoops in order to get it back in the form of ‘credits’.

Remember those poor pensioners who lost their pensions after relying on dodgy advice in a Government leaflet?

Even though the Parliamentary Ombudsman had ruled that the advice contained in the leaflet was “inaccurate, incomplete, unclear and inconsistent”, the Government looked the other way and refused to compensate them.

Good news for them. The High Court has today held that the Government was wrong to reject the Ombudsman’s report. This means that the Government will now have to revisit the Ombudsman’s report and consider how to resolve the situation. This will most likely lead to some form of compensation for the pensioners.

The Government had previously refused to countenance compensation, instead uttering some laughable, sanctimonious drivel about its fiscal responsibilities. This from a Government that has ‘excelled’ in inefficiency, waste, confused tax policies, and all-round economic incompetence.

Far too many people have suffered the consequences of this Government’s ham-fisted and incompetent approach to finance; pensioners, tax credits claimants, Railtrack shareholders, small businesses, investors, the ordinary taxpayer, all have suffered. Tax credits are overpaid, and then reclaimed all at once, causing hardship to claimants. Misleading advice is given to investors, who suffer loss after relying on the advice. Tax laws are made, and then just as quickly changed, causing uncertainty, and in many cases, loss to people who have laid out money in reliance on the law. Sometimes, changes are made with harmful and far-reaching retrospective effects, so that people are then forced to go back and undo financial arrangements they made many years ago, even before this Government came into office.

What a  risky and precarious climate in which we now do business and invest, and it has been created by Labour. In most cases, the Government has simply shrugged its shoulders and let the losses lie where they fell. That should not happen this time. Even though it will have to dip into public funds to do so, the Government must compensate these pensioners. It is surely the right thing to do.

John Prescott’s office is being given an additional £587,000 to assist him in his ‘duties’. What duties, may I ask. Ever since Prescott was stripped of his ministerial duties last May, he has been struggling to find relevance in one way or the other. The stark truth however remains that Prescott occupies an office without a job.

This bonus payment brings the total annual budget for Mr Prescott’s office to £2,547,000. Needless to say, the Conservatives have attacked the 30 per cent increase.

Leaving aside the fact that this is public money being so wasted, I wonder how much of this ‘excessive bonus’ Mr Prescott will be giving to disadvantaged communities. Perhaps Peter Hain might like to have a word?

According to the Telegraph:

The BBC has spent another £700,000 of licence payers’ money replacing its on-screen links between programmes, it announced today.

The corporation racked up the bill while creating seven different scenarios - made into 14 short clips - in which the camera pulls back to reveal the viewer is looking at the world in an unexpected way through the figure “2″.

Three of the new BBC2 shorts were shot in South Africa, apparently because the film-makers wanted sunny weather.

This on top of the £1.2 million they spent on “rebranding” the BBC1 shorts last year. Spending other people’s money, such a wonderful thing, isn’t it?

It’s Sunday, so it can only mean one thing: politicians are attacking City bonuses. They certainly seems to make a habit of it on Sundays (see here and here).

This time, it is our old friend, Peter Hain. He has returned to his favourite theme. Now he wants City workers to pay two thirds of their bonuses to deprived communities.

Exactly what is it about private enterprise that Peter Hain does not get? Is it the bit about what companies pay their staff being no business of the Government? Or does he not get that these bonuses have already been subject to high taxes, which in turn were supposed, under Labour, to have already been ‘redistributed’ to these deprived communities he so champions? Or perhaps he does not understand that people are generally paid what the market feels that they are worth?

What is it that Mr Hain cannot understand? I would have thought that these were truths apparent to a secondary school economics student, even in these dumbed-down times. I know the Left traditionally has a history of woeful ignorance in matters of the market, but at this stage of his political career, there is frankly no excuse for Peter Hain.

Peter Hain, and by extension, this Government, must learn that not everything is to be determined by political decisions, or legislative action. Some matters transcend even the so-called ‘good intentions’ of a Labour government.

By making this suggestion, Mr Hain is admitting that his Government has failed in its avowed pledge to tackle poverty. In 2005-06 (see pdf), this Government collected £405 billion in tax. It paid out a net sum of £17.3 billion in tax credits in that same year. Going by previous years, the taxman estimates an overpayment of tax credits of almost £1.8 billion.

So having collected, and ‘redistributed’, the above sums, there are still deprived communities in the UK, to which Mr Hain wants City workers to contribute? Unbelievable.

Under this Government, we have seen taxation rise to the highest levels for a long time, with nothing to show for it. If Peter Hain wants to act concerned about the plight of deprived communities, perhaps he could start by questioning his own Government about their failures in this regard. He could ask them precisely how it came to be that despite record tax levels, and despite their claims to care about the underprivileged, we are in the situation that we are.

Then after doing that, he could take a few weeks off work and enrol in a community college in Neath for a crash course in economics.

According to the Daily Mail, the target was the Capita office. If that is the case, I suggest it would be hard to find the culprits. There are as many possible suspects as there are motives. Capita is involved in the congestion charge, collection of council tax arrears, failed taxpayer-funded IT projects (eg the Criminal Records Bureau), and much, much more.

Bound to be lots of aggrieved folk about.

The National Audit Office is unhappy that a final budget for the Olympic Games has still not been set.

Surely the NAO should know better by now. Judging from the way the Olympics project has been going, a final budget would not guarantee anything approaching certainty. Even if such a budget were set, it would only be exceeded. Not to be too cynical, but it appears to me that its only purpose would be to indicate the minimum level of spending. The only way is up.

The Assets Recovery Agency, which was set up with the lofty aim of separating criminals from their ill-gotten gains, is to be scrapped.

The purpose of the Agency was to take civil court action seeking the seizure of money and goods obtained through criminality. With effect from April 2008, it will be merged with the Serious Organised Crime Agency.

Turns out that while the Agency has incurred costs of around £90m, it has only been able to recover around £8m from the bad men.

But why the poor results? The Agency’s head, Jane Earl, blames the crooks. Rather than obligingly handing over the money, these criminals were instead employing stalling tactics, ensuring that the court cases took a lot longer than necessary.

Such touching naivete. What exactly did Ms Earl expect a criminal to do? Write out a cheque and hand it over to the Agency as soon as a demand was made? One would think that an agency set up to deal with people convicted of serious crime would take a more hard-nosed approach to their work.

Apparently not. So that’s £90m of taxpayers’ money thrown away. I certainly consider that a crime.