Bad Broadcasting Continues

News today that the BBC is going to cease most of its “yoof” TV and radio broadcasting. All the programmes that have had millions spent on them in the past 5-10 years are deemed to have failed and will be closed. No news on whether the execs that green-lighted these doomed experiments will also be axed, but knowing government departments, of which the Beeb is one, they will be moved onto different projects where they can continue to waste our money.

How about trimming fat from BBC1 and 2, by reducing the reliance on "reality" TV and cookery programmes? How about rationalising the ridiculous amount of news broadcasting that happens simultaneously across TV and radio channels, but with different presenters, crew and studios?

The report also states that the BBC will spend only a fixed percentage of the licence fee on sports programmes. This is a coded message to say that they Beeb won’t be bidding to broadcast popular sports any time soon, but will continue to waste money on non-sports, such as darts and snooker, which are pastimes you partake in whilst supping beer, not athletic spectacles.

More importantly, can the licence fee be reduced in line with the reduction in services?

The changing face of Climate Change

The backlash against the Great Global Warming Swindle grows with the news that the data that underpins the warmists’ theories is to be independently reviewed.

Whilst this is good news, I seriously doubt that the review will be very independent, and will probably follow the same line that has been previously adopted whereby someone else from the inner circle of the ecomentalists is wheeled in to “review” the data and draw the same conclusion.

The review is not due to be released until 2013 or 2014. In the meantime, can all the policies and taxes that have been dreamed up in the name of “fighting climate change” be put on the scrapheap? The EU’s Emissions Trading Scam, sorry, Scheme, springs to mind. As does the Labour government’s obsession with raising fuel and motoring duties in line with CO2 emissions. The UK should also stop subsidising alternative energy supplies until they are proven to produce electricity at the same rate and for the same cost as traditional energy sources.

None of this will happen of course: even though the game is up for the climate change proponents, politicians at all levels and in all territories are in such thrall to their nonsense non-science that nothing will be done to reduce the tax-raising opportunities presented by CO2 emissions.

Once, twice, three times a bailout

The Tories’ latest attempt at making them the least popular government in waiting is to sell us back shares in the banks that were bailed out in 2008 and 2009.

We saved and invested in these banks all our lives; through Brown and Darling’s largesse and our tax, these same banks have been given billions to keep the banking system afloat; and now George Osborne would like to offer us shares in the identical institutions that we already own via Labour’s desperate attempt to resuscitate the economy.

Whilst ducking a mobile phone slung by his grumpy boss, Lord Mandlespin predictably announced that the Tory plan was “incoherent”. I wouldn’t call it that, but if Osborne does manage to persuade anyone to take up his offer, he should get himself a job as Director of Sand Sales, Middle East division.

Gordon – get a grip

Another government minister has weighed into the row over John Terry, England’s former Wendyball captain and alleged philanderer. This time, Mike O’Brien, taking time out from wasting £20bn of our tax on the 2012 Olympics, has called on the England Wendyball manager, Fabio Madeupnamio, to rethink his “crass” decision to sack the skipper.

Labour is totally split over this issue: first we have Gerry "Expenses" Sutcliffe calling for Terry's head; now the Sports minister is demanding the opposite.

Gordon Brown needs to show some leadership in the Commons to correctly communicate the government's policy on footballers' private lives. Forget the Tories’ indecision over tax breaks for married couples or whether to cut public services this year or next. The UK is rudderless on this crucial subject and needs direction.

The PM must do this as a matter of urgency, as it is obviously a much bigger issue than £178bn of public debt, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, a creaking transport system, inadequate health and education systems and 4m unemployed citizens.

Cash for snow

My favourite raiser of blood pressure, the London Evening Standard, today carries the news that £20m of damage has been caused to the roads by the recent cold snap. I wondered how soon it would be before the taxpayer was landed for the bill for the snow.

We have been paying billions in fuel duty and carbon taxes for the past 20 years. This was all done in the name of saving the planet from CO2 emissions. Since this myth has now been dispelled, there should be plenty of money in the coffers to deal with a real climate threat, rather than one inferred from a dodgy computer simulation.

Except there isn't. Because it's all been spent on subsidising wind farms, paying carbon credits to the EU and employing thousands of civil servants to “manage” government’s fight against “climate change”.

Well, here you go: the climate has changed. It’s got nothing to do with CO2, and the predicted rise in temperature has actually seen a gradual drop over the past twelve years. Spend what we've already given you in green taxes on a genuine weather threat. Any attempt by politicians to strong-arm more money out of us to pay for the weather should be met with appropriate resistance.

Stop pulling our leg(g)s

Sir Thomas Legg’s review of the MPs expenses system was unleashed on a mostly disinterested world this morning. This is the 3rd review into MPs expenses, after the ineffective one by the former disgraced speaker and the expensive KPMG one.

Between them, some MPs are being asked to repay just over a £1m in wrongly-claimed expenses. But I still don't see any MPs being charged for fraud, for that is what they are guilty of in a lot of cases. And I also don't see any change of the rules that will prevent them from nosebagging their way through the next parliament.

I also spend 4 or 5 days away from home, which is my choice. I get back in expenses only what I spend. I do not get a flat at my employer's expense; I do not get a free plasma telly; I do not get my garden at home tended to while I am away; and I don't get free porn, unlike Jacqui Smith's husband.

The whole system needs to be brought up to date and come under the scrutiny of the taxman, who would not tolerate any of the exaggerated claims we have seen in the past 18 months.
Despite what the denizens of SW1 think, MPs are not special. They have proven that consistently during this episode.

iSore

Ok, so now we know what Apple has been doing in its labs for the last twelve months. Whereas the trend in technology since about 1950 has been towards miniaturisation, Apple has gone the other way and taken its svelte Touch product and grown it by about 600%. Step forward the “iPad”. Very original name, guys. Dom Jolly and his comedy mobile obviously had a huge influence on the design.

Re-launching a product that his company already produces for a cheaper price and in a much handier size, Apple supremo Steve Jobs claims his new toy is the third way between a mobile phone and a laptop. Which it certainly is for Apple, as it will cost a third more than any comparable device on the market.

Jobs described netbook PCs as “cheap laptops”, unlike the iPad which is a “very expensive iPod”. Just goes to show, if you put a fruit-based logo on a product and prefix its name with an “i” you can convince the world to open its wallet faster than a sprinter on steroids. Or in other words, put two things together that no-one has ever done before, and some schmuck is sure to buy it, in this case "i" and a tablet computer.

Wish I’d bought Apple shares in 1993…

Recession is in recession

So, it’s over. The recession that has officially lasted 18 months (but has in reality been around for about 3 years) is now at an end. Last quarter saw a 0.1% growth in the UK economy.

0.1% growth? The only things I see growing are my council tax bill, utilities bills, fuel bills and shopping bills. So yes, some corporations are raking it in and "growing".

But me? My salary is unchanged. I still have to pay ever increasing bills. On top of that, the government keeps coming up with ever more inventive ways of increasing taxes and duties to pay back the £178bn of debt it has created and to fund £900bn of civil service pensions, not to mention Jacqui Smith's husband's porn habit.

Doubtless Brown and Darling will wobble on about how they have successfully steered us through the murky financial waters and that the Promised Land is now on the horizon. The fact that we shouldn’t have gone through the waters in the first place and shouldn’t have stayed in them for so long will soon be forgotten in a blizzard of good news spun out by this discredited government.

A statistical growth means nothing, especially an insignificant one of a tenth of a single percentage point. The country will not start to feel more confident until there is a change of Prime Minister, either from the incumbent party or preferably from a different one.

Good Service

“There is a good service operating on all London Underground lines”. This is an announcement I hear about ten times a day on the tube.

No there isn’t. There is a normal service operating. What LU means is that there aren’t any leaves on the line, snow or striking tube drivers. No trains have hit scaffolding at Aldgate. No-one has pulled a passenger emergency alarm at Baker Street. None of the customers have decided to use a Circle Line train as a one-way ticket to heaven (or hell).

A good service would be one where trains arrive every minute, there is always a free seat, there are no rabid, ranting lunatics in the same carriage and where there isn’t a chav playing crap music through the tinny speaker of their mobile phone.

Rubbish

I was under the impression that the colossal amount of money that I pay in council tax was used in part to pay for streets to be cleaned. Apparently not. As this government dreams up ever more fanciful ways to extract tax, MPs are now proposing that chewing gum, sweets and fast food be levied with additional duty in order to fund the cleaning up of the resultant litter.

This is typical New Labour thinking: rather than tackle the underlying problem, which is that there are elements of society who think that it is acceptable to drop litter on the street, let’s slap a tax on the affected products and dress it up as a solution. This also means that the Neanderthals who are prone to throwing rubbish onto the streets will have even less of a worry, because some government-employed minion will come along and clean up the mess.

Flippin’ Marvellous

News just in that after several inquiries and the expenditure of a few million pounds on reports, the proposals to revamp the MPs expenses system will be watered down to the point where almost no changes will be made whatsoever.

This includes the practice of being able to “flip” between their main constituency home and their rented accommodation in London, which means that duck houses and expensive plasma tellies will still be paid for at our expense. Also, MPs will be able to keep any profits from selling a taxpayer-funded second home. And Jacqui Smith’s husband will be able to pull his plonker to his heart’s content, safe in the knowledge that it won’t be costing him a penny.

So much for MPs listening to the electorate’s concerns. Their day of reckoning is coming soon.

Dangerman

An increasingly desperate Prime Minister is now using the politics of fear to attempt to win points from the Tories. He has announced that a Conservative victory at the next General Election would be a danger to the economic prospects of the UK. Whilst glossing over the not insignificant matter of how Labour would turn around the country’s finances, he is trying to portray David Cameron’s party as the potential creators of “an industrial wasteland” that would decimate public services.

Brown has shown many times over the last couple of years how massively out of touch he is with the nation. How he can stand up and announce that another party would be worse for the economy than his, displays the delusional nature of the man.

This is the man who "abolished boom and bust": time will tell - he inherited a boom and created the bust. There is no sign of a fresh boom.

This is the man who cosied up to the bankers and hedge fund managers, a bunch of people with an eye only on their next Porsche or holiday home, and not the best interests of the UK.

This is the man who has sanctioned the spending of nearly £200bn of our tax revenue to prop up banks, banks that have then used that money to pay themselves bonuses and not to finance the rebuilding of the UK economy.

This is the man who has permitted the civil service to expand to the point of torpor and allowed them to amass a £900bn pension deficit that is conveniently kept off the balance sheet.

This is the man who manages to find billions to spend on grandstanding projects such as the Olympics, climate change, ID cards and Trident, but can't finance equipment for the brave soldiers who fight in the two unwanted wars that his predecessor dragged us into.

Given that little lot, I can't see how anyone else could be a bigger danger to the economy than Gordon Brown and the Labour party.

To paraphrase Neil Kinnock’s rallying call from the 1983 election: don’t be ordinary, young, old or ill, otherwise the Conservatives will leave you by the wayside.

Or in Gordon’s words: “If Labour wins in May 2010, rejoice all ye who are scroungers, dole cheats, civil servants, bankers and hedge fund managers. The rest of you can get your cheque books out (although only until 2018 - credit cards accepted too)".

But of course Kinnock lost, too.

Mandy for Mayor

According to the Daily Red Rag, Lord Mandelson wants to stand as a candidate in the next London mayoral election. If true, this is the best news that Boris Johnson has had for ages.

If the Inebriated Newt, Ken Livingstone, decided to run again, there are just enough deluded souls to the North and East of London to hand him a victory; but apart from a few of the Notting Hill set, I can't see anyone in London voting for Lord Mandy of Pandy.

Then again, if I was Bojo, I would be happy to hand back the shambles that will be the 2012 Olympics to the administration that so wanted it in the first place.

Christmas is bad for your wealth

At least it is if you are one of the poor saps who contribute tax to the funding of the NHS. One of the administrative departments of the NHS, based in Southwark, has spent £2,500 on a Christmas tree to decorate its office.

This is wrong in so many ways that it is difficult to know where to start, but I will. Firstly, why is a manager given the authority to sign-off such a large purchase on what is basically a frivolity? Is the NHS so efficient and awash with resources that this sum of money can be afforded in preference to front-line services for patients? I think we know the answer to that one.

Next, how do you go about procuring a Christmas tree that costs £2,500? Allowing for the fact that Southwark is in London and therefore prices are higher than elsewhere in the UK, a decent-sized tree should not cost more than £100, and even that is outrageous. The tree is reported as “dressed”, so it must come with tinsel, baubles and lights, but even the most ardent spendaholic would struggle to waste more than a few hundred quid on decorations. So that leaves a balance of about £2,000 to deliver and set up the tree, which means someone is trousering a nice little earner.

But if this is a symptom of the spending patterns within the NHS, where Christmas decorations are bought for a minimum of 5-times their actual value, what does it say about the rest of the spending within the NHS? At a time when companies and households are trying to spend less, and when even the presiding party has woken up to the fact that the civil service might be a tad corpulent, it’s time for a full audit of the procurement process within the health department.

The NHS spends about £8bn per year on drugs: maybe that should be nearer £2bn? What about all the medical equipment? Then there are the IT systems, of which at least £12bn has been wasted on a national system for patient records. The total NHS budget is about £100bn, or should it be £20bn?

The Tory party has said that it will “ring fence” the NHS budget if it wins next year’s election. This cannot be justified in an economy where there is a £200bn budget deficit. If the NHS is wasting thousands on Christmas trees, how much is it wasting on core services? And how much are the other departments wasting? There is plenty of scope for reducing the deficit quickly, as long as there is political will to do so and cooperation from the civil service.

The next government needs to move on from Labour’s “think the unthinkable" and actually “do the undoable” – reduce the size and cost of government, whilst delivering better services.

Boilers, Broadband and Bingo

Alistair Darling’s pre-budget report did little for relations between himself and Gordon Brown, but I’m sure his eyebrows will lose no sleep over that. Brown wasn’t exactly friendly with his former boss. Tensions between Prime Ministers and Chancellors are nothing new. Although in this case, when is someone going to point out that there is a common denominator: Blair and Brown don’t get on and run the country into the ground; Brown and Darling don’t get on and just keep on digging us deeper.

But Darling’s PBR did wonders for the Conservatives’ chances of being elected in 2010. Not only did the Chancellor fail to tackle public debt, but he also saddled most taxpayers with tax rises in the form of additional National Insurance payments. Darling should do the honourable thing and cross the floor of the Commons and sit with his natural party, the Tories. Not only has he helped them win the election, but his public school background will sit well with their breeding. At least that is probably what Gordon Brown is thinking, a man who was disabled at his local school, but thinks this is preferable to having your policies tainted by a private school upbringing.

And the winners out of last week’s mini budget are those wanting to scrap their old boiler, rural communities without broadband and those with a disposition towards fat ladies and little ducks.

Introducing boiler scrappage is a curious ploy, but he can dress it up as a green initiative whilst actually targeting the low-paid and pensioners; the reduction in bingo duty is obviously aimed at the Jeremy Kyle-watching layabouts who cannot get enough of this government’s handouts. And broadband is touted by Lord Mandy of Pandy as an essential utility, akin to water and electricity. It has also been described as a “human right”.

So it’s a human right to watch monkeys pull peanuts out of their bums? Or to announce on Twitter that it is cold/sunny/wet or what you had for breakfast? And the last time I looked, provision of broadband in this country was the responsibility of private companies. I resent having £6 taken out of my pocket each year to help BT and other companies to improve the nation’s broadband infrastructure. Darling appears to have forgotten that BT is no longer part of the civil service.

I commend this budget to the workshy, infirm and impressionable males wanting free porn. And please vote for me.

War, what is it good for?

If the government is to be believed, they and us are currently waging many wars: there is the war on terror, which is physically costing lives in Iraq and Afghanistan; there is a war on benefits cheats, which is failing, as the number of people watching Jeremy Kyle increases every year; there is a war on drugs, which is obviously doing really well, too, judging by the number of people who go to the NHS with heroin addiction and end up with methadone dependence instead.

And the latest war that Gordon “Superman” Brown is fighting is against climate change. You would have thought that with his previous form with starting wars he can’t finish or win, he would know better than to take on nature. But the PM does not let little things such as impossibility, implausibility or lack of ability get in his way. Or the issue that the “science” behind climate change is not exactly rock solid.

The publication of emails from the University of East Anglia suggested that “scientists” were prepared to interpret their results in a manner that strengthened their argument for man-made climate change. There was a piece on the BBC news last night where a very large bar graph was shown, indicating the rise in global temperatures, but if you looked at the scale of the graph, the actual rises over the past two decades were about 0.1 degrees every 10 years. There are articles in the press every day about climate change that are littered with words such as “if”, “would”, “could” and “may”. I like to call them “green passive conditionals” – GPCs.

I doubt very much that there is a global conspiracy to propel climate change into the limelight and blame it all on overpopulation, meat eaters, flying, Land Rovers and cows. But it does seem that way sometimes. And I wouldn’t mind – quite so much – if there was any credible science behind the claims of the proponents of climate change. And by credible, I mean the empirically measurable, cause and effect kind of science that keeps buildings upright, aircraft in the air and that ensures 1+1 will always equal 2.

And talking of aircraft, the government yesterday gave the “green” light (forgive the unintended pun) on the third runway at Heathrow. Even though having more aircraft over London will generate more CO2, this will not matter as long as those aircraft are cleaner and there is a high-speed rail infrastructure to take passengers to destinations that normally require short-haul flights. So that’s great, the project is good for the planet.

Er… hang on, rewind. Notice how a couple of those green passive conditionals slipped into the government’s report? “As long as the aircraft are cleaner” – that stipulation will require all of the airlines using London’s airports to completely re-engineer their fleets to use less fuel. This is not cheap: a basic Airbus A319 costs about £36m; the current model Boeing 747 is about £150m. And that’s before they are redesigned to run greener, a project that will not happen overnight. And before all the airlines agree to swap their existing fleets, or at least the engines, for greener models, which the government has next-to-no power to force the airlines to do. It also overlooks the not insignificant matter that most airlines are running at a loss these days: the last thing they need is to replace their planes to satisfy the conscience of the green lobby (40,000 of whom are quite happy to use aircraft to jolly it over to Copenhagen…)

There was also a second throwaway GPC in the government’s statement: “a network of high-speed rail lines connecting the UK’s major cities”. Not only do we have a gratuitous misuse of statistics to justify an airport runway, but we also have the repeated announcement of Lord Adonis’ #1 Christmas present: a high speed train set. This is at least the 3rd time it has been announced this year. But not 1 inch of track has been laid. There has also been no planning as to where the track will go and which cities it will connect. It is a pure vanity project on behalf of Lord A, fuelled by vapour and propelled by steam. As I am oft to quote, it took eleven years to lay the 67 miles of railway between London and Dover for the Channel Tunnel High Speed Link. At that rate, it will take about 22 years to connect London to Birmingham, another 13 or so to get to Manchester and the same amount again – thirty-plus years – to get to Edinburgh. And that’s before they think about linking North-East to Newcastle or West to Bristol and Cardiff. The government thinks that by talking about something, it will magically happen. This is government by Harry Potter spells.

But not wishing to duck the issue of climate change completely, are there solutions that are less onerous than forcing us to kill Daisy the cow, exterminate every second-born child or give up our foreign holidays and cars?

Yes, and it’s called geoengineering. This is the appliance of science (remember that?) to combat a perceived threat from the climate, regardless of its cause. There are simple measures, such as planting trees and reflecting heat from roofs. There are also some Star Wars-y ideas that involve pumping sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere to cool the planet, or building machines capable of generating clouds from sea water, which again cool the air. These schemes are not cheap, but they do represent a return on the investment that the government is asking us to make in the name of green taxes. What would you rather see from your fuel duty? A waste of our money that is used to bail out banks, create quangos and provide civil servants with cushy pensions? Or, a machine that is capable of taking the waste products from mining and pump them into the air to cool the planet?
Geoengineering in itself is not the cure for climate change. But to use a GPC: what if climate change is not man made and cutting down on burgers, holidays and journeys to work does not cool the planet? Shouldn’t there be a Plan B? By all means let the climate change scientists beaver away at their models and predictions, but at the same time, let’s get some smart people like CERN and Intellectual Ventures to use some of those tax pounds, euros and dollars to investigate alternatives to disrupting the economic, social and labour fabric of society.

The Westminster Shuffle

According to The Times, Gordon Brown has been approached by Lord Mandy of Pandy, pressing him to reshuffle the government so that Mandelson can get an early Christmas present of a new ministry. If it goes ahead, less than 3 months after the last rearrangement of the Titanic's deckchairs, then it is time for us to take to the streets and demand an end to this government.

There will be no benefit to the electorate in allowing this washed-up bunch of fraudsters a last chance to play at being Foreign Secretary, Deputy PM or Assistant to the Privy Seal.

In case the Prime Minister hadn't noticed, this country is on its knees: £200bn of debt; £900bn of unfinanced civil service pensions; rising youth unemployment; rising inflation; unwinnable wars causing daily death tolls.

This is not the time to be indulging in vanity to permit a few politicians the chance to run the "department of their dreams". If any one of the geniuses currently in charge of a government department would have done a better job elsewhere, the PM should have had the foresight and intelligence to have appointed them a long time ago.

The election is over, can we please just get on and vote?

Yesterday’s parade of ermine and tiaras at Westminster (and that was just Peter Mandelson), highlighted that we have a dead government walking. Or lumbering towards an inevitable defeat. Most of the announcements were re-wordings of previous policies that still haven’t been implemented, despite 12 years of Labour promises and guarantees.

There was no mention of cleaning up the expenses system and parliament in general, at least not until the government was forced into a U-turn this morning by saying that this will now become a priority. There was no mention of how to pay for the new flagship elderly care bill – maybe OAPs will be shipped en masse to Spain to retire? There was no mention of how to reduce a £200bn budget deficit or how to finance an estimated £900bn of civil service pensions.

Six months is a long time in politics. But precious little will get done in SW1. If reports are to be believed there are between 33 and 71 actual days of debating between now and the end of May. That is next to no time to tackle major problems such as elderly care, the NHS or education. But it is plenty of time to implement a new expenses system and prosecute those who tried to buy duck houses and free porn from our hard-earned tax. And that would give us a clean system going into the election.

I would wager that most people intending to vote next May have made up their mind. There is little Labour can do to convince any sane person to give them another chance. The next six months are going to be wasted in Westminster because the government is tirelessly hanging on to their right to govern for the maximum 5 years. It’s a shame Her Maj (the real one, not Peter Mandelson) didn’t deviate from the script yesterday and announce that in the interests of her people, she was dissolving parliament forthwith and we could all have a new government for Christmas.

There are going to be six month’s of sniping, back-biting and murky revelations (and that’s just about Peter Mandelson). Can we please just draw a line under the tawdry mess and get the voting over with? It will save time and money that could be put to better use in sorting out the ruinous state that the country is in.

Stop the expenses scandal, I want to get off!

How many reports on expenses does it take to change the attitudes of MPs? We (the taxpayers) have paid KPMG millions to produce one report; Sir Christopher Kelly is now spending a few million more to digest that and produce another one.

One of the recommendations from Kelly’s report will be the setting up of a quango to oversee MPs expense claims – the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority. (You see what’s happening there? Not content with being caught with their hands in the till – or pants around their ankles in Mr Jacqui Smith’s case – they are creating yet more jobs for civil servants and cronies). But it won’t be independent, as the people working there will be appointed by the MPs themselves and you can bet that they will be ‘influenced’ to water down the proposals from KPMG and Kelly. The quango will also not start its work until after May 2010 and most of Kelly’s proposals will not take effect for 5 years, in order to give MPs time to adjust.

Time to adjust?! When any normal company implements a new policy, it usually happens within a few months and the employees get little say in the matter. MPs and unionised firms appear to be the exception, where toys are ejected from prams and the public is inconvenienced whilst ‘workers’ and employers decide who is going to back down first.

When are MPs going to accept that they are no more special than the thousands of people who travel for business every week and give up their plasma tellies and subsidised housing?

- Hotel or rented flats reimbursed at cost (less than £100 per night)
- Meals reimbursed at cost, limited to £50 per day
- No claims for those living within 50 miles of Westminster
- Travel to be via cheapest option from constituency, not a phantom home
- Porn and bath plugs not allowable

There, that didn't take £6m to work out, did it?

Santa Claus is coming to town

…in the shape of Alistair Darling and the town is the City of London.

Alistair Darling is going to give the banks an early Christmas present to the tune of £30bn of additional funding to see them through this difficult time of year. Bankers not knowing where their next magnum of Krug, holiday to the Maldives or deposit on a bolt hole in Cornwall will come from, can sleep restfully in the knowledge that the 28m other tax payers will be providing for them this yuletide.

It is obvious that Darling and Brown are clutching at straws and are desperate not to be the last major economy to be mired in recession, especially as we are now 6 months from deciding which UK party will have the right to implement Brussels' edicts for the next 5 years.
The Chancellor would be better off writing a cheque for £1000 for every taxpayer, which equates to roughly £30bn. That way we would either spend the money, in which case retailers benefit through increased sales, as does the government through VAT income; or we would save the money, in which case the banks get the money anyway.