Month: June 2012

Let’s Fly

Samuel Hooper2 Comments

Apparently the Conservative-led government can no longer be relied upon to do anything that doesn’t make me want to bang my head repeatedly against a brick wall in open-mouthed astonishment at their zesty blend of rank incompetence and lack of principle, so it was particularly refreshing today to read this piece in The Telegraph, reporting that the Taxpayers’ Alliance is renewing their call for an abolishment of air passenger duty (the ludicrously huge tax on passenger air travel in the UK).

The Telegraph reports:

The pressure group – which was formed in 2004 and supports lower taxes for UK residents – has given its backing to the Fair Tax on Flying campaign, which is urging the Government to reduce or abolish APD.

“Britain’s punitive taxes on flights, now the highest in the world, are an incredible burden on families taking a well-earned break,” said Emma Boon, campaign director at the Taxpayers’ Alliance. “Jobs are also at stake as tourists and business travellers choose a destination to visit or invest where they won’t get ripped off. APD should really be abolished, but the very least politicians can do is cut this tax to a fairer level.”

Absolutely. Air Passenger Duty is just another typically, depressingly British example of the government picking an arbitrary thing to fixate upon, and gradually cranking up the tax in each successive Budget to help fund whatever addle-headed, moronic scheme happens to be flavour of the month at that particular time. It penalises business travellers, leisure travellers, people trying to visit far-flung family, people in long distance relationships and  anyone else whose only crime is their need to transit through one of Britain’s dilapidated airports.

The article goes on to explain:

APD is paid by all travellers departing from a UK airport. Following the most recent rise in the tax, an eight per cent hike made in April, a family of four travelling to Europe must pay £52 in APD, while those flying farther afield are hit even harder. The cost of APD for a family of four flying to the United States or Egypt, for example, is £260; for those travelling to the Caribbean or South Africa, it is £324; and a family visiting Argentina or Australia must pay £368.

Those figures are doubled for those flying in premium-economy, business- or first-class cabins.

That level of taxation is simply not funny, in fact it is intolerably ridiculous, and ought not to be allowed to remain under a Conservative government. Staggeringly, in 2005 this tax was only £5 per person for a European flight and £20 for a longer distance flight. A 360% rise in any tax over just seven years is quite ridiculous, and this one is proving to be a real dampener on the economy at a time when we need to be keeping business and family costs down the most. It’s typical of this rudderless, unprincipled government that yet further rises are also planned this year.

I strongly encourage everyone to sign the petition to scrap Air Passenger Duty at this website.

George Osborne’s Last Straw vs My Back

Samuel Hooper2 Comments

George Osborne is receiving a lot of stick for his last-minute decision to postpone the planned 3p/litre increase in fuel tax left intact in his most recent, politically disastrous budget. Most recently he has been accused of cowardice for sending an unprepared junior minister – Economic Secretary Chloe Smith – to defend the government’s short notice U-turn on the BBC’s flagship ‘Newsnight’ programme.

Reports The Telegraph:

Chloe Smith last night strugged to answer questions about the decision to postpone the 3p rise in petrol duty.

After she refused to say when she found out about it or how it will be funded, the Economic Secretary was accused of being “incompetent” by Jeremy Paxman, the BBC’s Newsnight interviewer.

Mr Paxman also asked her whether she ever woke up and thought: “My God, what am I going to be told today?”

I think that we can now safely add political incompetence to the list of charges being levelled against Mr. Osborne in the wake of this all-too-avoidable mess up.

This is supposed to be a Conservative-led, tax-cutting government. It was bad enough that the 3p/litre increase in fuel duty was allowed to remain in George Osborne’s most recent budget in the first place, but the fact that it’s postponement was only announced yesterday, and that senior ministers had no prior notice whatsoever is an almost unforgivable act of political stupidity, for which David Cameron was predictably savaged during Prime Minister’s Questions today.

But more concerning to me even than the incompetent way that this – and almost every single other political decision of any significance recently – has been handled by the government is the fact that the Conservatives are boasting about their policy U-turn and rather petulantly demanding praise for their actions.

Take this typical tweet from Robert Halfon MP:

“In Welsh questions said to Minister that stoppage of August fuel tax rise means £16 million injected into Welsh economy”

I despair, I really do. I thought that it was only in the dystopian, nightmarish land that was Gordon Brown’s Britain that cancelling a planned tax increase could be said in any way to be injecting cash into the economy. How is making the decision to not do something monumentally stupid and increase a key tax that would punish many already-squeezed households in any way an injection of cash into the economy? At best it could very charitably be called a preservation of the status quo, or the maintenance of steady-state, though given the economic uncertainty created by arbitrary and last-minute changes of key fiscal policy such as this, even that assessment is doubtful.

This is almost as bad as the risible time when a desperate Gordon Brown and Peter Mandelson tried to claim that the Conservatives’ election manifesto promise to cancel the planned increase in employers’ National Insurance tax contributions would “take millions of pounds out of the economy”, as though the state were the ‘real economy’ and not the other way around.

I’m done with all this, I really am. I actively campaigned for the Conservative Party at the last general election in 2010. I delivered leaflets, probably annoyed my friends on Facebook and Twitter with my political posts, and talked to countless people on the high street. And for my efforts, and those of all the many people who did far more than me to try to end Labour’s grip on power in this country, all we get is a government with a broken political radar, one which betrays core conservative principles and apparently one which pouts and expects praise and candy for doing precisely the things that it should be doing without any outside pressure from their political base, such as not raising taxes on squeezed households during a recession.

Michael Gove for PM, as soon as possible. Anyone else with me?

Weak Arguments For A Weak Cause

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The Daily Telegraph reports that Argentine president Cristina Kirchner has warned her compatriot Olympic athletes that they should avoid doing “something stupid” to publicise their country’s claim to the Falkland Islands during the upcoming games:

“They (British) are waiting for us to do something stupid, but we’re not stupid,” Fernandez said.

An Argentine politiican had suggested that athletes wear a logo on their Olympic uniforms that would carry the message “Las Malvinas son Argentinas” (The Falklands are Argentine). The proposal failed to gain traction.

Because, of course, the right time to do something stupid to publicise your country’s sovereignty claims is during meetings of the G20 and in chest-thumpingly jingoistic television commercials.

Time for a certain country – or at least her head of state – to grow up a little and focus more on pressing domestic concerns rather than seeking to open negotiations about the sovereignty of a territory that has no desire to come under their rule, perhaps.

Come Dine With Me, Says Obama

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I wrote yesterday partly about cults of personality, with relation to some of Vladimir Putin’s recent shenanigans. I thought no more of it until I saw this tweet from President Obama’s Twitter feed:

This gushing quote led to this article from the Obama-Biden campaign website, in which a firefighter known only as “Jim” gushes about his excitement at winning a competition to have dinner with the president, and about how “normal” a guy Obama is. Some exerpts:

After walking to the restaurant, says Jim, “There was a lot of excitement. I felt like we were in the middle of the universe. Think about it: You’re in this restaurant, and you know nobody is coming in, you’re not going anywhere, there’s a lot of protection, and it’s for one guy who’s coming to have a meal with you. It’s a wild feeling. Our nerves were still kicking in—but I kept telling everyone, ‘It’s a good nervous.’ I wasn’t so much worried about what I would say to him, because I’ve watched him over the last few months and I knew deep down inside he was going to be a normal guy.”

And this:

“But then, he caught me off guard because he started asking me about being a firefighter! I wanted to know so much about him, but he was such a normal guy who just wanted to have a conversation. He turned to me and said, ‘You’re a firefighter, right? How long have you known you wanted to do that?’ I told him I have a picture of me as a little boy wanting to be a firefighter, and he said ‘Oh, so you’re one of those guys!’ He wanted to know all kinds of things, like how many fires I go into, how many guys do we have at your station, and I thought ‘Here’s the President of the United States, and he’s asking me about my job—this is just so cool.’ He really wanted to know!”

And finally this:

“Thankfully, he was exactly the way I imagined he would be. Like I said, I’ve been watching him, and he just seems so normal, and that’s exactly what he was. I wish I could have sat there for four hours and talked to him—he was just a good guy, normal. You’d never guess you were sitting there with the President.”

I’m pretty sure that he isn’t that normal (average Joe doesn’t typically ascend to the highest office in the land) and that I would guess that I was sitting there with the president if I had been in Jim’s place.

Now maybe I got out of bed on the wrong side today, and I certainly don’t want to pour any scorn on Jim the Firefighter’s evident joy and excitement to have met the president, I think that it is a wonderful thing. But given the fact that political opponents and a lot of more-or-less impartial observers tend to recoil a little at Obama’s tendency to make things about himself, about his taking credit where credit should perhaps be shared, his frequent use of the word “I” in speeches and so on, I’m wondering how wise it is to set up a competition to have dinner with the president, and then publish glowing testimonials from the winners in which they reveal how spellbound they were by his brilliance and normal guy charm.

So is this just a harmless way of re-enthusing the base about Obama’s likeability (given the fact that few people other than committed supporters are likely to see it), or is it part of a faux-pas which plays into a Republican narrative about the president’s ego and supposed cult of personality? I’m not quite sure myself, but if I were Obama’s campaign manager I might look to tone down this particular avenue of promotion. Neither he or Romney are ever likely to be seen as the guy you want to have a beer with (and a good thing too – I would want the leader of the most powerful country in the world to perhaps be a bit too busy and intelligent to want to entertain me over a pint), and I see little point in trying to change perceptions on this front.

Not that it is anywhere near as bad as similar online efforts in less fortunate countries, such as Vladimir Putin’s website for children, discussed in this old article from BBC News online:

On this new website, you can visit Mr Putin’s office – there you’ll find a virtual Vladimir sitting with his back to you – click the cup of tea on his desk, and he’ll answer some important questions.

No, not things like “Does democracy in Russia have a future?” or “When will the conflict in Chechnya finally end?”

Questions like these:

“Are you allowed to touch the President with your hands?” The answer – “no”.

Or “Who’s more important, the President or your mother?” Answer – “your mother”.

And “What should you do if you love the president too much?” Answer – “just calm down.”

Mind you, for those Russian schoolchildren who may already love their president a little “too much”, this site is bound to be a hit.

I think the “Come Dine With Obama” promotion is a little tacky, and that it will ultimately be a futile attempt to make the president seem more in touch with the common man, but at least it’s not like this Kremlin scheme, much as some on the right would like us to believe that Obama is attempting to recreate Soviet Russia in Washington DC.

On a lighter note, I was also reminded of this rather more humorous riff on the same subject from The Onion, this time about former president George W. Bush.