Ben Taskers Blog

The Taxman he cometh

26 04 07 - 21:38


I checked my payslip today,Chancellor Browns promises were true, my tax allowance has indeed changed, but having viewed how much Tax I have paid this month it became clear that in real terms the change saves me a whopping £0.40 a month! This add's up to £4.80 a year, and were I to put this into a savings account I would then pay tax on the interest I earn.

The reality is that whatever promises the Government make, we will always be paying them more tax than most of us can afford. The main incentive for the Government to put up the minimum wage each year does seem to be that it will put up the amount of Tax collected each year, the nation is at breaking point. It will not be long before someone does something about the ever rising level of state fund collecting, as if Income Tax were not enough we have the councils chasing us for their council tax, let alone seperate fund raisers such as Speed Camera's and Parking Permits.

It is high time that things were changed, and that the good people of Britain could go back to earning a decent living and the leading comfortable lives. I know of quite a number of people who blame "the immigrants" or the homeless, but in reality neither are the cause of our problems. The sole cause is a Government that spends it's money on wars that the vast majority of the nation do not want, or on trying to enforce new scheme's such as the blackbox scheme for cars.

Only the British Government could ignore a petition with literally millions of signatures asking them not to implement a scheme, instead they chose to ignore it and tell us we are uninformed about the benefits of the scheme.

I for one will not be allowing the Government to fit such a device to any of my vehicles, there is no way on earth the Government can take 29 million motorists to court, and were they to do so they would only find themselves accused of wasting our taxes once again.

The reality of the matter is that the US government allows itself to be lobbied into passing stupid laws by various industries, but our Government just does not require that sort of motivation, it can fuck up the country all by itself!

Our once great nation is slowly being dismantled by its own Government, if we allow it to continue all that will remain is the rubble of our once proud society and a lot of Politicians. I for one would have more faith in the Governments "concern for our wellbeing" if the end-result was not always a tax rise.

The Government is now at the point where it has the point to shape up, Blair will soon be departing (or so we are told) and Brown will step into the driving seat, hopefully he has the sense to realise he has to drive the nation forward. Sadly however I fear that he will instead drive us down the nearest cul-de-sac and leave us lingering once we reach the dead end.

We need a completely new Government, not some 'revamped' incarnation of the old Government, we need a Government that cares about it's people, and we need a Government that will not stop purely because something may not be 'politically correct'. No matter what the political situation, our Government needs to be looking out for the welfare of the Great British Public, and not simply looking to protect it's own political career.

The first step towards that is to stick up to the US, we are not their lapdog, no matter what Blair may believe. The US cannot enforce its own laws on the rest of the World, to do so denies others their freedom. No man or woman has the right to do that to another being, we have already seen that our current Government is not nearly strong enough to stand by that view, and has in fact stepped so far away from that viewpoint that it finds us invading another country.

I am glad that Saddam is no longer in control of the elusive 'weapons of mass destruction' but they do seem to have dissappeared into thin air, and the cynic in me does believe this may all be about Oil. The US is the worlds biggest consumer of Oil, only slightly ahead of China.

It does seem strange that Saddam's behaviour was more or less accepted by the west until the price of crude went up does it not??

The current geo-political situation is worsening, with the US trying to throw it's weight around more than it used to. Examples include insistence that certain countries cannot join the WTO because of their poor history of 'Copyright theft'.

Sorry America but we are not all subject to your arcane set of laws, and some of us quite simply would rather die than live in a society as capitalist as yours.