19th February 2014

The dog barked.

The letter box rattled.

The brown envelope was slipped through. It bore the legend HMRC.

Here comes the tax man after my cash.

One of the many fantasies about benefits is that they are tax free. Well of course some benefits are. Especially if you one of those whose sole income is represented by the benefit you receive.

Of course a state pension is a benefit, it is in fact one of the larger costs of welfare. And it is of course like so many benefits riddled with myths, urban and otherwise.

I heard one such myth about a pensioner who lives in Gordon Brown's constituency. He went to a surgery to ask why he was paying tax on his pension.

The then Chancellor denied that this was the case.

In today's newspaper the same Gordon Brown was quoted as telling Scottish Pensioners that they would lose the benefit they had paid for during their working lives if they voted yes to scottish independence.

But as I have mentioned previously in this blog.

Income Tax and National Insurance pay for pensions, there is no fund into which you pay and from which you withdraw when you retire.

So my pension is paid for not by me paying in over the forty seven years that I worked but by those who are working and paying tax today.

And that includes me.

Because I am fortunate enough to have an occupational pension, which I paid for from 1968 until I retired in 2007 I pay tax.

Because I am over 67 I receive a marginally higher personal allowance.

But in his letter to me today, the taxman explained that because I also receive a state pension and the DWP cannot claim the tax, my personal allowance is reduced by the amount of state pension I will receive in the coming financial year.

So I do pay tax on my pension.

One of the frustrations of living close to the Scottish Border is knowing that whatever the outcome of the referendum I personally cannot vote.

On Saturday I was in Annan, a twenty minute drive from home, but soon to be (possibly) another country, the indoor critic and I decided to stop to buy a picnic lunch and I went into a bakery to buy two Macaroni Cheese Pies, what could be more Scottish, reflecting as it does a tradition that goes back to Robert Burns via Gramsci and the Italian Ice Cream sellers who made their home in Scotland enriching both the culture and the food.

I commented to the Baker as I handed over a Scottish Twenty Pound note, I wonder what the transaction cost will be after independence?


She dismissed  George Osborne's finger wagging warning as rubbish. Commenting you cannot spend a Scottish Five Pound note any place south of Blackpool anyway, so we do have our own currency now. .
In which view she totally supports all those from the South who refuse to take cash out of a bank machine in a Scottish Airport if they are flying back to England because their money would be refused by every single taxi driver at any of the London Airports as my Scottish Ten Pound note was refused when I tried to pay for a round of drinks at a pub in Cleckheaton in West Yorkshire.

But perhaps the best way to resolve the debate between First Minister and Chancellor is to quote from the 1984 Scottish Pound the legend on which reads:

Nemo Me Impune Lacessit (None provokes me with impunity)

And as for the Tax Man I can do little better than reading from the edge of the two pound coin in my pocket:

In Victory Magnanimity in Peace Goodwill

Maybe all benefits should be paid in two pound coins and handed over personally by Mr Duncan Smith.

11th February 2014

Well today I am feeling very virtuous.

I had a problem with my laptop, at least after dropping it, I had a problem.

A cracked screen.

Expensive to repair I thought, so I watched a video on you tube and it appeared to be an easy job and so to ebay I turned and like the Aladdin's Lamp it is, I rubbed it a few times and lo and behold a new screen came through the post.

And today I fitted it.

Like the marvellous comment in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance about a Japanese folding bicycle. installing a new screen on a lap top requires great peace of mind and so I waited for the Zen moment to arrive and it arrived today so out with the screw driver, out with the old screen and in with the new.

Now I am wondering like the famous children's TV knitting wife of Noah whether there might be a you tube video for changing the Government?

You can't just buy one on ebay. Neither can you knit one. So I guess we will just have to wait for the election.

2015 can't come soon enough for me.

Underlying my general dissatisfaction with the con-dems is the fact that they make me feel ashamed. I find myself wanting to go up to complete strangers in the street and apologise for the government.

Of course once that is said there follows quite logically the inevitable consequence that some people apparently agree with all of what is being said and done and this expresses itself in the actions of people who are emboldened by the implicit support for their prejudices.

There is in my view a direct line of cause and effect which runs from the newspaper photograph of the Chancellor sitting in his car in a disabled bay eating his burger and the abuse of disabled parking spaces in town centres and outside supermarkets by people who appear as they walk away from their cars to be perfectly able bodied.

As the political rhetoric feeds into the public discourse attitudes harden, people are less generous, less kind to each other, less prepared to be tolerant, less neighbourly.

But the other reason why I cannot wait for 2015 to cast my vote is the rhetoric of blaming the last Labour Government for just about everything.

I came down to my newspaper the other morning to read that, on a recent visit to the Somerset Levels, the Prime Minister had suggested that the responsibility for the flooding should be laid at the door of the last government who had, it seemed, not dredged enough.

As with a previous conservative PM we are always being offered simple statements of the blindingly obviously wrong when faced with complex issues.

There are factors at work here from treeless uplands to canalised rivers (caused by dredging?) to swapping grass crops for Maize crops to rising sea levels all of which point to the historically complex roots of what is happening and which suggest that these extreme weather conditions are arising as a result of changes to atmosphere such as global warming rather than a left wing conspiracy.

I wonder whether the next time Mr Cameron is asked a challenging question on American TV, remember Magna Carta? such as who was responsible for the Norman Invasion? his response will be to blame the Labour Government for reducing the defence budget in 1066.

Well I don't blame Labour for my lap top failure, or global warming, (although the decline of Manchester United under a new manager might have contributed) but I have to admit that fixing it myself, whilst brilliant, hasn't helped the economy because it means that I haven't popped out to PC World or the co-op on line store to buy a new one, so the imbalance of payments when it is announced might be down to me or could I blame labour too?

4th February 2014

Gosh.

In my small world nothing much happens any more.

I read about stuff of course.

And I can see how easy it is to get facts and statistics and information wrong.

I watch the news most  nights, I have been known to watch Question Time but usually switch off before the end having concluded that the audience are usually more articulate, sensible and informed than the panel.

Why is it that ill informed prejudice can be broadcast as though it were a rehearsal of carefully researched fact?

I am all for debate in the public square, I have participated in one or two televised debates myself, on the Jimmy Young Show I debated Norman Tebbit and I was invited on to the Robert Kilroy Silk show to debate drug use.

I did my research for these opportunities made sure that I had a set of handwritten cards each one containing a fact or two pertinent to the argument.

But, its more complicated than that, or I'd rather stick to the known facts about benefit fraud, such as the reality of how much less, at 0.7%, fraud actually is than the public perception that it is 27%, is actually, televisually pretty dull.

Better to go for a quick attention grabbing headline.

Mr Gove, as an ex journalist knows this better than most.

His comments on the causes and effects of the First World War were one example of putting the attention grabbing headline before the facts.

But his latest, that his aim is that you might visit any school in the country and there would be no distinction between private and public education, using the distinction appropriately in so far as in the education sector generally, public means private, with other public schools being described as State.

But does this mean that student/teacher ratios will change in the two sectors? Will there be a fairer sharing of resources? Will State Schools be given their sports fields back rather than having them sold off for housing or industrial development?

One estimate I read suggested that if the State sector had the same access to playing fields as the private, it would require 50% of the countryside being designated as school playing fields.

All of these discussions need to be engaged with in a serious way and disagreements need to be negotiated courteously.

The least courteous forum is Prime Ministers Question Time and the baying and braying across the benches sets a very low bar for the discussion of social and cultural issues but as we consider the landscape in 2014 surely it must become clear to most blinkered and prejudiced that a whole class and generation have seen their jobs disappear and there will be more of that to come as many technical and office jobs become computerised.

As we monitor the rising flood waters and the significant changes in the weather it must surely occur to someone that climate change is not just a passing feature of cyclical weather patterns and that human activity is having a telling and profound effect on the environment we rely on to sustain human life?

When I bought my first subscription to cable TV I noted that the handset contained a button marked Vote. It occurred to me that this provided a whole new way to engage with debate in the public square. My proposal for an Academy in Bradford was that at its heart there would be a commitment to citizenship and to honour this the Academy would have an Agora, a physical debating chamber at its heart and debate would contribute to both pedagogy and management.

I read recently about someone called Katy Hopkinson, I had never heard of the young lady but apparently she took part in a recent TV Debate, the criticism of her performance by Owen Jones in the Independent described the Hopkinisation of political discourse likened it to 'panto'.

Well, Oh yes it is or Oh no its not, but as Question Time, whether the PM's or the BBC's, also gets close to pantomime with its heroes, the hardworkers, or its villains, the shirkers I find myself making a plea for faith and values to be restored to the public square in order to create a better space for the community to begin or deepen conversation about our culture and the critical issues confronting our society.

So having made my plea I will press publish and settle down with a good book.