The Olympics are all about sport, like socialism is all about fairness

Hands up everyone who believes that the head of IT at RBS-NatWest will not be in line for a whacking bonus this year.

I see. And do you also, by any chance, believe in fairies? Hold that the moon is made of green cheese and that the euro is a great engine of prosperity? Have you already placed a bet on England to win the 2014 World Cup? Do you eagerly look forward to the London Olympics and imagine that socialists are keen to pay tax?

I do not have space to tackle all these delusions, but let me deal with a few. The person in charge of computer systems at our favourite state-owned bank will surely deserve an exceptional reward for giving us a real taste of what life will be like if and when the euro finally implodes and takes our banking system with it.

Plus, of course, some additional bunce for sorting out the mess, if and when they ever do. Personally, I’d try turning it off at the plug and leaving it for a minute or two. That nearly always works for me.

As for England’s sporting prospects, I know nothing whatsoever about football, except that every recent humiliation seems to involve our players’ inability to score penalties. So here’s an idea. Why not try practising that a bit before the next tournament? There is no charge for this advice.

Then there are the Olympics. Could anything be more ludicrous than the half dozen or more police motorcycle outriders I encountered on the M6 last Wednesday, escorting not some head of state but a common or garden van and bus containing the sacred flame?

Which trundles around in this inflated convoy until it reaches a centre of population where it can be handed to a “runner” who will, on the evidence so far, almost certainly be unable to run either because they are even fatter than I am, or lacking the usual number of legs.

No wonder they commissioned those shapeless white torchbearer costumes, apparently sharing a designer with the orange jump suits worn at Guantanamo Bay.

Actually, something could be much more repulsive than that. Namely the cordoning off of “Olympic lanes” in London, making our capital resemble that of some totalitarian state, and the equally loathsome crackdown on everyday commercial activities to protect the investment of official sponsors.

The Olympics are all about sport in the way that socialism is all about fairness.

One of the joys of being self-employed is retrospectively handing over large chunks of money to HM Revenue and Customs twice a year. I have never pretended to enjoy it, or believed for a second that the Government has a better idea what to do with my earnings than I do myself.

Yet I have a number of diehard Labour-voting friends who assure me that I am wrong, and that the secret of a happy and fair society is for me to pay even more tax to support those less fortunate than myself.

Only it never seems to apply to them personally. Obviously. I still reel at the hypocrisy of a lifelong socialist who cheerily described over lunch how he had saved himself a million pounds in tax through some jiggery-pokery involving transfers between jurisdictions with different year-ends.

In the same way that these types rejoice in the destruction of state grammar schools, because they were unfair on the kids who could not get a foot on the ladder out of the sink estate. Then send their own kids to private schools rather than the local comprehensive. Because they’re worth it.

So it came as a delightful surprise to find that yesterday’s column by that inveterate left-winger Tom Gutteridge came to exactly the same conclusion that I have been arguing for years. Namely that taxes should be made low, compulsory and ideally flat.

Except on bonuses for IT chiefs at banks that have dropped millions of customers in the proverbial, where a marginal rate of at least 110% should apply.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

El Gordo: a better bet than El Gordon?

Like Alistair Darling, I took a very gloomy look at my finances last week. This led me to the depressing conclusion that the only way to make the sums add up was a major gambling coup.

I was duly talking to Mrs Hann about our chances on El Gordo for a full five minutes before she grasped that I was discussing the famously rich Spanish lottery, rather than our beleaguered Prime Minister.

This is indicative of a reality gap almost as yawning as that between the Chancellor’s assumptions and generally accepted probabilities. The notion that I am obsessed with Mr Brown is simply not borne out by the facts. For the record, I have mentioned him in precisely four columns this year, an average of one per month. Given that he has just presided over the biggest financial train crash in British history (a veritable Quintinshill of economic catastrophes, for those of you who are connoisseurs of railway accidents) I stand astonished at my self-restraint.

This Government has racked up more debt than the cumulative total managed by every previous British administration in the 315 years since the Bank of England was founded. Or, to put it another way, the combined efforts of New Labour and the Fred Goodwin school of banking have cost the British taxpayer more than Louis XIV, George Washington, Napoleon, the mad Mahdi, Kruger, the Kaiser, Hitler and Hirohito put together.

This is a truly mind-boggling mess. Every child born this year will be saddled with some £17,000 of British Government debt. A sum that will take until 2032 to pay off, even on the Treasury’s forecasts, which are almost universally acknowledged to be ludicrously optimistic.

Clearly I do not have the answer to this. Nor, I suspect, does David Cameron or even Barack Obama (both politicians from the Blair school of attractively packaged vacuity). I also have no personal axe to grind, as according to two respected firms of accountants the people who have done best out of the Budget are the very old with very young children, and I am about to sneak into that category. True, for maximum benefit I apparently also need to be paying myself lots of money from a loss-making company, own a farm in Bulgaria and a 10-year-old car, and be looking to retrain as an environmental engineer, but it is clearly a first step in the right direction.

The only personal downside I can see is that any slim chance I might have had of selling my house has been knocked on the head by the withdrawal of tax relief for properties used as holiday lets, which is about to flood the rural market with no longer affordable second homes.

Naturally, other wheezes will soon be found to shelter the incomes and assets of the better off from Messrs Brown and Darling. Because we can be sure that the one British industry to receive an absolutely massive boost last week was that of tax avoidance. The rich will always believe that they have a better idea how to spend the stuff than those jokers in Whitehall. On the evidence to date, who can doubt that they are right?

I promise not to mention this again, but as long ago as March 2007 I wrote of Mr Brown “It is hard to see such a famously shy, disorganised, irascible, indecisive and undiplomatic man as a happy or effective Prime Minister.” Would it be so wrong to add “I told you so”?

Now let us move on, in my case to an online flutter on El Gordo. Perhaps, I admit, combined with a bet on El Gordon pulling off a surprise election victory in 2010. With the odds currently on offer, it should generate a tidy and curiously tax-free sum to cushion the pain if the worst should happen.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.