Letters 3

If I had two letters published by the press last year, I also had one printed quite recently, this year. It was written in the Holiday Inn, Keele:-

UK businesses benefit hugely from the NHS, by having a healthy and well workforce, helping to deliver on their corporate goals. They tell us rightly that they are an integral part of our social fabric. Why then, in all of the discussion of the tax increases required to return NHS funding to its past levels (let alone give it the capacity to cope in the context of the horrendous cuts to social care and other services supporting the vulnerable), has there been no discussion of significant rises in corporation tax?

The idea of hypothecation, whether soft or hard, could also be extended to the taxes paid by business. In that way, a significant and transparent percentage would be clearly seen to be going to pay for our national health and care services.

Such an arrangement would also throw into stark relief the impact of the various tax-avoidance schemes developed by the finance industry and big four accountancy firms. “Saving so many millions of tax charges” would then translate directly into “this is so much revenue we’ve removed from the NHS”.

Just after I sent it in, a friend pointed out that businesses also benefit from the service by having healthy consumers living longer...

Flaws

A very Western middle class problem, but our dishwasher broke down.  We spent ages dithering about a replacement.  Then the one we wanted couldn't be had - not even for ready money - from Curry's (so why was it on display, we never did find out...), so we went to the much hated Comet where we found something close to what we had wanted and an extremely sensible, helpful and unpushy shop assistant sold us the thing, including installation.  D and one of his crew (they are still working on the house up the road... just very, very slowly...) had already kindly unplumbed the old one and plonked it in the garden for us (sealing the outlet pipe with sellotape, which didn't seem that secure, but hey-ho), so were keen for it to be delivered toute suite. Anyway the men turned up with the new machine earlier this week, and plumbed it in.  Today, we tried it for the first time.

And nothing happened.

So with lots of shoving and pulling we pulled the machine out from under the kitchen units.  To find that they hadn't switched it on at the plug socket.  Sigh.

So it is currently sitting in the middle of the kitchen, working happily, but rather dominating the room...

Bad Ideas Courtesy of the Tories

Yes, the election proper has started.  So far we have:-

- Wealthy business people telling us that they don't want their businesses to pay more tax - so everyone else will have to instead;

- Peter Gershon suggesting a range of cost-control measures in the public services that in many cases are already in place - and claiming reidiculous savings from them;

- A proposed reintroduction of the regressive 'married couples tax allowance'

Marvellous.  This will get much worse.

Obama Spin Laden

OK, so I may be a glass half empty kind of person, but all the same. The weight of expectation being placed on Obama, the sense of uncritical relief that a discredited, right-wing conservative executive is finally leaving, the notion that the new bod is a great communicator, who has also brought together a collaboration of many different talents, the use of the family to help with the message, the sloganising - they all remind me of someone else.

The parallels aren’t exact, of course, but where we now have the Bob the Builderesque “Yes We Can” we once had “Things Can Only Get Better”. Just as with Blair, people are projecting all of their hopes on Obama, in reaction to his predecessor. There is a desire for radical change being invested in a politician who I suspect is profoundly uninterested, at heart, in the concept.

The only direction left to the new President is down; he will disappoint. Not all of the time, not everybody, and not every day. But he will disappoint.

Like I said, glass half empty.