Huguenot

Can I also add that I think you probably have a terrific relationship with your kids, and it's bloody great that you can have that kind of chat where you say 'I don't think this is a bright idea' and they listen. Big Up.

"My daughter and her teenage friends were all very angry at having their EMA taken away and fruitless job hunting. When Connexions was closed and the youth provision slashed, they were even more angry." Who gave them the idea that everyone was giving them a leg up anyway? I had no idea what 'benefits' were open to me as a teenager, let alone being resentful if they were taken away. I knew that I'd get fed, I knew I had a bed. That was it. I knew I couldn't buy anything. I'm sorry LD, I love you to bits, but what the hell were they doing thinking people were there to give them a comfort blanket? Of course they experienced 'fruitless job hunting'. That's life. If they were like me they'd have taken a job winding power cables onto cassette players or putting car indicator lights into a box. I bet they bloody didn't. They probably were looking for jobs that gave them some sort of inner peace. They take jobs in restaraunts owned by predatory older men. They don't claim benefits. They're teenagers right? The lowest of the low. Teenagers clean toilets and wipe arses. That's what makes them adults. Life is shit. Get over it.

On a previous subject, AFN is making the same mistakes that many acitvists do when referring to the internet as a saviour. Any sensible review of the net contribution of technology to social empowerment must take into account the negative effects as well as the positive ones. Worth watching for its beauty as well as veracity. What activists don't realise is that 15 years ago the government would have to torture vast swathes of dissenters to gain even cursory information about the set up of a subversive network. Now they only need to look on Facebook.

@AFN - There are clinical studies that demonstrate that when politically committed people discuss political issues the rational side of their thought processes shut down. In other words they cease to be able to think clearly or reasonably. These girls are not engaging in political discourse, to them this is a day off work, fireworks and 'free alcohol' (their own words). In their own words, it was 'Good, good fun, of course it is' Their political insight was limited to 'It's the government's fault though, yeah, I dunno, the Conservatives, yeah whatever, who it is, I dunno'. It simply doesn't suit you to accept this brutal truth. There are complexities - particularly why these people are so divorced from society that showing people you 'can do whatever you want' is a good idea. This isn't power - it's showing people you can do whatever you want - anyone can do this. We don't do it because it's stupid and destructive, because it's disempowering and cripples us all. I know from past experience that you will not accept this, because it doesn't conform with your world view. You'll deny it, you'll try and twist it, you'll try and negotiate your way out of it. In the end you'll just start abusing people who disagree with you (I notice you've already started).

As usual UDT, having been found incorrect, you're trying to change the argument to one you can win. There was never a question about understanding the lingo, you simply said there was no Jamaican Patois, and you were wrong. The 'eHow' page that you linked to to support your incorrect assertion actually has a link on the right hand side to 'How to speak Jamaican Patois'. There's no point in continuing this conversation with you.

I don't disagree there were many factors, but to my mind those factors revolve around the fact they they thought looting was acceptable behavior, not that they were engaged in any sort of valid political discourse.

Possibly, or more likely you're insisting that these people are oppressed victims fighting for their rights because it suits your world outlook. You deny that they were just shopping with a hammer instead of a wallet despite the airwaves hot with kids cheering about the 'free stuf' they was getting innit. If you can completely ignore the evidence like this then it rather makes it pointless to discuss it.

"Both my parents are West Indians and have visited family in several of the Caribbean islands." So that means that you can ignore the definition of patois, and deny the existence of Jamaican Patois? I think what David was implying was that just because your parents did something, it doesn't make you an expert in it. In the case of the word patois you are simply wrong, which rather proves his point.

Yeah, but I don't think it's an accurate assessment of the figures. Firstly as we've seen the bottom quartiles only averages 10% of their income in tax, and the top quartiles (over 50k a year) pays around 25%. If you're averaging 50% in tax then you're in the 'massive earner' 0.00001% of the population category which is the same group you're trying to target anyway. Then I think you've got an overall challenge with the maths - I think there are so few people in your target group, and the tax so limited, that it'll make absolutely no difference to the overall take. In other words you could impose this tax, but you couldn't use it to change taxation further down. Don't forget we're borrowing 40% of our government expenditure figure anyway.

"People sat on assets that are disproportionately high when compared to their income will need to liquidate a portion of their asset base to meet the tax. To an extent this will mean selling property and this is where the downward pressure comes from." Your system only works if you are deliberately seeking to make people poorer, in other words it's a tax deliberately setting out to asset strip wealthy people. This is morally unsound. It's just robbery. If the tax is less than their income then there's no incentive to to liquidate the property anyway. Besides because you're talking about properties in the multi million pound range it'll have no impact on the people you claim to be trying to help - the ones at the bottom of the chain. This seems like simply revenge attacks on wealthy pensioners.

I'm not sure how you could keep things as simple as possible with an asset tax - are you considering having forced entry hit squads breaking into houses to value however many old masters are hiding behind Athena posters? ;-) How are you considering identifying overseas assets? Won't the rich just put all their assets overseas where they can't be found even today because the UK has no jurisdiction to demand transparency in a different country? @David_Carnell - I was secptical about an LVT when you first proposed it a couple of days ago, but now I've spent an hour reading up on it I'm absolutely converted! It works so well BECAUSE it taxes the land value, and not the property. It's massive incentive for private money to tackle urban blight - a cost that is currently carried by a reluctant and mistrustful general taxpayer at the moment.

Sorry UDT, you're simply wrong - a patois is any non-stamdard language. The etymology of the word is French There is a Jamaican Patois Mind you mate, I don't expect you to let facts get in the way of your assertions ;-)

I'm not sure that quite fits together. If the prices are 'kept down' with your asset tax then the owner would be taxed on the other products or investments that they spent the money on instead. Hence it makes no difference whether the price of a house goes up or not - rich person is going to be taxed on his assets regardless. For this reason an asset tax has no impact on house prices.

If you took the Aussie approach then farms and smallholdings would be exempt, as would the primary residence. In fact in Oz LVT gathers less than 5% of the total tax take, so it's not seen as a revenue generating programme, it's seen as a way of imposing the cost of localised development (which increases the land value) upon the people who benefit from it most. They believed it had the secondary effect of increasing development (the tax is on the land NOT the building) so that the land is more productive, and it disincentivised speculative land squatting (because landlords were paying even if they didn't use the land). This was Brisbane's summary, and it seems well thought through and very persuasive. LVT can never generate much revenue, as if it reaches the point where the LVT exceeds the revenue generated by the land it leads to land abandonment and a collapsing total tax take. The asset tax proposed by SC suffers the same problem. The tax generated by such a system at the levels he proposes could never return enougb cash to the exchequer to cover his proposed 30% income tax rate (also SC called this a 'flat' rate, is that a rejection of progressive taxation?). Besides which SC's asset approach seems illogical if put in the full context, as the same money would be taxed twice - once when you earn it, and again when you save it. It seems bizarre that the impact of such an approach would incentivise people to spend money recklessly on perishable goods and services just to avoid tax. This is not what a sensible nation should be doing - it should be incentivising investment and long term development. It is the rich person's investment in stocks and shares that creates the jobs for blue collar workers.

Presumably UDT believes that teenagers exhorting their chums over social networks and BB messenger to come and join the riot 'and get free stuf' were actually referring to pamphlets and Socialist Worker badges. As for an 'elite' conspiracy to divide and conquer - presumably that's being enacted by the 'New World Order' yes?

I found a new one here in Singers that I absolutely swear by - Tiger Balm (the white, not the red). Try and cool it as quick as possible - it shrinks the blood vessels and slows transmission. Just an icecube from a drink will do. Try not give yourself a cold-burn though ;-) There are some moderately effective off-the-shelf antihistamines you can gete - Benadryl and Actifed. Combined with booze they might get you more than a bit confused though. If I know I'm going somewhere where my bites blow up to half tennis balls then I'll usually take a few Claritin.

That was kind of my point - I wasn't suggesting that anarchist movements couldn't operate collectively - I was trying to say that the distribution of resources that are vital and necessary for a modern society is so fragmented around the world that it requires co-operation on a scale that anarchy couldn't co-ordinate. I'm sure that anarchist groups could find ways of operating on a community level, but I also have no doubt that would be quite impossible on a global scale. The only society that could sustain itself in such a context would be a low density agrarian one. Even that wouldn't work across vaste swathes of the planet, where many societies can only import sufficient foodstuffs if they're exporting resources necessary for a highly technologically advanced society (which would cease to exist). Ceasing to exist is just about the best imperative for war yet...

I don't think anarchism works simply because it's inefficient. Local groups can't pull together to feed, clothe and empower their community because the means of production needs to be organised to deliver efficiently at the current population weights. Anarchism is a dream of an essentially agrarian fantasy not too far distance from John Major's 'Old maids bicycling to holy communion through the morning mist'. The only way manageable populations could be delivered would be so inhumane that they would corrupt the soul of the movement. To claim the death of capitalism is to assume that it already exists in a 'pure' form anyway - which it doesn't. The only question is the degree of regulation. This is essentially an 'analogue' control, not a 'binary' one: i.e. capitalism is not either on or off, it's simply of varying influence.

I'm not sure credit could have been the only influence on mobility. Surely with a growing population you can't expect multiple family generations to continue to live within a stone's throw of each other? A disapora would have been forced upon society just by population density, whether or not they moved to rent or buy?

I agree in a way. I've seen how pub fighters with minor gripes and feed themselves into an unreasonable fury if only one 'reasonable' person mentions in passing that their gripe may be justified. It's not the crim's sense of injustice that feeds this social rage, it's the general public's (albeit muted) justifications of it. I'm not saying that this justification is unfair either - multiple political scandals over the last decade have led the general public to distance themselves from normal social acquiesence, and they have unwittingly unleashed this turmoil upon themselves. Incidentally, I don't think the answer is acquiesence, but I'm staggered at the actions of the public at the ballot box. They voted for more of the same.

Do you know that the last thing that Walt Disney wrote before he died was 'Kurt Russell'. He died before he could explain it, and even Russell claimed to have no clue. However, I think it's now apparent that Walt knew, many years ago, that the only person to save us from this social unrest was Snake Plissken, aka....... Kurt Russell. ePetition anyone?

That's not really relevant. Most criminals claim they're innocent and have been treated unfairly. In this sense the belief in 'unfair' treatment is only as valid as it actually being unfair.

Judging by that, there seems to be a great deal of confusion about what 'liberal' means - it certainly doesn't mean no boundaries. Neither does liberal mean an end to the family. The abuse of 'liberal' in this style is a facet of American politics which doesn't transfer well to English politics. The best equivalent would be 'bleeding heart pinko', but I think most sensible people would agree we haven't seen any of those leading the country for a long long time. They're nothing to do with New Labour. In fact 'libertarianism' tends to be a preoccupation of the right wing.

*chuckle* Loz (!), I think you're right on the spot there!

That's the benefits fraudsters Loz, they've got disabled stickers.