OFF: Re: Foot & Mouth

[Jon Jarrett]

On Thu, 22 Mar 2001, Carl Edlund Anderson wrote:

> Unfortunately, UK poltics seems to be headed down exactly the same
> road.  Labour are pretty hopeless, but the Tories are probably worse,
> and who knows what the Lib Dems will do?  Like in the States, any
> real choice has been lost in a mire of career politicians playing
> one-upsmanship party-politics games. Meanwhile, there aren't any
> teachers, trains, hospitals, sheep, etc.

        Well, obviously what the future holds for any government is
obscure unless you're fofp. But as to what the Libdems *think* they will
do, well, that's obtainable on the policy section of <www.libdems.org>.

> I would admire the Lib Dems for saying that they think taxes actually
> need to be raised -- since the UK does occupy this weird,
> disfunctional middle ground between the US's low-tax
> low-public-services and Europe's high-tax high-public-services --
> except that I have absolute confidence that they would waste them
> just as well as Labour or the Tories. Ah, well, at least they're all
> more or less centrists ...

        A while back, the LibDems did float a motion at the conference,
based on the then white-hot heat of computer technologies as one in ten
schools got themselves BBC Micros already! that there should be a single
revenue mechanism, whereby you filled out one quite large form each
year, which covered your entitlement to all benefits and your taxable
income and so on, everything to do with money you paid the government and
they paid you, it was machine-processed and then they sent you one bill or
one remittance. It would have cut the cost of bureaucracy hugely,
including of course the civil service which I suppose is the reason it was
rapidly dropped, _Yes Minister_ being required viewing even then. Yours,

Jon

ObCD: Pressurehed - _Sudden Vertigo_

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     Jon Jarrett (01223 514989)      jjarrett at chiark.greenend.org.uk