Sam Iles's Blog

Coalition proposes a policy which will increase emissions by 20%:

Ministers to look at 80mph limit

Coalition proposes a policy which will reduce recycling:

£250 million to fund weekly bin rounds

So much for the promise that this would be the ‘Greenest Government Ever’…

Today I had to file a company tax return with the government. It was the most technologically awful experience of my life. Let me explain it to you.

First of all you log into the ‘Government Gateway’ and select that you want to file a Corporation Tax return. I clicked through a few pages, carefully reading what turned out to be irrelevant drivel. “I’ll start entering figures soon,” I thought. Not so.

The website eventually asked me to download a PDF saying that would be how I file my return. “No,” I thought, “the whole point of this was to file it online – not print a PDF and send it to them…”. But, I acquiesced.

My Mac opened the PDF in the wonderfully lightweight Preview.

The PDF was just a white page with the words “make sure you are using the latest version of Adobe Reader”.

Hmm. I acquiesced and downloaded Adobe Reader. All 450mb of it.

To my slight amazement the PDF prompted me to enter all my login information where it then validated itself (in the clear, I wouldn’t be surprised). I then had to clumsily click through pages of the PDF entering values. The only help provided was by clicking a ? which gave a popup with bold, unformatted and unpunctuated barely readable text.

After struggling through and entering lots of duplicate information while being offended with bright red errors and ugly green tones everywhere I had to validate the PDF with some ridiculous 16 step process of fiddling with deep Adobe Reader settings which basically gave the app root access to my Mac.

I then had to enter my ‘Government Gateway’ login info one more time, click submit and stare expectantly at a blank page for several minutes until – to my amazement – it declared that it had worked. It then advised me to print a copy of my billion page return which, surprise surprise, wouldn’t work on my Mac.

So there you have it. Submitting a company corporation tax return to Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs through a macro-laden PDF.

Why don’t they just have a website? A website which could do have the sums for me, save my progress (why not let me enter it month by month throughout the year), actually function simply and operate like everything else on the website. I could code such a website in a matter of hours. Paying tax should be a simple process.

And, you just know that the government was scammed out of millions by some IT company for that PDF.

A PDF.

I’m sure the Pros and accountants have software which does this for them. And, no wonder. I’ll be buying that next year.

A PDF.

I think the rich should be taxed more. A lot more, in fact.

People often get upset by the idea of taxing the rich, for some reason.

Michael Arrington (a stupid man I know, but stick with me) wrote this in TechCrunch:

What I really didn’t understand until recently though is why so many rich Americans seem to loathe their richness as much as everyone else does. Many in Silicon Valley want to tax the rich into the middle class and let government spend and spend and spend. The super rich tech elite flock to Obama, joining in the call to screw the rich as loudly as all the rest.

What nonsense. For one thing, no marginal increase in tax for the super-rich would “tax them into middle class”.

Tax brackets work like this: let’s say the standard tax rate in 30% and then there is a 40% rate for people who earn over £150,000 then they don’t pay 40% of everything, but rather they pay 40% on everything they earn over £150,000.

To clarify, someone who earns £160,000 would pay 30% on £150k on 40% on £10k. Capisce? Good.

Do remember, in Eisenhower’s day the tax rate for people earning more than $1million was 91%. Yes, 91%. But that worked exactly as I just explained. You paid 91% on everything over $1m, not all of it.

So, let’s explore some more – with maths! Let’s use the Green Party’s policy of 50% tax rate for incomes above £100,000. At the moment there is a 40% rate for incomes over £35,000 (which would remain under Green Party policy). So, observe the following:

(Note: I realise now that I’ve forgotten to take into account the personal income limit, so the actual tax values will be slightly lower than they are here. However, the comparisons are still accurate, so it’s all good.)

Once you put that 50% rate into perspective you realise it really isn’t as drastic as it may sound on paper. In fact, it makes our tax system seem rather lenient. Why there isn’t a band for people who earn over £500,000 and over £1million I have no idea. Each year in the UK, 14,000 people earn more than £1million. That’s a lot of tax money. To Arrington’s point: these higher incomes with the new band of tax have lost a few thousand pounds at most – they certainly haven’t rocketed into middle class.

And let’s make one thing clear from a personal standpoint – this isn’t about raising more tax money. The last thing I want the government to do is raise tax. What I do want them to do, however, is reduce tax for poorer people. The smallest tax band is 20% and that’s for anyone earning from £0 to £35,000. In my opinion, there should be another band of 10% for income under, say, £20,000. That’s my belief: shift the tax burden away from the poor and towards the rich.

Warren Buffet, the billionaire investor recently wrote (I know this is in America, but it’s still relevant to the UK):

Last year my [tax bill] was $6,938,744. That sounds like a lot of money. But what I paid was only 17.4 percent of my taxable income — and that’s actually a lower percentage than was paid by any of the other 20 people in our office. Their tax burdens ranged from 33 percent to 41 percent and averaged 36 percent.

Think about that. The guy who made $39,877,839 in one year pays 17.4%, whereas his staff who are on normal salaries pay up to 41% a year. What possible sense does that make?

Warren adds:

I have worked with investors for 60 years and I have yet to see anyone — not even when capital gains rates were 39.9 percent in 1976-77 — shy away from a sensible investment because of the tax rate on the potential gain. People invest to make money, and potential taxes have never scared them off. And to those who argue that higher rates hurt job creation, I would note that a net of nearly 40 million jobs were added between 1980 and 2000. You know what’s happened since then: lower tax rates and far lower job creation.

He makes a brilliant point. People often complain that higher taxes for the rich will stop people becoming doctors or lawyers and we’ll all die and… have insufficient legal representation, or something. This simply isn’t true. People become doctors to become doctors. They will still do it if they’ll have to pay a few extra hundred pounds of tax because the bottom line is they will still make a lot more money by becoming a doctor than if they’d chosen to work at Tesco to avoid that tax. The very idea that doctors would just disappear is nonsense.

I’ve only discussed a few ideas about higher taxes for the rich here. There is still more to talk about. And, please don’t berate me in the comments or the Twitter or whatever for something which I haven’t discussed here.

Still, I hope you’ve learned something and have realised that higher taxes for the rich are actually very good.

In the House of Commons debates on Thursday, Caroline Lucas, leader of the Green Party, said to Mr Cameron (amongst other things):

Given the growing evidence, from Scarman onwards, that increasing inequality has a role to play in drawing at least some people into violent behaviour, can the Prime Minister reassure the House that comprehensive impact assessments will be undertaken before his government introduce any more policies that increase inequality?

I very much agree. It’s fairly obvious – and has been said by the Prime Minister himself – that there is a clear social-economic background to the people rioting. They were mostly, for want of a better term, poor. And, inequality is what makes the poor, poor – isn’t it? Surely nobody could argue with Ms Lucas’s suggestion that fighting inequality is perhaps the biggest factor in stopping similar events happening again…? In fact, all she’s asking for is impact assessments!

The Prime Minister disagrees. He replied:

I have to say to the honourable lady that young people smashing down windows and stealing televisions is not about inequality.

And that was it. No diatribe as he did when responding to everyone else (I watched all two plus hours of it). Will he even agree to impact assessments? No; just a single sentence which instantly brushes away the idea of inequality and says “I don’t want to make society fairer”.

Odd, isn’t it, that the PM talks about the people rioting being from poor, disadvantaged backgrounds but just a few minutes later dismisses inequality out of hand.

As Mrs Thatcher famously said, laying out the classic Tory response to leftists trying to make society more equal: “they don’t want to the poor to be richer; they want the rich to be poorer”. sigh

So how could we expect a Tory Prime Minister to respond to Ms Lucas’s question sensibly. Why can’t he just say what’s really on his mind? “Don’t be silly, Caroline! Us Tories love inequality!”

In the wake of the recent UK riots, David Cameron is toting ’social media’ (that’s Twitter and BBM to you and me) and a huge problem in this. He says that people were using social media to organise themselves and ’stay one step ahead of the police’. I have a few very large problems with all this.

• I thought these were a bunch of ‘opportunistic, mindless criminals’? Yet, almost in the same breath, you tell me they’re organising their efforts over the Twitter…? I’m afraid, Mr Cameron, you cannot have it both ways. Either these people are destitute riot-addled youths or they’re master criminals using technology to outwit the police.

• If these people are tweeting out their plans and the like for the world to see, then it should be incredibly simple for the police to deal with them. In fact, it should make it easier. I’m sure even the MET have access to a web browser (or is twitter.com blocked on government machines, perhaps…). To me, it seems like the perfect opportunity to stay one step ahead of the rioters. And, if they’re using Direct Messages, then there isn’t a problem at all given that’s a one-to-one system, and SMS could be used. Same goes for Black Berry Messenger – I’m sure the kids know how to use SMS.

• Even if all this is happening on the grand scale you’d have us think, surely it should be a jolly good thing. Because, the MET now has a giant digital trail of evidence catch people and to present in a court of law. Perfect, right?

To solve these ostensible problems Mr Cameron has a few solutions.

• Ban the youths from social media for the time of further unrest.

• Ban the youths from social media forever…

• Shut down Twitter and BBM in the event of any further unrest for the duration of said unrest.

Again, I have a few problems with all this.

The first option is technically impossible. The idea of having some kind of elite task force watching the Twitter for people who mention the riots in what seems like a participatory way and then hitting some button to temporally ban them from the Internet would be near impossible and, most obviously, would require literally thousands of people who’d be better used out on the streets fighting the rioters with batons.

The second one is also pointless. Firstly, it requires they be convicted of rioting in the first place. By the time the next UK riots roll around, it’s likely these people will be all grown up and very much not the one’s who are rioting.

The third one is both pointless and evil. I have an image on my head of Mr Cameron stood in his office like a Bond villain reaching down and pushing a big red button marked “Twitter” to switch it off. Firstly, it’s technically very difficult to do. Just about the only way to do it would be to get the Internet Providers to do it. Even then, with IP addresses and proxies it would be a hard task technically. Secondly, the Internet is a big place and nerds are smart. Shut down Twitter and they’ll use Facebook. Shut that down and they’ll fire up their MySpace accounts. Shut down every third party and someone will make a little website just for the purpose of rioting. The Internet is too big.

Thirdly, and most obviously, the government really would be punishing everyone here. If London has a few looters, shutting down all of Twitter is akin to closing all roads in the UK, switching off the phone networks, forcing the TV stations to stop broadcasting and banning the sale of anything hard – all over the UK. It really is massive overkill which punishes everyone in the UK rather than just a few.

Fourthly (and this one will be somewhat hard to explain, no doubt), but, it really is terrible hypocrisy.

In the recent and ongoing ‘Arab Spring’ Egypt and friends shut down the Internet or phone networks and Western governments cried foul. “You can’t shut down the Internet, you evil people! NO FLY ZONE!”

In fact, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has recently been travelling around the world teaching people how to use social media to fight their governments – people she calls ‘techno-experts’.

Of course, I’m not comparing Mubarak to Cameron. Clearly, we live in a Democratic society, which is fairly liberal. Or, is it…?

As I suggested in this post, we live in something of a police state here:

If you’re being stopped-and-searched at random for no reason; you can’t take pictures of anything; get on the spot fines for swearing and a host of other things; you can’t protest without being kettled; your car gets clamped at every opportunity; tracking devices on your rubbish bins; CCTV cameras on every single street in London; paying to watch TV; hiking the regressive taxes; and you live in a country where you can’t walk down the street without breaking some law, eventually you’re gonna get mad.

Really, honestly, if the UK were located in the Middle East and Mr Cameron had a nice beard, I really can see Hillary giving a speech declaring her undying support for the poor, oppressed people of the UK living in this horrid fascist country.

It’s just that, from a politics point of view, when Cameron stands at the dispatch box in the House and declares his intention to shut down the Internet to control the dissidents, he really does sound just like a Middle Eastern dictator.

At the height of communism hysteria in the USA, the crux of the horror stories were people in communist countries handing in their family members to the authorities. “Ye Gods!”, the ’50s American man would cry, “families telling on families! What horrible people the commies are!”.

Nowadays, however, such activities are “extremely admirable”.

BBC News – Salford looting: Boy handed in to police by mother

Now, I’m not saying she was right or wrong, I just think it’s jolly curious how times change…

Electronic tattoo ‘could revolutionise patient monitoring’

Well this is funniest thing I’ve read all year.

It starts with monitoring ‘patients’, perhaps. Heart beats, that kind of thing.

Then, they track what meds you’ve had to make sure you’re sufficiently drugged up at all times.

Then, they get a GPS to, y’know, make sure patients are safe.

Then, they become permanent tattoos. Going to hospital? Leave with a tracker.

Then, they get administered at birth to, y’know, make sure you always take your meds and we know where you are.

Then, we congratulate George Orwell for being spot on.

I’ll die before I let anyone tattoo a tracking device onto me.

Let me explain a few points regarding the recent UK riots.

Firstly, ‘explanation is not justifying’. Suggesting reasons why people decided to take to the streets and riot does not mean you think they’re right, but I’ve heard dozens of people say this over the last few days. From politicians to journalists, it’s an idea I’ve heard so many people say. If people suggest a reason, they get the response “that doesn’t justify rioting, though”. I’ve even heard supposedly opinion-less BBC presenters say just that in a n interview. If someone murders someone because they were annoying them, it doesn’t justify it, but it’s certainly a reason why.

Is that cleared up? Good.

Secondly, there is, undeniably, a reason that all this happened. There is a reason that these people took to the streets to throw things. To say there isn’t, as so many – even ’smart’ people like politicians – have done and just blame mindlessness and the like is just plain silly. There must be something that makes certain people want to riot and certain people not want to.

And, when David Cameron blames it on a ‘lack of responsibility’, what he doesn’t realise (or, perhaps he does and is just lying) is that a lack of responsibility is a symptom and not a root cause. Whatever the reason is, lack of responsibility is caused by that. I think that’s fairly simple. David would have us believe these people are born with a genetic condition which makes them not be responsible for things. Quite silly.

Is that cleared up? Good.

For what it’s worth, my opinion of why it did happen is somewhat simple. And (unsurprisingly) it’s mostly the fault of the government – not entirely the current one, but of many of the governments of the past too:

If you condition people to live in a nanny state where they’ll get looked after and be provided for and everything will be wonderful but then you suddenly dump austerity measures on them, they’ll get disillusioned and angry. If you take away any hope these kids have of higher education, benefits, support, etc and really prove to them that they have no future, how can you expect respect and love from them?

If you’re being stopped-and-searched at random for no reason; you can’t take pictures of anything; get on the spot fines for swearing and a host of other things; you can’t protest without being kettled; your car gets clamped at every opportunity; tracking devices on your rubbish bins; CCTV cameras on every single street in London; paying to watch TV; hiking the regressive taxes; and you live in a country where you can’t walk down the street without breaking some law, eventually you’re gonna get mad.

If you back the nicest cat in the world into a corner, it will get mad and lash out at you.