Tag Archives: immigration

I Don’t Count

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I don’t count. You don’t count. Not if, like me you’re an ordinary person quietly getting on with life, perhaps working to support your loved ones or maybe retired now, drawing the pension you’ve paid into all your life and paying your taxes. You don’t count. I don’t count.

Politicians only become interested in you, and then only as a statistic, when election time rolls round. They see us, in the UK at least, as a cash cow, needed only to fund not merely those services that are necessary to a functioning society but also for every other ill-thought-through scheme they devise.

When Labour – the equivalent of the Democrats in the States – came to power last year they suddenly ‘discovered’ that the previous Tory (Republican) government had left them with a £22 billion debt. A number of financial institutions disputed this figure and the government produced no concrete evidence for it. Nonetheless, they took immediate action, shelving most of their pre-election promises until the debt could be repaid. To this end, our politicians, being among the most unproductive members of society, cut out an enormous amount of government waste and immediately cancelled projects of no benefit to the British people. The Spectator magazine estimated that they saved in the region of £200 billion this way. They were quids in!

Except they did nothing of the sort. What they did was keep up their prolific spending, turning to their cash cow – the British tax-payer – to milk it for even more money by increasing taxes all round. Particularly hard hit were high earners (which I am not), the lower paid, businesses and farmers.

A disputed debt, created solely by politicians (much of it by unnecessarily locking down for two years), now has to be paid for by those who had nothing to do with its creation. As if this weren’t bad enough, the new UK government has extended its control of its people by –

  • Deciding what can and can’t be said online and elsewhere (a new, so-called Islamophobic blasphemy law is currently being considered);
  • Encouraging police to investigate ‘non-crime hate incidents’, while ignoring burglaries and shoplifting ‘incidents’;
  • Restricting how much of our own money we can give away to family and friends before the government helps itself to a massive slice;
  • Freezing tax thresholds, meaning individuals will start to pay tax at lower levels of income;
  • Making taxpayers pay for schemes and projects with no proven track record (carbon capture, net zero);
  • Permitting local councils to increase council taxes, some above the legal limit, for fewer services. (Almost a quarter of council tax collected is spent on ‘unjustifiably generous’ staff pensions.)
  • Allowing government agencies access to private bank accounts in order to determine whether benefit recipients are lying about their income (powers that are set to be extended in 2029);
  • Making tax payers fund mass immigration, which successive governments have failed to control.
  • Requisitioning farm land in order to build more houses. In a second blow to farmers, paying them less than the market value. The government seems hell-bent on destroying food production in the UK.
  • Expecting tax-payers to pay Mauritius between £9 billion and £18 billion to take a tiny island in the Indian Ocean off our hands (though Trump might prevent the handover). 

Also under consideration is a two-tier justice system offering greater lenience to those from minorities. Should penalties for criminal acts be determined by ethnicity?

None of this makes us North Korea, but it certainly doesn’t feel like we’re  living in a Western democracy. What happened to government of the people for the people? Why is there growing resentment in the UK that government is now something that is done to the electorate? Beware legislation that is ‘for your own good’ because it never is.

It’s no wonder so many British citizens feel neglected and side-lined by politicians who view them only as a source of income. Can you blame them, and me, for feeling like we don’t count?

Neil’s Third Letter, to the Sceptics

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Dear Sceptic,

I understand, I really do. Some of your explanations for what’s going on in the world are way out there. Some of them, in fact, are absolutely preposterous. But, I know how you got there. You’ve spent so long being misled, deceived and, yes, let’s face it, lied to by politicians and some of the media that you’ve come up with your own explanations for things. You’ve suspected in some cases that the establishment’s frequent misdirection and disinformation amounts to conspiracy, and certainly there have been conspiracies of silence in recent years (we’ll get to some examples soon). Unfortunately, this has meant those same authorities have been able to say that your views can be dismissed as mere conspiracy theories. You should be cancelled. Certainly some of your more way out theories – satanic overlords, faked moon-landings and microchip vaccines – need to be. Unfortunately this has also meant any reasonable arguments you’ve arrived at that run contrary to the prevailing narrative have also been airily dismissed as the work of nut-jobs and thrown in the dumpster along with all the whacky stuff.

You were right, it turned out, about Covid19. It was manufactured in a Chinese laboratory, partially funded by the US, from where it escaped in 2019. Even the US State Department has accepted that this is the most likely explanation of the virus’s origin and has asked Chinese authorities to release the relevant data (you can guess how this request was met.)

Look where it got you during the pandemic when you argued for the virus’s lab based origins. Despite the evidence you presented you were labelled conspiracy theorists, were cancelled and hurled in the ‘not worth your time’ trash can. It’s still happening now, because no-one can be allowed to upset the Chinese authorities when it could mean research labs in the West could lose Chinese sponsorship.

You’ve pointed out too that the UK government’s efforts to eliminate the country’s less than 1% contribution to to global emissions is futile. At £22 billion, its plan to ‘capture’ carbon waste is both ridiculously expensive and pointless: carbon capture has never been successfully achieved by any country that has previously attempted it. Never mind, the British taxpayer will fund this particular tilt at windmills (no pun intended); you can be dismissed as climate-change deniers, purveyors of false information as well as conspiracy theorists. A three-in-one success!

You’ve suggested that the current narrative on immigration doesn’t hold water. The government says we need present levels of immigration to fill job vacancies, sustain the economy and fund others’ welfare benefits and pensions. You’ve highlighted the unfounded assumptions inherent in this strategy, pointing out it has failed to improve the economy. You’ve suggested too that in the long term it will necessitate even more immigration to fund those currently entering the country when they draw welfare and claim their pensions. It’s a ponzi scheme writ large that merely kicks the can down the road. And for your trouble you’re labelled far-right, racist and Islamophobic (even when you don’t mention Muslims). You can always tell when those who seek to control the narrative have no counter argument; they’ll subject you to name calling, political slurs and seek to censure your views. Get with the narrative or else!

I could go on –

Question the idea that people alive today are somehow responsible for the slave trade 300 years ago: racist!

Express the view on the deleterious effects of the trans-movement on women’s rights and safety: transphobic!

Ask whether the plonkers who make stupid comments on social media should receive longer prison sentences than rapists and thugs: hate-filled bigot!

– but I won’t. Often, sceptical free thinker, you don’t get it right and others are taken in by your more whackadoodle theories. Unfortunately when you do have a point, backed by sound argument and evidence, it can easily be dismissed by lumping you in with the whackier of your brethren, and ultimately by silencing you and the platform on which you write. That’s Britain today (or is that just a conspiracy theory?)

Yours,

The Apostle Neil

Death and Taxes. But mainly taxes

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Can I have a rant? I’m sick and tired of tax I have to pay in the UK to pay for others’ ill-conceived schemes and failures. I know a society depends on taxation for its services; taxation, in theory, ensures its successful operation. Here in the UK taxation pays for health care, policing, the justice system, defence, amenities, schools, welfare support, local services and the salaries of local and national government officials. However, British tax payers are currently paying the highest tax in 70 years – since World War 2 in fact.

Currently in the UK, average incomes are taxed at 20%. Purchases on everything except essential food items and children’s clothing are taxed at 20%, petrol at a staggering 54%, average house purchases at 5% while so-called green taxes are set at around 15%. Then there are local taxes, based on property size, road tax for those who drive and inheritance taxes that limit how much an individual can pass on to his or her offspring of money that has been already taxed. Plus the tax on alcohol (variable but around 25%), sugar tax (an average of 21p per litre of fizzy drink), house purchase tax (‘stamp duty’), inheritance tax and tobacco tax. It is estimated the average working person in the UK pays in the region of 40% of their income in tax.

What does the government do with all the money it collects? Too much of it pays for government bungling:

  • The mess made of the Covid pandemic when almost 10 billion pounds of public money was wasted – thrown away – on unusable PPE equipment. More tax payers money is now being spent on destroying that same equipment, while the Covid Enquiry, set up to discover just how badly the government bungled lockdown, is currently costing tax payers a further 156 million pounds.
  • Approximately 10.3 billion pounds was lost on the government’s Covid support scheme in 2012-22 due to ‘fraud and error’. In the same period, a further 40 billion pounds was wasted on other government schemes, none of which it was capable of operating with any degree of competence. 

  • The government’s inability to control immigration, both legal and illegal, despite numerous promises it would do so. I have a great deal of sympathy for those fleeing danger (though many who claim asylum in Britain are actually coming from France) but the UK’s services – those mentioned above – simply cannot cope with the increased numbers. Asylum seekers are initially accommodated at a cost of 8 million pounds a day, 1.3 billion pounds per year, in hotels and houses bought or rented by the government’s appointed agencies. It takes about 18 months for the Home Office to assess whether applicants can stay.

  • The 537 million pounds of tax payers’ money the government gave to China between 2009 and 2021. This apparently funds private enterprise in a country known for its disregard of human rights, one which the government itself has recently said poses a major threat to world security. It is currently donating a ‘reduced’ amount of 10 million a year. Why? Is this little more than protection money?

    Last year, the UK also gave £33.4 million to India, a country with its own space program. The amount is set to increase to £57 million next year. The UK government claims that much of this is for ‘business investment’. But again, why?

  • The 480 million pounds being handed over to French authorities in return for them preventing smugglers leaving French shores with illegal immigrants in unsafe rubber dinghies. The French authorities fail to do this but the British government continues to pay them.

  • The subsidies government hands over to private business, like the train companies that now receive more tax payers’ money than they did when the system was in public ownership.
  • The bailing out of failing banks in loans, only a small fraction of which is ever repaid despite the extortionate amounts the banks continue to pay their executives in bonuses.
  • Redundancy payments made to those in failing private businesses: the Body Shop is the latest to benefit from tax payers’ largesse.
  • Paying not just the salaries but the pensions of civil servants, bureaucrats, politicians and police. (Disclosure: as a former teacher, I paid, together with my employers’ contributions, for my own pension.)

  • The generous pay increases MPs award themselves. The latest only a few weeks ago was 5.5%. Local councillors meanwhile awarded themselves 20%, again payable by tax payers. The bars and restaurants in the Houses of Parliament are all subsidised in the same way, as is the heating of MPs’ second homes.

  • The endless expansion of the civil service, some of whom are currently considering striking because they have been told they must turn up at the office two days a week. This, they say, is an imposition too far, contravening the basic human right to work at home in their pyjamas (or something.)
  • Failing to get people back into work and paying those who will not work, often over entire lifetimes.
  • Unnecessary green policies. Britain has little need, despite the ranting of a few excitable extremists, to rush headlong into unsustainable green policies. Green taxes are, in theory at least, passed to multi-billion pound industries, that are more than capable of doing so for themselves, to develop more sustainable energy sources.
  • For the government’s failure to reform the NHS, which, it is estimated, employs as many administrators and bureaucrats as it does clinicians and medics, the people who actually deliver health care.

Tax payers’ money is not the panacea for all the problems politicians have failed to resolve. Liberally throwing tax payers’ hard-earned cash at whatever problem arises should not, on every occasion, be the first resort. It ought to be the last. It is easy to spend other people’s money, without accountability, and easy to waste it. When it runs out, it is equally as easy to increase taxes to extract still more from the masses. This is precisely what happened last year when taxes were, yet again, raised ‘temporarily’.

There is nothing I and ordinary hardworking people can do about this unjust, exploitative arrangement. We can vote against the current governing party and perhaps, as seems likely, have it replaced with another who will tax us just as much, or, as seems likely, more. They will then waste our money on other self-serving, hair-brained and ultimately fruitless causes.

End of rant.