There is a trend in the media, in politics, even in the population as a
whole, to down-talk Britain's position in the world. With the latest round of
the EU debacle coming to the fore, with Israel once again bringing the middle
east to the brink of general war, with the US making noises about withdrawning
from the European theatre to focus on the East, there has been plenty of
opportunity for the nay-sayers to remind everyone, at volume, that Britain is
no longer a world player.
They're wrong.
-
Tempted as I am to stop there, I'm never-the-less going to go on to give a
defense of Britain. We should be proud to be British, and we should be proud of
British power in the world. While we may not be a match for the United States
or China anymore we are still a titan amongst the nation's of the world. At our
command is the power to end in the world in nuclear fire, to end world hunger
and poverty, to reach the distant stars. That we make poor use of that power is
an undeniable fact, but its time we took a stand against the rot that is making
people doubt that we ever had it.
As a bit of context there are 206 sovereign states in the world.
So compared to these 205 competitors, where does Britain stand?
Economics
Britain is/has;
The seventh largest economy in the world by nominal GDP.
The eight-largest by purchasing power parity (i.e. accounting for costs)
A member of the G7, G8 and G20 (all three of the 'big economy' clubs).
London is the (joint) centre of the global finance industry, and the city
with the largest GDP in Europe.
Britain contributes the third highest number of scientific papers of any
country in the world.
Four of the world's top 10 universities.
Politics
Britain is;
One of only five permanent members of the UN Security Council, and has been
since it's inception in 1946.
Arguably 'first amongst equals' of the British Commonwealth, which includes
54 countries.
A member of the Council of Europe and the Council of the European Union (in
which we have the joint largest number of votes).
Has a seat on the WTO (left vacant now due to the EU minister taking all
decisions for Europe)
Military
Britain is/has
The fourth largest defense budget in the world
Second biggest contributor to NATO (in £s)
One of only nine nuclear armed states
A slightly suspect rating of the "5th" highest firepower in the
world from the firmly tongue-in-cheek Global Firepower . com
I could probably drag this list on ad infinitum, but I think the point has
been made. On the whole Britain is not a two bit player with an over-inflated
ego, we are consistently in the top 5% of nation's in the world using just
about any measure you want.
Is also bears point out that the two super-powers of today are
conglomerates. Both the US and China's gigantic economics and militaries are
based of them being a collection of what, in Europe, would be separate
nations. The relationship between the US and Europe comes far more into
focus if you consider Europe as a whole, or individual states against
individual European countries.
(Just to put that in perspective the European economy is 13% larger then the
US economy, despite the current crippling economic problems).
There may come a time when Britain's role in the world has faded, there may
be a time when the Old World finally is forgotten by the New and the Developing
one. But it's not here yet. and its time people start remembering that.
/Z
Tuesday 4 December 2012
Saturday 1 December 2012
The Truth Will Make Thee Fret
So the Leveson enquiry has finally come to an end; after millions of
pounds, thousands of hours, and probably a small forest's worth of reports,
drafts, re-writes and commentaries, the Right Honourable Lord Justice Leveson
has delivered a two thousand page report in four volumes, which, if a glance of
the executive summary is to be believed, ultimately boils down to "the
press shouldn't do bad things."
..
I feel I should start this by actually offering a (rare) defence of the Leveson Inquiry. It was probably an impossible task to deliver a report that would achieve anything noteworthy. The problems with British press practices are so systemic, so widespread, so completely beyond the reasonable mandate of a government that has to pretend to be democratic, that there was unlikely anything Leveson could do except make the recommendations he did, and then smudge the whole thing over with fifteen hundred pages of waffle and committee minutiae.
The tradition of the Free Press is long and (in parts) even heroic. Since 1695 the British press has been free to print more or less what it wanted without government interference. The idea was at heart a simple one - if the great and mighty did stupid things that risked the welfare of the nation, the Press would find out, print stories about it, and the masses would rise up in rebellion against the incompetent overlords threatening the country.
Unfortunately the people of today don't really want information about the political and economic events of the present time, they want to know about celebrity gossip, TV shows, and who various pop stars are doing drugs with. The Leveson Inquiry was set up because a murdered teenager's phone was hacked. At root there was only one reason that happened - it sold papers. The blame for that lies solely at the feet of every single person who ever bought a copy of a newspaper that touts sensationalist or 'shock' news. Just as every country gets the government it deserves, so to does every country get the press it deserves. Ours hacks phones and prints topless pictures of our future queen. The logical inference about our population is not difficult.
Even if we do accept that the blame for this issue lies with the public, not with the Press, what about the recommendations themselves?
Politicians, the press themselves, various lobbying groups, have more or less split into two camps. One group is standing by the idea of a Free Press. They want to see a new, independent, regulatory body to oversee the industry, possibly backed up by statute in a similar way to the FSA. The main argument is that while the Press has done some bad things, other investigations, like those in to MPs expenses and the Hillsborough disaster, have brought to light cover ups and abuses which would otherwise have remained hidden.
The opposing group claim that anything short of full scale legal regulation is bowing to the pressure of the press barons, and a heartless abandonment of the victims of phone hacking or other press intrusion.
Those backing the second option, of full on state legislation, seem to be living in fairy-cuckoo land (or probably more precisely are riding the wave of interest in this subject for personal and politic gain). Here are a few points to consider;
1.) Legislation is supposedly meant to transfer some of the decision making power in the media from the journalists to politicians - however, a recent poll has shown that politicians are jointly the most dis-trusted group of people in the country - the other? Journalists. Transferring power to government only makes sense if you think the government is trustworthy. People don't.
2.) Many of the actions that have been deplored in recent months (phone hacking, intercepting emails etc.) are already illegal. Punishing those responsible is now a matter for the court system. If victims, or lobby groups feel let down they should be chasing the legal system not the press.
3.) What does state regulation even mean? Is there some suggestion that a newspaper would have to run its stories through some kind of government watchdog before publication? Is that not the definition of censorship? How can this be expected to achieve anything except a media completely controlled by the government?
4.) If a more 'softly softly' approach is taken, with regulation defining what can, or can't, be published, how will this be administered? Again who is to determine what a valid news story is and what is just gossip? If people want to buy gossip what right has an elected government got to ban that?
5.) The Leveson Inquiry more or less blanks the issue of the internet. UK legislation would only have the force to cover articles published in the UK. With an increasing share of news reporting taking place online what good would regulation do anyway?
6.) The expansion of regulation has seen Health and Safety become a by-word for bureaucratic meddling, has seen hundreds of thousands of speed cameras sprout across the countryside, without an obvious benefit, has led to drug safety administration that takes over a decade to sanction new medicines. Why, exactly, do people thing more regulation is going to solve things in the media?
..
Anyone still unconvinced by the whole issue, I suggest they read to the Discworld novel "The Truth." After setting up the city's first newspaper, aspiring editor William de Worde finds himself being out-sold by a rival publication that leads with the headline "Man stolen by Dog."
Also, next time you meet someone calling for the Leveson recommendations to be implemented in full, ask them what recommendation 51 (b) is.
On the off chance they know the answer (That sections 44 to 46 of the Data Protection Act 1998, with special application to journalism is repealed), ask them what section 44 of the Data Protection Act actually means.
/Z
..
I feel I should start this by actually offering a (rare) defence of the Leveson Inquiry. It was probably an impossible task to deliver a report that would achieve anything noteworthy. The problems with British press practices are so systemic, so widespread, so completely beyond the reasonable mandate of a government that has to pretend to be democratic, that there was unlikely anything Leveson could do except make the recommendations he did, and then smudge the whole thing over with fifteen hundred pages of waffle and committee minutiae.
The tradition of the Free Press is long and (in parts) even heroic. Since 1695 the British press has been free to print more or less what it wanted without government interference. The idea was at heart a simple one - if the great and mighty did stupid things that risked the welfare of the nation, the Press would find out, print stories about it, and the masses would rise up in rebellion against the incompetent overlords threatening the country.
Unfortunately the people of today don't really want information about the political and economic events of the present time, they want to know about celebrity gossip, TV shows, and who various pop stars are doing drugs with. The Leveson Inquiry was set up because a murdered teenager's phone was hacked. At root there was only one reason that happened - it sold papers. The blame for that lies solely at the feet of every single person who ever bought a copy of a newspaper that touts sensationalist or 'shock' news. Just as every country gets the government it deserves, so to does every country get the press it deserves. Ours hacks phones and prints topless pictures of our future queen. The logical inference about our population is not difficult.
Even if we do accept that the blame for this issue lies with the public, not with the Press, what about the recommendations themselves?
Politicians, the press themselves, various lobbying groups, have more or less split into two camps. One group is standing by the idea of a Free Press. They want to see a new, independent, regulatory body to oversee the industry, possibly backed up by statute in a similar way to the FSA. The main argument is that while the Press has done some bad things, other investigations, like those in to MPs expenses and the Hillsborough disaster, have brought to light cover ups and abuses which would otherwise have remained hidden.
The opposing group claim that anything short of full scale legal regulation is bowing to the pressure of the press barons, and a heartless abandonment of the victims of phone hacking or other press intrusion.
Those backing the second option, of full on state legislation, seem to be living in fairy-cuckoo land (or probably more precisely are riding the wave of interest in this subject for personal and politic gain). Here are a few points to consider;
1.) Legislation is supposedly meant to transfer some of the decision making power in the media from the journalists to politicians - however, a recent poll has shown that politicians are jointly the most dis-trusted group of people in the country - the other? Journalists. Transferring power to government only makes sense if you think the government is trustworthy. People don't.
2.) Many of the actions that have been deplored in recent months (phone hacking, intercepting emails etc.) are already illegal. Punishing those responsible is now a matter for the court system. If victims, or lobby groups feel let down they should be chasing the legal system not the press.
3.) What does state regulation even mean? Is there some suggestion that a newspaper would have to run its stories through some kind of government watchdog before publication? Is that not the definition of censorship? How can this be expected to achieve anything except a media completely controlled by the government?
4.) If a more 'softly softly' approach is taken, with regulation defining what can, or can't, be published, how will this be administered? Again who is to determine what a valid news story is and what is just gossip? If people want to buy gossip what right has an elected government got to ban that?
5.) The Leveson Inquiry more or less blanks the issue of the internet. UK legislation would only have the force to cover articles published in the UK. With an increasing share of news reporting taking place online what good would regulation do anyway?
6.) The expansion of regulation has seen Health and Safety become a by-word for bureaucratic meddling, has seen hundreds of thousands of speed cameras sprout across the countryside, without an obvious benefit, has led to drug safety administration that takes over a decade to sanction new medicines. Why, exactly, do people thing more regulation is going to solve things in the media?
..
Anyone still unconvinced by the whole issue, I suggest they read to the Discworld novel "The Truth." After setting up the city's first newspaper, aspiring editor William de Worde finds himself being out-sold by a rival publication that leads with the headline "Man stolen by Dog."
Also, next time you meet someone calling for the Leveson recommendations to be implemented in full, ask them what recommendation 51 (b) is.
On the off chance they know the answer (That sections 44 to 46 of the Data Protection Act 1998, with special application to journalism is repealed), ask them what section 44 of the Data Protection Act actually means.
/Z
Sunday 25 November 2012
Not Everyone's A Winner
Poker is a great game. At its finest poker combines skill, aggression, determination, psychology, maths, luck, strategy and theatrics, at its worst its a boring, tedious, uphill slog against an endless stream of morons with unbeatable hands, all the while watching your stack dwindling. But the one thing that all poker games, and poker players, have in common is that not everyone wins. Poker is openly, notoriously, brillantly unfair. An old adage runs that over the long run only about 20% of players ever break even, while an even smaller fraction actually make significant winnings. The other 80% lose (all) their money to fund the winner's prizes, and the huge infrastructure costs that go into running and maintaining the poker world.
It's time something gets said that I, and I think many people, have known for a long time, but which society doesn't like being shouted too loudly... Life is like poker. Not everyone wins.
**
It's not particularly difficult to look at the social strata and decide who are the clear winners, and who are the clear losers. At the top end are the attractive, intelligent, confident, 'old money' aristocrats who have the personal ability and the funding to do just about whatever they want. At the bottom are the personally brillant but struggling low-middle classers who scrimped and saved, worked 80 hour weeks, never took a hand out, and then got crushed into welfare dependancy by whatever crisis has recently reared up (Financial catastrophes, wars, plagues and revolutions all have the habit of destroying people's livelihoods).
Where the world of today has changed is a shift in personal, and national, consciousness. We (romanticised, national "we") used to be a people who dreamed of shifting up the social scale. Whether its Great Expectations, the folk songs about common soldiers becoming generals, or a thousand tales of 'self made men' the idea was consistent - you started off lower down the scale and dragged, kicked and fought your way up into the 'winners' bracker. Just like poker, you might be languishing down 2,432nd place now, but ability, courage and a little luck later, might just see you jump up into the 'them that get's paid' bracket.
But we don't want to do this anymore. As I've discussed elsewhere 'progressive' taxes, welfare dependancy, the 'prizes for all' education system, and a raft of anti-success legislation and social commentary is consipiring to bring about the end of 'winners' and 'losers'. The message now one of the grand tennants of 'happy liberalism: "Everyone is equal." It doesn't matter whether you work hard at school or just bully the kids who do, it doesn't matter if you find a job or live on welfare, it doesn't matter whether you plan you finances or just have kids and then look for a handout. It doesn't matter whether you obey the law or break it. Everyone is equal, and therefore everyone must end up with the same outcome, regardless of the choices they make.
As I learned from my Economic History lecture you should always include some statistics. So here is my statistical analysis of this issue, as usual crouched in terms of national spending. This time round I'm looking at whether people are net contributors to the state or not. What this means is do people put more in in tax, then they get back in benefits (both directly like child tax credits, and indirectly like education and the NHS).
So here are the numbers;
(A "quintile" is a 20% segement of the population).
You can draw all kinds of conclusions from these numbers (and you can poke all kinds of wholes in them with context and comparisons - though if your that bothered I suggest reading the paper this was drawn from, published by the Centre for Policy Studies).
A few of the things that jumped out at me however,
1.) Without tax driven re-distribution the gap between the top and lowest earners is approximately 16x. (I.e. a top earner earns 16 times more then a low earner). After redistribution the difference is only 4x.
Conclusion: Whether you think this is good or bad depends on various things. Egalitarians would say its a good thing, but more needs to be done. Socialists would probably also say it was positive, but again more needed to be done. I would suggest looking at this from a different viewpoint. The national minium wage for 21 year old is £6.19 an hour, thus to earn £5,089 you would have to work 15 hours a week. Allowing a bit for National Insurance and what-not, this is the equivalent of a service industry part time job. Whether its stacking shelves, pulling pints, or mopping floors, you should be able to clear £5,000 a year without qualifications, experience, ability or effort. At the reverse end of the scale to earn £80,000 (a brief Google search suggests) requires being a senior manager or 'professional' (lawyer, accountants, doctor and so on). All of these roles require extensive academic backgrounds, long hours, some basic underlying ability, and yet when the chips fall, your only four times better off then the guy stacking shelves in Tesco.
2.) Only 40% of people actually pay into the system
Conclusions: This is something most people don't actually realise. Most people are not net contributors to the system. There is some wiggle room here (for example on an income basis I'm somewhere in the middle of patch, but since I don't have kids, don't use the NHS, didn't get support in paying for my studies, don't claim any allowances or benefits, I get back a lot less then the 'average' household. Likewise I'm sure there are households on £50,000 a year who are still net beneficaries because they have four children in state funded education, someone in long term NHS-funded care, and so on). A cynical person might suggest that since a political majority of 60% would give a political party an overwhelming advantage it is in the interests of the ruling class to ensure that 60% of people benefit from the system, thereby supporting it, I'm not discussing this here but its an interesting point.
Again however the question becomes, why are the minority supporting the majority? The idea behind insurance, or collectives, or virtually any other group activity, is that risk or hardship can be spread across the group and thereby reduce it to the level where each member only carries a tiny part of the burden. In our system though the whole burden falls on the shoulders of only 2 in 5 people, the others are, literally, getting free money every year for doing nothing.
3.) The top 20% earn almost exactly 50% of the income (before re-distribution), but pay almost 80% of the effective taxation.
Conclusion: There is an argument that comes up on a fairly regular basis to do with who pays how much tax. The argument runs that the top 10% pay just over 50% of all tax, and therefore the system is unfair. A reasonable rebuttal to this is that if the top 10% also earn more then 50% of all the income then its still a fair system.
The above figures however let us re-jig the numbers to look at 'net' taxation rather then gross taxation. What we find now is that it is only the top percentiles that actually pay tax at all. 100% of effective tax is paid by people in the top 40%, and 80% of all effective tax is paid by the top 20%.
4.) For 40% of the population state support makes up half, or more, of their total household income.
Conclusion: The 'client' state is here. For over 20 million people in the UK, hand outs from the government have a bigger effect on their standard of living over than their actually jobs. If this isn't the end of 'work to succeed' than I struggle to think what would be.
..
Poker games without real risk don't work. People do stupid things, make 'wrong' decisions, and generally mess the game up for everyone else, but who loses? It's not the people who were going to lose to the good players (after all their money was gone the minute they sat down in a game they couldn't win), its the good players themselves. Much of nuiance in poker is destroyed when your playing against someone who just doesn't care. All the long hours spent studying theory, grinding out thousands of hands, considering betting patterns, its all pointless. As a friend of mine once said "If they don't know what they're doing, how are we meant to?" Every government handout, in any shape or form, does the same to life. Life without risk doesn't hurt the people who would have got themselves crushed anyway, it hurts the strong people who make good decisions, only to have then be swamped in a morass of poor-choice junkies we're expected to support.
/Z
It's time something gets said that I, and I think many people, have known for a long time, but which society doesn't like being shouted too loudly... Life is like poker. Not everyone wins.
**
It's not particularly difficult to look at the social strata and decide who are the clear winners, and who are the clear losers. At the top end are the attractive, intelligent, confident, 'old money' aristocrats who have the personal ability and the funding to do just about whatever they want. At the bottom are the personally brillant but struggling low-middle classers who scrimped and saved, worked 80 hour weeks, never took a hand out, and then got crushed into welfare dependancy by whatever crisis has recently reared up (Financial catastrophes, wars, plagues and revolutions all have the habit of destroying people's livelihoods).
Where the world of today has changed is a shift in personal, and national, consciousness. We (romanticised, national "we") used to be a people who dreamed of shifting up the social scale. Whether its Great Expectations, the folk songs about common soldiers becoming generals, or a thousand tales of 'self made men' the idea was consistent - you started off lower down the scale and dragged, kicked and fought your way up into the 'winners' bracker. Just like poker, you might be languishing down 2,432nd place now, but ability, courage and a little luck later, might just see you jump up into the 'them that get's paid' bracket.
But we don't want to do this anymore. As I've discussed elsewhere 'progressive' taxes, welfare dependancy, the 'prizes for all' education system, and a raft of anti-success legislation and social commentary is consipiring to bring about the end of 'winners' and 'losers'. The message now one of the grand tennants of 'happy liberalism: "Everyone is equal." It doesn't matter whether you work hard at school or just bully the kids who do, it doesn't matter if you find a job or live on welfare, it doesn't matter whether you plan you finances or just have kids and then look for a handout. It doesn't matter whether you obey the law or break it. Everyone is equal, and therefore everyone must end up with the same outcome, regardless of the choices they make.
As I learned from my Economic History lecture you should always include some statistics. So here is my statistical analysis of this issue, as usual crouched in terms of national spending. This time round I'm looking at whether people are net contributors to the state or not. What this means is do people put more in in tax, then they get back in benefits (both directly like child tax credits, and indirectly like education and the NHS).
So here are the numbers;
(A "quintile" is a 20% segement of the population).
You can draw all kinds of conclusions from these numbers (and you can poke all kinds of wholes in them with context and comparisons - though if your that bothered I suggest reading the paper this was drawn from, published by the Centre for Policy Studies).
A few of the things that jumped out at me however,
1.) Without tax driven re-distribution the gap between the top and lowest earners is approximately 16x. (I.e. a top earner earns 16 times more then a low earner). After redistribution the difference is only 4x.
Conclusion: Whether you think this is good or bad depends on various things. Egalitarians would say its a good thing, but more needs to be done. Socialists would probably also say it was positive, but again more needed to be done. I would suggest looking at this from a different viewpoint. The national minium wage for 21 year old is £6.19 an hour, thus to earn £5,089 you would have to work 15 hours a week. Allowing a bit for National Insurance and what-not, this is the equivalent of a service industry part time job. Whether its stacking shelves, pulling pints, or mopping floors, you should be able to clear £5,000 a year without qualifications, experience, ability or effort. At the reverse end of the scale to earn £80,000 (a brief Google search suggests) requires being a senior manager or 'professional' (lawyer, accountants, doctor and so on). All of these roles require extensive academic backgrounds, long hours, some basic underlying ability, and yet when the chips fall, your only four times better off then the guy stacking shelves in Tesco.
2.) Only 40% of people actually pay into the system
Conclusions: This is something most people don't actually realise. Most people are not net contributors to the system. There is some wiggle room here (for example on an income basis I'm somewhere in the middle of patch, but since I don't have kids, don't use the NHS, didn't get support in paying for my studies, don't claim any allowances or benefits, I get back a lot less then the 'average' household. Likewise I'm sure there are households on £50,000 a year who are still net beneficaries because they have four children in state funded education, someone in long term NHS-funded care, and so on). A cynical person might suggest that since a political majority of 60% would give a political party an overwhelming advantage it is in the interests of the ruling class to ensure that 60% of people benefit from the system, thereby supporting it, I'm not discussing this here but its an interesting point.
Again however the question becomes, why are the minority supporting the majority? The idea behind insurance, or collectives, or virtually any other group activity, is that risk or hardship can be spread across the group and thereby reduce it to the level where each member only carries a tiny part of the burden. In our system though the whole burden falls on the shoulders of only 2 in 5 people, the others are, literally, getting free money every year for doing nothing.
3.) The top 20% earn almost exactly 50% of the income (before re-distribution), but pay almost 80% of the effective taxation.
Conclusion: There is an argument that comes up on a fairly regular basis to do with who pays how much tax. The argument runs that the top 10% pay just over 50% of all tax, and therefore the system is unfair. A reasonable rebuttal to this is that if the top 10% also earn more then 50% of all the income then its still a fair system.
The above figures however let us re-jig the numbers to look at 'net' taxation rather then gross taxation. What we find now is that it is only the top percentiles that actually pay tax at all. 100% of effective tax is paid by people in the top 40%, and 80% of all effective tax is paid by the top 20%.
4.) For 40% of the population state support makes up half, or more, of their total household income.
Conclusion: The 'client' state is here. For over 20 million people in the UK, hand outs from the government have a bigger effect on their standard of living over than their actually jobs. If this isn't the end of 'work to succeed' than I struggle to think what would be.
..
Poker games without real risk don't work. People do stupid things, make 'wrong' decisions, and generally mess the game up for everyone else, but who loses? It's not the people who were going to lose to the good players (after all their money was gone the minute they sat down in a game they couldn't win), its the good players themselves. Much of nuiance in poker is destroyed when your playing against someone who just doesn't care. All the long hours spent studying theory, grinding out thousands of hands, considering betting patterns, its all pointless. As a friend of mine once said "If they don't know what they're doing, how are we meant to?" Every government handout, in any shape or form, does the same to life. Life without risk doesn't hurt the people who would have got themselves crushed anyway, it hurts the strong people who make good decisions, only to have then be swamped in a morass of poor-choice junkies we're expected to support.
/Z
Tuesday 30 October 2012
The NIMBY Tax
Nimbyism (Not In My Back Yard) is a pretty well documented phenomena.
While people may be broadly in favour of wind farms, a third runway at
Heathrow, badger culling, or nuclear power, general support turns quickly to
vehement rejection when people find out the new Sellafield is going to get
built at the end of their road. A couple of recent newspaper articles
seems to indicate Nimbyism has now found its way into the tax/spending
argument.
..
In a BBC documentary produced towards the end of last year a selection of people around the cities of Britain were interviewed on their opinions of their own social situations and on who should pay more tax. The answer was almost universal; everyone thought they were struggling and paid too much, and they all thought the people in the next bracket up should do more. This view was repeated (albeit with increasing eloquence) from the £8,000 / year part time supermarket lackey to the £80,000 a year professional financial services managers. The only people to offer an alternative view were the super wealthy (i.e. multi-million annual income) for whom taxation was, by their own admission, "entirely voluntary." Interestingly the super-wealthy seem split between those who really do pay their full tax bill out of a sense of social responsibility, and those who don't pay anything and avoid talking about the issue.
Although at the time this didn't elicit much from me aside from a slightly exasperated sigh, a recent Daily Telegraph article interviewing a financial services professional earning 'high 50,000s' made me reconsider this issue.
Sometimes "people" think things because they are narrow minded, ill informed, media led, naive, or otherwise lacking. Particularly in the field of politics instinctive and emotional reactions to the main political parties seem to triumph over reasoned argument or policy specifics. Rarely however, the national zeitgeist actually gets it right. I think this might be just such a time.
As I've said for a long time everyone really does pay too much tax.
As the BBC and DT have shown, people are even starting to realise this, although its a slow, slow trudge up the slippery slope of realisation. (Just as a thought experiment on this imagine you earn £18,000 per year gross, pay student loan deductions, and save £100 per month - how much do you pay in tax? Answer at the bottom). Unfortunately we aren't out of the woods yet however, people still misunderstand why everyone is paying too much tax.
To try and illustrate this I'm going to resurrect my intrepid islanders who seem to have been unexpectedly popular; Spike, Timmy and Jonny. They are joined in their tribulations this time round by Sammy and Andy. Rather then create another island I've set this one in a frontier village (this gets a bit complicated by the end so bear with me).
Timmy, freshly reincarnated from his island-based doom, arrives on the frontier first and picks out the best land for farming. Using his tools, knowledge and start-up funds he builds a farm and becomes not only self-sufficient but surplus producing.
Second along comes Jonny, he's heard there’s good farming in these parts and also sets up his own fields and orchards. He's not quite as capable as Timmy, but he still gets by and makes a small surplus each year.
Next comes Sammy. Sammy can't farm, but he's got useful skills (let's say blacksmith). So rather then setting up a third farm he becomes the village smith. He charges Timmy and Jonny for his services, and since they can only pay him out of their surpluses he is the poorest of the three, however, the farms both become more productive because of the repairs and improvements Sammy can make to their tools, and in the winter the two farmers both put aside some of their store to help the smith.
Fourth is Andy. Now Andy doesn't really have any skills, he can't farm, he can't smith, he can't thatch. But... he does have some fighting experience.. so what happens?
..
Zero out of ten if you said anything involving police, army or anything else 'happy liberal'.
..
Andy of course takes over. Threat of violence is the basis of all state authority, and one guy with a sword is a pretty big threat to two farmers and a smith who has to get bailed out in the winter. Andy gets both of the farmers to pay him a part of their produce each year (more from Timmy since he has the better farm), and gets Sammy to build and maintain his house and equipment.
We now have a functioning mini-economy. We have two producers (Timmy and Jonny), a service industry (Sammy), a welfare state (Timmy and Jonny helping Sammy out in the winter), taxation (anything Andy takes), and a government with an army (Andy).
Now along comes Spike.
To start off with Spike goes to work for the farmers, after all with the need to support Andy and the new tools from Sammy, they can make use of the extra hands, so Spike goes to work. Any initially this works, both of the farmers make bigger surpluses, give some to Spike, some to Andy and make some extra themselves. This is how an economy is supposed to work - each member increases overall productivity, and that extra production gets split between the various stakeholders.
But then Spike gets bored and decides he doesn't actually want to work for the farmers anymore, and he can't work for Sammy since he doesn't have the skills or abilities to help out in a forge. So instead he goes to Andy, and he tells Andy that if Andy doesn't make sure he continues to get his share of the farm output he's going to help Timmy, Jonny and Sammy throw Andy out.
Andy, believing this to be credible threat (four against one is starting to get a bit hairy), agrees to give Spike some of the produce he takes from Timmy and Jonny. Of course, in time Andy decides he doesn't want to give up his own standard of living so Timmy and Jonny will just have to cough up more in tax, and Sammy is just going to have to maintain Spike's house as well as Andy's.
We've now got through to something, that seen at a distance and in dim light, is a super rough approximation of the current economy. In particular a significantly sized class that isn't government, doesn't work, and use the threat of overthrowing the government to keep itself supplied at the expense of the rest of the society.
A bit later Timmy, Jonny and Sammy met up in whatever passes for a pub in my 5 man frontier town. Timmy complains that he has to give up more from his farm then Jonny has to give from his, and Jonny should do more to help. Jonny in turn complains that Sammy isn't get his tools fixed fast enough and he needs to do more to fix up equipment faster and to a higher standard. Finally Sammy complains that he is getting less for his services because the two farmers have to give most of their surplus to Andy and Spike now, and so he is having to work faster, and do more, but he is getting paid less. The three all go round in a circle blaming one another, or occasionally blaming Andy for taking so much off them.
Spike meanwhile, lounges on, doing no work, paying no tax, but indirectly causing all the problems of Timmy, Jonny and Sammy.
I'm not going to end this one with actual mass death. (Though obviously the solution is a Timmy, Jonny, Sammy uprising, kicking Spike out (possibly of the land of the upright and breathing), and requiring Andy to actually do something in exchange for his share of the farming output). Instead I'm going to link this back to my original point about Nimbyism.
Everyone really is paying too much tax.
The problem isn't the tax, or the government, or other taxpayers (all of whom are paying tax as well).
The problem is everyone and anyone who wants something for nothing in the form of state support. To whatever extent you want the country to provide healthcare, education, defence, roads, bin collections, pensions and so on, your Spike.
Welcome to the welfare state...
/Z
EDIT: In answer to the 18,000 question, the maths goes something like this;
£18,000 gross,
Income tax, national insurance and student loan is deducted at source leaving;
£14,574.04
You presumably live somewhere and therefore pay council tax. The average council tax bill for 12/13 in England is £1,201, leaving;
£13,373.04
Let's say you drive a car, that's probably £60-80 a year in VED, plus about 50% of your cost of fuel. Some serious guesswork later (average 10 miles per day at 25 mpg) implies an annual fuel bill of, at current prices, £900, or £450 in tax, including tax say £520;
£12,853.04
Now take out the £100 a month saving (£1200).
Means your disposable income is about;
£11,653.04.
But of course you get taxed on that as well, I'm not going to run the whole thing out but an average VAT of 20% would mean a final post-tax spending power of
£9,322.43.
Adding your savings back on (since you do get to keep that for now)
£10,522.43.
So your total tax bill, after consumption, on £18,000 is about £7,477, or 42%.
..
In a BBC documentary produced towards the end of last year a selection of people around the cities of Britain were interviewed on their opinions of their own social situations and on who should pay more tax. The answer was almost universal; everyone thought they were struggling and paid too much, and they all thought the people in the next bracket up should do more. This view was repeated (albeit with increasing eloquence) from the £8,000 / year part time supermarket lackey to the £80,000 a year professional financial services managers. The only people to offer an alternative view were the super wealthy (i.e. multi-million annual income) for whom taxation was, by their own admission, "entirely voluntary." Interestingly the super-wealthy seem split between those who really do pay their full tax bill out of a sense of social responsibility, and those who don't pay anything and avoid talking about the issue.
Although at the time this didn't elicit much from me aside from a slightly exasperated sigh, a recent Daily Telegraph article interviewing a financial services professional earning 'high 50,000s' made me reconsider this issue.
Sometimes "people" think things because they are narrow minded, ill informed, media led, naive, or otherwise lacking. Particularly in the field of politics instinctive and emotional reactions to the main political parties seem to triumph over reasoned argument or policy specifics. Rarely however, the national zeitgeist actually gets it right. I think this might be just such a time.
As I've said for a long time everyone really does pay too much tax.
As the BBC and DT have shown, people are even starting to realise this, although its a slow, slow trudge up the slippery slope of realisation. (Just as a thought experiment on this imagine you earn £18,000 per year gross, pay student loan deductions, and save £100 per month - how much do you pay in tax? Answer at the bottom). Unfortunately we aren't out of the woods yet however, people still misunderstand why everyone is paying too much tax.
To try and illustrate this I'm going to resurrect my intrepid islanders who seem to have been unexpectedly popular; Spike, Timmy and Jonny. They are joined in their tribulations this time round by Sammy and Andy. Rather then create another island I've set this one in a frontier village (this gets a bit complicated by the end so bear with me).
Timmy, freshly reincarnated from his island-based doom, arrives on the frontier first and picks out the best land for farming. Using his tools, knowledge and start-up funds he builds a farm and becomes not only self-sufficient but surplus producing.
Second along comes Jonny, he's heard there’s good farming in these parts and also sets up his own fields and orchards. He's not quite as capable as Timmy, but he still gets by and makes a small surplus each year.
Next comes Sammy. Sammy can't farm, but he's got useful skills (let's say blacksmith). So rather then setting up a third farm he becomes the village smith. He charges Timmy and Jonny for his services, and since they can only pay him out of their surpluses he is the poorest of the three, however, the farms both become more productive because of the repairs and improvements Sammy can make to their tools, and in the winter the two farmers both put aside some of their store to help the smith.
Fourth is Andy. Now Andy doesn't really have any skills, he can't farm, he can't smith, he can't thatch. But... he does have some fighting experience.. so what happens?
..
Zero out of ten if you said anything involving police, army or anything else 'happy liberal'.
..
Andy of course takes over. Threat of violence is the basis of all state authority, and one guy with a sword is a pretty big threat to two farmers and a smith who has to get bailed out in the winter. Andy gets both of the farmers to pay him a part of their produce each year (more from Timmy since he has the better farm), and gets Sammy to build and maintain his house and equipment.
We now have a functioning mini-economy. We have two producers (Timmy and Jonny), a service industry (Sammy), a welfare state (Timmy and Jonny helping Sammy out in the winter), taxation (anything Andy takes), and a government with an army (Andy).
Now along comes Spike.
To start off with Spike goes to work for the farmers, after all with the need to support Andy and the new tools from Sammy, they can make use of the extra hands, so Spike goes to work. Any initially this works, both of the farmers make bigger surpluses, give some to Spike, some to Andy and make some extra themselves. This is how an economy is supposed to work - each member increases overall productivity, and that extra production gets split between the various stakeholders.
But then Spike gets bored and decides he doesn't actually want to work for the farmers anymore, and he can't work for Sammy since he doesn't have the skills or abilities to help out in a forge. So instead he goes to Andy, and he tells Andy that if Andy doesn't make sure he continues to get his share of the farm output he's going to help Timmy, Jonny and Sammy throw Andy out.
Andy, believing this to be credible threat (four against one is starting to get a bit hairy), agrees to give Spike some of the produce he takes from Timmy and Jonny. Of course, in time Andy decides he doesn't want to give up his own standard of living so Timmy and Jonny will just have to cough up more in tax, and Sammy is just going to have to maintain Spike's house as well as Andy's.
We've now got through to something, that seen at a distance and in dim light, is a super rough approximation of the current economy. In particular a significantly sized class that isn't government, doesn't work, and use the threat of overthrowing the government to keep itself supplied at the expense of the rest of the society.
A bit later Timmy, Jonny and Sammy met up in whatever passes for a pub in my 5 man frontier town. Timmy complains that he has to give up more from his farm then Jonny has to give from his, and Jonny should do more to help. Jonny in turn complains that Sammy isn't get his tools fixed fast enough and he needs to do more to fix up equipment faster and to a higher standard. Finally Sammy complains that he is getting less for his services because the two farmers have to give most of their surplus to Andy and Spike now, and so he is having to work faster, and do more, but he is getting paid less. The three all go round in a circle blaming one another, or occasionally blaming Andy for taking so much off them.
Spike meanwhile, lounges on, doing no work, paying no tax, but indirectly causing all the problems of Timmy, Jonny and Sammy.
I'm not going to end this one with actual mass death. (Though obviously the solution is a Timmy, Jonny, Sammy uprising, kicking Spike out (possibly of the land of the upright and breathing), and requiring Andy to actually do something in exchange for his share of the farming output). Instead I'm going to link this back to my original point about Nimbyism.
Everyone really is paying too much tax.
The problem isn't the tax, or the government, or other taxpayers (all of whom are paying tax as well).
The problem is everyone and anyone who wants something for nothing in the form of state support. To whatever extent you want the country to provide healthcare, education, defence, roads, bin collections, pensions and so on, your Spike.
Welcome to the welfare state...
/Z
EDIT: In answer to the 18,000 question, the maths goes something like this;
£18,000 gross,
Income tax, national insurance and student loan is deducted at source leaving;
£14,574.04
You presumably live somewhere and therefore pay council tax. The average council tax bill for 12/13 in England is £1,201, leaving;
£13,373.04
Let's say you drive a car, that's probably £60-80 a year in VED, plus about 50% of your cost of fuel. Some serious guesswork later (average 10 miles per day at 25 mpg) implies an annual fuel bill of, at current prices, £900, or £450 in tax, including tax say £520;
£12,853.04
Now take out the £100 a month saving (£1200).
Means your disposable income is about;
£11,653.04.
But of course you get taxed on that as well, I'm not going to run the whole thing out but an average VAT of 20% would mean a final post-tax spending power of
£9,322.43.
Adding your savings back on (since you do get to keep that for now)
£10,522.43.
So your total tax bill, after consumption, on £18,000 is about £7,477, or 42%.
Tuesday 2 October 2012
All You Can Eat
Sometimes small issues give a better insight into the opinions of the
masses then grand events. Everyone is becoming increasingly jaded with
politics, and most people are so woefully unaware of economic theory (much less
reality) that opinions are little better then 'a man in the pub said'. But when
some trivial matter comes to the nation's attention there is an unfettered
ability to see and hear what people think without any macroeconomic or
geopolitical ignorance coming into play.
The issue that caught my eye today was to do with a two men and an 'all you can eat' Mongolian restaurant. The advertised deal was simple; you paid a set amount (£12 I think), and you could then supposedly eat all you wanted from a buffet. By implication it seemed that you could get a jug of water for free but other drinks were charged normally, and that there was a voluntarily 'service fee' some people choose to pay.
This seemed a fairly standard set up, and I've partaken at similar venues throughout my student career and as a 'productive' member of society. It neatly avoids the problem of "who pays what" when the bill comes in large groups, and ensures that you don't go home hungry. The complaint for the two protagonists in this instance though was that they had been asked to leave their 'all you can eat' buffet of choice, and then banned for life, on the basis that they ate too much. In an interview with the owner the reason given was that the restaurant was a business, and it didn't help things when people came in and ate more than everyone else.
Fairly confident that the community feedback from this article was going to be universal condemnation of a restaurant that offers 'all you can eat' (AYCE) and then kicks people out for eating too much, I was stunned, not to mention slightly nauseated, to find that the actually the main popular opinion coming through was that "people like that (meaning the complainants, and with an unspoken caveat of over-weight people) are a disgrace," various other offenses were laid at their door, including putting other people of their food by eating too much, ruining things for everyone else and so on. Less than half of the comments took the view that a restaurant advertising 'all you can eat' didn't have much of leg to stand on if people ate more than had been budgeted for.
After my initial shock at this response blew over, I have, on reflective consideration, realised I shouldn't be surprised. This is exactly the phenomena I described in the previous post 'Don't Read It, Sign It!' - the fault can't lie with the person/business making an offer they can't honour, it must lie with the person/business that has the audacity to expect that people/businesses stick to their stated agreements. For future reference I'm going to refer to this concept as Gobian Responsibility (after the restaurant that inspired this).
For definitive purposes;
Gobian Responsibility holds that responsibility for a hurt lies not with the individual or corporate suffering the harm, even when they, in full knowledge and without coercion, agreed or actively undertook the activity or decisions which lead to the harm. Responsibility must therefore lie with a third party, involved in, profiting from, or extraneous to the incident.
Socialist politicians (or at least their Labour and Lib Dem equivalents) have spent a great deal of time and effort to mould a national narrative based on Gobian Responsibility. The matter of AYCE restaurants is a worrying indication that we, the people, are actually starting to buy in to. At least of part of this is no doubt the beguiling simplicity of a system that says nothing bad that happens to you is your fault - it’s always the fault of someone else.
Here are some examples for consideration;
1.) The London Riots
Genuine Cause; Masses of people seeing an opportunity to get something for nothing and deciding to take it, even if it meant stealing from others. Exacerbated by a break down in the credible threat of force offered by the police (this is actually the foundation stone on which every human civilisation going back to the Stone Age is based - lethal violence wielded by some form of rule-setting authority).
Gobian Cause; 'Society' (meaning people who work, earn money to buy things, own shops, houses, cars and so on) not giving enough to those who choose not to work and therefore have less things.
2.) The Credit-Crunch
Genuine Cause; The cost of capital being driven down due to political pressure, at least in part due to the British obsession with home ownership. As a result many people and organisations were able to take on loans or other financial obligations they couldn't, in all honesty, ever hope to honour. When this level of unserviceable debt reached a large enough level it led to financial institutions (banks) either refusing to lend more money to unviable entities, or to call in the collateral securing defaulted loans.
Gobian Cause; Bankers refusing to continue to lend out vast sums of money to zombie-corporations which should have already collapsed so they can pay themselves vast sums in bonus.
*Footnote on this: Banker-bashing is something of a personal hatred of mine since it is exactly the sort of narrow minded political point scoring that ensures economic recovery is all but impossible. To clarify briefly on a few points;
a.) The proposed tax on bonuses is, (optimistically) expected to raise £2 billion. This will cover the costs of social security (pensions, unemployment benefits and so on - excluding health care and education) for 4 days.
b.) The 'we need to make things' myth; it's true that not everyone in the world can sell insurance. This is not the same as saying that no-one in the world should sell insurance, or that insurance and banking do not have a value-adding place in an economy. (The fact that much of banking and insurance infrastructure developed to service the needs of the expanding commercial empires since the Venetians should tell you something). Given that we now existing as part of a global economy there is no reason at all why a financial services industry operating at a global level is not a sustainable basis for the national economy.
c.) Some banking product isn't "fair" (charges, salaries, overdraft fees etc.); it is still relatively easy in the UK to get a free bank account. Assuming all you want to do is get paid your salary electronically, make various direct debit payments, have somewhere to safeguard your money, use ATMs, pay on debit card at the supermarket, use internet shopping then most major banks will provide this service completely free of charge. Anything other than that almost certainly means you want some form of borrowing (overdraft, credit card, loan, mortgage and so on). This, in all forms, is a contractual obligation in which you get an upfront wad of cash, in exchange for a series of repayments or conditions to which you are fully aware before signing up for anything. You get all the money to begin and the banks take all the risk. If you don't like the conditions, don't get the loan. Remember - you do not have a right to anyone else's money - including a bank's.
3.) National Debt of £2,311 billion
Since I rarely pass up an opportunity to try and express the size of this problem how about this... the British national debt is, at current exchange rates, 198% the combined national output of every country in Africa combined.
We owe nearly double the amount that 14% of the global population earn in a year.
Genuine Cause; a succession of neo-liberal and socialist governments elected since the end of the second world war on a mandate to build, expand and violently oppose reduction in, the 'welfare state,' combined with overwhelming popular support for such activities.
Gobian Cause; The richest not paying enough tax.
As long as the political and social narrative continues to be based on this version of 'responsibility' we will continue to have politicians who break election promises (after all it's not their fault), a criminal justice system designed to help criminals (after all it's not their fault), a social system designed to redistribute wealth away from the successful and to the failing (after all it's not their fault), and all you can eat Chinese restaurants that kick people out who want to eat all they can (after all it's not the restaurant’s fault you thought that advertisement was genuine).
So whose fault is it?
/Z
The issue that caught my eye today was to do with a two men and an 'all you can eat' Mongolian restaurant. The advertised deal was simple; you paid a set amount (£12 I think), and you could then supposedly eat all you wanted from a buffet. By implication it seemed that you could get a jug of water for free but other drinks were charged normally, and that there was a voluntarily 'service fee' some people choose to pay.
This seemed a fairly standard set up, and I've partaken at similar venues throughout my student career and as a 'productive' member of society. It neatly avoids the problem of "who pays what" when the bill comes in large groups, and ensures that you don't go home hungry. The complaint for the two protagonists in this instance though was that they had been asked to leave their 'all you can eat' buffet of choice, and then banned for life, on the basis that they ate too much. In an interview with the owner the reason given was that the restaurant was a business, and it didn't help things when people came in and ate more than everyone else.
Fairly confident that the community feedback from this article was going to be universal condemnation of a restaurant that offers 'all you can eat' (AYCE) and then kicks people out for eating too much, I was stunned, not to mention slightly nauseated, to find that the actually the main popular opinion coming through was that "people like that (meaning the complainants, and with an unspoken caveat of over-weight people) are a disgrace," various other offenses were laid at their door, including putting other people of their food by eating too much, ruining things for everyone else and so on. Less than half of the comments took the view that a restaurant advertising 'all you can eat' didn't have much of leg to stand on if people ate more than had been budgeted for.
After my initial shock at this response blew over, I have, on reflective consideration, realised I shouldn't be surprised. This is exactly the phenomena I described in the previous post 'Don't Read It, Sign It!' - the fault can't lie with the person/business making an offer they can't honour, it must lie with the person/business that has the audacity to expect that people/businesses stick to their stated agreements. For future reference I'm going to refer to this concept as Gobian Responsibility (after the restaurant that inspired this).
For definitive purposes;
Gobian Responsibility holds that responsibility for a hurt lies not with the individual or corporate suffering the harm, even when they, in full knowledge and without coercion, agreed or actively undertook the activity or decisions which lead to the harm. Responsibility must therefore lie with a third party, involved in, profiting from, or extraneous to the incident.
Socialist politicians (or at least their Labour and Lib Dem equivalents) have spent a great deal of time and effort to mould a national narrative based on Gobian Responsibility. The matter of AYCE restaurants is a worrying indication that we, the people, are actually starting to buy in to. At least of part of this is no doubt the beguiling simplicity of a system that says nothing bad that happens to you is your fault - it’s always the fault of someone else.
Here are some examples for consideration;
1.) The London Riots
Genuine Cause; Masses of people seeing an opportunity to get something for nothing and deciding to take it, even if it meant stealing from others. Exacerbated by a break down in the credible threat of force offered by the police (this is actually the foundation stone on which every human civilisation going back to the Stone Age is based - lethal violence wielded by some form of rule-setting authority).
Gobian Cause; 'Society' (meaning people who work, earn money to buy things, own shops, houses, cars and so on) not giving enough to those who choose not to work and therefore have less things.
2.) The Credit-Crunch
Genuine Cause; The cost of capital being driven down due to political pressure, at least in part due to the British obsession with home ownership. As a result many people and organisations were able to take on loans or other financial obligations they couldn't, in all honesty, ever hope to honour. When this level of unserviceable debt reached a large enough level it led to financial institutions (banks) either refusing to lend more money to unviable entities, or to call in the collateral securing defaulted loans.
Gobian Cause; Bankers refusing to continue to lend out vast sums of money to zombie-corporations which should have already collapsed so they can pay themselves vast sums in bonus.
*Footnote on this: Banker-bashing is something of a personal hatred of mine since it is exactly the sort of narrow minded political point scoring that ensures economic recovery is all but impossible. To clarify briefly on a few points;
a.) The proposed tax on bonuses is, (optimistically) expected to raise £2 billion. This will cover the costs of social security (pensions, unemployment benefits and so on - excluding health care and education) for 4 days.
b.) The 'we need to make things' myth; it's true that not everyone in the world can sell insurance. This is not the same as saying that no-one in the world should sell insurance, or that insurance and banking do not have a value-adding place in an economy. (The fact that much of banking and insurance infrastructure developed to service the needs of the expanding commercial empires since the Venetians should tell you something). Given that we now existing as part of a global economy there is no reason at all why a financial services industry operating at a global level is not a sustainable basis for the national economy.
c.) Some banking product isn't "fair" (charges, salaries, overdraft fees etc.); it is still relatively easy in the UK to get a free bank account. Assuming all you want to do is get paid your salary electronically, make various direct debit payments, have somewhere to safeguard your money, use ATMs, pay on debit card at the supermarket, use internet shopping then most major banks will provide this service completely free of charge. Anything other than that almost certainly means you want some form of borrowing (overdraft, credit card, loan, mortgage and so on). This, in all forms, is a contractual obligation in which you get an upfront wad of cash, in exchange for a series of repayments or conditions to which you are fully aware before signing up for anything. You get all the money to begin and the banks take all the risk. If you don't like the conditions, don't get the loan. Remember - you do not have a right to anyone else's money - including a bank's.
3.) National Debt of £2,311 billion
Since I rarely pass up an opportunity to try and express the size of this problem how about this... the British national debt is, at current exchange rates, 198% the combined national output of every country in Africa combined.
We owe nearly double the amount that 14% of the global population earn in a year.
Genuine Cause; a succession of neo-liberal and socialist governments elected since the end of the second world war on a mandate to build, expand and violently oppose reduction in, the 'welfare state,' combined with overwhelming popular support for such activities.
Gobian Cause; The richest not paying enough tax.
As long as the political and social narrative continues to be based on this version of 'responsibility' we will continue to have politicians who break election promises (after all it's not their fault), a criminal justice system designed to help criminals (after all it's not their fault), a social system designed to redistribute wealth away from the successful and to the failing (after all it's not their fault), and all you can eat Chinese restaurants that kick people out who want to eat all they can (after all it's not the restaurant’s fault you thought that advertisement was genuine).
So whose fault is it?
/Z
Saturday 29 September 2012
Who Says?
The
internet age has put a powerful weapon into the hands of single interest
groups, lobbyists and all the other flotsam and jetsam of political life. With
websites, twitter, YouTube, podcasts and so on a relatively small group can
co-ordinate national and even international support. The success of
institutions such as a Taxpayer's Alliance is, at least in part, down to 21st
century technology.
**
But all
is not well in the interweb lands of single issue lobbying. With the disposal
of conventional media the requirement to avoid provably false statements is
also started to wane. If your giving an interview to a newspaper or political
affairs programme you really need to make sure your statistics are supported,
and your not sprouting gibberish. Unfortunately this safety net doesn't exist
online.
I'm
currently reading the final independent report of the Rail Value for Money
Study (RVM), with a view to, at some point in the future, writing an insightful
post on where our current transport policy is, and where it should be going.
I'm not there yet.
However,
I also came across the Road Users Alliance (RUA) while looking for some
statistics on the number of road users in the UK, and the total
passenger-distance covered. Coming straight from the RVM's analysis on the
costs of the UK rail sector, and with a practical understanding of the size and
composition of UK government receipts, some of the more sensationalist claims
from the Director of the RUA stood out as probably failing the "provably
false" test.
As such I
have just fired off an email to RUA asking them to explain these apparent
inconsistencies, (coped below);
===
Hi,
I'm in
the processing of completing some research for my own interest into how the
costs of the road and rail networks are provided for. In looking for statistics
on road usage and costs I came across the RUA website. While looking at your
website I came across the piece by Mr Tim Green, entitled Road Users Want a
Better Deal. I was wondering if you could provide some answers to the questions
I had after reading this article;
1.) At
the beginning of the piece a figure of £47bn is given for the tax raised from
British motorists - could you provide a source for this figure? From reviewing
the 2010 Budget the predicted 2009/10 revenues from fuel duty and VED combined
is only £31.9bn.
2.) The
piece closes by stating that "Road users collectively pay £138 billion in
road related taxes and vehicle costs." Could a source for this please be
provided? The implication is that these are costs levied by, or on behalf of,
government; not privately incurred costs. If things such as the price of buying
or maintaining a car have been included this seems out of place if not
deliberately misleading in a discussion of centrally funded road maintenance.
3.)
Again, could a source be provided for this statistic; "While roads account
for 92% of passenger travel most of Government spending has been on rail."
Based on the Department of Transport's estimate that the average road user
covers 6726 km/year, and the final report from the Study on Rail Value for Money's
figure of combined annual passenger-kms on the railways of roughly 50bn this
would mean there are approximately 85 million road users in Britain.
I await a
response at your earliest convenience,
Thanks
and Regards,
=====
When I
get a response I'll post that up as well, though I'm not holding my breath
(personally I think I'm going to get some form of "it's under review"
response).
This does
however illustrate that even apparently reliable sources (such as the
Directors of national campaigning groups) are not beyond toting patently absurd
statistics as the truth if it will further their cause.
I'd like
to close this (short) piece with a request to anyone and everyone who ever ends
up reading this. Next time you come across an unreferenced statistic online
send a query to the website or group responsible and call them to account.
Thanks,
Z
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