The changes in the United Kingdom economic structure, from a manufacturing based economy to a service based economy are often the subject of debates and are most often considered as positive. However, before making any conclusion on this, it is very important to have an historical look at what happened, far away from sentences like ‘the Tories sold off our industries’.
Britain created most of its current wealth thanks to manufacturing and, as most people know, the Industrial Revolution started here. The relative decline of manufacturing started much earlier than what is commonly thought. Indeed by the time of the First World War, Britain was outmatched by both Germany and the United States. The reasons for this decline are numerous, but the lack of technological investment was a major factor at the time. Real decline in the sense commonly understood, only started for good after the Second World War and accelerated once the seventies were reached.
Beyond statements like ‘Maggie destroyed our pits and our factories’, the truth is clearly not at the advantage of the ‘defenders of British industries’ namely, the Labour Party. One of the reasons of the decline, was the lack of properly trained workers. Indeed manufacturing requires skills which are very different from the ones required for white collar jobs, one of the aspects of the Tripartite system were Technical Secondary Schools. These schools very similar to the ones existing in Germany and to the French Lycées Techniques, had a very clear role, providing the engineers, scientists, machinists and technicians of tomorrow. They were nevertheless starved of cash by the Labour Party and its trade unionists cronies. Now let’s talk a bit about, the crazy mergers and then nationalisations made by Harold Wilson. Labour involvement in the motor industry had only one result, the creation of an unmanageable juggernaut, offering similar yet competing products whose dire fate was already sealed in the seventies, the same can be said for the steel making and the shipbuilding industry. Excessive taxation of profits and the free hand given to the trade unions, also did a very good job in wrecking what was working, in the few industries still in private hands.
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Yesterday, the Government announced that unclaimed money from ‘abandoned’ British bank accounts will be used to fund the building of ‘a youth centre in every town’.
The Government’s reasoning is that if they create a large number of very expensive youth centres, teenage thugs and ruffians will just suddenly stop causing trouble and enjoy using the new facilities instead.
Apparently many youths go out and cause ‘trouble’ (government speak for getting drunk, beating up other people, causing criminal damage to property, etc) because they have nothing to do. It’s not their fault you see. The fact that there are many other children who have ‘nothing’ to do and yet do not go around breaching the law does not seem to register as applicable to a government and a Labour party that just loves to waste your money on pointless and ineffective schemes.
But that is not really what this post is about. This post is about how the Government are attempting to legalise the theft of private money so that they can waste it on further unnecessary state projects, and unfortunately, this plan has been on the cards for sometime. With most British pension plans already pillaged and with government borrowing and taxation at unprecedented levels, Gordon Brown has been forced to pursue new ways of raising money for yet more unnecessary and wasteful government spending.
Currently the plan is to allow the Government to claim any money in any UK bank account, so long as it has remained dormant for fifteen years. Apparently there is £15bn of such money is stashed away in UK bank accounts. However, what individuals do with their own money is up to them. If they wish to keep money in an account for fifteen years or more, then that is their right. The Government should not be able to take an individual’s money whether they wish to make use of it or not. In the event that a person dies and leaves money in an account, then the bank should make efforts to trace the relatives of that person’s family and they should receive the money.
The government has plenty of other nasty ways of taking money which they have no right to – inheritance tax being a perfect example. Legalised theft from private accounts should not be another way.
Gordon Brown yesterday told MPs in Parliament that, ‘tax rises for small firms were needed to counter East European scams’. He claimed that East European workers were being encouraged to register themselves as companies to avoid paying income tax when they arrived in the UK.
That is, quite possibly, the most ridiculous excuse since ‘the dog ate my homework’. To punish all small businesses with a tax rise for the misdemeanours of a few seems completely unfair. The Federation of Small Business rightly accused Mr Brown of being ‘disingenuous’ and commented:
Why did he not close that particular loophole, rather than increasing tax on small firms, the vast majority of whom don’t incorporate as a tax dodge.
In truth, Gordon Brown is an archaic socialist who hates enterprise, freedom, personal effort and self-furtherment. He desperately wishes to curb such behaviour by stifling everyone and everything through ever increasing levels of taxation, regulation and bureaucracy. These were the reasons for the small business tax increase; nothing to do with Eastern European immigrants.
Such a deceitful man does not deserve to leader this country as Prime Minister. So far it would appear that there is no challenge to the seeming inevitability of Brown’s Labour leadership victory. David Miliband waits in the wings – though he too is equally as bad a prospect, being another Blairite clone who has never had a real job in his life. Future British prospects seem bleak.
