Tax Avoider to Review Tax Spending.

The retail store mogul, Sir Philip Green has been asked by the Prime Minister to independently scrutinise all the past three years of government spending. He will conduct an external audit and report back to Cabinet Office minister, Francis Maude and Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Danny Alexander. As well as being a well known entrepreneur, Green is also a well publicised tax avoider. His wife 'owns' Arcadia - the parent group of Topshop, BHS etc - and lives in the tax haven of Monaco. Asked on the Today Programme about his living situation, he claimed that his wife is "...not a tax exile. My family do not live in the United Kingdom". So it's okay to make billions from customers in the UK but not actually live in this country and pay your fair share - like all those millions of people who can't afford to decamp to Monaco have to do all their lives. It's been estimated that the Greens save themselves around £300 million a year by living out of reach of the Inland Revenue's grasp,Vince Cable, who quite rightly denounced the last Labour government for obtaining the advice of Green, stating that "having an adviser who is also a tax exile is completely incompatible and totally unacceptable" - has now strangely completely changed his mind on the issue and will stand idly by whilst Sir Philip uses his 'expertise' to go rifling through expenditure plans. It's incredibly hard to swallow the fact a man, so detached from the everyday lives of Britons, who doesn't even pay his own fair share to the tax coffers is now deciding how taxpayers' money is then spent!

Prezza for Treasurer.

Just a quick post to show my support for John Prescott in his aim to be Labour Treasurer. He wants to turn the Treasurer role into a role that really counts, not the non-job that it currently is.

John has four key aims that he believes the Labour Party should implement:

To proudly defend the record of the Labour Government
To promote Labour’s progressive policies
To actively encourage greater participation in the Labour Party
To hold the Lib-Con coalition effectively to account

Prescott and his 'battlebus' travelled 5000 miles during the election campaign, clearly showing we need his energy to remain in the day to day running of the party.

Beware the Irish Example

I've just come across a superb article by Johann Hari, which uses Ireland's example of wholesale spending cuts to predict the problems Britain may face as we tread the same path. The Irish have had a two year head start on the British, but at the time the cuts began their leaders used the familiar arguments that we've all become familiar with on this side of the Irish Sea. It was argued that when the economy withers, the Government needs to react like a responsible family and pay off debts by cutting spending. The Irish populace was scared with the usual threat that if the debt was not acted upon fast, the international bond market would charge Ireland more for its liabilities, and the debt would become intolerable. Then Shadow Chancellor, Gideon Osborne described Ireland to be a "shining example" to follow. I'm sick to death of repeating the same things all the time when discussing the cuts agenda being forced upon us, but here we go again. The majority of economists agree that during a recession the government must spend because ordinary consumers naturally spend less and save more; if government was to cut at the same time then nobody in the economy would be spending. Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize-winning economist explains: "If you introduce austerity measures, the amount you can raise in tax falls, and welfare payments go up - so you don't have enough money to pay your debts anyway". This has been shown perfectly in Ireland - austerity has killed their economy. Those bond markets that cuts were supposed to guard against are now turning on Ireland. South Korea is a shining example of the way to get out of a recession. It spent a fortune on employing people to green the country's infrastructure and has been rewarded by being one of the first to come out of this worldwide recession. The lessons of the past and even of our contemporaries are glossed over in favour of severe, ideologically minded cuts that will hinder our economy's recovery and make life that much more harder for the millions already scraping by.

The Man Who Invented the Twentieth Century

I’ve just finished reading ‘The QI Book of the Dead’ – a very interesting read containing the life stories of some famous, some infamous and some forgotten dead people. One of the most intriguing people to be featured is Nikola Tesla – known primarily for inventing the Tesla coil, which gave us radio, X-ray tubes and fluorescent light. He was described as having almost ‘extraterrestrial’ gifts as he was so far ahead of his time that science has still not caught up with him. Like many of this planet’s geniuses he was an eccentric (if he had been born today he’d have been diagnosed as being on the autistic spectrum) and suffered from a severe case of obsessive-compulsive disorder. Anyway, I’m featuring Tesla because he has largely been unfairly overlooked in the history of electrical development. He built the first alternating current (AC) motor when general consensus (and that of Thomas Edison) favoured direct current (DC) generators. Edison led a propaganda campaign that claimed AC to be dangerous, and bizarrely electrocuted animals in public to make his point. But the tide of public opinion turned to Tesla’s favour, shown by the fact that from 1893 80 per cent of all electrical devices bought in the US were AC. Up until 1905, Tesla was paid $2.50 for every horsepower of electricity sold by his industrialist backer, George Westinghouse. But when Westinghouse’s funds were almost wiped out by a stock-market crash, Tesla made one of the noblest gestures in modern business by foregoing any further royalties. He was not recognised as the inventor of radio (that honour went to Marconi, who won a Nobel prize thanks to it) until after his death in 1944, and one of his most technologically advanced inventions has been mostly forgotten about. In 1899 his piece de resistance was unveiled, it was a ‘magnifying transmitter’ able to send radio waves and electricity through the air over long distances – it could generate 4 million volts, and light 200 lamps without wires, from 25 miles away. His plan was to eventually unite telephone and telegraph systems in a single wireless network – he had in effect envisioned the World Wide Web a hundred years early. Alas, his backer, J.P. Morgan backed out of financing the scheme and his plans were dead in the water. Tesla’s selfless act in ripping up the contract with Westinghouse would lead to his eventual bankruptcy in 1914; he would live the rest of his life in hotel rooms being given money by friends. He came, like many of Earth’s most brilliant residents, to a sad end. But history must surely re-evaluate this man’s contribution to life and class him as one of the greatest to have existed.

Feminists vs the Coalition

Hilarious news today, it seems that the feminist group known as the 'Fawcett Society' is taking the government to court over their emergency budget, on the grounds that it discriminates against women. They are claiming that the government should have commissioned a gender equality survey, and then shown the results to MPs before the vote on the budget, thereby apparently showing them that voting in favour of the budget would result in women bearing the brunt of the coalition's proposed cuts. Now, personally, I find the whole situation rather amusing, as if the Fawcett Society win their case, the coalition will have been publicly humiliated and will undoubtedly lose a great deal of whatever authority they may have possessed beforehand.