Nice little earner!

It was there in the small print, but it's taken a few months before it's become apparent.  It's all to do with car tax and the doing away with the tax disk.  Suppose A has a car which he taxed for a year back in January.  He now decides to sell this car to B, and he does so today  The tax - or what's left of it - no longer transfers with the car.  B has to tax it anew, and as the DVLA only work in complete months, he has to tax it from the beginning of this month.  A can claim a refund for the unused tax he paid, but once again, as the DVLA only works in complete months, he will just get back the tax for the months of June to December.  So A has paid to tax the car for the month of May, and so has B!  Like I say - nice little earner.  The answer of course is for the DVLA to switch to working in days rather than months - but think of all that lovely lolly they'd lose!

How does it go?

I'm confused (nothing new there then).  In the paper the other day was a graphic showing the line of succession to the throne.  So first, Charles, then William, then George, then the new baby, then Harry.  So far so good.  But then next in line is Andrew, followed by his children, and then Edward followed by his children, and only then do we get to Anne.  Now I thought we'd passed a recent law doing away with this idea that males took preference over females, so surely Anne and her children should slot in after Harry and before Andrew?  Like I say, confused.

Let's have a break.

I think we really do need a rest from politics.  I'm sure there will be plenty to say after Thursday, so I'm declaring an election-free blog until then.  So, what to talk about? Well, it did occur to me that I could have done one more post on my "It's a secret" series, so here it is.  You'll remember that we ended up with public-private-key cryptography, whereby you have a public key which you tell everybody about and which they can then use to encrypt a message to you.  But the message can only be decrypted by you using your private key.  But the system works just as well the other way round and so has another use.  Suppose I send a message to you and I want to convince you that the message has indeed come from me.  I can add something to my message which I encrypt using my private key. You - or for that matter anybody else - can decrypt it using my public key and as only I have my private key, it must have come from me.  This is known as a digital signature and has proved one of the most useful and used aspect of PPK.

Here we go again?

So all the indications are that we are heading for another hung parliament, leading inevitably to another coalition - formal or informal.  Indeed we could end up with a "coalition of the losers" whereby the Conservatives could have the most seats of any party, but Labour could cobble together enough seats with the help of other parties to defeat them.  I don't think we've had such a situation before in recent times and the question is bound to be raised as to what legitimacy such a government would have. In such an eventuality the Conservatives or Labour could of course try and govern with what seats they have - a minority government.  In my view this would be preferable, even if it is pretty well bound to be short-lived. And all these protestations by Ed Milliband that he won't do a deal with the SNP are frankly so much piss and wind.  He doesn't have to do a deal - he knows that the SNP as a matter of principle will never vote with the Torys - so their votes are his, deal or no deal.  The only thing which could upset the apple-cart is if the SNP throw their teddies out of the pram and decide to abstain to teach Milliband a lesson.

Food banks

I 've had my say about these (3/6/13) and I won't rehash what I said then, but apparently their usage has increased significantly over the last couple of years and this is being presented as evidence of an increase in poverty.  I've had my say on that too (13/6/09) but the question it seems to me is whether this increase is supply-led or demand-led.  In other words is the number of food banks increasing because more are needed, or are they being used more because there are more of them? I imagine your view will depend on your political stance.

A child's guide to politics.

Labour - all problems are rooted in social inequality, and you solve social inequality by taking money from the rich and spending it on the poor (note - spending it on, not giving it to - subtle distinction).
Conservative - society works best when people are left to their own devices to sort things out. Government should interfere as little as possible.
LibDem - why can't we all get along?
UKIP - England for the English - sod everybody else
SNP - Scotland for the Scots - sod everybody else
Plaid Cymru - dywarchen y lot ohonoch
Greens - who knows?

What's the point?

Strange move by the Conservatives, who are promising to pass a law prohibiting any rise in Income tax, VAT or National Insurance over the next parliament.  This of course is if they form the next government - but why?  Firstly as has been said before, the basic constitutional position is that parliament cannot bind itself - anything parliament can do, parliament can subsequently undo, so does it really mean anything?  And then why paint yourself into a corner?  Suppose we have another Lehman Brothers situation coming out of the blue - if you can't raise taxes and you are opposed in principle to borrowing, how are you going to deal with that?  Smacks a bit of meaningless posturing I think.

Can't be too careful?

You know those brightly-coloured plastic guns that fire sorbo-rubber darts?  Kids love 'em.  But there's a time and place for everything.  A four-year-old boy going on holiday with his parents was stopped by security at East Midlands airport when such an article was found in his hand luggage.  It was confiscated and he was subjected to a body search.  So was this, as the parents maintained, a pathetic over-reaction by the security personnel, or was it an act of stupidity by the parents in allowing their son to attempt to take such an article onto a plane.  Bit of both, I think...

Sounds good, but...

We have to accept that the urge to regulate is hard-wired into Labour's DNA.  The problem is that if you give advance warning of how you intend to regulate what, you are simply giving those that will be regulated the opportunity to get ahead of the game.  We've seen it with the promise to freeze energy prices, which has resulted in consumers not getting anywhere near the full benefit of falling oil prices, because energy firms are wary of cutting their prices and then finding that they can't increase them when the price of oil recovers - as it will.  And now we have this idea of capping the amount by which landlords can increase rents - which of course will simply mean that landlords will factor that into the rent they charge initially, which will inevitably be higher that it otherwise would have been.  People aren't stupid!

Put your dolly down, we need to talk...

There's a story of a nursery school (note that - nursery school) in London where would-be pupils must sign (again I stress, this is a nursery - 3 and 4-year-olds) a document promising not to use racist or homophobic or transphobic language in school.  So, two things - do the school powers-that-be really think children of that age are capable of understanding such concepts?  As one mother put it "How am I meant to explain to my three-year-old that he must sign on the dotted line not to do something which he is not even aware exists when he can barely hold a crayon?" Crazy, yes??  But I have another issue which goes beyond the stupidity of this particular school, and it's this use of the suffix "-phobia" to mean something which it doesn't mean.  Phobia is the fear of something whereas its use in words like "homophobia" has little or nothing to do with fear, but is meant to indicate dislike or even hatred.  Sloppy use of language, and given that "homo" means "same" (see 10/1/07) if homophobia means anything at all it means - fear of the same.  And where the hell did "transphobia" come from? Fear of the beyond??  Is this simply a case of disguising a shameful and unpleasant concept behind impenetrable language?