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State of decay?
This pretty much sums up the reactions of large swathes of talking head commentators over the last week:
When I look back to what I've read about previous riots in London over the centuries, when I look at corruption scandals or financial collapses, it really does put into perspective how lucky we are and have been.
I mean, seriously, riots across all of London,no one very few killed[1] and the London murder rate actually goes down?. Total deaths nationally five, including three men run down by a car.
The bankers are finally brought down, not by deliberate deceit, not by active fraud or theft, but by incompetence and optimism.
Parliament is brought into disrepute in a corruption scandal. What over? A few grand on a duck house, a few grand over claimed on a mortgage, etc. Compare that to many other countries today? Compare that to corruption scandals in the past in the UK?
Moral decay? We've never had it so good.
Scary, isn't it?
ETA: Apparently there's been a death in Ealing that I had overlooked, the post is amended to reflect that.
When I look back to what I've read about previous riots in London over the centuries, when I look at corruption scandals or financial collapses, it really does put into perspective how lucky we are and have been.
I mean, seriously, riots across all of London,
The bankers are finally brought down, not by deliberate deceit, not by active fraud or theft, but by incompetence and optimism.
Parliament is brought into disrepute in a corruption scandal. What over? A few grand on a duck house, a few grand over claimed on a mortgage, etc. Compare that to many other countries today? Compare that to corruption scandals in the past in the UK?
Moral decay? We've never had it so good.
Scary, isn't it?
ETA: Apparently there's been a death in Ealing that I had overlooked, the post is amended to reflect that.
no subject
I'd rather you were taxed where you live and work only, if you live in one place and work in another it becomes more complex, the US thing of claiming taxes from people that don't live there is just iffy to me, but it's their country.
Well, 75% of the manifesto according tot he BBC, but specifically Osborne closed a large number of corp tax loopholes in the budget and plans to close more, they've also set up a tax simplification commission which has already identified a huge number of different tax breaks that can be closed (the Treasury actually didn't know how many different tax breaks there were, how useless is that?).
Plus, there's been a massive injection of funds into the tax avoidance/corporate tax compliance department at HMRC, with the stated objective of trying to reduce avoidance by at least a quarter, preferably more.
It's one of those Govt policy announcements that gets reannounced every so often because no one noticed the first time, but no one notices again, it got the most publicity when Danny Alexander announced it in his speech at conference, but that wasn't as much as we'd like, etc.