WAT A TORY HOBNOBBER
Cracking the whip
FREE the Chocolatee Digestive One. That’s Labour’s’s deputy leader Tom Watson,, who tweeted a thank youou to a former Tory councill leader for leaving the biccies out for his constituency surgery.ry. Tom was then besieged on Twitter for not settingting a good eexample. Now I know TTom is, er, a little on the roround side but haven’thav people got more important things to worry about? Tom certainly has. Jeremy Corbyn. PHILIP Hammond has never peed on a fly. That was my conclusion after watching the Chancellor’s Budget on Wednesday. Had he done so, Spreadsheet Phil would surely not have hiked tax on the self-employed. You may be wondering what on earth the financial state of the nation has to do with taking a leak on an insect. It’s about nudging people so they behave in a certain way. It began with a fly painted on to the porcelain in the gents at Amsterdam’s i nternational airport. Spillage reduced 80 per cent because blokes had something to aim at. As a result, cleaning costs went down a fifth. This ruse, and others like it called nudges, has been repeated successfully all over the world. The debt recovery office in New South Wales, Australia, found that fines were more likely to be paid promptly when the penalty charge ticket said “you owe” instead of “amount owed”. Nudge theory was popular with David Cameron and Barack Obama. Automatic workplace pension enrolment and presumed consent for organ donation were the results. TV Licensing must be the country’s most cackhanded enforcement authority.
They’re accused of targeting vulnerable people, and the people they’re targeting in my block are certainly vulnerable to the weather because they must be living on the roof. You see, TV Licensing thinks Flat 5 has been watching TV without a licence. But there isn’t a Flat 5. Just flats 1, 2, 3 and 4. I’ve told TV Licensing this repeatedly but they don’t listen.
Threatening letters keep arriving, and they’re wasting more money sending an enforcement officer tomorrow.
So I’ll tell these bozos again. Above Flat 4 there’s nothing but sky.
As in empty space. Not the TV channel.