Recent Articles

Dead and buried: the fallacy that Iraq was a humanitarian project

Saturday’s Wikileaks revelations – of British and American troops in Iraq covering-up civilian deaths whilst systematically ignoring and facilitating torture – have begun to expose the full horrors of a war that long-ago went terribly wrong.

Tuesday’s Guardian revelations – that British troops systematically employed torture methods that violate the Geneva Convention – makes the picture darker still, even if only by adding detail.

One consequence of the latest revelations is that they demonstrate the nonsense-thinking behind the original case and “justification” for war.
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Hey, City Boy – bugger off, then

Barclays is thinking of quitting the UK. That’s the front page splash on City AM, a histrionically rightwing freesheet  that seems to subsist largely on advertising from spread betting firms. And we’re all doomed, doomed I tell ye, the breathless accompanying editorial from editor Allister Heath informs readers.

It seems that billionaire boss Bob Diamond are unhappy at the impending £2.5bn levy that the heir to the Osborne baronetcy is set to impose on British banks, and may seek to hightail it to New York as a result. He is a yank, after all.

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Child benefit cuts exposed as unworkable

Iain Martin at the WSJ reveals that the Treasury never really thought through the cuts to child benefit.

And now, the department is desperately running around trying to figure out the best way to either withdraw the plan or make it work as intended (which is unlikely).

So, what seems to be the problem?

Child benefit is generally paid to the mother. She is under no legal obligation to tell the father that she receives it. The Treasury confirms this. It is her benefit. The father’s tax status is irrelevant. If a mother claims it there is nothing forcing her to flag up to the taxman that her husband earns above the level that Osborne stipulates should mean no child benefit.

In other words – it will become extremely hard for anyone enforcing the cut to figure out who is eligible and who isn’t, because they don’t know what the household earns.

They might be able to withdraw it from women who earn more than £44,000, but that’s about it.

I hear that ministers are considering (and tell me which part of the rest of this sentence might provide cause for concern) “a new government database” to try and match up mothers with their partners.

Well that will really go down well won’t it? And if women don’t disclose what is being earnt, will they be arrested en-masse?

I can see the Daily Telegraph and Mumsnet headlines already.

This is what happens when you make policy to try and out-manoeuvre your opponents rather than thinking it through first.

Climate change denialists take issue with Darwin too

contribution by Tomas Rawlings

Yesterday was Fossil Fools day – when a small clique of climate change deniers gather at Parliament to decry logical and the scientific method.

Yet the ever thinning ranks of even vaguely credible people associated with climate denial has finally jumped the shark with an article that once and for all lays bare the real thinking behind climate denial; not science but pure naked ideology. Strip away the ideology and all that’s left is profit.
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Osborne gifts £40bn to super-rich in Swiss deal

Wealthy Britons could dodge £40bn in tax payments after the UK agreed ahead of negotiations on a tax deal with Switzerland that the country could maintain its traditional banking secrecy.

Thousands of higher rate taxpayers, who pay 50% tax on their income in the UK, will be allowed to keep their secret accounts in Zurich and Geneva and pay a low tax rate after the Treasury failed to secure agreement on sharing bank details.

Proposals to make the deal retrospective were also rejected by the Swiss authorities, saving further large sums for wealthy UK residents.
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Richard Murphy, head of Tax Research, said: “No indication is given as to how these accounts are to be regularised. Indeed, there is no prospect they can be because the £40bn or so of evaded assets will not have to be declared by name by the Swiss. In that case there is no prospect of UK interest or penalties being charged.

…more at The Guardian

A firefighter speaks out: ‘who would you trust, us or politicians?’

This was posted as a comment on an earlier article, and we thought it was good enough to publish properly as an article. It has been slightly edited for clarity.

I’m a London fireman.

What annoys me is a lot of people choose to believe the spin made up by politicians who are infamous for spouting lies to support their cause rather than believing the voice of firefighters who are prepared to risk everything to get people out of dire situations.

Who would you trust with your life – a firefighter or a politician?

Firstly, I think the beds argument is irrelevant, I’ve not heard this mentioned once at work, there are much more important things at stake.
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How welfare cuts hit low paid workers

In 2008, David Cameron declared that the abolition of the 10p tax rate for low paid workers was “punishing the low paid”. Vince Cable called for “fully costed proposals on how to make those on low incomes better off” and Nick Clegg said that “this was a matter of principles – remember them?”

They were right to do so. So how have they been putting these fine words into action since they took power in May?

The abolition of the 10p tax rate left some low paid workers worse off by up to £4.46 per week. Households with two adults, each earning less than £18,000 per year, were, therefore, hit by up to £8.92 per week – a substantial sum for people in low paid work at a time when the cost of living was rising, as Mr Cameron and Mr Clegg pointed out.

So let’s use that as an uncontentious baseline measure for measuring the impact of policies on low income workers. Everyone now agrees that the abolition of the 10p tax rate was a shameful attack on the working poor. Instead of the overheated political rhetoric about social cleansing, or competing graphs from government departments and research institutes, let’s just compare any recent policies which the government has announced, and compare them in magnitude to the impact of abolishing the 10p tax rate.

In the Comprehensive Spending Review, George Osborne announced that the percentage of childcare costs covered by tax credits would be reduced from 80% to 70%. A technical sounding change, which a casual listener might presume would have minimal impact.

This will cost a low paid worker with two children up to £30 per week, or rather more than three times as much as the maximum impact of the abolition of the 10p tax rate.

Osborne also announced that after one year, people would lose their entitlement to contributions- based Employment and Support Allowance. Probably fewer than 1 in 100 people know what contributions-based Employment and Support Allowance is. How bad could that be?

It means that a family where one adult is in low paid work and the other is currently receiving Employment and Support Allowance could lose up to £91.40 per week, or rather more than ten times as much as the maximum impact of the abolition of the 10p tax rate. Even if they are then able to claim Jobseekers’ Allowance instead, they will lose more than £30 per week.

What of housing benefit? Inside Housing magazine calculates that 936,960 of the 939,220 local housing allowance claimants will lose out by an average of £12 per week – rising to £22 per week in London. The average loss from technical sounding things like “setting rents based on the 30^th percentile of private sector rents rather than the median” is more than one and a half times the maximum amount which the abolition of the 10p tax rate cost any family. That’s the average – some low paid workers will lose far more.

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That’s just the initial impact (it is possible to calculate the effect of other cuts using the same measure). It doesn’t consider what happens to the low paid lone parent who has to try to find an extra £30 per week to pay for childcare, and is forced to quit her job as a result. It doesn’t consider the health impacts where one person is trying to hold down a low paid full time job and care for their sick partner, when they suddenly have to manage with £90 per week less. Or someone who has to find £12 a week or more in extra rent every week out of the wages of their minimum wage job, and who ends up getting into debt and getting evicted.

But even if you just consider those policies in cash terms, without making any further assumptions, then it shows that the government has already, within its first six months in office, announced three separate policies, each of which hit low income workers far harder than the abolition of the 10p tax rate.

Watch: Vodafone store shut over £6bn dodge

Well done to all those who went to the flash-demo this morning to take action against Vodafone.

Here is a video from the event. More demos against Vodafone are now being planned.

Earlier this week, ThisisMoney.co.uk reported:

Controversial tax boss Dave Hartnett agreed a deal to let Vodafone off a £6bn tax bill, it emerged yesterday. In what was described as an ‘unbelievable cave-in’, the HMRC’s permanent secretary for tax allowed the phone giant to avoid paying vast amounts of tax on profits racked up by a subsidiary based in a tax haven.
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The agreement between HMRC and Vodafone came after negotiations-between revenue officersand John Connors, Vodafone’s head of tax. Until 2007, Mr Connors was a senior official at HMRC, where he worked closely with Mr Hartnett.

The massive tax-dodge, equal to most of the welfare cuts, was first highlighted by Private Eye magazine last month.

Watch

via @tommilleruk

Watch: Osborne repeats himself 4 times in intvw

This video is hilarious. George Osborne is asked four different questions and each time he just repeats himself.

Either Osborne has nothing else to say or that is some serious attempt at message discipline.

hat-tip Left-Outside

British Tea Party: discontent is not enough

Angry middle-aged white blokes with a grudge against politicians of all stripes, measured on a per capita basis, must surely make up a similar proportion of the population of this country as the comparative demographic does in the States.

Yet somehow rightwing activists over here have not been able to tap into the spleen and launch a mass populist grassroots movement on the lines of the one that has emerged with frightening rapidity in the US.

It’s not as if the wingnuts haven’t tried. Twice this year already – once in February and once in September – the birth of the British Tea Party has been declared. Has anyone out there in the real world even noticed?

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