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June 2015

Yup, still looking for a job

Isn’t it time David Gauke faced facts?

Several questions I’d ask in parliament follow on. They are:

1) When will HMRC’s tax gap estimates be subject to independent economic audit to check their economic credibility?

2) When will HMRC’s claim of tax recovered be subject to independent scrutiny to ensure that they are credible for the benefit of Parliament and the public at large?

3) Will the Minister concede that a review of HMRC as now demanded by a number of leading figures in the tax profession and cicil society is now overdue and when will he agree to undertake it with a panel of independent experts including from unions and civil society being included in the task?

4) Isn’t it time that we had an Office for Tax Responsibility, reporting to the Public Accounts Committee, to ensure that independent review of HMRC is undertaken on behalf of parliament so that this most critical department of government is held to account by this House in the way that would be appropriate?

Sigh.

Fun fact

Reading a history of the late Roman empire by Peter Heather. Enjoying it, talks a lot about the economy etc.

As an aside he tells us that the marble mines all pretty much closed down in the 390s. Constantine has gone Christian 60 years before, but paganism still thrived. And it was really only in the 390s that all the pagan temples got pulled down leading to a glut of second hand marble on he market, thus to the closure of the mines.

Sorta like what’s happened to the US steel industry really. So much scrap is now recycled that many of the blast furnaces have closed….

Yes, but, Seumas

Opposition to all this has barely begun. But there’s no democratic reason for people to accept it. The Tories were elected by fewer than 37% of voters. Only 24% of those eligible backed the Conservatives – and that’s not counting the unregistered.

The Conservatives have never won a parliamentary majority on a lower share of the vote in their history. Most of the public oppose the extreme austerity the Tories are preparing to mete out, just as they reject the privatisations.

I think I’m right in saying that Blair got less than that of the vote in 2005. Does that make everything done between 05 and 10 illegitimate?

Quite

But I also worry that projects like the Euro show the capacity we now have to create structures so large that they are beyond the scale of human management, given how frail that is.

Our inability to handle the compromises needed to make progress when mistakes are discovered without recrimination and punishment being on the agenda is the biggest issue arising from the Greek crisis, in my opinion.

And I have not got an answer for that.

I do. So stop trying to plan he fucking society you moron.

That Finnish teaching success

Ye, we know, Finland’s teachers are great, the school system is excellent.

But the five-year master’s degree for primary school teachers is not in question. Competition is fierce – only 7% of applicants in Helsinki were accepted this year, leaving more than 1,400 disappointed.

It’s the smart people going to be teachers. As opposed to the UK where….well, I don’t know about now so much but back when two Es got you into the teacher training college when three As might or might not get you into Oxbridge. Many of the inmates of the girlfriend farm that was the local teacher training college were in fact remarkably dumb.

Dear God this is shit

Apple is accused of attempting to launch its new Spotify rival, Apple Music, in a way that would leave Britain’s independent record labels “completely screwed” and struggling to survive.
The Silicon Valley giant is demanding that record labels such as XL Recordings, the home of Adele, and Domino, the label behind the Arctic Monkeys, agree to a free three-month trial of Apple Music, during which they will receive no payment.

That the provider of a service decides to market it with a free trail is fine. But it should rather be the finances of that provider of that service carrying the costs of making it free, no?

Difficult to tell

The civil rights activist who was “outed” as white after years of presenting herself professionally and socially as a black woman has called into question her parentage, saying she has no proof that her white mother and father are her biological parents.

Is this just blowin’ smoke and desperately inventing whatever? Or an actual delusion?

Does this make me a bad person?

After I’ve stopped hooting with mirth over the Rachel Dolezal story I’m left really with only one reaction.

Yeah, nice rack.

Does this make me a bad person?

Or does it show that I have managed to truly transcend the consideration of race?

Yes, Owen Jones is an idiot

More than half of the top 100 media professionals in Britain hail from private schools, even though only 7% of Britons are privately educated. Amongst court judges, the figure surges to 71%; in the senior armed forces it approaches two thirds.

Officering in HM Armed Forces is rather a familial affair. There really are such things as “Army families” and “Navy families”.

And one of the ways that British officers are paid is in a substantial subsidy to boarding school fees for their children. So, the combination of inheritance by choice of serving, plus the way the previous generation get paid, leads to a substantial increase, above that of the general population, of public schoolboys in the senior ranks of the services.

Sigh.

Discrimination laws and free speech

Boris Johnson has been criticised by a Labour MP for defending claims that women in the workplace cry more readily than men. Chi Onwurah, who worked for 20 years in a male-dominated sector as a chartered electrical engineer, said the mayor of London may be in breach of discrimination laws by defending comments made by Professor Tim Hunt.

In a newspaper column, Johnson said it is a scientific fact that women cry more readily than men, and maintained that it should not be an offence to point out a “gender difference”. Hunt, a Nobel laureate and senior scientific adviser, was forced to stand down last week after claiming that women colleagues cry when criticised.

Onwurah, who was head of technology at Ofcom before becoming an MP, said that while it was reasonable to argue that Hunt had been treated unfairly, Johnson’s comments were irresponsible because he sought to excuse views that are unacceptable in the workplace.

Perhaps such speech really is in breach of the discrimination laws. At which point fuck off to the discrimination laws. For free speech is a lot more important than the delicate feelings of an MP.

Good Grief

The first priest to marry his same-sex partner has begun a discrimination case against the Church of England over its withdrawal of his right to officiate as a priest following the union.

Canon Jeremy Pemberton, who married Laurence Cunnington in April 2014, had been informed that Sherwood Forest Hospitals NHS trust was withdrawing an offer of a job after Bishop Richard Inwood refused him the official licence in the diocese of Southwell and Nottingham.

The clergyman, who argues that Inwood unlawfully discriminated against him, told the first day of hearings at Nottingham employment tribunal how he felt after his permission to officiate (PTO) was revoked.

“PTOs are (only) really revoked if someone has done something serious, they’re criminally involved, is involved in an affair or has lost their capacity,” said Pemberton, the Lincolnshire Echo reported.

A spokesman for the Church of England said the church has no truck with homophobia and supports clergy who are in civil partnerships.

He added: “The Church of England’s doctrine on marriage is clear. The church quite reasonably expects its clergy to honour their commitment to model and live up to the teachings of the church. Clergy do not have the option of treating the teachings of the church as an à la carte menu and only modelling those with which they personally agree.

If you’re going to be an official of the club, officiate in the club, it’s hardly too much to ask that you follow the rules of the club, is it?

Bit like a footie ref insisting he’ll have no truck with the offside laws. Not quite the point of him being there, is it?

It’s the quality of the analysis that stuns

So, an argument for more solar subsidy by:

Leonie Greene is head of strategy at the Solar Trade Association

Containing this gem:

No more paying for the coal that funds Vladimir Putin’s empire;

Russia does mine coal, yes. But we generally think that the regime is paid for with either or both oil and gas, not coal. And if they’re going to get that sort of thing wrong then how good is the rest of their evidence base?

Racist idiots

The aim is to learn more about “the intensity of the Scandinavian colonisation” in the 9th and 10th centuries in the Cotentin Peninsula, said Richard Jones, a senior history lecturer at the University of Leicester.

That includes trying to find out whether the colonisers kept to themselves or married amongst the locals, he added.

The French volunteers have been chosen because they have surnames that are of Scandinavian origin or that have been present in France since at least the 11th century. They also qualify if all four of their grandparents lived within a 50-kilometre radius of their current home.

French data protection authorities gave their green light to the study, which will be published in 2016, but the DNA testing has raised eyebrows in some quarters.

“We’re worried this will build on the idea that there are real Normans and fake Normans,” said Jacques Declosmenil, head of the local wing of the Movement Against Racism (MRAP) group.

“In the current context of xenophobia, it’s very dangerous. Racists could use this to say: ‘I’ve got proof that I haven’t got any Arab blood,’ for instance.”

Jeebus.

It’s really only looking at which flavour of Germanic overlies the original Celt after all. The Franks, like the Scandis, were all of that Germanic grouping that came in from the east anyway.

So these Kansas tax cuts

Apparently everyone’s running around saying that the tax cuts haven’t worked because they created a deficit and there’s not been all that lovely economic growth that was promised.

OK.

So, where’s all that lovely economic growth that having a deficit is supposed to produce?

Interesting

We are definitely seeing more diversity today, in television and in movies. Probably more than we ever have. There are certainly more Asians, more South Asians, more people from the Middle East, portrayed on television today, as compared to when I started out.

But in Hollywood, Caucasian is still the norm. Your heroes are still Caucasian. So that is somewhere we need more diversity, in terms of who’s creating the stories, who’s starring in the stories, who the stories are about. You can have a lot of brown people, but if the story’s really about white people, then it’s diversity, but not the kind we need.

Aasif Mandvi

Given that, you know, Indians are caucasians….