"Labour’s planned rise in national insurance contributions"

The pol's and their chums in the media have been busily giving us the impression that the Lib-Cons shelved Labour's plans to increase National Insurance contributions by 2p in the £ (Employee's NIC up from 10% to 11%; Employer's NIC up from 12.8% to 13.8%) and instead hiked VAT from 17.5% to 20%.

See for example last week's FT:

As the coalition strives to deal with the mess in the public finances, the issue of how hard its deficit-cutting measures will hit the poor has consistently proved a political irritant.

The argument was reignited on Tuesday after Alan Johnson said the rise in value added tax to 20 per cent “hits the poorest hardest”, only for George Osborne, the chancellor, to respond that the increase was more “progressive” than Labour’s planned rise in national insurance contributions...

Mr Osborne said a VAT rise would be more progressive than increasing national insurance contributions, “because of the economic damage of an income tax or national insurance tax rise, and the people most likely to be affected by that are people on low incomes.”

Or at least that's what the words 'Labour's planned rise' and 'a VAT rise would be more progressive that increasing national insurance contributions' suggest, is it not?

Nothing of the sort.

HM Revenue & Customs have finally updated their tables for next year's tax rates, and it is quite clear that the Lib-Cons are merrily pressing ahead with 'Labour's planned rise' as well as increasing VAT.

Whether or not Labour would have increased VAT as well (this being an EU-harmonisation thing) is a moot point, I strongly suspect they would have done, but hey.

Knickers in a twist ...

In a hurry to act tough following the recent spate of mephedrone related fatalities, Alan Johnson is pushing through a Misuse of Drugs Act ammendment on 16th April. Only Parliamentry process doesn't seem to be quick enough for our Home Secretary, hence this morning, on 1st April of all days, every council chief exec in the land received a letter urging trading standards to seize it under 'consumer protection' law.

Several took the advice, seizing white powder today labelled as 'plant food' and 'bath salts' using powers under fair trading legislation. While Johnson is probably working to a May 6th deadline, local authorities have to abide by the law and pay compensation to traders they wrongly seize goods from.

The reasoning for the action was that the substance was no use as 'plant food' and therefore the labels were misleading to consumers. However, the 'transactional decision' test in the regulations requires that misleading labels have to be proven to be likely to cause consumers to take purchasing decisions they would not have otherwise taken. Was anyone really misled into buying this product thinking it would make their tomatoes grow? Of course they weren't, it goes up their noses.

Another question is why trading standards didn't use powers under product safety laws to detain the goods. This is a mystery, but 'plant food', or 'miaow, miaow' has a similar active ingredient to Khat. Banning white powders that kill middle class white kids might be good for Labour's election hopes, but banning the Somali recreational drug of choice?

Watch this space for developments.

Quote(s) Of The Day

Well, yesterday, actually:

Alan Johnson, in his letter dismissing a scientific advisor for complaining that the government was completely ignoring his findings:

"I cannot have confusion between scientific advice and policy"

In case you thought that the main opposition party would be any better, their spokesman had this to say:

"This was an inevitable decision after his latest ill-judged contribution to the debate but it is a sign of lack of focus at the Home Office that it didn't act sooner given that he has done this before."

"Will no-one rid me of this turbulent Drugs Tsar?"

From the BBC:

The UK's chief drugs adviser has been sacked by home secretary Alan Johnson after criticising government policies.

Professor David Nutt had been critical of the decision to reclassify cannabis to Class B from Class C. He accused ministers of devaluing and distorting evidence and said the drugs classification system was being used in a "political way". The Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, which he headed, is the UK's official drugs advisory body.

A couple of these quangista actually take their remit seriously, do some proper research and go round telling the truth. Look where it gets them.

Logical flaw in an objection to proportional representation

Alan Johnson set the electoral reform ball rolling again with this in the Times* and there are one or two worthy ideas in David Cameron's piece in the Guardian, some of which he pinched from UKIP.

One of the most common objections to PR, e.g. as espoused by TFB, is that ".. it is healthier for one party to be able to do its worst and be shot down than to have a series of compromise solutions that satisfy no one."

Fine. Let us start by imagining a system with only two parties. Parliamentary majorities would be larger under FPTP than under PR, but apart from that there wouldn't be much difference, seeing as laws are enacted by simple majority. If voters were happy with a rotating two-party dictatorship, then the objection to PR falls flat on its face. I fail to see why core Labour voters, especially those who live in safe Tory seats would be happy with this (or vice versa), but maybe that's just me.

However, we have more than two parties. If we had PR and most people opposed it, they could continue to vote for either Labour or Tory and not much would change; but would Labour voters in Tory areas really vote Tory to maintain the political see-saw at national level (and vice versa)? I doubt it somehow.

So there we have it - even under PR, voters would still be able to maintain the rotating two-party system if they so wished; and those who prefer a smaller party or live in what would otherwise be a safe seat would know that their vote counted.

What's not to like?

* The AV+ idea seems a tad gimmicky to me; my preferred system would be first-past-the-post-with-top-up-seats, which I outlined here.

Let me be Leader! Me! Me!

United Kingdom flushes self down toilet

Bill Quango examines the thought processes behind the latest outbreak of bansturbation in Scotland and Dick Puddlecote tears into the feeble response from CAMRA and Tesco.

As Dick points out, "The implication appeared to be that it is almost certainly going to be mirrored in England and Wales. In fact, scratch that. It wasn't implied, it was cast as almost a definite."

Well, that didn't take long. From those socialist running dogs, The Daily Mirror:

England could copy Scotland by banning cheap drink, Health Secretary Alan Johnson signalled yesterday. He is looking at ending irresponsible shop discounts and introducing a minimum price per unit of alcohol.

There's an interesting point on the price-inelasticity of the demand for booze in that article; "The British Medical Association said the rest of the UK should follow Scotland after research showed a minimum 40p per unit caused consumption to fall 2.6 per cent."

One unit is half a pint of weakish 3.5% beer, lager or cider. So sticking 80p on a pint or 70p on a half-litre can would reduce consumption by one-fortieth?

Alan Johnson's speech at the Labour Party Conference

Just caught the umpteenth rerun of this, yadda yadda, blah blah blah, but this stuck in the craw:

In the mid 1990s infection rates rocketed in understaffed and dilapidated hospitals. Last week I announced that NHS staff had succeeded in cutting MRSA infections, not by half as envisaged but by 57% in three years.

Woah! Fact check!

Deaths from MRSA increased from 51 in 1993 to 800 in 2002 (BBC)

Deaths from MRSA increased from 955 in 2003 to 1,168 in 2004 (The Torygraph)

Deaths from MRSA fell slightly from 1,652 in 2006 to 1,593 in 2007 "the first time the number of MRSA-related deaths has fallen since the ONS began keeping records in 1993" (BBC).

So we are still way above the numbers back in 1997, eh lads?

Meanwhile, the number of death certificates mentioning Clostridium difficile increased from under 2,000 in 2003 to over 8,000 in 2007 (BBC).

If you're going to tell Big Fat Lies, don't lie about things that can be disproven by scratting around for twenty minutes on the internet, FFS! Ah well, at least Tractor Production is up, I suppose ...

Postman Pat

"More people can choose to die at home"

I overlooked this fine article on a recent pronouncement by Health Secretary Alan Johnson MP (Lab, Kingston upon Hull West and Kessle).

Faced with headlines like these, a more accurate statement would be "More people will choose to take their chances at home".

"Alan Johnson ordered to forfeit donation"

This is a good start, let's hope it doesn't all just fizzle out.

Let's not forget that Nulab were already insolvent to the tune of £25 million as at 31 December 2006 (see page 10 of their accounts) and I think their income has pretty much dried up since then, so when they have to forfeit David Abrahams' £650,000 it'll be curtains for them.