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April 21, 2005
Council Tax
The TBCs have announced they will cancel the revaluation of properties in England.
This is cant. (Or it soon will be. Definition is "buzzword: stock phrases that have become nonsense through endless repetition" I note an alternative definition is "A squared off piece of timber that was initially a round log". Square pegs and round holes spring to mind.) Council taxes are, of course, very visible, because the bill drops on the doormat and isn't part of the price, like VAT, and isn't hidden in the small print of your wage slip like income tax. The fact remains, however, that it's very small. The whole point of the TBC "initiative" is to be able to say "I told you so" sometime in the future. Council tax bills will go up and they'll blame ZNL and their insistence on revaluing. If, by some miracle, TBCs get in, they'll be able to say, when council tax again goes up, "well, at least it's not as bad as it could have been if we'd revalued".
The whole point of revaluing is to make the system a little fairer. The fact that venal, hypocritical, greedy politicians will use it as an excuse to screw a bit more tax out of you doesn't alter the motive for doing it.
Gutter politics.
Slogans
Let's look at slogans again, and how Flo Ting Voe Tah might respond: -
TBC
"Dunno" (perfect for the Don't Knows)
ZNL
IT'S A BEAUTIFUL DAY
"Not here it's bl**dy not"
Lib-Dem
HIGHER TAXES
"Ooooh, goody"
"Fantastic! I didn't even know it was your round"
YES! today we have a new manifesto for you. The NMBP is alive and well and was featured prominently on NewsNight last night. Oh lucky, lucky, people of Cardiff. I was going to put a copy of the manifesto on my web site, to save overload on their server, but when I got there the hit counter showed 8 so it doesn't look as though they've suffered a Denial of Service attack lately. Here's a direct link to their manifesto.
15 Minutes of Fame
Welcome to the world of Rehman Chishti
Horsham Constituency Labour Party have selected 25 year old barrister and councillor, Rehman Chishti, to challenge the Conservatives in the next General Election. According to 'Perspective,'the members newletter for the Horsham Labour party, "Rehman Chishti has spoken of his absolute determination to overtake the LibDems, who received just over 2,000 votes more than us at the last election".
He won't win, of course. Francis Maude got 26,134 votes at the last election (51.5%) and our hero's predecessor only got 10,267.
But anyway, Good Luck Rehman!
Today's political betting projected majority is 76.
Posted by Flo Ting Voe Tah at April 21, 2005 11:55 AM