Looting at the top: Marie Antoinette meet George Orwell

The two million dollar bra

The looting at the top carries on apace. While we wait for the results of the next vote on the break-up of the NHS, here's a delightful Rogues' Gallery of Tory peers and their connections to private health companies.

Essentially, they are privatising our public services, removing the wealth via tax havens, making the majority capitalise their banks, finding more mad luxury items to waste our money on at a time when corporate profits are at a 50-year high and the Sunday Times Rich List is breaking records.

Luxury items include the £100 million yacht recently built for former Miss UK Kirsty Bertarelli and her Swiss pharma tycoon husband, multi-million dollar bras, spider silk fabric because they reckon they're worth it and Beckham and Ecclestone owning Birkin handbags worth between £500K - £1.5 million. Ever suspect we are being run by a bunch of degenerates?


The Tories were not elected to power and have no mandate for any of this. Their Lib Dems human shields are helping to usher in major healthcare companies in a feeding frenzy as they use tax havens to suck out public money. Lib Dems who talk about "bloated public services" being the problem are ill-informed at best. A friend tells me that, according to a World Service report, over 30% of local authority expenditures are private 'Special Services' run by ex civil servents who avoid income tax on their fees by being paid directly by the private company.

Meanwhile, the cop with the machine gun in Trafalgar Square on Saturday's NHS protest goes unreported in the mainstream press.Welcome to Britain, George Orwell stylee.

Don't tell me there's no money: great facts and figures from Mark Wright

Simon Hughes dons fishnets for Tory education cuts

Ah, yes, "perception". How very Mad Men of the Coalition. Lucky Tories never having to consider the actualité now they can hide behind the human shield of delusion provided by their LibDem juniors.

Following in the footsteps of Vince Cable (Cable 0 — Satellite 3), Simon Hughes suppresses his political instinct to challenge, or at least abstain, when he finds himself charged with pushing through the education policies he so obviously despises. Having spoken against the rise in university tuition fees and the cuts in education, Hughes's new role is to sell the new measures to the people who will be picking up the bill despite funds intended to encourage disadvantaged pupils being cut from £360m a year to £150m, by massaging their "perception".

How does someone square this?

Observe the self-loathing as his eyes flip between two modes: the giveaway lying eyes of the unblinking thousand-yard stare, and the barely-able-to-open-his-lids gaze blocking out the world as we know it crumbling around him on his watch. Wince as you witness him performing verbal gymnastics with the grace and conviction of someone kneecapped by his senior partners.

Has Simon been hard-wired for fagging, 'cause he does it so well? Do the Bullingdon bullies make him toast their crumpets and then flush his head down the toilet for sport?

Laurie Penny ponders these matters here.

"The problem with the system is the perception rather than the reality," said Hughes, whose new role as "advocate for access to higher education" will see him trying to persuade poorer teenagers that lifelong debt is no reason not to go to university and join the bargain-bucket scramble for the educational opportunities that their mothers, fathers and political representatives enjoyed for free. Hughes will be taking his higher education roadshow to deprived schools and under-funded sixthform colleges over the next six months, a glorified door-to-door salesperson for unpopular Tory policies, an Avon Lady for Thatcherite university reform. The dogged, defeated hypocrisy of this former rebel Lib Dem's decision to accept the appointment is far from the most compelling thing about this story.

Greater love hath no man than this: that he lay down his principles for his career. Does Hughes believe he is setting a good example for his young constituency? Is he happy to be Morlock-in-chief, ushering in a Brave New World bereft of humanities in favour of a one-note profit-obsessed business juggernaut?

Are we content to be Eloi, herded for slaughter and consumption via a sausage-meat grinder which used to be a pretty good education system?

As Joe Strummer seddit in White Riot:
"All the power in the hands of people rich enough to buy it,
While we walk the streets too chicken to even try it."

Happy 2011. Let's see some resistance.

VAT rise as LibDems aid Tory attack on the poorest

It's official. The poorest ten per cent in Britain will see their shopping bills rise and lose the most as ConDem make up the deficit their banker friends caused by raising VAT to 20 percent and cutting our public services. Nick "Ramsay McClegg" Clegg just helped push through the most draconian budget in decades despite all their promises in the run-up to the election, and gave his party their Clause Four moment.

I listened to Vince Cable squirming last night on C4 News as he was quizzed over the LibDem election pledge not to hike VAT as it is a regressive tax that hits the poorest hardest. We were treated to the usual politicians' weasel words, "I may have said that but that's not what I meant". Humpty Dumpty can make words mean whatever he wants, whenever he wants.

I wonder how the LibDem party faithful feel now when you can search on the internet for "libdem vat election ad" and find the unequivocal image above plastered all over their websites. I wonder if there'll be a swift spate of deletions as this part of their bid for political power gets airbrushed out of history. Will it be like Chinese art during the Cultural Revolution, when a person's party loyalty could be measured by the size of the red tractor in their landscapes? In this case, the rebels feature it prominently, while the greasy-pole ascenders minimise or delete it altogether.

More weasel words as David Cameron learns from 1984 and mangles the English language, calling this budget "progressive" when all the evidence shows that it is no such thing.

How progressive is it to raise a tax where the richest ten percent pay one pound in every £25, while the poorest ten percent pay one in every £7? Not just VAT: by a ratio of four to one, the deficit is being paid for by those who did nothing to cause the recession. Why not raise top rates of tax? Even under Thatcher the top rate was 60%. The only crumb of comfort is the rise in the threshold where you start paying tax, but this still means that the poorest end up paying the most when all the changes are taken into account.

Child benefits have been frozen for three years and public departments cut by 25% , while Morgan Stanley joyfully declares the "Austerity Budget" a big win for business. The corporate tax rate falls 1% per year from 28% to 24% by 2013/2014 but a levy on the banks balance sheets rises to only 0.07% by 2012.

Despite a rise in Capital Gains tax by 10% to 28%, Morgan Stanley says:

In general, we thought this was a sensible, balanced and business-friendly budget, which is actually likely to result in an effective tax cut for UK PLC of c. £2.3bn by 2012/13.

And The Daily Telegraph reports the Planet Business rubbing its hands with glee:

Dismissing fears that increasing taxes and cutting public spending could send the country back into recession, the Institute of Directors (IoD) said the Chancellor had "faced up to the challenge", while the British Chambers of Commerce hailed the strategy as "courageous".

Moustache-twirling, bean-counting, avaricious creeps, the lot of them. But this is to be expected of the Conservatives because this is what they do and that is why more than two thirds of the electorate voted left of centre. In empowering them, Clegg has just crapped over everything the LibDems are supposed to stand for.

We all know by now that 23 out of 29 members of the cabinet are millionaires, including Clegg. One of them is George Gideon Oliver Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer who gave us yesterday's budget, and heir to the wallpaper brand of Osborne and Little. One of the blizzard of tweets yesterday wished for 100% tax on inherited wallpaper fortunes. I've always disliked the company's bland tasteless metallic nouveau-riche designs (explains a lot) and I'd be happy just to see him take a pasting and then get hung.

And a moment of silence for poor old Billy Bragg, a decent man criminally misled by his own wishful thinking.

VAT rise as LibDems aid Tory attack on the poorest

It's official. The poorest ten per cent in Britain will see their shopping bills rise and lose the most as ConDem make up the deficit their banker friends caused by raising VAT to 20 percent and cutting our public services. Nick "Ramsay McClegg" Clegg just helped push through the most draconian budget in decades despite all their promises in the run-up to the election, and gave his party their Clause Four moment.

I listened to Vince Cable squirming last night on C4 News as he was quizzed over the LibDem election pledge not to hike VAT as it is a regressive tax that hits the poorest hardest. We were treated to the usual politicians' weasel words, "I may have said that but that's not what I meant". Humpty Dumpty can make words mean whatever he wants, whenever he wants.

I wonder how the LibDem party faithful feel now when you can search on the internet for "libdem vat election ad" and find the unequivocal image above plastered all over their websites. I wonder if there'll be a swift spate of deletions as this part of their bid for political power gets airbrushed out of history. Will it be like Chinese art during the Cultural Revolution, when a person's party loyalty could be measured by the size of the red tractor in their landscapes? In this case, the rebels feature it prominently, while the greasy-pole ascenders minimise or delete it altogether.

More weasel words as David Cameron learns from 1984 and mangles the English language, calling this budget "progressive" when all the evidence shows that it is no such thing.

How progressive is it to raise a tax where the richest ten percent pay one pound in every £25, while the poorest ten percent pay one in every £7? Not just VAT: by a ratio of four to one, the deficit is being paid for by those who did nothing to cause the recession. Why not raise top rates of tax? Even under Thatcher the top rate was 60%. The only crumb of comfort is the rise in the threshold where you start paying tax, but this still means that the poorest end up paying the most when all the changes are taken into account.

Child benefits have been frozen for three years and public departments cut by 25% , while Morgan Stanley joyfully declares the "Austerity Budget" a big win for business. The corporate tax rate falls 1% per year from 28% to 24% by 2013/2014 but a levy on the banks balance sheets rises to only 0.07% by 2012.

Despite a rise in Capital Gains tax by 10% to 28%, Morgan Stanley says:

In general, we thought this was a sensible, balanced and business-friendly budget, which is actually likely to result in an effective tax cut for UK PLC of c. £2.3bn by 2012/13.

And The Daily Telegraph reports the Planet Business rubbing its hands with glee:

Dismissing fears that increasing taxes and cutting public spending could send the country back into recession, the Institute of Directors (IoD) said the Chancellor had "faced up to the challenge", while the British Chambers of Commerce hailed the strategy as "courageous".

Moustache-twirling, bean-counting, avaricious creeps, the lot of them. But this is to be expected of the Conservatives because this is what they do and that is why more than two thirds of the electorate voted left of centre. In empowering them, Clegg has just crapped over everything the LibDems are supposed to stand for.

We all know by now that 23 out of 29 members of the cabinet are millionaires, including Clegg. One of them is George Gideon Oliver Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer who gave us yesterday's budget, and heir to the wallpaper brand of Osborne and Little. One of the blizzard of tweets yesterday wished for 100% tax on inherited wallpaper fortunes. I've always disliked the company's bland tasteless metallic nouveau-riche designs (explains a lot) and I'd be happy just to see him take a pasting and then get hung.

And a moment of silence for poor old Billy Bragg, a decent man criminally misled by his own wishful thinking.