Tough Times

Big price rises and restricted credit are here and are going to get worse for a while yet. As spending inevitably slows, pay demands grow and sales fall, we can expect unemployment to rise and exacerbate the situation. The whole mess will feel worse as public sector unions organise strikes to get what they feel they deserve, despite the problems we all face. Further, the corrupt politicians will award themselves yet another massive pay rise, while scamming even more from us on bogus expenses claims.

Government has borrowed heavily on our behalf in expectation of continued growth, which evidently was financial bad judgement. They borrowed in the recent good times, running up debt rather than saving for this rainy day. To balance the books now they have three tools: increase our countries already huge debt, which eventually has to be paid for with taxation, raise taxes less but immediately, cut services. Raising taxes immediately is perceived as political suicide, indeed government has just committed us to even more debt to pay for the interim 10p tax concession, so obviously the pay later option will be selected in combination with cuts to services.
These problems show how poor our system of government is: clear financial incompetence, political power placed before good judgement, corruption at the very top. Sadly the incompetence is not limited to the financial aspects of government. It seems impossible for the public sector to keep our information safe or prevent top secret information from being scattered across the country. To top the list of complaints, how did we end up in an expensive and damaging war in two countries that were no threat to us? Was it breathtaking incompetence or an ego trip for our previous PM Tony Blair? Whichever it was Gordon Brown was not seen to be against it.

We need a new form of government. One not based on an adversarial political party system run by the dysfunctional people that are politicians. Politicians tend to be self serving, power hungry, deluded and egomaniacal. Adversarial political party based government is an anachronism, we are all in this country together and we need to work together, not fight each other. We need a new government system that is not party based but formed from people of all views. It must be adaptable and able to respond rapidly to changing world conditions, not based on dogma or ideologies or evolved out of rule by despots. The system needs power to be widely distributed to deny corruption and ego. Positions need to be filled with experts, not friends and family of those with existing positions. Changes are needed to the legal system, so that it does not persecute the innocent, unlucky and misinformed, but targets the criminals. Control of the economy needs to be placed squarely in the hands of the expert with a remit of long term stability for the whole, rather than be used a tool for political party advancement. Accountability needs to be more immediate. One vote every few years for one of a small number of parties composed of dysfunctional individuals is not good enough.

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Unpaid police

Why should the ISPs have to take on an unpaid policing role? It is for government to arrange policing. Laws exist on copyright and patent, but they are not effectively policed by the public sector. I think the ISPs should be paid for checking and again for each infringement they find. Lawyers are also required to act as unpaid police. They must apply money laundering checks to their clients.
The UK government is increasingly making business carry the costs of policing laws. This effectively makes services and products more expensive and is yet another stealth tax. It also makes those products and services less affordable to the lower income members of society and so discriminates against them. However, in principle I like the shift of policing to the private sector, as they will doubtless do a better job of it than the public sector. So to make it work well and discriminate less against the economically poorer members of society, there need to be incentives to catch law breakers. The current approach is to penalise the unpaid enforcer for any failure. If there is some benefit to this kind of work then it should be reflected in compensation for doing it. Payment is also likely to encourage a better enforcement process. The well known carrot and stick approach!
Ultimately we must decide if policing laws should be funded by public taxation or fees applied to those who seek the protection afforded by them. Clearly some enforcement is for the good of us all, where some is only for the good of a few. I would suggest for example that enforcement of fraud laws be publically funded, where copyright of music be privately funded. The latter need not be mandatory, but non-payment = no protection.