Under Labour, 900,000 more people are in deep poverty compared to 1997 and the gap in life expectancy is now the highest since the Victorian age. A person on £100 a week takes home just 6p for every additional pound earned. Government borrowing will burden generations.
The EU will be limiting the number of pesticides available to farmers. Lower yields and higher prices are expected. No impact assessment was carried out for the proposals.
It’s as if the bureaucrats think regulation is free!
A taxi driver reminded me tonight of something my father, a carpenter, has long told me:
the worst kind of government for the ordinary working man is a Labour government.
Endless intervention, condescension, degrading regulation, a crumbling economy, ineffective legislation and inefficient management of the public services: these are the hallmarks of Labour’s self-serving big state. “Progressive” politicians may mean well, but their approach just doesn’t work. Yes, a social safety net; yes, free education and healthcare; but not this endless, painful tinkering with society in pursuit of “progress”.
What most people want is to be left alone to make their own way, to be protected from criminals and to rely on a safety net if they fall on hard times. The left “progressives” are failing on every count.
The government is getting it all wrong and the saga is just beginning.
I notice that chapter 11 of Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom” is introduced with the following quote from E H Carr:
It is significant that the nationalisation of thought has proceeded everywhere pari passu with the nationalisation of industry.
Far too early for that connection though, surely?
According to the BBC:
Fast-food giant McDonald’s has become one of the first firms to offer its own nationally recognised qualifications. It will offer a “basic shift manager” course, training staff in skills such as human resources and marketing.
The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority said the company had been approved to develop courses up to the equivalent of A-level standard.
The QCA will also allow Network Rail and Flybe to award qualifications based on their workplace training schemes.
So, now the role of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority is to rubber-stamp bespoke corporate training?
Before we go much further into changing education, we might do well to define its purpose. Is it to produce good employees within the franchise system, or is it to set people free to appreciate our world and to make their own, independent, informed and sensible decisions?
Who gets to choose who goes down which path? What about “equality”? Will everyone ultimately be forced to sit for only narrow vocational qualifications? Where and what are the benefits?
Without apparent irony, HMRC offer both an update on the personal information lost and warn of fraudulent attempts to obtain personal information:
This front page has been up for a while.
In my seven years working with HMRC on and off, either providing services from a small company or representing software developers’ interests, it has been perfectly obvious that trivial technical tasks become time-consuming and expensive once they have been put to HMRC’s prime contractor.
I have been on conference calls, providing a parallel service to the prime contractor, where they quoted months and many thousands of pounds for changes I had already implemented for a few thousand, had tested and could have deployed in a few seconds. We ran rings around them and my old colleagues still do.
There are some tremendously dedicated, hard-working people at HMRC, but the system fails to give them the skills, tools or contractual flexibility they need to achieve simple tasks quickly at low cost. Our money is being wasted hand over fist and, under the current circumstances, the alternative is the risk of fiascos like this massive loss of unprotected, undisguised data.
And they are not well-organised these days either…
It struck me as I woke – ! – how hopeless is the FSA’s regulation of the mortgage lending industry? Now, every time you buy something which could potentially involve credit, whether or not you take it, you have to listen to, or read, some pointless blurb about that firm’s regulation by the FSA. It just bores everyone.
On the other hand, in a market that has been pumped by interested parties, in which many economists agree there should already have been a crash, in which the FSA has warned participants must prepare themselves to survive a 40% drop in prices, mortgage lending firms can get away with offering 5 or 7 times salary on a mortgage that lasts 40 years and may involve profit sharing on the capital appreciation. When did that become a good idea?
I would like to believe the FSA is constrained by the law, and that otherwise they would act to impose limits on mortgage lending to protect people from greedy and foolish lending. If that were the case, we could blame Labour and consistency would be satisfied.
It’ll end in tears.
