Randomly Selected Article or Link

Anyone not already outraged by the treatment meted out by the military, both British and American on our citizens from Tipton should have been watching:

The Road To Guantanamo: - Channel 4's new drama from multi award-winning film director Michael Winterbottom – The Road to Guantanamo – created huge international impact and won the prestigious Silver Bear for Direction for Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross in competition at The 56th Berlin International Film Festival.

...tonight.

You can say all you want about the necessity to do certain pretty nasty things in time of war, about rules of evidence not functioning properly in a foreign country you are trying to subdue, and who knows whether the lads from Tipton are telling the God's honest truth (though personally I am more inclined to believe them than all the FUD that comes out of the security services), but it seems to me that heads should roll for their treatment and that of others still in GTMO and other members of the gulag archipelago.

Impeaching Blair is too good for him. I hope he's watching and can still say what he said to Parky last week about conscience and being judged by history and his God.

Sometimes it only takes the back of an envelope to verify rough tax calculations. Clearly e-Tory Iain Dale doesn't keep real envelopes any longer when he says that in his interview with Andrew Marr this morning Ming Came Clean on Tax Hikes:

Well if you're a lobby journalist scratching your head about what to write tomorrow, Ming Campbell's just given you your story. On the Andrew Marr programme he readily admitted that the cost of his so-called "Tax Cuts" would see "the rich" (which he couldn't define) paying £40-£50,000 a year more EACH in tax, as a result of his reform proposals. Let me spell that out again...

£40-£50,000 MORE in tax per year! Each!

Feel those pips squeak! This will apparently enable him to fill the £12 billion hole in the LibDem tax calculations. I suspect that although they might be able to fill the hole in the first year, the would reoccur in the second. Why? Because every so-called "rich" person will have left the country. Perhaps someone should remind Ming of what Abraham Lincoln once said...

You don't make the poor richer by making the rich poorer.

Aside from the fact that Ming did no such thing as anyone who watched it could see he was reacting guardedly to a set of figures thrown out by Marr himself making assumptions about who would be targetted by tax increases. Marr's researchers had suggested we were talking about, I think he said, the top 250,000 wealthiest households. So just who are they and what difference would it make?

Well 250,000 households are about one per cent of households. Most statistics seem to show that the wealthiest one per cent in the UK own between about 20% and 23% of all the wealth in the UK. By contrast, fully half of the UK adult population shares 7% of wealth including housing wealth between them, or just 1% without housing wealth.

Now the wealth of this 250,000 wealthiest households is growing, at average returns (and in fact they tend to grow faster than the average), at about £50,000,000,000 a year, of which we may or may not want to capture about £12,000,000,000, or around a 25% tax rate, in order to bring my and other average earner's tax rates fall to about 34%.

Seems like a good deal to me for the vast, vast majority of the British public. Scaremongering Tories beware - when people realise who is affected one way or another, I think they will be pleasantly surprised.

Technorati Tags: lib dems, taxation

...or at least his party does, much more eloquently than any of the debates on the subject in either house of parliament:

In ConservativeHome's current poll of support amongst Tory members for their leader's choice of Shadow Cabinet Davis tops shadow cabinet league table again with Warsi at bottom.

Listed below are the rankings given by 1,274 Tory members for twenty-seven shadow cabinet ministers

1. David Davis: +79% | 88% satisfied, 9% dissatisfied
...
27. Sayeeda Warsi: -20% | 19% satisfied, 39% dissatisfied

Now, I am perfectly willing to concede the distinct possibility that she could have got +19% just for being anti-gay and -39% just for being of a race and gender that grassroots Tories do not consider as belonging to the governing classes, but it strikes me that this might come to be a case of "act in haste, repent at leisure". For in his haste to add a bit of colour to his shadow cabinet, Cameron neatly side-stepped the democratic process, as others have done certainly in the past just as egregiously, and made this woman a permanent member-for-life of the UK's legislature.

Actually, anyone who has seen her on television can see why Tory members would disapprove. She comes across as loud and boorish. If I were a Conservative member I'd probably cringe that she was representing my party on Question Time too. But that's not the point of this really. It's merely the fact that she is now there for life, or at least for as long as she deigns to grace the second chamber with her presence.

Indeed, it seems worse that this is someone who had attempted to get elected and had failed - she doesn't merely not have a mandate in common with all her fellow members of the second chamber, she went for one and the people, the core of our democracy in theory, didn't give her one. I've opined before that, as a rule, we should be even more wary of giving defeated ex-MPs a permanent consolation prize in the form of a peerage - let alone defeated candidates who have no prior experience of government. Those who step down voluntarily are somehow slightly less of a democratic outrage, but only just - as we shall see again when the former Deputy Prime Minister takes the ermine.

Still, it's done now. She has presumably had her letters patent and is now immovable, short of making anti-gay statements a thought crime which might land her in chokey and potentially disqualify her from sitting - though that would disqualify half the Tory benches in the Lords before her. Whether the grassroots Conservatives like it or not, she is likely to remain representing them for as long as she likes. Appointed peers are simply not the answer to the democratic deficit at the core of our legislature, and the sooner the Marquis of Minster Lovell finally gets round to finishing the job his government promised to do ten years ago the better.

I have to say with a certain smugness that I was out in the pissing rain and blustery icy wind delivering Lib Dem leaflets while our two men in suits were spitting feathers at each other on John Sopel's lunchtime politics show. And reading some of the blog comments on it, especially, though understandably I guess as the "victim" of the briefing document with which Sopel ambushed Huhne, in the Cleggosphere, I was prepared to be confronted with a truly undignified public school spat complete with debaggings and wedgies.

So, having just now watched it, and having already read the document in question as published by the Huhne campaign team, I did think it was a bit of an unedifying spectacle, but really nothing to get so worked up about as to start talking about bringing "the party into disrepute" or "consign him to the backbenches" or even, from someone who has one blog entitled "Chris Almighty" and another called "The Anti-Chris Blog", a comment that electing Chris would see him resign from the party.

Nick is a big boy. He will have to weather a great deal worse if he is leader. Chris is, tonight, a very silly looking boy, he will have to learn from this - though I have to say that for me, on reading the document (far more useful than watching the spat on television) many of the "inconsistencies" set out in it do ring true in the various things I seen written about Nick's position on the relevant issues compared with what he says himself (hence my earlier confusion in the early part of the contest).

The bigger problem for me is that I don't want someone who rules out vouchers, insurance, the break-up of state monopolies or any of these things that Chris criticizes Nick for, and the fact that in his attempts to clarify his position Nick also seems to rule them all out means I have nobody squeezing me in my "comfort zone" in this election. So I am sticking with Chris, because as I have said many times, I believe the future of the party and the country is in adopting an identifiably Liberal political economy and I believe that means having an economist as leader who can instinctively make those arguments when put on the spot.

Personally, and I realise that with this post I am adding, possibly minutely, to this, I reckon it's the Lib Dem blogosphere and their shrill partisan screams bordering on vitriol, who are the real losers in this spat and I am sure the men in suits will have made up with each other very soon.  And actually - if they don't make up, neither of them deserve to lead this party!

I asked this question a few weeks ago when I heard Chris Huhne talking about carbon trading being a better incentive than carbon taxing for businesses to make cuts in their pollution output, but nobody responded with an argument either way. Now, in Obscenity of carbon trading:

The Stern Review's emphasis on carbon trading is wrong, Kevin Smith argues; only cutting emissions at source will curb climate change.

So I'll ask again, since Kevin Smith doesn't actually put forward any mechanism by which people and businesses should be encouraged to cut their emissions.

You see, the air is mine, and yours, and yours, and yours. It belongs to us all collectively. We need it to survive, and there is, sort of, a finite supply of it. So why would we want governments or some other trans-national body, to hand out permits to businesses to pollute a certain portion of it, allowing them to sell some of that portion on if they don't use it all themselves? It is enclosure of the air, just as surely as the enclosure of land sent millions off to rot in the hell of the satanic mills. If it has value at all, and there doesn't overall seem to be much argument about that, it is value that we, the people, own collectively and should be used for our benefit and not for the benefit of corporations.

Smith reports that companies collectively have made windfall gains of £940bn across Europe after persuading governments to allocate bigger chunks which they have then been able to sell on - under any definition that is what is known as "rent seeking".

The polluting widget manufacturer is in the business of making widgets, not trading air (I have a similar problem with UK Coal deciding it is now a property company rather than a coal miner). If it can't break even by making widgets it needs to change its way of working or close. That's the market.

So, why not tax every process and business on its total carbon consumption. Of course, you would want to use that tax to reduce tax on good economic processes. If you can make the same widgets in a less polluting way why should you also pay corporation tax or the consumer sales tax on them. It is consistent with our "Green Tax Shift". It is consistent with Georgists' "Tax Shift" onto economic land and externalities. And it doesn't give away our air to someone to make money out of.

You could get tax credits if you invent a process that actually takes more pollution out of the atmosphere than it puts in, which is fair enough - a sort of "negative carbon tax". The same calculations need to go on anyway whether you use the trading or the taxing mechanism - each process, or end product, needs to have a carbon assessment somehow. And that must already be underway for companies to be able to participate in the various trading schemes that have sprung up around the world.

Keep it simple. There would be no need for a separate aviation pollution tax - it's a process just like any other (though there are other externalities in aviation that ought to be taxed - like use of physical airspace through landing slot auctions), no need for a separate vehicle pollution tax system - the vehicle must have a carbon rating on which any of the suggested emissions based vehicle tax systems will be based.

I don't think you would even need to make it personal, on individuals. They would be paying for the pollution their lifestyles may cost in the price they pay for goods - no need for a complex "personal carbon allowance" as has been suggested.