h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Where are all the people who said they'd pay more tax, for better education and health services gone?
(Standing on Winchester railway station platforms?)

What I'd like to know is how do drivers express NON support of the fuel protest, or the way it's being carried out? If you blow your horn or flash lights it's taken as support. If you drive by in silence it's taken as aquiescence. So.................?

Nah - he was called 'two jags' well before labour were elected. I believe that all members of the cabinet get a car and driver with the job - this has been true for quite some time.

Election advertising - one of the principles of democracy is that the electorate have to be vaguelly well-informed - given the % of people in the UK who don't even know who our PM is, I'm not sure there's a lot of slack there.

Oh, and election adverts are funded by parties, not by government (our) money. Exceptions are party political broadcasts which have to be given free, so they're indirectly funded by the advertisers, and occasional cheats by the government of the day to disguise political ads as 'informational' ads.

Wazunga: to express non-support you could join greenpeace's delegation to the blockade, when it next happens. They're going to be trying to persuade the blockaders that global warming isn't just a con trick the government pulled to raise more tax.

To express non-support- take a gun and shoot the ignorant scum - OK,OK maybe do it with one of the really cool high powered water pistols (filled with petrol maybe).

CH

Saving money - a few weeks ago we spent £50m on propping up the Euro only to see it sink even further. Last week it was announced that the Government was going to spend £42m on advertising to persuade the people of Britain to join the Euro. Every time the government announces it is selling off more of our gold reserves, the price drops and it is sold at a loss. These are only three examples, virtually every week tens of millions of pounds are wasted on things purely for the Government's benefit.

It is a well known fact that the Governement is currently sitting on a surplus of between £16 and £25 billion. Whether you support the fuel protest or not, the governement's propogander about having to make cuts if the fuel tax is reduced is absolute c**p and I'm amazed by how many people are foolish enough to believe it.

On the radio last week at midday I heard Hanley state catagorically, for the record that he would never and had never advocated blockading the food outlets. Two hours later, in the House of Common, Jack Straw claimed that the protestors were going to blockade the food outlets. Jack Straw was shown up to be a lying scaremonger. Last Monday, Jack Straw told eveyone to 'stock up, keep a full tank of fuel and be prepared'. By Friday he was deriding and condemning the people who were doing just what he had told them. Unfortunately for Mr. Straw the evening news on Friday played the earlier footage of him telling everyone on Monday to stock up. If anyone was to blame for last week's panice buying it was him.

Jack Straw is a pillock of the first order, and the sooner he is binned the better.

That said, the last time that the budget surplus was spent on tax cuts (by a Mr. Lamont) the economy overheated and inflation soared. I can't really see how spending all the surplus on tax cuts would not have that effect this time.

As an aside for another thread, if we don't join the Euro in the next decade we will become an irrelevance, so money spent achieving this is not wasted...is it really worth this just to keep calling our currency a "pound"?

With regards to the Euro. It will inevitably strengthen as the US dollar weakens, therefore, all the buying of Euros will see dividends when the rate begins to rise.

Perhaps that would be a good use for Gordon Brown's surplus. It would be a little risky, but if it paid off, we could all probably get a free holiday in Alecante or something. Or he could put it on a horse and bankrupt the betting industry while he was at it. Or buy 15 billion scratch cards. The prison population could be press ganged into scrubbing of the manky silver paper with 5p coins. God, I'm starting to sound like Micheal Howard!

re: euro - yes, we bought euros when the rest of europe bought euros to prop it up. However, its value then went back up, and the government cunningly sold back the euros for pounds and made a profit. Perhaps you're referring to a different intervention than the one I'm thinking of?
Incidentally, had we not intervened, and the euro had continued to fall, then our exporters to europe would have been hammered even more than they already have been. It was in our own interests to keep the euro from total collapse. Still is.

re: gold reserves. If you are a government and have staggering amounts of cash, it is impossible to buy or sell either gold or other investments quietly. People notice. Large companies have exactly the same problem.
If the government had sold off the gold without informing anyone, then it *would* have leaked, and we'd have had an uproar about the lack of open government as well. "He tried to sell it off quietly so nobody could complain - kill 'im!".

re: surplus. The government will have more money at the end of this year than it predicted, so in that sense it has a surplus. On the other hand, the government is, like all governments - hugely in debt. The cost of servicing the interest on the money the government has borrowed is a significant proportion of our tax.
So don't have any images of there being large piles of cash sitting idle in a bank account - we're just marginally less in the red than was expected.

If countries are all in debt to each other, why don't they just strike large amounts of it off the record and start again making up the difference? For example, if Randland has borrowed six billion US dollars from Shara, and Shara's borrowed seven billion US dollars from Randland, they could just cancel them out and make Shara owe one million US dollars to Randland. But then they'd lose their interest, so they wouldn't like that very much I suppose.

Anyway, I probably don't understand what's going on as I didn't understand last time there was a petrol crisis, and world debt is really not a happy thing. But how is blocking refineries a good way to get fuel tax lowered? It'll just make the government even more stubborn and woolheaded than it is already - and at the moment it's worse than the Emond's Field village council.

What I want to know is, if Labour don't make it through the next election, will their replacements (most likely the Tories) be any better? Probably not. Both of them make my skin crawl. It's time for something new. Douglas Adams was right, you know - nobody who wants to rule should under any circumstances be allowed to. Government should be like jury service - you get called up for a year or so to run the country. How's about that?

"nobody who wants to rule should under any circumstances be allowed to." also no-one who votes because someone "has a nice face" or any other bizarre reason should be allowed to. A basic test on politics should be taken by everyone wishing to vote.

CH

And a basic test on common sense should be taken by all wishing to stand for election.

no, No NO, never, you apply DNA's rules about never letting those who get elected govern, OK contadiction in my posts, let's think.......

OK, those wishing to stand have firstly to have been a tax payer in a non-political job for 10 years, secondly they must have either sufficent cash of their own to be un-bribable (Alan Clark, Micheal Heseltine, etc) or enough open bribes (OK sponsorship) to support themselves, you don't pay them anything at all. All tax returns are made totally public. You only appoint ministers in roles they have had direct professional experiance (The only time this has happeneed to my knowledge is when John Major appointed my ex school chair of the govennors as a minister for education). This should limit the choices dramatically and result in less movement.

next post my solution to fuel tax.

CH

OK serious solution-

The problem is that, yes, there is a surplus caused by increased revenues from VAT on fuel and income from North Sea oil.

However, cutting fuel duty with this surplus runs the risk that when oil comes down in price, and it will (especially when the UN remove the murderous sanctions on Iraq) the surplus will vanish and spending cuts will have to be made elsewhere.

SO...you have a lookup table. Every three months the duty on fuel is adjusted based on the previous three months average cost of Brent crude. This table is set up so that the overall revenue from fuel duty, VAT on fuel and North Sea revenue remains constant.

The advantage is that it would remove the peaks of fuel prices, yes when crude is dirt cheap fuel will be slightly more expensive, but when crude is at a high, fuel will be cheaper than present.

If Brown adopts this idea, remember where you saw it first.

C Hawke

The only problem with appointing people to government who only have enough cash to be unbribable, it would mean only about .1% of the nation would be eligable. And having lots of cash, in my experience, just makes people want more of it.
Which group of people, would you say, were most vociferously against the minimum wage? Was it a) nurses. b) doctors or c) people like Michael Hesletine who bring home £100 million a year?

I await your answer with bated breath.

MaW - there are two sorts of debt - there is the national debt, which is the money owed by the country to certain residents of the country. Normally these individuals are the stinking rich ones, plus banks, etc, so in affect it becomes a form of taxation which takes from the poor and gives to the rich. In the UK, this is called National Savings.

The sort of debt you're thinking of is trade debt - where one country owes money to another country. I'm not sure whether UK has trade debt or credit, off the top of my head.

When I said practically every country in the world was in debt, I meant the first kind...

re: govt as jury service - I've seen good arguments that the people who sit in the house of lords should be selected via the national lottery - anyone who wins the jackpot has an option to take up a seat in the lords, should they choose. (+law lords and religious leaders, as now).

The minimum wage would be supported, under my idea, by those with total and open sponsorship by unions and the like.

Sounds interesting... might work as well. There'd definitely be better representation of the average person that way...

How about pressganging as a form of government? You jump people outside the pub on a saturday night and force them to vote on the issues they have been hotly debating all night. I always know how to solve the worlds problems after a couple of pints

Only if you make midnight raids to student, smoke filled , rooms, an equal source of world problem solving

Ever read the Mars books by Kim Stanley Robinson? When they finally got a Martian government set up after the second revolution, they left it up to each district (most often that meant each town) to decide how to choose their representative. One town, I think it was Sabishii (Mars' version of Cambridge University!) decided to choose more or less at random, so each M-year they have a big party where everyone who didn't get picked celebrates not being picked, and comiserates the people who were picked for the government.

Yes, Universities could be a very good source of people to run the country. That's what they should do with the House of Lords - the Commons can be trained politicians and liars (and people who are both), while the Lords can be normal, randomly selected people who are there to ensure that the people are represented, which they clearly aren't by the current system.

So would only Uni students be eligible for a seat in the Lords? Sounds a little elitist to me... actually, it sounds like the House of Commons.
The jury idea is interesting, but people would need to give up their careers (and social lives) for four years to make it work. You couldn't do it annually, because nothing would ever get resolved and your jurors wouldn't have time to research their subjects before making these vital decisions. Oh, that sounds like the House of Commons as well.