After two months I think I’m back, really, but I’m suspicious enough to be cautious.
These days I am very concerned because I worry that we are no longer governed by the Cabinet, but rather by un-elected spin doctors, representatives from the Labour Party and other influences, in order for the existing government to maintain power, and be successful in the next election. It seems that those at the top of government are more like gerbils in a cage running round on a treadmill, powered by public criticism. The number of unworkable proposals that have been put forward and then rescinded in recent months, especially under the pressures of the credit crunch, seem to prove my point. I have said before that the reason we are in this situation is that while the average man in the street could see it coming with the ever-increasing internal debt, because of buy now and spend later, unfortunately it was grossly aggravated by the Treasury and the Bank of England permitting dealers to invest in exactly the same problems abroad.
How the very poor are going to fare in the coming years is a given. Those of us pensioners who have been frugal all our lives, those being made redundant, and those struggling in business at the high street level, have been and are going to be taxed heavily to make up the shortfall, and ultimately a large proportion of us will join the very poor. The other day I was talking to a lady who specialises in counselling those with personal problems, and the quality of her work is such that she obtains clients purely by word of mouth. She told me that an unusual and growing proportion of her clients are suffering severely on a financial level, many of them because of the credit crunch, which was so sudden and so deep, that it gave them no opportunity to retrench, as they had expected the high standard of living, that we had been given to believe was secure, and had made decisions accordingly.
What I find extraordinary is that there seems to still be the same opportunity to buy, often heavily, if one accepts the TV ads, without security to back the purchases, with months if not years of interest-free loans. How often do you see someone open a wallet at the cash-out of a supermarket, that has pages of credit cards either in waiting, or perhaps redundant. The government is taxing everything in sight, without rhyme or reason in many cases. If the price of everything is going up, then the VAT is consequently rising also, and this is particularly applicable to food and fuel. I repeat, the government sets out its budget in April, but doesn’t seem to stick to it. If it did, the amount of money that it had calculated to receive from food and fuel would be so much in excess that on those items the VAT could be modified, to the benefit of every section of the community, especially transport and haulage.
While I was without any access to the Internet I saw a proposal by the government for charging vehicles by the mile, using satellite identification. I just wondered, when one considered even the policing of the system, the recording , and the cost to the individual motorist for his equipment, just how much profit there would be, and the fact that there would be yet another government computer that will go down inevitably, as they all seem to do, and the chaos and cost that getting that lot sorted, would engender.