Columns – Page 4 – The Daily Opinion

Holy Taxation Batman!

My daily commute to work consists of driving around six miles a day and also consists of driving into pot holes that even a Challenger tank would struggle to get through. And year after year the roads get a cheap repair and subsequently end up as pot holes again within a few short months. And this in turn has me a) on the verge of a cataclysmic mental break down as my spine is shattered by what appears to be a meteor crater , and b) makes me wonder what the council’s authorities for our area are doing with our cash.

And so, upon arriving at work today on ungritted roads I made a few quick calculations as to how much of my monies have been taken from me.

So, here we go.

Okay, my yearly Income Tax payments work out to a staggering £3423. I’ve earned a pretty similar wage for the last ten years, which tells me that over the last ten years I’ve paid approximately £34,236 in Income Tax. It also tells me that after ten years of the same wage that I’m probably due a pay rise.

Then I looked at my National Insurance contributions. In a one-year period I paid £2073. Over ten years this comes in at a princely sum of £20,730.

So after spitting some tea over my desk as my calculator returned these numbers I then looked at my Council Tax bill.

My council tax for the last 10 years has been over £100 a month, but I rounded off at £140, the actual number these days is £159 but with fluctuations over the years I’ve rounded off to a more suitable number to accommodate the rises. My calculator returned a number of £14000 for ten years. Tea was then sprayed out of my nose and a meek cry squeaked from my throat.

Now, basing the above figure of £14,000, I then looked at the number of houses down my road, forty-four, and as all the houses down my road are the same, minus the occupants, the ten yearly Council Tax payments return at, and this made me pretty much launch my cup across the room, at £616,000. Remember, this is forty-four homes over ten years and I’ve been pretty generous in rounding off to the lower denominator.

Where I live, Wikipedia has the 2001 census as showing 14,732 residential homes. I appreciate that perhaps 60% of these homes either pay a lot less in Council Tax or get some form of support in paying it, yet still, if for the sake of being generous subtract 60% off we are left with 8,839 residential homes; now let’s be even more generous to the Council Tax that the remaining households pay and let’s say that they all pay £90 a month, quite a large deficit but I’m being generous, but now we are left with a monthly tax to the Council of £795,510.

Then over a ten month period of tax, as they so kindly allow us two months free of payments, we reach the figure of £7,955,100.

That’s the year done.

Okay, so 10 years?

Add another zero to that figure my friend. £79,551,000

And this is for a small town where the Christmas tree that the Council put in our town was dubbed by tabloids nationwide as “The Worst Xmas Tree In Britain” and now small businesses are rallying other businesses to put some of their earnings into a kitty so they can provide the next Christmas tree!

So where does our Council Tax go? Well, a breakdown of the taxation can be found here: http://www.canterbury.gov.uk/main.cfm?objectid=1416

Note that my tax is a touch higher per annum than the example shown on the Canterbury Council website, but do note that section “7” shows that the annual charge on this example is £1307.39 Then scroll your eyes up to section “6” and look at the breakdown of this tax.

And now look out of your window and wonder how on a national scale of taxation that this country can be in recession.

And remember I’ve only used Council Tax as a larger example – to show how this cartel aggressively take your hard earned money yet collects my landfill bin waste every fortnight and only provide enough recycling sacks per year to allow for 4 sacks of recycling waste a month.

I appreciate that the Council don’t just collect our bins, but I’m looking at the big picture. The one where surely the expenditure of Kent City Council cannot be above the cost of the tax paid across our little South Eastern county?

I’m basing all the above figures on a town that probably wouldn’t even be missed if it fell into the sea, I’m not including the larger cities, towns and villages in the area, I’m basing the above on a town with an estimated population of 35,188.

So with this in mind after having my skull smashed into the roof of my car repeatedly I started wondering about car fuel tax.

See the link below of how this is made up. http://www.petrolprices.com/the-price-of-fuel.html

This is ludicrous, how can the tax be over 60%?

Or how the cost of fueling your home so you don’t have to start pulling down your fences and torching them in a metal bin in your front room to keep warm.

Or the VAT on every item you purchase at a 20%.

Car tax. This is a big “Wow” for me, because again, with Council Tax payments and Car Tax payments I still can’t travel from A to B without my car breaking up like the Challenger Spaceship.

Cigarettes and alcohol – you can’t even kill yourself for cheap in this country.

And then you start getting really pissy and start looking at Congestion charges, Travel costs. TV licensing, the cost to use a public toilet, and I’m not talking about the fear of assault or STDs caught off the taps, airport costs, the cost of buying a house and so on.

The cost of living in the UK is now at a point where your wages are gone before you’ve even seen them. Disposable income is something we will tell our grandchildren about as we sit around a fire burning the coffee table and family albums.

Jesus H Christ, where is this all going? Can we smile? Or will that be taxed soon as well? But then again, the fact we are being raped of all that we earn; it makes it difficult to keep turning that frown upside down. It’s a good thing this country doesn’t have the same gun laws as the USA because this country is bleeding hard working folk dry. And there are only so much of us that you can consume before you end up in a revolt.

Italian Food & The Space Time Continuum

Italian cuisine is always a mixed emotion for me. I married into an Italian family so I tend to find myself either completely maxed out on Italian or pandering for more like a junkie.
I guess there must have been a shortage of Italian food in our home because I was needing a fix.
Enter the restaurant “Ask”. Literally. In we went.
The restaurant was pretty much empty, which should have had me edging towards the door or signalling to the wife to bring the car round. But I didn’t. I must have assumed that the evening rush just hadn’t started. Either way, we were sat in an empty restaurant and looking at a menu with hungry eyes.
We were left uninterrupted by the waitress for a considerable length of time, in fact such a considerable length of time that I was able to read each item on the menu numerous times and even read the small print on the rear of the menu.
Eventually a surly waitress that had all the joy and enthusiasm of a teenager asked to clean their room shuffled over and took our simple order in the manner of someone that was meeting their attacker for the first time.

The waitress then shuffled off and into the kitchen.
And then something unexplainable happened. It was one of those moments that is featured on the Discovery Channel and has speakers such as Stephen Hawking or Professor Brian Cox and almost certainly some profound perspective from a NASA scientist, because no sooner had the kitchen door closed behind our delightful waitress had it burst back open with her holding two plates of food and steering towards me and the wife.
And then it happened . . . the plates were placed in front of us. I looked at my offering for a few moments before looking up to the wife. My lips flapped but words would not escape from my voice box. Had I taken a serious blow to the head whilst in the restaurant? Or had they been pumping monoxide in via the air-conditioning? Because this seemed an amazing speed in which to be served a dish you had ordered less than 45 seconds prior to it arriving. I’ve had slower falls down stairs than this, and the drinks weren’t even with us yet.
I reasoned that this must be some space anomaly whereby everything operates at a speed that the poorly evolved human brain just can’t comprehend and therefore I must have already had my drink – obviously launched at me in the form of protons that were blasted at me as if from an exploding neutron star.
So with a perplexed look I raised my fork and tucked into the pasta.
What was I really expecting? Compliments to the chef? A rolling of my head as I make orgasmic sounds of sheer delight?
Well, I know Italian food well, and this, this pile of jaundice blandness was not even comparable to a petrol station pasta bowl that has sat two weeks past its sell-by-date.
No, this was the offering of a meal that had been reheated for perhaps no less than three attempts in order to sell it.
It was a disgrace to the Italian world of food.
Hell, it would have been a disgrace as a first attempt at cooking by a primate that had been pumped full of sedatives.
I couldn’t stomach more than a mouthful, and I’ve eaten at a Little Chef before.
I hacked at the pasta until it was a pulpy mess – in the hope that they couldn’t reheat and serve this to the next poor S.O.B that enters Ask with a slither of hope of receiving an edible meal.
I covered my plate with my paper napkin, as if covering a victim of an accident that didn’t make it, and pushed the plate away with the repulsion I reserve only for when Jordan appears on TV.
The waitress scuttled over and slammed two drinks down in front of us and then took my road kill dinner away without even asking (ironic) if I enjoyed it. Had she enquired, I feel I would have stood up and fired off a tsunami of abuse about the insult to my taste buds that I had just gone through.
Let us not forget that all of this, the food order, the food serving, the pulping of the food, the drink servings and removal of my plate had happened in less than three minutes . . .
I didn’t even wait for the wife to finish. She too had had a single mouthful of this utter garbage and what with her fiery temper, I thought it best to settle our bill and exit before she went all Godzilla on the restaurant and reduced the building to debris.

So, short of around £18 later, I exited Ask with a feeling of betrayal, confusion and hunger.
One thing I always promise after a bad dining experience is that the establishment that wronged me will never, ever see another penny of my money and with that I will ensure that anyone prepared to listen will know of my woes. It might have been a bad day for the restaurant . . . however, is your stomach asking for sustenance? Then just Ask yourself, do you feel lucky, punk? Well? Do you?

Film Review: Went The Day Well?

Summon up an image of a quintessential picturesque English village and it’s quite likely you’ll get somewhere close to Bramley End, the fictitious setting for this 1942 WWII drama. Surrounded by rolling countryside, bees hum in untended hedgerows and butterflies flutter by in the warm spring sunshine. Narrow country lanes connect Bramley End to the neighbouring village of Upton Ferrars nearly seven miles away. There are picture-postcard cottages aplenty, their windows and front doors half obscured by climbing roses and honeysuckle and a church at the heart of the village and the church is our first stop as the film’s opening titles end. It’s here that a friendly pipe-smoking local welcomes us with a “Good day to you,” and leads us to the unusual memorial that we have no doubt come to see. It’s unusual because it has the names of German soldiers written on it. German names in an English graveyard? How bizarre. The local then proceeds to tell us how such a thing came about.

Saturday morning on a sunny Whitsun weekend in 1942 and a group of lorries filled with British soldiers rolls into the village. Apparently on an exercise of some sort for three days, they ask the villages for billeting for sixty men who, once the arrangements are made, settle into various houses around the village as well as the village hall. The villagers see it all as frightfully exciting and welcome them gladly but it doesn’t take long for them to discover that the soldiers are actually Nazis forming the vanguard of a German invasion of England. With their cover now blown, the Germans round up the villagers and lock them in the church while the children are held captive in the local manor house and supervised by the kind matronly lady of the manor. An attempt by those locked in the church to escape and get word to the neighbouring village is thwarted by a traitor among them, the village squire (played by Leslie Banks) who is revealed to be collaborating with the Nazis.

That night at the manor, a plucky young lad named George shins down a drainpipe after lights out and escapes into the woods to get help from Upton while at the same time, a group of extremely stiff upper lips finally manage to overpower their Nazi guards at the church. There follows numerous gun-butts to Nazi heads, a lot of gunfire and plenty of heroics from the stoic and defiant locals and just as their bullets are running out, a force of nearby British soldiers arrives to bring an end to proceedings. Oh, and as for the traitor….well, you’ll just have to see for yourself. All in all, a nicely shot little film from Ealing Studios with a cast packed full of familiar faces, some that you’ve never seen so young – if you thought Thora Hird was born a bespectacled granny then check this out; it was her first major role and she was a 31year old sweetheart.

But what marks this film out as truly interesting is its propaganda quality. Bearing in mind it was made when the Second World War still had two years to go, the introduction that the pipe-wielding local gives us at the start of the movie is a post-war one. He speaks of the newspapers calling the event at the village “The Battle at Bramley End” but that nothing was said of it until after the war was over and “old Hilter got what was coming to him.” One can only guess the impact such a film would have had on its audience, particularly one that knew all too well that the only thing separating them from occupied Europe was a narrow strip of water. Hitler’s planned invasion of the UK “Operation Sea Lion” may have been indefinitely postponed by 1942 (due in part to the Germans not having air superiority over the channel) but to a war-weary British public, the threat must have still been real and constantly in the backs of their minds. What this film did was to show the audience that even if such a thing were to happen and Nazis did land on British soil, with cool heads, brave heart and plucky British spirit, the Germans wouldn’t stand a chance. Simply put, evil would never triumph over good and the Nazis were the personification of evil.

Based on a short story entitled “The Lieutenant Died Last” by the English author Graham Greene, Went the Day Well? was directed by Brazilian born Alberto Cavalcanti who would go on to make a handful of films for Ealing Studios in the 40s most notably, “Champagne Charlie” and “Nicholas Nickleby”. The film’s reputation has grown significantly with the passing of time and in 2005 it was named as one of the “100 Greatest War Films” in a Channel 4 poll in the UK. In 2010, the British Film Institute National Archive released a restored version of the film and it was met with critical acclaim. I think Tom Huddleston of Time Out London summed it up perfectly by writing that it was “jawdroppingly subversive. Cavalcanti establishes, with loving care and the occasional wry wink, the ultimate bucolic English scene, then takes an almost sadistic delight in tearing it to bloody shreds in an orgy of shockingly blunt, matter-of-fact violence.”

Went The Day Well? is a great little film and a window into a time and a place that has long gone and yet to watch it and to understand its message is to truly find respect for the men, women and children that lived through those dark years of Nazi terror. A classic in every sense.

News in Briefs 08/07/12

Wow I didn’t know hell had frozen over in the past week. Somebody actually decided to open up criminal investigations over the recent banking scandal and Andy Murray didn’t continue to be a massive disappointment by being knocked out of a Wimbledon Semi-Final, yet again. Maybe I’ll actually have nothing to talk about this week as everything is all right and well with the world? Nah just joking, apart from that stuff nothing has really changed. George Osborne is still a slime ball, Nick Clegg is still spineless, and we are still fighting a worthless conflict in Afghanistan. Ho-hum!

Political Oops of the Week

Some of you may not have heard about this as it wasn’t something that made the news in the face of Bob Diamond and his antics. But George Osborne is expected to defend the banks’ rights to provide multi-million pound bonuses for its employees. This is in the face of EU proposals that are proposing that bonuses should be kept down to a 1:1 salary to bonus ratio. Now tell me how is this right?

Ok, let’s look at the main argument for it. If we stop paying the bankers those big bonuses then they will simply move to somewhere like Switzerland or Monaco and thus cause financial destruction of the UK. I agree with him, but only if it wasn’t the whole of Europe doing that. If we did it on our own then it would be a genuine concern, however it’s everybody who is considering this. If it happens on an international basis then it doesn’t matter what the banks do because they won’t get more money if they simply move to another country. And it’s not as if they will ever completely leave Europe, so there’s no threat there.

What gets me is that George Osborne looks like a guy who would stab you in the back, and now he obviously has done that. And this is just days after he claimed that he was going to take the bankers to the cleaners with all that new legislation too. Poor show, George!

The Painful…

When people get desperate they can do really silly things. One of those situations happened this week when a man set himself on fire outside of a job centre in Birmingham. He came in at about 9:00am that morning and started threatening people with a can of petrol over a benefit payment that hadn’t been made. The building was evacuated and he tied himself to the railings outside. He then dropped his trousers, doused himself in petrol, and set himself on fire. But since the police had already been called he was put out quite quickly.

Now I can empathise with the fact that going to a job centre in Birmingham must be one of the most degrading experiences known to man, but talk about an extreme reaction. I’m not sure whether this shows he was just nuts or whether we have really driven people that far. I’m siding with the latter as the cuts made by the government and the fact that there are few jobs means that many people now have no hope at all. In an effort to either get attention or find a way out they are committing very public acts like this.

But we all know that nothing will change as the government couldn’t care less about these people. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me if you all forget about this within five minutes.

…And the Pointless

Does anyone remember the story of King Midas who gained the power to turn anything he wanted into gold by just touching it? Well Barak Obama evidently decided to gain the power to do something similar because after he hugged one of his supporters who served him breakfast she fell over and died.

70-year-old Josephine Harris who served the president in Ohio during a campaign trail felt strange, apparently, when serving the president. But she apparently ignored the symptoms, according to her daughter. And yet a few hours later she died of natural causes. Either this was due to over excitement or Barak Obama now has the power to kill old people by hugging them. I’d like to think that it isn’t the latter, but if he can become the first black president then who said that he can’t have some extra tricks up his sleeve?

The So Outrageous that it’s Borderline Hilarious

A man called Stephen Birch is the subject of this part of the News in Briefs column this week. All you need to know is that he’s a South African property developer. This week he shocked the world by going public with the view that he had found the grave of Madeline McCann. Yes, we are back to that old chestnut again (sigh).

Anyway, whilst he was carrying out scans on an area of land he owned he claimed that a grave was present with human bones. Ok, that’s believable as finding a grave site on derelict land is not unheard of. But what gets me is that even before digging them up he’s already claiming that it must be Madeline McCann. Really, Stephen? Of all the people who have died since humanity began you are assuming that this grave has to be of a specific person? To me it sounds like somebody just wants lots of rewards and a chance to get on TV. Well he might manage the latter, but it certainly won’t be as heroic as he’s wishing it to be.

Anyway, enough of that, maybe next week won’t be as bleak and irritating after all…

News in Briefs 01/07/12

There’s a thief in our midst! Ok, that’s not really a shock as it seems like there’s always a thief around these days. But things just seem to get worse. Just when you think that the worst of something has passed it just comes back and slaps you back in the face again. Anyway, I think you might be able to predict some of what comes up this week.

Political Oops of the Week

So Chancellor Angela Merkel decided to give in and now the German taxpayer will be actively funding the broken banks of Europe. I can’t help but think that this will be the decision that everybody regrets in the next five years. Let’s look at it like this. Germany has essentially said that we will save Europe with everything we have. Now, the only way they can do this is by plugging more and more money into it.

It’s nothing but a delusion. What Chancellor Angela Merkel doesn’t realise is that it’s just deluding the markets because every time German money is plugged into the hole the markets will go up, but the currency is fundamentally flawed. It’s broken and it just eats money and swallows it up. Unlike other currencies that occasionally get hungry, the Euro suffers from perpetual hunger. After what it’s been through no investor will trust it again. It will collapse, and now that Germany has committed herself she will go down with the Euro sooner or later.

Let’s look at the overall logic of the affair. Closer integration and spending got us into this mess in the first place. So what’s the logic to solve the problem? Oh that’s right, more integration and more spending. Yeah, that’ll work.

Homeless — Oh look it's a vision of Germany in the future.

The Painful…

Lord Wei, the guy who was the guru of David Cameron’s Big Society plan, has marked his return to public life as he just revealed that he wants to encourage new retirees to volunteer and give something back to the community. Ok, he hasn’t said that it’s compulsory or anything like that, it’s not like national service. Now, I can understand that it would be a nice thing to have as some pensioners probably would like to volunteer and do something with their time. But what gets me is that he’s having the audacity to say that pensioners should be giving something back to society.

The contradiction in what Lord Wei is saying is shocking. As part of this Big Society initiative he’s saying that since pensioners have worked for the community all their lives they should now be giving back to the community. How is working your entire life not giving something to society? If anything they should be encouraged to go away and do what they like because they’ve dedicated their lives to society. It just seems so ungrateful and just blatantly wrong.

I don’t have a problem with the fact that he wants to make a service like this available, but what I do have a problem with is the way he’s presenting it. He’s making it sound as if new retirees haven’t given enough and should be made to do more. In other words, he’s basically going for the guilt-trip factor.

…And the Pointless

The pointless, wow, we have something quite weird this week. This week it was aged 46 Nicolas Saunders who was caught by his ex-wife in her bed with her bull mastiff. If you don’t know what a bull mastiff is then we’ve provided you with a picture of one here. And, yes, the father-of-three was naked. He actively called the dog to his room and his wife found him attempting to stick his lightning rod into Sasha’s weather balloon; Sasha is the dog.

He was then arrested and was forced to provide a sperm sample, which, of course, came back as a 100% match to the substance found on Sasha. But Mr. Nicolas Saunders isn’t finished yet. Even despite his humiliation he now has to go back to court for pre-sentencing. I’m curious to know how many years you can possibly get for having sex with your ex-wife’s dog, maybe he can tell us all about it soon?

The So Outrageous that it’s Borderline Hilarious

This is the part that’s incredibly predictable. I’ll just give you one entity to attune you to the subject matter that I’m going to be discussing next. Ready, ok let me just stretch it out, it’s the banks. Yes, the banks are at it again. Corruption, cheating, thieving, and doing it doggy style with the public’s money once again.

Firstly, the banks started by being caught for manipulating interest rates. Although as of this writing it’s only been Barclays that were fined the £290 million the other banks are also under investigation, and the case is expected to cast its net over a number of American banks as well. So expect more fines and more naming and shaming to come after this case.

But it wasn’t over, oh no. Less than 48 hours later they were back in the news because they’ve been caught mis-selling insurance plans to small businesses. Supposedly, these expensive packages were designed to protect small businesses against the impact of changing interest rates. Whilst the packages were perfectly applicable to some businesses, the banks were selling them to companies that didn’t even need them. And they were too complicated to understand so they made sure that nobody would ever know that they were pointless.

And before this we had the Payment Protection Insurance (PPI) scandal, which was just blatant exploitation. Oh and nobody can forget all the stuff that we had to deal with in 2008 when they almost committed suicide.

What can we do about it though?

The answer is probably nothing as they have a complete and total hold over us. If we upset them then they just move somewhere else. And if that happens then London will turn into a slum.

Anyway, maybe next week won’t be so bleak and irritating after all…

News in Briefs 24/06/12

Greek elections bringing about pretty much the same stuff as before, education changes, coalition splits, more chuntering from Ed Miliband, and a Syrian Civil War that people have stopped caring about. It’s been a busy week so it’s time to get started. Although I hope this column won’t include most of that stuff, if I’m lucky!

Political Oops of the Week

Away from Syria and the same old stuff from the Eurozone, we now move to Egypt once again. It’s been a long time since much of relevance happened in Egypt, but after the military rulers dissolved the entire parliament last weekend things started to move forward again. So this week they then introduced new powers for themselves. To put it simply, they can now control the budget, implement new legislation (as governed by themselves), and the president now doesn’t really exist in any real capacity despite the fact the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood won fair and square.

This pretty much reminds me of how most dictatorships are created. The military tends to always back a dictator and this is how they do it. The only difference is that the military happens to have a ruler from its own brotherhood, as opposed to an outsider leading it.

On the plus side, at least that bed-ridden bastard Mubarak is about to go to the great hospital bed on Satan’s right nipple.

The Painful…

This was quite a recent YouGov poll conducted in the US. It basically said that 63% of all high level Republicans still believe that Iraq had Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) when they invaded it in 2003. This was compared to 15% of Democrats. So you’re telling me that the most powerful country in the Western world should be governed by a party like the Republicans who have a majority of people that believe that WMDs existed in Iraq in 2003? And this is despite the fact that solid evidence consisting of first-hand accounts are arguing for the opposite.

I don’t like to believe that all Americans are complete and utter morons, but the politicians certainly are. Not only do they operate a system that favours only the multi-millionaires, due to the lack of any controls on campaign spending, but it’s an example that a lot of rich people really do live sheltered lives. I hope for the sake of the entire Western world that Obama receives a second term in the White House. But the problem is I honestly do think that he will get voted out, and we will all be left regretting that.

…And the Pointless

Zimbabwean MPs have decided to undergo circumcision as part of a campaign to reduce the prevalence of AIDS in the country. In 2009 Unicef reported that around 14% of the adult population had either HIV or full-blown AIDS. I can understand that the National Trust says that you can reduce AIDS by up to 60% by getting circumcised. However, what gets me is how we prevent the same problem in the West. We don’t mutilate our own cocks in order to prevent it. It just seems to be extreme and unnecessary. Surely a better idea to reduce those Unicef statistics would be to just use a little common sense and just stop having so much sex with strangers? Those statistics will go down by themselves if people just use a little responsibility and common sense.

Oh wait, common sense is in short supply these days isn’t it?

The So Outrageous that it’s Borderline Hilarious

Jimmy Carr is the subject of this section this week as his story really is fitting. Let’s look at the facts. Jimmy Carr utilises a legal yet slightly unethical loophole to bring his tax bill down to single figures, when realistically it should be nearer 50%. For those who don’t understand how he did this, I’ll explain the general process. This scheme, which many figures like the members of Take That are using, is all about creating an off-shore company. The way it works is that they send the money to the company and they then have it loaned back to them immediately. When it comes to loans there’s no tax attached to them so he’s essentially getting the same amount of money without paying any tax at all.

So this week he apologised. I watched his shows and he did get heckled quite a bit, but the most surprising thing is that he was actually being cheered for everything despite the fact that what he did was still blatantly wrong. He never had to pay back any of this money and now the matter is supposedly closed.

It really does amaze me how fickle some people are. We’ll complain about bankers and multinational companies doing this sort of thing for hours and hours on end, but when Jimmy Carr does it then all it takes is a crap apology and that’s the end of the matter. Come on!

Anyway, maybe next week won’t be as bleak and irritating after all…