This is recommended by me and is self-explanatory! I hope the public will realise what is happening.
One small point - IF Eton has such good privileged education isn't it a good idea to have them in government rather than the ill-educated products of our dreadful state education ?
Christina
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TELEGRAPH 3.12.09
Labour has given up governing and now just wants a class war
Gordon Brown is picking a fight with the Tories that will damage Britain, says Benedict Brogan.
So the general election is to be fought on the playing fields of Eton, which I suppose makes a nice change from the West Midlands marginals. No wonder Gordon Brown sounded so perky yesterday. He spoke like a man set free. In a fight to the death, there is no longer any point pretending to govern in the national interest. As it was in the beginning for Labour, so shall it be in the end: class war, plain and simple. Soak the rich, crow about it, and damn the consequences.
That enclave of privilege and educational excellence featured prominently at Prime Minister's Questions. Mr Brown spat out the name with the venom he reserves for those he despises most – namely Tories, those educated privately, and the English middle classes. "Is it public services for the many or inheritance tax cuts for the few? Your tax policy seems to have been dreamed up on the playing fields of Eton," Mr Brown taunted David Cameron, quoting no doubt from Labour's campaign battle plan. On the benches behind him, it was open season on the toffs in tails.
The brazenness with which Mr Brown reduced the election ahead to a battle between the rich and the rest has one advantage at least: it exposed the fraudulence of his claim to govern for all the people, or whatever the phrase was that he used when he first took over in 2007.
He governs for himself and his party, first and always.
And, like the Russians retreating before Napoleon, Mr Brown pursues a scorched earth strategy. Its purpose is two-fold: to put the Tories on the spot as an Opposition by driving them towards difficult policy choices that can then be demolished, while doing everything to ensure that if they do get in, they will find the wells have been filled and the fields ploughed with salt.
Was it a tough decision in the national interest to shelve Post Office reform, or has the postal service been left in a terminal limbo to buy off the unions and Labour backbenchers? Was it good for Britain to break the unspoken ban on discussing special forces deployments, or were they publicly added to the Afghan total to get the overall figure above 10,000? Was the European Commission's internal market portfolio surrendered to the French to advance the British interest, or could Mr Brown not bear to do something the Tories had suggested? Has the tribal Mr Brown converted to voting reform because he wants us to be like Belgium, or is he messing with the constitution to buy off the Lib Dems in case of a hung Parliament? The same with the vast expansion of the public workforce, and the extension of welfare subsidies in the guise of tax credits into every home, policies deliberately designed to be impossible to reverse without political pain.
On current planning, next week's pre-Budget report will be heaving with measures which will be presented as necessary for restoring order to the public finances, but will in fact be calculated to flush out the Tories.
The Treasury has been asked to throw everything in, including the kitchen sink. Half-baked and even unbaked ideas for raising extra cash, which would normally never reach a minister's desk, are being contemplated, all in the name of ploughing that "dividing line" between the many and the few.
Some of the ideas are quite staggering in their recklessness. If you comfort yourself that Vince Cable will never get a chance to introduce his annual 1p levy on the value of properties over £2 million, think again. Taxing illiquid assets, as sure-fire a recipe for wealth destruction as there can be, is not just a Lib Dem conceit. Labour are toying with taxing future wealth.
Believe it or not, No 10 and the Treasury are considering extending upper-rate income tax to the annual gain in value of your pension pot. The better your retirement fund does, the more you would have to hand over each year out of your income. This in effect would be a tax not on your income now, but on what it might be at retirement, a sort of Minority Report tax that would depend on outside forces rather than the fruits of your effort. A Government that raided pension funds once, with devastating effects, is minded to do it again.[It has ‘nicked’ £5bn a year off all private pensions for 12 years. And it has squandered the money. Is the NHS better? Are the schools better? Is immigration controlled? Is crime down ? ALL ARE WORSE! -cs]
Other targets discussed include another penny on National Insurance, again for high earners, that would push the marginal rate well north of 50p. Bad enough that Mr Brown smashed the unspoken cross-party consensus on keeping the higher rate at 40p; now that barrier has been crossed there is no longer an upper limit. Speculation also suggests the starting rate for the new 50p band could be dropped to £100,000. It is a mark of how mistrusted this Government has become when it comes to the treatment of wealth that the City has slashed the odds on the introduction of a new wealth tax on those worth more than £1 million. [Watch the City’s talent emigrate! -cs]
Companies are braced for corporation tax to rise to 25 per cent or 30 per cent, to offset the gulf between its current level of 18 per cent and the higher income tax rate at 50 per cent. This follows growing evidence that those who can – the rich, again – are shifting from income to capital to avoid tax. Banks in turn can expect some form of populist windfall tax on bonuses – this is described as "a dead cert". [Remember that when Maggie Thatcher cut the top rate of tax - the tax collected went UP not down -cs]
Then there is the untapped potential of contingent tax rises. Mr Darling would offer a pledge to raise certain taxes as and when the economy was doing well enough to bear the strain. This would be his way of reassuring increasingly sceptical markets that Labour is serious about restoring the public finances to some kind of health.
Truly, as the saying goes, the idiot's warehouse is full. Even before you add in other wheezes for raising revenue or ‘encouraging growth’ [!], we will be presented next week with the makings of a bumper March Budget. Yet none of these measures can be implemented without the support of the Opposition, as there will be insufficient time to pass anything before Parliament is dissolved a fortnight later. It will be a Potemkin Budget.
So when Mr Darling unpacks his bag of tricks, you will know that most of them are there merely to put the Tories on the spot: if David Cameron rejects them, he is a friend of the rich; if he accepts them, he is not a proper Tory. He and George Osborne will, as they have done before, try to step around the elephant traps, but accept that they will be asked for greater clarity about their red lines. Up with what, exactly, will they not put?
Yet at a time of national financial uncertainty, with the markets even now running their slide rules over our credit rating, and with a collective effort called for, it is a cornered Prime Minister prepared to play politics to the very end who should be held to account. Not by Etonians, but by all of those who want to hear less of the politics of "them and us" and more of the politics of "we".
Watch this one!
Christina
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CONSERVATIVE HOME 2.12.09
Labour inaction threatens British interests in Brussels (again)
Posted by Daniel Hamilton
With the Lisbon Treaty having passed into law on December 1st, eighteen new Members of the European Parliament are now entitled to take their seats in the European Parliament.
Using complex population calculations, the Treaty has allocated new seats to Spain (4), Austria (2), France (2), Sweden (2), Bulgaria (1), Italy (1), Latvia (1), Malta (1), the Netherlands (1), Poland (1), Slovenia (1) and the United Kingdom (1).
The new MEPs will be “elected” on the basis of the first-placed unsuccessful candidate at the 2009 European elections and will officially sit as "observers" in the Parliament without the right to vote (but with the ability to speak and attend committee meetings) until a complex legal protocol is ratified by national governments - expected to coincide with Croatia’s accession to the European Union in 2011.
The majority of countries have already confirmed the names of their new MEPs or released the timetable for their appointment. The Government of the United Kingdom is not amongst them.
A press spokesman for the Electoral Commission confirmed to me a few minutes ago that the Ministry of Justice has not yet, as legislation demands, directed the body to calculate a new seat allocation for United Kingdom European Parliament constituencies so as to determine which region will receive the new seat.
According to calculations made in June, the United Kingdom's 73rd seat would be allocated to the West Midlands region, a move which would see the “election” of Conservative Anthea McIntyre. The London and Scotland areas are also rumoured to be pushing hard to have the extra seat allocated to their regions. An extra MEP in the capital city would see Labour's Anne Fairweather “elected” while a seventh seat in Scotland would go to Conservative Belinda Don.
Whatever any of us might think about the European Parliament and its endless tide of damaging legislation, only a fool would deny the importance of ensuring the United Kingdom’s interests are defended vigorously in Brussels.
It's time for Labour to stop dragging its feet and send our new Member of European Parliament to Brussels.
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