Inheritance Tax

Chris Dillow of Stumbling and Mumbling has used the current debate over whether reparations for slavery where justified or not to put forward some arguments for the need for inheritance tax.

I will admit that most of my objections to inheritance tax come from a combination of my general objection to all tax, and an irrational distaste of the state sending its bully boys out to threaten the the recently bereaved so they can pick over the corpse. The irrational yuck factor. However in this argument I can see some of Mr Dillow’s priors coming through as well. As the core of two of his arguments he assumes that the recipients of inheritance don’t do anything for it, and more importantly that this has any relevance at all. This is expressed here:

This too suggests a case for taxing inheritances. After all, if you've no connection with your forebears, how can you complain when you don't get their money? Longrider, who's expressed the individualist argument well says: "I plan to keep what I’ve earned." 
But don't think  you can keep what others have earned
Inheritance is not guaranteed. It does not necessarily go to the decedents, it goes to whomever the deceased wanted it given too. This could be a trust to give prizes in order to promote science and goodwill. It could be to a foundation to promote the well-being of humanity. It could even be to make sure that the newspaper that you founded remained free of the press barons (even if that did not stop it from moving away from your editorial preferences). If you don’t want to give it away to anybody and choose to try and take it with you then you can do that as well.

These are the big examples, but many people will decide that they do not want all their money to go to people other than their decedents. A will is a gift like any other. It is you giving away your property because you want to. That property is yours you can do whatever you want with it, just one where you can give more because you aren’t going to need it anymore. Again like any other gift once it has been given to you it becomes your property. You might not have earned it from hard graft down t’ pit. However whomever gave it to you thought that they (and possibly you) would be happier because of this as in any voluntary exchange and it is that, not simple calorific calculus, that is in the end the motivation and justification of all voluntary exchanges. It increases of Utility.

That one of the participants in this type of exchange happens to get their happiness in advance of the exchange does not change the basic nature of it or that, like practically all voluntary exchanges, it served its purpose and did increase utility.

Smash the State (a bit)

In order to try and cure it's woeful performance the government is proposing a de-merger at the Home Office. It is going to split the internal security powers away from the justice powers, which could hopefully mean that the new justice department is less likely to be as prone to go trampling over civil liberties in the name of internal security as a result of the internal empire building that goes on in all bureaucracies. It might even mean that both parts can focus better on their respective functions and so perform more efficiently. I'm sure I remember Nosemonkey saying that it was “about bloody time” that that bureaucratic monster was split for these reasons months ago, which I completely agree with. Unfortunately this also means another cabinet minister, unless they also propose to split John Reid in two as well. Now that would be something to celebrate.

EU Fraud

The EU despite making the majority of our laws has dropped off the radar since the collapse of the Constitution. But it is certainly continuing as before as this latest revelation of EU fraud demonstrates:

An EU civil servant and an assistant to a European Parliament member were among those under arrest, a spokesman for the Brussels public prosecutor said.

The three were arrested as part of a multi-million euro case over suspected fraud involving EU building tenders.

This fraud has according to the article been going on for a decade, that is almost as long as the EU has not been able to get it's accounts signed off and involved

suspected bribery of European civil servants, forming a criminal organisation, violating professional secrecy, breaches of public tender laws and forgery

But this can in a way be considered progress. They are at least arresting the EU officials suspected of fraud, rather than arresting journalists investigating fraud

Shivering in the cold

Spam has been <a
href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6505807.stm">forced to take
down his windmill</a>, so it looks like he is going to have to find a
different way to get <strike>good publicity</strike> clean energy. The sight
of his little generator being taken down did give the wonderful image of
Cameron and family huddled, shivering, around the light of a single candle
as their energy supply is removed. How I laughed.

Unfortunately this is not to be as they will still have their grid
connection to those big smokey coal power stations (and the clean, quiet,
nuclear ones) so their supply of electricity will continue without any
noticeable difference, nor will there be any noticeable difference to their
electricity bills given how little energy that little windmill was actually
producing. Rather like Cameron's cycling to the office to save the planet,
but still with the chauffeur driven car tagging along behind.

But then the windmill was there to produce good headlines rather than
electricity, so I guess that it has served it's purpose.

That list

Many people have attacked the Independent's fairly pathetic list of reasons for the EU (headed, of cause, by the peace myth) by fisking the entire thing. I'm going to concentrate on just a couple points.

These two points are basically the same thing phrased differently:

44. European immigration has boosted the British economy
...
48. Total mobility for career professionals in Europe

They are a good thing, but why limit a good immigration policy to just Honkies Europeans? What about Africans? Or Latin Americans (and not just to give the Police something for target practice)? Or Asians? Or Orientals? Or Polynesians? Or maybe even some of those North American people? Not being in the EU does not mean that we are forced to close our borders to anybody. Just as a country being in the EU does not mean that their borders will be open to you, as people from the eastern European states found out when only the UK and Ireland where willing to let them in and work. A good immigration policy does not need a massive supranational organisation, as has been proven by the EU not being able to make France have one, it does not even require a bilateral agreement. Like with free trade we could simply swing the doors open and shout "We love you!" to the world if we wanted to (we'd have to get rid of the Welfare State first, but that is a good thing in itself).

Europeans are increasingly multilingual - except Britons, who are less so

I prefer not to use personal anecdotes, but this time it is useful as it really shows the point. When I was 6 I lived in Sweden and went to Swedish school for a couple of months. Everybody there spoke English, very good English. Even at 6. This was nothing to do with the EU, as Sweden was not yet part of the EU. Nor was it even due to the Swedish school system, they did not start learning English in school for another 2 years. It was because of Television.

At that time there was not that much Swedish language TV, but there was a lot of American exports that had been subtitled. I can remember sitting in the basement rooms (all middle class swedish homes seemed to have them) with some Swedish children watching the Lone Ranger till 1AM while my parents where upstairs being feed every alcoholic beverage known to man. It was fun, and it was not unusual Swedish children grew up spending hours each day watching, and enjoying, all of these programmes in English together with a Swedish translation. The perfect way to learn a new language. I would expect that you could find this kind of eeeeevil yankee cultural imperialism enriching the lives of children all over the continent, and it also explains why this effect is not felt in the UK since we already speak the language of American TV. Like with the peace myth this one smacks of Ameri-phobes desperately trying to get hold of something, anything, that will mean that they do not have to acknowledge that the USA might have done something good in the world.

Brown doubles tax on low paid

If Gordon had wanted to give a tax cut that would have really helped people then instead of removing the 10% tax band and making everybody pay at the 20% rate, he would have removed the 10% tax band and then not made them pay any tax at all. I don't yet know how this will effect the marginal withdrawal rate for the low paid but I doubt that it will help them and expect that it will be even worse than before, creating even more of an incentive not to work or if they do work not to work any more than currently. The headline might be a tax cut, but remember this is revenue neutral as the government cannot afford a tax cut because it is broke (not that Gordon Brown would be really want to) so the money has to come from somewhere and Gordon decided to take it from those that can afford it least because their votes are already guaranteed to go to Labour. This isn't Gordon Brown being generous, this is Gordon Brown attempting to gather some good feelings to counteract his consistently poor poll results compared to David Cameron. No surprise there then.

Technology will save us

Malaria is the worlds number one killer. If perhaps maybe something (which is always either left unspecified, or specified in some kind of insanely overcomplicated conspiracy like the plot of a bad movie) where to happen and this not be as successful as hoped then, no, that does not mean we should not try to destroy this deadly parasite. We could have done it an awful lot sooner and so saved many many live had DDT not been banned, but it was and the anti-human wing of the green movement is not going to let it become legal again that is not an option. Just wait for the anti-human brigade to find something so that millions continue to be killed when we have the technology to prevent it. Probably pointing and shouting hysterically, "GM, science, Yuck. Progress is bad, we fear change."

EU Fingerprints Database

If the nasty illiberal control freaks we have in britain were not enough they are now also working through the great big democracy bypass in Brussels. Lets leave now, then at least we will just have to fight illiberalism on one front, and one which can be better influenced democratically.

state political funding, bad idea

The political parties have decided that because everybody is so disappointed with them that they are no longer willing to give money voluntarily that they should be allowed to get the government to steal money from us for the political parties. Apparently there is a consensus (amongst the political parties) that this is the best way for future of funding politics and it is only the details that need to be worked out. This consensus does not include me, and probably many other people, as personally I would rather the cunts buggered off and drowned themselves in putrefying yak vomit rather than give any of them any of my hard earned money.

Of course the large political parties are going to like a system that means the large parties get handed large slabs of other peoples money without having to lift a finger. The proposal is similar to the POWER Report, except that it misses out on the most important part as you cannot nominate a party other than the one you are voting for to get the cash. This ignores the fact that with a first past the post voting system people will often be voting for a party they don't like simply because they like an other one likely to get in even less. This is not a system for making funding fairer but a system for maintaining the position of the major parties while staving the smaller ones of the money that they would need to stage a breakthrough. So no wonder they are all generally in favour, it reduces the work they have to put into getting money while also reducing their competition from the minor parties.

The only fly in this particularly slimly ointment is the Labour party and their desire to maintain their link with the unions, the original cash for legislation scam (cash for legislation being the one Labour tradition that New Labour was not willing to ditch). Not that this will stop them for long, the lure of all that money will simply be too great.

demand revealing referenda

Stumbling and Mumbling as an explanation of how a demand revealing referendum would work. People are asked how much money would say how much they would be willing to pay for a given result, much like how things work at the moment, but then when the money is collected it is handed over to the people that wanted the decision to go the other way, rather than the Labour party coffers. This way everybody thinks more about how much each issue is really worth to them as it is their money on the line, and should things go against them the will be compensated by the amount that it is worth to them.

There could be a problem with this that money does not have the same value for everybody, for somebody that is very rich the marginal worth of a particular amount of money will be less than for somebody that is poor. A rich person losing £20 would be no hardship, but for somebody less well off that could be their weeks food budget. Therefore somebody that is rich can consider an issue to be of less worth than poor person, but when the rich person puts an amount of money equivalent to how much it is worth it could be higher than that of the poor person because the marginal worth of the money will be less to them than for the poor person. Using demand revealing referenda could therefore entrench the current implicit power imbalances between rich and poor, and make them explicit rather than implicit. As a nasty righty, and therefore spending my spare time swilling champagne in a Jacuzzi powered by the finest hand blown bubbles from a third world sweatshop while plotting new ways to oppress the masses, it still seems a scheme with considerable merit. But it does rather surprise me that it be proposed by a Marxian like Mr Dillow.

amateur Kremlinologists

To the BBC and the rest of the media trying to understand the message of Cameron's new hairdo I have a simple message. Its just a bloody haircut. I wish the amateur Kremlinologists would stop reading things into useless trivia.

Climate change

Whilst I have been away ensconced in my secret Caribbean underwater volcano base plotting the subjugation on the masses, as us nasty righties do, climate change has raised its head again.

Personally I have no problem with accepting the idea that the global climate is changing as it has since our ancestors pulled themselves from the primordial seas to begin the exploitation of an entire new set of resources. Nor do I have a problem with accepting that this time humans have something to do with it, being able to deliberately changing our environments to better suit our needs is one of the basic expressions of human intelligence. Maybe the extraordinary power of the products of our minds is having some unforeseen consequences that could in future cause us problems. This is the point where mainstream environmentalism and I diverge because I worry about people, not the planet. The planet is just a lump of rock and gas whirling around pretty average star, it's already been around for 4.6 billion years and will be around for another 4.6 billion. We and our descendants on the other hand are unique and irreplaceable.

With people uppermost in my mind I cannot accept the standard hair shirt approach of environmentalism. Simply reducing our output in the west a little is going to make no difference as the third world races to reach our standard of living. I certainly cannot contemplate forcing the third world to stay third world and not raise their own standards of living to match that of the west. To live 'in tune with nature' in a pre-industral way, as we are exhorted to do by the more fringy groups, would not be able to sustain our numbers requiring a mass cull (as happened in the killing fields of the only place ever to attempt it deliberately). That is totally unacceptable. We cannot shrink our way our of trouble without the cure being worse than the disease, but that still leaves using the enormous power of human intelligence to grow our way out of it.

So what are the options?

Maybe using LED lighting system instead of incandescent bulbs, flat screens instead of CRTs (yes, pat yourself on the back. With that nice new flat screen monitor of yours you are helping to save the planet).

Perhaps using locally solar produced hydrogen converted to power in fuel cells for road transport instead of fossil fuels.

But that is all small beans compared to removing fossil fuels from the grid and replacing it with renewable energy. I am not talking about prissy windmills either, we cannot replace fossil fuel power stations with a source where on any given day you can never know whether they are going to produce any power at all (and most days won't). There is one renewable energy source that can be set up anywhere and can provide the kind of reliable power needed for an industrial society. The atomic reactor.

Implicit Association Test thingy

Via Rachel from North London I find a particularly interesting one of those self test thingies I cannot resist (the Implicit Association Test), and one that actually has some scientific merit this time coming from Harvard University.

I wasn't very surprised by the result:

Your data suggest little to no automatic preference between European American and African American.

Skin tone is unimportant, all are merely pawns for me to exploit the surplus value from [eeeeeevil laugh].

Good riddance to Patrick Mercer

The only thing I can add to this is that I agree completely. Good riddance to bad rubbish

Lords reform

We might finally be about to get an elected house of Lords, something that I should be viewing as an unmitigated good thing. But with the way that over the last few years it has been the Lords along that have stood up for liberty on issue after issue I will feel a little sorry to see them go and can only hope that an elected chamber will be able to continue there work as a revising chamber able to tell the commons 'no' when it fucks up. It would be good if one of the reforms that is bound to come in at the same time is the abolition of the Parliament Act, its purpose of making sure it is the democratically elected House of Commons that has the final word is no longer needed since both houses will now be democratically elected.

That an elected House of Lords is good is not to say that Labour cannot still royally fuck things up, the obvious way being by choosing a Party List voting system as opposed to Single Transferable Vote. As a revising chamber the last type of people needed for it are the party animals that would get promoted under a Party List system. And is it just me or does the timing seem an awful coincidence that just as the House of Lords stops being useful as a cash machine for the Labour party that they get around to actually reforming it properly.

Below the Barrel

The despite Labour hosing it down with money welfare state is failing, and now there is no money left so they need a scape goat. 'Dr' John Reid has decided to turn to that old staple illegal immigrants.

Mr Reid told BBC Breakfast: "It is unfair that foreigners come to this country illegitimately and steal our benefits, steal our services like the NHS and undermine the minimum wage by working.

The small problem that most illegal immigrants do not take any form of benefits what so ever, and will be going out of their way not to so as not to attract the attention of the authorities. Likewise they will not take much in the way of services for exactly the same reason. If he wanted to find the real welfare leaches then it would be better to look at our indiginous underclass than illegal immigrants. Immigrants will be working and work, 'Dr' Reid, is a good thing. They are doing valuable jobs that the underclass clients of the welfare state will not. This is good for us, since we get the results of this work. It is good for them, since they get paid for it. It is good for their employeers, since they get the jobs they need done. It is good for our country as it helps the economy. It is good for their countries as when they return they take some of the money they earned with them. Like all voluntary agreements it is good for everybody involved, except the government as they cannot be taxed as the government does not know how much it can extract from them, or where to send the heavies around to extract it. Which will be one of the reasons that they make the perfect scape goat.

'Dr' Reid has a cunning plan to rid us of this menace, in addition to using the government cure all of ID Cards he is going to send them all a text message asking them to leave. Hmmm, I see a few problems with this idea not least of which is getting every illigal immigrant to send him their phone number so that he can text them back. Many will not even have a mobile phone, unlike the underclass, and so be completely outside persuasive power 'Dr' Reid's homilies anyway. John Reid has stopped scraping the barrel, he has now broken through the bottom and started digging.

Unreformable

For a while I have held off judgement on Mr Cameron, there has simply not been enough substance to make a judgement on. This peice on the EU gives one definite answer, he is absolutely clueless about the EU.

Cameron wants the EU to be an outward looking free trade area. However the EU is a customs union it is not and never has been about free trade or reducing tarrif barriers. It is a protectionist bloc, it always has been and always will be, this is intrinsic to the structures it was constructed from.

Cameron wants the EU to work with the USA, but the EU wants to be a counterweight to the USA.

Cameron wants the EU to be an intergovernmental organisation of freely cooperating nation states. Unfortunately this is basically what every single Prime Minister since Heath has wanted to do to the EU, they all tried and failed. It is was every single Prime Minister since Churchill, except Heath, wanted instead of the EU. Britain and others made several attempts to create this kind of intergovernmental stucture of which NATO is the most sucessful example but there where others such as the OEEC, EFTA, and WEU. That is one of the reasons why the likes of Atlee, Churchill, and Jean Monnet was only too happy that Britain was out, they all knew that the whole point of what was to become the EU was that it was supranational rather than intergovernmental. They also knew that the British view was that intergovenmenal was better than supranational. To shift from being a supranational institution to a intergovernmental one would require such dramatic structural changes at every single level of the EU, not least the elimination of the EU's holy writ that nothing can be removed from the Aquis Communitaire, that the only way of getting there would be to rip up everything that has gone before and replace it all with a new system utterly different than that that has gone before. The treaties needed to do this would be far more ambitious than the current EU Constitution and that is never going to be ratified (even if the EU Constitution is being implemented anyway), so the chance of it getting through even in a highly diluted form is basically zero.

Not that this deck chair shuffling in the European Parliament as to which transnational party the Conservatives sit with would be able acheive any of what he talks about anyway since the European Parliament is nothing more than a (just about) democratic fig leaf, a purely revising chamber with no power to initiate or kill legislation merely suggest revisions, and even then they can be overruled.

UPDATE

Thinking about it it is actually funny in a strange sort of way. The biggest barrier to a future more intergovernmental EU is the major intergovernmental component of the present one, that all the member states have to agree to ratify any treaty changes.

comic crime

Euro arguments

This New Statesman article caught my eye as good fisking material. It manages to get through an entire article with only one haft decent argument for what it is proposing, but since it is proposing that we join the Euro that is unsurprising.

My concerns about the currency never came to fruition. Now the pound looks antiquated and sets us uncomfortably apart from the rest of Europe.

With uncomfortably higher growth, and uncomfortably lower unemployment than the other big EU economies.

The euro has become the world's favourite - and most stable - currency and no country has lost its identity.

Yes, still no sign of a EU demos forming.

We need, therefore, to reopen the debate, for many reasons. First of all, it would make economic sense to consumers not to have to change money when they travel. France and Spain are not just the world's top holiday destinations, they're ours, too. If only half of us visit mainland Europe just once a year, at a 3 per cent exchange commission, that is a conversion tax of £5.4bn alone.

Yes lets make sure that we screw the entire economy to save a little money on a once yearly activity, that we then won't be able to afford. Not that the savings would be anything like the £5.4bn quoted as is pointed out in the comments:

if that's 3 percent of spending abroad on holidays, as you imply, then total spending would be £180bn. If half of us go abroad each year, that's £6,000 spend per head or £24,000 for a family of four. Or to put it another way, £180bn is about 15 percent of total GDP, so about 25 percent of private sector GDP. 25 percent of all our income spent on holidays?

But back to the article.

Britain is magnificently overpriced. With transparency, "never knowingly undersold" John Lewis would be handing out refunds constantly. Its Levi's 501 jeans at €96.46 compare badly to those priced €75 on the mainland. Calvin Klein's perfume at €80 is €10 cheaper there. A trendy Mandarina Duck wheelie bag at €244.78 in John Lewis? Just €185 in Barcelona. Catch a movie later at the Odeon, and that €14 seat would be half the price.

A nice selection of average consumer goods there but at least he finally has an argument with a little substance to it. Being able to perform price comparisons more easily would be good for the market and the Euro can help this. As can Google, but Google also lets you do it for free and without screwing up the economy though imposing the wrong interest rate and thereby reducing everybody's ability to buy anything.

There is no evidence to suggest that our "special relationship" with the US would deteriorate.

The European defence initiatives initially championed by Blair will have an impact though by reducing the ability of our armed forces to work closely with the americans due to incompatible weapons logistical systems. That is if our European partners would dian to allow us to do anything with the hated yankees.

We have never been invited to join the dollar.

Britain was given the chance of a free trade agreement with the USA, which we had to turn down as we no longer have the power to create trade agreements separately from the EU.

However, our special relationship with Europe would improve beyond measure, putting us back in lead position.

Britain has never, not once, been in a lead position in the EU. We have always been on the fringes tolerated for the money and resources we bring. There is absolutely no evidence that joining the Euro would change this.

Moreover, despite Gordon Brown's business regulations

Most of which are not actually Gordon Brown's but the creation of some bureaucrat, either in Brussels or Whitehall, imposed on Britain without the ability for elected British parliament to do anything about it.

and taxes (and the euro has had no effect on individual countries' tax regimes),

Except the most bureacratic, complicated, and fraud prone of all taxes, VAT. VAT is a requirement of EU membership and the EU controls the minimum level at which it can be levied.

most companies hoping to trade in Europe would prefer to build their factories and financial centres here, rather than the employer's nightmare that is the rest of Europe.

Which is why we still have the highest level of investment in the EU, and London remains one of the world's chief financial centres despite Britain not being in the Euro.

The Irish have learned this. Weren't they considered third world before the euro?

No, they weren't. The Celtic Tiger started to prowl years before the Euro began thanks to reductions in Irish tax rates. They are not doing quite so well now though.

And what of nationalism? Despite practically running the British cabinet, the Scots are angling for a break-up.

Yes and a party dedicated to the break up of the UK could well become the largest one in the Scottish Parliament. Forming a common national identity takes time, despite a common currency, full political integration and even a common language 300 years has not been long enough to form one between England and Scotland. That does not hold out much hope for the EU, with it's many many different languages and cultures.

One thing dividing us is our currency.

So a common currency is a bad thing for political unity? Hardly a ringing endorsement for the Euro.

The pound is too English in Scotland, while the Scottish pound is anathema in English kebab shops. A euro, endowed with respective national imagery for the English, Welsh and Scots, would bring us together.

So a common currency in Sterling is bad while a common currency in the Euro would be good? Because ...

How many of us notice the difference between a German eagle and a Spanish King Juan Carlos euro coin? But they do, and we will.

Ah ... so the differences between the common currency that the English and Scottish currently use are divisive, but when imbued with EU magic they will bring people together.

Switching currency would also provide a welcome nightmare for money launderers. Bank robbers and drug dealers would have to bank it to convert it. We are seeing this legitimising effect further afield, as former Soviet republics choose the euro over the rouble.

The accession 10 actually chose their own currencies, which they almost all still have and don't look likely to get rid of in the near future.

How many of our criminals would be able to hide away in Spain with a truly single currency?

Plenty, they will just bank their money in Switzerland or the Caymans as they do now.

Then there are mortgage rates. House price rises would be tempered by the transparency of sharing a currency.

Shopping for a house is rather different from shopping for jeans, for one thing you cannot pick up a house and walk away with it. Being able to more easily see that houses are cheap on the Baltic coast is not really going to change your buying options if you work in Swindon.

But eurozone mortgage rates have, on the whole, been almost half ours.

Because our economy needed different rates to that of the Eurozone. The bank of England doesn't pick these numbers out of a hat you know. Deliberately setting them too low would guarantee stoking up an even worse property bubble than we have now, like the bubbles that exist in Spain or Ireland. A property bubble is not a good thing.

By pushing rate decisions further away, they become so depoliticised that they just become the price of borrowing - not something that our bank changes every time our "local" chancellor messes up.

Or rather interest rates will not change when our "local" chancellor messes up and the needs of the economy changes, this is not a good thing.

Low interest rates make us think more seriously about saving. And we need to save.

We may need to save more but low interests make people less likely to save as they get less return on the savings. Low interests make people more likely to take on debt as debt cost less.

However, the most important consideration has to be the future of British businesses.

Currently being strangled by the red tape that spews out of the democracy bypass set up by the EU.

None benefits at present from clinging on to the pound. On the contrary, I cannot think of a business that would not benefit if exchange commissions and fluctuating currencies disappeared.

Only if they trade internationally, which is only 10% of the economy does, and only haft of that with the EU. However 100% of the economy would be subject to the effects of getting the wrong interest rate, and they would not be pretty.

The euro has surpassed the dollar to become the world's number-one choice. If you are building your product in China using oil from Iran (from next month) your partners will all trade in euros. Currency risk and exchange costs disappear.

Except that China uses the Renminbi, which happens to be pegged to the Dollar, not the Euro. So this trade would not be free of currency fluctuations. Using his logic it would be more accurate to say that were you to build your product in China using oil from almost any other oil producing country in the middle east except Iran then everything would be conducted in dollars or currencies pegged to the dollar so we should adopt the Dollar as our currency. However this is a pretty fatuous argument either way as Oil is a fungible commodity, so you will always end up getting it from where it is lowest priced.

In short, the pound makes no sense for anyone wanting to see a United Kingdom

Because a common currency is bad for creating a stable polity, so long as its Sterling and not the Euro obviously.

for anyone going on holiday anywhere (I took euros to India in January as if they were dollars);

Lucky you, I guess that you and your family also spent the equivalent a years wages for the average private sector worker if your earlier numbers are to be believed. With that much money floating around they would be willing to take it in seashells in order to get a cut of the action.

for businesses wanting to relocate to Britain

which is why they are flocking to Britain

for anyone interested in stamping out fraud and ill-gotten gains;

Ye gods! The EU stamping out fraud. This is an organisation that hasn't had its accounts signed off for over a decade, where the auditors think 9 out of 10 transactions are suspect, where everybody from the Commission to lowly MEPs have the noses firmly in the trough. It is a fraud magnet.

for any business operating in the UK

Because having interest rates that better relate to the local economy is such a hardship, What is really makes no sense for anybody wanting to operate a business in the UK are the reams of EU regulations and directives that spew forth every year.

And the longer we hold off, the weaker our entry will be.

Thanks to having an interest rate set to suit local conditions better every year our economy has out paced that of the Eurozone making us an ever more attractive prize for the EU to pick over. So of course our bargaining position is getting worse.

Gordon Brown wanted to join the euro for the wrong reasons and gave up the fight for the wrong reasons. He began by seeing it as a way of federalising Britain, and ended up being corrupted by our little-Britain Treasury and the ultimate corrupter - power itself.

Or rather he realised that by handing over the economy to the EU the enormous power that he wielded to change the country thanks to his agreement with Tony Blair giving him a free rein over the treasury would suddenly evaporate. But he would still get the blame when everything went wrong. The Euro is not just an economic question it is one of politics as Gordon knew.

David Cameron, before he, too, allows the establishment to rein in idealism, must shed the Conservatives' entrenched hostility and step up to the debate. The things a new prime minister can do, before "they" get to you, are almost the only things worth being prime minister for.

I guess that "they" must be especially powerful at the moment having taken over the minds of the majority of people in France, Spain, Italy, and Germany. Flee! Flee for you lives, "they" are coming!

The euro is now inevitable because it is the best option available. There is no more time to waste.

The Europhiles favorite argument is left to the end. Resistance is futile, you will be assimilated. Never mind the little things like the economy or democracy.