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Alistair Darling's Budget in bad for Ealing and Britain

This is one of the worst budgets ever- even by Gordon Brown’s woeful standards. It will do nothing whatsoever to stimulate the economy, create employment and avoid recession. It will do very little to protect the environment as the so-called "green taxes" are simply just desperate revenue raising measures and are hypocritical coming from a Government which pursues global warming and environmentally disasterous policies such as Heathrow, Gatwick and Stanstead Expansion and coal-fired power stations.It will do nothing to get people out of the poverty trap or to stimulate the economy and help Britain thrive in an increasingly  competitive world.It will not protect Britain against recession and in fact may hasten recession and make it worse. It will not stimulate productive private sector employment.It will however lead to more unproductive public sector employment this increasing the cost of Government to all of us.It does nothing to reduce real cost inflation for ordinary people which is now running at well over 7% per annum when rapidly rising food, housing, fuel and tranport prices are properly accounted for.It is backward rather than forward looking, regressive, unimaginative, much too complex, inefficient and economically illiterate. But there again Alistair Darling was a lawyer and Gordon Brown was and is still a historian and neither of them know very much about economics, poverty, business or the real economy.Alistair Darling fiddles while Brown broods and worries about his place in history.What we need now are very serious cuts in public expenditure, a massive downsizing of the bloated public sector, concentration of spending on front-line services, radical reform of Brown’s wasteful,complicated and inefficient tax and credit schemes, raising the basic  personal allowance for everyone to at least £10,000 a year (like in Ireland) to take the lower paid, pensioners and others out of the tax and benefits dependency traps, abolition of hundreds of quangoes, regional assemblies, advisory bodies and such like, strict control on the hiring of expensive private sector consultants to do the work which should be done by civil servants, reduction of corporation tax for small businesses to 15%, an end to foreign military adventures we cannot afford or sustain and a greater harmonisation of public spending throughout the Disunited Kingdom.And of course we need an end to the expensive, wasteful and immoral EU Common Agricultural and Fisheries Policies and the increasing transfers of British taxpayers' money and rights to the unelected, corrupt and unaccountable EU bureaucracy.The Conservative Party response so far has been adequate but not radical enough. It took an American journalist on Sky News this morning to remind us of the Laffer Curve, an economic concept widely accepted in the USA, Ireland and elsewhere which says that if you reduce taxes and give people the freedom to spend and invest their own money, the economy will be stimulated, more jobs will be created, exports will grow, companies will prosper and consequently tax revenues will grow allowing more money to be spent on defence, literacy, numeracy, education, health services, the police, prisons, pensions, infrastructure and the other essential functions of government.It is time to:Move Over, Darling.Come On Down, Brown and have an Election soon !

David Giles ● 6776d11 Comments ● 6763d

Guinea-pig

Guinea-pigMeaningA person or animal who is used as the subject of an experiment.OriginIt isn't at all clear why these cute family pets came to be given their name. They are cavies, not pigs, and they don't originate from Guinea. Both 'guinea' and 'pig' seem to stem from simple, but mistaken, associations. The name 'guinea pig' dates from the 17th century and the first record of it is in Henry Power's Experimental Philosophy, 1664:"You may see them... like so many Ginny-Pigs, munching and chewing the cud."The 'guinea' part of the name is perplexing. It was certainly a reference to a place rather than to the idea that the animals cost a guinea to buy, as is sometimes wrongly suggested. Guinea is in fact in West Africa but the little rodents, properly called Cavia Cobaya, are from the Andean region of South America. It could be that the name derives from the 'Guineamen', which were sailing ships that followed a route from the UK to Africa and then on to the Americas, plying the slave trade. It could also be that the distinction between East Africa and South America wasn't as clear as it is now. 'Guinea' may have just been a synonym for 'somewhere a long way across the sea'. 'Pig' is a little easier to understand. Cavies do at least look somewhat like tiny pigs and that was in the mind of the academics who first gave them a Latin name - Cavia porcellus, porcellus meaning 'little pig'. This is in line with the habit at the time of naming any small and vaguely porcine creatures as 'pigs'. George Gascoigne's translation of Noble Arte Venerie, 1575 does that for baby badgers:"There are Foxes and theyr Cubbes, and Badgerdes and theyr Pigges."The same loose associations were no doubt at work when the animal was called the Spanish Coney in a 1710 edition of The British Apollo: Containing Two Thousand Answers to Curious Questions in Arts and Sciences:"A Guinea Pig... in Johnston's Natural History goes by the Name of a Spanish Coney."Coney was the old name for rabbit so, instead of a pig from Guinea we have a rabbit from Spain.The first use of the term 'guinea pig' to describe a person didn't have the current 'subject of an experiment' meaning, but was a name for inexperienced midshipmen on the sailing ships mentioned above, as recorded in The Adventures of a Kidnapped Orphan, 1747:"He sent his nephew, at the age of fourteen, on a voyage as a Guinea-pig."It wasn't until the 20th century that the expression was given its current meaning. This was first alluded to by George Bernard Shaw, in Quintessence of Ibsenism Now Completed, 1913:"The... folly which sees in the child nothing more than the vivisector sees in a guinea pig: something to experiment on with a view to rearranging the world." Shaw, who was a noted vegetarian and what would now be called an animal liberationist, was referring to the practice of using guinea pigs in scientific experiments. This had been going for some time by 1913. The celebrated French chemist Antoine Lavoisier used a guinea pig in an experiment on respiration in 1780. Why guinea pigs were chosen as subjects of experimentation isn't entirely clear. They may not have cost the huge price of a guinea but, being imported from 'Guinea', they were more expensive than mice and rats, which have now largely, if doubtless reluctantly, taken their place.Copyright © Gary Martin

Peter Wright ● 6769d3 Comments ● 6765d

TVs on Standby.

I have had an expensive week-end. My 5 year-old CRT widesreen Television packed up. I had started doing the 'Green thing', and switching it off at night, or when I went out for a few hours. In my case this was a bad mistake. Came in on Friday night, switched on, and for a few minutes all was well, then a click, and Jonathan Ross turned blue in the face.(That at least was funny, never did much like the bloke anyway, sorry you fans!) Red Blue Green halos round everything told me of a Colour Gun, and or Shadow Mask failure, which would have been too costly to fix even if a new CRT could have been obtained, along with a little 'White Haired Old Boy' with specialist skills to re-alighn everything etc. Why was it a bad mistake? Well if your CRT TV is used to be on 'Standby' for years at a given tempreture, and then suddenly that tempreture starts to fluctuate over a wider range, it very often spells death to any CRT TV unless you are very lucky, a fact that is well known but ignored by me at the time!.My fault of course, from my RAF Radar Mechanic days I should have remembered that leaving CRTs and Valves on 'Heaters'prolongs their life.I love 'Green Politicians',and attendant 'Luvvies' etc said my Supplier, since all this propaganda, my sales of Flat Screen LCD TVs, has gone through the roof! If you still have a CRT TV be warned, a visit to the 'dump' may soon be your lot!!!In any situation of course someone ends up living 'The Life of Riley'I suppose.

Colin Vaughan ● 6766d4 Comments ● 6766d