As usual, I flinch not and when it comes to reporting I do so from the comfort of my desk at my window overlooking The Thames. I’ve not really ever got the point of the need to stand in a puddle while reporting on floods, stand about in a fur coat outside BBC television Centre when it snows, or, indeed, stand outside Parliament while reporting on matters political.
So… on that premise, I bring you news of the Tory Party Conference in Birmingham – described yesterday on TV… or was it radio… or even ‘pub talk’? …. as Britain’s second city; once the very heart of industrial and manufacturing Britain but now just a large car park with a lot of restaurants.
Day One involved George Osbore – who seems to find it difficult to shrug off his childhood name of ‘Gideon’ – giving us the low down on his latest well thought out plan to get rid of Child Benefit for everyone earning more than £44k – giving rise to the wonderful anomaly that a single person earning £45k with children will lose child benefit, but middle class couples who both earn less than £44k – but between them rake in £87k – can continue to get it. Needless to say Mumsnet has not been overcrowded by couples earning less than £44k.
I don’t suppose that my tweet, offering advice, was that helpful…
The Daily Mail, The Sun and other sundry news providers raged about the injustice and I enjoyed a few happy moments (not blessed with the pleasure of having *greedy, venal, precocious and spoiled little darlings*) watching the sheer terror on the faces of various members of the middle classes being interviewed about the loss of their M&S shopping allowance from 2013.
I am advised that there is to be a protest march..and tweeted accordingly….
I did enjoy one comment from a regular on The Sun who summed the issue up perfectly… “if you can’t afford to feed ’em, don’t breed ’em’.” Rather more insightful than the usual knuckle dragging comments on online tabloid stories.
Guido Fawkes came in for quite a bit of stick on his story about William Hague sharing a room with his SpAd – and some even refused to have anything further to do with Guido Fawkes or his website!
Leading commentator, blogger, television commentator, radio presenter, publisher and occasional kneejerkitis sufferer, Iain Dale, had an amusing piece in his blog this morning about ‘sharing rooms’….
Guido in ‘Sleeping with Employee’ Shock Revelation
Dale revealed.. (breathily?)…..
Remember how I took Guido Fawkes to task for his insinuations about William Hague and his assistant, Chris Myers after they innocently shared a room together during the election campaign?
I interviewed blogger Harry Cole on LBC during the furore and reminded him of the time he shared not only a bedroom, but a bed, with fellow blogger Mike Rouse. He made the perfectly fair point that Mike wasn’t his boss.
So what are we to make of the revelation that Guido Fawkes and his able seaman employee Harry Cole have been sharing bunks in a barge moored alongside the conference centre here in Birmingham.
I wonder if bargepoles are being touched…
The response from Guido amused me and I have even decided that Toby Young, often so terribly serious on TV, does have a sense of humour and I have revised my opinion accordingly. It is Young, not William Hague… on the right! Tory Bear (aka Harry Cole) is occupying the centre ground…. but for the purposes of the picture only. I would not wish to defame him by suggesting that he is, in any way, a *Centrist*!
Picture tweeted by Guido Fawkes… no idea who took it? Not Osbore, surely?
More tomorrow… if my doctor says that I can take the excitement….
Oh… and, remember… it is all Labour’s fault… and we are all in this together…..
This poor Guardian journey did not get a wholly positive response when pleading his special case with five children in his family.
http://tinyurl.com/38n6jk2
Personally I’m all for fiscal disincentives for overly large families. A bit of a moral problem in the truly poor where it might push children into real poverty so this can’t be taken to extremes. It’s hardly the kids fault that they are place in that position. I feel that’s less of an issue for more affluent families where it’s more a matter of sacrificing lifestyles than anything approaching real poverty.
That said, the Osborne model is clearly too shot full with anomolies to remain as it is. Something that tapers in will be required and also takes account of family income. The feminist battle cry was always for separate taxation, but I’m not sure that should hold true for benefits. Taking the single highest income rather than that for the family surely makes not sense.
Poor Guardian journo of course…
Steve – taking a break from the serious business of being utterly baffled by politicians and their extraordinary ideas – I would have thought it much fairer to look at the *family* as a unit…whether married or not.
Unfortunately – as IDS pointed out… Labour broke the bank, we tax people as individuals, it would be too costly to actually work out family units given our IT incompetence etc… yada yada yada?
I don’t have children – so it doesn’t affect me – but I would have thought it unfair to let two people with 87K get benefits whereas a family where only one earns 45k does not get them?
But….. hey… I am but a blawger…..
Indeed – i totally agree. Of course family units in this modern age can be a tricky thing to define on social terms, let alone the IT issues. Inevitably there are anomolies, but this one is far too big to let go. Perhaps we ought to go back to Adam Smith on this. He had some strong principles on tax systems.
For a while I’ve favoured some form of system for at least partial transfer of tax allowances, although a full one would be very costly indeed. I think it would iron out some of the family income anomolies, but I fear it would be seen as very retrogade by many.
One of my pet hates is the NI system – from my perspective the employess parts is an income tax payable only by those in work. Given that it no longer forms any part of a true employment insurance system, I cannot think of a single valid reason why we have this separation (and I speak as somebody who intends within the next 18 months to join those non-NI paying members).
So if they want something to really upset a lot of people, reform the employee NI and Income tax system into a single unified scheme with the appropriate adjustments. The losers would be the more affluent non-employed people.
However, I have another issue in the opposite direction. I’m not sure how the government can justify taxing inflation, which is what they do on interest bearing accounts. Taxing returns after inflation adjustment would surely be fairer, even if at a higher rate. It’s never going to happen of course – it would be far too expensive. It also shouldn’t escape people’s attention that it was the erosion of the real value of government debt through inflation that was a theme of the high inflation through much of the 1970s and 1980s (and, for people of the right generation, the erosion of the real value of their mortgage debt).
Maybe I should have taken economics rather than physics.