Smoke and mirrors

This morning, in the words of The Evening Standard, ‘George Osborne tightens squeeze on banks with £800m raid on profits’. In reality he's doing no such thing. As Robert Peston explained on the Today programme, £800 million is dwarfed by the sum the banks are paying out this year in bonuses: around five thousand million.
Unfortunately, Peston didn’t raise the issue of a very different tax change revealed by George Monbiot in today’s Guardian. This abolishes taxation on earnings from a bank’s overseas branches whilst at the same time allowing it to claim the expense of funding its foreign branches against tax it pays in the UK. Far from causing the banks pain, the Posh-Boys’ squeeze resembles one given by an aged roué to his mistress’s thigh as he empties his wallet into her lap.
But it will no doubt convince the readers of the Daily Mail that tough action is being taken. In Monbiot’s words:

‘… this government … has learned the lesson that
Thatcher never grasped. If you want to turn this country
into another Mexico, where the ruling elite wallows in
unimaginable, state-facilitated wealth while the rest can go
to hell, you don't declare war on society, you don't
lambast single mothers or refuse to apologise for Bloody
Sunday. You assuage, reassure, conciliate, emote. Then
you shaft us.’

Be very, very afraid

Listening to Radio 4 this morning I gather that the posh-boys have set up a new web-site enabling the hoi-polloi to access the crime figures within any given postcode. Apparently its had 70,000 hits a minute, causing it to crash.
John Humphrys comprehensively demolished Policing Minister Nick Herbert’s rationale for the site - giving the public the information needed to hold the police to account. As Humphrys said, if your street’s being terrorised by yobs you don’t need a website to inform you of the fact. If you’ve been burgled, as Humphrys had, you report it to the police as does every other victim of a crime, so the Old Bill don’t need a website to tell them what their crime stats are. If you urge the police to prioritise your case they will reply, not unreasonably, that they have many calls on their time - some, murder and rape for example, more urgent than yours. (And, as Humphrys didn’t point out, thanks to the posh-boys’ cuts there are fewer policemen to investigate your burglary or arrest the yobs.)
Unfortunately, Humphrys didn’t go on to suggest the real reason the site has been created: to increase paranoia among the general public. This will enable the government to add yet more authoritarian measures to those introduced by Blair and hasten the day when the ordinary citizen is treated with all the respect and dignity accorded a Ryan Air passenger.