Mind The Gap

You can’t make the poor rich, by making the rich poor.

Regular readers may recall that a few weeks ago, in a piece about the deterioration of London under grim grinning gremlin Sadiq Kahn, I bemoaned the ubiquity of phone theft in the capital, and the laissez faire attitude that our Mayor and the Met seem to have toward the problem.

Well my family became a victim this week when my almost grown up daughter had her iPhone swiped while on a night out in a leafy part of North London.

My daughter was fine, and we are grateful for that, but she was quite shaken up by the experience. Once we’d sorted her out, we made a quick assessment of what was missing. Not just her phone but also a bank card she had tucked into the phone case.

So we went to work cancelling the SIM, erasing the phone remotely, and blocking the card. It was stressful and annoying, especially at 1 am in the morning.

It was only after we’d sorted out the mess as best we could and I was finally heading to bed that I realised with a jolt that there was something obvious we hadn’t done.

Call the police.

To be honest it hadn’t even entered my mind. Not for a second. It would have been a complete waste of time anyway. We knew they wouldn’t be interested, even if we had given them the location data of the phone, they would have probably just shrugged it off. Not our problem.

And since we weren’t going to claim on insurance, only for our premium to be bumped up accordingly, we didn’t even need a ‘crime number’.

In fact, there’s so much crime in London, I’d be surprised if numbers even go up that high.

As I said in the London piece. Both Khan and the police seem to abnegate any responsibility for the issue, preferring instead to blame Apple for making such nice phones. If Apple could only be bothered to make crapper devices, they scold, then maybe this wouldn’t be quite as much of a problem.

It’s all fine now. I’ve ordered a secondhand replacement (from what I believe is a reputable reseller) and my daughter has learned her lesson. Not to take her phone out on the street, no matter how posh the neighbourhood. (That is a joke. She is a teenager. She has definitely not learned her lesson.)

And so, that was the end of that.

A couple of days later I was sitting in my kitchen when I heard a commotion outside. A car alarm was going off and there was a general noise and bustle on my usually quiet street. I couldn’t tell what was happening from my window, so I popped out to see, because I am nosey.

What was happening was a car, a regular family car, nothing fancy, was being hydraulically lifted onto the back of a council lorry by a burly bloke in hi-vis jacket, while a sullen parking enforcement officer stood by supervising. Someone was about to pay the price for parking in the wrong part of Camden. And that price would likely be pretty high.

The car owner would be faced with the original parking fine, £130. Plus a £200 ‘charge’ to release their vehicle, and a £40 a day ‘storage fee’ for taking up valuable space in the vehicle pound.

Now look, I’m not saying people should be able to park willy nilly on the streets of London. But a fee of at least £370 for a regular person who made an everyday, human mistake seems a bit steep.

What struck me though, as the offending car levitated past me, wasn’t so much the exorbitant fine, it was the amount of infrastructure which has been put in place in order to extract that fine.

There’s the legion of traffic enforcement officers who stalk the streets, eyes peeled for the slightest infraction. Each must be paid, uniformed and monitored. Then there’s the lorry. A lorry with a hydraulic winch on the back is a serious bit of kit, and paying for, running, and maintaining a fleet of them must cost a lot of money. Also the driver/operator needs to be trained, decked out in day glow, and paid a wage.

And of course all of this relies on a massive bureaucracy, responsible for sending out the lorries, administering the fines, and organising the vehicle pounds. It is a serious logistical undertaking.

There is a clear priority here.

Our government seems largely indifferent when it comes to protecting its citizens from low level, but impactful crime. But spares no effort or resource to ensure the swift and efficient punishment of those same citizens, whenever they commit a minor offence against the state.

And it’s not just phones. If our government funnelled the same amount of resources it enthusiastically commits to enforcing parking violations to preventing petty crime like bike theft, shoplifting, mugging, burglary, and pick pocketing, even littering, the state could improve, immeasurably the quality of life, for regular, normal, boring people like me, going about our humdrum lives, in the big city.

But instead of tackling real world problems our bosses seem increasingly obsessed with expanding the scope of ‘hate crime’ legalisation. Which does little but criminalise regular people for thinking bad thoughts, or expressing unfashionable, but broadly held opinions.

Of course we are told by our politicians that the reason they cannot tackle these blights is because our country, (by which they mean our government) is running out of money.

But that simply isn’t true.

As recently as 2005 UK government spending was (a mere) £500bn a year.

This year government spending is expected to reach £1226bn.

Which the maths whizzes among us may notice it almost two and a half times as much.

(No. I’m not adjusting for inflation, because our tax free allowances haven’t been adjusted either. So why should I?)

The government isn’t cash strapped. It’s rolling in money. Our money.

Maybe I’m being unfair. Governments are big and important, and they are there to deal with big important issues. OK fair enough.

So have our bosses used that extra £726 bn a year to solve a single problem?

Have they addressed the housing crisis? Fixed the NHS? Got to grips with illegal immigration? Reduced knife crime? Constructed a single nuclear power station? Mended a pot hole? Eradicated Alastair Campbell? Or built a navy?

No, of course not. They have failed to even build a third runway at Heathrow, or a railway line to Manchester.

Living standards are falling, while government consumes an ever increasing amount of our money.

These things are not unrelated.

My two stories represent, in very real terms, the gap between what normal regular people want their government to do, in this case, keep the streets safe for fun loving teenagers, and what it actually does, use the full force of the state to extract the maximum amount of money from its citizens at each and every opportunity.

They remind us that the government’s agenda is not our agenda. The elite’s priorities are not our priorities. The progressives’ obsessions are not our concerns.

This gap is likely to only get wider under a Labour government led by Corbyn cheerleader, BLM supplicant, referendum denier, and toolmaker’s son (oh you didn’t know he was a toolmaker’s son? Of course not, he hardly ever mentions it ) Sir Keir Starmer

Starmer and his front bench are such an odd bunch. They look like the assembled Heads of Years of a midsized comprehensive.

And it doesn’t exactly fill you with confidence when Headmaster Tony Blair literally has to school them in the difference between men and women.

Although to be fair, at least Shadow Health Secretary Wes Streeting doesn’t appear to need to harden his position on penises.

Blair’s intervention was necessary because according to Starmer’s empirically challenged front bench, the science behind sex differences is ‘intrusive and outdated’.

I worry that once in power, Labour might attempt to outlaw gravity. Simply on the grounds that it is ’old fashioned’ and was originally invented by old white dude, Sir Isaac Newton.

Despite their whiny obfuscation, it is obvious exactly what Labour plans to do once in power (Further increase taxes). Who they will tax. (You). And what they will spend those taxes on. (Not you).

Of course weasel worded Starmer and sidekick Rachel Reeves have long insisted that they have no intention of putting up taxes on ‘working people’.

But pressed for a definition Starmer suggested that ‘working people’ means anyone who has no savings, relies on the state for many of life’s basics and holds few, if any assets. (I’m no psephologist but that sounds a lot like a ‘traditional Labour voter’ to me). These people are the goodies, the blameless lucky ones who will avoid the bitter scythe of pernicious, confiscatory levels of taxation.

Which means that people with any savings, assets or have made something of their lives, (let’s call them ‘traditional Tory voters’) are the baddies. Rapacious hoarders who deserve to have their greedy bank accounts, holiday homes, rainy day funds, and pensions plundered in the name of social justice.

But you can’t enrich the poor by giving them other people’s money. Literally the only way to create wealth, bring jobs and develop opportunity, is by creating an environment where private enterprise, is allowed to thrive.

Everything we know of Labour, Starmer and our new government, screams that it is about to take our country in the opposite direction.

It is inevitable that Labour will bring capital gains tax into line with income tax.

Some readers may celebrate that change, but the target won’t simply be grasping second home owners, or posh people who have the temerity to own stocks and shares.

Assets include companies, businesses and other wealth creating enterprises.

And we know that if you tax something like cigarettes, booze, driving around cities, or education, you get less of it.

So increasing the taxation on investment will inevitably lead to less investment. Which means less wealth for our socialist bosses to redistribute to their client base of grievance fuelled rent seekers the vulnerable.

If high tax, anti wealth policies actually worked Wales would be out earning Singapore by now.

But it isn’t. At the moment it makes Burkina Faso look like Dubai.

Which is worrying because Sir Keir Starmer has previously called the Welsh Labour government the “blueprint for what Labour can do across the UK”.

Yikes.

And they don’t just have plans to raise taxes in the future. Labour literally has a scheme to raise taxes on the future.

The ‘Shadow Minister for Technology and Digital Economy’ (too long, I’m going with ‘Minister for Tik-Tok’) has proposed a special new tax to punish companies which use AI to ‘take people’s jobs’.

But jobs are a cost, not a benefit, so that would be effectively taxing companies for increasing productivity.

And low productivity is one of the many reasons why the British economy is such a laggard. So the last thing you want to do is to incentivise British industry to have more of it.

It makes about as much sense as us still paying monks to copy out each and every copy of the Harry Potter books, rather than you know, using that new fangled printing press that all those trendy Lutherans keep going on about.

Sure it costs more and takes longer. But hey, no one wants a load of unemployed monks, hanging about, clogging up the place. So let’s stick with that.

Labour has always insisted that its insatiable craving for other people’s money is fuelled by a beneficent desire to ‘invest in public services’.

But public services are not an ‘investment’, again, they’re simply a cost.

That’s not to say they’re aren’t important. Of course they are, we all rely on them in one form or another.

But saying public services are an investment is like saying your Big Shop once a week in Tesco is a form of long term financial speculation, which could, in the future, yield a substantial financial reward.

It isn’t. You’re just loading up the car with biscuits. Which, like the money Labour plans to pour into our failing public sector, will all be gobbled up by the weekend.

The problem with UK public services is that they aren’t.

They are instead, bloated fiefdoms, presided over by a superannuated elite, whose interests are on no level advanced by actually providing a service to the public who pay their wages.

Think of the Tax Office which had to be compelled to answer phone calls from taxpayers after it tried to shut down its help line for half(!) of the year.

The Foreign Office which preferred to WFH rather than turn up at the office to deal with the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan. Leading to substantial loss of life. 

Or 2nd class Post Office boss, and holier than thou lady vicar Paula Vennells, who is accused of trying to cover up the Horizon IT scandal while raking in £5m in wages. As we all know now, the cost in human life, and general misery, for those caught up in the scandal, was almost incalculable.

And I’ll spare you, by barely mentioning ‘our’ NHS and its seven million strong waiting list.

Rachel Reeves, has recently come over all Liz Truss and claimed that Labour will ‘prioritise growth’.

But how?

I’ve read Labour’s manifesto. It has a section entitled ‘Kickstart Economic Growth’. But the only thing I can genuinely see it kickstarting, is more government intervention and increased regulation.

I have not heard Reeves or Starmer suggest a single pro-growth policy. No tax incentives. No divergence from sclerotic, innovation sapping EU directives. No enterprise zones. No deregulation of any sector. In fact no repealing of any regulation whatsoever. Not a one.

Instead, according to the Guardian;

‘Reeves added that the party would raise money to fund its pledges by introducing VAT on private school fees, increasing tax on private equity bonuses, extending the windfall tax on energy companies’ profits, and cracking down on non-doms and tax avoidance’.

Labour seems to think that economic growth comes from simply redistributing harder.

Which means that the only thing which will grow under Rachel Reeves is the already bloated state.

I don’t know much, but I do know that all the problems caused over the last thirty years, by too big a government trying to do too much, can’t possibly be solved, by more government, doing more things.

As well as using the tax regime to separate the middle classes from their savings, Labour’s other money making wheeze is its so called ‘Green Prosperity Plan’.

This is of course an oxymoron.

You cannot achieve ‘prosperity’ by increasing your energy costs. Off shoring your industry. Relying on intermittent energy sources. And massively increasing government spending (ie taxes again) to pay for it all.

This is tied to the fantastical insanity of ‘high paying green jobs’.  As if paying ten people tomorrow £100 each, to do a job which one person can do today, for £10, is a net benefit.

It’s not. And I’m sounding like a broken record here. It’s a cost.

This is nothing short of a Green Impoverishment Plan, of the sort favoured by soup sploshing idiots Just Stop Oil.

Incidentally I don’t understand what the upper class imbeciles of JSO have against Stonehenge, when their every dim witted, declaration, denunciation and de growth demand revolves around sending Britain back to the Stone Age.

Keir Starmer seems to live in a strange upside down world, where aspiration and a desire to better yourself are treated with suspicion. Rainy day savings are rebranded as hoarding. And investments are dismissed as rapacious, acquisitive greed.

Where every dividend represents stolen money. Every ISA account opened, or stock held, a manifestation of unrestrained grasping avarice.

We are already a highly redistributive society. The top 1% pay 29% of all income taxes. For this they are pilloried as greedy and self serving. Because it is not 100%.

Meanwhile nearly half of all British adults pay no income tax at all.

The politics of envy, the sense that it is right and proper to punish people for the temerity of having more than you, has never seemed so popular.

And it’s a sentiment which Labour will exploit right up until the moment anyone with a roof over their head,  a pair of matching shoes (so not you Diane), and a technically edible pet, realises that the government is suddenly coming after them too, because, hey, they’re the ‘rich’ people now.

The left hates capitalism because history has shown that it can (and yes, with caveats) achieve that which socialism cannot. An escape from poverty, higher living standards, consumer choice, longer life spans, Nintendo Switches.

The Labour Party, which once promoted working class agency, aspiration, independence and financial betterment is now the tax gobbling party of the elites, captured by an ever more authoritarian, Malthusian, censorious, anti-human, science phobic, technocratic, safety-first, freedom repelling, vindictive and economically illiterate left.

It really is something when your plans for government can read like the most anti-growth, anti-industrial, and anti-technology manifesto, since the Unabomber’s.

This is a joke.

Probably.

The Tories were utterly useless at making us rich. I have absolutely no doubt Labour will excel at making us poor.

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