Yesterday’s Evening Standard carried a story about the Government’s road pricing experiment - apparently the trial region will be “South West London”.
Does that mean we in Richmond Borough will be one of the trial areas?
Will we have our Road Tax reimbursed? How will this affect company allowances and taxable benefits? or will this just be forced upon us?
Watch this space for more news…
Reports in today’s Guardian suggest that the LibDems are ditching their flagship policy of a local income tax as a replacement to council tax, a move that is backed by Vince Cable.
Back in February, when the Government belatedly nationalised Northern rock, I wrote a post on this blog that said it was a bad idea.
I criticised Vince Cable’s idea of nationalising the bank and suggested that the right thing to do would have been to let the bank go under, a view that has been supported by more than one person I have spoken to in the industry.
I deeply respect Dr Cable’s intellect, but have always maintained that, as an academic economist with only 2 years’ experience in the private sector, he is not very commercial in his outlook.
The motivation for injecting disproportionate funds in to the bank was clearly political and not in the public interest .
Now Northern Rock has, as predicted, posted £585m losses, is taking a £3bn cash injection from the government and looking more like a millstone around the taxpayers’ necks every day.
Vince is now blaming the “private sector managers”, the FSA and the Government for this debacle. Perhaps he’s right insofar as the system clearly didn’t work.
Shouldn’t he also take some responsibility for pushing the nationalisation agenda as well? As I said at the time - “he was wrong then and he’s wrong now”.
A welcome back to my readers, who will have noticed that this is my first blog post on the new revamped website, so please use this as an opportunity to look around…
The big non-Brown-leadership-crisis story of the last week is that Centrica have posted a near-£1bn half-year profit, after announcing that British Gas were raising fuel prices by 35%.
Sorry for the rapid blog entries today, but we’ve just had the news that the expenses claimed by all Conservative Front Bench MPs for the last three months have been published.
This comes as part of David Cameron’s continued efforts to bring greater openness to the issue of MPs’ expenses and allowances.
The information published includes a comprehensive list of staff and their positions, an indication of any family members employed, and a breakdown of office running costs and expenditure incurred by staying away from their main home.
To see expenses claimed, please follow this link. Please note that comments on individual MPs’ expenses should be posted on the conservatives.com website.
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