Scams

I rarely get political on this blog – it is just asking for trouble, but today I saw that our own Prime Minister has seen fit to criticise a single person and draw scorn upon him by criticising his tax strategy.  I saw this, and thought I needed to write something.

Now, you may love or hate Mr Cameron, and you may love or hate Jimmy Carr, and indeed, you may love or hate tax strategies that enable you to minimise what you have to pay to the government. None of this is my concern, except when I perceive such a ludicrous amount of hypocrisy and unfairness – wielding the power of the Prime Minister’s office on a single person in our country is not just unsavoury, it’s completely unacceptable. Mr Cameron is entitled to his own opinions but to become the nation’s moral compass and pass instant judgement on morality in the way that he has is to live up to his ‘Flashman’ nickname.

Let’s be clear – Jimmy Carr is acting within the law. Our own definitions of morality are not the point, but acting within the law is something we should be aware of at all times in this. The law is upheld by the judiciary, and made through legislation that is debated at length by our politicians. In short, Mr Cameron, you and your peers created the very situation that Jimmy Carr and others have exploited. It is totally legal, and whilst you may say that it is unsavoury, I am pretty darned sure there are many more things we would find unsavoury about you if only we knew them.

For example, did you not say that having dealings with people running an aggressive tax scheme is something you should avoid? Did you not allocate £900M extra funds to HMRC to combat this sort of loophole? Did you not appoint a person who you knew works this kind of strategy? And did you not inherit a whole shedload of money from similar activities and investments designed to minimise the tax payable to the government? How do you deal with yourself, dear David? Here, in case you don’t recall, is your interview.

Should Jimmy Carr repay the money? No, I don’t think so. He has simply taken an option that is available to ALL people in the UK, and uses a loophole that thousands of very wealthy people use, including many of our politicians… if not this exact strategy, then one very similar.  And so would any one of us in his position.

Is it not a bigger issue to chase down the lost revenues from major corporations, such as Barclays, Vodaphone, Boots, etc, who are allowed to exploit similar loopholes and operate from overseas and who therefore cost thousands of times more money in lost revenues than you, I and Jimmy together would save?

I find this kind of bullying very unpalatable, the hypocrisy is epic and the nerve to consider yourself a moral compass entirely distasteful. However, yet again the media and the politicians will sew up the situation to their benefit and deride those who are taking perfectly legal action. One man’s morality is not another’s, clearly. Indeed, arguably, a moral man would not become a politician. Anyone recall the expense scandal? Oh yes… wasn’t that where we found out just how much immorality exists in Westminster, but were unable to remove all of the rotten apples, just a few examples?

In conclusion, I believe Jimmy Carr has done nothing wrong. He has made jokes at the expense of ‘fat cats’ and been found out to be one himself. So what. He still makes people laugh and has not acted illegally. There are many examples of similar schemes (Gary Barlow, anyone?) and many people benefit from using them, including politicians.

Of course, not everyone benefits from them… and that’s perhaps the point most would like to make. If I don’t benefit directly then it is a moral crime. If I do, I should keep quiet! If I were David Cameron, I’d be as quiet as a church mouse right now…

 

Today I went to the local supermarket and did the usual rounds of the aisles, loading the trolley with packets of food all wrapped in excessive amounts of cardboard and plastic. Today I picked up less than I usually do, but even so it was more than would fit into one or two bags.

On 1st October, Sainsbury’s took the decision to move the plastic bags off the end of the checkout, but to make them available if asked for. Not realising this, I stopped and asked. The conversation with the enthusiastic (over zealous?) 17yr old lad went along these lines:

“Could I please have some bags?”

“Yes, how many would you like?”

“I think six should do it, thanks.”

“Six? For that little lot? You don’t need six, you could get all of that into just four…”

“Do you think so? I don’t, which is why I have asked for six. If it turns out I can manage with less then I’ll leave some on the end of the checkout. Please pass me six bags.”

Now I wasn’t in a very good mood at that point in the day, and could possibly have been a little less ‘sharp’, but I really do object to being told I can do with less by someone who hasn’t done as much shopping as I have done, who chooses not to question the reason why he has been told to restrict the bags in the first place.

Apparently, it’s to save the planet, some environmental excuse like that. Which is fine – I’m the first to complain if I see something not being done, but I was told that it was the scourge of plastic bags which is most damaging to the environment, and made to feel as I was somehow to blame for the multiple thousands that are strewn along our highways and byways. I was the culprit, obviously.

I pointed out that plastic bags form less than 1% of all landfill, and that plastic packaging, such as that used for ready meals, forms a massive component. What really made me cross was that the supermarkets themselves promoted the use of plastic bags back in the late seventies to replace the humble cardboard box. Does anyone else remember hunting for a decent box under the checkouts and using those to pack the groceries in? When home, the box would be unpacked and crushed to go into the bin… or these days into the recycling. So what happened to boxes then? They were untidy components at the tills, polythene seemed far cheaper, more accessible, maybe. The humble cardboard box was cast out as inefficient and unwanted. Yet what is more environmentally suitable?

To my mind, the supermarkets drive the need for plastic packaging, by demanding foodstuffs that can be kept on the shelves longer, and are responsible for a huge proportion of the environmental damage we have got by importing foods from all over the planet (apparently we consumers demand that they do so) by using less than environmentally friendly processes. They introduce bags that do not degrade, and refuse to absorb far better alternatives, such as alternative plastics because they cost a bit more (and goodness knows, we can’t have a supermarket giant like Sainsbury reducing its profit margin by giving away better bags). They remove the cardboard boxes which were fine, actually, and then employ some spotty 17 year old child who is told to peddle the environmental angle to those of us who can remember what it was like to shop in small greengrocers that have long since been put out of business by supermarkets.

So the supermarket that employs the young man who doesn’t actually question any of what he has been told is the very same one that has been driving the need for the plastic packaging which forms the vast majority of household waste, and then turns on the guilt for the consumer by telling them how wasteful it is to use too many bags… the very bags which make up so very little of the content of land fill sites.

I just don’t get it.

Are we consumers now somehow responsible for the decisions that were taken at corporate level years ago? Decisions that were driven by efficiency demands, cost savings, commercial directions? Are we now going to just sit back and let Sainsbury and Tesco and every other large supermarket hoodwink us all into believing that we are all to blame for this? Maybe we should stop eating lychees and guavas, or tomatoes from Holland, and stick to the foods we can produce in our own country? Actually, I’m quite in favour of that.

Give me back the cardboard box and I’ll take it to a recycling plant. Give me a paper bag to pack the products into.  Start putting milk back in to glass bottles, which are made from a pretty abundant raw material, after all and can be recycled. Start spending some of your enormous profits on envinronmentally friendly, alternative plastics for your bags (if you are going to provide any) and start putting meals for one into packaging that isn’t going to take three barrels of oil to make. But whatever else you do, never ever tell your staff to advise me that I don’t need six bags, particularly when they have no idea about what my needs really are, and when you have spent so much of this planet’s resources lining your pockets with cash for far too long.

So the government asked the care trusts to ask the schools to ask their parents if the children could be weighed.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7541279.stm

So the children whose parents said ‘Yes’ were weighed, and the data collected and used to inform the nation about the state of obesity in young children. Glory be.

However, a *significant* number of parents said ‘no’ – and I am estimating significant to be around 20% in every county – and so those children were not weighed. Lo and behold, the county closest to home for me declared that there is not an obesity problem with young children for them, and they had the data to prove it. Citing healthy schools initiatives, a growing appreciation of participative sports and all manner of ways that children are being encouraged to exercise and eat a healthy diet, the campaigns have been hailed a success.

I’m sorry if this rains on anyone’s parade, but the 20% of children were very likely the ones who were overtly conscious (and worried, perhaps) about their apparent weight problems. The very children who need to inform the statistics were not included out of their own choice. Suddenly, in a county with some *very* overweight kids (and I have taught a few), none of them have been included in the census.It is hardly surprising that the figures show no obesity, when the obese children were not weighed.

Lies, damned lies and statistics, eh? When will we stop paying out money for this kind of ‘research’ and realise that there are far more realistic ways of gathering the data?