LIBDEMS SHOW TRUE SOCIALIST COLOURS.

So Nick Clegg and his 'LibDems' have shown their true colours at last.

The Party Conference currently in progress has seen announcements of yet more tax and spend, yet more socialist claptrap and yet more bullshit. Any future 'LibDem' involvement in government will now see them pushing for higher taxes on what they term 'the better off', without any indication as to what' better off' might mean. They propose to restrict payment of the winter fuel allowance to 'wealthier pensioners' - what does that mean ? They still want a 'mansion tax', albeit dressed up as additional council tax bands, and are apparently considering ways of hitting already hard-pressed savers by an attack on dividend payments.

On the other side of the coin, they want to avoid the freeze on benefit payments proposed by the Conservatives and plan to abolish what they and Labour choose to call the 'bedroom tax'. How this last proposal can be considered fair is beyond me; all that it has been done is to bring council and housing association tenants onto the same footing as those in privately rented properties, which is hardly unreasonable. Somehow, and despite rowing back on these particular money saving schemes, they still propose to tackle the remaining vast deficit in our national accounts.

The 'LibDem' may not be quite the party of sandal-wearing, tree-hugging nuts that they used to be (that distinction now belongs to the Greens) but they are still a bunch of privileged socialists who want to take from those who have as a result of working hard and give to the idle and workshy scroungers who so populate our island. The real answer to our country's malaise is to cut benefits and taxes, so that all those who are able to work are strongly encouraged to do so; there can be no reason why anyone who is able cannot be employed, if necessary by the state on community service projects until other opportunities arise. The utter nonsense of paying substantial amounts of tax credits and other benefits to anyone working 24 hours, in such a way that they are wholly discouraged from working longer, is farcical and must end.

As it stands, only the Conservatives have anything like the right approach, even UKIP indicating that they're in favour of abolishing the 'bedroom tax'. How it will all play out over the 7 months up to next May's election is anyone's guess.

WILL MILIBAND AND HIS ILK NEVER LEARN ?

You can always rely on Labour to promise to spend money that isn't there.

 

With their annual conference about to get underway, Ed Miliband has finally come out with a few scraps in an effort to keep his followers happy. Unfortunately, the latest round of promises are nothing but political cant and attached to the usual rhetoric about 'taxing the rich'.

 

The only possible reason that Miliband and his clan should promise to reverse the current government's changes to housing benefit is vote-catching. That tenants in council-owned property have historically been able to claim a higher level of housing benefit than those in privately owned homes was a nonsense and needed to be stopped. The claims Labour has made about the change being a 'bedroom tax' are ridiculous and to reverse the change would be a shocking and unwarranted act. It will also cost money which the government does not have.

Something that would cost us all is his additional commitment to increase the minimum wage. Rather than extolling people to live within their means, or reducing taxes, it's always been Labour philosophy to hand out cash, someone else's that is, in a pointless effort to make the lower paid better off. All it actually achieves is a general uplift of all wages which can only be paid for by increasing prices, taxes and borrowing; the supposed 'poor' don't benefit in any way and everyone suffers, as we all know only too well from the efforts of the previous Labour government.
 

Next, Rachel Reeves, a horribly nasal and earnest shadow treasury person, has separately said that people earning up to £60,000 are not rich and will not be taxed more under a Labour government. That the first part of her statement is blatantly true can't be denied, but the second will deserve serious scrutiny. We already know that Labour, under the Blair / Brown axis, made similar promises about income tax and promptly increased national insurance. There is nothing to say that a future Labour government would be any less weasel-worded and anyone with anything will be well advised to think very carefully before accepting Ms Reeves words at face value. Anyone with an income of more than £150,000 pa, the 'rich' according to Labour, can expect to be absolutely hammered, of course.

 

Thirdly, another of  the old guard, Yvette Cooper aka Mrs Balls, has said that Labour would guarantee what she refers to as "wraparound" childcare for the parents of all primary care children, meaning that they would not have to bother about little Johnny or young Tilly at all between the hours of 8am and 6pm. Why this is considered to be a good thing escapes me. Far too many parents already give far too little attention to their children and pass them over to others at every opportunity, some of the consequences being the appalling behaviour of hordes of our teenagers, their addiction to their 'phones and the internet, their lack of meaningful educational achievement and their total lack of any moral compass and sense of decency or self respect. What we need is a reduction in the outsourcing of our childcare and much more input from parents, not even more state intervention and support.

 

How they would pay for all these promises hasn't been explained but I think we can all be pretty certain that anyone who has anything will find that they become poorer. Buying and owning a house will become even more expensive, indirect taxes will rise dramatically and inflation will soar. While you can take the boy out of Labour, there's no known way of taking Labour out of the boy, and Miliband and his friends still have a basic belief in a big state funded by excessive taxation, despite the shocking consequences of the Blair / Brown years from which we are only just beginning to recover.

 

We can only hope and pray that enough of the population has enough sense to ensure that Labour never again gets the chance to destroy our nation as it so nearly did between 1997 and 2010.

 

BENEFIT 'CUTS' ARE NOT UNJUST.

The spokesmen of various churches have today claimed that the supposed 'cuts' to welfare being enacted by the Government are 'unjust'; apparently they target society's 'most vulnerable'.

 

As well as being the expected ramblings of a mish-mash of wholly unrepresentative and ill-informed socialist-minded individuals, one has to wonder what these befrocked people know about what has been, and is, going on in our society. It's only too easy to criticize others from a position of total ignorance and much harder to develop a coherent plan for tackling major economic difficulties.

 

Most churches are rich in that they own land; they also enjoy charitable status and so avoid paying certain taxes, notably VAT on their purchases, and also enjoy the benefits of 'Gift Aid' whenever any benefactor decides to leave them any asset of value, be it cash or anything else; this measn that they can claim additional amounts from HMRC that are related to the value of the donation and the tax status of the donor. Given this preferential status one has to wonder why these socially minded bodies don't offer the proceeds of these benefits to the least fortunate of their flocks. The answer, of course, is that it's much easier to spend other peoples' money and to try to claim the 'high moral ground' when the other people don't want to play ball.

 

Our country is all-but bankrupt. For decades, we have spent much more than we have earned and we've led lifestyles that simply aren't supported by the real wealth that we have; far tto much has been based on credit of one sort or another. The chickens are now coming home too roost. All debts have to be repaid eventually, be they credit cards, mortgages or government borrowing; what we are now seeing is start of the repayment of what the Governments of this country have borrowed over many years in order to finance an utterly unsustainable standard of living for most people in our country. This process will go on for many years, perhaps even decades, given the extent of the debts that have been built up.

 

The beneficiaries of most of the largesse of Governments have been the supposed 'poor'. Compared with the real poor of Victorian times and even with the poor of the the 1930s, these people are, in fact, rich; they have homes of their own, modern appliances of every sort, cars, mobile telephones, computers and regular, often foreign, holidays. These are things of which the real poor of the 20th century couldn't even dream; their predecessors in bygone days would have no understanding whatsoever of any of this.

 

It is the case that the definition of 'poor' has been subverted to mean anything that its speakers want it to mean. For the most part, 'poor' in 21st century Britain means less well-off than others; it does not mean destitute or on the streets; it does not mean unclothed. More often than not, those who claim poverty can still afford to drink and smoke; their 'poverty' is as much a life choice as anything else.

 

To return to the theseis proposed by the churches that the Government's approach has been 'unjust', I would have to say that this view is rubbish. Everyone except the very rich, and by this I mean people with wealth of many millions of pounds, has been affected by the current economic crisis. The bulk of the population are those whose assets are massively below this level but many are also the people who have been the recipients of vast government support over many years; the only way for the Government to even to begin to redress its huge financial imbalance is to start to reduce the level of support which it has hitherto offered. This may be painful for those who are most exposed but it's also entirely just; how can it be right that millions live on benefits paid for by those who are frequently not much better off ?

 

I have said before and I will no doubt say again that churchmen should keep out of politics. They are usually ill-informed and usually speak from a blinkered standpoint. It's bad enough that they profess belief in a deity which cannot be seen, heard, touched or experienced in any other way; that they should also profess belief in an economic system which can support everyone, all of the time, really is a step too far.