The Chew Valley is a part of north-east Somerset just south of Bristol. It takes its name from the river Chew, after which some of the villages are named, like Chew Magna, Chew Stoke and so on. Their local paper, the Chew Valley Gazette, also includes news from Bristol. As with many other towns, Bristol has a housing shortage. According to the Gazette, the city council has decided to help solve this problem by voting to raise the council tax on second homes, and to shorten the period unused buildings can be exempt from paying it from two years to one. I really do think this is an excellent idea, and should come in nationally. Especially in rural areas where outsiders buying second homes are pricing local people out of the housing market.
Posts Tagged ‘Council Tax’
Boris Johnson and His Cabinet of Privileged Thugs Seize Office
July 25, 2019So it’s finally happened. As just about everyone expected, but nobody outside his circle of the Tory far right actually wanted, yesterday Boris Johnson finally slithered into office. It was already on the cards on Monday, when the papers published this piccie of an expectant, jubilant Boris.
It sounds ridiculous, but I know people, who were genuinely unsettled by this image. They described him as looking mad, possessed even. I think it was probably due to a loathing of the man’s vile personal character and views coupled to his goofy expression. It also struck me that with his eye’s wide and his mouth wide open, there’s a certain superficial resemblance to the expression on this notorious American mass murderer, Charles Manson.
Which means that when they saw the picture of Johnson, subconsciously they saw this:
Which is enough to give anyone the creeping horrors.
Now Johnson isn’t a vile, unrepentant serial killer and cult leader like the late Manson. But he is an obscenely wealthy aristo, who has just appointed a cabinet of similarly obscenely wealthy aristos, none of whom seem to have the old virtues of genuine concern for the poor of the Tory paternalists. Because being ‘wet’ went out with Maggie Thatcher. They also stand for nothing more than their own enrichment and the simultaneous impoverishment of the less fortunate. They are vehemently pro-Brexit, anti-welfare and for privatisation and deregulation, despite the immense harm these zombie economics have done to this country and its proud, fine people. And it hardly needs to be said that they’re also pro-fracking and against the environment.
Two days ago on Tuesday, male feminist and anti-Fascist YouTuber Kevin Logan put up a video, Super Rich F**ks, which exactly described the Tory front bench. It was a piece of musical satire, mirrored from Dirty Little Owl’s channel, which showed images of various leading Tory politicians, with captions showing their personal wealth and a short piece about their horrendous voting record, while a song plays in the background viciously sending them up.
It begins with the statement that the Tories have a combined net worth of £2.4 billion, before going to the following –
Michael Gove
Net worth, £1 million +
Consistently voted against paying higher benefits over longer periods for those unable to work due to illness or disability.
Chris Grayling
Net worth, £1.5 million
Almost always voted for reducing housing benefit for social tenants deemed to have excess bedrooms. (Bedroom tax).
Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson
Net worth £1.5 million
Almost always voted for a reduction in spending on welfare benefits.
Is a massive child.
Theresa May
Net worth: £2 million
While her husband’s £1.1 trillion investment firm avoided UK tax, she cut 2,000 police, raised tax on the self-employed and took benefits from 60,000 disabled people.
Penny Mordaunt
Net work: £2.5 million
Always voted to reduce help with council tax for those in financial need.
Philip Hammond
Net worth: £8.2 million.
Consistently voted against raising welfare benefits at least in line with prices.
Sajid Javid
Net worth: £8.5 million
Almost always voted against spending public money to create jobs for young people who’ve spent a long time unemployed.
Lord Stratchclyde
Net worth: £10 million
Voted against free school meals and milk.
Wryly commenting on the girth of the above aristo, the video comments that ‘clearly hasn’t suffered a want of meals himself.’
Jeremy Hunt
Net worth: £14 million
Here the video quotes his views advocating the destruction of the NHS:
‘Our ambition should be to break down the barriers between private and public provision, in effect denationalising the provision of healthcare in Britain.’
Adam Afriyie
Net worth: £50 million
Voted for reduction in benefits for disabled and ill claimants required to participate in activities intended to increase their chances of obtaining work.
Zac Goldsmith
Net worth: £75 million
Voted in favour of proposed spending cuts and changes to the welfare system in favour of spending on new nuclear weapons.
Lord Deighton
Net worth: £95 million
Voted against protections for pensions being ‘raided’ when the master trust fails.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
Net worth: £100 million
Voted for cuts in Housing Benefits for recipients in homelessness hostels, refuges, sheltered housing and accommodation for people with ongoing support needs.
Richard Benyon – richest MP in the UK
Net worth: £110 million
Voted to set the rate of increase for certain benefits, payments and tax credits at 1%, rather than in line with the increase in prices at 2.2%.
The Marquess of Salisbury
Net worth: £330 million
Receives £250,000 each year of taxpayers’ money for his inherited 10,000 acres, mostly in Jersey.
Lord Ashcroft
Net worth: £1.2 billion.
A tax exile in Belize who has poured millions into the Conservative Party over the years and strongly supported Brexit, which would remove Britain from the jurisdiction of forthcoming tax avoidance rules in the EU.
This bit has a clip from Panorama showing Brexit hiding in the gents’ toilets to avoid having to answer questions on tax avoidance.
I dare say that some of these grotesques are no longer in power, like Theresa May, thanks to Johnson’s massive purge of the cabinet. But those, who have replaced them are pretty much the same. They are what Private Eye once described as ‘the futile rich’. Their only concern is to grab more money for themselves, and steal it from the mouths of the poor.
And the press are complicit in this. Owned by millionaires themselves, they’ve now started a campaign of truly nauseating sycophancy, praising Boris to the rafters. Toby Young even raved about how Boris was a type of ‘Nietzschean superman’.
See: https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2019/07/tory-propaganda-assault-begins.html
https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2019/07/toby-young-says-gissa-job-bozza.html
And the Beeb enthusiastically joined in last night on the One Show, where one of the guests was his father.
It’s all just Tory lies, one after another. Boris won’t do anything for this country. He doesn’t stand for more investment in the NHS or public services. He won’t put 20,000 more rozzers on the street. But he will privatise the NHS and cut welfare spending like the Tories always have. And Brexit will decimate our manufacturing industry, just as they’re anti-environmentalism will destroy our natural environment.
Get these thugs and hypocrites out now!
Boris, do what you said ought to be done when Blair transferred power to Brown and call an election so we can kick your sorry rear end out of No. 10.
Congratulations to Paul and Sue Rutherford on Successful Appeal against Bedroom Tax
January 27, 2016Mike over at Vox Political has offered his congratulations to one of his readers, Paul Rutherford. Mr Rutherford and his wife, Sue, are the grandparents of a disabled lad, who needs special overnight care in an adapted room. This did not impress the authorities, who decided that they were underoccupying their council house, and so should pay the bedroom tax. Fortunately, common sense has prevailed, and their appeal against it upheld.
I also offer my congratulations to Mr and Mrs Rutherford, and their grandson. Mike hopes that Mr Rutherford will send him his account of the matter some time. I hope so too, as their experience could possibly benefit many others in the same situation.
The story’s at http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2016/01/27/victory-for-vox-political-reader-in-bedroom-tax-appeal/. Go read it and enjoy someone managing to stick it to the DWP.
Your Unrepresentative Representative: Esther McVie in Wirral West
March 25, 2015Mike in his series exposing the lies, hypocrisy and sheer malignancy of Tories in marginal constituencies has also turned his attention to Esther McVey. McVey’s views and the policies she embraces are so unpleasant, that she has been dubbed ‘Fester McVile’. It seems, however, that from the number of falsehoods she has spun to justify herself and her continuing punitive attitude towards the poor and less fortunate, that she should equally be called ‘Festering Lie’. And Mike goes on to list the lies she has told.
She said it was impossible to hold a cumulative impact assessment into the effect of government welfare reforms. Untrue.
She also lied, and denied the existence of a loophole in the bedroom tax legislation that meant the government removed housing benefit from people, who were actually exempt. At least one person, Stephanie Bottrill, committed suicide because she feared she could no longer support herself because of the reduction in her benefit. She also denied she knew anything about how many people were affect by the loophole. Mike cites FoI requests that show that at least 16,000 people have been affected.
It was Mark Hoban, rather than Lie, who came out with the next whopper. He claimed that independent reviews of the work capability assessment showed that the government was working to improve it. Studies instead showed that almost 2/3 were either incompletely or inadequately put into practice.
It’s on the subject of foodbanks that she really begins to lie. She claimed that the government’s austerity programme was due to uncontrolled spending under Labour, and not from the greed and venality of out-of-control bankers. She then declared that foodbanks were Labour’s ‘nasty little secret’, until Jim Cunningham set the record straight by pointing out that under Labour they were set up to support asylum seekers awaiting decisions on their cases, and not poor citizens.
She’s repeated the lie that the Coalition came about to solve ‘the mess we’re in’, rather than as the result of a cynical political deal by two parties desperate for power. She claimed that 60,000 people would go to a foodbank in 2014. Jim Murphy pointed out that that was an underestimate. It’s the number of people in Wales, who would be forced to go to them. In 2013-14 the minimum number across Britain was 913,138.
She attacked Labour for allowing five million people to be supported on benefits for being out of work, with two million children living in families without jobs, and claimed that children were three times more likely to be in poverty if they lived in households where the parents were unemployed. Another lie. The Joseph Roundtree Foundation found the number of working households in poverty has risen to 8 million, while unemployed households in poverty is now 6.3 million.
She boasts that the Coalition has got more people into work than ever before, but doesn’t mention that this is nearly all zero-hours, part-time or self-employed contracts that deprive workers of certain basic rights and pay low wages. She claimed that the tax cuts meant families were better off by £700 per year, but in fact low wages and the cost of living means that people or £1,600 worse off.
And when you examine her voting record, it’s pretty much the same tale that emerged with Anne Soubry, Nick de Bois and Kris Hopkins: she supported the cuts to all the welfare benefits, including benefit uprating cap, and legislation making councils responsible for their citizens ability to pay council tax, while depriving them of the funds to do so. She also strongly supported the Bedroom Tax.
She’s against tax increases for the rich, wants to see corporation tax cut, and also supports increasing VAT. She is also in favour of further military action overseas, but against strengthening the military covenant. In education she support the privately run academies and free schools, voted to raise tuition fees, and end state support for 16-19 year olds in education. She also supported the privatisation of the Royal Mail and Britain’s forests, and is against localism and the devolution of further powers to local authorities. She is also in favour of deregulating gambling and allowing rail fares to rise without government restrictions. And she’s also a supporter of the piecemeal privatisation of the NHS.
She was also one of those in favour of the police and crime commissioners, the secret courts, restrictions on legal aid, and the expansion of government surveillance. She doesn’t support equal rights for gays and same-sex marriages. She’s also voted both for and against a referendum on Britain’s EU membership.
Mike’s article begins:
There is little that this blog can add to the litany of outrage against the woman who has been dubbed ‘Fester McVile’ by commentators who are feeling kind towards her.
In a previous column, this blog stated that the employment minister, who works under Iain Duncan Smith, “has accumulated a reputation so bad that the only way she can hide the metaphorical stink from the public is by associating with …Smith himself, in whose stench she seems almost fragrant. But not quite”. How accurate those words are.
This is a woman who has lied to the public that it is impossible to carry out a cumulative assessment of the impact on the sick and disabled of the Coalition’s ‘final solution’ changes to the benefit system.
This is the woman who, in the face of public unrest about the prevalence of zero-hours contracts, announced that Job Centre advisors will now be able to force the unemployed into taking this exploitative work.
She has previously misled Parliament over the loophole in Bedroom Tax legislation that meant the government had removed Housing Benefit from thousands of people who were exempt from the measure – including Stephanie Bottrill, whose suicide has been attributed to the pressure of having to survive on less because of the tax. Asked how many people had been affected by the loophole, McVey played it down by claiming she did not know the answer, while other ministers suggested between 3,000 and 5,000. In fact, from Freedom of Information requests to which just one-third of councils responded, 16,000 cases were revealed. Esther McVey is a very strong supporter of the Bedroom Tax.
Mark Hoban stood in for McVey to trot out the lie that independent reviews of the Work Capability Assessment had identified areas of improvement on which the government was acting. In fact, out of 25 recommendations in the Year One review alone, almost two-thirds were not fully and successfully implemented.
Mike’s article is at http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2015/03/24/will-wirral-west-divest-itself-of-esther-mcvey/
Read it and decide for yourself if this is a woman, who should be anyway near power and public authority.
Another Unrepresentative Tory: Enfield’s Nick de Bois
March 23, 2015Nick de Bois pretending to care about the closure of Chase Farm’s A&E.
Mike over at Vox Political has started turning his ire on hard-line Tories in marginal constituencies, whose voters may not be quite aware of how exploitative and nasty their candidates’ views and voting records are. He started off with Anne Soubry in Broxtowe in his piece Broxtowe: Do you really want Anna Soubry as your MP? Now he turns his jaundiced gaze to Nick de Bois, the Tory MP for Enfield in Nick de Bois: Enfield’s unrepresentative representative.
He starts by pointing out de Bois’ hypocrisy in his campaigning against the closure of his local hospital’s, Chase Farm’s, A&E department after he voted for the very government measures that have led to its closure. He is also, like 91 other Tory MPs, a senior employee of the private healthcare firms hoping to profit from Cameron’s piecemeal privatisation of the NHS. Mike’s article begins
Here’s a fork-tongued MP who deserves to see voters turn their backs on him: Nick de Bois.
Before becoming an MP, he was the majority shareholder in Rapier Design Group, an events management company heavily involved with the private medical and pharmaceutical industries. As an MP, he strongly supported the privatisation of NHS services that has drained money from the system and imperilled the future of Accident & Emergency services in hospitals across the UK.
That did not stop him from attacking the decision to downgrade Chase Farm Hospital in his own constituency of Enfield North. Describing it as “the wrong decision” he claimed that “Chase Farm needs 24-hour A&E, end of story”. In that case, why did he vote for the very measures that led to it being downgraded?
He took Enfield North in 2010, after the seat had been held for 13 years by Labour’s Joan Ryan with majorities in the thousands. His is just 1,692.
How would residents vote if they knew Mr de Bois’s voting record? Let’s find out.
It’s pretty much to be expected that he is as strongly pro-rich, and has the same contempt and spite towards the poor as Anne Soubry.
He’s against increasing the tax burden on the rich, wants to cut corporation tax, and is favour of increasing VAT. He also supports the privatisation of the NHS, cutting welfare benefit across the board, and capping benefits below the rate of inflation. He also voted in favour of making sure that local councils should ensure people could afford council tax, and then voted to cut that support.
He is like his colleague Soubry in that he support further British military actions overseas and nuclear weapons. Like her, he supports private Free Schools and Academies, and also raising university tuition fees to £9,000, as well as ending financial support to sixth form students.
He’s also against localism, but for police and crime commissioners. And yes, he was in favour of the privatisation of the Royal Mail and Britain’s forests.
As for injustice, he was very strongly for it. That’s injustice, note, not ‘justice’. He doesn’t like the plebs having access to the courts, nor for your right to open, public trial. He voted for the restrictions on legal aid, and for the Coalition’s Kafkaesque secret courts.
Mike’s article is at http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2015/03/22/nick-de-bois-enfields-unrepresentative-representative/. Like Anne Soubry’s constituents, his need to see his voting record, and judge if they want to return him to parliament.