The budget

No surprises in the budget really. Taxes have increased, because Labour always increases taxes. The country is borrowing more, because Labour always spends more than it earns. The economy is on its knees, because in the end Labour always bankrupts the country. The only difference that unlike most of Gordon Brown's other budgets they are increasing direct taxes as well as the normal indirect taxes.

They have decided to squeeze the rich, where rich is defined as people earning more than a cabinet minister, with a 50% tax rate. That this will probably loose them money is irrelevant. It isn't about what is best for the exchequer, it is about what is best for the Labour Party and by attacking people that create wealth to try and motivate some its core vote to get off their arses and vote. There is nothing like a bit of envy and spite to motivate a lefty. What is another few of billion lost? It is merely the politics of envy. It isn't the big revenue raiser, nor is it meant to be. The big money is coming from yet further rises in fuel tax, because that is almost unavoidable by normal working people since most people have to drive in order to get to work. The only exceptions are those few that work in central London or have a chauffeur driven car paid for by their work, an MP for example.

There is no money but still there will be no spending cuts. Money is still going to be hosed up the wall in order to keep Labour's payroll vote fat. Even when the economy was growing strongly Labour could not fund their payroll vote from normal tax receipts and had to take the country deep into debt. This year as revenues fall we are going to have to go even deeper, that debt is set to rise to a level not seen since the defeat of Fascism (the last bunch of Third Way authoritarians to threaten this country with destruction).

The proposed tax rises are mere drop in the ocean of debt that has been forced upon us. This is debt that they are assuming that they will be able to raise from the gilts market. This despite there having already been a failed gilts auction this year. Maybe that is the reason why deflation is being touted around? It gives the government an excuse to print extra money to pay for its excesses. Which is absolutely nothing like what a tin pot dictatorship bent on its own destruction through hyper-inflation would do. Oh no, absolutely nothing like that ... really.

It is a good thing Brown managed to get world leaders to commit to putting more money into the IMF at the G20, because we are going to need it.

Personally there is one part of the budget that I will personally be taking advantage of. This is the scrappage payment of £2000. Getting rid of my old banger would be a good thing while my money is still worth anything. It will be a good thing for me to get something more reliable which is more fuel efficient since fuel is going to be taxed even more. I will, of course, be buying Japanese.

Slave Labour

Labour wants to bring in child slave labour in order to reduce the costs of the ever expanding state.

Mr Brown said a promise to bring in compulsory community service would be a part of his next election manifesto.

Luckily this will be a manefesto that they will never implement. Cameron did promote something similar, but at least he didn't call for out and out slavery to the state. He just hinted at it instead. If either of them actually implements it they should paraded naked and chained to the site of an ancient slave market and publicly auctioned off with the highest bidder getting to flog them to death on a sugar plantation.

Problems in Ireland

The ECB is willing to sacrifice Ireland for the Greater Good of the Euro, good thing that we didn't get pushed into it. This should also mean that it will be harder for the political establishment to win the Lisbon Referendum second round, so maybe Ireland's sacrifice will to the UK some good as well. The Irish themselves however are up the creek and have had their paddles taken away by the EU.

Gordon Brown, Economic Genius

There is a lot that you can complain about of Gordon Brown, an aweful lot, but with the joys of spring bursting around me I decided to see if I could think of anything good to say about him instead. It turns out that there is.

Firstly thanks to Gordon Brown being in the treasury for the past decade we are probably in a better place now than if he had not been there. Yes the country is bankrupt, but this is a Labour government and that always happens under a Labour government. Yes he has spent far too much on the Labour payroll vote with nothing to show for it, but again this is Labour so there was no way around that. However had Gordon not been chancellor, and a chancellor with enough power to say 'No' to the Prime Minister, it is almost certain that Tony Blair would have lead us into the Euro. Had we been in the Euro then the country would still be bankrupt, Labour would still have spent billions bribing their payroll vote, but the interest rates would have been a point or two lower for the last decade and if you want to now what that would mean just look at Ireland or Spain.

One of the reasons for the current recession is the bursting of a ginormous property bubble. Had we been in the Euro the property bubble would have been that much bigger, due to the lower interest rates, and so would the bust. Also being outside the Euro it means that the value of the currency can float downwards, as it has. This imports inflation so removing the risk of debt-deflation, exactly as happened during the Great Depression and why the UK escaped that relatiely well, and reduces the prices of our exports so making them more competitive and helping to price us back into the market. We are not in the Euro and for that we should heartily thank Gordon.

Secondly he has bankrupted the country. There is no money left. This means that whatever they want to do the incoming Conservative government is going to have to cut back on the size of the state, they have no choice in the matter. Over the last decade the size and intrusive nature of the state has grown and grown, but it has grown based on putting the costs onto the nations credit card. Now that card is maxed out and the money needs to be repaid. The size of the state has to be trimmed anyway, because a smaller state is a better state, but now there is actually a chance that it will be trimmed simply because there is no money to keep paying for its current bloated excess. For that too we can thank Gordon Brown.

He didn't mean to do either of these things. Staying out of the Euro was simply a way of putting one over Tony Blair so he could get the 'credit' later. Nor he did not inflate the size of the state to make it go pop, it was because he is a statist that equates spending money with doing good. However the results, staying out of the Euro and setting up the conditions for shrinking the state, will aid this country in the long run.

Somebody is watching you

If you notice your ISP bill joining the long list of things with higher prices then there is a simple reason why. All of your data is now being stored by the ISP so that any busy-body quangocrat can browse through it in order to get some tips for new porn movies to put on their expenses.

As you would expect this legislation comes from Brussels, but it is not soley the creation of the EU. It is the EU is being used as a democracy by-pass mechanism by Labour, again, so that they can create authoritarian legislation, again, which will penalise the law abiding while doing nothing at all to hinder the microscopic fraction of the population that do serious crime, again.

Were the EU in itself more democratic then perhaps just maybe this legislation might just possibly have been stopped by protests to our representatives there (ha ha), but it isn't. Were Labour not the most authoritarian government that this country has ever had maybet they would not have proposed it, but they are, and if they held the veiws of the population in anything but contempt then maybe they would have sent it through Westminster rather than Brussels, but they do.

Is there anything that can be done? No, there isn't. What about getting rid of Labour post-haste and having some other party repeal this legislation? No, they cannot since having been sent through the EU it is now impervious to the wishes of the British government. There is no way that this legislation can be reversed by Westminster and it is now lost in the quagmire of supra-national politics. Short of leaving the EU, though a good thing in itself, we are stuck with it. That is not to say that people shouldn't vote for almost anybody that stands a chance of getting Labour out. Other than ID cards, which Labour also tried to encase in EU armour, I don't expect them to do much about any of the piles of authoritarian crap that Labour have dumped onto the country for the last decade, but at least they might not add to it as quickly as another Labour administration would. It might not be great but given the electoral system it is the only option available.

Labour with its obsession with databases does not seem to understand the concept of the signal to noise ratio. They think that more data is always better, not understanding that more data could well make finding the data that they are interested in harder to find because you have to wade through more meaningless non-sense to get to it. Rather like attempting to read any of their legislation. For anybody that wants to increase their personal noise levels here is a basic bit of Python 3.0 code which will open random HTTP connections and then shut them again. It will only try once every 10 seconds so shouldn't hog your bandwidth, but it should help fill their logs with noise.

import time
from random import randint
from urllib import request

while True:
    try:
        f = request.urlopen("http://" + ".".join(map(str, [randint(0,255) for x in range(4)])))
        f.close()
    except:
        pass
    time.sleep(10)