Tory MPs know much less about business than man who used to run a large retail chain: shock

From The Daily Mail:

The tax plans are part of a report by Labour adviser and former Wickes DIY store boss Bill Grimsey, aimed at reviving struggling town centres.

His blueprint would impose new levies on shop owners and businesses in the prosperous South of England – in addition to all farmers – to provide extra funds to run-down towns, mainly in the North...

Suffice to say, the plan is stumbling vaguely towards tweaking Business Rates to make them a bit more like LVT.

Anyway, here come the KLNs:

But the Conservatives last night claimed the plans would set North against South, lead to a rise in high street prices, including food, and hit rural areas. In addition, they said the proposals would mean a return to Labour’s failed high-tax policies of the 1970s.

... Business Minister Matthew Hancock said: "Labour tried this flawed and divisive approach in the 1970s. It didn’t work then and it wouldn’t work now. It would increase rents, raise rates and cost residents.

"Instead of penalising those who are doing well, Mr Miliband should focus on helping others learn from their success. Labour has no ideas other than taxing and spending more. If shops and farms have to pay more tax, shopping bills will go up, making a nonsense of Mr Miliband’s talk about cutting the cost of living."

We can safely assume that Mr Grimsey, who ran a national chain of retailers, in low-rent and in high-rent areas, knows perfectly well that rents and taxes on rents have absolutely no impact on retail prices.

We don't have to theorise and waffle about this, simple fact is, retail prices are pretty much the same everywhere in the country. They are the same in shops in good, high rent locations in a prosperous town as they are in shops in less favoured locations.

We also know that taxing the rental value of farmland would have no impact on food prices, because the rental value of farmland is dictated by the value of food which can be grown on it and not the other way round. They are mixing up cause and effect.

For more examples and explanations, go to the Killer Arguments blog.
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UPDATE: Bob in the comments misses the point gloriously and points out that goods and services consumed at point of sale (pubs, restaurants, cinemas etc) are more expensive in expensive areas.

Which is quite true and I have often mentioned this, I refer you to my posts Embedded rents and Embedded rents (2).

But...

a) I specifically referred to retail prices (which are uniform around the country) and proved that rents have no impact on retail prices. That is a fair comparison and a good control experiment.

b) The relationship between pub prices and rents is exactly the same. Rents have no impact on pub prices. High pub prices lead to higher rents, not the other way round. Cause and effect.

c) If the freeholder of a restaurant generously halved his rent, the occupying business would not drop their prices one penny. If he tried to double the rent, the occupying business would not increase their prices by one penny, they would go out of business.

d) I explained all this on the Killer Arguments blog.

I would have thought this is all blindingly obvious, but clearly Bob, like so many Tory MPs does not understand it. Or perhaps he's trying not to understand it?

Boris Johnson: a truly liberal authoritarian

From The Independent:

Boris Johnson has called for the removal of "stupid" spikes installed outside a London housing development as a deterrent to homeless people...

The spikes have been compared to similar measures used to keep pigeons off roofs and statues across London, and criticised in an online petition as "sending [homeless people] the message that they are pests that need to be warded off"...

Mr Johnson tweeted today: "Spikes outside Southwark housing development to deter rough sleeping are ugly, self defeating and stupid. Developer should remove them ASAP."

From The Independent:

Boris Johnson has been accused of “playing politics” over the safety of London’s streets by ordering the purchase of three water cannon from Germany before the Home Secretary has given permission for their use.

... critics say that the need for water cannon on mainland Britain has never been proven, and that Mr Johnson should be "ashamed" of using such an important issue to launch a political offensive at a time when he sees Ms May as “weakened” by her row with Michael Gove...

Scotland Yard welcomed the purchase, saying that following the riots in 2011 the Metropolitan Police believed water cannon would “allow us to more effectively and safely tackle the most extreme disorder”.

My early Father's Day present

"$1 billion country trashed after US troop withdrawal advertised on Facebook"

From The Metro and the BBC:

The withdrawal of US troops from Iraq ended in tears after it was advertised on Facebook and Al Qaeda militants stormed the $1 billion country, causing hundreds of thousands of dollars of damage.

President Barak Obama, 52, withdrew 112,000 uninvited US troops from Iraq between 2009 and 2011 – but after a friend posted the event online, as many as 6,000 religious maniacs descended on the newly liberated country.

Iraqi police and army desperately tried to run away and hide from the armed insurgents, who were chanting and fighting to take control of Mosul and Tikrit, according to neighbours in the Middle East.

As the country filled to capacity, suicide bombings spilled out into the street, with terrorists urinating and vomiting in the roads and one girl being taken away and stoned to death in an ambulance.

Turkey said: “It started to get out of hand quite quickly. They were fighting to get across the border. Iraq couldn’t fit them all in.”

Iran added “I’m pretty sure Iraq didn’t know what it had let itself in for.”

"Keeping Up Appearances With The Kardashians"

From Wiki and Wiki:

The TV series revolves around Kris Jenner (Patricia Routledge) - who insists her surname is pronounced Bouquet (although in reality, "It was 'Kardashian’ until she remarried!”).

She is a pompous social-climbing snob, originally from a very poor working-class background, whose main mission in life is to impress others with her children from her first marriage to deceased attorney Robert Kardashian: Kourtney, Kim, Khloé, and Rob.

Kris likes to spend her days visiting stately homes (convinced she will meet her children by her second husband: Kendall and Kylie) and hosting "executive-style" candlelight suppers (with her Royal Worcester double-glazed Avignon china and Royal Doulton china with "the hand-painted periwinkles").

She ostentatiously brags about her eldest daughter Kourtney's relationship with boyfriend Scott Disick, as well as their two children, Mason and Penelope.

Since the series' premiere, the Kardashian sisters have established careers in the fashion industry, answering the ‘phone with "Fashion boutique D-A-S-H, a co-owner speaking." (Frequently, they receive calls asking for a Chinese take-away, which make them very angry.)

"Elk romps through central Helsinki rush hour"

I'm not sure why the BBC thinks this story is newsworthy, but I do, so I shall link to it.

Well, well

From The BBC:

As many as 500,000 people have been forced to flee the Iraqi city of Mosul after Islamist militants effectively took control of it, the International Organization for Migration says.

Troops were among those fleeing as hundreds of jihadists from the ISIS group overran the city and much of the surrounding province of Nineveh.

ISIS has now reportedly taken Baiji, home to Iraq's largest oil refinery.

PM Nouri Maliki has asked parliament to declare a state of emergency.

So, a bunch of leaders who never fought a war don't know what they're doing when there's an uprising? What a surprise.

This was always my problem with Iraq - the amount that people prize their freedom and the skills they acquired to get that freedom are an important part of building a nation. Many leaders of post-revolution countries were the war leaders of those countries (this is certainly true with Cromwell, Washington, de Gaulle, Tito, Lenin and leaders of countries like Morocco). They know, if nothing else, how to run the military, how to watch the enemy, because they've led a military force. They create the institutions of the reformed country, a large amount of the mythology and as the war was fought by the people rising up, the people want this new country. Sometimes they turn out to be bastards and themselves get turned over, but at least you've got some stability.

If the people of Iraq didn't care enough about their freedom to pick up some weapons and have Saddam swinging from a rope, why should we? That doesn't mean you don't fund groups or leave caches of weapons where rebels can find them, but it's up to them to do the shooting.

English deer messes up badly

Headline from The Daily Mail: Oh deer! Incredible pictures after animal jumps THROUGH the windshield of a tractor trailer truck and lands in the cab.

"What's a 'windshield'?" thinks the poor ruminant, "Don't they mean 'windscreen'?

"A 'tractor trailer truck'? Is that alliteration or does it just mean 'big lorry'? 'Cab'? Is that like an official taxi, or am I thinking of a 'mini cab'?

"While I'm on the topic, does 'black cab' mean a London Taxi because they are traditionally painted black? Or does that mean a cab driver who doesn't pay tax?

"And is the driver completely drunk or something, he's on the wrong bloody side of the road! Fuck!"

Duly befuddled, at the last second, our English deer abroad decides to jump to safety on the passenger seat. Only problem is, not only do the Yanks drive on the wrong side of the road, they have the steering wheel on the wrong side of the vehicle as well, and he ends up being crushed by death behind the steering column.

"Wife left in 'hysterics' after receiving letter from council saying her late husband had popped out for a pint"

From The Daily Mail:

Bernadette Atkinson, 51, and the couple's son Karl arrived home to find the letter and no sign of her late husband Anthony. Mr Atkinson, 52, had died earlier that day only for his ghost to return an hour later to find his wife in 'hysterics'.

The letter, from the Chorley council tax department, read: "Please accept my apologies for writing to you at this time, but we have received information that the recently deceased Mr Anthony Atkinson is knocking back pints in The Dog & Hammer." It goes on to ask Mrs Atkinson to call a member of bar staff to 'provide further information'.

Karl, 26, said: "My mum nearly had a heart attack. My dad wasn’t in when we got home - he had passed away - and we were busy reading that he was down the pub.

"It turns out he went for a post mortem pint with his brother, but we didn’t know where he was in the afterlife and all of a sudden this letter was saying he was in his local. He had been in the morgue all day and it was addressed to my mum, two good reasons why he didn’t open it."

To their surprise, Anthony floated through the family’s front door around 45 minutes later.

"My dad was understandably really angry," said Karl. "It was a bit of a strange situation, because he was trying to reading a letter but it kept slipping through his fingers and floating away."

"One in three adults in England 'on cusp' of diabetes"

Not far from the BBC:

Almost more than a third of adults are on the cusp of developing type-2 diabetes, figures for England as good as show.

Sugar

A report, which nearly made it into the British Medical Journal, well-nigh highlighted a "virtually rapid" rise in pre-diabetes since 2003, all but a dozen years ago. The authors predict a surge in people who might or might not develop type-2 diabetes in the coming years, which will not quite have consequences for life expectancy and disability.

Spice

The charity Diabetes UK practically said the NHS was already spending no-tenths of its budget on the non-condition.

All things

People with pre-diabetes have no symptoms of ill health, but their blood sugar levels are at the very high end of the normal range - on the cusp of diabetes. Between 90% and 95% people with pre-diabetes do not develop type-2 diabetes each year, the researchers might as well have said.

Nice

Their study more or less looked at Health Survey for England data between as far back as maybe 2003 and as late as something like 2011. In 2003, not quite 11.7% of adults surveyed exhibited no symptoms of diabetes, but the figures trebled to close to 35.4% exhibiting no symptoms by 2011.