National insurance offers no health reassurance
Maurice O'Brien • Published 28 Jul 2011 09:01
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SOME of you probably still can't believe how easily you fell for that con trick about a working lifetime's National Insurance contributions providing comfort and tranquillity through one's twilight years and into eternity.
Peering into that maiden pay packet and discovering that for you there was little difference between a tax collector and a taxidermist, the distant guarantee of a comfy, worry-free armchair in the bay window of the Happy Harvest rest home still seemed reassuring, if only in a vague way.
Now everyone's been properly stuffed it's almost comforting in itself to realise there's always another con bearing an HM Government imprimatur lurking nearby.
Take the vehicle excise licence or road fund tax, costing £165 more or less, depending on your green-ness. HMG rakes in somewhere in excess of six billion a year from it, but only the permanently bewildered would waste time wondering how much goes anywhere near our Third World roads.
It's high time the Treasury was forced to specifically allocate every taxed penny to the purpose for which it was extracted, albeit that would require a far greater degree
of imagination (fags, beer, spirits, petrol , road tax, yawn) than any Chancellor's possessed in my lifetime.
But, talking of imagination, let's raise a glass to the Chinese city of Xiangyang where officials seized a swathe of farmland and built an entire by-pass without planning permission, only for it to show up on satellite pictures and incur the wrath of Beijing.
Ordered to rip it up and return the land to the farmers, the devious burghers of Xiangyang kept their smart new road, disguising it with a layer of soil and planting a giant vegetable patch on top.
Sadly they've now been rumbled and the federal fine will send the city's taxes through the ceiling.
Coincidentally, around Tilehurst we have several
badly ploughed vegetable patches, all currently disguised as roads.
IF THE Murdochian resignation merry-go-round has done one good thing, then surely it's killed off the idea of elected police chiefs.
It's a sure thing that when their secret backers started calling in favours for a successful election campaign the rozzers wouldn't be talking about a quick rub-down at a health spa.
Meanwhile Dave ducked and dived through 138 Commons' questions about the Murdochs, and avoided having to explain why the German Fourth Reich is taking shape under the guise of yet another breach of the Lisbon Constitreaty.
But I guess we'll only find out what's really going on when someone hacks his phone.
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