Jacqui's Tax Advice Column

With the tax year coming to a close, TMP trusts we will all now be taking advice from our leaders, and like the Home Secretary, claiming relief for everything from kitchen sinks to porn subscriptions, as these are plainly required to help us survive our "employment" as the milch cows of the Exchequer..?

However, even TMP would draw the line at admitting to have watched Ocean's 13 once, never mind twice. Although the opening line in the trailer voiceover starts:

"what does it take to steal 500 million...?"

So perhaps he was simply researching the causes of Broon's Busted Boom...?

Protesting the Presumptions

The protests running up to the G20 gathering have brought "them" out in their droves.

Ms Jackie Ashley (aka Mrs Andrew Marr) and the usual Guardianista suspects continue to jump to the conclusion that capitalism is dead. But she (and they) needs to take note that we still have no proper analysis of what happened. We continue to meekly accept the analysis from the guilty parties (both political and financial) that toxic mortgages are worth nothing. If there was any security involved, then they should not be worthless, even if that security is minimal.

If it transpires there was never any security, then on the face of it, a massive fraud has been committed and the rules/laws are already in place to prosecute the guilty - however cleverly it was wrapped up - and all the people involved need to be tried and if found guilty locked up. Ask Nick Leeson.

If Clinton's Democrats did indeed tell key US financial institutions to break rules in order to appease their voters, then those politicians may also need to be locked up, including the Vice President's husband. Such a thing seems quite possible, given that one of the Auld Fraud's initial delusional responses to his busted boom was to tell the voters that he was ordering the bailed-out banks to abandon the established rules concerning mortgage repayments and loan granting.

So then - call yourselves journalists? Don't extrapolate unresearched assumptions simply to allow the presumptions to hold out the hope of fulfilling long held fantasy desires to write off capitalism to make way for the halcyon times, when that egalitarian and banker-free Socialist future can be ushered in.

As you say, there is much confusion amongst the ragbag of demonstrators who feel compelled to protest about anything that is tainted by the "establishment" because they feel let down and disenfranchised after the past 30 years, during which time all politicians seem to have become increasingly amorphous "all things to all voters social democrats" as they climb aboard the gravy trains that they have expensively constructed for themselves in Westminster, Edinburgh, Cardiff, and Brussels ...and hand in their expense claims.

If we want the future to have any credible foundation, then we must trace this all the way back to the one shack in Alabama that started the cascade of dominoes, and let's see precisely who was involved at every stage of the process - and hound them as surely as any UK bank chases down any defaulter on a £50 overdraft.

And still no one knows what happened

Lord Turner's effort at excusing bankers and politicians has failed to properly address the underlying issues. We all know what happened, but we still have yet to hear why or how. We still don't know what security all those securitised debts is associated with: the UK might own the whole of Louisiana and Alabama for all we know.

The best analogy TMP can come up with is a car crash.

Brown's instant reaction has been to blame the lamp post for jumping out in front of him. Then blame the maker of the car, and then the provider of the petrol - while most normal people traditionally tend to suspect drivers who accuse jumping lamp posts, of being pissed.

Then there's also the matter of misleading the road signs. This all kicked off because Slick Willy Clinton directed the US financial industry to buy the Democrats some quick votes using loans and mortgages for people who had no hope of repaying them.

This is also the first IT "Microsoft Office Recession". Ever since spreadsheets were invented, accountants and financial analysts everywhere have believed in their infallibility. Even when it was obvious to an averagely intelligent normal person that the decimal point was in the wrong place.

There have been all manner of solutions proposed concerning the nature of the car, the octane rating of the petrol, the placing of the road signs or even the lamp post. But these seem to be missing the main point - TMP's suggestion would be to breathalyse the driver of the wrecked car, and lock him away for a long time where he can do no more harm (and in the case of the Auld Fraud, especially if the boozometer said he was perfectly sober...)

ITV moves in with the BBC

Not quite a trial marriage yet, but the BBC is to cooperate with ITV to allow independent regional news in England and Wales to keep going. The BBC will share facilities, and some content in order to save ITV around £7m a year.

But let's be clear here: scheduled broadcast media is dead. This is more about deckchairs being reorganised than any realistic commercial future.

The BBC was doing a pretty good job until the 90s when it became overtaken by Common Purpose's subtle but insidious PC ethos, and thus a useful tool for social engineering for the "champagne socialististas" of Blair's "project".

The problem seems to be that it was allowed to grow and become ever fatter when the costs of broadcast technology dramatically dropped in the 80s/90s. Ironically, the result was that the luvvie-heavy management slashed the BBC's own world-class technology development operations and bought in cheap foreign solutions. The savings were not passed onto license payers but immediately "reinvested" in vast empire-creation projects, and especially the new digital media experiments that stunted the UK's crucial commercial media industry.

And so the BBC's dependence on government patronage grew with the inevitable consequences that various oleagenous political creeps have been allowed to get away with outrageously cynical behaviour in public office for as long as they have. A familiar corrupt face is making headlines again today in the "free press" - but will the BBC cover the story adequately, I wonder? The website doesn't seem to have noticed.

When Auntie underpaid the market rate, it developed and held on to its considerable wealth of home-grown talent through loyalty and dedication, not just cash; but now its deep trough can attract the gadarene swine of the world of "meedja" as they pass by. Some of the better talent simply gets weary of the left-ist bias and departs without making any sort of public fuss. Any BBC employee that is willing to go public with attitudes that are not on message quickly learns that there is no future for them.

The way that the "have your say" section of the website is moderated in the effort to suppress off-message comment and PC comment is laughable. The social engineering efforts of a decade do not seem have worked as well as expected, and management must be distraught at having to provide a platform for the very views that it spends hundreds of millions pounds to try and engineer out of British society.

Let's not underestimate the scope and depth of the technology revolution that has empowered creative talent and has enabled anyone with £10k to produce TV programming that competes with the best in the world. Yet still "olde worlde" budgets are thrown at shows like Dr Who and a cast of thousands of luvvies are hauled in and hyped to the rafters, and even the costly regional diversity box get ticked along the way. And still too many people accept the arguments about the cost of producing such shows.

Of course the old guard is not interested in proving that they can do it on 10% of the budget and set a dangerous precedent - but the world has changed fundamentally, and there is no way to stuff the many geniis back into the bottle, no matter how hard the BBC is bent on keeping its gravy train running at full steam.

Overall, this announcement means no more than ITV needs a cut price way to avoid breaking its licence terms and this is the cheapest solution; and the BBC is probably anticipating picking up the pieces when ITV finally tanks, since such a fractured organisation would probably be a lot less attractive to any potential purchaser of ITV. Although an alternative view might be that this also makes the BBC operations easier to commercialise when the time comes and all scheduled broadcasting becomes web deliverable.

Brown's guaranteed penury

The news that the so-called "government backed" loans to businesses are only available where the directors of those business also personally guarantee 100% of the loan is a further example of just how little this government actually knows or cares about life outside the Westminster media village.

Real businesspeople are correctly furious that these terms are being determined by the very same catastrophically failed bankers who have been bailed out by the rest of us, and kept in work without themselves risking a single penny of their salaries, pensions or personal wealth.

Maybe the government and all persons participating who get paid from public coffers should now also provide bottomless personal guarantees on the performance of all aspects of government?

Chickens and heads reunited

Everyone slow down for a moment and allow the chicken and head to reunite. What actually changed between 2007 and now? The oil price shot up and scared a lot of people; and several industries reliant on cheap oil (agriculture especially) shat themselves.

Nothing else really changed with the fundamentals, other than the world is now being expected to only purchase what it can afford to pay for with cash. The oil price is back down, (even if utilities like Eon are still subsidising their EU customers from mugging UK punters).

The most obvious consequence of the global banking fraud is that people cannot still have what they want the moment they want it - thanks to the end of hitherto easy credit. This probably puts a 2-3 year hiatus in sales of cars; which is hard on the supply industries and countries like Japan, Germany and France (we're not weeping) that still own substantial car manufacturing industries. Countries producing the endless tat that we don't actually need will suffer; maybe the more industrious will be tempted to make their own birdtables instead of buying them at £50 from a garden centre. Maybe people will plant 10p seeds instead of buying £10 potted plants..?

Is this really so terrible as a way of life?

Few will weep for those luxury brands who sell goods for 10x the price of virtually equivalent quality merchandise from unknown sources.

For most of the world where currencies have not also been trashed by an persistently inept socialist government, nothing much has changed, other then a bunch of reckless criminal frauds and charlatans have been exposed in business and politics. And we have been given a nudge in the direction of finding replacement energy sources that are better under our control; which has probably done us all a bit of a favour in the long run.

There may be some reasons to be cheerful; none of which are in any way down to the skillful management Gordhelpus Brown and his worthless junta. So don't let the Auld Fraud in Chief take any credit for anything that might accidentally go right.

However, if you are a prudent British saver staring at 1% return on your dwindling cash (at best) you are entitled to be pissed off. And if you are a Lloyds shareholder, TMP hopes that you will support one of the group initiatives to put the old pals act of Broon and Blank in the dock, and make them pay for their cocktail party shortcut to poverty.

TMP shows the way

Right at the start of this crisis TMP offered the world's politicians the simple way out, but no one listened.

We proposed that the US paid off Billy Bob's mortgage by printing money to employ him on public projects and thus crucially allowed the status quo to continue, while the toxic mess was sorted out and villains of the piece were identified and expunged.

Now EVERYONE is going to be forced to print money in a desperate attempt to stave off depression - except that vastly more money is now being poured on a bonfire that need never have been allowed to get to the size of conflagration we are now witnessing.

Obviously TMP would indeed have saved the world (sic) a lot of bother if only anyone had bothered to listen. But no one ever gets thanked for being right, do they?

Last days of the Caledonian Empire ..?

Even the redoubtable flag bearer of the left, Poly Toynbee, seems to have given up and accepted the Cameron will be the next PM. SO there is a vigorous debate going on in left wing circles to try and work out where it all went so horribly wrong.

Of course, the prime suggestion must be that "Blue" Labour was simply not socialist enough, and that what we really needed was state ownership of everything whilst it was still worth a couple of quid. However, the left theorists and thinkers expressing their (typically) voluminous analysis are missing the point. Their philosophy has been tried in all its many degrees for the past 100 years, and it has not evolved past 1917 for the most part.

Sad or otherwise, the idea of working hard for the benefit of someone you don't know is utterly contrary to all human nature. There may be a few good Samaritans out there, and the greatest irony of all politics is that such people are rather more likely to be found on the right, than the left . Probably because they have understood enough about the way the world really works, and used that skill to earn the money to be able to assist.

The good communist would have given up all his/her (and everyone else's) possessions for the commune committee to manage, and thus there was nothing left to offer in times of trouble.

The left is still over populated by those who believe that Robin Hood had the plot - although even more ironically, they mostly end up as the soul mates of the Sheriff of Nottingham: rob from absolutely everyone, and use it buy apparatchiks.

So then all those of you who are still tempted to find ways to excuse socialism, give it a rest, and spare us the wibble. Then pause and learn how to work with human nature, rather than against it. Otherwise you'll need all the razor wire, CS gas and riot gear that you and your fellow travellers can muster.