Hands up anyone who enjoys political propaganda so much that they think they should be charged for it?
...
?
What? Where is the crowd of happy punters throwing their cash around with gleeful abandon?
OK, before the men in white coats come along I'd better explain what I'm getting at.
During last night's Community Government Task and Finish Group at the council I was astonished to hear the argument being made that the taxpayer should actually pay for councillors to have websites through which they can air their views, make political points and generally tell the world how wonderful they are.
Now I can see the case for councillors maintaining websites (or better yet blogs!) and even for these being linked to from the council website with a suitable disclaimer but why on earth should we pay to hear from our elected representatives?
Readers will know how critical I am of the established party system and of the way in which politicians "communicate" with their constituents or prospective constituents around election time. Imagine actually being charged for such drivel!
Any person who takes themselves seriously as a politician should be able to broadcast their activity and views through means such as blogs without burdening the taxpayer. But even accepting the idea that the council should pay for websites they must be policed in such a way to stop them being abused.
The disgraceful Labour MP Paul Flynn has just demonstrated why there is a need to police taxpayer funded communication.
Now we are in a recession it is more important than ever to be careful with taxpayers' money. If we are looking for savings this should be one of the first.
In the meantime what is wrong with free blogging of the sort practised by myself, David Clifford and Brian Parker?
Friday 21 November 2008
Tuesday 18 November 2008
The Emperor Has No Clothes!
Here Boris Johnson says it like it is.
The outrageous hubris of this government seeking to blame George Osborne for the fall in the pound can only really be compared to the idea of the royal courtiers and tailors in The Emperor's New Clothes blaming the little boy for the fact that everyone is laughing at the Monarch.
Gordon Brown and his cohort of identikit incompetent ministers have denuded the pound of any value and made the UK a truly dreadful place to do business.
When no one wants pounds because there are no British goods to buy and when no one wants to keep their savings in pounds because interest rates have had to be slashed to their lowest rate for fifty years it really takes some gall to blame the Shadow Chancellor for pointing out that something's not quite right here!
Get a grip Gordon! Preferably on something with a considerable voltage going through it and let someone who knows what they're doing take over- NOW!
UPDATE- At last! Since Brown never intended to stick to his borrowing projections it's about time that we ditched his spending plans! Good work DC- now let's see those taxes going down and spending re-entering stratospheric levels!
The outrageous hubris of this government seeking to blame George Osborne for the fall in the pound can only really be compared to the idea of the royal courtiers and tailors in The Emperor's New Clothes blaming the little boy for the fact that everyone is laughing at the Monarch.
Gordon Brown and his cohort of identikit incompetent ministers have denuded the pound of any value and made the UK a truly dreadful place to do business.
When no one wants pounds because there are no British goods to buy and when no one wants to keep their savings in pounds because interest rates have had to be slashed to their lowest rate for fifty years it really takes some gall to blame the Shadow Chancellor for pointing out that something's not quite right here!
Get a grip Gordon! Preferably on something with a considerable voltage going through it and let someone who knows what they're doing take over- NOW!
UPDATE- At last! Since Brown never intended to stick to his borrowing projections it's about time that we ditched his spending plans! Good work DC- now let's see those taxes going down and spending re-entering stratospheric levels!
Monday 17 November 2008
Traffic Calming?
What is expensive, ugly, bad for your car, bad for the environment and completely ineffective and unfit for purpose?
OK, so you've probably named about twenty things that fall into that category just now. so let's narrow the parametres a little to exclude members of The Cabinet and other senior Labour Party figures. This leaves us with one particular nuisance that we can get rid of- speed bumps.
OK, so you've probably named about twenty things that fall into that category just now. so let's narrow the parametres a little to exclude members of The Cabinet and other senior Labour Party figures. This leaves us with one particular nuisance that we can get rid of- speed bumps.
Rushmoor already has a policy in place against such "traffic calming measures" on the simple basis that the don't work, are bad for the environment, damage people's cars and end up creating more noise than there was in the first place.
Avenue Road is extremely bad in this regard- forcing people to practically crawl down the hill or to take a massive detour round through Rectory Road.
Most people accept that speed bumps are, to use the technical term "stupid" but not many realise just how bad they are. A study in Canada has now shown that because people speed up and slow down more often between speed bumps, that consumption of fossil fuels is actually worse than if people were maintaining a higher speed straight through.
Yes, I know we should try and control speed and yes it would be nice if people didn't speed up and slow down as well all know they do. But surely we should legislate for the world as it is, not as we imagine it ought to be?
In some places we do need to control speeds- Marrowbrook Lane is an example of this- with some people using it as a rat run in the mornings. It is in these places that it actually makes sense to deploy speed cameras or speed visors to enforce a safe speed. There are plenty of speed cameras around- we just need to take them away from their more profitable but less useful locations on the main roads and actually use them to protect residents.
All of this is to say that I will be making a big issue of this in council. We have already accepted that speed bumps are no good- so let's get rid of them!
I'm due to meet traffic officers soon and will bring this up with them. You'll read about the outcome here first.
Friday 7 November 2008
Starbucks in Farnborough?
Good news for fellow coffee drinkers out there- following a decision of the Development and Control committee on Wednesday we are now due to get a coffee house/cafe in a prominent location right in the heart of Empress Ward.
One area that I have constantly been saying that we need to improve in Farnborough is the appearance of the town when people are arriving in it. One of the worst offenders in this regard is the old HSBC building on the corner of Victoria Road and Farnborough Road.
Listed by Historic Farnborough as one of the worst eyesores in the borough, this building has been standing empty for over a year and is frankly depressing. As the building was designed and built in the 1960s I can only speculate on what substances those involved may have been on at the time when they decided that people might like to live or work in this Soviet style concrete elephant of a building!
Luckily, we have now approved an application for a hotel to revamp (its a pity we couldn't demolish it and start again) and reuse the site. In addition to this they will be building a cafe in the space currently occupied by the concrete stilts that the building is on.
As this area is currently a site for antisocial behaviour and youth drinking I think this is a fantastic idea. It will also provide a much more pleasant spectacle for people driving in to Farnborough and will be great for those of us who like coffee!
We do not yet know who will occupy the cafe but we can only hope it is one of those commercial chains like Starbucks who so annoy the whinging left but who happen to serve good coffee in a nice environment.
Farnborough is taking off!
Thursday 6 November 2008
Start your clocks...
Amidst all excitement about potential cuts in mortgage rates (for that is all they are so far) it seems churlish to point out that the economy is heading to hell in a handcart but as John McCain has shown- the right aren't in this game to be popular.So here goes:
First up- the interest rate cut. Expect to hear calls from generous government ministers (they are so good at giving other people's money away) for banks to pass on the interest rate cut to householders. Neither the proper banks nor their nationalised emasculated counterparts will pass anything like the full cut on- they've got to make up their losses somehow. The government will howl with outrage about this and subsequently blame much of the downturn on the banks (and of course on Norman Lamont, Dominic Lawson, Harold MacMillan and William Pitt)
Next- the pound. Having lived in a country whose currency was so weak that even some official bodies refused to accept it I can tell you that what is going to happen is not pretty. The government's excessive borrowing, the public's excessive borrowing, the absolute unproductivity of the UK workforce (more regulation anyone?) leading to a pathetic balance of payments situation means that there will be very little demand for pounds but huge oversupply. For anyone who doesn't understand economics out there or who is a Prime Minister who pretends to- that is what we call a BAD THING. It leads to a collapse in the price of the currency. This in turn makes it very very expensive to buy things from overseas. In the UK that is everything unless you were wondering.
Currency value induced inflation has historically been subject to constant fluctuations. Not any more. The weak pound is here to stay for as long as economy is managed the way it is.
OK, so that's the mild part out of the way. Now for the real problems:
All that borrowing needs to be paid for- we need to borrow from someone. Most UK national debt is now held overseas. To increase borrowing we need to persuade lenders that it is worth their doing so. The thing is- with government interest rates so low and the pound being the currency equivalent of a man walking round town with a sick chicken fewer people will want to lend to the government.
This leaves the government with the unthinkable option of cutting spending, or the Brownite solution- raise taxes. This is of course bad in its self. It will be worse because it will further undermine productivity and enterprise.
And just around the corner is the real kicker- inflation. It takes a special kind of genius to achieve both recession and inflation at the same time. It is called Stagflation and we had it in the seventies and it is not pretty. Friedman demonstrated it to be the inevitable result of Keynesian economics, common sense reinforces this. The trouble is that a lot of left wing politicians and economists had already fallen in love with Keynes and big government by then.
Reflating the economy on credit as the government is trying to do is just the same as printing money- it won't mean that any more goods or services are produced. Unfortunately, as the economy tanks more people will end up on benefits- leading to ever more government spending which we can't afford.
The result= we end up where we also end up under Labour- going to the IMF cap in hand. Mark my words- it is now a matter of time. Start your clocks now...
First up- the interest rate cut. Expect to hear calls from generous government ministers (they are so good at giving other people's money away) for banks to pass on the interest rate cut to householders. Neither the proper banks nor their nationalised emasculated counterparts will pass anything like the full cut on- they've got to make up their losses somehow. The government will howl with outrage about this and subsequently blame much of the downturn on the banks (and of course on Norman Lamont, Dominic Lawson, Harold MacMillan and William Pitt)
Next- the pound. Having lived in a country whose currency was so weak that even some official bodies refused to accept it I can tell you that what is going to happen is not pretty. The government's excessive borrowing, the public's excessive borrowing, the absolute unproductivity of the UK workforce (more regulation anyone?) leading to a pathetic balance of payments situation means that there will be very little demand for pounds but huge oversupply. For anyone who doesn't understand economics out there or who is a Prime Minister who pretends to- that is what we call a BAD THING. It leads to a collapse in the price of the currency. This in turn makes it very very expensive to buy things from overseas. In the UK that is everything unless you were wondering.
Currency value induced inflation has historically been subject to constant fluctuations. Not any more. The weak pound is here to stay for as long as economy is managed the way it is.
OK, so that's the mild part out of the way. Now for the real problems:
All that borrowing needs to be paid for- we need to borrow from someone. Most UK national debt is now held overseas. To increase borrowing we need to persuade lenders that it is worth their doing so. The thing is- with government interest rates so low and the pound being the currency equivalent of a man walking round town with a sick chicken fewer people will want to lend to the government.
This leaves the government with the unthinkable option of cutting spending, or the Brownite solution- raise taxes. This is of course bad in its self. It will be worse because it will further undermine productivity and enterprise.
And just around the corner is the real kicker- inflation. It takes a special kind of genius to achieve both recession and inflation at the same time. It is called Stagflation and we had it in the seventies and it is not pretty. Friedman demonstrated it to be the inevitable result of Keynesian economics, common sense reinforces this. The trouble is that a lot of left wing politicians and economists had already fallen in love with Keynes and big government by then.
Reflating the economy on credit as the government is trying to do is just the same as printing money- it won't mean that any more goods or services are produced. Unfortunately, as the economy tanks more people will end up on benefits- leading to ever more government spending which we can't afford.
The result= we end up where we also end up under Labour- going to the IMF cap in hand. Mark my words- it is now a matter of time. Start your clocks now...
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