Nu-Labour & Sleaze
'If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and / or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.'
Josef Goebbels, Reich Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda (1933 - 1945)
In the general election held on the 1st May 1997, the Conservative government who had been in power since May 1979 was defeated, ending up with only 165 seats and with no MPs for seats in Scotland or Wales. The Labour Party, now re-branded as New Labour, the brainchild of Tony Blair, Peter Mandelson and Gordon Brown, won in a landslide victory with 418 seats and an unassailable majority. But, in the process, they abandoned many of the principles on which the party had been founded.
- New Labour was built on the 'free market' foundations laid by Margaret Thatcher.
- Tony Blair promoted wealth as a virtue and subjected public services to market disciplines.
- Chancellor Gordon Brown endlessly praised the speculators in the City of London.
- MPs turned were permitted to turn their political offices into a source of personal enrichment.
- Local authority bureaucrats were allowed to award themselves mega salaries.
To misquote Mr. Spock, 'It may be called Labour, Jim, but not as we knew it'.
On coming to power in 1997, Tony Blair promised,
'a government that was purer than pure',
'a government that seeks to restore trust in politics in this country'.
This was a response to the fact that, under the previous Conservative administration, there had been the 'cash-for-questions' scandal. In July 1994, The Sunday Times reported that two Conservative MPs Graham Riddick and David Treddinick had accepted cheques for £1,000 for agreeing to table a parliamentary question. In October, The Guardian newspaper broke another 'sleaze' story involving two Conservative MPs, Tim Smith and Neil Hamilton. Smith resigned after admitting to accepting payments from Mohamed Al-Fayed, the Egyptian owner of the Harrods department store and said he would not contest the next General Election. Hamilton, however, chose to stand for re-election in the Cheshire constituency of Tatton.
A former BBC reporter Martin Bell (he was immediately nicknamed 'The Man In The White Suit', only partly due to his previously reporting from various war zones dressed in this manner) stood as an independent candidate on an 'anti-corruption' platform. The Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats both withdrew their candidates and supplied party workers to help with Martin Bell's campaign. As a result, Bell defeated Hamilton by 11,077 votes (29,354 to 18,277), overturning a Conservative majority of over 20,000. In 1998 Neil Hamilton issued a writ for libel against Al-Fayed and the trial began at the High Court in late 1999. Hamilton lost his case and was ordered to pay costs. He lodged an appeal which was heard at the Court of Appeal in late 2000. The three judges dismissed the appeal and, in 2001 Neil Hamilton declared bankruptcy.
So what happened with regard to Blair's promise ?
In 1997, Tony Blair's fledgling administration was forced to hand back a £1 million donation from the F1 racing mogul, Bernie Ecclestone.
At the time of the 2001 election, Lakshmi Mittal made a donation of £125,000. Mittal, 8th in the world's rich list with a personal wealth of US$ 19.3 billion and owner of LNM steel company, registered in the Dutch Antilles and maintaining less than 1% of its 100,000 plus workforce in the UK, sought Blair's aid in its bid to purchase Romania's state steel industry. A letter from Blair to the Romanian government, hinted that the privatisation of the firm and sale to Mittal might help smooth the way for Romania's entry into the European Union.
Ahead of the 2005 election, Labour was secretly loaned £13,950,000 by several wealthy individuals. Prof Sir Christopher Evans (£1 million) was under consideration for a life peerage. Peerages were given to ~ Sir David Garrard (£200,000), Sir Gulam Noon (£200,000) and Paul Drayson (£600,000) and Richard Desmond, the publisher of Nude Readers' Wives and Asian Babes, gave £100,000 to Labour after a decision not refer his purchase of the Express newspaper group to the Competition Commission.
Taxes and Savings
In his speech launching his campaign to be leader of the Labour Party in May 2007
Gordon Brown stated, 'If you save, you're rewarded'.
Gordon Brown's famous 'moral compass' which has 'guided him through each stage of his life' ?
When Labour came to power in 1997, the interest rate was 7.0%. Under Chancellor Brown's stewardship, it has dropped, in 2009, to 0.5%, the lowest rate for 315 years. Despite the fact that, in the UK, those people who choose to save outnumber the borrowers by 7 to 1, the authorities appear unwilling to introduce any form of reduced tax or compensation for the loss of income from savings accounts for those who actually did embrace 'Prudence'.
There has been an increase of £86.6 billion in additional tax accruing to the Treasury in a 7 year period. As a result of the additional regulations relating to both new taxes and alterations to existing ones, the 2007 edition of the 'accountants' bible', Tolley's Tax Handbook ran to 9,800 pages, more than twice its 4,555 page length when Labour came to power.
| 1997 / 1998 | 2004 / 2005 | |
|---|---|---|
| Income Tax | £77 billion | £123 billion |
| National Insurance | £45 billion | £78 billion |
| Stamp Duty | £3.5 billion | £9 billion |
| Inheritance Tax | £1.7 billion | £2.9 billion |
| Capital Gains Tax | £1.4 billion | £2.3 billion |
| Funding To Treasury | £128.6 billion | £215.2 billion |
Since coming to power, Labour have imposed a series of 'stealth' taxes (this is NOT a complete list).
- July 1997 :
- Mortgage Interest Tax Relief At Source (MIRAS) reduced from 15% to 10%
- Dividend Tax Credits for pension schemes abolished
- Insurance Premium Tax extended to some health insurance
- Road Fuel Tax escalator increased to 6%
- Vehicle Excise Duty increased
- March 1998 :
- Tax relief for the married couple's allowance (MCA) cut to 10%
- Top rate of Insurance Premium Tax extended to travel insurance
- Road Fuel Tax escalator increase brought forward
- Tax on company cars increased
- Additional diesel duties introduced
- March 1999 :
- National Insurance Contributions for self-employed increased
- Tax relief of Married Couple's Allowance abolished
- Mortgage Interest Tax Relief At Source (MIRAS) abolished
- Company car business mileage discount limited
- Insurance Premium Tax increased to 5%
- Duty on domestic fuel oils increased
- Vehicle Excise Duty for lorries increased
- March 2000 :
- Company car taxes raised
- April 2002 :
- Personal tax allowances frozen
- NI Contributions for employers raised
- NI Contributions for employees raised
- NI Contributions for self-employed raised
- North Sea taxation increased
- April 2003 :
- VAT imposed on electronically supplied services
- Tax on red diesel and fuel oil increased
- Vehicle excise duty raised
- Personal tax allowances frozen again
- September 2003 :
- Price of petrol raised 7p per gallon (with the VAT)
- March 2004 :
- £550 tax rise (at standard rate) for people using a company van or people-carrier out of work time
- Duty on red diesel up 1p/litre above inflation (57% rise)
- Duty on liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) used as fuel up 1p/litre above inflation (45% rise)
- Personal allowances for taxpayers under 65 frozen
A 2008 report stated that taxpayers are paying an extra £10 billion a year in charges for NHS and local authority services under Labour, equivalent to almost 3 pence on the basic rate of income tax. Scotland, and Wales, have reduced prescription charges. The Scottish Government have 'frozen' Council Tax charges, in England it will increase by an average of 3% in 2009.
'Goldfinger' Brown's 1999 £2 billion
blunder in the bullion market
The Sunday Times (April 2007)
Nu-Labour ~ Socialism ~ Scottish Nationalism
Logically, independence in Scotland should actually be welcomed by the traditional Labour supporter.
The Labour-biased electorate of the South-West of Scotland need to be shown that, in moving to a Nationalist position, they are neither betraying their beliefs nor deserting their socialist principles but are, in fact, returning to one of the founding principles of the original Labour Party in Scotland. They have to also accept the fact that, in their desire for power, the New Labour leadership have abandoned almost all of their socialist principles and have moved to the right of Thatcherism.
Perhaps they need to be reminded that the party of Keir Hardie, Ramsay MacDonald and Jimmy Maxton had, as one of the principle planks in their original manifesto 'Home Rule for Scotland' and that it was only in the Fifties that the concept of 'Home Rule' was quietly dropped from the manifesto by what had, by then, become a 'London Centric' Labour Party.
The Barnett Formula
The name given to the obscure rule designed in 1978, and only intended as a short-term solution, by Joel (later Lord) Barnett, Labour's Chief Secretary to the Treasury. However, in the 1880s, when formula funding started, it was named the Goschen Proportion after George (later to become Viscount) Goschen, the Chancellor of the Exchequer in Lord Salisbury's Unionist government. The big problem then was to try to keep Ireland, not Scotland, within the Union, so the Unionists threw money at it. The policy, at that time, was known as 'Killing Home Rule by Kindness', a policy that ultimately failed in Ireland. So, logically, the only reason for the continued higher spending is that Scotland poses a credible threat to the very existence of the U.K.
