Thursday 15 July 2010

The Lie of Broken Britain....

"Broken Britain" was one of David Cameron's mantras, playing on the fear of crime that is so often exaggerated and inflamed by the Tory tabloids. But the crime figures released today show that crime is down to below the levels of 1981. This BBC Graph shows that crime in England and Wales shot up under the Conservatives in the 1980s and early 90s, and has fallen steadily under Labour. It is now at levels not seen since before the Thatcher Government. So much for the Tories as the so-called Party of Law and Order!

It's ironic that Cameron made so much of the fear of crime when his party drives crime up and Labour brings it down...

It's the same with the economy of course, and there's another Tory version of "Broken Britain", the one that says the economy needs such massive and early cuts that the Welfare State can no longer be afforded. This case is not accepted by the majority of economists and is clearly driven by right-wing Tory ideology.

And the Tory claim that There Is No Alternative (TINA) to the cuts, is not necesarilly true either. This document, The Great Tax Parachute, spells out some alternative ways to cut the deficit by raising taxes and by recovering some of the estimated £100 billion that is lost to the Exchequer by deliberate tax evasion, non-paymet and tax avoidance strategies.

It is issued by a group calling themselves The Green New Deal. I'm no economist, but the ideas that this group espouse seem to me to be at least worth considering. If we really are losing £100 billion a year through unpaid taxes, it must be worth trying to get some of it back from the thieves who are stealing it...

3 comments:

  1. Great post.

    Much is made of how much money the people at the bottom of society manage to steal from the "hard working British families" so beloved of politicians of most hues.

    So much less is made of this £100,000,000,000 a year that the rich pocket thanks to being able to afford seriously bad tax dodge lawyers... and simply by lying about their income.

    Oh yes, most of it, unlike telling the Dole that your girlfriend moved in, is quite legal, thanks to the fact that the tax lawyers are cleverer than the treasury economists, and the governments over the years have not wanted to upset people who make that kind of money.

    I wish we had the bottle to treat everyone equally in the UK.

    For sure hit the greedy grasping lazy layabouts that take their JSA and work at the same time on building sites or in small businesses, but let's do something with the cheats at the other end besides giving them Knighthoods and Lordhoods!

    As for the crime figures... a lot of it, certainly in my area is that there’s no point in reporting things to the police. Unless you need a crime number to collect your insurance money, it’s best not to bother. All you get is a cheeky policeman or two being rude and dismissive. That and the fact that they fiddle them royally!!

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  2. You actually believe those crime stats published by Liebour? You are aware that they have massaged the stats and how crimes are recorded over the years?

    But the real acid test, ask people what they think. Do they feel safer, even though we have tons of CCTV and DNA testing? I don't and nobody I know does.

    Youth crime especially has rocketed under Labour. I think you must be the only person I have ever heard that thinks that crime really has gone down under Labour.

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  3. No. Of course I don't believe anything any government department under any government of any colour tells me.

    That's laughable.

    I don't believe the unemployment figures, nor do I believe the inflation figures. I don't believe when they tell me what our debt is. I wouldn't believe David Cameron or Gordon Brown or Harry Harman or Nick Clegg if they told me the sky was blue.

    I said:

    “Certainly in my area is that there’s no point in reporting things to the police. Unless you need a crime number to collect your insurance money, it’s best not to bother. All you get is a cheeky policeman or two being rude and dismissive. That and the fact that they fiddle them royally!!”


    In short, if the figures are down it's because no one reports crimes any more. Unless you need a crime number there is no point in reporting it.

    The last line is ..."they fiddle them royally"...

    I can’t imagine where you got the idea that I believe a word of them?

    BTW... I seem to recall that when that nasty little man Howard was Home Secretary, he changed the way that crime figures were counted. If there was one robbery in a street it was one crime, and if there were 12 robberies, it was still considered as one crime, because it was the same person who’d done them. I remember that even as a kid I thought that was cheating a bit. Particularly with car crime, that cut the figures massively. It’s not only the labour party that lie through their teeth.

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