Labour’s economic policy in full

Boom : tax lots, spend more, put UK into increasing public debt.

Bust : tax lots, spend more, put UK into increasing public debt.

Quite brilliant.

The Wisdom of Gordon

Gordon Brown  has urged energy firms to reduce petrol prices and household fuel bills to reflect the sharp fall in global oil prices in recent weeks.

When Gordon’s tax makes up over 65% of the petrol price, it’s a bit rich asking for other people to make cuts in their income when Gordon won’t make cuts in his own slab of taxable petroleum.

As it says on Wiki here without the tax we’d be paying about 37p per litre. It’s hard to believe we’d use cars three times as much (which would be the straight-line argument for keeping the tax at its current level) if prices reflected the base product cost.

That said, on the flip side having the fuel tax does mean that those who use their vehicles do contribute more to the Exchequer than those who don’t, which is fair enough. I’m just concerned about the pure level of the tax.

Advertiser Letters

There’s a good crop of letters in today’s Advertiser.

Irate and Concerned Parent – on Desborough’s litter. This is not the first time I’ve seen/heard complaints about Desborough School and litter; I have witnessed and have photos of litter on the school property which I brought to the attention of one of the Governors. I recently visited (as a parent) to look around the school and didn’t see any litter. A cynic might think that extra effort was put in on the day when the school is seeking to sell itself (like one cleans a house when you have visitors) but the fact that I have seen litter, the complainant to the paper saw litter and I have had another, separate recent report about the litter problem at Desborough leads me to the conclusion that it is some way from being perfect….

ME Lewington once again has a go at the Waterways in what appears to be a small minority crusade against the project.

Chris Raymond – writes about the attire of pupils at Desborough and seems resigned to failure. I’ve looked around a few schools in the last month and it is certainly interesting the percentage of boys who ‘do up their top button’. I have a confession – and an excuse. I never used to do up my top button at school or for years afterward because – and here’s the excuse – I have a rather thick neck, which I get from my mothers’ side of the family. Fortunately for my son, he’s got his mothers’ rather more svelte neck which means he hasn’t got any excuse not to do up his top button.

I always wore black shoes if I remember rightly and (usually) had my shirt tucked in. I didn’t drop litter either.

A Name and Address Supplied writes on PCT parking charges at St Marks. The PCT is now in the crazy position of having bought and installed the machines but now not using them, as well as having all of the points that are raised in the letter. Not ideal.

And for our next trick

I’m very honoured to be Lead Member for Maidenhead as the old cinema site finally hits the dust … years and years have passed with the eyesore building sitting there, a blot on the High St and a blot on the Green Way by the York Stream, a place that (apparently) lots of needles were found and all sorts of undesirable rubbish right in the town centre.

Great news.

BBC Libdem bias

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7671046.stm

Here the BBC give higher billing to the comments of the Libdems (popular vote around 15% nationally) than the Conservatives (popular vote around 45%).

The quotes from Chris Huhne get 6 paragraphs at the end, whereas Dominic Grieve’s get just 2.

EDIT : Here’s another one; David Laws goes first, Michael Gove at the end.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7669254.stm

EDIT 2: The BBC Education journalists can’t even get their apostrophes in the right place. World class.

Shadow children’s secretary Michael Gove welcomed Mr Ball’s announcement to reduce the amount of testing.

Banks Nationalised

I haven’t got the time to do this justice, but before the credit crunch began I would not have predicted this headline. Amazing.

No thanks to Gordon – it’s his regulatory framework that failed to curb the problems in the banks (and now the BBC are trying to give him the credit for implementing the Swedish banking crisis solution)

Bad news for UK Ltd

Appropriate finance?

Colossal taxpayer injection into UK banks said the news this morning – about 10% of the national debt apparently added overnight. Thanks Gordon.

And to really juice up liquidity and the money supply (isn’t that the problem?) we’ve just had an not-enormous rate cut of a piddling half a percent. Don’t we need a bit of growth/recession prevention right now?

My mate Vince thought a rate cut was in order, well, nobody is disagreeing with that. Shame it was so little.

Comment of the month

Today’s comment-of-the-day at Conservative Home is

There is still subversive anti-establishment comedy but you won’t hear it on the BBC, nor in trendy London comedy venues either, which naturally cater to the establishment views of their mostly left-liberal middle-class audiences.