Thursday 22 March 2018

Requests and Requires

This French company, in which George Osborne's Blackrock is a major investor, does not make French passports. France does not contract out passports at all. It says that they are matter of national security, so the State does the whole thing in-house. Quite right, too.

We could have had blue passports anyway, and the new ones are going to bear no resemblance to the old ones. The short-term saving from contracting out their manufacture springs from the same mentality that is selling out the fishermen for the sake of the City.

Meanwhile, the relevant Select Committee of the House of Lords has today reported that DEFRA paid no attention to the 90 per cent and more of the rural population that had no more connection to food production than any other eater had. That Committee calls for DEFRA to be stripped of its responsibility for rural communities, as such. Rubbish at that, and rubbish at protecting the fisheries under that always fake Brexiteer, and that career disaster area, Michael Gove.

"A tax on your home, a tax on your garden!", shrieked the Mad Woman at yesterday's Prime Minister's Questions after she had decided to bring up the Land Value Tax even though no one had asked her about it. In this of all months, she was apparently unaware of the existence of a tax on your home, a tax on your garden. Are 10 Downing Street and Chequers subject to Council Tax? I mean that as a serious question. The point here is that some of us want a fair tax on property, or at least as fair a tax as there is ever going to be.

We need a statutory requirement of planning permission for change of use if it were proposed to turn a primary dwelling into a secondary dwelling, a working family home into a weekend or holiday home; the distinction already exists in law for taxation purposes. That would set the pattern for the empowerment of the rural working class, with representation on school governing bodies, on hospital boards, on the Bench, and so on.

That empowerment would be assisted, both by the Land Value Tax alongside the Universal Basic Income within and under Modern Monetary Theory, and by a windfall tax on the supermarkets in order to fund agriculture and small business, with strict regulation to ensure that the costs of this were not passed on to suppliers, workers, consumers, communities or the environment.

You know what you have to do, brothers and sisters. You know what you have to do.

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