British Parliament Now Wholly Owned Subsidiary Of Big Business

February 13, 2008 · Filed Under Politics · Comment 

When Britain was re-named UK Plc under Margaret Thatcher, it sounded like a catchy, if empty slogan. It was just part of the zeitgeist, where everyone was a thrusting go-getter in the dog-eat-dog commercial jungle. In Thatcher’s brave new world, everyone was going to be rich. Apart, of course, from the legions of poor on whom the rich always depend: or, more accurately, on whom they stand after they have trampled them underfoot.

Now, in New Labour’s New Britain, this selling of a nation as a commercial enterprise has actually come to pass. Britain no longer has an independent legislature, but is governed entirely by the diktats of big business.

If Mrs Thatcher was accused of selling the family silver in her mania to sell public assets and utilities on the cheap to businesses on the make, New Labour can trump her in that they have sold the nation down the river because a handful of businessmen barked orders at them and they responded by asking “How high do you want us to jump?”

Everyone knows that the Tory party is just the political wing of business, so from them it is expected. However, not only did New Labour readily jump into bed with big business like the local bike on a drunken night out, it was happy to sell its children and family into prostitution and slavery without actually bothering to ask for payment.

To a degree, it is not that we ever imagined or pretended that business was not pulling the strings of the puppets in Parliament, it is just the clumsy ineptitude of New Labour in making it all so publicly humiliating and so financially incompetent.

Under Blair, they had to receive the blessing of business in order to be electable, but business did not just sprinkle a few drops of water on the figurative forehead of the nation’s government, it gave them a thorough waterboarding. Both Blair and Brown are so in thrall to what they see as the inexplicable mysteries and wonderments of business, the magical enchantment of how business can make money appear as if from nowhere and the trembling craving that maybe, just maybe, some of that could find its way into the pockets of the nation’s administrators, that they have allowed legislation to become entirely subordinate to the whims, quirks and tantrums of a few business leaders.

Alistair Darling, the Chancellor and by default Gordon Brown’s puppet at the Treasury when he is not passing him around the unelected chairmen of New Britain Plc, had thought that taxing people who are not domiciled in the UK for tax purposes, but are making fortunes off the back of the country and its infrastructure and workforce was a modest and reasonable proposal.

The problem was that in Gordon Brown’s ‘government of none of the talents’ there had been an appointment made in the shape of Digby Jones as Minister of State at the newly created Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform. Lord Jones obviously saw it as his role to prevent a mere Chancellor from proposing legislation which he felt might not be agreeable to his mates in business.

Darling of the Treasury had to succumb, climb off his ridiculous hobby-horse that the rich should sometimes pay a miniscule amount of tax, humble himself with a grovelling apology and publicly agree that New Britain, from the pinnacle of government to the lowliest babe in arms, are all mere bondsmen to the unelected cabal of international business.

New Britain is now a small cog in the globalisation machine, which business can pull out and replace at any time with a country whose government is more supine and spineless if any lickspittle politician ever dares to stand up and make threats that business cannot keep every last penny of everything it extorts from the slave force of New Britain or anywhere else.

In The Guardian:

Opposition MPs accused the government of muddle and harming Britain’s reputation in the international business community. Business leaders said the government needed to be more careful in future before rushing through “ill thought out” legislation. It called the move a “victory for common sense”.

That is not even code for: “Never try to do anything which business does not like”. That is a master telling a servant to behave or be dismissed.

Vince Cable, the Liberal Democrats’ treasury spokesman, said: “The government has made an unholy mess of this issue and is being made to look thoroughly foolish, now it has been demonstrated that ministers haven’t thought through the implications of their own policies.

“However, there has been some outrageous special pleading from the City with wildly exaggerated accounts of the damage that would be done by taxing non-domiciled residents. British taxpayers do not understand why they should pay 40% top rate tax, while the super-rich may pay little more than council tax on houses worth tens of millions.”

Expect more maltreatment of ordinary people by this government, now that its powerlessness has been publicly revealed.

Expect, as usual on the economic front, the rich to get richer and the poor to get poorer.

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HMRC: First Millions Data Loss, Now Billions Money Loss

February 5, 2008 · Filed Under News · Comment 

When we come to look at Gordon Brown’s legacy (no, Tony Blair’s has still not been found) it may be that, like in Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Galapagos, the problem was that his brain was just too big.

At least, we are all persuaded to imagine that our prime minister has this wonderful and massive brain, despite all the evidence to the contrary. It may be that he is just the buffoon behind the curtain, like the very ordinary fraudster who pretended to be The Wizard of Oz.

It was Gordon Brown who created the the monstrosity which is HMRC and it was he who invented the jibbering nonsense which is Tax Credits.

HMRC, through its incompetence and lack of ability to perform a simple function without making itself a global laughing stock, lost the data of 25 million people, along with most of their critical personal information, such as bank account details and National Insurance numbers.

Nobody knows where this information now is, but it could certainly be in the possession of criminal gangs or terrorist groups. Like so many things to do with Gordon Brown and New Labour, they simply do not know.

As for Brown’s wonderful contrivance called Tax credits, it is a byword for profligacy and incompetence, riddled with inaccuracies and maladministration. When it is not handing out money like a drunkard on payday, it is attempting to extort from terrified pensioners through threats and menaces money which it has forced upon them against their will and then finds was not their due entitlement.

So, how much taxpayer money has Gordon “Prudence” Brown managed to simply lose through the bad offices of HMRC? Well, it is apparently running at a cool one billion pounds sterling a year.

According to AOL Money, HMRC Tax Credits is about as bad as a bureaucracy in meltdown could possibly be:

Some £65 billion has been paid out in tax credits since their introduction in 2003, but high levels of error and fraud and harsh procedures for clawing back overpayments have left some recipients wishing they had never got involved in the scheme at all, said the Commons Public Accounts Committee (PAC).

Error and fraud is running at more than £1 billion a year - the highest level of any Government department - while the ombudsman is still upholding 74% of complaints referred to him, more than on any other topic.

Some £6 billion has been overpaid in the first three years of the scheme, of which just £2 billion had been recovered by March last year. Around £700 million has been written off and HMRC is unlikely to get a further £1.6 billion back.

There is a case where HMRC took so long to process a claim that the claimant asked their MP to take up the matter. When it was finally resolved, the letter to the MP from HMRC quoted the claimant’s name correctly only once. Throughout the rest of the letter, the MP was referred to as the claimant and by the end of the letter, HMRC were even spelling the MP’s name incorrectly.

This would be laughed off as simple clerical error.

First you lose a few personal details of claimants, then you lose millions. First you lose a few quid through not processing information accurately and buying a useless pile of junk as your computer system, then, before you know it, you are losing billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money every year.

Still, Gordon Brown knows that if you tax the poor more, you can get that back without hurting the rich. David Freud knows that if you stop paying money to benefits claimants, you can disguise what you are losing through your own ineptitude. Caroline Flint knows that if you evict council house tenants, you can sell their homes to property speculators.

New Labour’s New Britain.

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Egg On Face Of Bunch Of Bankers

February 3, 2008 · Filed Under Business · Comment 

Bankers are very far from being the cleverest people on earth, but because they deal in money, rather than, say, vegetables, people think that they are very special. Special needs would be more accurate.

This is what one City banker said of his own trade: “[it is] always sensible to work on the assumption that banks are mad, they behave like lemmings, there is always something they all go and do that then explodes”.

This is David Freud, the chap who advises the government on stopping payments to benefits claimants.

He also said that banking was recently a “pioneering piratical industry where we made up the rules” and that the City is still “morally ambiguous because it’s so competitive”.

So, when bankers themselves cannot find a good word to say about their own trade, it is hardly surprising that Egg, owned by one of the biggest bankers of all, Citigroup, should make such a complete and utter hash of dumping its customers in an attempt to make up for its losses in the sub-prime mortgage market.

In The Guardian:

John McFall, chairman of the powerful Treasury Select Committee, said: ‘The motives of Egg need clear explanation if this a case of them ditching long-standing creditworthy customers because they make no money out of them. Perhaps this is an issue that requires an Office of Fair Trading investigation.’

Last October The Observer revealed how consumers with blameless credit ratings are being refused credit cards and consumer groups report that the practice is spreading.

Peter Thornton, a Liberal Democrat councillor in the Lake District, has been an Egg customer for over five years. He received a letter terminating his credit card on Friday. He said: ‘This is more than an amazing PR blunder. There’s a huge amount of people in my position. I’m on a lower interest rate because presumably they’ve assessed me as a good risk. Every business would benefit from losing 10 per cent of the least profitable customers, but the rest of us realise we can’t do that because it would be a PR disaster. They’re on the radio saying it’s just bad risk people they’re getting rid of. I feel slandered by that.’

Of course, banks and bankers are slightly higher on the social spectrum than MPs, but still way below common criminals, confidence tricksters and convicted grandmother-sellers.

According to the BBC News, Egg’s own statement is appropriately arrogant and stupid, as would befit a banker:

A spokesman for Egg said: “We are sorry some customers are upset after receiving notification we are ending their credit card arrangement, but they are people we do not feel it is appropriate to lend any money to.”

He added: “The decision was taken after an extensive one-off review of our credit card book following acquisition by Citigroup.”

“We can certainly understand the concerns, but even if people are up-to-date with repayments, they are people we decided we no longer wish to lend money to regardless of their status.”

The spokesperson for the British Bankers Association almost hits the nail on the head, if you convert what she says to what she actually means:

Angela Knight, chief executive of the British Bankers Association, said that Egg’s action was “a sensible way of looking after a business”.

“Whilst it is lovely to spend, it is the paying back that is always the difficulty. It might seem a bit hard to say to people ‘You do need to stop spending’ but it does actually make real sense so to do.”

If you read this as: “It is lovely when the banks are making loads of money on the backs of people when times are good, but as soon as things get harder for us, we will drop you like a stone” you will be nearer to the truth.

The BBC also kindly lists some customer comments about the actions of these not-so-clever bankers:

I too have just received one of these letters. I have had an Egg card for almost 8 years and have never missed a payment (like others here I usually pay off the balance if I have one) and have never gone over my limit and my credit rating is excellent. It seems to me that Egg are picking on those who are in control of their finances and therefore not paying them lots of interest. If they deem fit to remove my Egg card, I shall be removing my Egg Savings (which has a far larger balance than my Egg card!). I think this is disgraceful behaviour on their part.
Mary, Edinburgh

I received the letter yesterday. What angered me most was the suggestion that the decision may have been the result of some detrimental entry to my credit report, causing me to fear that I may have been the victim of identity theft. This put me to the needless expense of obtaining a copy of my credit report, which of course is fine. The letter from Egg consisted of a tissue of lies which were merely a smoke-screen for the real reason behind the decision which I suspect is that I don’t use the card enough. Why couldn’t they just be honest and say that - but then I suppose the two words “honest” and “banking” don’t sit well together these days do they!
Chris O’Shea, Woking, Surrey

Of course, nobody would expect the people at Egg or any others with banker-sized brains to remember the Northern Rock crisis of a few months ago and how a run on a bank caused it to collapse.

Bankers actually need customers more than customers need the so-called services of any individual bank.

It might not do Egg any harm if people started withdrawing their savings and writing to them telling them that you no longer wish to deposit your money with a bank which you find behaves in an untrustworthy way and may not be creditworthy anyway.

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