Some political views

In my many years I have come to a conclusion that one useless man is a shame, two is a law firm and three or more is a government.
John Adams
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of government…..... But then I repeat myself.
Mark Twain

A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.
George Bernard Shaw
Foreign aid might be defined as a transfer of money from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries.
Douglas Casey, Classmate of Bill Clinton at Georgetown University
I contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.
Winston Churchill
Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.
P.J. O'Rourke, Civil Libertarian

Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you!
Pericles (430 B.C.)
If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it's free!
P.J. O'Rourke

If you don't read the newspaper you are uninformed, if you do read the newspaper you are misinformed.
Mark Twain
In general, the art of government consists of taking as much money as possible from one party of the citizens to give to the other.
Voltaire (1764)
Talk is cheap………...except when government does it.
Anonymous
The only difference between a tax man and a taxidermist is that the taxidermist leaves the skin.
Mark Twain
We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office.
Aesop

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Industry - for discussion at COPOV meeting

British Industry a personal view on the decline of British Industry.

                    This paper was prepared by  Cllr Mr Allan Glass     

                                 For presentation to   C.O.P.O.V.   

Preface.

Looking back to the Industrial revolution and on through Victorian times Britain has flourished at times when industry was at its strongest.   Britain once led the world in industrial and manufacturing methods and machinery developments, this brought great prosperity and meaningful employment to the workforce.    Commerce banking and general trade has at times made Britain although small in land mass a prosperous country and enabled the spread of industry throughout the commonwealth and the world.

Inventions and expertise are the strength of the industrial heritage Britain has developed.

Manufacturing industry

Manufacturing industry requires highly skilled and trained workers as well as operators of machines.   The UK used to have most industries from ship building to electronics but recently it has been transferred to foreign countries due to industrial costs and taxes. 

The UK could regain its position within world industry with the right conditions and political outlook.    We have the engineers and designers as clearly displayed by the fact that most formula one racing teams are based in the UK.     Factories take a lot of space therefore the capitol cost of setting up a factory would make the UK not cost effective but the UK could be the development area for products made where manufacturing is less expensive.

Investment in industry should be encouraged as it could bring employment and financial reward.   

During my career I have worked in several types of engineering business improving quality and throughput and this took me around the world.  One thing I noted was in developing countries such as India all types of qualification and experience are appreciated and rewarded.   In Germany where industry is still profitable to work as an engineer the correct qualifications are required before you can even call yourself an engineer.        In the UK we say we will call an engineer to fix our washing machine, it is this lack of understanding of the training and experience required to earn the title engineer that is one reason why our universities have so few engineers in training. 

To re-develop our industry we need leader’s free thinkers and investors all to understand what the manufacturing industry entails.  Our industries could be very high tech with the right backing and promotion.

Gone are the dark satanic mills of old our industry but we should use the resources we have in abundance and that is our younger generation of students and industrialists.

Current industrial development within the UK.

In recent years the UK has been used as a resource by several foreign investors taking over ailing companies and redeveloping them to use British respected company names like Rolls Royce, Bently, Jaguar and Land Rover to sell products made in the UK but by companies with foreign owners.    Nissan and Honda have set up companies from green fields and used the UK work force skills to make high quality cars but again the ownership and therefore the profit has been foreign. 

From Southampton near where I live UK built cars are shipped all over the world some even to within the EU this trading on the UK reputation for quality and recently good industrial relations is a resource that UK investors should be taking advantage of.

Hope for the future

One company that had all but closed, Triumph Motor Cycles were underfunded in the late 50,s and early 60,s their products were left behind as obsolete and old fashioned with poor reliability.  Triumph was purchased by a UK investor and the company has been reinvigorated with traditional models brought up to date and new models all of high quality and the company is one of the most rapidly growing motor cycle companies in the world.

With this brief and very personal statement the question I would like answered by the UK now is where do we go from here.

Allan Glass

Lord Tebbit gets it right on Party membership

In an article for Brietbart Ben Harris-Quinney wrote on March 25th:

The Bow Group, the UK's oldest conservative think-tank, hosted a “State of the Party” lecture last week, delivered by Lord Tebbit. The Thatcher-era cabinet minister expressed a desire to see a change of leadership so we can feel like conservatives again and feel like the Prime Minister is “a son of Thatcher and not a son of Tony Blair”. But he felt there was a more important consideration; the extent to which a future leader is willing to enfranchise the party membership:

“We need a leadership with an attachment to the grassroots, and one that spends less time on focus groups and opinion polls and much more establishing a network of constituency associations and agents to rebuild the membership.

"When eventually it comes to choosing the next leader, it’s not about whether we go left or right, but whether we will be a top down, narrowly focused party run by an elite, or a bottom up party run by like-minded, anti-statist minded people.”

After a disastrous decade of party membership, another 10 years of the same would ensure that the Conservative Party ceases to exist. An ideological conservative won’t be enough. Tories also need a leader who is willing to drive freedom and democracy within the Conservative Party for the long term, pushing power down and out through local Tory branches, and empowering and attracting members.

COPOV FORUM

Our next Forum will be on 12th April.   See "Events" in right hand column for details.

Tax avoidance - can we afford it? updated 31 Mar 2014

At the last COPOV Forum there was a discussion about tax avoidance.   The discussion was about legal tax avoidance and relied on examples from Richard Brooks book "The Great Tax Robbery".   The big question is "Is it fair?"   Over the next few weeks we will set out some examples and why nothing is being done about it.   Consider the following:

(1) Prosecutions for evasion of direct taxes (like income tax) run at just thirty per year even though the offence is estimated by HMRC to cost around £5.5 billion annually.
(2) Following its takeover by a private equity group in 2007 Boot's tax payments halved as the new owners loaded the company up with billions of pounds of debt on which it now makes tax deductible payments.   As a result, out of operating profits of £1 billion in 2010/11, the now Swiss-controlled group paid just £59 million in tax.
(3) Barclays has over 300 tax haven subsidiary companies, 181 of them in the Cayman Islands. 
(4) In 5 years from 2006 the Revenue put just eight corporation tax schemes - all of which took place before the end of 2003 - before the tax tribunal that is the first step in the legal process.
(5) Foreign football players - as "non-doms" they can keep their image rights offshore in a tax haven company entirely untaxed.  Share schemes for bonuses are more valuable to non-dom players who can leave them offshore.   The same net wage for a foreign player thus costs a club far less than it does a native one.   So for the same total cost the club can get a better overseas player.   This goes some way to explaining why the Premier League had just 11 non-British or Irish players in 1992 but by 2007 it had 250.
(6) In 2006 accountants Grant Thornton estimated that in the previous year Britain's fifty-four billionaires, mostly non-doms, paid tax of £15 million on combined fortunes of £126 billion.
(7) By 2010 penalties for fraudulent or negligent understatements of income charged on all 770 companies dealt with by the Revenue's Large Business Service had dropped to £0.4 million, or around 0.01% of the tax they had underdeclared on their tax returns.
(8) Public Buildings and Territory of Ownership
      HMRC Tax Offices            Bermuda
      HM Treasury                     Jersey
      Home Office                      Guernsey
      Ministry of Defence            Guernsey
(9) Research suggests that developing countries lose at least $50 billion per year and perhaps as much as $280 billion in corporate profit sharing (i.e. avoidance) and evasion by individuals. Total worldwide annual aid to developing countries is around $100 billion.

Labour or Conservative

One of my friends told me the following:

Recently, while I was working in the flower beds in my front garden, my neighbours stopped to chat as they returned home from walking their dog.
During our friendly conversation I asked their little girl what she wanted to be when she grew up. She said she wanted to be Prime Minister someday.

Both of her parents, Labour Party members, were standing there, so I asked her, "If you were Prime Minister what would be the first thing you would do?"

She replied... "I'd give food and houses to all the homeless people."

Her parents beamed with pride!

"Wow...what a worthy goal!" I said. "But you don't have to wait until you're Prime Minister to do that!" I told her.

"What do you mean?" she asked.

So I told her, "You can come over to my house and mow the lawn, pull out the weeds, and trim my hedge,

and I'll pay you £50. Then you can go over to the shop, where the homeless guy hangs out,

and you can give him the £50 to use toward food and a new house."

She thought that over for a few seconds, then she looked me straight in the eye and asked,

"Why doesn't the homeless guy come over and do the work, and you can just pay him the £50?"

I said, "Welcome to the Conservative Party."

Her parents aren't speaking to me anymore

Local Democracy?

The following article appeared in Private Eye last week.

"A surreal lesson in how democracy works - or doesn't - from Herefordshire.

County councillors were unanimous earlier this month in reversing a cut imposed by the council's cabinet in the provision of free school buses for hundreds of children across the county.   Even the cabinet members voted against their earlier decision.   Yet days later the council announced: "This... does not change the policy position for home to school transport set by cabinet in December, which will take effect in September 2014."

Officers told gobsmacked councillors the cuts would go ahead without any further reference to them.   They explained that under local government legislation the decision of the cabinet, once made could not be un-done."

Even in parliament members can overturn a decision of the cabinet.   Why can't councils?

Thirsk and Malton selection update

Martin Vander Weyer is a member of the Thirsk and Malton Constituency Association.   In the article printed below he sets out the role of the Party's Regional Office.   What were they playing at?   Are they so incapable that they let this breech of the Party's constitution go through.   Questions need to be asked and answers given.

Martin Vander Weyer is business editor of The Spectator:

"How dirty were the tricks?   The chief allegation was that in 2012, Chairman Steveney (a former cavalry officer and Jockey Club official) expanded the association’s executive council to include representatives of electoral wards that did not have active Conservative branches.   The panel quoted a rule that ‘representation should be “from each Ward or Polling District branch” (not from each Ward or Polling District)’, and said the rule was ‘designed to prevent an unrepresentative “takeover” of an executive council’, a phrase much quoted after the leaked publication; but the panel did not suggest Steveney had attempted such a takeover.   It simply said he had misinterpreted the rules and must go through the restructuring exercise and -reselection vote a second time.

Steveney and his colleagues’ rebuttal, now also in the public domain, never received a response from party HQ.   It pointed out that the panel had ignored the role of regional officials who advised on the restructuring, and the fact that a senior party agent, Maurice Cook, had not called it out of order when challenged to do so at the AGM."

The members have spoken

In a ballot of the members of the Thirsk and Malton Conservative Association the result was a majority in favour of de-selecting Anne McIntosh as the Conservative candidate for the 2015 General Election.   The Constituency association  has 560 members and 88% of them voted.
Anne Mackintosh says this is a small cabal trying to get rid of her, but it does not look so small.   She has also said that she may fight the seat as an Independent.   Of course if she does so, against the official Conservative candidate she could find herself together with any Party members that support her, subject to disciplinary procedures of the Party leading to their expulsion from the Conservative Party
Thank heavens for the "wisdom of the crowd".