Author Archives: Tim Worstall

There are two political/economic achievements I can claim. Not that I achieved them alone, but there was very definitely a part in them for me. Suggesting, convincing people at the right points in the policy development process. And one of them is at risk:

It is understood that a freeze on tax thresholds is being considered as one option to pay for up to £10bn of the extra annual cash injection. This would, however, mean another big policy U-turn by the Tories, who are committed to raising the tax-free threshold to £12,500 and increasing the level at which people pay high-rate tax to £50,000 by April 2020.

The point I made was quite simple. The difference between the Living Wage and the minimum wage is, pretty much entirely, down to the taxation of low wages. If people received the minimum wage free of income tax (and it’s a slam dunk if it’s free of both NIs) then they would, in their hands, have what the Living Wage insists they should get. We’d also reduce the far too high marginal tax and benefit withdrawal rates, increasing labour supply, make the poor better off and so on.

Plus there’s that moral point, if minimum wage is the minimum that it’s just and righteous that people should gain for their labour then what in buggery are you doing taxing it?

So, the tax allowance should be whatever the minimum wage is. That’s why the aim is that £12,500, that’s what the full year, full time, minimum wage was when the policy was adopted.

Working against that we’ve the fact that fiscal drag is just too tempting a place to go get tax money. Which is why we ended up in this ludicrous situation in the first place, with people working part time on minimum wage playing taxes upon labour income in the first place. Several decades of such fiscal drag.

So, of course I think they’re doing the wrong thing here. But then I’m also right, they are doing the wrong thing. Because if you want the poor to be better off you have to stop taxing them.

She has been one of the fiercest critics of companies and institutions which fritter away taxpayers’ money.

But now the veteran Labour MP, Dame Margaret Hodge, is seeking a salary for a voluntary post at a university, it has emerged.

Dame Margaret, the former chair of the public accounts committee, applied to be Chair of Council at Royal Holloway, University of London, which was advertised as an unpaid position.

However, sources have claimed that the former minister said that she would only take up the post if it came with an income of £20,000 per annum.

Dame Margaret, who has served as MP for Barking since 1994, was honoured by the Queen in 2015 for her political and public services.

A source told The Sunday Telegraph said that the university role “attracted well over 100 good applicants when it was advertised. So lots of capable people wanted to volunteer to give back to support the University.

“Royal Holloway University’s statutes, or laws, forbids the University from paying their Chair of the Council a salary. The post has to be done for free. This did not deter our Labour MP who is not willing to do the job for nothing, even though it had been advertised as a voluntary job. A very socialist approach to volunteering and the public good.”

Ritchie doesn’t give evidence without cash support either. What is it?

And yes, when asked to give expert evidence to aid in jugging some criminals I did indeed do it for free.

A High Court judge has criticised a social worker who took a child away from his mother because she refused to give him an ice cream.

The social worker said the woman was failing to meet her son’s “emotional needs”, and also highlighted how she did not allow him to get his hair to be cut “in the way that he liked”.

Mr Justice Mostyn, who is based in the Family Division of the High Court in London, said the social worker’s criticisms were “utterly insubstantial” and “obviously inconsequential”.

The judge said the social worker had outlined her evidence in a 44-page witness statement which was “very long on rhetoric” but “very short indeed” on “concrete examples” of “deficient” parenting.

He said it was “very hard” to pin down within the “swathes of text” what exactly was being said “against” the woman.

We’ve two problems with this idea that the State is in loco parentis.

One is the quality of the people likely to do the job. This is not just me being a gammon, those working in the front line of these sort of state services are not going to be the brightest and best of our society. The other is the beliefs they’re going to hold. Rather the point for some is that such state parenting – like state anything else, education and so on – is going to be determined by the “correct” views. You know, those they’d like to impose upon society and which no one will give the time of day to in the real world.

Our truly great problem here being that we also undoubtedly need some form of child protection because there are some truly appalling, even evil, parents out there. Thus, how do we do the protection bit that actually needs to be done without handing over the entirety of society to the ideologically driven incompetents? And that such services are run by the ideological incompetents is easily enough proven. Just look at the rules about race and adoption….