Soldier on…

Another day you'll have to survive without me - meetings all day for no readily apparent reason. And after that, I'm heading off to a fencing competition. Or more specifically, I'm off to spend the evening setting up a fencing competition, as it's the Shropshire Open and therefore my home event. The foil event is tomorrow - looking at the entry list, it's clear that I'll be out by lunchtime…

If you haven't seen any of the Nick Clegg apology parodies, here's the best one, and you can see more here.

Oh Nick. Nick Nick Nick

It's almost comical how Nick Clegg gets it wrong even when he gets it right. This time, he's proposed a 'time-limited wealth tax' on the mega-rich (which includes him of course: he's a multi-millionaire, while the median wage in this country is £26,000).

Obviously everybody other than the Tories have made one simple point: Clegg voted to cut the top rate of income tax from 50p to 45p on earnings above £150,000, so proposing a new wealth tax seems a bit odd.

However, despite this stupid and regressive tax cut, Nicky's on to something here. The reason hedge fund traders, Mitt Romney (apparently it's OK to run for President of the US while keeping your millions in various other countries) and every rich bastard you've ever heard of avoids paying most of their taxes is quite simple: they don't pay income tax like you or I. I have a salary and savings account and an ISA. I pay tax via PAYE, so no chance to avoid it there even if I wanted to. My savings account is taxed each year automatically (I think the government took £12 last year) and my almost empty ISA is tax-free.

Up in the realms of serious money, there's none of this nonsense. Rather than take salaries, these people acquire cash through 'capital gains' (taxed much lower), investment income, dividends and various other mechanisms. They don't buy houses: opaque offshore trusts and companies buy their houses for them. They are 'non-doms', like the owner of the Daily Mail, who built a (predictably) appallingly reactionary £20m mansion in Wiltshire yet is officially domiciled in France, and therefore avoids all taxes on it and all his other financial dealings. There are entire streets and blocks in central London worth £billions which have no individual owners, just Cayman Island companies

So the Lib Dem idea of a wealth tax is actually a good one. It doesn't discriminate between income and gains, but taxes the lot. It's easy to hide a salary behind a 'service company' (as lots of civil servants and BBC executives have been doing - it avoids income tax and national insurance) but it's harder to hide a mansion, and if extended slightly, taxes the offshore companies used to hide ownership. No cheque in the post? Send in the bailiffs.

I'd forget the 'time-limited' aspect of his plan, reinstate the 50p rate (even Thatcher had a 65p upper band) and tax all financial transactions, particularly the speculative kinds which bankrupted the world. I'd also abolish all benefits for people with jobs. I know that sounds a little rightwing, but hear me out: it's actually a progressive socialist policy. Providing benefits for the working poor isn't good for them: it's a subsidy for the greedy and evil corporations which employ them on such low wages. It raises their profits, which go to shareholders who hide the money away from the taxman. So we pay for the benefits while those who profit don't share the burden. If we stopped paying benefits but massively increased the minimum wage, the employees would still be needed to do the work, but some of the profits would be diverted to their salaries. They'd spend the money on necessities and the economy would improve, while the state's expenditure would drop. All it needs is for us to decide that profit margins can and should be lower. The executives and shareholders have fed off us like leeches for a hundred years: time for them to adapt to changed circumstances.

Poor old Nick. Even when he comes up with a good idea, it's laughed out of court.

The revolutions continue

Reports are trickling in suggesting that the Middle East's tide of coups and topplings is spreading to the West. In a move reminiscent of the 1970s, shadowy forces have taken control of the UK in the absence of its leader, David Cameron, who took control following an inconclusive election in 2010. He is currently on an arms sales tour of the Gulf and seemed shocked but determined to hold on to power:

Asked who was running the country, Nick Clegg, believed to be leader of an opportunist clique formerly subservient to the 'Tories' (directly translated as 'Servants of Mammon') known only as the Liberal Democrats, replied:

"Yeah, I suppose I am. I forgot about that. I'm holding the fort but I'm hoping to take the end of the week off with my kids. Someone else will have to do it then. It sounds more haphazard than it probably is."

Taken aback, an embattled and deluded Cameron insisted from a secure location that he could maintain his grip on power:

The prime minister dismissed Clegg's comments as a "throwaway line" as he made clear that he remained in charge, regardless of where he was.

Speaking from Oman on the final leg of his tour, Cameron told Sky News: "I'm not absent, that is the way government works. In the age of the BlackBerry, the telephone, the internet, just because I leave the country doesn't mean I am not in charge." 

 Journalists report that the situation is fluid, and the outcome depends on the loyalty or otherwise of a paramilitary force calling itself The Big Society, about whom little is known.

You can't trust the Tories - in blogs or with the economy

Over at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, the very serious men in grey suits are ripping the government's claims about the spending review to shreds. Faisal Islam, the Guardian's economics correspondent, describes it thus:

already the most devastating critique of flaky claims, policy inconsistencies, dodgy maths, i've ever seen by IFS

Laughter at the IFS briefing as it shows the most regressive looking graph in history vs the puny looking treasury version 

in response to Cameron and Clegg saying things like this.

People do not only think of themselves as recipients of benefits. There is also: "How much does it cost to get childcare? What kind of education is my child getting at school? What am I getting back if I am doing some low-paid, part-time work?" That is how people live in the real world, and in the real world it is the richest that are paying the most – about that there is not doubt at all.

Meanwhile, it's time to look to Nadine Dorries, one of the most appallingly unpleasant of the Tory Scum back benches. She fiddled her expenses but fell ever so slightly short of being charged, but the Parliamentary Commissioner's report takes her to task over her non-co-operative approach and generally relaxed attitude towards the truth. She responds with this astonishing confession about her blog, which the authorities used as evidence:

My blog is 70% fiction and 30% fact. It is written as a tool to enable my constituents to know me better and to reassure them of my commitment to Mid Bedfordshire. I rely heavily on poetic licence and frequently replace one place name/event/fact with another.

Right. I see. Or rather, I don't see. But here are a couple of extracts which might help us understand this menace to society:

Did you know that if every GP referred one less patient per year and requested one less diagnostic test, the NHS would save half a billion pounds in that one year?

Would you like to be that one patient? How does the doctor decide who shouldn't be treated because it's too expensive? Why doesn't Dorries know the difference between 'less' and 'fewer'? (And where's the source for this statistic?).

Try this:

The BBC will only receive the equivalent of a 16% cut over five years. That just isn’t good enough.

The BBC has done a very good job over the last thirteen years to support the Labour Government. They have facilitated the very process which has resulted in the cuts every family in the nation has to bear. The blood which will flow from the cuts is all over BBC hands too.

That's right. You heard it here first. The BBC caused the banking crash and made Labour rescue the banks and needs to be punished. 

It's like reading Ewar's Shropshire Star letters over and over again, before remembering that this woman is a Member of Parliament on the government side. 

The stupid, how it burns.

Sold! To the Tories!

OK, I'm not invigilating - got the week wrong.

Mark has sent me this: someone, bored by Nick Clegg whoring himself around the main parties, has put Clegg up for sale on EBay (sale withdrawn at £1m due to some petty clause about not selling humans: proud of yourself, Wilberforce?).

In today's irony news, the new Home Office minister and Minister for Equality has consistently voted against equal rights for homosexuals. Well done, Theresa May (but probably won't). She loved the Iraq war but didn't want an inquiry into it, adores nuclear weapons and hunting (voting record).

The Cabinet's up: depressing if you know who these people are, enigmatic if you're normal. I see that Cheryl Gillan (another millionairess with expenses problems - amongst other things, the taxpayers fed her dog), the Secretary of State for Wales left that country at 11 and never came back - she doesn't even represent a Welsh constituency. She opposed Wales's National Assembly and doesn't speak Welsh. Which means we can look forward to a repeat performance of John Redwood's triumph (though to be fair, speaking human would be an improvement on his normal approach):