Out-Klassed

What is wrong with people? Well, according to some airhead moron on Radio 4 the other day it seems we harbour the pernicious social disease of – are you ready - Unconscious Bias. So bad is the epidemic that the BBC is way ahead of the game and forked over handfuls of your licence fee to be re-educated earlier this year. Now it appears big businesses have fallen for the snake oil chicanery and are investing heavily in ‘experts’ to deliver this kind of bullshit.

“So,” she said (Of COURSE it’s a she – Diversity Consultants are too irony-blind to even notice the utter bland uniformity of their practitioners.) “So, imagine a gay man.” A pause for effect followed by, “Now imagine he is eighty years old… and married.” At this point you could almost picture the upper lip of Jimmy-John Humphrey-Naughtie curling and quivering. “Then picture him as Japanese,” droned the drone. “If you had to alter your mental image during that process then it indicates that you have an unhealthy and potentially fatal unconscious bias.” Or some such bollocks...

Had I not got work to attend I was sorely tempted to run my car into the nearest lamppost and end it all right there and then. What? You tell me to imagine a gay man and you think the first person I should think of is not Boy George but George Takei? It takes some powerful effort of indoctrinated mind-control  to overcome all natural human instinct and play the non-judgemental automaton game. Because that is what the practitioners of this idiocy are trying to create; an army of counter-instinctive, creepy clones incapable of distinguishing talent from toss-pot, creative from crack-head. If anything the pursuit of the unicorn of diversity is more than likely to stalk only the cart horse of crap.

Then we will have the society the left truly deserve; the sort of delusional, quasi-religious mob morons who at the relevant signal will gang up on a sensible member of their own species daring to challenge a sacred living god… in this case Special Ed Miliband. When Myleene Klass took Ed to task over his knee-jerk, tax-everything, policy reflex you would think that while most people laughed, even the most diehard Labour supporters could only resort to the facepalm counter-reflex. (Couldn’t you just see that in church – Ed in the pulpit reading the scriptures and the congregation slapping their faces in response?) But no; astonishing as it seems, some people are so stick-of-rock Labour that they went on the offensive against Ms Klass with a petition to remove at least a part of her earning potential.

Oh, the irony of also reducing her tax bill. But some on the left are so blinded by their own unconscious prejudices and class/success envy they simply cannot face the truth of difference. Why can’t we have elitism? Why shouldn’t somebody who succeeds pass on to their own their wealth, their drive, their ambition? If we have a world where it isn’t possible to get ahead where is the incentive to even pull your own weight? Socialism, taken to its logical end can only ever result in a low mediocrity where any initiative is punished, any spark snuffed out.

When you put it like that I just want to smell you...

Instead, these equality and diversity goons would suppress our natural biases, our ability to pick the best side to play for, our natural tendency to pursue opportunity and success and replace it with a dull monotony of uniform; uniform action, uniform thought, uniform poverty, misery and a beige world of bland. The only people getting rich would be the party apparatchiks flying the calico flag of indifference and calling it multi-coloured, calling it diverse. Well listen to this you stupid, lefty mongs - I've thought about this and I can tell you, here and now, that there is absolutely nothing unconscious about MY bias! 

Mansion Polish

So Labour’s Mansion Tax motion is defeated. Champion of he poor and downtrodden, Saint Polly Toynbee, must be devastated. She talks in The Guardian about the ‘gilded few' “siphoning off national wealth into palatial properties, gold-plated pensions, bulging share portfolios, fine wines and fine art” Well, so what? They genuinely are ‘a few’ and they already paid plenty.

Those who create such wealth pay huge amounts of tax and provide employment and thus more tax payers on the way up and those who inherit that wealth tend to spend and squander it like drunken monkeys over a few generations until they’re broke and the ‘spoils’ are redistributed anyway. Wealth is already penalised, but the Toynbees of this world will never be satisfied until it’s a pants-down-in-public punishment.

Tax high earners unfairly on the way up and you will lose their enterprise and their money. Try and tax them on the way down and they'll just find a way of disappearing all that wealth by such measures as, say, buying property abroad, eh Polly? Then it’s gone for good.

But who are the so-called super-rich you and the voracious Labour Commissars want to punish so much? You will never really touch the properly super-rich, those you describe in such envious tones; they can afford to piss all over your punitive plans or else just piss off somewhere where they are welcomed. You must know this, so you must have your sights set somewhere lower – on altogether easier targets, such as those who genuinely want or need to stay in Britain. You’d prey on the very people Peter Mandelson praised?

Hypocritical Champagne Socialist poster-girls like Polly don’t ever seem to grasp the essential relationships between effort and reward, aspiration and the accumulation of wealth.

We create a poverty of effort when there is nothing to be gained by working harder – the higher tax rate is an insult to those who find that their reward for finally earning enough to have the same take home pay as a benefit capped feral family of deadbeats is to have their tax rate actually raised for daring to work harder or smarter, or be luckier. That’s like the attitudes in the old nationalised industries; the jobsworth mentality where a curtailed tea break becomes a national strike.

We create a poverty of aspiration if - having put up with being continually robbed by the state we nevertheless manage to live frugally enough to save for an uncertain future; investing, building and spending wisely in fear of old age, frailty and that rainy day - we are still in danger of being plundered. Having survived income tax, national ‘insurance’ tax, stamp duty, capital gains tax, corporation tax, council tax, road tax, fuel duty, value-added tax, beer tax, tax tax and carpet tacks, we are still not safe and our little Englishman’s castle, is broken into, broken up and taxed yet again.

Tax is theft, but it’s a theft we tolerate because we like to think we care about society and besides, there but for the grace, etc... But as tax taking becomes a mission, then tax avoidance becomes a game worth playing. And the people who MAKE money are inevitably better equipped than those who can only TAKE it to circumvent the taxman’s schemes and come out on top. And the ultimate tax avoidance scheme is to flee the coop.

Polishing off our wealth for generations

Polly Toynbee’s version of Socialism is a tax on one of our nation’s former finest resources, our character. Let people improve themselves in a modern economy and you will get prosperity and yes, fairness. Try to force them to be ‘equal’ and you will lose everything. We very nearly have. Polly, the champion of poverty creation talks about people hoarding “pyramids of gold”. The only place those pyramids are ever likely to stay safe is tucked up inside another pile. In Tuscany, perhaps?

Mansion? What mansion?

Charles Dickens had Mr Micawber say, "Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery." Decent parents tell their children that if they work very hard at school, they can get a good job, save up their money and buy a nice house to live in.

In anything like a civilised society you work, you pay the tax you have to, you live within your means and you save what you can. Then you get to do what you want with what's left after you have already paid your share. Pretty soon, you learn that the harder you work, the more you pay, but even that is bearable if, at the end, with a few sacrifices along the way, you get to lead a comfortable retirement.

Unlike some parts of the world  nobody is going to fire rockets at you, or shoot you, or drive you from your home with pitchforks and fire. We used to use the phrase, "An Englishman's home is his castle". Not any more, it seems. Because, once again, having run out of other people's money, the spectre of a mansion tax has raised its ugly, spiteful head.

If anything epitomises the politics of envy that is the main plank of Socialism this is surely it. The thrifty, working, middle classes pay and pay and pay. But they also take less; they tend to use less in terms of public services such as transport, health, education and legal aid. They cost the police and the courts system less because they behave. All in all it's this so-called 'squeezed middle' that bears the brunt; being penalised yet again, in order to cover the endless costs of the huddled, ignorant masses that teem and breed like vermin.

The mansion tax principle is nothing less than state-sponsored theft. To extract yet more from those good citizens who have strived to better themselves; who may be just as cash-strapped as those who have squandered - are they now to be punished for their thrift? Vince Cable said: "There needs to be a sense of fairness, and these best-off people in society have got to contribute more." 

No, Vince, no. It's not fair. They have already contributed far more than is fair. You've already extracted all the tax you were due or were able to. The tax system is far too complicated and every change delivers yet more legal opportunities to opt out of paying. The tax credit system is ludicrous - take with one hand and appear to give back with another? Isn't it about time the government took responsibility and sorted that out?

Mr Micawber also said "something will turn up". I can only hope he's right... and that it's the next flight out of here.