Tax Cuts For The Many I: Petrol & Diesel At 60p/Litre?
Often, the left like to portray tax cuts negatively: as a vassal for the rich to be allowed to keep more of their money. Whilst most tax cuts do benefit the rich, that doesn't mean that they don't also benefit the rest of us. High levels of taxation and poor economic growth are linked beyond a reasonable doubt, and the more that the left argue that low economic growth is the major problem in the economy, the more that they are making the argument for tax cuts for us.
Having said that, tax cuts do not need to focus on the headline top rate of income tax. There are plenty of other areas which are in dire need of attention, where low-cost tax cuts could make a real difference to peoples' standards of living in the country. One such tax is the fuel duty, currently levied at an eye-watering 73p per litre (61p fuel duty, and 12p VAT on that duty -- yes, they tax the tax...), which has been named by small firms as a serious detriment to their growth. We all complain at the greedy oil companies, but not many of us realise that as much as 60% of the price we pay for fuel is tax, and as little as 3% is oil profits.
Yes, the government pocket as much as 2000% of what Shell do, every time you buy fuel.
The Case for a British Confederation
I was reading the Wonko's World post by the same title earlier, and found myself agreeing with much of the reasoning behind the suggestion. Now, the author of that blog and myself have some major differences: he is 'proud to be a Nationalist', where I am proud to be a globalist. Having said that, I think that confederalism is the only liberal mechanism by which to join countries.
If you accept that England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland are sovereign nations which have the right to self determination, then it is only natural to assume that anything binding them to a union -- whether that is the British Union (UK), the European Union or the Commonwealth -- must be based on consent. No country should be forced against its will to be subservient to a union. The people of the country must have the right to determine their membership (or otherwise) of the union.
It irks me when EU-sceptics do not apply the same logic to Scotland's membership of the UK that they do to the UK's membership of the European Union. They accept, on one hand, that the British people have a right to be free of European rule, but not that the Scottish (or Welsh, or English) have a right to be free of British rule.
One argument they like to trot out is that we all have the same head of state, but this argument is invalidated already as Canada, Australia and many other countries share our head of state but are not members of the United Kingdom.
Guilty Until Proven Innocent?
Something we are taught in this country, from a very early age in most cases, is that every single person should be considered innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Now, we know that this right of men has been subverted in the United Kingdom, with the introduction of control orders and our media being all too happy to condemn suspects, but in the past 3 months, these subversions of liberty have taken an entirely new and more sinister look.
I'm going to talk about two recent cases where British courts have taken it upon themselves to punish people who have never been convicted of the crime they are being punished for: the case of Christopher Tappin and the case of Arran Coghlan.
These are two very different cases as Tappin has no prior run-ins with law enforcement, whilst Coghlan is known to the establishment, having received convictions for dishonesty and having been tried (and cleared) for three murders and drug smuggling offences. However, the common theme in both cases is that the burden of evidence has been hoisted upon to the accused rather than the accuser.
Self Wars: The Unions Strike Back
It's in-fashion to bash the unions, which makes me somewhat reluctant to do it, but I really can't say anything positive about the November 30th strikes: they are simply a gratuitous power grab by the unions. And not against the government. They are a power grab against us, the taxpayer; we, who pay the gold-plated wages and pensions of public sector workers.
But isn't it illiberal to say that they can't strike? Surely the right to withdraw one's labour is reasonable? After all, it just levels the playing field, right?
No, actually, it really doesn't. In an equal relationship, the worker must have no right to which the employer cannot have an equal right. This would mean that if the worker can suspend his/her labour, or essentially suspend his/her half of the contract, then the employer should be able to do the same: to withdraw pay at any time that he/she feels the labour provided doesn't meet his/her standard.
What, in effect, this would mean is that contracts would be utterly pointless. We could simply refuse to pay taxes whilst the government failed to meet our standards, and the public sector workers could withdraw their labour all they wanted, but at least it would be an equal relationship.
Are Travellers Not Natural Libertarians?
I was reading Pip Borev's blog earlier (really recommend it, fascinating stuff) and trying to work out how the Travellers had ever come to align themselves with the left in the first place. Surely an enterprising peoples who sell goods and services to market and receive little or no support from the public sector are about as natural libertarians as can be.
One would assume that the old right's sometimes less than accommodating approach to their communities may have something to do with it, but it's the 21st century and about time that we extended the olive branch to a people who live quite independently of the state, run what can only be described as small, for profit, businesses, and are, for the most part, hardworking.
Yes, you hear the horror stories about some traveller camps being a nightmare, thieves or vandals etc, but there are many which go without comment for good reason. There are good and bad people in any race, any community and any culture, and we need to be able to separate the criminal minority from the peaceful and non-aggressive majority.
How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, by The Lib Dems
Up until yesterday, I was willing to brave out the hard times because I had a belief that the core tenets of the Liberal Democrat party were still in place. Transparency and honesty are cornerstones of any liberal device, but it seems like that party, much like Labour and the Tories, only support honesty and transparency when it's in their interests to do so.
At the General Election in 2010, the Liberal Democrats ran on the mandate of an in/out referendum on the European Union. I knew they would support the 'in' campaign, but they did offer this referendum. To back up this position, they had an official campaign for the in/out referendum on their campaigns site.
The more tech-savvy of you will notice that this link directs to the Archive.org record of the page. This is because after I spread the URL on Twitter, the party decided to simply delete the campaign page with no formal explanation. This happened on the 21st or 22nd October 2011. In my mind, this is certainly a betrayal of transparency.
Dale Farm: Regulation at Her Unnecessary Worst
Left-wingers, I'm going to be somewhat annoyed at you if you agree with the statement here but still campaign to keep Tescos out of your towns. Planning permission laws are ridiculous, and unfortunately it has taken people being forcefully evicted from their home of over a decade to make the left see what we've been saying all along.
In this instance, we're dealing with a special type of planning permission law, dealing with designated 'green belt' zones which are supposed to preserve wildlife areas between towns. When I talk about this, you're probably not imagining a concreted-over piece of land which was being used as a scrapyard, but that's pretty much what Dale Farm was in the 1980s when the Travellers started to use the site.
The Issue With The ‘Consensus’ Concept
I just found this reply to this post on democracy I wrote a while ago, and I'd like to address some of the concepts and suggestions proposed within the post briefly.
When I challenge majority democracy, many people leap to this idea that the issue is that the arbitrary number of people who must agree with the policy is simply too low. If we move to 50%, 80% or 99% then we will have a far better set of rules, but the 'consensus' model is fundamentally flawed from the start.
Are We Headed For An Information Blackout?
When considering the characteristics of a free country, it usually doesn't take very long until we stumble upon the 'free press', but very few of us actually think about what makes a free press work, we just assume that it means that the press can give us the information which is in our interests, and hold government to account.
Several mechanisms exist to ensure that the press is capable of doing this: freedom of expression, of course, so that the press can print the stories which the government doesn't want it to; minimal regulation, to prevent certain viewpoints being shut down (we have regulations in TV media which create a very un-free press, but Fleet Street is usually exempt from this) and of course the right for journalists to protect their sources.
Why is that so important? Well, let's imagine a world where government employees just don't talk to the media because they fear ending up in prison even if what they're exposing is in the public interest. Even in today's world (a relatively free country), we would never have found out about the Millie Dowler phone hacking case, we would probably never have found out about prison corruption, you can see how this allows the government to sweep its own failings under the rug quite easily.
You Cannot Blame Blackberry & Twitter for the Riots
It's a common concept amongst liberals that politicians look for any reason to assert control over the people, and I think we're going to find out over the next few days what the liberal credentials of our MPs really are.
I've been watching BBC Parliament with some alarm as MPs talk about how to deal with social media, talking about preventing access to social media to would-be rioters, and refer to false rumours being spread on Twitter as similar to 'police hoax calls'.
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