Labour's VAT figures

According to an article on the BBC, Labour says the increase in VAT will cost the average family £7.50 a week.

So the average family spends x/1.175*1.2 - x = £7.50 => x = £7.50/(1.2/1.175 - 1) = £352.50 per week on VATable goods? That's £1410pcm. Is this plausible?

AFAIK, the list of exempt or reduced rate goods hasn't changed. At least I recall no mention of this happening and haven't found anything by Googling.

Housing

“Over the long term it would be desirable if house prices did not do very much as all as it would allow earnings to catch up and for housing to become more of an affordable commodity as so many white goods have become over the years,” he said.

Says Grant Shapps, the Housing Minister.

Let's federalise the UK. Regions in the North could use their autonomy to lower taxes to tempt businesses to set up there, make it easy to get planning permission to build houses on former industrial wasteland, etc.

Far better than building an expensive railway so more people can spend exactly the same amount of time commuting to London, just from further away.

Is Murdoch More Evil than the BBC?

Presumably anyone against the News Corp buyout, because they're worried about it being anti-competitive or harming media plurality, is in favour of doing something about the BBC's privileged position?

This isn't a point made in favour of Murdoch; I'm hoping that his power over UK elections will decline, that the Times paywall will fail miserably, etc, etc. I just hope people might start to think more about the BBC's unsavoury aspects.

The licence fee is crude, anachronistic and unjust. It's a tax, no two ways about it. If I want to watch live TV, there is no way for me to avoid paying money to the BBC, and this is backed up by the implied threat of violence. I can't shop around or make a protest by denying an organisation my custom. I pay the same no matter how much or how little I consume, rendering it 'regressive'. I'm not sure how it will evolve to react to streaming TV over the Internet, but it will surely get more ugly and unjust unless it's abolished.

AFAIK, if you don't watch live TV, or don't watch content streamed over the Internet at the same time as it is being broadcast, then you don't need a TV licence. If this is the case, then you'll probably get a threatening stream of letters from 'TV Licensing', which fail to clearly explain when you need a TV licence and what their powers exactly are. Interestingly, this is all handled by Capita, and the BBC refused to disclose the details of this arrangement in an FoI request, in case Capita's competitors found it useful - presumably to outbid Capita and provide the BBC with a cheaper service.

If you jump through their hoop and tell them that you don't need a TV licence, they say they might want to send one of their salespeople around to search your home to check you're not lying. If the salesperson (who is paid on commission for TV licences sold and successful prosecutions) has a snoop around your house, and is satisfied he can't catch you out, then TV Licensing will stop harassing you for some period of time, and then the letters will start again.

If you don't comply with their salesperson's desire to search your home, they can apply to a court for a search warrant. It's not clear what might convince a magistrate that there are reasonable grounds to believe an offence is being committed on the premises. Simply refusing a voluntary search might be a good enough reason. I can't find any information about this, and I suspect it varies from court to court and magistrate to magistrate. They must think it helps to send courts their glossy annual newsletters, which has got to be quite an unusual thing for a plaintiff to do.

If a warrant is served, it's not unusual for police to be present, who are only officially there to keep the peace. However, as we have seen many times with bailiffs, rather than uphold the law, police often make unlawful demands, such as for the name of the occupier, or other information TV Licensing don't need.

While they maintain that people who don't buy TV Licences are guilty until proven innocent, it's worth remembering that about 25% of those people investigated require them. While this percentage would go up without their draconian approach, I don't think guilty-until-proven-innocent is a justifiable way to keep it down, furthermore it makes the letters seem all the more unreasonable when they don't even have the balance of probabilities on their side, and it makes the whole concept of a TV licence seem all the more ridiculous.

It would surely be better to let the BBC fend for itself rather than let the state bully on its behalf for its money, and abolish the licence fee?

Drugs

I love this from Jackart:

Heffer with his tired, ignorant, knee-jerk moralising has ignored every argument, and simply asserted what he believes to be true without deigning to do any research, or even thought. Remind me again, why does anyone pay any attention to journalists? How is repeating your readers prejudices for pay any more "moral" than selling them a relatively harmless herb to help them relax?

It is estimated that more than half of acquisitive crime is to fund a drugs habit (with 70-80% of burglaries, and 85% of shoplifting), and that drug misuse conservatively costs the economy £13bn per year. Our solution is to grant criminals a monopoly on the supply of drugs, manage to seize only about 1% of drugs in circulation, and to boldly claim that this approach 'sends a signal'. Yet drugs have never been cheaper and misuse is more widespread than ever. I am wondering what it would take for prohibitionists to decide that it is time to try something else.

Countries that have tried more liberal drugs laws have generally seen good results. Doctors could prescribe hard drugs to addicts, and softer drugs could be regulated and taxed. This would make life more stable for addicts, make them less likely to turn to crime and prostitution, cause less use of dirty needles, solve the problem of 'legal highs', provide a source of revenue for the government freeing money to be spent on treatment, cut off a massive source of revenue for the criminal underworld, and free up the time of the police and courts. It would also free up prison places, keeping Ken Clarke happy, or provide more space for career criminals, keeping the traditional wing of the party happy.

If drugs policy 'sends a signal', it didn't stop so many politicians experimenting with drugs in their younger years. One signal it sends is that we treat violent sexual offences less seriously than drug trafficking. The average custodial sentence for rape is 79.7 months, and for the importation or exportation of drugs it is 84 months. To look at the 'sending a signal' hypothesis the other way around, does it imply substances like alcohol and nicotine are safe?

For many who experiment with drugs, the procurement of those drugs is the only contact they have with the criminal fraternity, and being caught by the police can result in serious damage to their future careers and education plans, their freedom to travel, and their access to insurance and other financial products. These are people doing nothing different to what many politicians have done. These implications are created by prohibition and not drugs themselves, and will more than likely affect people who have never broken any other law and never will. I imagine that these outcomes make people question their respect for the law and the police.

It is in all of our interests to pursue a policy that is directed by evidence, and it is shocking that an impact assessment has never been carried out. The previous government refused an impact assessment because it said it was fully committed to the prohibition of drugs. This misses the point of pursuing a policy based on evidence. There are millions of people's lives being made a misery by drugs, and there are huge benefits to be had by getting policy right. If the government cares about this then it should try to make sure its approach is the best one.