The News In Shorts

How the news would look if everyone stopped waffling and told the truth.

Friday 22 April 2016

Boris: Ignorant Or Just Plain Stupid?

Boris Johnson told off President Barack Obama for having the temerity to offer an opinion on Brexit. The United States would never share its sovereignty, Boris announced and, in any case, President Obama has only voiced his opinion because his Kenyan ancestry makes him naturally anti-British. Now these are both curious arguments coming from Boris. In the first instance the United States is made up of 50 sovereign states who share that sovereignty under a federal government. In other words those 50 sovereign states have already voluntarily given up part of their sovereignty to form a greater and stronger combination. The clue is in the title - the United States. Boris also has non-British ancestry, in his case Turkish. Now given that Turkey was at war with Britain during WWI does that mean that Boris secretly hates Britain and does that explain his wish for it to exit from the EU? It certainly makes you think. Which is more than you can say for Boris who has managed to be both factually wrong and racist at one and the same time. Barack Obama is no more Kenyan than Boris Johnson is Turkish. The difference between the two men, however, lies in the quantity of their intelligence. Barack Obama has a great deal of it, Boris has practically none. Comparing Boris to Obama is actually a fruitless exercise, but comparing Boris to Donald Trump is a different matter. Both men are ignorant, both are plainly stupid and both would make spectacularly incompetent leaders of any country, let alone the USA and the UK.

Tuesday 12 April 2016

Achievers Or Just Numbskulls?

There appear to be some very contradictory views coming from the Tory party at the moment. MP Alan Duncan believes that criticising David Cameron could lead to parliament being filled with "low achievers". who "hate people who look after their own family and who know absolutely nothing about the outside world". This is pretty punchy stuff especially when you consider that the Tory party seems to hate everyone who isn't a Tory, look after their own families at the expense of everyone else's and have absolutely no idea about the lives of ordinary people outside the Westminster bubble. At the same time his comments seem to confuse achievement with making money. Albert Einstein, Mahatma Gandhi, Leonardo Da Vinci and Archimedes certainly achieved a great deal but, as far as I know, none of them were millionaires. What Mr.Duncan doesn't seem to understand is that greed does not equal achievement while obsessively piling up huge amounts of money in offshore accounts is not an achievement but a mental health issue. Nor does inheriting large amounts of money from dead relatives make you an "achiever". Still, to redress the balance William Hague then said something equally as shallow, misleading and downright stupid. Looking too closely at a politician's financial dealings, according to Mr.Hague, might frighten off otherwise talented people. It might, for instance, frighten off those whose personal finances are an absolute shambles and deny us all the valuable experience they might bring to high office. "Personal circumstances are not necessarily a good guide to how good they will be as a prime minister, a chancellor or anything else," he said. So a really good politician, according to Mr.Hague, might be stupid, he might be feckless and he might even be dishonest. This is in sharp contrast to the way in which the Tories regard everyone else however. If you are poor, disadvantaged, disabled and badly educated, then you cannot by definition be deserving. But, if you are rich, privileged, expensively educated and stupid, then you deserve to wield power and should be given every opportunity to prove how worthy you are. Accustomed as we are to the Tories turning the world on its head these mental gymnastics are truly awesome. It is certainly true that being greedy, over-privileged and utterly stupid has never held back either Mr.Duncan or Mr.Hague. What holds the rest of us back, however, is a system that puts too much emphasis on wealth and not enough on real ability.

Saturday 9 April 2016

Cameron: "I could have handled the tax row better"

"I could have handled the tax row better," David Cameron told a Tory party forum today. Actually no Prime Minister you could have told the truth instead. Even now Cameron is being less than candid as it is revealed that his father was responsible for not one, not two, but at least three tax dodging wheezes that kept him and his family out of any tax bracket for the last 30 years. While the PM, his wife and his children might not benefit from any such scheme "in the future" it remains pretty well certain that he and they profited mightily from them in the past. What is immoral for the goose is immoral for the gander as Jimmy Carr might well observe. It remains difficult, however, to shame a Tory Prime Minister since Tories have no sense of shame and measure everything by what they can get away with. What this does reveal is how rotten the whole financial structure of Britain has become. We should not be surprised that sleaze still exudes from every financial orifice considering that the whole stinking pile was first heaped up by the Thatcher government, was patiently tilled by the Blairite Labour party and has continued to fester under Cameron. You would need a very bad sense of smell today not to notice it.

Samantha Cameron's Fingers In The Till As Well.

In this recent picture of the Camerons two things are obvious. First David Cameron seems blissfully unaware that he is being targeted by an assassin with a laser scope. Second, his wife looks very stylish in her Indian sari. So she should considering that she employs one of her mates as her style guru at a cost to the taxpayer of £53,000 per year. Of course such "advisers" and "consultants" are common in the corridors of power, but we could be forgiven for pointing out the obvious problem with Sam's fashion arrangements. She is not in government. She is not even an MP. She is merely the PM's wife so why is tax payers money being squandered on her appearance? And why is the PM married to a woman who is so dim that she can't dress herself without forking out £53,000 of our money? In fact the answer is actually quite obvious. This is not just any government, this is a Tory government. Stealing tax payers money for such things as cleaning moats, pruning orchards and heating the stables for their horses is second nature to such people. Privilege, it should be pointed out, is an expensive hobby and a sense of entitlement is inevitable under such circumstances. How else can any self-respecting Tory maintain the lifestyle he or she is accustomed to without resorting to a bit of petty larceny? In fact the success of the entire Cameron clan has been almost entirely based on it, from stealing money from the poor and disadvantaged to stashing the proceeds in tax havens, the Camerons know how to look after other people's money. It's time for this farce to end and well past the time that Britain turfs these scroungers out of office.

Thursday 7 April 2016

How Much Can Cameron Get Away With?

So it comes down to this - what can Cameron admit and still get away with it? So far he has admitted that he sold his shares in his father's offshore investment fund for a mere £30,000. Loose change for Cameron and, he hopes, not too big an amount for the plebs to swallow. Of course this ignores his wife's nice little earner for being a "consultant" for Smythson's - a company that is based, for tax purposes, in a tax haven. This might explain why the Cameron's spend so much time out of the country as she commutes to her job every Monday morning. It ignores the fact that Cameron's father paid no tax in the UK for 30 years as his son was being educated at Eton and Oxford University. It also fails to address the question of George Osborne's financial affairs which remain completely opaque while he refuses to speak on the matter. Worse yet, there is no explanation as to why both Cameron and Osborne have consistently opposed any attempt by the EU to shed light on tax avoidance by the rich and greedy. Cameron once described Jimmy Carr's financial dealings as "immoral". Was Cameron's father immoral then? Apparently not for, according to Cameron, he remains "proud of my dad and what he did and the business he established and all the rest of it." Double standards? Why not, after all there is one law for them and another for the rest of us. This, of all the begrudging statements given by Cameron over the last few days, comes as close as we are likely to get to his mindset. Good at pointing the finger at others he doesn't like it much when others point at him and his immoral family.

Wednesday 6 April 2016

Cameron, Osborne And The Panama Papers.

The Panama Papers have been described as the biggest leak in history and it shows us all exactly what our leaders think of us. We are here to pay taxes while they are here to avoid them. Asked about their connection to tax-dodging and money laundering the answers that both David Cameron and George Osborne gave are more illuminating for what they didn't say rather than from what they did say. After three previous attempts to divert public outrage Cameron finally said that he and his family would not benefit from such underhand tactics "in the future." Which, of course, rather begs the question about what he and his family were doing up until today. Osborne's answer was even more illuminating. He said nothing and immediately terminated an interview during which the question was asked. This seems to suggest that Osborne has no defence of any kind to offer. Hardly surprising since his family business, despite healthy profits, has not paid tax in the UK for a decade. While they have been forcing austerity down our reluctant throats Cameron and Osborne have been profiting at our expense. Austerity, so crucial to Britain's economic survival, does not apply to them or their rich mates. They are exempt, they have a get out of jail free card. There is one law for us and another for them. Now do you get it?

Top Tory Defends Criminal Organizations.

Dominic Grieve, the former attorney general, has admitted that the UK government could stop British overseas territories acting as tax havens if they wanted to. However, he added that it would be wrong to do so because it would mean job loses in those tax havens! "Ordinary workers losing their perfectly legitimate jobs in the steel industry is fine," a leading Tory spokesman told our reporter, "but bankers in the British Virgin Islands is a completely different thing. What would happen if Britain put a stop to all criminal activity in its overseas dependencies? It would be chaos. Billionaires around the world, poor souls, would be reduced to tears as they could no longer avoid tax, while criminal organizations would have to find some other way to launder their ill-gotten gains. Wealthy people don't pay tax, what about that does no one understand? They will always find loopholes in the tax system, so its only fair, right and proper that we should provide those loopholes for them legally. If not they would be forced to break the law making them into real criminals and we can't have that can we?"

Monday 4 April 2016

The Panama Papers.

So what do the Panama Papers actually tell us? That the wealthy, the greedy and the selfish have been lying to us and have expertly avoided their responsibility to the societies that have supported them? We already knew that, even if we've allowed ourselves to be blind-sided by these reptiles. We have stood by as they have pedaled their lies about austerity like the fools they always took us to be and allowed ourselves to be diverted into hating the under-privileged while they returned the world back to the cesspit it was before 2008. These people, it must be said, are experts at the long-con, but we saw that revealed in 2008 and yet we still allowed them to get away with it and, to our shame, allowed them to set the whole thing in motion once again. We were taught our lesson in 2008 and we then promptly forgot it. In the UK 37% of the population were so stupid that voted into power the most rapacious, vile and utterly ruthless bunch of conmen they could find. The Tory party has condemned hundreds of thousands of our fellow citizens to lives without hope and have scapegoated the most vulnerable in our society simply to cover their own tracks. They have stolen money from the poorest in our country in order to reward themselves and their rich mates with nice juicy tax cuts. They have told the disabled that they deserve to lose £30 a week even as their rich mates greased their palms. Now their two-faced treachery has been laid bare for all to see. And what was the response of our Prime Minister? Contrition? Guilt? Embarrassment? No, he simply told us that his family's part in this grubby affair was "private business". Private business? Not any more it isn't. As the great Roman poet Horace once told us; "A word once let out of the cage cannot be whistled back again." Well, maybe not twice.

Sunday 3 April 2016

Privatisation: The Story So Far.

So how is privatization working out? British rail was privatized by the Tories between 1994 and 1997. In the years since then those of us who have to use rail have spent our time waiting for late, dirty and overcrowded trains and watched glumly as the price of our tickets has spiraled ever upwards. Much of that money is going to nationalized transport industries owned by foreign governments who are making a fortune for their taxpayers. It is the same story for the utilities, gas, electricity and water. Much of this is now supposed to be in private hands. In fact much of our "privatized" utilities industry is owned by foreign governments. One of the biggest investors in British privatized industries are the Chinese, a country run by a communist oligarchy who have been doing their level best to destroy any and all competitors in the steel industry by dumping their steel products on the world market at lower than cost prices. Why is this? In many foreign countries the concept of "the commanding heights of industry" - those assets vital to a country's continued existence - is still recognized. There are some things, transport, gas, electricity, nuclear power and the production of steel, that are just too important to national security to be put at risk. The Tories don't see things in quite the same way. The only thing that they believe should never be put at risk is their wealth. They do not care if ordinary people are put out of work, don't care if ordinary people are being held to ransom with ever increasing cost of living rises, don't care if foreign countries control our industrial infrastructure and don't care if these same foreign countries can blackmail us by turning off the supply of things we need to survive. None of this matters as long as they can continue to stuff their offshore bank accounts with tax free profits. Betraying your own country in this way once had a name - treason. The word treason has now been replaced with another, less harmful sounding word - privatization. But it remains treason nonetheless. Our entire steel industry is now under threat and our Tory government is "doing everything it can to save it." Everything, that is, except re-nationalizing the industry. Nationalization in times of peril to a vital industry is only contemplated by the Tories when the vital industry is banking. When their wealth is at stake anything goes. When ordinary people's jobs and our national security is at risk re-nationalization is simply not on the table.

Friday 1 April 2016

Tories Hit The Real Hard Workers Again.

Following David Cameron's Easter message of "all standing together" his best mate, George Osborne, has once again put his hand into the pockets of hard working people and grabbed enough cash to give a nice bonus to their rich mates. A hike in national insurance which comes into force today will snatch up to £40 a month from ordinary working people so that Tory fat cats can buy new yachts, cars and holidays in Lanzerote. Most of the burden will fall on public sector workers (not MP's of course) who paid a lower rate of national insurance to encourage them to invest in public sector pensions. This advantage has now been removed, negating much of the reason for taking out the public sector pension in the first place. In other words the whole thing has been a turned into a giant scam with the only real beneficiaries being the already wealthy scroungers who infest this country. This is what David Cameron means by "standing together" - we stand while the fat cats loll about and help themselves to our money. However, no one can say that Osborne's economic policy is not working. Billions of pounds have been transferred from the poor to the wealthy over the last six years while the national debt has ballooned to £1.3 trillion. None of this matters of course since the poor are undeserving and the rich fat cats who bankroll the Tory party will never have to pay off the national debt - paying taxes is only for the little people after all. Meanwhile the Tories are busy wringing their hands over the British steel industry even as they block attempts by the EU to stop the Chinese dumping cheap steel on us all. The reason for doing this? Because national security comes a distant second to the financial well-being of the Tory's best mates, the bone-idle rich, who bankroll the criminal and treasonous enterprise that they like to describe as a "government".