GET OUT OF SILVER NOW !

The Silver boom is well and truly over. Stories abound of this being due to market manipulation. This may be true but it doesn't alter the fact that prices are set to fall even further. The recovery- if there is one- is a long way off.  Private investors, particularly in the US, have been stockpiling the stuff and it may not be long before they lose their nerve and start dumping their silver holdings.

Fair Ways to Raise over £10 Billion Quid.

   It's disconcerting when you have to listen to the likes of Cameron, Osbourne,Clegg and Milliband attempting to the claim the word "fair" as their own.  It's as if they can't help themselves. "Fair" to working families, "fair" to the taxpayer, "fair" to the nations' children etc,etc. This is a group of people who never had proper jobs,never had to make harsh financial decisions in their own lives, trying to tell us all that they want to be "fair" when they clearly don't understand fairness as a concept. The light from "fair" would take decades to reach them.

 

  To hear the word "fair" come out of George Osbourne's mouth is doubly galling. Here's a man who flipped the mortgage on his second home to make a few quid out of parliamentary expenses. A man who receives a trust fund income every year that means he doesn't even need to work. Despite that fact that this man is an odious creep, the very embodiment of the toxic strain of Toryism that rendered his party unelectable for a regrettably short 13 years, I'd like to offer him some advice. I have some ideas to help the impoverished Tory boys  raise some  money for the UK. The ideas are based on the concept that you should get money from working and not by exploiting others or by sitting on your arse. The idea of fairness in politics should be based on the ethical principle of justice. To save George the effort of having to look this up, the principal of justice states that one should do what is of the greatest benefit to the greatest number of people.



 1) PROPERTY TAX:

Scrap Council Tax  in  it's present form. The main problem with Council Tax is that it's levied on property occupiers and not owners. This makes it difficult to collect and means that Councils have to spend vast amounts of time attempting to find out who lives in each property. Leaving to one side that it's none of the council's fucking business who shares a property with whom, it also creates a large and unnecessary bureaucracy. The solution is a property tax. This should be charged at the same rate as Council Tax but  levied on property owners rather than tenants.  It's easy to find out who the property owners are as  their name appears on the land registry. If some owns more than two properties they pay an accelerated rate of property tax. This helps to protect people who've  bought a small cottage for their retirement but will hit buy to let landlords who've done rather well in recent years. I suggest that someone with  ten properties should pay an accelerator of 15%. In other words they pay what would have been levied on their ten properties in Council Tax plus fifteen per cent. In addition to this any properties empty for more than 3 months attract a 20 per cent surcharge. There could be exemptions for properties in need of structural repairs etc. This would mean that it is not in landlords interests to leave properties empty. Then we should introduce a Mansion Tax on properties worth over £1 million. Many commentators have said the super rich would simply avoid this by using offshore companies etc. Therefore the rules should be simple: Pay up or we'll take your fuckin house away and you won't get it back.
        I don't really like to take any notice of what the Liberal Democrats say but on this topic I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. They estimate that it costs £600 million per year just to collect Council Tax. A property tax would mean collecting at least the same amount of revenue from far fewer people. Based on nothing other than guesswork I think that this could save £300 million a year.
        

  

2) BENEFITS FOR THE UNEMPLOYED:

The concept should be simple. If you haven't paid in you can't take out. One of the most unfair aspects on the present system is that in lots of cases if you have paid in you can't take out. Partners earnings are taken into account when assessing eligibility for benefits. The effect of this is that someone who may have paid ten years contributions is entitled to nothing because the person they're shagging has a job. This is patently unfair. It's none of the state's concern who someone lives with or who they choose to have sex with. Provided of course that it's consensual and legal.
  To protect those who've just left school or university and may not have paid any contributions they'd be entitled to benefits for 2 years. People who are acting as carers for the sick or disabled should be given National Insurance credits. Bearing in mind that they save the country a fortune this is only fair.

3) CHILD BENEFIT: 

Only available for the first three children. If you want more children than that then good luck but I don't see why everyone else should pay for it.


4) ELECTORAL ROLL:

At present anyone who's name appears on the electoral roll has their details submitted to credit reference agencies. Regardless of whether or not they want this to happen . Give people the choice. If they are happy for their details to be submitted then the credit reference agencies should pay a fee for being able to access each persons details.

4) ENTERPRISE:

The Tories spend lots of time talking about encouraging enterprise and wealth creation. They may even mean it. The problem is that because they've led such useless existences they don't have the first clue where to start. First they should abolish business rates. The system is a mess. Also rates bear no relation to profit. Increase Corporation tax to offset the cost of abolishing business rates. Then make sure  that companies and that means all companies pay their Corporation tax. This can't be that difficult. Why do we live in a world where the powers that be will chase the average person to ends of the earth for parking ticket but won't ensure that Vodafone pay their tax bill. I'm led to believe that Vodafone did a deal with the tax man. If the garage down the road tried to do that they'd get told to fuck off.

5) HOUSING:

Build social housing. Lots of it. The criteria for getting social housing should be that you've got a job or are in training. The people who live in these properties would then have more income to spend because they'd no longer be paying obscene percentages of their income in rent.
  Then bring back fair rent tribunals.

6) INCOME TAX

    A one pence rise in the basic rate of Income Tax. It is estimated that this raises £4.5 billion per year.  Nobody likes income tax but at least it's proportionate to income. It's also four times cheaper to collect than Council Tax.

7) FLAT RATE TAXES: 
      

           Some ideas for some new flat rate taxes. You can avoid paying these by not buying the goods or services that would attract these taxes:
   

•                   A new tax of £10 to register a vehicle with the DVLA. If you can afford to buy a car then you can afford a tenner. For cars with a purchase price of over £30,000 this would rise to £200.

• A £5 tax on all new tattoos. If you want to walk around looking like a tattooed fuckwit then thats fine but it'll cost you a fiver a time. It'll make it easier for the rest of us who have to look at you. This will particularly disadvantage Premier League footballers which is a good thing in itself.
• Satelite/ Cable TV: £10 a year. Collected via your provider once a year. Around 12 million households in the UK subscribe to these services so this should raise £120 million per year.
• A ten pence additional tax on every Lottery ticket sold. This would raise the price of a normal ticket to £1.10. Over 30 million lottery tickets are sold every week so this would raise somewhere in the region of £156 million per year.
• Mobile phone tax of £1 a month. This would rise to £5 a month for anybody with more than two phones. There are an astonishing 75 million mobile phones in the UK. That's more than one phone for every person in the country. This would raise £900 million per year.

          


Just a few ideas for you George. I think most of them are "fair." As most of you're mates won't benefit from them you probably disagree.



  
  

Standing Room Only ?

 It's good to hear that the Scottish Premier League (SPL) are to trial safe standing areas in some football stadiums from next season. It's highly unlikely that the same thing will happen in England though. Football fans don't matter in England. Particularly the sort of football fans who'd like to see a return to the terraces. If you support a  Premier League team and are glued to the Champions League on Sky  like a tattooed, track suit wearing fuckwit then the powers that be will happily pretend to listen to your views. At the same time they'll  try and take  all your cash. If, like me, you support Orient - or any other lower league club - you might as well fuck off and die.

The Conservatives have always had a deep distrust of football supporters, viewing them as little more than animals.  The game has been sanitised and politicians like to claim allegiance to a football club in order to court popularity. Their choice of club is usually predictably anodyne. Cameron is said to support Aston Villa along with Prince William, whilst George  Osbourne strikes me as too much of a mincer to be interested in football. The point is that few, if any MP's, will admit to supporting Millwall. Both the Conservatives and the Labour party are happy to see English football become the preserve of the few that can afford it.     

In the case of Scottish football it's all a bit different.  The Scots had to do something as Scottish football was headed for a particularly nasty economic meltdown. The SPL has nobody to blame but themselves for this state of affairs. They've allowed the Celtic and Rangers to call the shots and in doing so have impoverished the game. They're to be applauded however for trialling a safe standing system that the vast majority of fans support.

The economic imperative that's driven the change in the SPL's thinking doesn't really exist in England.  Lots of smaller clubs are struggling financially but the FA and the Premier League couldn't care less. Therefore,  the only way to  bring about the changes  in the game that I suspect many fans would like to see, is to vote with your feet. Don't subscribe to Sky, don't watch the Champions League and don't watch England games. There are several advantages to this approach. Firstly  it'll save you a fortune. Even better than the welcome financial gain is the thought that you won't have to watch total wankers  like John Terry and Rio Ferdinand attempt to play football.

If you really want to support football rather than the money men, try a  lower league or non league football match. I was recently invited by a friend to watch Leiston FC play Enfield Town in the Ryman League. The game took place at Leistons' Victory Road ground. It was only  eight quid to get in. You could stand and watch the game with a reasonably priced pint in your hand in a good atmosphere. The crowd on a chilly Saturday afternoon was around 300-400. The standard of the football wasn't all that bad either. Leiston won 2-1, with the Nathan Stone scoring an impressive winner. It was a thoroughly enjoyable afternoon and I'll be putting another eight quid through Leistons' turnstiles soon.

PUB TRADE AT THE MERCY OF THE ROBBER BARONS

The pub trade appears to be in crisis. Since 1980 17,000  pubs in the UK  have closed their doors. A combination of factors such as cheap supermarket booze, the smoking ban and the bitter economic climate are often blamed for the demise of local watering holes all over the country. This isn't the whole story. The pub trade isn't dying. It's being murdered.

The majority of pubs that have closed in recent years belong to the so-called "Pubcos". Enterprise Inns and Punch Taverns are two of the best known examples of a "Pubco". They operate pubs on a "tie" system. The pub company sells a lease on a pub to a tenant. The tenant then pays rent to the pub company for the pub itself and is also forced to buy their beer from the pub company. It is vital to understand at this point that the "Pubcos" don't actually make beer.  They buy beer on the open market and then sell it at inflated prices to their leaseholders.Some estimates suggest that pub companies are inflating the price of beer by up to 45% . Despite the fact that they pay rent, the publican is also responsible for repairs to the property. If the roof caves in, it's down to the publican not the pub company who own the building.  It's a bit like paying rent on a flat , being forced to buy your groceries from your  landlord and then having foot the bill when the ceiling caves in. According to the Government this is all perfectly legal....

As if that's not bad enough, when a leaseholder  decides that they're fed up with lining the pockets of their feudal overlords and decide to throw  in the towel they're hit with the draconioan "delaps" clause.  Just to insure that they've squeezed every last penny out of their impoverished leaseholders, some "Pubcos" insist that the property is restored to the condition it was in at the start of the lease.

  Let;s briefly look at the numbers. The rent on a recently closed Bristol pub owned by Enterpise Inns was £38,000 per year. The former landlord estimated that he paid  £200- 300,000 per year to Enterprise Inns in addition to his rent. In his last quarter of trading he made a profit of £700.  The Guardian recently estimated that tax losses to the Treasury are £5.5 million per week as result of pub closures.

The Government recently refused to introduce legal changes to the system that the pub companies operate. They did make some minor concessions such as allowing independent arbitration on rent increases.The Governments response to the Select Committee report on the pub trade was greeted with dismay by the Campaign for Real Ale.  Brian Binley MP was quoted as saying that the Government had "sold out to the devil," on the question of publicans rights.

Under the circumstances you'd expect the the pub companies would be making a fortune. It you want to find an example of how to run a business into the ground with a combination of greed and crass incompetence then you need look no further than Enterprise Inns. If you doubt my word, then type the words "Enterprise Inns" followed by a swear word of your choice into Google and look at the results. It you're not familiar with bad language may I suggest "Enterprise Inns cunts" as a good starting point.  Enterprise Inns borrowed huge sums of money on the bond markets and used it to buy vast numbers of UK pubs. In 2007 Enterprise Inns stock was over £7 a share. It's now worth 28 pence a share. The company has net debt of over £3 billion pounds. Ted Tuppen the CEO of Enterprise Inns makes some smooth noises about helping publicans who are struggling in tough times.  However the suspicion persists that Enterprise Inns are more interested in running pubs into the ground so they can apply for change of use planning consent and convert the property into houses or flats.

The dynamic duo of Cameron and Osboure have made plently of noise regarding their support for small buisness. When it come down to it they're really much happier protecting spivs such as Ted Tuppen. The high debt speculation model that Enterprise Inns was founded on has a distinct Thatcherite ring to it. This is probably why the toxic tories are happy to support the current feudal status quo.