Public Sector, the state and petrol prices

I'm not sure if I'm filled with rage, or just paracetemol and lactic acid, but I received this email from a colleague who happens to work in the state sector.

Dear All,

Here is an interesting idea to think about (and act upon?)...unless you've already received the same message independently!

Please see what you think and pass it on if you agree with it.

We are hitting £129.9 a litre in some areas now and soon we will be faced with paying £1.50 per litre. So Philip Hollsworth offered this good idea:

This makes MUCH MORE SENSE than the 'don't buy petrol on a certain day campaign' that was going around last April or May! The oil companies just laughed at that because they knew we wouldn't continue to hurt ourselves by refusing to buy petrol. It was more of an inconvenience to us than it was a problem for them. BUT, whoever thought of this idea, has come up with a plan that can really work.

Please read it and join in!

Now that the oil companies and the OPEC nations have conditioned us to think that the cost of a litre is CHEAP, we need to take aggressive action to teach them that BUYERS - not sellers control the market place. With the price of petrol going up more each day, we consumers need to take action. The only way we are going to see the price of petrol come down is if we hit someone in the pocket by not purchasing their petrol! And we can do that WITHOUT hurting ourselves. Here's the idea:

For the rest of this year DON'T purchase ANY petrol from the two biggest oil companies (which now are one) i.e. ESSO and BP.

If they are not selling any petrol, they will be inclined to reduce their prices. If they reduce their prices, the other companies will have to follow suit. But to have an impact we need to reach literally millions of Esso and BP petrol buyers. It's really simple to do!!

Now, don't wimp out on me at this point... keep reading and I'll explain how simple it is to reach millions of people!!

I am sending this note to a lot of people. If all of you send it to at least ten more (30 x 10 = 300)....and those 300 send it to at least ten more (300 x 10 = 3,000) ... and so on. By the time the message reaches the sixth generation of people, we will have reached over THREE MILLION consumers! If those three million get excited and pass this on to ten friends each, then 30 million people will have been contacted! If it goes one level further, you guessed it.....

THREE HUNDRED MILLION PEOPLE!!!

Again, all YOU have to do is send this to 10 people. That's all (and not buy at ESSO/BP). How long would all that take? If each of us sends this email out to ten more people within one day of receipt, all 300 MILLION people could conceivably be contacted within the next 8 days!!! Acting together we can make a difference. If this makes sense to you, please pass this message on.

PLEASE HOLD OUT UNTIL THEY LOWER THEIR PRICES It's easy to make this happen. Just forward this email, and buy your petrol at Shell, Asda, Tesco, Sainsburys, Morrisons, Jet etc. i.e. Boycott BP and Esso

I remember when I was young my father would drive a little out of his way to fill up on petrol at a petrol station that was a couple of pence cheaper than the nearest petrol station. I'd question the logic, but he'd costed it out and knew his fuel efficiency, and paying 43.9p per litre ten miles away was better than 45.9p at the petrol station opposite.

These days things have changed, petrol costs £1.30 a litre, most of that money goes to the government, about 80p is fuel duty and VAT.

Bear in mind Esso, BP, Shell, Tesco and all the rest are private sector companies.

I used to be a private sector company, I used to make CDs and sell them. They cost about 50p to make, to print on my desktop printer, and burn on my PC, cos I made so few of them I never paid VAT or any kind of tax.

Imagine if you will, that the government decided to force me to charge a duty and VAT on those CDs so I could no longer sell them for 50p each, but instead had to sell them for £1.30 each. I probably wouldn't have bothered.

Every few years we have a general election, we vote in 665 members of parliament, some of whom make up the government, but those in the government can't do much themselves, they need the vast vast apparatus of the state, thousands of employees, public sector workers following their dictats in order to collect taxes and spend the money. These people are all complicit in raising the price of petrol at the pumps.

And that is what exasperates me right now, that not only does the state artificially push the price of petrol up, but they also complain about the high price and suggest ways to put the companies out of business, to force them to lower their prices.

Ethically, public sector employees who object to high petrol prices should quit their jobs.

Here's another way I look at it. When I spend £1.30 at the petrol pump, I don't get £1.30's worth of petrol, I get 1 litre of petrol plus 80p's worth of government spending on schools, hospitals, European Union bullshit, MPs expenses, antismoking enforcement, Police officers working undercover, benefit payments and so on.

Actually I'd rather just have the petrol I pay for.

Kroll, the City of London Police and my blog

Happy new year dear blog readers.

Last year this blog had its biggest ever-readership
27,000 hits for 2010, up from 22,000 hits in 2009. Alas, its not quite call for skipping round the office, high-fiving my online journalistic success, the number of returning visitors has declined. I see these people as being folk I used to go drinking with before I moved to London, and slowly they're forgetting I exist.

Furthermore, it was in the first half of the year when the site got the most visitors.

The most popular posts being ones where I'd used magic google-juice to summon the search engine traffic (putting the right key words in the url), such as the Hollie Creig story and the Paul Chambers Twitter Joke thing.

For the latter half of the year, I've been blogging less and my subject matter has been boring.

That said, there's been one or two exciting moments, like when I blogged a moan about my temp agency messing up passing me for a week, and within minutes of clicking "PUBLISH POST", my mobile ringing with someone from their head office, raining down a firestorm on the local office, I got my money in the end. I feel a little guilty cos I was partly to blame. Anyhoo, I took that post down, fearing for my job, even though the company I work in are quite different from the company who pays me.

There was another thrilling post where I was frustrated by the amount of time it was taking my former housing renting landlord folk to give me my deposit back. They took a few hours before phoning me, the money arrived shortly after and they even phoned back the next day to ask that I update the blog post.

This is the future, rather than actually phoning helplines, just write arsey blogpost about stuff, let google do its work and someone else can run round resolving any problems.

Its a thrilling way to live.

The other week I was inspired to write a blogpost about some banner that had been strung up over a road, this blogpost in fact.

One thing I didn't mention in the original post was Kroll, they're a private investigation company who it is alleged under the auspices of Guy Carpenter, persuaded the City of London Police to expend vast resources on bringing Ian Puddick to justice.

A day or two after I clicked publish post, I noticed a Kroll ISP address in the server logs, as having read my blog. I was terrified, I felt threatened and intimidated. So, in a funk I took the blogpost offline until my nerves had calmed and I'd stopped shaking. It took quite a few sleepless nights, but eventually I thought "fuck it, live by the blog, die by the blog". I've lost countless relationships and jobs cos of this philosophy, I'm crazy, but I get the job done.

Its a weird thing about threatening and intimidating things, its all in the eye of the beholder.

I discovered a neat thing about my ADSL wifi routery thing, I can rename it anything, and so whenever my neighbours search for their networks they'll find one nearby called "MI5 mobile surveillance unit 23".

Is it Kroll's fault that I felt threatened by their ISP's appearance in my server logs? Well yes, they did hunt down my website. On the other hand I am just being a pussy by being intimidated by such things?

I dunno. Should I fuck with Kroll? Probly not. But does this blogpost count as fucking with Kroll? Well, that's up to them, innit?

There is another angle...

As part of my job, I spend hours at work randomly surfing the web, reading up on episodes of Lost or V or obscure statistics about far off lands. Its not really part of my job, just that I am incapable of doing productive work unless I have some kind of inoffensive release for my curious mind, without it, my work rate would fall.

Perhaps, Kroll appeared in my server logs because my counterpart, some underpaid temp at Kroll, was bored in his lunch break and arrived at the aforementioned blogpost randomly, with no prejudice or malicious intent.

This is how wars start, people feeling needlessly threatened. We could all do with being a little more like Samantha Smith.

Student protests and education funding

Yes, its shocking that the bastards bastards Police were so brutal, none of the protesting students could have expected the police to be so frightful.

Yes, its shocking that such a large and overwhelmingly peaceful protest could be overshadowed by the vandalism of a tiny minority.

Yes, its shocking that a university education that was free or cheap to previous generations will now have to paid for by the graduates once they start earning over £21,000.

Yes, Charlie 'Son of multi-millionaire David' Gilmour is an asshole for swinging on the cenotaph.

But why?

Well, its what the police have always done.

It would be nice if the protests could be carried out without any police violence. It would also be nice if protests could be carried out without any vandalism, smashing of private property and graffitiing of public property. It does happen occasionally. Nice ideal protests, like those anti-war marches, they failed in achieving their stated aims, but the protests were less violent than these graduate tax protests.

And there's something dodgy about anarchists demanding more state funding.

The number of students in the UK has pretty much doubled since I was at university a decade ago. In the sixties, 5% of the young went to university, now its 45%. Whatever was spent by the government on universities fifty years ago, to maintain the same cost per student would cost nine times as much.

As an aside, I wonder how much university education costs, not how much people have to pay, but how much it costs, before any excessive profits. Does it really cost prestigeous universities like Oxford, Cambridge and Hull so much more than the local polytechnic to educate? Or do they charge an excess amount cos they can, for the prestige. In the same way that houses in London cost so much more than in Motherwell, despite using the same number of bricks and the same labour to build.

I've been meaning to write this blogpost for weeks, I've been doing research.

Here, how much of GDP should the government spend on education?

Rightly or wrongly I take GDP as a proxy for my income. If the government spends 5% of GDP on defence, thats the same as them taxing me 5% and spending it on defence, the same as taxing everyone likewise. If the government raises corporation tax and lowers income tax, I reckon the corporations will pass on the cost to the consumer and that 5% will still come out of my pocket. They can tax 'the rich' more, but that money will still come out of my pocket.

Anyhoo, here's a graph showing defence spending in the UK over the past few hundred years is a constant around 4% of GDP, apart from when there's a war.

Out of all the money anyone in the UK has earned, about 4% has gone on tanks and planes or muskets and horses, depending on the technological era. We can suppose that that's about how much defence costs to maintain the UK and stop other countries from trying it on.

Now government funded education, that's more of a new thing and hasn't been a constant. As a percentage of GDP it has been increasing.

See how in the 19th century, it was a small fraction of a percentage, and now its about 4.5%. Down from a peak of 6.5% in 1980.

In 1980, there were around 800,000 students in the UK, today there are around 2,500,000 students, about three times as many. If spending per student was to stay the same as it did in the good old days of student grants and 'free' education, then the UK would be paying around 20% of GDP on education.

Sure, I'm playing fast and loose with the facts here, that graph is for all education spending, not just university education. And also, its just government spending, here look:-

In 1850, government spending was only 10% of GDP, the other 90%, other people spent on things of their own choosing, or stuck in banks where it was invested in things. People paid for their own education, or their kids or charitable scholarships or their own choosing. But in the last hundred years, the state as taken more of our money, around 40% and spent it however the prevailing government has decided. Individually we can't be trusted to spend that additional 30% on what we want, government knows better.

That's the welfare state. That's what it costs.

The welfare state is a great thing. Its better that there is a welfare state than if there wasn't one, I think we can all agree on that. However, some people think the welfare state is too big, too costly, to all encompassing, some people think it should be bigger and encompass more.

Personally as a small state libertarian, I'd prefer a smaller welfare state, and more freedom for individuals to keep hold of their own money and spend it how they see fit, like the legendary policy from The West Wing, making college fees tax-deductable.

Elsewhere on the internet, wiser men than I have highlighted the fact that education isn't free, and demanding free education.

What is the point of amassing public money to subsidise the madness of young people who (a) think that complex services even in theory can be 'free', and (b) then proceed to 'demand' them.

My own theory is that there are far too many students to be paid for from the public purse. There should be some degree of rationing, how about letting the best achieving 10% of students from any school have their university fees paid for by the government, regardless of institution and course, non-transferable so the rich kid can't palm off their good fortune on a poor kid. And the next best achieving 10% get a lowest subsidy.

And say the best achieving student doesn't want to go to university, or for some reason gets knocked back from all his choices of uni, then well, hard cheese.

Advice for student who riot in London

From FITWatch

If you fear you may be arrested as a result of identification by CCTV, FIT or press photography;

DON'T panic. Press photos are not necessarily conclusive evidence, and just because the police have a photo of you doesn't mean they know who you are.

DON'T hand yourself in. The police often use the psychological pressure of knowing they have your picture to persuade you to 'come forward'. Unless you have a very pressing reason to do otherwise, let them come and find you, if they know who you are.

DO get rid of your clothes. There is no chance of suggesting the bloke in the video is not you if the clothes he is wearing have been found in your wardrobe. Get rid of ALL clothes you were wearing at the demo, including YOUR SHOES, your bag, and any distinctive jewellery you were wearing at the time. Yes, this is difficult, especially if it is your only warm coat or decent pair of boots. But it will be harder still if finding these clothes in your flat gets you convicted of violent disorder.

DON'T assume that because you can identify yourself in a video, a judge will be able to as well. "That isn't me" has got many a person off before now.

DO keep away from other demos for a while. The police will be on the look-out at other demos, especially student ones, for people they have put on their 'wanted' list. Keep a low profile.

DO think about changing your appearance. Perhaps now is a good time for a make-over. Get a haircut and colour, grow a beard, wear glasses. It isn't a guarantee, but may help throw them off the scent.

DO keep your house clean. Get rid of spray cans, demo related stuff, and dodgy texts / photos on your phone. Don't make life easy for them by having drugs, weapons or anything illegal in the house.

DO get the name and number of a good lawyer you can call if things go badly. The support group has the names of recommended lawyers on their site. Take a bit of time to read up on your rights in custody, especially the benefits of not commenting in interview.

DO be careful who you speak about this to. Admit your involvement in criminal damage / disorder ONLY to people you really trust.

DO try and control the nerves and panic. Waiting for a knock on the door is stressful in the extreme, but you need to find a way to get on with business as normal. Otherwise you'll be serving the sentence before you are even arrested.

Spread of rents in the UK housing market

Good evening blog readers, I'm in the process of moving house. I'd been meaning to move away from Wembley and closer to work for a while and now, well, to be honest I'm of no fixed abode until I get keys to the new place some time next week.

Anyhoo, it took a while to find somewhere to live. We had a budget, around £800 per month, no more than £900. We wanted a two bedroom place so one room could be an office/studio/den/spare bedroom, but a one bedroom place would be okay if it was nice. I had location stipulations, nearer to where I work in Enfield than Wembley, and also closer to ways into London town centre of gigs an stuff.

Other people in the househunting game have other stipulations, such as, not in the east and near on of those cool west London tube lines.

Here, take a look at RightMove, London doesn't really really cater for the two bedroom less than £800 a month west dweller.

No matter how hard you look, there's always going to be something better in that price range towards the east.

The concept of 'cheap' two bedroom doesn't exist in west London.

Its been a while since I was out looking for a two bedroom flat, in fact last time was around ten years ago, in Glasgow. We got a rather executive city centre flat for £575 a month, that was expensive for Glasgow. But for London, that's not even on the radar for the cheap end of the market.

There isn't even a cheap bit of London with the shittest two bed flats for around that. I know inflation exists, but no no.

Anyhoo, so I like graphs and stuff. I went onto RightMove and started scraping.

This is a graph of the distribution of two bedroom flat rental prices in Glasgow from RightMove. It tells us that if you're looking for a £800 two bed there, you can pretty much get any flat on the market. A shitty flat in a shitty area will cost £400 a month and a decent one will cost £800. Sure there are more luxurious city centre ones over a grand, but most of the market is within your grasp.

Its not just Glasgow that's that cheap, here's a look at the spread in Glasgow and Manchester. Its the same spread.

Sure, Manchester is a touch more expensive. The average being £628 per month compared to Glasgow's £593 per month, but there's not much in it.

Anyhoo, here are all the price spreads that I scraped off of RightMove.

Yes its hard to see what's going on there, suffice to say there's a wide spread of rental prices comparing different cities and towns in the UK. That's kind of obvious to all.

You'll have heard of the north/south divide, or how London is horrendously expensive compared to the rest of the world and it gets cheaper the further from London you go.

So to illustrate this here's a graph of average rent for a two-bed in different parts of the UK, with latitude along the y-axis and price along the x-axis.

The rent floor for the UK seems to be £490 a month. No town has an average rent much below this. Sure, some of the vilest shitholes will be cheaper, and there's always flatshare.

London is generally more expensive than anywhere else in the UK. Even the cheap bits of London are more expensive.

Here's a wee graph of the spreads of various places in that expensive latitude around London.

I've cut off the x-axis at £1500 per month cos above that it gets rather depressing. Do you really want to know that the average rent in West Hampstead is £1710 a month an Tower Hamlets is £1570? Around three times more than double the average in most of the UK.

The other day Raedwald blogged about how Middlesbrough was well cheap, you could buy a four bedroom house there for £132,000. But that still not quite scraping the barrel.

I use to joke with people that I could quit my job and move to Hull and live in a nicer flat just on my Job Seekers allowance. But it appears there are cheaper places than even Hull. Carlisle for example.

Here, this is my wee list of the average 2-bed rent in various places in the UK.

£1,711.15 - West Hampstead
£1,569.78 - Tower Hamlets
£1,530.41 - Bethnal Green
£1,394.95 - Brixton
£1,252.63 - Wembley
£1,173.56 - Brighton
£1,144.02 - Enfield
£1,093.44 - Uxbridge
£1,031.45 - Walthamstow
£955.47 - Croydon
£874.05 - Reading
£869.32 - Slough
£828.37 - Chelmsford
£783.09 - Edinburgh
£775.00 - Burnham on Crouch
£755.04 - Portsmouth
£736.06 - Bristol
£692.54 - Plymouth
£668.94 - Cardiff
£666.67 - Birmingham
£664.54 - Colchester
£648.22 - Newcastle upon Tyne
£645.89 - Norwich
£627.92 - Manchester
£617.50 - Leicester
£606.42 - Liverpool
£597.65 - Sheffield
£592.19 - Glasgow
£581.67 - Swansea
£578.26 - Moss Side
£576.36 - Nottingham
£553.09 - Coventry
£516.23 - Doncaster
£507.14 - Bolton
£504.90 - Rochdale
£504.41 - Middlesbrough
£497.64 - Bradford
£496.24 - Hull
£479.17 - Carlisle

Thrilling stuff, I'm sure you'll agree.

Does this open up some interest questions about the nature not just of Housing Benefit, but also Job Seekers Allowance in the UK, and who pays for who.

**UPDATE**
Playing around on Excel instead on OpenOffice Base, I've put together this surface graph of the spreads in each of the aforemention towns, and done it so it looks a little like the cover to Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures.

Its going to be a wee while until I can get on a 'puter that can run better graphing software.

Money lost in the BP disaster

I caught the arse end of a tweet this morning, and having not done a ranty blogpost in a while I think it lit my fuse.

From: @mrrichclark
Sent: 29 Jul 2010 08:09

RT @BrandRepublic What could the money lost in the BP disaster buy? http://ht.ly/2i4Ff #oilspill #bp <--- A whole country, wildlife haven

sent via web
On Twitter: http://twitter.com/mrrichclark/status/19809766881

I love stats and figures and graphs and stuff, but this brings the taste of ash to my my mouth.

Oil is great, its what makes the modern world go round. You can either have lots of men working in the fields growing crops to feed their families, or just one man driving a tractor running on fossil fuels, whilst the other men design HTC Desire touchscreen smartphones.

I see disasters like the Gulf Oil spill and the Exxon Valdez as part of the package, part of the risk and consequences we accept if we want ubiquitous touchscreen smartphone.

If you want to do away with oil, then chuck away your phone and get back to the fields, and if your crops die, you starve.

Sure, its not a black and white thing, you can tighten up legislation to reduce the risk of such disasters, but that like squeezing jelly. It'll put up the price of oil just a little, so that other sources of oil become more cost effective, such as biofuels and tar sands, but with them comes a whole raft of different problems, like pollution and energy efficiencies. These in turn you can tweak with legislation, which in turn puts up the price.

If the government tightens up controls too much, the oil companies will just break the law, or drill for oil elsewhere with less restrictive controls, or employ less scrupulous subcontracts. As long as we want our ubiquitous touchscreen smartphones oil companies will find a way, its completely unavoidable.

If you accept the package, you accept the inevitability of disasters, the best you can hope for is a decent regime that clears up the mess, an insurance fund if you will, that whenever a disaster occurs, can suck up the oil, hose down the seagulls and get those affected back to business as usual as soon as possible.

Such an insurance fund would need to be huge and inevitably funded by the oil companies. But the get their money from selling oil to us the punters who want smartphones rather than working in the fields.

But here in the UK, about 70% of the cost of fuel at the pumps goes to the government, not the oil companies. The government that legislates to control the risk and is ultimately responsible for clearing up the mess.

Which bring me back to that tweet, and the phrase "money lost in the BP disaster". Whatever money is "lost" to BP, it originally came from the consumer, and on the way the government took more than double that. If the disaster cost BP $30billion, the government has taken $60billion.

If there is to be an insurance fund, don't we already pay for it? Sure, it would be nice if there was a specific pot of gold set aside, but that's just office admin.

When the government started bailing out banks the other year, I saw a similar infographic and possibly a blogpost from Tim Worstall going through what that many billion would buy. Things like the International Space Station or writing off the debts of third world countries, and so forth.

But no, the guvmint chose to bail out banks with money that didn't actually exist. The UK government essentially took out loans to be paid back "in the future" to not pay for third world debt or cool stuff like space travel, but banks.

The government have got far more of our money than BP, we handed it over in good faith for them to spend wisely on making the world a better place.

The money BP get as a cut is exactly the value of the oil to them, otherwise they'd sell us something else. In the UK in return for £1 we get about 30p's worth of oil and 70p's worth of the government making the world a better place.

That's the package, 30p of ubiquitous touchscreen smartphone and avoiding work in the fields and 70p worth of government spending.

Having finally clicked on the tweet's link to Brand Republic I see they're using the loss in value of BP due to the oil spill, which amounts to $100billion, and lists items such as the following:-

• A new home to replace all 275,000 homes lost in hurricane Katrina
• An iPad for all US college students
• 10 years clean water for each of the 884,000 people without access to it

Anyhoo, its all pish. At any point the UK or US government could, at the drop of a hat, take out a loan to buy any of these things, to make the world that much of a better place.<

But they don't, cos they know as well you do, that such gestures would lead to riots, fighting in the streets, buildings on fire, crops left unharvested, starvation and death.

**UPDATE**
I can't let it lie, every time I click post and walk away some more rantin' goes through my head.

How about this? Instead of paying £1 for petrol and getting 30p of oil and 70p of government spending, you could pay 30p for the same amount of petrol and keep the other 70p in your pocket and then spend that 70p making the world a better place by your own design. Rather than relying on the government deciding who is worthy of their largess, you can choose for yourself whether to give the money to charity, to buy clean water in far off lands, propping up dictatorial regimes, or hosing down seabirds or giving iPads to US college students and making Apple exactly the same amount richer.

I mean really, this lost BP money couldn't have been spent on anything else, there was never any plan to do things on that marvelous shopping list, no plans that have now had to be cancelled due to the oil spill.

Back home, I have these huge credit card debts racked up from a period of unemployment, and I really want an Xbox 360 Elite, my debts equal the cost of fifty Xbox 360 Elite, that's the scale of my disaster. So I can't afford an Xbox 360 Elite. If I somehow came across the money to buy one Xbox 360 Elite, I wouldn't buy one, I'd pay off a fiftieth of my debts.

If I came across enough money to buy forty Xbox 360 Elites, I still wouldn't buy one cos I still have more debt than money to buy an Xbox 360 Elite.

Strangely, even before I'd racked up the credit card debt I didn't have enough money to afford an Xbox 360 Elite. There were other more pressing things to spend the money on, like getting my car serviced, rent, food, flowers for my attractive young ladyfriend, and propping up a small fraction of London and Glasgow's indie music scenes.

Actually, I could, at any point just get an Xbox 360 Elite with my said credit card, whether I have the money or not. The fact there is a huge oil spill or outstanding debts has little bearing on whether I get it or not.

Sleepless and frustrated

I was up late last night, and then had a restless and fitful night. I had a piece I needed to finish writing, precious little time during the day when it wouldn't come. Doubt and uncertainty with the finished article.

Always doubt and uncertainty with finished articles. I'm tearfully grateful when certainty arrives.

Someone finally read my film treatment the other day, it was such a relief when they confirmed my doubts and uncertainties, I was grinning for hours.

Its just the awkward fraction of the autistic spectrum I inhabit. I could have just not bothered writing anything, written it off as another thing I'd planned to do, but didn't. It sure would have saved time and effort and made the world a nicer place.

But my head doesn't work that way, when there is an intention or a plan to do something right away then I feel the need to do it. That's normal right? Or no? The willingness to sacrifice the plan, that frustrates me.

Something that still plays on my mind even after many years was when I was helping a friend move from Glasgow to London. We'd hired a van and I figured if we drove at x miles an how, we'd get to London in daylight, and it would be easy to unload and have the job finished. The trip would use this much petrol, and cost this much money. But now I think should we have stopped more on the way, for lunch at a Little Chef, dinner at Watford Gap and who cares if we arrived at 2am and put off unloading til the next day? The journey would have been more pleasant, more relaxed.

Maybe we'd still be friends today, if we'd stopped at the Little Chef, abandoned the plan and loosened my embrace of the plan.

Anyhoo, about the frustration. I'd read a stack of blogposts, all during the week. Freakishly fast sprinter Usain Bolt can't run in the UK for tax reasons, under the UK government's tax regime, he'd be paying more in tax than he'd earn. Its a familiar story for the super-successful. I remember read that for years the Rolling Stones couldn't play in the UK because the tax and the costs would be more than they could make from the concert, regardless of how much they charged for tickets, the costs and tax would mean they'd make a loss. Government policy dictates the Rolling Stones tour schedule.

Elsewhere in the blogs was coverage of Vince Cable and the LibDems proposals for a graduate tax. I might have misread, and right now on a train, hammering this out on my blackberry, graduates would pay an extra 9% tax on their income, to pay for the ever increasing cost of further education.

Firstly, I'm sceptical of why the costs of further education keep increasing, what are they doing differently? Are the universities incapable of keeping costs down? Why does is cost proportionately more to educate a student now than it did ten years ago. Sure there are more computers, but entry level computing costs the same now as it did even twenty years ago, £300 for an Amstrad CPC, £300 for a crap desktop PC, £300 for ahalf decent netbook/laptop.

I'm not expert, but is it cos there are more university students now. That was some damn fool idea to get 50% of folk through university. Society doesn't need that many graduates, the population isn't smart enough for that many graduates. Everyone with an IQ of 101?

Or is it that further education costs more cos primary, and secondary education isn't educating enough, so now universities are have to teach people how to read and write, do addition and subtraction, derivatives and integration before they can start the meaty stuff of rocket science, particle science, manufacturing engineering and media studies?

I digress. Some spectacularly successful people didn't go to university and some did. Alan Sugar didn't. Anyhoo, at the top of the pay scale, high earners are going to be paying their 50% income tax, plus another few % for national insurance, say 10%, I dunno. But then some of them are going to be forking out 9% on top of that. Paying almost 70% in tax if you pay by the rules and neither avoid or evade tax. Its hardly an incentive to work at all.

Lower down the pay scale, a university degree is less of a benefit. You'll have half the people in the office are university graduates and half got where they are today by the hard slog of working on the shop floor, streets typing pool and getting promoted. These folk are all going to be doing exactly the same job, the same amount of effort day to day. Yet under a graduate tax system, half of them will be taking home less money for their labours.

The Daily Mash had it right with "the harder you work, the more you're taxed".

Some newspaper story earlier in the week about a Somalian family with seven kids who've been put into a huge £1,200,000 house in Kensington. Jesus Christ could they not have been deported to Hull and gotten a bigger place at the fraction of the cost to the taxpayer.

Mark Wadsworth can wade through the arguments for and against social housing and how in this case its just transferring money from the hardworking employed through government and a brief stop in the bank accounts of the residents and then into the pockets of the rich private landlord. Redistributing wealth upwards.

I was thinking, shit if I hadn't worked so hard in school and university and a succession of office jobs, I could be unemployed with seven kids in a huge expensive house.

Not only that but I often hear of families, living in accommodation paid for by various benefits who manage to run up arrears by not even paying the rent to the landlords, instead the money is spent on other things, fags, phones, plasma TVs and holidays abroad. I choke on my cappuccino til it comes out of my nose.

As an aside, during writing this I have now arrived at my destination, a pleasant bar in Camden. Last time I was here it was called the Oh Bar, now its called the Blues Bar. The barstaff, whilst friendly and helpful, don't remind me as much of the barstaff at the 13th Note in Glasgow like they did in the Oh Bar. There was one who looked like a b-movie Cameron Diaz, she is absent now.

Every blogger's favourite former ambassador was writing about slavery the other day, how folk work hard and forced by threat of violence to pay taxes to subsidise those who don't work. Those who chose not to work. The employed are the slaves now.

It was weeks ago that I came upon the realisation that I'm slaving away for forty hours a week to pay people who are getting more for free in benefits that I earn in a five years or something. It just seems a bit unfair.

Why more laws? Why more taxes?

That Somalian family in Kensington were offered other, cheaper places but turned them down. They didn't like the cheaper places.

Its a familiar story. This sense of entitlement from those who reside on benefits, that they are somehow entitled to free housing of their chosing.

Not me. I left home at eighteen to go to university hundreds of miles away, staying in halls of residences and flatshares with friends. The flatsharing continued after graduation. And as my friends peeled away for marriage and job elsewhere, I too left. I arrived in London with nowhere to stay, an afternoon on gumtree.com checking out different places within my price range soon found me a complete shithole of a flatshare which I tolerated for a few months until I found friends with a more pleasant flatshare.

Whilst I've always wanted a place of my own, with a garden and woodchip wallpaper that I put up and painted myself and walls lined with shelves, I know I can't afford it and so that's going to have to wait.

Not so for the unemployable who live on benefits, they expect the provision of their own houses, they demand it. Stamping their feet, and threatening to spawn. No thought of paying for it themselves or building their own route to the house of their dreams.

Its a minor bugbear of mine, the 'waiting lists' for social housing. Anyone can get on the waiting list, it would be really nice to get a nice house for free. When Camden New Journal says there's a waiting list of 18,000 people, I think is that all, there's only that many people who'd like a nice house for free?

So my solution to the ills of the nation is an income tax threshold of whatever the living wage should be, and then 40% tax, scrapping VAT and national insurance.

Or even just scrap National Insurance and make it so everyone has to get their own private medical and employment insurance scheme. Like you have for car insurance, the government doesn't run that, so why should they for health and employment. The voluntary charity sector can fill the gap for people who didn't insure themselves. Somewhere there will be a charity that judges even the worse case of self-neglect as worthy.

Its all bullshit this. Like Behind Blue Eyes, I look back at the city on fire and acknowledge my proxies. I'm not a high earner, nowhere near 50% tax, judging by my pay packet I earn so little I pay 17%. And my univeristy costs were paid off a long time ago. I escaped the benefits trap months ago, other than jealousy these issuesdon't concern me.

What frustrates me in reality is the huge credit card debts I ran up in my last tranch of unemployment. That's my own fault, I should have moved out of the expensive flatshare and found a cheaper shithole one instead of claiming Housing Benefit. I should have gone straight to Office Angels instead of the Job Centre Plus.

That's all in the past, now I just need to pay off my credit card. At the current rate I should be debt free by 2016. Sooner if I stop spending money on other things.

It not the folk who live on benefits or the government's tax regime, its just me spending, its entirely within my control. I can whine for days but its all bullshit.

Yesterday I bought a load of presents and for myself a new pair of shoes. Its debateable whether I need new shoes or not, where to draw the line, can I afford it or not, are the old ones a detriment to my employability and social or not.

No point even debating it. On Friday night I could have stayed in and not spent but instead I went out for a meal and then pints and pints, costing about the same as the shoes.

Even today, right now as I sup my second cappucino in the Blues Bar, ist cost me about the same. Could have stayed in my flat and not spent anything.

Sitting here in Camden cost me £3.20 for the train to Euston, £3.20 for the train to Camden, £5 for a couple of coffees and then maybe £3.20 for the train back home , that's 0.14% of my credit card debt.

More than getting over my creditcard debt, I really want an Xbox 360 Elite. Not some shitty red ring of death Xbox 360 Arcade, but a decent Elite with 120gb hard disc, that will play both new games and second hand original Xbox games like Warriors and Project Gotham Racing 2 where you can drive round cities like Edinburgh, Stockholm and Moscow. This Xbox 360 Elite will cost me around £150.

New shoes = Friday night out = 1/6 of a Xbox 360 Elite

My credit card debts = fifty Xbox 360 Elites

I'm a smart cookie. Sometime ago the computer I had that ran Quicken Accounts died a death, but recently on my wee netbook I wrote me some home finance personal household accounts software in Perl. I rule. It does neat graphs showing income and expenditure. How much and what proportions I spend on rent, my car, going out and pointless shit. I can easily see what spending needs to be reined in. And how to rein it in is all under my control, any reason not to is bullshit. I can reduce travel costs by moving closer to where I work, I can lower my communications costs by getting rid of this phone. I could live off rice and baked beans to cut down on food, or just sleep in my car to reduce my rent.

But I don't, for I am that Somalian family, stamping my foot, demanding this lifestyle and turning down the cheaper options.
Sent using BlackBerry® from Orange

Redistributing wealth

There was an epic post over at Devil's Kitchen the other day, pulling together Guardian pieces, Tim Worstall and Ol' Blue Eyes, covering the government's proposed cap on Housing Benefit. Therein the Devil summarises the problem by quoting a comment from the Guardian piece.

To sum up, some people are effectively being given a pre-tax income of £77,000 for doing nothing, and people far poorer than that are paying for it through taxation. The chancellor claims this is unfair and you disagree. Right.

The case point being that housing benefit is paid based on average rents in each area, so in posh Camden unemployed folk, folk on low income, foreigners and the incapacitated can claim £1000 a week or so, paid for out of the tax that everyone else has to pay.

After discussing the issue with people who know about this sort of thing, and my own wee flag I like to wave about how you can pretty much buy a house in Hull if you're on Job Seeker's Allowance, it seems that the problem lies in the 'Local Connection' section of the 1996 Housing Act, which essentially penalizes claimants and councils who seek better value further afield.

I suggested doing something about this one the government's Spending Challenge website.

So I was rather surprised this morning to read on the BBC that the government were acting on my suggestion.

Alas, I didn't bother reading the article until later. The thrust seems to be to move unemployed folk from poverty ghettos to more affluent areas, which is kind of the opposite of what I had in mind.

JAY'S POLITICAL BLOG reads it as:-

On the surface, this idea is not bad in itself. Many people do move to wherever a job takes them. But as Mr Balls says, the coalition has already cut millions of pounds from funding for the jobless. He is absolutely right to accuse the Tories and the Liberal Democrats of taking money away from the poorer regions whose economies need regeneration; a move which will, in turn, only serve to slow the overall economic recovery, if not take Britain back in recession.

By encouraging people to move to more prosperous areas where the jobs are more likely to be, that is exactly what the Conservative-Liberal coalition are doing.

My take is that in Hull you've got fourth generation unemployed people, the cost of living is very low, the housing benefit bill per claimant is low compared to Camden, Westminster and Islington.

So, if you've got unemployed and unemployable people, why keep them in broom cupboards in the most expensive areas when they could quite merrily have a higher standard of living and more space elsewhere.

What could happen is that the Tories and the Liberal Democrats would be taking housing benefit money away from the richer regions and moving it to the poorer areas.

Me, I used to live in expensive West Hampstead, I had a nice job and could afford it, unemployment got me, my self-confidence was shot to fuck, I moved five miles west to Wembley where rent was so much cheaper and I could survive on minimum wage until my self-confidence rose to the heady heights it is today.

I'm fucking great me.

iPod Daleks

I can't say I'm that impressed with the latest episode of Doctor Who, not quite naff, but getting there.

Even last week I was put off with the idea of a historical figure phoning up the Doctor for an urgent/non-urgent thing, that just didn't happen in Doctor Who, its the sort of thing an American who'd never seen the program would suggest, ten minutes into a brain-storming session.

It doesn't even make sense, historical figures know about the Doctor and have his phone number, but somehow don't remember the daleks. Someone's crossed the timestreams.

Anyhoo, the new daleks, now available in colours to match your iPod, how very 2010.

Sure, I accept the unsurpressed need to redesign all the monsters for every series, it worked for the cybermen, but somehow the design process for these new daleks in just uninspired.

Sure, they're bigger and sleeker than their older cousins, but they're thundering hulks, rather than anything sinister, and they have a hump back.

I would have preferred more variations on a theme like the old Rememberance of the Daleks heavy weapons Dalek, or the glass Dalek. More of that sort of thing please.

Besides all the ones in this evening's episode seemed a bit rattley, they'd shake when they were talking, and wobbly when they moved. That's just not right. If the Doctor can fend them off with a jammy dodger, surely he can point out that they're made of plastic with a wee man inside pedaling a tricycle.

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