Hypocrite Hodge

One of the recurrent themes on this site is the exaggerated terminology and projected moral outrage (not to mention ‘grandstanding’) of politicians progressing their influence in the Westminster bubble, and possibly their earning capability when thrown out by the electorate.

High on Grumpy’s vomit list is Dame Margaret Hodge, who wins the award, if there was one, for high minded, bombastic self-righteousness. A constant topic for Ms Hodge has been organisations and individuals not paying a “fair share of tax”.

Of course no-one (including our good Dame) has any generally accepted or definitive definition for what a “fair share” is. It seems to be a deliberately opaque (and hence indefensible) measure based on firstly (a) paying the maximum amount of tax the regulations might allow, whilst ignoring government granted allowances, plus (b) paying an additional amount until there is no left wing objector (Owen Jones?) to the figure actually paid.

Grumpy admits to being a tax “avoider”, in that he uses ISA’s, pension funds and a few other things to avoid giving any more of his meagre income than he is obliged to the government. Is he paying his fair share ? He doesn’t know.

What he does know is that he pays the amount mandated by tax legislation and no more. This is the accepted principle as set out in 1936, when Lord Tomlin ruled that: “Every man is entitled, if he can, to order his affairs so that the tax attracted under the appropriate act is less than it otherwise would be. If he succeeds in ordering them so as to secure this result, then, however unappreciative the commissioners of Inland Revenue or his fellow taxpayers may be of his ingenuity, he cannot be compelled to pay an increased tax.”

This is exactly what Amazon, Google etc. do, which annoys Dame Margaret. They follow the law, as set out by politicians like Hodge. If there are ‘loopholes’, it is because of sloppy drafting of those laws. The answer is simple – politicians made the laws, these companies follow them, and if Dame Hodge doesn’t like this then she should get her own sort to change them, not ask the companies to somehow donate an undefined “fair share” or be pilloried. Politicians response to legislation they drew up having unforeseen aspects is to ‘name and shame’, rather than admit their drafting errors and fix them.

It would be entirely scurrilous of Grumpy to note that the highly moral Dame Margaret was a significant shareholder in a family business, the billion dollar company Stemcor , a private and secretive company based in a tax haven, which is now owned – wait for it – by a private equity fund. Billion dollar ? Tax haven ? Private equity? surely not the godly socialist Margaret ???

It is illustrative of Dame Margaret’s singularly repulsive hypocrisy to quote from Stemcor’s own web site

“The Stemcor Group may optimise its tax position to maximise shareholder value … ” *

Pass the sick bag ….

https://www.stemcor.com/terms-conditions/tax-strategy/

Indian water mystery

Grumpy is often surprised by the frequency of news reports which appear to contain contradictory elements.

Reliable sources indicate that mobile phone penetration in India has reached over 85%, being some 1.1 billion users. Now smartphones contain a numbers of elements called ‘rare earths’, which are (as their name implies) scarce, and are also expensive and difficult to extract. For some of these elements, unless better recovery can be achieved by re-cycling, shortages might become critical in less than a decade.

The contradictory report in question was an article published by CNN which said that India was ‘on the brink of crisis’ because of ‘extreme water shortage’, which was affecting 600 million people, amounting to some 46% of the population. It claimed that up to 200,000 people a year died as a result of shortage or contamination of water. Let’s assume that this report is correct, and hold that thought for a moment.

One fact needs to be made clear first; unlike rare earths, there is no shortage of water in the world as a compound – it covers 2/3 of the surface of the earth to a depth which can often be measured in kilometres. Furthermore, compared with just about every other compound extracted and used by man, it is very pure – for example, over 96% of seawater is plain H2O; it’s hard to think of any other industrial process which is as simple as extracting pure water from it.

So why is Grumpy puzzled by these figures ?

Shimla, one the cities highlighted by CNN with a picture of the populace carrying buckets, has a significantly greater average annual rainfall then the UK. Many other cities and parts of India have vastly more rainfall. Overall, India has an average rainfall of 1168mm per year and 80% of the total area at least 740mm.
Nearly all major cities lie on the banks of rivers (which for the avoidance of doubt, have water in them) where ipso facto the majority of the population lives.
However, since 85% of the populace have mobile phones, and 46% are suffering ‘extreme shortage’, then people must be dying of thirst whilst clutching a mobile in their hand. One must conclude that this is not a finance issue, since if someone can afford a mobile, then they should be able to afford water, if available.

So the CNN article is a best misleading. There is patently no shortage of the compound water either globally or in India; however, there is a shortage of easily accessible potable water arising from lack of infrastructure, economic governmental stupidity in commodity pricing, and lack of political will (and maybe pork barrel corruption) to address the issue. This is not how CNN portrayed it; the reality is any water shortage exists with the connivance of man, rather than being some state of nature.

This is not a technical challenge – you can distil water by boiling a kettle. India itself does not seem to be poor; it is a country which is the world’s sixth largest economy, has the world’s second largest military, has developed nuclear weapons and launched a satellite, and yet it allows 200,000 citizens to die each year of thirst or disease for lack of action on what surely should be one of the primary obligations of a government – providing potable water for its populace. The problem here is not resource, but politicians, and their unwillingness or incapability to solve (relatively simple) problems. It just takes will and money – which had they not spent on nuclear weapons, could have been directed to save the population from cholera.

As a footnote, dear taxpayer, the UK provided India with over £150m in ‘development aid’ in 2015, to a country with clearly distorted priorities and weak moral integrity.

Guilty by assumption

One law for males, another for females

From the writings of Justinian onwards the notion of an accused being innocent until proven guilty has been the bedrock of democratic civilisations. The situation relating to the appointment of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court in the US, in which he has been accused of sexual impropriety many years ago in his student days, seems to have spurred the #MeToo Harridans into ever more dangerous and irrational demands. Amazingly, CNN reported that a poll found that “eight in ten Americans say that victims of sexual harassment should be given the benefit of the doubt until proven otherwise”. This would be a reversal of the norms of justice which have stood for centuries.

Given the increasing list in Grumpy’s files of males who have been the victims of miscarriages of justice at the hands of females in the last 12 months alone (examples being Liam Allan, Isaac Itiary, and Conor Fitzgerald) this seems to widen the scope for injustice, given that police incompetence seems to bias cases against the accused from the outset. In the latter case of Fitzgerald, his accuser (who of course remained anonymous) deliberately set out to frame him, texting to a friend “I’m going to ruin his life, LOL” as punishment for breaking off a relationship. The plod even missed this clue (unbelievable!), so further help by an assumption of guilt would seem to weigh the odds too far.

Grumpy feels that the time honoured approach of innocent until proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt is essential for a civilised society.

Distorting Law – Stella Creasy

The whole #MeToo ‘movement’ has attracted the attention of female politicians in a number of countries as a useful bandwagon to gain visibility which may promote their position in the pecking order of governing elites. However, as cited elsewhere in a contemporaneous post, several of the resultant initiatives are beginning to threaten the fundament order of law.

UK MP Stella Creasy has dragooned Ministers to instigate a Law Commission review as to whether misogyny should be considered a hate crime. Misogyny is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as being “Dislike of, contempt for, or ingrained prejudice against women”.

Set aside that Creasy wishes to expose men who merely dislike women to the possibility of a prison sentence, it also exposes the inherent bias in a significant number of those of a feminist disposition. There is no ‘goose’ and ‘gander’ here – men are the enemy.

Grumpy would point Creasy and her colleagues to another word in the OED – ‘misandry’, defined in the same source as a mirror of misogyny; “Dislike of, contempt for, or ingrained prejudice against men”. This seems to have resonance with the approach of certain high profile females in the public eye.

The biased thinking of Creasy and her fellow travellers is that women should be free to act in a manner which, if emulated by a man, could send him to jail if directed to one of their own, whereas they wish a free hand to do exactly the same. Grumpy would contend that this displays Creasey’s own ingrained prejudice against men, and she thus is awarded the Harridan of the Week award from Grumpy.

Hypocrite Rawnsley

I have no fixed opinion about Andrew Rawnsley, a Guardian writer, other than that he works for the Guardian, which rather positions him on the political spectrum. He gets a mention here because he recently repeated (The Guardian 11.08.19) a canard which is recently popular amongst remoaners and Labour politicians; referring to BoJo he said that the UK was being “driven down this perilous highway by a prime minister installed without reference to the country “.

This is both duplicitous and hypocritical, as Rawnsley (a highly intelligent man) knows. It is duplicitous because he is perfectly aware that Prime Ministers are not in their position as a result of a popular vote (the ‘country’), but he and his ilk use the expression because it supports a meme that Bojo has no authority to set and progress executive policy. It is a deceit, but one that plays well to those are ignorant of, or chose to ignore, the workings of UK politics.

With the exception of referenda, the populace at large vote for a local representative of a political party which has published a manifesto to which they on balance can subscribe to, not for a Prime Minister. There is no such vote. However, there is a well defined mechanism for appointing the holder of this office, and BoJo was elected by a majority of party MPs and then members of the Party which he represents. He holds office by virtue of having succeeded in a time honoured due process.

It is also appallingly hypocritical because Grumpy does not recall voting for Gordon Brown to be PM; that is because he was installed because he went through exactly the same process that installed BoJo in that role. In fact, he was elected unopposed; indeed, no Labour PM has ever been elected by party members. Blair was elected by the very same process in 1994.

In positing that there is something undemocratic in Johnson being Prime Minister without “reference to the country” Rawnsley knows full well this is a deceit and grossly dishonest as a piece of political comment.

However, he is merely exercising the norm for his trade. Political commentators, pundits and interviewers have the luxury of being able to level unfettered criticism at politicians and their policies, without ever having, as politicians have, the responsibility and burden of delivery. One might well invoke the words of Stanley Baldwin – “power without responsibility – the prerogative of the harlot through the ages”.

Disgrace of Indian doctors in the NHS

Jeremy Hunt, who has conspicuously failed to deliver any of his albeit unsustainable promises during his tenure as Health Minister, has presided over a continuing disgrace perpetrated by governments of both parties over several years.

Linked to the wider assertions from both left wingers and commercial organisations (who wish to exploit cheaper overseas labour) that the UK will come to a halt unless the borders are flung open, the NHS continues to be reliant on foreign doctors to function, with Indian doctors making up by far the largest percentage.

This approach (driven – oddly – by MP’s seeking ‘multicultural’ credibility on the one hand and by companies seeking a profit on the other) is excused on the basis that there is a shortfall of home grown medics; this is indeed true, but this is entirely by governmental design. Governments have for years restricted and then capped the places available in English medical schools (only raising that cap by 1,500 in the last 3 years) to save money, in spite of having a surfeit of qualified applicants for domestic training places.

The simple explanation is that it is cheaper to spend a reported (August 2017) £100m to recruit doctors from Poland, Lithuania, Greece and above all India, rather than expand medical training in the UK.

This is hypocritical, appalling illogical, but above all disgracefully and unconscionably immoral. Does India have an excess of doctors? No, absolutely the reverse, India has one of the highest rates of infant mortality of any developed country and one of the lowest ratios of doctors to population. The fact is that the UK’s failure to address medical training here has directly resulted in loss of life in in a country where 600m people have no direct access to structured healthcare.

Labour MP Tulip Siddiq (a typical, privately educated, privileged champagne socialist if ever there was one) even said it was ‘disgraceful’ that the UK should try and increase the domestic supply at the expense of immigrant doctors, as proposed by Theresa May. No, Tulip (really ?), the disgrace is the government denying willing and qualified UK citizens the opportunity of become doctors whilst simultaneously poaching them from a country with a chronic shortage of same. It’s not moral.

British politicians of both major parties should hang their heads in shame that their collective unwillingness to address the fundamental funding issues of the NHS results in effectively exporting ill-health to India by raiding their vital scarce indigenous medical skills.

F1 and grid girls

Nice butt …

F1’s managing director, in response to one of the many packs of baying feminist harridans, announced the end of motor racing’s Formula 1 ‘grid girls’ in May 18, saying

“While the practice of employing grid girls has been a staple of Formula One Grands Prix for decades, we feel this custom does not resonate with our brand values and clearly is at odds with modern day societal norms.”

The is unadulterated piffle. ‘Societal norms’, far from shunning women in skimpy clothes, have resulted in a whole billion dollar industry based around selfies in underwear, ‘flaunting ample assets’ (see the ‘Daily Mail’), and carefully orchestrated ‘wardrobe malfunctions’ being depicted in social media and family newspapers.

Grunpy, who has oft voiced his frustration at this sort of nonsensical capitulation exhibited by F1, was pleased to see that the premier world motorbike race competition, MotoGP, decided to keep its ‘Paddock girls’, who hold up umbrellas over the riders on the grid, grace the winning ceremonies, and add charm to the otherwise oily rag proceedings.

Grunpy cannot help but feel that F1 was targeted because, as it has wide recognition as a sport, it hence brings maximum publicity to the self-seeking agendas of the objectors. Probably none of them have ever heard of MotoGP, and if they had, they would realise it wouldn’t get much PR coverage.

See an objection on moral grounds, and then look to see where the self-interest is, seems to be a good rule when assessing the objectivity and integrity of complainants who are not directly involved.

Brexit lies get more extreme

The Chartered Institute of Procurement and Supply ( www.cips.org ), a supposedly global body upholding high standards of excellence, issued a press statement on 26/09/2018 which stated

“One in ten UK businesses believe they would likely go bankrupt if goods were delayed by just 10 – 30 minutes at customs as a result of Brexit, according to new research from the Chartered Institute of Procurement & Supply (CIPS)”

This statement exemplifies the extreme lengths to which pro-remain organisations will go to promulgate information which is at best grossly misleading, or (likely in this case) to publish deliberate untruths aka lies. For clarity, CIPS made no qualification to the ‘UK businesses’ set, i.e. the reader is to assume ALL UK businesses.

What are we to make of the ‘headline here?’ There are 3.93m companies in the Companies House database. The estimates of those which are dormant vary, but even a conservative estimate would indicate that there are 1.8m incorporated businesses and some 420k partnerships actively trading.

The failure of 1 in 10 businesses would be at least 180k failures in trading incorporated entities. But wait, 76% of all businesses have a single owner operator, and so that 1.8m headline figure needs to be drastically re-cast.

The Department for Business Innovation and Skills (DBIS) points out that 99% of all SME’s employ less than 50 people, and only 7,000 of all businesses have more than 250 employees.

What CIPS would have the reader believer is that 180,000 business are not only critically dependent on their business with the EU, but that they have supply chains which are so sophisticated and systemically dependent on the supply chain that even a 10 minute customs delay might bankrupt them. Given that the vast majority of those businesses statistically employ less than 50 people (or probably just one person) this is simply not credible.

The rest of the press release descends into statistical idiocy. 500,000 businesses will stockpile goods, and 900,000 will find it difficult to find supplies and skills. Given the percentage of businesses which DBIS state have a single owner, this is patently nonsense.

The CIPS figures, even with cursory examination, don’t add up, and at best they fail at all levels of statistical presentation.

Either (a) the figures for ‘UK businesses’ as a whole have been extrapolated from a sample set of 1310 organisations surveyed, in which case the survey has been subject to extreme ‘selection bias’ from a non-representative sample OR (b) the actual set of businesses referred to should have been properly qualified to state that it was restricted to companies with supply chain managers with materially critical import / export processes, and the extrapolation was for similarly structured organisations.
If (a) is true, then the press release is simply patent nonsense on every measure.
If the extrapolation was done on the basis of (b), the failure to qualify the description of ‘UK businesses’ is a serious and juvenile error.

It’s hard to not conclude that CIPS has deliberately provided unqualified figures to make a pro-remain point. Grumpy (who cares not if he is in or out of the EU) does object to distorted data being presented to grab a headline and contribute to the ‘fake news’ surrounding Brexit.

Chairman Tim Richardson should be embarrassed by such tosh, and the writer demoted to some position where s/he has no public voice.

https://www.stemcor.com/terms-conditions/tax-strategy/