End to Austerity Means More/Better Services? Don't Hold Your Breath.

It seems the single take-away point from the Conservative Party Conference for the BBC is the declaration that there will be an end to austerity.

Don't hold your breath.

Despite the "cuts", the national debt has spiralled. Controls on spending have failed to curtain the increase in the amount of debt the country as a whole has to service.

That people across the country still see reduced services means that there is something systemically wrong happening with public finances. We are taxed more than ever as a proportion of GDP, yet the debt is rising, public service wages have flatlined and services are reducing... how can that be?

The problem is the system. The system that controls spending and oversees expenditure is broken.

Take the NHS: I hate to bang on about this, but almost half the money being put into the NHS goes into settling negligence lawsuits and paying lawyers. That's half the NHS budget gone before deciding on priorities like wages and service provision.

The system allows this to happen because it fails to tackle the cause of the lawsuits. Doctors and nurses found guilty of negligence are allowed to continue to practice. It's just one of those things, human error, etc.

This systemic failure needs to be addressed. Quality control in the NHS needs to be stepped up and the bad apples rooted out. Otherwise the lawsuits will bleed the NHS dry like an infestation of ticks. When exactloy do we do something about it? When three quarters of the NHS budget goes to lawyers?

Exactly the same goes for MOD procurement. There is so much waste. Yes, I get that the military should have the best equipment going, but it can get the same capability at a far cheaper cost by being a bit savvy. First, by specifying better contracts with contractors so that the contractor takes the hit for any failures to meet specification. Second, by buying equipment already available rather than keep inventing brand new equipment every time it needs something. A little compromise can bring great savings. For instance making our new carriers suitable for cat and trap aircraft would have made them interoperable with other Navies and allowed us not to rely soley on the expensive F-35 to provide fixed-wing capability. For the 4 million (probably 8 mil by the time it had been implemented, such is the creep in costs) or so it would have cost had it been specified ofrom the outset, we could have had far greater flexibility and larger numbers of cheaper aircraft flying off their deck. As it is, we will have the humiliation of never being able to fly decent numbers of fixed-wing aircraft off the carriers.

When it comes to tax, there is lots to be done. The corporate abuse of tax havens needs to be stopped. Brexit will go some way to end that by forcing companies trading in the UK to pay tax in the UK and not in Luxembourg, Lichtenstein or Ireland.

Making tax simpler by reducing tax at source rather than collect it and pay someone to administer it being paid back is just a more intelligent way of doing things. Instead of tax credits, a universal family tax allowance will stop the tax credit job creation scheme. Abolishing the IR35 tax rule will free up investigators scrutinising endless tax returns for small discrepancies so the HMRC can jump on the self-employed. Lets free up that sector and get back the freedom, ingenuity and entrepreneurship that produced such a boom in I.T. across public and private companies back in the 90's. it will also put an end to the persecution of agency workers in the NHS, mission creep using IR35 as a tool it was not envisioned for.

In local government a cap on earnings can keep ludicrous salaries to a minimum. These are public servants and there should be no need for them to be paid six figure salaries. The person doing the job needs to be aware of their position as a servant of the people and should not take the piss by paying themselves 100 times the national average wage.

There needs to be a big push to rationalise national and local government. It's not about cuts, it's about doing things smarter, cheaper, freeer, it's about stopping practices that cost the puiblic money, it's about cutting the dead wood from the public purse.

Cutting the EU payments from the buget will be a big boost, but the impact can be magnified if we do things smarter and better.

Paradise Papers: Storm in a teacup yet another distraction from what?

The so-called "Paradise papers" were relesed this week, detailing the financial dealings of the rich elite. Much wailing and gnashing of teeth from the haters, saying it's immoral not to pay tax, or to reduce reduce their tax bill by taking advantage of the various loopholes in the tax law.

Well sorry, it's not illegal to do any of what has been described so far. It may be immoral, but immorrality seems to be everywhere doesn't it, even in Parliament. Just look at the various sexual allegations in the past week.

The thing that galls me is those pious people throwing stones, like the Guardian and certain Labour MPs, themselves forget they or their agents are using the self-same offshore mechanisms to reduce their tax bill and increase profits. Rank Hypocrisy, everyone in the elite is doing it.

Of course you have to be earning a certain amount to be able to take advantage of these tax dodges; the likes of you and me, the ordinary person on the street had our own loopholes closed decades ago.

The heinous IR35 rules introduced by the previous Labour government, declaring independent contractors as employees and subject to tax, continues to cause controversy and stifle self-employment for the masses.

Now self-employed NHS workers are being targeted in a crack down, at a time when the NHS can ill-afford to lose good people. But lose them they will, just as the I.T. sector I used to work in before IR35 came into being crushed the independent I.T. contractor sector. Back then it was about crushing the more flexible and adept independent contractors in favour of the big I.T. companies. The ones that fucked up a huge amount of government I.T. contracts and cost the taxpayer billions.

As it is, a large number of independent contractors either left the country for fairer climes (tax and weather-wise), or left the industry altogether. I'm one of the latter.

A huge loss of resource to the UK I.T. market and a boon to America in particular and other countries like the Middle East.

The same will happen when the governemnt eventually bows to this latest media shitstorm and starts to crack down on offshore business accounts. The tax take will take a nose dive just like it did back in the seventies with 95% tax rates. We've been here before: the politics of envy do not work and making anyone a cash cow just pushes them away, or they collapse. People will just become tax exiles and probably not come back when they find out how shit the UK is to live in compared to other countries.

I don't normally do this country down, but really: forcing people to Monaco, the Middle East or the USA. Do you really think that people would come back? Well, okay from the Middle East maybe, but the rest? Nah. My nephew has a great life working in I.T. in America. He wouldn't have half the quality of life if he moved back here.

But hey, force the innovators gifted and the intelligent away from the UK. Whats the worst that can happen?

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