The observations of a taxpayer, an atheist, a victim and a high court judge

I’m not an expert on off-shore accounts and I don’t know much about tax avoidance.

Would you like to see my tax returns? 

The only declaration of interests I feel obliged to declare is that I do prefer to keep as much of my money as possible. Do you want to know what I think of David Cameron’s personal finances? 

No?  Quite right too. Who’s interested in the opinion of a relatively ill-informed nonentity?

The BBC seems to think their audience is interested in the opinion of relatively ill-informed nonentities. That must be why Evan Davis approached the philosophers and intellectuals in a nearby pub to find out whether they thought David Cameron should resign. (Newsnight)

I think they did think that, but weren’t 100% sure why. 

This morning Sima Kotecha took to the streets of Dunstable (has the Today programme only got one intrepid reporter these days?) (It’s the cuts, the cuts) to find out what passers by had to say. 

“He’s not the man to run our country.” 

“He hasn’t broken the law”  “Well ‘e ‘asn’t admitted ‘e done it, ‘as ‘e?” 

Oh good. Glad you got that out, missus. 

Was it up to Sima Kotecha to decide which of her interviewees’s words of wisdom made the cut? I don’t suppose we’ll ever know.

  

Now, I’m not Matthew Parris’s biggest fan, but he got it about right in the Times. 

“Cameron faces a virus that’s out of control” He sure does (and that’s not the only out of control virus we’re facing) 

Matthew Parris’s analysis is jolly good, says this particular uninformed taxpayer. The thrust of his argument is that the media has done what comes naturally and made a mountain out of a relatively minor molehill. Here’s an excerpt from his piece that concerns the Beeb:

“But after the BBC (bizarrely) asked major contributors to form companies rather than call themselves self employed I started a company. It sells my services to a range of clients, including this newspaper. I live modestly so some of this money accumulates in the company. I don’t understand it myself, but for the moment I’m definitely paying less tax this way than I would as a self-employed person paying top-rate tax on all my earnings every year. I knew this when I took the company route and went ahead; but not without hesitation. And already I find myself mouthing those stock phrases you hear from the cornered, spluttering rich about “all the required declarations” “paying all taxes due” etc., and furiously distinguishing between avoidance and evasion”

The BBC’s accountants’ advice is just the same as any other accountants’ advice. Keep as much of your money as the tax laws permit. If the law is full of holes, get it fixed.  

I didn’t think much of Kitty Ussher’s attack on the P.M. (Today Programme)  

(Not that I knew who she was till I saw this.) She thought David Cameron should resign, as she had to. Why?

“Miss Ussher had designated her London property as her main home for tax purposes, while claiming the property was her designated second home for claiming parliamentary expenses. However, Miss Ussher paid an accountant to change her declaration, to make a property she owned in Burnley her main home shortly before selling it.”

As an MP she flipped her primary residence to avoid paying capital gains tax. She might have been encouraged to do this by HoC accountants at a time when many others were doing it. 

But she clearly made a less than accurate declaration to avoid paying tax, whereas David Cameron did pay the requisite tax.

I thought Chris Grayling was right, also on Today, and I do declare I’m not much of a Chris Grayling fan.

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Talking of men in hats, Justin Welby’s biological father wasn’t the actual father everyone thought was his father. He swapped a rogue father for a toff.  What if it was the other way round, if the biological father had turned out to be the alcoholic whisky salesman and the pretender the more respectable Sir Anthony Montague Browne?

Personally, I couldn’t care less.

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Douglas Murray has a piece in the Spectator about “Norway syndrome”. A male Norwegian victim of a Somali rapist feels guilty that he’s responsible for the rapist being deported from whence he came. Probably to some hellish future. http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2016/04/norway-syndrome-a-new-condition-for-western-victims-of-rape/

At first sight this looks like male left-wing Norwegian politician, Karsten Nordal Hauken being hoist by his own petard. His own left-wingery coming back to bite him on the bum, if you’ll excuse my flippancy.

This brings up a more fundamental question, which calls for a brief personal tale. 

We once faced a nocturnal intruder - an armed (though we didn’t know it at the time) drug addict and opportunist thief, who fled without the spoils when he realised we were awake. A police dog sniffed him out and he was apprehended at a nearby property soon after, when the blade was discovered. 

Much later, we were told that one of those protracted ‘no comment’ pantomimes had held the procedure up for weeks,  but eventually he was sentenced to a number of years inside.

We were informed that it was all about drugs. 

“Maybe it’s partly societal,” I ventured to the policeman updating us on the outcome.  “Perhaps the product of a failed upbringing and exploitation by dealers and pushers?” 

“Don’t waste your sympathy” said the good copper.  “on a thoroughly nasty piece of work.”

So even though I still think these problems are societal and stem from failures greater than the sum of the individual  perpetrator, I have come to the conclusion that we can’t really deal with other peoples’ monumental problems. We’ve got enough of our own. So send them back, put them in jail, close the borders. We can still feel guilty about it if we want, but our priorities have to be ourselves. (Who ever we are) 

This is what I would say to Yasmin Alibhai Brown if I ever happened to meet her, which God forbid.

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What is the most annoying trailer doing the rounds on the BBC? 

I don’t know what or why it is, but it looks like positive discrimination gawn mad.

Okay, I found out it’s a black poet called James Massiah - (Not 'the' Messiah; just a very naughty boy.)

Poetic aspirations are all well and good, but what about awkward, muffled, glottal-stop pronunciation and dodgy rhymes? “Dawn” doesn’t rhyme with “on”. (Okay, the Queen might just say “turn the radio awn”?) 

“Once we find our frequency, we frequently find...” is wordplay, rap style, but not the kind of poetry I want.  I frequently find the frequency with which this rap appears on my screen makes me want to turn it awf.

I like to think of myself as a high court judge who doesn’t know what the Beatles are. That’s why I find that plug for the radio really annoying.