Site of the month

You really must look at http://911review.com/ Whether or not you are prepared to accept the basic premise, it's formidably well argued, and if its facts are even half correct, extremely disturbing.

Nothing is certain but death and taxes

A recent poll found that inheritance tax is the most hated tax of all, and yet I would imagine that most people would agree with the general principle of redistribution of wealth, which is exactly what inheritance tax is designed to achieve. So what's the problem? The most quoted objection is that it's double taxation - a tax on money which has already been taxed. And yet, what is VAT if not double taxation, and you don't hear people complaining about that (or its predecessor, purchase tax). No, I think there are three main problems with inheritance tax. The first and most obvious is that it is no longer a rich person's tax - it is now catching people who would not consider themselves as particularly well off. But more than this, it's a tax which catches people at the worst possible moment. Most executors are close relatives of the deceased, and the last thing they want at a time of grief is insensitive hassle from the Revenue. And then there's the problem when - as is often the case - the majority of the value of the estate is in the family home, which may have to be sold to pay the tax. You would have thought that, where this is the case, the problem could be dealt with by the Revenue taking a charge on the property, rather than requiring its sale. All in all, I think a lot of the distaste and distress the tax causes could be avoided if the Revenue took a more sensitive and flexible approach. Unfortunately this is not something that they're known for. Perhaps there is a case for a separate section being set up to handle collection of the tax?

Must try harder

I sometimes think I must have gone to sleep and woken up in an Alice in Wonderland world. We hear stories, which we hope are not true but suspect are, of parking meter attendants and traffic police being given targets as to how many tickets they must issue, but this morning on the box a Government Minister, no less, was bemoaning the fact that only 6% of rape trials result in a conviction, and stating that This Is Not Good Enough, and that Something Must Be Done About It! I mean - it couldn't just be that the answer is that only 6% of the accused were guilty, could it? We do still work on the premise of the presumption of innocence, don't we? The argument seems to be that because this is a much lower conviction rate than for other offences, it must mean that men who should be being found guilty are getting away with it. But this ignores the fact that rape is very much a crime sui generis and any attempt to draw comparisons, statistical or otherwise, with other crimes is like comparing apples and pears.

Dirty tricks

Much comment about the Chancellor taking action in the budget to thwart those seeking to avoid or minimise inheritance tax by creating trusts. There are two very valid points to be made I think - firstly that he is seeking not merely to prevent people doing this in future, but also to make ineffective such trusts as already exist. In other words, this is retrospective legislation - something which governments rarely do, and usually only in cases of dire necessity, and this can hardly be considered to fall into that category. Secondly, it blurs the distinction between tax avoidance - that is, so arranging your affairs that you pay as little tax as possible - which is entirely legal, and tax evasion - failing to pay tax which is due from you - which is illegal. These trusts were a form of tax avoidance, and although it is perfectly within the Government's right to change the law so as to make them illegal in future, they were legal when created, and to retrospectively make them illegal is a misuse of Government's powers.

Who takes care of the caretaker's daughter...

Most of the local schools will be closed tomorrow because of strike action, No, it's not the teachers who are striking - it's the caretakers and the canteen staff. So how come the schools have to close? There's been plenty of notice, so ample time for parents - or for that matter the schools themselves - to provide packed lunches for those who normally stop dinners. And surely schools can survive for a day without a caretaker - they don't usually do their work during school hours anyway. It all seems to be down to "health and safety" - in other words the fear of being sued if anything were to go wrong. I really think it's about time we started to take a rather more adult attitude to these matters.

Spring is sprung

Thank heaven for some milder weather! The garden's been more or less on hold since the beginning of February. Now you can almost see the buds developing before your eyes. Of course there's always a down-side - it also means that the lawns will soon need cutting!

The price of everything and the value of nothing.

I've commented before on the issue of "pirate" copies of goods, and my views are clear - if your product is being pirated, then it's almost certainly because it's overpriced. But what exactly do I mean by this? The value of an article to me is what I am prepared to pay for it. The price of that article is the amount the producer is demanding of me for it. It's where these two amounts substantially differ that the problem arises. There was a bloke on the telly this morning extolling the virtues of being able to download a copy of "King Kong" for £20 - about the same price as the DVD. Now I'd quite like to watch King Kong, but the question is - how much (in monetary terms) would I like to watch it? Certainly not £20 worth. A fiver - yes, that's more the mark. So if I go down my local car-boot and see a DVD of King Kong for a fiver...? I've got what I want at a price I'm willing to pay (and I'm prepared to accept that it probably won't be an A1 copy). I wouldn't have paid £20 anyway, so nobody's lost a sale. So what's the problem?

The Peter Principle

Looked at from the point of view of the country, rather than any particular individual, Gordon Brown can certainly lay claim to being the most successful Chancellor of modern times. Whether this is a result of good luck or good judgment, or some combination of the two is debatable, but certainly, under his stewardship, we have had the longest continuous period of economic stability of my lifetime. Problem is of course, that there's a general belief that, in a matter of months, he will move from Number 11 to Number 10. And while this may be a good move for him, what about the country? If you've got someone doing a sterling job in a particular post, the last thing you'd want to do is move him out of that post, surely? And yet this is what happens - this is the eponymous Peter Principle. Originated by one Dr. Peter, it states that everyone is promoted to their level of incompetence. You get a job, do it well, and as a result get promoted to another job. You do that job well, and get promoted to another job. You do that job well.... and so on. Eventually you are promoted to a job which you don't do so well, and there you stop. Anyone who has worked in any large organisation will know that this is exactly what happens. So Gordon Brown may come out a winner, but the country may be the loser.

When is a quote not a quote?

Headline in my local paper the other day - Diana's tribute "disaster". This of course refers to the Public Accounts Committee's report on the Royal Parks and the Princess Diana fountain. So what would you understand by that headline? I imagine you would assume that the Committee had said that the fountain had been a disaster. And yet the word "disaster" appears nowhere in their report. They're pretty scathing about it, but that word is not used. So why did the paper put it in quotes? If they hadn't, it would simply have been a reasonable assessment by the paper of the overall tenor of the report, but by putting it in quotes they are representing that that is specifically what the report said. And I'm not just getting at my local paper - there is a tendency throughout the press to attribute apparent quotes to people who, when you examine the reality, never said any such thing. I think it was Thomas Jefferson who said something about the only truth in newspapers being in the adverts!

Jurassic truth

You would hardly think to look to a Hollywood blockbuster for words of wisdom, but when I read or hear about some of the strange and foolish things people get up to, it brings to mind a quote from "Jurassic Park"- I can't remember if it was in the book, but it was certainly in the film - when the Jeff Goldblum character says something like "...you were so preoccupied with whether or not you could, that you never stopped to consider whether you should...".

Divided by a common language

One of the perennial problems with computers is that, although we here in the UK have a strong claim to have invented them, they are dominated by American culture, and in particular by American spellings. When I create these posts, for example, the spell-checker constantly queries my spelling of words like "colour", "centre", "defence" and so on. The worst problem I ever had was with a program I had written for work in BASIC (which, for anyone who doesn't know, is a simple programming language). It just wouldn't work properly, and I couldn't for the life of me find out why. It took me over five hours of de-bugging to come up with the answer - in one line I had called the random number generator by using the command RANDOMISE. Except of course that BASIC didn't recognise it, because I should have used the American spelling RANDOMIZE. I think the short and pithy word I used when I eventually discovered this is spelled the same both sides of the Atlantic! Program(me) by the way is another word we spell differently, except that it has now become accepted over here that spelled the American way - without the final "me" it means a computer program, whereas if you are referring to a TV or theatre programme, for example, you use the British spelling.

Down the drain.

Read in the papers over the weekend that the Princess Diana Memorial Fountain, after all the problems it's had since its opening nearly two years ago, is now beginning to break up due to subsidence. Somehow seems a very appropriate memorial to the lady - superficially attractive, but unreliable and flaky.

It could be you...

Do you do the Lottery? I do, and the biggest mistake I made was to pick my own numbers, because now, like I suspect many other people, I daren't miss playing every Wednesday and Saturday - the thought of my missing a draw, and that being the one where my numbers come up is just too terrible to contemplate. So now I'm locked in for ever at an ongoing cost of £2 a week. If I could see my time again, I would just go for Lucky Dips, and then I could play or not, as took my fancy.

Hole in the wall

I make regular visits to the (not very) local branch of my bank to cash a cheque. It's the town where I used to work, and I've banked there for nigh on fifty years. I can remember when they had fifteen cashiers serving. Over the years, the number has steadily reduced, and a few years back they had a major refurbishment and ended up with five counter positions, which were hardly ever all manned at the same time. Now they've blocked off two of these positions, so we're down to three. Despite notices in the bank assuring us that this is all "progress" designed to "improve our service to our customers", I now regularly have to queue for ten minutes or more to cash my cheque. "Why don't you use the cash machine?" is the bank's response when I grumble about this. Well, the answer's quite simple - in order to do what I need to do with it, I need my money in certain specific denominations, and you can't get that from the cash machine - the machine decides what denominations it's going to give you. So by reducing the counter positions, the bank is trying to force me to use an inferior system which doesn't meet my needs - and this is progress??

That's the way to do it.....

Watching the opening day of the Commonwealth Games, it occurred to me that the Commonwealth is the ideal exemplar for multi-culture, multi-faith interdependence. The Americans don't seem to be able to grasp the concept that others may legitimately have different views and values to their own. The EU are having difficulty with the idea of admitting a Muslim state - Turkey. But the Commonwealth has a wide spread of beliefs and viewpoints, and although it may creak at the seams sometimes, and be seen by many as dominated by Western Christian values, it does survive and continues to grow in stature. So the question is - what are the Commonwealth doing to export their blueprint to the rest of the world?

The public purse

The Government is coming under heavy pressure to compensate people whose employer has gone bust, and who as a result have lost the occupational pension they were relying on. Certainly there is no doubt that these people were led to believe by Government that their pensions were "safe" and protected by law, and the natural reaction is to say that the Government is under at the very least a moral duty to make up the shortfall. But the problem is that Government doesn't have any money - or more precisely, what money it does have is ours, the taxpayers'. So the real question, which I'm afraid is much less clear and obvious, is whether you and I should foot the bill.

This compensation culture...

Programme on the telly the other night about the discrepancy between those injured by terrorist activity here at home, and those similarly injured abroad. The former are entitled to compensation from the State under the Criminal Injuries Compensation Scheme, whereas the latter are not. Certainly seems inequitable at first sight, until you stop and wonder - why should anyone get compensation at all, home or away? We have a benefit system for those who are injured - you can argue whether or not it is adequate - but why should the circumstances leading to the injury make any difference? I know it seems heartless, but why should someone who loses a leg, let's say, as a result of a terrorist bomb, be any better (or worse) off than someone who suffers a similar injury as a result of a straightforward accident? What the programme did highlight was the lack of ordinary basic humanitarian assistance for UK citizens in the immediate aftermath of a terrorist (or for that matter, a natural) disaster abroad. This certainly needs addressing.

...for training and quality purposes...

What's all this fuss about the Head of the Met recording his telephone calls? I would have thought - particularly when dealing with politicians, who are notorious for changing their stories - it is a perfectly sensible precautionary measure. I'm not terribly happy with the performance of Sir Ian Blair generally, but on this issue I am 100% with him, and I don't think he has anything to apologise for.

Doggy style

If you use the motorway network around here on a regular basis, you must dread hearing the word "Crufts". You know that it means four days of gridlock around the NEC. And for what? I like dogs, but all this preening and posturing leaves me cold. It calls to mind little girls playing with their dollies, dressing them up and giving them ever more exotic hairstyles. This isn't so much about dogs as about the egos of their owners. So there's something to think about while you're sitting in a queue of traffic on the M42.

The prince and the pauper

Much talk recently about poverty - problem is that no-one seems to be able to come up with a definitive explanation of just what constitutes poverty. I don't like to play the "when I was a lad" card, but I can remember when poverty meant not having enough money to put decent food on the table, or to buy enough coal to keep a good fire going. Today it seems to mean not having a video recorder or a washing machine. It has been suggested that, rather than poverty, it should be referred to as "social deprivation" - but then, that's just as difficult to define. Someone on TV the other morning said it was "not having enough money to do what you wanted to do" - well on that basis, most people would fall into that category. I certainly would. There will always be those at the bottom of the income ladder, just as there will always be those at the top, but is anyone really poor these days?

Good news is no news.

Top story today is the death of John Profumo. There can't be too many of us to whom that name means anything, but those of us who do remember him will almost certainly do so in connection with the Christine Keeler / Mandy Rice-Davies affair which resulted in his resignation in disgrace from the Government of the day. But it is only now, after his death, that we learn that he devoted the rest of his life to charitable work where he did a tremendous amount of good. How sad that - until now - his good works have been completely ignored by that same media which had had such a field-day with his peccadillos. But then, it's simply a reflection of the fact that we're not interested in public figures unless they are doing something naughty, are we?

Selection (n), define...

Great quote in the paper by the Head of a local school in response to criticism from parents living locally who have not been able to get places there for their children - "We are not a selective school, but if you are an oversubscribed school where hundreds of children are applying for places, then obviously you must select". Right, that's cleared that up then??

Lies, damn lies and statistics.

One of my pet annoyances is when people use percentage figures as though they have some independent relevance - you know the sort of thing: "Figures released today show an increase in (something or other) of 75% over the past year". Other than the fact that there has been an increase, this statement is meaningless without knowing what the base-line figure was. It could simply mean that 4 instances have increased to 7, for example, or more significantly that 10,000 have increased to 17,500. It all depends on what we're talking about of course, but an increase of 3 would probably not be worth getting your knickers in a twist about, whereas an increase of 7,500 might well be highly important.

Nursery rhymes for the 21st century?

One of my occasional sidelines is playing the piano at my local primary school. One of the perennial favourites they like to sing is "Baa, baa, black-sheep", so I was amused to see that somewhere in Oxfordshire, some nursery has decided that this could cause offence, and that instead they should teach their little ones to sing "Baa, baa rainbow sheep". Rainbow sheep??!! It doesn't even scan for goodness sake! But just what kind of person makes such idiotic decisions? Whoever they are, I think they should be led quietly away and re-employed as road-sweepers or something similar - more in line with their level of intelligence.

Bring back the clippie.

Do you remember when buses had conductors? Not only did they take your fares (change given!) and give out tickets, but they also helped deal with any problems which might arise, including misbehaviour. So now all that's down to the driver - right? Well, no apparently. Drivers in this neck of the woods have been told that they should not consider intervening if there's any bother on their bus, because once out of their cab, they are no longer covered by insurance. Another good reason for avoiding public transport!

Quick - dial 101!

Have you seen this idea of having a separate telephone number for "non-emergency" calls to the Police? The idea is to take some of the pressure off the 999 service. Seems quite a sensible move, until you realise that calls to this new number (101 has been suggested) will not be free, as 999 calls are. So we shall have to pay for the privilege of doing our duty as good citizens and reporting matters to the Police. And I wouldn't mind betting that it will only be a matter of time before calling 999 when you should have used the other service will result in some sort of penalty - and who is to decide which service is appropriate anyway? You wonder why they can't simply put more resources into the 999 system if it can't cope with the volume of calls - the answer, I suspect, is money.

Stand by your man.....

....unless he's endangering your career, apparently.

The times they are a-changing....

So David Cameron has put his cards on the table, and made clear his intention of moving the Conservatives back towards the centre ground. Only sensible move he could make really, but it will be interesting to see how his parliamentary colleagues react. The LibDems have gone for experience and stability with Sir Ming and it will be equally interesting to see where he tries to position them - under Kennedy they were very definitely to the left of Labour, and if, as suggested, Campbell is going to shift them more to the right, we could see Labour being squeezed - which would be extremely interesting!

Choice - what choice?

Well it's the dreaded beginning of March, and my grand-daughter, like I suspect many other children, has learned that she has not got a place at the secondary school she most wanted to go to. So now her parents are faced with deciding whether to accept second best, or go through the appeals procedure. She seems to have taken it quite well really, but I know she is very disappointed. This isn't the first time we've been through this - five years ago the same thing happened to her brother, who eventually ended up at a school very much not of his, or his parents' choice. Not that he hasn't made a good go of it, but the whole procedure seems to be designed to create the maximum worry and stress for children and parents, and you can't help but feel that it badly needs sorting. A mother on television described it as "a gamble", and that's just what it is - you as a parent have little say, and no control over the outcome. Quite apart from the question of whether it is right to put children of such a tender age through such an emotional wringer, the government's own aim of providing to every child "the choice of an excellent secondary school" seems far removed from what actually happens.

Heads should roll!

Glad to see that BBC's "Breakfast" programme has highlighted the obscenity of charging for parking at hospitals. Talk about kicking people when they are down! A relatively short stay in hospital can result in family and friends having to fork out hundreds of pounds between them in car-park charges. There can be no - repeat absolutely no justification for such a callous and heartless policy. I hope the Breakfast programme follows this up, and doesn't just treat it as a one-day story. It is wicked beyond belief.

Weather witch.

Bit parky, innit? Apparently, one of the various bits of weather folklore is that a snowy end to February presages a nice Spring. Let's hope they're right, eh?