What they think of us Scots
Scottish Opposition Leaders’ Quotations
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David Cameron’s usurious chums
Usury: the lending or practice of lending money at an exorbitant interest rate.
Wonga is a company which fits this description exactly. Their interest rate is a cool 5853% per annum! They have recently come to a gentleman’s agreement, sorry a “Voluntary Requirement” with the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), to write off the debts of 330000 customers, a move which will cost them £220million, or put another way £667 per customer. They have also agreed to waive the interest on another 45000 customers’ debts. The reason given by the FCA is “Wonga was not taking adequate steps to assess customers’ ability to meet repayments in a sustainable manner.” In other words they were handing out loans to poor people who had no way of repaying the debt. They would then “roll over” the loan plus interest into another loan, then “roll over” that one too, until the original debt had ballooned out of control. Then they would send out fake legal letters to bully their customers, 45000 at the last count. These are the actions of loan sharks.
You’ve been Wongad
But what has this got to do with David Cameron, our infallible leader? Adrian Beecroft has donated over £500000 to the tories, he is currently the chairman of venture capital Dawn Capital, the private equity fund which Wonga belongs to. He is also a government adviser and he produced the Beecroft Report which advocated the destruction of employees legal rights. When Vince Cable criticised the report Beecroft labelled him a socialist. This revolving door was also used by Jonathan Luff, former senior digital economy adviser to our Dear Leader himself who left the civil service for Wonga where is now a political lobbyist. All perfectly legal and above board old chap, and that obnoxious smell has nothing to do with corruption. Oh no, it is merely the smell of filthy lucre.
Another friend of the Dear Leader is Henry Angest, who gave the Conservative Party an overdraft facility of £5million with an attractive interest rate of 3.5%. Unlike the interest rates that his company Everyday Loans charges it’s customers, a cool 79.7%. Angest is also a party donor, but that’s ok. As our Divine Leader proclaimed this week at the tory jamboree, “Look, I have no problem giving honours to donors”. We will probably be seeing Lord Angest of Usury swathed in ermine quite soon.
With friends like these, is it any wonder that the tories haven’t regulated these despicable firms yet?
0.5% cheer Osborne
George Gideon Oliver Osborne was roundly cheered for his speech at the Conservative Party Conference today as he promised to cut the benefits to 10 million families by up to £500 per annum if the tories are re-elected, saving the exchequer £3billion per annum. This was part of a package of cuts totalling £25billion which was announced today by the Baron in waiting.
Bullingdon Boy George
Government departments will be forced to cut their budgets by £13million and there will be another £9billion cuts to welfare spending. We will just have to wait in trepidation to see where that particular axe will fall but my guess is that it will be the state pension since that is what makes up the largest part of welfare spending, but it would be electoral suicide to announce that particular bombshell prior to a general election.
As a sop to the grey vote he also announced that the 55% tax rate on inherited pensions would be abolished and in some instances there would be no tax liability at all on sums up to £1.2million, in effect turning pensions into tax free savings vehicles for the well off. This move is expected to benefit around 320000 people in the UK, or put another way 0.5% of the population. Who says this government only works for the 1%?
In other news Ian Duncan Smith, or Ideologically Driven Shithead as he’s known to his friends, has proposed a new state credit card for the poor. The idea is that their benefits would be credited to the cards, assuming that they haven’t been sanctioned this week, and they would then be able to spend them in “selected stores”. I wonder which of the tory benefactors will benefit from this particular poverty control measure. With his halo reflecting eerily upon his pate he announced to his breathless admirers that the poor would not be allowed to spend their benefits in betting shops or off licences but, in a move widely regarded as a thank you to Rupert Murdoch for his help in the Scottish Referendum campaign, the poor will be allowed to use their benefits to pay for Sky TV. Watch the bookies share prices fall if the tories win the next election.
And finally a little compare and contrast about the state of the housing market. The BBC says “House Prices Accelerated In August” citing Land Registrystatistics although they failed to mention the fall in house prices in the South West and North West. The Bank of England has stated that the number of mortgage approvals had fallen in August, a sign that the housing market is cooling off according to Reuters. Prime Minister David Cameron pledged on Sunday to assist young first time buyers into a lifetime of debt if his party is re-elected by knocking 20% off the price of new homes, so even he admits that the housing market is over priced and due a correction soon. But the debt fuelled economy that he has helped to create cannot continue unless there is more debt. Now would be a good time to pay off as much of that debt as you can afford.
Raytheon cheers commons IS vote
It will probably be too late to buy into the bomb and missile maker on Monday morning, but I’ll bet that the people who count are already in. The shares were up 1.33% to $101.52 at Friday’s close on the expectation that UK’s MPs would vote in favour of going back to war. With a P/E of only 15.8 there could still a lot of upside left and the quarterly dividend of $0.605 is not too shabby either. This good news for Raytheon is on top of the good news that Saudi Arabia, the UAE, France and Denmark will also be dropping their products over the sands of the Middle East. It can only be hoped that Raytheon has learned it’s lessons from the Libya campaign and it can keep up with demand.
The Paveway IV, £30000 a bang
The commons vote means that there are another 6 aircraft dropping Raytheon’s finest munitions in the Middle East. The Royal Air Force will deploy 6 Panavia Tornado GR4 aircraft to Iraq and they will be equipped with the Paveway IV, a so called smart bomb, which is guided to it’s target by GPS or laser designator. Each bomb costs £30000. That’s enough to house, feed and clothe a family of 4 for a year and still have some change for a holiday! This cost does not include the cost of the delivery platform but, I’m sure you’ll all agree with David Cameron, that it is a small price to pay for keeping the “brutal terrorist organisation” off the streets of Britain. Indeed we have a “duty” to do so.
But let us consider where IS came from. After the warmongers Bush and Blair conducted their illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Sunni group al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) rose up to fight the invaders. They joined with other Sunni groups to form the Mujahedeen Shura Council which then became the Islamic State of Iraq. Their main area of operations were in the predominantly Sunni areas to the north of Baghdad. Their extreme views and violence against the civilians in the areas which they controlled led to The Awakening, in which the more moderate Iraqi Sunnis pushed them out. There then followed a period of consolidation and another name change to ISIL, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. Their stated aim was to create an Islamic state, or caliphate, in Iraq, Syria, Israel, Jordan, Palestine, Cyprus and southern Turkey.
The group entered the Syrian civil war and made astounding gains in both territory and materiel, they then pushed south towards Baghdad, east toward Kirkuk and west towards Jordan. The Iraqi armed forces fled in terror, they did not have the stomach to fight for the puppet government in Baghdad. It was only the Kurdish forces which managed to halt their advance, along with some assistance from the Iraqi Air Force.
So you can see that it is the US and the UK’s actions in Iraq which led to the rise of IS. It is therefor quite ironic that we are having to go back there to clean up the mess that we helped to create. But as I mentioned in an earlier post the bombing on it’s own will not defeat IS, they will just move into the cities and hug the civilian population so that they cannot be bombed without unacceptable “collateral damage”. As the last foray into Muslim lands, Libya, showed the availability of targets for the aircraft could quickly dry up. Unless IS are so unhinged that they will drive about the desert in pick up trucks, black flags flying, just to tempt the infidel to spend another £30k.
The only way that IS will be defeated militarily will be to attack them with ground forces and it would appear that the Free Army of Syria are being groomed for the job. They will be equipped and trained then sent against IS. Of course they are busy fighting the Assad regime so, if I were Assad, I would wait until FAS start attacking IS then I would move against them. This would then draw the Americans in to the civil war and the Russians would also join in. Cue WW3, but in the quagmire of the Syrian civil war anything could happen.
The next thing to watch out for is “Mission Creep”. Did you notice how David Cameron explicitly left the door open to attacking Syria without asking the permission of parliament? Once all of the IS targets have disappeared then the next targets will be other groups in the Syrian war who don’t fit in to the US’s world view. The UK will follow on like a good poodle in order to lend some legitimacy.
The operation is going to last for years, it is going to cost us millions which could have been spent elsewhere. Isn’t it funny how money can always be found for war but not for housing, feeding and educating the poor? I wonder how many MPs have shares in Raytheon?