Saturday Seven Up

Five-Times-a-Night Farage | Mail
Still Not Cutting Enough | Jeff Randall
French Buyout Bosses Join London Flight | FT
€uro Survives 2012 Despite Predictions | Reuters
Alistair Darling to Step Down? Perhaps Not… | LabourList
PM Urged to Give EU ‘Nuclear’ Options | Guardian
‘One Pound Fish’ Singer Deported | Spectator
Guido’s Column | Daily Star Sunday
A Christmas Fairytale | John Redwood
Scottish Murder Rate Higher Than 10 US States | LibertarianHome
IDS v George Osborne | Peter Oborne

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 29, 2012

Saturday Seven Up

This week traffic halved as people enjoyed the holidays and a mere 53,289 visitors visited 142,122 times viewing 215,522 pages. The top stories in order of popularity were:

• Happy Christmas: From the Guy News Team
• Review of 2012: Expenses Cheats, Liars and Criminals
• Petition the Whitehouse to Keep Piers in America
• Read Guido’s Daily Star Column
• Mad Al’s Dodgy Gamble
• Quote of the Day
• IPPR Still Doesn’t Get It

You’re either in front of Guido, or behind…

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 28, 2012

Mad Al’s Dodgy Gamble

Alastair Campbell has spent most of the festive period going off on one about the gambling industry, which he accuses of “getting it’s tentacles into Parliament.”
Its an interesting line to take from someone who is in the pay of an organisation whose job is to do just that – push the interests of gambling in parliament. What Mad Al likes to keep quiet when he is on one of his new moral crusades is that he is a well remunerated lobbyist for Portland. And who are are on the spinmeister’s client list? The Association of British Bookmakers, of course.

IPPR Still Doesn’t Get It

Left-wing think tanks the IPPR and the Resolution Foundation have a joint report out advocating higher “living wages” forced on employers by regulatory diktat. Guido doesn’t dispute their claim that low pay increases the welfare bill by billions. Brown’s blizzard of redistributive bureaucracy and welfare transfers effectively left taxpayers subsidising low paying employers. Low paid workers pay taxes which they then get back in benefits…
Apart from the obviously wasteful tax-to-pay-benefits merry-go-round their policy has another fundamental flaw completely ignored by the wonks; it will increase wage costs and reduce corporate competitiveness, further undermining economic growth. Wouldn’t it be better instead to just raise the personal income tax threshold to £12,500 – as advocated by the LibDem’s Danny Alexander – effectively taking minimum wage earners out of income tax. It will have the same outcome – raising take home pay – without undermining competitiveness.

Raising the tax threshold is simple, has popular appeal and will benefit those on low earnings proportionately more than those on higher earnings. It will take some pressure off the “squeezed middle” and won’t increase the welfare trap. It isn’t a perfect policy, prominent Orange-booker Mark Littlewood, a wonk at the rival Institute for Economic Affairs, is wary that it will result in millions of voters being unaffected by the basic rate of income tax who therefore won’t be incentivised to vote for parties and policies that favour lower taxes. He fears that low-earners will have no reason to buy-in to tax cuts if they are taken out of the income tax bracket entirely.
IPPR’s wonkish sophistry may well appeal to Ed Miliband, IPPR’s Will Straw is likely to become a Labour MP at the next election. If in 2015 the coalition parties are both standing on a platform of reducing taxes on the working poor with the Labour Party standing on a platform of taxing the poor and increasing welfare benefits, Miliband will be on the wrong side of the dividing line. “Vote Labour and tax the poor” is a winning campaign slogan – for the coalition parties…

Review of 2012: Guido v Leveson

2012 was very much the year Brian Leveson enjoyed his fifteen minutes of fame, spending £5 million of taxpayers’ money to change, well, nothing, leaving nobody’s favourite Lord Justice free to jet off into the Australian sunset. Leveson couldn’t get enough of Guido in February, though it is fair to say both he and the Information Commissioner less than appreciated this blog exclusively publishing the Operation Motorman Blue Book later on in the spring. An establishment cover-up of hundreds of crimes committed by journalists was revealed, and Brian went bonkers…

The Leveson effect meant no British media outlet would run the naked photos of Prince Harry that emerged overnight from Vegas during the summer,  fortunately for readers of this blog Guido didn’t care what Leveson thought. When Kate Middleton’s topless snaps found their way onto the internet Guido let the public decide whether or not to publish, you chose to spare the Duchess of Cambridge’s dignity. It didn’t hurt traffic though…
When it came down to it, Dave decided that Leveson’s demand for statutory regulation of the press was a step – to the seventeenth century – too far. There was a bashing for Piers though. As we enter 2013 Brian is gone yet not quite forgotten…

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 27, 2012

Review of 2012: Expenses Cheats, Liars and Criminals

Another year, another crowd of venal, lying, cheating ‘honourable’ members bringing shame upon the Mother of Parliaments. There was much cause for celebration in November as the Standards and Privileges committee finally found that the disgraced invoice falsifier Denis MacShane was guilty of swindling tens of thousands of pounds worth taxpayers’ money. They described it as “the gravest case which has come to us for adjudication”, and MacShane’s career was over before thiscrooked, corrupt, gutter politician could say slush fund. Guido hazily remembers cracking open the seventh bottle of Chateau MacShane that fateful autumn afternoon. It’s now in the hands of the CPS...
Back in January Guido kicked off the year by launching a campaign against the MPs food and drink subsidy. This blog revealed that the taxpayer was subsidising their rib-eye steak and chips to the tune of £5.93 a pop, forking out £3.15 for eachseared pigeon breast and chipping in £5.27 for each glazed belly of pork chowed down by our honourable members. John Bercow said there wasnothing to see here. The old media didn’t agree…
As the year drew to a close another expenses scandal threatened to cost the jobs of several MPs at the next election. Guido caught a few rent-swappers of his own, it will be interesting to see how Stephen Dorrell, Linda Riordan, Meg Munn,Andy Burnham, Chris Bryant, Helen Grant, Bill Cash, John Whittingdale, Peter Luff, Jessica Lee,David Amess, Kevin Barron and Don Foster fare in 2015.
A review of this year’s expenses cheats would not be complete without a special mention for piggy-in-chief Margaret Moran. She received a two-year treatment order after she was found by a court to have committed 15 counts of false accounting.
And, lest we forget a politician who takes our money and laughs in our faces, wish a happy anniversary to Gordon Brown…

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 26, 2012

Petition the Whitehouse to Keep Piers in America

It was inevitable that sooner or later Americans would grow weary of Piers Morgan. It wasn’t so predictable that some 70,000 would actually go to the trouble of petitioning President Obama to have him deported.

On balance the only way Guido wants to see him back in Britain is to face charges, so he commends to you the counter Whitehouse petition, to keep Piers across the pond. He will of course be loving all the attention…
Hat-tip: Tim Worstall