Why can’t politicians just tell it like it is?
Widdecombe A rude awakening for our hedgehogs
IWISH somebody would introduce some common sense into the tax debate. Labour say the Conservatives raised taxes but all they mean is the amount of tax taken by the government has risen, not that individuals have paid more in the pound.
Obviously two people paying tax at any given rate will raise more than one person and you do not need a degree in mathematics to work that out. When employment rises so does the tax take and most people cheer that on because it means more available for the NHS, schools or even tax cuts.
So why don’t politicians talk in those terms? Why not simply talk about rates of tax? Theresa May can surely guarantee that she won’t put up the rates of personal taxes?
Even that can cause a problem as we saw with the proposed but now discarded NI changes in this year’s budget. The manifesto had pledged no change in the rate of national insurance and there was none but because the Chancellor imposed that rate on some of the self-employed it was portrayed as a breach of an election promise.
So the parties need to spell out in clear language exactly what assurances they are giving or not giving and then they need not be so coy when interviewed.
The same applies to foreign aid. The party leaders should distinguish between a target and actual spending. Targets distort spending because they mean that the government will spend on any old scheme as the year draws to a close rather than fail to meet the target. If instead the aim was to relieve real suffering then more time would be spent directing spending where it is needed even if that meant missing a target in any given year. Not exactly rocket science, is it? DAVID Cameron has purchased a shepherd’s hut for his garden and here is an intriguing fact: the hut was made by a man who cashed in his pension under freedoms introduced by Cameron and George Osborne and set up a business. It was a brilliant Tory policy. The government let people do what they liked with their own money. It should have been cherished and extended, not abandoned by their successors. IN THE 17th century traitors were hanged, drawn and quartered, a revolting death involving being disembowelled while still alive. In the same century people were burned at the stake. Charles II, that most relaxed of monarchs, dug up Oliver Cromwell’s corpse and displayed its head for all to see.
Lesser criminals were confined in cramped spaces full of rats while HEDGEHOGS are out of hibernation now and already facing a new threat. DEFRA has recently approved the use of a trap called the A24, designed to catch rats and stoats but which was originally designed as a hedgehog killing machine in New Zealand and which is more than capable of killing off this already sharply declining species. capital punishment was applicable to a whole range of felonies.
Even in the next century conditions in prison ships were appalling with men crammed into tiny spaces dying of disease and malnutrition.
Free men on merchant or naval ships also lived in cramped conditions on meagre rations, while on shore people went ragged and It can also kill red squirrels and pine martens and anything else small enough to go innocently nosing about in it.
The British Hedgehog Preservation Society has created a parliamentary petition but this will not be active until a new Parliament is elected so I will not give details till then. While on the subject of hedgehogs let me pay hungry. Sorry to be so graphic but I am merely setting the scene for the times in which merchant Edward Colston lived. He used his fortune for the benefit of the people of Bristol.
Two centuries before slavery was abolished by Parliament, Colston was a slave trader and would have thought no moral wrong in it.
He was a man of his time and tribute to a Chelsea Pensioner who has recently died at the age of 86, Major Adrian Coles. He was better known as Major Hedgehog, having founded the BPHS in 1982, and campaigned tirelessly to bring the plight of these little creatures to public attention. I cannot appear in a red coat adorned with medals but I shall try to carry on his good work.
MADNESS OF JUDGING 17th-CENTURY FIGURES BY OUR MODERN STANDARDS
should be judged by his time. Yet his name is now to be expunged from the Bristol Concert Hall because some politically correct busybodies feel that otherwise the venue would be associated with slavery.
George Washington and 11 other US presidents owned slaves. Should their names also be wiped from history?