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Apparently the Palace of Westminster is exempt from this draconian smoking ban.

Given that the staff already went on strike because they were being treated differently, and worse, than other public servants, I think this is appalling. If it is an argument about protecting workers' health why are they any less worthy of that protection?

Disgraceful. Abolish the lot of them, I say. We can do without Westminster.

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

This interested me today:

Telegraph - Sharia law is spreading as authority wanes

By Joshua Rozenberg, Legal Editor

Islamic sharia law is gaining an increasing foothold in parts of Britain, a report claims.

Sharia, derived from several sources including the Koran, is applied to varying degrees in predominantly Muslim countries but it has no binding status in Britain.

However, the BBC Radio 4 programme Law in Action produced evidence yesterday that it was being used by some Muslims as an alternative to English criminal law. Aydarus Yusuf, 29, a youth worker from Somalia, recalled a stabbing case that was decided by an unofficial Somali "court" sitting in Woolwich, south-east London.

I expect we're supposed to be appalled. Yet I'm not. I don't see a problem with this idea. In fact it's a good deal more responsible a solution than meting out punishment beatings or kickings to the local scrotes on the say so of the local hard-man.

In fact, I quite like the idea that communities deal with many matters of justice on their own. As the report says, people submit to these courts because their families make them. Those families are shamed amongst their friends and the rest of their communities by their relatives' actions. The only stipulation I'd make is that no punishment should be imposed that would itself be a criminal offense under British law or that the "arrests" do not actually amount to kidnappings - if miscreants do not submit voluntarily to such local community justice.

It has always struck me, especially since the experience of accompanying a friend to a magistrates' court on a driving charge last year, that our good old British magistrate system is failing miserably in many places. They appear merely to be applying a regular slap on the wrist to a group of people, chief amongst them the hapless and hopeless, on behalf of an overburdened legal system. There's no sense, to me at least, that the magistrate system is reflecting the wishes and concerns of the communities they serve in any way that would assist in rehabilitation of relatively minor offenders or reconciliation with the communities they offend against.

But in terms of these Sharia courts, I don't see why we should get any more worked up about it than by, say, a Catholic Charismatic Renewal church that holds confessions in public, or the idea of church congregations "shunning" miscreants in some Christian sects. All our communities should be encouraged to find their own answers within the overall framework of the law to the sort of crimes against the community these courts are dealing with. Far better, say, than a broad brush "Anti-Social Behaviour Order" I'd say.

Norwich City Council to pursue hairdressers with undercover agents to check they're not giving their customers a glass of complimentary mulled wine while they wait:

You couldn't make it up!

A friend, and former council colleague then defector, some of you will know who I mean but I won't name him, got the news early this week that his mother, in Glasgow, had been taken into hospital having been lain at home for the best part of a month not feeling well but doing little about it. Anyway, without going into too many details said friend is not really working full time at the moment and not claiming benefit - because of the irregular work he does for the local TA and ACF. THis is about enough to keep him in bed and board but without anything left over for "shocks" like having to travel to Glasgow from Oxford in a hurry.

Last night I booked him a train ticket for next Wednesday after his next ACF session, paid for with my debit card, and to be collected at Oxford station. At that far off it was £95 return. But this morning he got a call to say she might not last the weekend so we had to try and make some rearrangements for today. So first, trying to cancel the original ticket I found it wasn't possible online because it was an overnight service and had a reservation automatically applied. The cancellation has cost me a tenner as well. Then looking for a new ticket for today we concluded the only deal was to take a standard single, which was itself £85 (because he did not know precisely now when he was going to come back and so an open return was going to be pretty expensive.

Still, again, since I was the one booking it, I had to accompany him to the station to collect the ticket so that I could insert my debit card. And we had to wait for two hours to be able to collect it after the booking was made. So, getting to the station too early to be out before the time limit on the short stay car park I had to park in the long stay. The fee is £4.50 if you use something called "RingGo" and £6.00 if you only have cash. The process of paying via RingGo was quite stressfulm even for a techie like me, requiring some code off the platform (so I was lucky the man let me, the non-passenger, onto the platform to get the code which changes every hour. The instructions on how to pay seemed only to be back at the car park so having collected that code number I had to return to find out how to do it and then go through a most complicated automated system which has now, with no specific authority from me, got my mobile number linked to my car registration number. There was nobody at the car park checking, and no ticket either for the car window or the exit from the car park, so I presume it is monitored by ANPR.

So, it seems that if you are not very well off, don't have a credit or debit card, and need to travel quite quickly, you must be faced with a ticket that would be about 50% higher than even the extortionate "supasava" online and 50% extra on the car park. And this is supposed to be encouraging use of public transport? What a joke!

He texted me after about ten minutes on the train to say that it was like sardines in a tin.

And all that for ninety quid and it would take eight hours if everything went smoothly. I know all about the fixed, annual costs of driving, like my tax and so on, and actually I don't do much mileage a year anyway, so driving up there would have been cheaper at the point of use (I would have got there on two tanks at the most and with two of us in the car that would have been less than half the train price) and helped me justify my annual fixed costs in any case. And when I went looking for a plane ticket for him yesteray I gave up because I could not find a single ticket under £93.

Bonkers. Bonkers and discriminatory. Oh, and why on earth do two type of first class ticket vary by as much as £200 quid for the same (single!) journey - one was £250 or something and another £450. Just what is that about?