Digital Music

I’m all for progress but I really am not too sure about robots conducting orchestra’s. I think it is just silly, although some human conductors are a bit mechanical!

By-election planning not too good.

The Crewe & Nantwich By-election takes place on May 22nd, however no-one thought to look at the memorials for that day. It is the saints day of St Rita of Cascia, she is the patron saint of lost causes and impossible situations. D’oh!

Are the bendy buses disappearing?

As I walk about 5 miles across central London most days from Liverpool Street to Green Park I have noticed that I am seeing less Bendy buses. I now see a lot more single decker non-bendy buses and a fair number of double-decker buses. Of course I do still see the odd Bendy bus around Trafalgar square but I’m sure not as many as I used to. Is Boris removing as many Bendy’s as he can now? It might just be my perception.

Did the Chancellor mislead the house?

Just looking at the statement that Alistair Darling gave to the house of Commons today in which he announced that the threshold for higher tax would be reduced and said “I am therefore reducing the threshold at which an individual starts to pay tax at the higher rate by £600.” However when one looks at the HMRC press release it states something different and says “To reduce the higher rate threshold as announced by the Chancellor, the basic rate limit will be reduced by £1,200 from £36,000 to £34,800.”  The press release then states that higher rate taxpayers will not lose out. Now my maths might be slightly dodgy here but the tax free threshold goes up by £600 so as the basic rate is 20% that is a saving of £120 in tax. However if the 40% threshold is lowered by £1200 pounds then that means that an extra £1200 is charged at 40% tax equating to £480 less the £120 benefit of the tax free threshold so higher rate taxpayers will be worse off to the tune of £360 pounds it seems, or about 99p a day worse off. Please someone correct me if I am wrong.

Somewhere along the line someone was being misleading. Also when did we become customers of HMRC? Can we withdraw our custom?

Update:- Just looked at the tax bands for 2007/08 and the 40% rate kicked in at 34,600, as a result of the budget that was indexed up to 36,000. From the press release today the level has been bought down again to 34,800 all but cancelling the indexation in the budget. This is major fiscal drag and will trap new people in higher rate tax.

Update 2:- Having looked again at a simple tax calculator it appears that the £1200 difference does mean that higher rate tax payers get no benefit from the increased personal allowance, however the point stands that Darling said that the Higher rate threshold was being reduced by £600 not £1200.

10p tax the Climbdown

So Alistair Darling has finally been forced into a humiliating backpedal over 10p tax. He has been forced into a wide-ranging compensation package that has literally blown a hole in the governments finances. In order to pay for this U-turn they are adding another £3bn pounds to borrowing for the current financial year. They are raising the personal allowance by £600 pounds for this year, although it is unclear what the base for indexation will be for next year so they could claw it all back in 2009/10 tax year. Simultaneously they have reduced the threshold for 40% tax by £600 pounds. So effectively the only people who will benefit are standard rate taxpayers. A few people will now be taken out of tax altogether but now an unknown extra group of people will find themselves in the higher rate of tax bracket. I doubt that they will be happy about this.

The whole farrago is instructive. Let us be clear raising the tax threshold is right in principle. However this is not a principled move by the government. The government have partly done the right thing but only under severe duress, for political reasons. If they could have got away without compensation they would have done. The biggest bugbear I have is how they have financed this, they have financed this by simply adding to the PSBR. We should be clear that government borrowing is simply deferred taxation or deferred spending cuts. At some point the money borrowed has to be paid back, so either spending gets reined in or taxes go up. There is no pain free way of repaying this money and £3bn is roughly an extra penny on basic rate income tax.

The problem the government will now find is that once the mood has turned even when the government gets things right Labour will not get the credit. The public will bank the good deed and carry on intending to vote the government out. This is because the public will be highly cynical of the motives, they will see all good deeds as electoral calculation and all bad deeds as malign. The government is now past the point where it can seek credit for its moves. I still expect the government to take a hammering in Crewe & Nantwich, and I expect that within a few days new disasters will overtake Labour. As John Major and a queue of Conservatives will testify, once the wind changes direction there is literally nothing you can do but brace yourself for the worst. Labour needs to start bracing.

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The government is falling apart and Cameron caused it.

The government is falling apart, day in day out new revelations appear. The slew of memoirs released at the weekend would have been deeply irritating for the PM and the inner sanctum. Then Frank Field fires an exocet at the government this morning in an interview. All this is against the backdrop of a collapse in economic confidence and the governments opinion ratings in freefall. David Cameron would be forgiven for thanking his lucky stars, that is if he wasn’t partially responsible.

Why do I say that Cameron is responsible? Well firstly the strategy that Cameron during the final years of Tony Blair was to deliberately hug the modernisers or Blairites extremely close. This was a deliberate attempt to split the Labour party, it was designed to force the incoming Brownites to tack away from the centre-ground. This was accompanied by Cameron simultaneously moving the Conservatives towards the looming gap in the market. Now that strategy has come to fruition as Brown moved slightly away from the Blairite inheritance and Cameron moved in to the centre. As the Conservatives rebounded in the Autumn and moved ahead in the polls it caused the split in Labour to widen as each side in the Labour party try to pull it in different directions.

Cameron now has the space to move to a new stage of his strategy, to map out the Conservative alternative and to exploit Labours continuing difficulties. I expect that Cameron will now project more gravitas and unveil more ideas as he uses the disintegration of Labour to stake out more of the Centre ground for the Conservatives and also seeks to put the next election totally beyond doubt. Make no mistake whilst some of the governments woes are self inflicted a lot of that is down to Cameron driving the wedge in whilst Blair was still in office and playing the Labour factions off against each other.

Milliband the prophet

This David Milliband clip cannot be reposted often enough. Prescient or what?

Latest Opinion Poll

I always like to leave it a while before I comment on Opinion polls, when they first appear there is either an unnatural excitement or a dismissive attitude depending on what the poll says. The latest opinion poll from YouGov appeared last night and the headline figures are absolutely sensational. The Conservatives have a rating of 49%, Labour 23% and the Lib Dems 17% a Conservative lead of 26%. If repeated at a General Election on a uniform swing Labour would be annihilated and the Conservatives would have a majority heading up towards 300. This poll will add to the sense of impending doom which is beginning to define this stage of the Labour government.

There is nothing of comfort for Labour in this poll, there is no Labour politician featured in the poll who would not do worse than Gordon. The poll rating for Labour is easily one of the most catastrophic in its history, and we need only compare it to the 25% or so that Michael Foot actually acheived in 1983. Now an opinion poll taken when we are almost certainly 2 years out from a general election is probably worthless as a predictor of the outcome however the trend is there for everyone to see. The Conservatives are in a formidable election winning position. This poll is about the limit of most Conservative’s wildest dreams and I doubt there will be a significantly better poll than this. I blogged earlier in the week about whether we are at the tipping point, we will know more after the Crewe & Nantwich by election where I’m hearing rumours that Labour are struggling and could get pushed into third, I think that by the time Parliament rises for the Summer recess expectations of a Conservative victory big or small will have been locked in. By then I suspect even Labour will be privately conceding that the next election is lost with the only questionmark being the scale of that defeat. This is the sort of poll that is pointing to a paradigm shift in public attitudes.

I’m an angry angry voter

The government is making me angry, correction, the Labour party is making me angry. They are clearly struggling at the moment, that is fine all parties hit difficulties it is how they handle those difficulties that is the measure of them. Wendy Alexander has had a torrid time since becoming Labour Leader in Scotland, however the breathtaking way in which she has tried to leverage her national party leaders difficulties to boost herself is astonishing. It would be bad enough if the potential collateral damage wasn’t the tearing up of the constitutional settlement that has sustained our nation for 300 years. To be reckless as to the break up of the UK would be unpardonable to deliberately risk it for short term personal political gain is a complete disgrace. Wendy Alexander shoud be ashamed of herself, she should resign at her earliest convenience.

If Ms Alexander fails to do the decent thing then Gordon Brown should dump on her from the greatest possible height. Gordon Brown has often talked about ‘Britishness’ as an antidote to the separatist agenda, he should put his political authority where his mouth is. He should launch a vigorous defence of the Union and hang Wendy well and truly out to dry. He of course won’t do anything of the sort, he will calculate that it will harm his chances at the next election. Yet again personal political advancement coming first. It is an utterly abysmal attitude to take. I have some advice for Gordon, you have no chance of winning the next election. Nothing you do will change that. Have a bit of courage and do the right thing here. Or do you just write books about courage?

Some people are commenting that Labour are treating the constitution as a personal plaything for Labour’s advantage. It is far worse, different factions within Labour are risking our nation for ascendancy in the opening shots of a fratricidal civil war. I apologise for the next sentence as it will contain expletives, I rarely swear in print but I am outraged. Labour are a complete and utter fucking disgrace and should be kicked out on their collective arses at the next election!