Tax Payers' Alliance in Nottingham

Photo courtesy of the Nottingham Post.

One of my favourite think tanks, the Tax Payers' Alliance, visited Nottingham on Sunday as part of their 'War on Waste' tour of Great Britain. The tour plans to travel the whole country from Brighton to Carlisle and point out local and national government waste across the UK. The TPA is a non party political think tank rightly criticising any party that wastes money whilst in office. The TPA also invited MPs, Councillors and activists of all political persuasions to join them to promote cutting taxes and cutting waste.

The one major fact the Tax Payer's Alliance have been plugging is that £3,800 of your money is wasted every single second by politicians in this country. The TPA were obviously in Nottingham to make aware to people how much of their money has been wasted by the current Labour administration in the City Council. For example Nottingham City Council has wasted £4,450 of our money on just one Christmas Tree. I'm all for festive spirit but not to the tune of the cost of a Caribbean cruise.

Leader of Nottingham City Council, Cllr Jon Collins, is ultimately responsible for all this waste.

Then of course there was all that waste with all those deliberately political and divisive posters. Nottingham City Council thought it would be a great idea to have a website for people to complain to about Government cuts and thus launched this political attack using a poster campaign. The posters made comparison between the well dressed business men of Windsor and the ordinary folk of Nottingham to illustrate the point. This wasted £3,000 of our money (this figure of course doesn't include the loss of advertising revenues form the board, the cost of the website and administration). What a joke and waste that was 'unfair on Nottingham'.

Political waste which is most certainly 'unfair on Nottingham'.

And what do we get out of Nottingham City Council as compensation for all this waste? A 1.99% raise in council tax every year and a work place parking tax on parking at work. They really are bastions of caring for the community. It seems they are intent in making our life just that bit harder every year through mass taxation.

The Tax Payers' Alliance had a very good day in Nottingham. Andy Silvester from the TPA said to the Nottingham Post "Far too much taxpayers' money is wasted, keeping taxes high and taking precious resources away from essential services. It's time for a war on waste right across the public sector.

"It would be nothing short of immoral to saddle the next generation with our trillion-pound debt mountain. We need to strip out wasteful and unnecessary spending and start living within our means again."

Jane Hunt with the TPA in Nottingham. Photo Courtesy of the Nottingham Post.

Jane Hunt, the Conservative candidate for the General Election was also there, helping to defend tax payer value. She has said that "while I don't agree with everything that the TPA puts forward, the principles are absolutely right. We need to help individuals and small businesses in particular by keeping down taxes and cutting waste.

For Nottingham, the workplace parking tax is restricting business in the city. The tram facility will be fine once it is finished and for the areas it covers, but we need to make sure this works for Nottingham, not against it."

I thoroughly recommend backing the TPA's 'War on Waste'. Politicians spend our money and it should be done in a way that is efficient and helps citizens. Waste is a crime against the tax payer and should be stopped. I would urge you to join the TPA to help achieve this.

Murder on the HS2 Express

HS2 has yet again been in the news this week, and it's not very good for our good old friend Patrick McLoughlin, the Transport Secretary. Essentially it has been discovered HS2 is one of the most expensive things that the tax payer is going to have to bear this decade and this is all for an infrastructure project with no business case. What a waste.

  Patrick McLoughlin, the Transport Secretary, used to be a miner at a time where nationalised industries were the biggest white Elephants.

It all started just before the summer recess when the Government announced they were increasing the budget of HS2 from the £32 billion. This figure they said was definitely going to be the maximum cost of the project despite having gone up from £17 billion. However the Government have now said HS2 will cost £42.6 billion with an added contingency budget. It seems the Government realised it needed to put out more realistic figures because he Treasury, the Transport Select Committee and lots of other independent organisations saying that HS2 will cost massively over the proposed budget. 

But is HS2 going to cost just shy of £50 billion? Erm ... no. This week the Institute of Economic Affairs joined in on the scene and said that HS2 is now going to cost £80 billion, more than double the original costings. To back this figure even more it was reported in the FT that the Treasury actually believes High Speed Rail will cost £72 billion.

 Even Alistair Darling can't believe his eyebrows when he sees the full cost of HS2.

I believe it is bordering on madness to stick with an infrastructure project that would be so costly to the public purse. To put the figures of the project into perspective, our national deficit in 2010 was £167 billion. This means if we did not build HS2 we would cut our deficit nearly in half. No wonder even Labour figures are turning against High Speed Rail. These are the people who supported the project in government because they are prepared to use Keynesian infrastructure spending to provide unsustainable jobs which give the false pretence of an economic recovery. Alistair Darling, who was Transport Secretary at the time of HS1, has said HS2 "could easily run out of control" with highly contentious economic benefits and plenty of Labour and Conservative MPs are backing his words on this.

The Government's reasoning behind HS2 is that it will see a growth in trade using the railways and save time for businesses in the North. There is a debate using evidence from French and Japanese versions of HS2 as to whether quicker railways actually centralises growth in capital cities. There may be no growth in the North at all. What is for certain is that some growth will occur but is it really worth £42.6 billion let alone £80 billion?

The Government's plans have so many flaws that similes of HS2 have gone past the sieve stage and have now entered the more realistic metaphor of a hoop. For example the Transport Department accounts the time travelling on the train as lost business hours. Yet it is true from anybodies experience that people work on trains. This was much pointed out by the Public Accounts Committee but the Government have yet to listen. Back in the time when HS2 was supposed to cost £17 billion, the Tax Payers Alliance worked out that each of the 40,000 jobs the government said would be created by the scheme would cost £400,000 each. Yet if we took the national average of the amount of money it cost to create a job HS2 should be producing 170,000 jobs, the same as the working population of Coventry. 

This whole High Speed Rail nonsense should be stopped now. It is probably, considering the magnitude of its spending, the worst decision made by the Government. It is a clear murder of the representative of the value for money and common business sense. We're all victims and the government should be called to account so it doesn't get away with such criminal waste. 

Waste and Cuts

Today the figures for the cost of PM Direct, where Dave speaks to members of the public, was announced at £50,000. This does seem a tad too much for a glorified Town Hall meeting but I think we need should have a scale of the amount of cuts that are needed and pick the fights on what really needs to go.

Dave Direct.

The budget deficit stands this year at £108 billion and the national debt is £1.18 trillion. So let's cut PM Direct and have no public questions at all. That would save us the £50,000 and bring our deficit down to £107,999,950,000. This is obviously a truly massive saving.

It's clear we've got to do better than that. PM direct is similar to that of local government, listening to people directly and so on. So let's abolish it we'd save £27.1 billion. that's a fair size of money but barely a quarter of the budget deficit.

Let's try and get rid of that deficit. I'd then abolish the Northern Irish, Scottish and Welsh assemblies. They are a bit like local government and together make a saving of £48.2 billion. The deficit would stand at £32.7 billion.

Councils also are closely affiliated with the police. So let's get rid of them and any justice system we have in this country. We'd then save £31 billion. Almost got rid of the budget deficit then.

So let's cut international aid, that's £12.7 billion, most Tories want this to have a cut if not to go completely. That will get rid of our deficit. Hurrah, although I wouldn't in a real life scenario want an end to government departments, I would like the government to make net cuts.

But let's see how far we get the debt down by cutting. Dave said that he wanted some of the international aid budget to be spent on military expenditure so let's get rid of all forms of the MOD and military expenditure. A whopping £40 billion will be saved. But that doesn't make much of a difference to the debt either. Let's get rid of education too, that's almost £100 billion. The state at this point is now just a glorified wheelchair.

Our national debt will then stand at £1,040,000,000,000. Still loads. So let's get right to the bone. What about cutting all welfare and the NHS, tough times and all that. This comes to the massive total of  £357 billion. £683 billion pounds is left.

The State has very little to do now, so what's the point of it. Let's abolish it completely. If we can get round the logistical problem of privatising tax collectors and the like. We can save a total of £720 billion. There is now no spending, only income to pay the debt.

If we did that we'd still have to pay £468 billion. That's how big our problem is. If we abolished all spending for 1 year we'd still not pay off our debt.

If we abolish the state we would still be left with a huge amount of debt.

Obviously I'm not here to tell you we should abolish the state. That's just silly. But we need to be looking around for big areas where we can cut. £50,000 is nothing. I am a great believer in look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves. But clearly this will not work in the mess we are in. We need to really get a hold of the economic problems. 

Weekly Poll Lowdown

It was a close run thing but, after a heated debate with the Speaker having to shout ‘Order’ a lot, I think the ayes have it, ayes have it.

Yes	13 (52%)
No	10 (40%)
Unsure	2 (8%)

HS2 is very misguided. Like most government policies HS2 is going to seriously go over budget hitting £45.5 billion not £17 billion which will cost every family £1,000. And what is it for? so people can travel faster by 30 min across the country? Why? In the age of super fast broadband we need higher speed information streaming into our lives, that is where the money is nowadays. The Government should spend more on this surely (especially considering they said they would).

Railways are a shrinking business because of the high prices, you can see how bad it is when you sit in an empty carriage that is not running at peak times. It’s gotten so bad the Government has nationalised the industry virtually. The trains may be run by ‘private companies’ but they are at the whim of Westminster, who owns the line too. Apparently this will be worse in the future as well. The HS2 plans admit there needs to be a 27% increase in train fares in order for the Government's business plan to work.

The Government should invest in broadband not in HS2. But if they are committed to Victorian follies then I suggest they launch a Thomas the Tank Engine line. It will certainly make more money from the tourist trade.

Thanks for voting, make sure you do in the next poll

The Madness of the SU

Today you may have got this message from the Nottingham University Students Union:

Dear members
A referendum has called regarding whether the Union should adopt a ‘Support the Right to Choose’ policy. A full copy of the policy that is the subject of the referendum can be found here:
http://www.su.nottingham.ac.uk/pageassets/makethechange/elections/The-Right-to-Choose-Policy.pdf
Objections
Objections to this referendum shall be submitted to suelections@nottingham.ac.uk by 6pm on Tuesday 12^th February or be brought to the next meeting of Elections Committee. Elections Committee will next meet at 6pm onTuesday 12^th February in Committee Room 1, Portland Building, University Park.
Location and Timings of Poll
The poll will open at 12noon on Monday 18^th March and close at 3pm on Friday 22^nd March.
Voting shall take place on the University of Nottingham Students’ Union’s Website at the following address: http://www.su.nottingham.ac.uk/

WHAT!!!!!! The Students Union wants us to have a referendum on whether it should support a woman’s right to choose to have an abortion. Why?

Why on Earth does it want to do this? Has the SU suddenly decided that instead of pretending to look after the welfare of students it wants to open up an abortion clinic? Is the SU president and his staff wanting to perform abortions in the Portland Building? Unlikely. So why waste our money on such nonsense.

Is the SU deluded? Do they think themselves a mini-legislature ruling over University Campus where they dictate the rules? Or do they think that Nottingham University SU, a few over paid, unrepresentative and politically motivated students, are so influential that Mr Cameron (who by the way isn’t going to change the Abortion laws) is going to say ‘my God we must not change the Abortion laws a few nobodies in Nottingham say it is wrong’.  

Also why do they wish the whole of the University to be ascribed with a massive tag of we are pro abortion and pro women’s choice? Why bother? The campus has many religions the SU isn't asking the student population to vote on whether the SU is Church of England Christianity. Indeed the SU quite frequently says how this is a multi faith campus so why on abortion do they wish to make Nottingham University speak with one voice on an issue people really care about? Surely this is against people’s freedom of expression. Whatever the result of the referendum we will either support women’s right to abort or not which either way is an attack on the other people’s beliefs.

Sadly the SU are fools. They waste a fair portion of the £9,000 I pay to come here on discussing politically motivated motions like whether we should bring back the death penalty (an idea voted upon in the past) instead of making students lives better. This abortion referendum is more of this same lunacy.

Quite frankly there is only one word to say to the SU. Resign! We are hard working students and we will not pay your near £20,000 a year salary in order for you to be feckless towards your real job. We do not want you to debate your own political beliefs and how they can be applied to the university and waste our money on referendums on issues that students do not want you involved with. You live in Cloud Cuckoo land, you’re not the government, I want my money back!

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