French Dressing Down

French visits and wealth taxes

Bonjour mes petit pois. It’s cetainleament been une buseé couple de weeks depuis nous last caught up.

You’ll forgive me practicing my advanced language skills on you. But everything French is very much en vogue at the moment, with handsome Gallic President Emmanuel Macron gracing us with a three day state visit.

And to make sure she didn’t get too lonely back home without him, he even brought along his mum.

Macron travelled to Britain by aeroplane. Which was a bit weird, since most young men arriving from France these days prefer to take the more scenic route. A dinghy halfway across the English Channel. And then ferried the rest of the way by Border Force sea taxi.

On Tuesday at a sumptuous banquet fit for a king, our unfit-to-be-King told Macron that

‘There are no borders between our countries’.

Yeah sorry The King. But that’s kind of the problem.

It’s genuinely hard to keep up, but over 20,000 illegal migrants have already crossed the Channel this year.

With several hundred being waved off from Calais beaches by cheering crowds of gendarmes just last Thursday, the final day of Marcron’s visit.

This is already up a jaw dropping 48% on last year. And with the calm seas typical of a perfectly normal British summer impending climate apocalypse, set to continue, those numbers are only likely to rise.

But never fear, though the gangs remain resolutely unsmashed, Sir Keir has come up with a brand new, one sided, expensive, and unworkable scheme to bring down the numbers.

A ‘one in-one out’ system for asylum seekers.

One in-one out? We are the sovereign nation of Great Britain. Not a newsagent’s outside a school.

And I don’t mean to be picky.

But since one, minus one, plus one, is one, it seems unlikely that this brilliant new initiative will bring down the numbers at all.

The details of what I’m generously calling ‘the plan’ remain vague, but seem to entail Britain exchanging one illegal migrant who has made it to Britain by euro-dinghy, with one of France’s own choosing.

For some unfathomable reason, thick as mince human rights lawyer Keir Starmer, thinks this is a brilliant idea.

But how might it actually work?

Maybe the French will happily take back our worst illegal migrants, and send us some of their newly arrived doctors, engineers, and scientists in exchange.

Maybe.

Or perhaps the French, who hate Britain almost as much as Glastonbury rappers Bob Vylan, will demand the return of the six genuine refugee women, and the three kids, who have somehow made it to our shores this year.

And insist we swap them for their most rapey rapists, terroristy terrorists, and gangstery gangsters instead.

Of course ace negotiator Keir Starmer would turn his nose up at such a rubbish deal.

At least until the French agreed to also take, all our fish, (another) half a billion pounds of British taxpayers money, and the Isle of Sheppey as well.

But let’s not blame Macron. Sure, he might be smarmy, duplicitous, and creepy, but he’s simply working in his country’s national interest.

A concept which Starmer’s bezzie mate, Attorney General Richard Hermer has already decreed is racist, Islamophobic, and by the time you read this, probably illegal.

Macron even had a moan at the British for largely causing the problem in the first place.

Suggesting that it is our pull factors which are drawing illegal immigrants to Britain.

Incentives such as our government’s commitment to eagerly shower every newly arrived Iranian sleeper agent desperately sad asylum seeker, with a lifetime’s supply of benefits, free housing, healthcare, and teenagers.

You know what? Manny might just be onto something.

When the French are the ones berating you for meekly surrendering your country to a bunch of foreign invaders, you know the world has really come off its hinges.

Luckily for Starmer the state visit helped overshadow the dismal anniversary of his first year, and almost inevitably, last year, as Prime Minister.

Lucky, because Sir Keir’s approval ratings are currently hovering around 18%. Which puts his personal popularity somewhere between Greg Wallace, and Parkinson’s Disease.

It’s no wonder that Starmer’s ratings are so low. Amongst all the grift, U turns, unforced errors, economic calamity, two tier injustice, assaults on free speech, and next level incompetence, he’s even gone out of his way to disown the one sensible thing he’s said all year.

When he echoed Enoch Powell and warned that Britain needs to rethink its open border immigration policy lest we become an ‘Island of Strangers’.

Starmer now claims that the whole speech was a terrible mistake, and that he’s usually far too busy picking up litter for Donald Trump, arresting mums for Facebook posts, and dooming scrolling through Tik-Tok hunting for especially leng Ukrainian boys, to read his own speeches.

At PMQs last Wednesday Starmer trotted out his well rehearsed roll call of Year One ’achievements’.

It was pretty thin gruel.

From the way he keeps invoking her name, it seems Starmer considers his dismal administration’s Number One Top Accomplishment as ‘not being Liz Truss’.

And fair enough. Starmer and Liz are very different.

After all, unlike the hapless Liz Lettuce, Sir Keir didn’t spend forty four days ‘crashing the economy’.

Instead his government has spent an entire year absolutely annihilating it. With economic figures so bad they make Truss’s brief tenure look, in comparison, like a golden era of probity, prudence, and restraint.

You’d think that ‘Iron Chancellor’ Rachel Reeves would have spent the last twelve months battling the far left of her own party in an effort to actually get the economy growing again. But no chance.

Rachel Reeves is a blubber, not a fighter.

According to Starmer, his other crowning achievement, apart from persuading Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner to stop referring to herself as ‘The Growler’ in cabinet meetings, is the roll out of breakfast clubs and free school meals.

Starmer seems to believe that the state providing free food for all children in Year 1 and 2 is a wonderful measure of success.

It is not. It is a shameful mark of failure.

That so many regular families have become dependent on state handouts, subsidised welfare, and taxpayer funded charity to feed their kids, is nothing to be proud of.

Instead it is a damning indictment of every knock kneed social, cultural, and economic calamity our ruling elite has visited on our ruined nation over the last thirty years.

The good news is that the Labour government has finally come up with a sure fire way to dig the country out of the hole it created by its own catastrophic policy of increasing spending, and raising taxes.

It’s going to increase spending and raise taxes.

But not just any tax. A tax which only greedy bad people have to pay. A wealth tax.

Wealth taxes speak to the worst instincts of the socialists. They embody a seductive combination of giddy jealousy, priapic spite, and haughty entitlement which these self regarding stealers of other people’s money find utterly irresistible.

But who exactly is going to pay this wealth tax? The rich are fleeing Britain like rats.

In fact right now, while Britain’s biggest import is unvetted Eritrean rapists and sex offenders academics and coders, our biggest export, by far, is millionaires.

And good riddance! Say the people who can’t add up.

As far as Neil Kinnock, the Labour grandee who has been wheeled out to pitch roll the idea is concerned, the problem isn’t this unprecedented exodus of wealth. It’s that Labour isn’t driving money out of the country fast enough.

For younger readers, Lord Kinnock was the Labour leader who after thirteen years of Tory rule, couldn’t even win an election against John Major.

Even among Labour’s ever expanding line up of also rans, has-beens, and no-hopers, Neil Kinnock is very much the loser’s loser.

Listening to policy advice from Neil Kinnock is like taking likability lessons from Nicola Sturgeon.

Older readers might enjoy this slip down Memory Lane.

The ever rapacious unions also love the idea of wealth taxes.

The Daily Telegraph explains

A Unite spokesman said: “Unite has led the campaign for a wealth tax inside and outside the Labour Party. A 1 per cent wealth tax on the richest 1 per cent would generate £25 billion.”

The Unite spokesman clearly does not understand what the word ‘generate’ means. The Brinks Mat heist did not simply ‘generate’ £26m for the gang who robbed it.

Any more than not paying for his food ‘generated’ an armful of sushi for the shoplifter I just watched casually stroll out of Wasabi in Kings Cross.

Wealth taxes are popular with many regular voters because as they do not consider themselves ‘rich’, they believe a wealth tax won’t affect them.

But of course it will.

2% on £10m quickly becomes 10% on £2m, next it’s 20% on £1m and soon there’s no one ‘rich’ left to tax.

‘But I’ll never have a £1m!’ Scoff the Corbynites. (Not Corbyn himself of course, he’s minted) ‘So who cares? I hate the rich!’

Ok then, let’s imagine for a moment that Labour’s wealth tax works as advertised.

It won’t, but anyway. Let’s pretend it can bring in what advocates claim, at least in the first year.

So in Year One the exchequer gets a whopping £25 billion boost, which of course the government immediately pumps into the cash hungry maw of the increasingly useless NHS.

A desperately needed fillip our health service can finally spend on essentials like rainbow lanyards, DEI officers, and a cutting edge new phone app which Wes Streeting assures us will magically cut waiting lists and cure the nation’s sick because something something A.I. something something Envy of the World something something something white heat of technology.

Fine.

But what happens in Year Two? All the properly rich people you rinsed last year have either left the country, or are no longer rich because you’ve stolen away/taxed away all their money.

But of course the NHS doesn’t care, it has increased its annual budget and it’s now owed another £25 billion.

And like mob boss Paulie, from the movie Goodfellas, it is not interested in how it gets it.

Henry Hill: [Narrating) But now the guy's gotta come up with Paulie's money every week, no matter what. Business bad? F**k you, pay me. Oh, you had a fire? F**k you, pay me. Place got hit by lightning, huh? F**k you, pay me

So where is the £25 billion coming from now?

From the next richest of course. Not the mega rich, but the rich. People with their own business, who own their own home, greedy old people with some savings, families who have the temerity to have a nice garden, or own a caravan.

You know. The rich. They’ve had it too good for too long. And now they’re going to have to pay.

And what happens when they run out of money? Then all the Guardian readers who demanded a wealth tax in the first place are aghast to discover that suddenly they are the ‘rich’ ones.

And the government is coming for their ISAs, their beach huts, their pensions, their inheritance, their houses, and their kid’s, Bank of Mum And Dad, deposit fund.

That’s when they start bleating, ‘But I didn’t mean me! I meant Jeff Bezos and all the gweedy biwyonaires’.

Of course by then it will be too late because suddenly we’re Venezuela. And now the ‘rich’ are the dwindling number of desperate citizens who can still afford the gas to cook their pets.

Britain is riding the economic theorist’s Laffer Curve like a real world rollercoaster.

Our Labour government has spent its first year making a series of unforced, avoidable, catastrophic, errors, and now, in typical socialist fashion, consider it only right, moral, and proper that someone else should be made to pay for them.

It’s like intentionally burning down your own house and then demanding your neighbours build you a new one, on the grounds that they had a nicer house than you in the first place.

The problem for the far left is that no far left policy is ever far to the left enough. Their kindly Utopia is always just one more subsidy, one more cash grab, one more tax rise away.

And when they eventually run out of tax rises. And they always do. It’s just one more bullet.

Now If you don’t mind je need to go cherchè mon singe, je pense it jumpéd out le fenêtre and climbèd up l’arbre. Wish moi bon chance.

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ATB

LSO