Jobsworths uber alles

There are those out there without a spark of humanity, whose adherence to petty rules and regulations forms their raison d'etre and to whom an exception has to be authorised from on high.
Such is the life of a Department of Work and Pensions civil servant who applied the letter of the law to a poppy seller.
Express.

A VETERAN soldier has lost his jobseeker’s allowance – because he was selling poppies instead of “actively seeking work”.
The decision to take away the benefit from father-of-four Stephen Taylor, 60, who served in Cyprus, Kenya and Northern Ireland, caused outrage last night.
He admitted when he signed on at his local Jobcentre that he had spent 24 hours over a two-week period selling poppies to raise charity funds for veterans.
His honesty was rewarded by staff deeming he was in breach of rules governing benefit payments and his £71.20-a-week allowance was withdrawn.
The former pub manager has been out of work for a year and has now missed out on four weekly payments for selling the poppies outside an Asda store in Bury, Greater Manchester, in the run-up to Remembrance Day.

This is the mindset of those who work for the state, all must be declared and penalties will be given for breaches of the rules no matter what you're doing. It wasn't as if Mr Taylor was even earning money, as he was selling poppies, technically he wasn't actively seeking work so the Dept of  Work and Pensions penalised him for doing a good deed and having the temerity to honestly admit to them what he was doing. Had he just sat in his house with his feet up, no problem, down the pub (assuming he can afford too) no problem, shopping, no problem. Sell poppies for a very worthy cause down comes the wrath of the state...

A Department for Work and Pensions spokesman said: “We make it clear to people what the rules are and that they risk losing their benefits if they don’t play by them. Sanctions are only used as a last resort.

Sounds like they were used as a first resort here and no doubt someone in the Debt feels particularly smug about putting the boot into a veteran soldier.
In other news, Trafford Council landed a £300,000 bill because a bunch of asylum seekers were dumped on them by the Home Office.
Makes you wonder just where the priorities of the government in the UK are, doesn't it?

This is what happens if you make the price too high.

It's something that is well understood by the public but seems to be a bit of a blindspot for those in authority whether in government or utility companies. If you price a commodity too high or even attempt to ban it, then people will find a way around it legally or illegally. Happens with drugs, happening with cigarettes and tobacco and happening with alcohol. There are really times I am blessed by living 45 miles from Dover, I can make massive savings by doing a booze cruise as and whenever I need too, others will use "a man in a van" to buy their cut price ciggies, it happens all over the place and the righteous have only themselves to blame for trying to socially engineer out of demand something that the people clearly are not prepared to do without.
Now it's starting to happen with electricity...

BBC.

Criminal gangs are targeting people with electricity pre-payment meters in a doorstep fraud with hotspots reported in Kent, London and the Midlands.

Crimestoppers has warned people to be alert to the doorstep fraud and offered a £10,000 reward for information.

The fraudsters sell illegal, cut-price electricity top-ups by pushing a cloned key into people's meters to add credit.

Data from six energy companies has shown more than 120,000 people have been affected across the UK.

More than 5,300 incidents have been reported in Kent this year. Birmingham saw 6,978 incidents.

Across the country, customers have given the criminal gangs more than £7m, figures from British Gas, EDF Energy, E.ON, npower, Scottish Power and SSE have shown.

Over the last 13 years ever since governments got heavily into the climate levy scam, electricity and gas prices have risen well above that of inflation and this affects those particularly at the bottom end of the financial scale who struggle from week to week juggling their budgets and making decisions as to heat the house, top up the car or have something other than beans on toast as their main meal for once. So if someone comes along and offers a £10 top up for £5 what do you think is going to happen? Pretty much the same as what happens when someone offers cheap ciggies, booze or a half inched pay as you go mobile top up. No, I'm not saying everyone will do this, but if the government and by proxy the utility companied continue to squeeze us all financially then sooner or later people will look for ways around it. It will be unregulated uncontrolled and at times illegal and yes people will get caught, it won't stop others from doing it though and new scams will develop as the people doing it get more sophisticated. I rather expect that when the companies try to foist smart meters on us all that someone somewhere will develop a hack so they can't be controlled from outside or at least appear as if they are working when they aren't.
There's probably some natural law or formula out there to describe the phenomena of diminishing returns for price increases, the laffer curve I know describes it. Private industry know it quite well and it affects their pricing policies, however when governments become involved then this goes out of the window as they just raise prices and duties to fill their coffers without regard to the consequences. One of the consequences is of course that people will look for an alternative, happens every time, without fail legally or illegally. Prohibition in the USA shows what happens when governments interfere too much in the market, criminals step in to fill the gap because the demand doesn't go away it just goes underground.

Bonfire of vanities

It never ceases to amaze me, both about Labour and socialists in general, in their inability to get their heads around whose money they were actually playing with. It's like dealing with demented toddlers in a sweet shop who are prepared to gorge themselves until sick without realising the consequences to those who have to pay for the gluttony and waste.
They have the keywords down pat though, fairness, equality, social justice, poverty etc. Yet never do they realise that those of us who earn in the real world (not the public sector) do not like the idea of the state picking their pockets to pay for these concepts.

Times.

Half a million of the poorest families will be denied free school meals by deep cuts in welfare spending.

George Osborne, the Chancellor, indicated yesterday that some departments would lose up to 20 per cent of their budgets when he laid the ground for a four-year austerity programme to last the whole Parliament.

Even social security spending will be included when every Cabinet minister will have to go before a panel of colleagues to justify every pound they spend. Mr Osborne said that the task ahead represented “the great national challenge of our generation” and that after years of waste, debt and irresponsibility it was time to rethink how government spent its money.

As he was announcing the spending review, which will cover the four years from next April, details of early cuts began to emerge. 

Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, said that he was scrapping plans by Ed Balls, his predecessor, to extend free school meals from next term to 500,000 of the very lowest paid.

The decision will cost families earning less than £307 a week about £600 a year, equivalent to a penny rise in their income tax for each child.

Mr Gove said that he had to make the savings to protect the overall schools budget. But his move was criticised by poverty campaigners who said that it raised questions about the Government’s commitment to reducing child poverty and protecting the poorest from cuts.

Children whose parents are on income support or jobseeker’s allowance will continue to be eligible.

Mr Gove said that Mr Balls had underestimated the costs. It would cost £125 million initially, rather than the projected £85 million, rising to £350 million in 2012-13 rather than the £215 million for which Mr Balls had planned.

The Child Poverty Action Group said that it was “stunned” by the move, which would have lifted 50,000 children out of poverty at a stroke.

OK, first off the measure hadn't been introduced, so what the poorest families haven't had they'll never miss, bit like PAYE.
Second, this was a bribe pure and simple to Labours core support, a vote for us and we'll give you more money in your pocket, they knew fine well that those who had to pay for this weren't going to vote for them anyway.
Third, should Labour not get elected, cutting this measure would get them the headlines of "cruel Tories" that they wanted, so essentially a win, win scenario for them.
Fourth, the Child Poverty Action Group is a fake charity, funded by the government taxpayer to lobby the government on behalf of the government and stuffed with bleeding heart Labour placemen. Closing them down would save the government at least half a million in grants, possibly up to £2.5 million.
Fifth, Children whose parents are on income support or jobseeker’s allowance will continue to be eligible. So those who are at the bottom of the food chain will still get this support.

Now where Labour got it wrong was by creating a system so complex that even where they were picking the pockets of the taxpayers (child tax credits) to give to the poor (If you could count on someone earning over £45k being poor) that they had a massive bureaucracy to administer it, this cost money that really could have gone to the poor and made the taxpayer better off by not having to fund it anyway. So great was Labours need for money that even those on minimum wage paid tax only to get some back if they had kids via a convoluted bureaucratic nightmarish system. There are far easier ways to do it including raising the tax allowances of working parents with children. But again Labour were deluded enough to see the public sector as part of the economy, rather than a drain on it, besides all those public sectors were likely to vote labour otherwise it might be like turkeys voting for Christmas.

So it's no good the Labourists and socialists screaming about cuts, they created the mess we're in where the government ended up paying out a third more than it was taking in. They can scream about the evil Tories, but they were responsible or rather irresponsible enough to believe that the money would never run out. It's time for the UK to pay the piper and the only way we can do that now is to cut away some of the flesh rather than trim the fat, in some cases the limb will have to be removed to pay our debts. This is what Labour and the socialists forgot, there's always a price to be paid for spending what isn't yours.