An Overwhelming Narrative. Propaganda by Omission.

I've signally refused to cover the election much, because I think all of those on the leave side of Brexit all know what they need to do. It's simple: get Boris back in (for all his faults) but also get the Brexit Party in Parliament to nudge the Brexit process in the right direction.

Anyway, today on Polling day, I want to point out something that isn't.

That's not a grammatical error, I'm talking about something that isn't in the news, isn't being reported online, isn't in the papers, it just isn't in the media at all.

I'm talking about citizen protests. Not just the Gillet Jaune protests and now general strike in France or even the Protests in Hong Kong and the massive amounts of unrest there, but protests in South America, in the Middle east and in Asia.

They just aren't being reported, so ask yourself why that is?

Why are we not being shown the daily struggles of people across the globe against tyrannical governments?

The reason is they don't want us, the great unwashed of the UK rising up against the  pressures from the big corporations. Pressures to allow cheap labour into the country, the pressure to allow corporations to book tax offshore at a cheaper rate, the pressure to allow big corporations to make the rules and stifle competition.

We are being fed propaganda, not overtly, but covertly. By omitting reports on these protests against lowering of working class standards across the globe, we are not getting the picture that this is a global issue, it's a problem caused by the big corporations. No, we get to think the lowering of wages and living standards is an entirely local phenomenon.

Lest we get a bit uppity and start to revolt.

I mean, you can't even criticise an MP in the street these days without getting arrested.

The working class are a majority in this country and we need to start flexing our atrophied muscles, we need to reclaim our country, our standards and our rights. We must not listen to the elite who say those goals are dependent on the whim of the EU. We have the power to claim those rights without the EU. We do not need their beneficence to bestow rights upon us. We were born with those rights, forged through centuries of struggle.

I suppose, in the end this post is about the election. We need to give the elite a wake-up call.

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.