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Polly Toynbee is in the pay of the Government.

Thursday, September 17, 2009
As revealed by Eric Pickles through a brace of questions:

Mr. Pickles: To ask the Minister of State, Department for Business, Innovation and Skills what payments his Department and its predecessors have made to Ms Polly Toynbee in the last five years; and for what purposes. 


Mr. McFadden [holding answer 14 September 2009]: A payment was made to Polly Toynbee in July 2007 in the sum of £587.50 for chairing the women's Entrepreneur Ambassadors Event at Lancaster House in London.
And
Mr. Pickles: To ask the Minister of State, Department for Business, Innovation and Skills what payments regional development agencies have made to Ms Polly Toynbee in the last five years; and for what purposes. 


Ms Rosie Winterton [holding answer 14 September 2009]: Ms Toynbee chaired the EEDA annual meeting in September 2006. The meeting is an open annual public meeting to report on the activities of the agency. The focus of the event was growth through successful partnerships. A payment of £2,500 was made to an agency.  She was a speaker at the 2007 Prowess Conference at Brighton Racecourse 7-8 February 2007, which was part sponsored by SEEDA. No direct payment was made to her by SEEDA.
  
Well, fancy.

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posted by Croydonian

A brief observation. And an even briefer snidey aside

Sunday, June 28, 2009
I am re-reading Victor Davis Hanson's peerless 'Why the West has Won - Carnage and Culture from Salamis to Vietnam' for the umpteenth time, and fancied that this quote merited a narrower audience:

"Later the Greeks even had their triremes named Demokratia, Eleutheria and Parrhesia".

Which one might render as 'Democracy', 'Freedom' and 'Freedom of Speech'. Which I think are rather better names than HMS Ark Royal, USS Nimitz or, come to that, the Charles de Gaulle.

"Arnold Toynbee (guess whose grandfather he is)..in one of his more foolish asides suggested that a Greek loss to Xerxes might have been good for Hellenic civilization".

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posted by Croydonian

An ebay listing to freeze the blood

Wednesday, October 08, 2008
Found this while searching for Toynbee, hoping to be able to scoff at how lowly-priced her books were:


The reference is actually to an interview with Arnold Toynbee, Mary Louisa's daddy, but I thought I'd make everyone's flesh creep. Hope it comes back.

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posted by Croydonian

Toynbee fact checker....

Tuesday, November 27, 2007
"Instead [Brown] boasted of Labour's deep cuts in corporation tax, which now at 28% is among the lowest in the west". Source

OK, let's take The West as being a synonym for the OECD. Fair?

"...at the turn of the millennium the British rate of 30% was 3.6 percentage points below the OECD average. Yet by 2005 it was 1.4 points higher. In 2000 there were only seven OECD members with a corporate tax rate lower than 30%; there are now 14". (This is from The Business in January 2007, quoted on the personal site of the author)

"Comparing Britain’s tax policy with that of the most forward-thinking European nations has become almost embarrassing. The Irish (with their 12.5% corporation tax) and the Eastern Europeans – in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia corporation tax is respectively 24%, 16%, and 19% – remain ahead of the pack. The rest of Europe is starting to follow their lead, as tax competition works its magic and forces even social-democratic governments to adapt to reality; some of the developments on the continent have been truly remarkable, albeit barely noticed by the British chattering classes. The Austrians cut corporation tax from 34% to 25% in 2005. A week ago, corporation tax in Holland was cut to 25.5%. Denmark has reduced its tax rate from 34% to 28%. In Finland it is now only 26%, compared to 29% in 2004. Between 1999 and 2004, the Portuguese reduced their rate from 37.4% to 27.5%. Corporation tax is also lower in Greece and Luxembourg than in Britain. Even in those European countries where corporation tax remains higher than in Britain, the direction is clearly down. In Belgium company tax has fallen from 40.2% to 34%; the Germans slashed theirs from 52% to 38.9% in 2001 and could introduce additional reductions next year. Last year, the French cut their own corporation rate from 41.7% to 34.4%; even more depressingly from Britain’s perspective, President Chirac has just pledged that France will reduce corporation tax to 20% in five years with the long-term goal of getting it down to 10%".

"....among the lowest in the west". Yeah, right.


"To quote Stefan Bach of the German Institute of Economic Development, “Even if a nexus between tax cuts and economic growth is not clear in theory and difficult to prove empirically, the international experience shows: countries that have lowered their corporate income tax had a positive economic development.” KPMG corporate tax survey 2006

Which survey also shows an average corporate tax rate, across 88 countries, of 27.1% as of 1/1/2006.

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posted by Croydonian

A small memory jog for Polly Toynbee

Tuesday, March 27, 2007
Today Public Enemy #1 is having a good old rant about the Manchester Casino (she's agin it):

"The word is that the old Son of the Manse in No 11 always shuddered at this gambling bill (Yeah. Right. He, of course can do no wrong in her book. She described as being like 'a kindly uncle' once. C). His other unexpected tax bombshell in the budget slapped 50% on casino takings and 15% on online gambling: it left the whole policy battered.

But heftier tax is no answer. It may slightly diminish profits and bring a shedload more cash into the Treasury. Isn't that a good thing? No, Australia stands as a warning. Their great expansion of gambling, mainly through "pokies" - high-prize slots - now means more than 10% of government revenues come from gambling. The state has become addicted to the nation's gambling habits. No future government could decide gambling was damaging its people and seek to reduce it. How could they afford to lose those revenues? Better by far to try to hold down gambling as best a government can - and it can.


And now for the fun bit, from 2001: "History will record very little of interest about the John Major era. What stands out? His near- criminal rail privatisation perhaps. Yet he did bequeath one great monument to the nation. No, not one but an ever-growing cornucopia of monuments large and small - the bounty of the national lottery....: back in 1998 when gambling fell under the remit of the Home Office, Jack Straw asked Sir Alan Budd to examine our antiquated gambling laws and suggest reform. There were old-fashioned nannyish restrictions to be removed from casinos (no drinking, must be a club member), some new ones needed (protecting children from one-armed bandits) and urgent review of e-betting, which Gordon Brown quickly remedied".

Perhaps she agrees with Emerson that "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines".

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posted by Croydonian

Tuesday, July 04, 2006
Polly Toynbee on Inheritance Tax

Our 'friend' Polly is getting all fired up about how liberal our inheritance tax laws are, and the article is filled with all our usual politics of envy rhetoric, despite her own considerable wealth. Rather pleasingly, the readers' comments attached do a fair job of filletting her thesis, so I will concentrate on the 7 year rule for potetnially exempt transfers, which she terms a 'loophole': "But the main loophole is the extraordinary rule that you can give away any amount free of tax if you stay alive for seven years thereafter".

A 'loophole' would normally be considered as a flaw - perhaps - in the draughting of legislation. In this case the seven year rule is at the core of the legislation, and calling this a 'loophole' is idiotic. If memory serves, the definition of theft under the '68 Theft act is 'to dishonestly appropriate property belonging to another with the intention to permanently deprive', and PT's argument could be paralleled by describing the 'permanently deprive' clause as a loophole.

Doubtless Fact Checking Pollyanna will dissect the article point by point....

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posted by Croydonian

Tuesday, April 18, 2006
  • She's at it again....



    • Dear old Polly Technic. Clearly she has little or no knowledge of gambler psychology, with her fruit machine comment especially vapid. I'm not, and never have been one for fruit machines, but I know enough people who play them to rebut 'yes, it is a legitimate, and more to the point, eyes open form of entertainment'. People who play the machines know full well that the odds are against them (bar the pondlife who lurk in pubs counting the cycles and dive in when a win is due), but do so because they enjoy getting into the second or third level games. That's for them to decide, likewise casino gaming. I regard casino gambling, fruit machines, the nags etc as far less iniquitous than the national lottery, where the state truly is encouraging, rather than merely facilitating gambling. I think it was Walter Block who noted that state lotteries in the US give a lower level of payout than numbers 'rackets'. But of course the state does this all for own good, as it is the Good Shepherd to we errant sheep.


    And herewith a tyically pithy analysis from Spiked:

    http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/0000000CB026.htm

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    posted by Croydonian