Globalisation: The Stealer of Skills

OK my snarly gnarly little English illiterati. Here the next dose of why Globalisation is bad for you, me, and the rest of the world-wide Hoi Polloi** (see note below).

Put that bottle of cider down and pay attention.

The easy way to illustrate this is to give you a couple of recent examples regarding the theft of skilled workers from the third world and the corresponding theft of jobs from England

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One of the great obscenities perpetrated by the last Labour government was the bribery and theft of trained medical professionals from the third world.

What! I hear you exclaim. The Labour party indulging in a spot of slavery? Well, Almost.

Starting in the late 90's teams of recruiters from local health authorities were flown to places like India, South Africa and the Philippines with the sole aim of stealing the medical staff away to the UK.

Nobody would dispute that these individuals were a great gain for the UK.

I would also hope that nobody would dispute that stealing them away from their own nations was not only immoral but also a catastrophe for those Hoi Polloi** left doctor-less and nurse-less back home.

Why did the ruling elite do this?

Because it was cheaper than training our own medics.

It got them out of a short term hole of their own making regarding impractical promises they made about the NHS.

Simple.

Now of course, it is a long term problem. But they don't care anymore. Another ruling elite has to pick up the pieces.

It also gave them leverage in keeping down wages. It enhanced their control over the NHS at the expense of the medics.

I am sure that in the future the Labour party's addiction to globalisation and its immoral theft of these medics will be regarded much in the same way as we regard slavery today.

To be fair there were rumblings of discontent from the odd senior (though soon to be junior) member of the Labour Party (like Clarles Clarke)

The other skilled worker obscenity we will be looking at today is the abuse of skills within the third world.

An engineer or technician is a precious resource in any country. But today many multi-lingual highly educated individuals in the third world will be found answering the phone and dealing with Mr Angry from Cheam and his missing direct debit.

Meanwhile the people in this country that used to do this job sit at home watching the afternoon telly waiting to sign on again. Their prosperity and self reliance ruined.

The foreign engineer, temporarily gets paid more than he would doing his proper job. Meanwhile his skills rot and the country that trained him goes without.

Long term nobody gains.

Except the fat cats.

OK?

Sermon over. Back to the cider.

**NOTE
I know you lot are, like me, a bit dim. (John Prescott told me this. So it must be true.)

So I need to explain the term Hoi Polloi.

Hoi Polloi is a Greek expression meaning the many, the masses, etc. It is usually used in private by the Great Good and Extremely Well Fed. They use it as a sneeringly derogatory term when describing people like you and me, my plebian proletariate mates.

Occasionally they get carried away and use it in public, so if you hear it, now you know what it means.

So theres a little lesson for you.

Of course Dioclese should know this already. It is not because he is brighter than the rest of us its just that as a short term past resident of Greece he must have heard the remark delivered about himself as he queued up every night to buy his industrial strength Metaxa.

An Outbreak of Common Sense

Many of the Great Good and Extremely Well Fed are moaning about the lack of commitment that has been shown to the victims of the Pakistani floods.

So why is the level of support so low?

Why are we not providing significant support from either the government or from the general population?

Cast you mind back to the Tsunami of 2004. Initially, that catastophe also went unaddressed. At the start the government grudgingly donated a derisory amount of aid. The sum was actually soon outstripped by personal donations. The government under Gordon Browns direction tried to hold its position. But public outrage dictated otherwise.

Today, the the lack of public support for the Pakistani disaster is primarily due to the economic constraints upon the country at this time. This is ampified by the fact that Pakistan spends £2 billion a year on nuclear weapons, and has been actively seen as supporting those that are murdering British troops in Afganistan.

But in both the Tsunami disaster and the Pakistani floods the government has found itself in a position where it simply did not have any money left in the coffers. The reason for this is that most of the Foreign Aid budget has always been squandered on African gangsters and other odious members of the worlds corrupt elites. We have always heavily contributed to the UN Central Emergency Relief Fund. This fund is supposed to deal with crises like the Pakistani floods but it is arguably worse than useless.

At least now, the coalition government appears to (at last) have smelt the coffee and is axing some of the multitude of commitments that have previously soaked up the foreign aid budget like a sponge.
See Channel 4 here

Morover, (shock and horror) we will be targetting aid to help extract us from the mess of Afganistan. See Guardian Here

Maybe in future years we will not be buying Lear jets for the corrupt bully-boys who rule the third world. Perhaps we will have enough kept back so we can immediately respond to a calamity like the Pakistani floods.

Maybe if there is not a disaster in a particular year, then maybe, just maybe, we could spend it on our own poor and needy instead.

Globalisation: The Real Enemy.

Dear fellow disowned and derided little Englanders

Billothewisp is going to have a rant (or occasional series of rants) about Globalisation. This is the first.

Today I am just setting the stage with an outline of this wrecking ball of an idealogy.

I promise to interperse this stuff with some more digestable (or at least drinkable) posting or I, like you, will probably have a haemorrhage.

Globalisation

On a personal level, we all hold self reliance and self sufficiency in high esteem. But on a national level, these same attributes are villified and undermined.

Globalisation dictates that a national self reliance is regarded as something to be aborred and Free Trade (which is anything but) should fill the gap.

Nationally all our political parties are beholden to the great god of Globalisation. They appear oblivious to the damage and distress it causes to many societies, not just our own.

There is opposition to globalisation but most of the anti-globalisation movement is firmly entrenched on the more lunatic fringes of the left.

Billothewisp does not think firebombing MacDonald's is going to solve anything. Neither does he think that the average member of the Global Justice Movement has so much as a clue as to what is really going on.

Globalisation is a semi-random methodology that entrenches vested interest. The Great Good and Extremely Well Fed get ever richer, while the rest of us become ever more serf like in our position.

Globalisation encourages many of the woes we see in the world today.

Examples include:

Skilled Worker Theft
Predatory pricing
Unemploymnet
Sweat shop labour
mass migration
poverty
false competition
and many others.

To keep these posts to sensible lengths I will keep to one issue/example per post.

The next post will be Skilled Worker Theft.

There. I have said it. Now I feel better. Pass the cider.

England Erased

Good evening my fine fettled fellow little Englanders.

Billothewisp has a request.

I would like to try and compile some documentation on the airbrushing out of the English identity and the villification of Englishness.

My first port of call was going to be the notorious letter that hailed from the offices of John (pass the pies) Prescott in 2002.

You may remember it. If you don't, make sure you are sat down or at least stood well clear of breakable objects before reading the following snippet (all I can currently find....)

Ready?

[quote]
…there is no such nationality as English as laid down by various acts of Parliament and accession. Persons born in the United Kingdom are citizens of the United Kingdom and are therefore British/English.
[unquote]

Now, I really need the full text of this letter, vile and poisonous though it is. If you have a copy could you attach a link to it as a comment to this post?

Thanks

Billothewisp

Taxing Empty Containers

OK my bankrupt and poverty stricken English compatiots. As you may know Billothewisp is no fan of taxation. But today he has obviously had a little too much sun (or cider, or both) and he wishes to suggest a shiny new tax to help out our financially deprived exchequer.

While I can see some of our control freakery ruling classes jumping up and down in excitement on the possibility of stiffing the average Joe Bloggs for a bit more of his hard earned dosh, they may not like it so much after they have read what it is.

There are, of course, brethren who will despair at the mere thought of yet another tax. They can give me a good kicking later. The cider will ensure I don't feel a thing. But I digress, back to Taxing containers.

One of the main avenues ruthless globalists are using to stiff our economy is via the use of sweat shop labour in poor foreign countries. In these countries their ruling elites or "Great, Good and Extremely Well Fed" get ever richer while the slaves employees get paid a pittance. But the goods produced by these globalists are priced too highly or are inappropriate for local population.

We end up in the bizarre situation where our own people are on the dole because no business can compete with the sweat shops. But in the countries involved in this sweat shop labour there is a shortage of economical goods for the local population. This because the fat cats can make much more money out of shipping it to the UK than they can by doing the right thing and supporting their own people.

This abuse is made even worse due to the containerisation revolution that has taken place in the shipping industry. As an example, it is considerably cheaper to ship a television to the UK from China than it is to ship that same television 100 miles up the motorway from the port to the supply depot.

We need to level the playing field. One way of doing this would be to place an tax on each container coming into the country full and leaving empty. This would also help our exporters by inducing a market where shippers actually competed to fill their containers. At the moment most cannot be bothered. If a container leaves the country full of goods then the tax would be neutral for the shipper. If a container comes in empty (unheard of) no tax is paid and VAT is waived if it leaves full. At the moment most containers come in full and then simply ship fresh air out of our ports.

There are approximately 5.5 million TEU (Twenty Foot Equivalent Unit) deep sea (i.e. non European) container traffic movements a year. If you assume that 4.5 million of those are shipping air back to their point of origin and you charged a £500 tax per empty deep sea container leaving the country, you would bring in £2.25 Billion. It would also incentivise shippers to get UK goods shipped out cheaply.

Just an idea. Now let the kicking start.

The Trouble with VAT

Cast your mind back my despised little Englander mates. To when the last group of "Those Who Should Be Obeyed", panicked and adopted the ludicrous concept of dropping VAT by 2.5%.

As if that was ever going to make people stampede to the shops.

It did though cost a shedful of money. Not only that, it had no positive effect on employment within the small businesses.

Now of course the latest group of "Great Good and Extremely Well Fed" plan to raise VAT to 20%.

Granted, it is an easy hit. A way of raising a considerable amount of money in a short time. "As is" this rate increase will probably also have little effect on employment levels.

But VAT does have a big affect on employment. Especially within the small business sector. But this is due to the VAT Registration Threshold.

The VAT Threshold is based on the turnover of a business. If a business has a turnover of £70K or more it must register for VAT. This means that any bill the business issues will be inflated by 20% (i.e. the VAT). However this will be off-set by the business being able to reclaim VAT it has paid to its suppliers.

So how does this effect employment in small businesses?

Take a plumber working as a sole trader. Say his turnover (that's not profit... that's everything) is £68K. He does not have to register for VAT. No VAT registration means he has to absorb the VAT on the goods he supplies but does not have to charge 20% on his labour. As his labour will account for probably 2/3rds of the final turnover, he can charge less (or make more profit) than another plumber with a turnover of £71K.

There is a distinct disincentive to go through the VAT threshold. If you are going to breach it then you need to do it in style (aka turnover £150K etc.).

Now let us assume that our plumber decides to expand and wants to employ a labourer. Automatically the plumbers turnover inflates by the wages paid to the additional employee. The plumber goes through the VAT threshold and now (as well as paying the labourers wages) has to increase his bills by 20%.

The labourer will have to bring in a great deal more work to make his employment viable. In essence it make much more sense for the plumber to leave the labourer on the dole and to take a holiday when his turnover gets too close to the VAT threshold.

This could be fixed by raising the registration threshold to (say) £100K. It would encourage small enterprises (like our plumber) to expand and to do that he would then require the labourer to help him. Multiply that by (say) 300,000 small businesses across the country and you see the affect.

In the cash straitened time the big question is how much would this cost the exchequer? I think the answer is very little. One of the big savings is the labourer is no longer on the dole (and he is paying taxes) also there is the enterprise affect. As he has expanded once, maybe our plumber will hire more people and risk going go through the VAT threshold. But now it won't hurt so much. Relative to his expanded business, the hiring of extra staff is not so monumental.

So raising the VAT threshold could possibly take 300,000 people off the dole maybe more.

Seems like a good idea to me.

Billothewisp Returns from the Dead

My dear deranged and desperate English pals.

Billothewisp is not dead. He just smells funny.

A new list of topical and contentious blogging items for beration and derision are being prepared.

In the mean time, Billothewisp has been on tour, or, at least, to the Cambridge Folk festival.

Here among the dreaming spires (or is that Oxford?) you find an interesting and eclectic mix of individuals from the far flung frontiers of our nation. From the Mung bean eating classes through to our tattoo bedecked shaven headed brethren. You know, those who always give you the urge to look at your shoes when they pass by.

This year the festival was, well, so-so. But hey! that is only my view.

What I do wish to impart is a tale of stunning achievement performed by one of our young and delightful English female patriots at the festival.

The venue was the main beer tent.

At that time Billothewisp was sticking to the Bishops Tipple, a fine brew.

However there are those who would consider Bishops tipple a mere Nancy boys drink compared to the main item.

The drink of champions.

The nectar of the gods (of war).

Of course I refer to Old Rosie (7.2% ABV).

Old Rosie is cloudy. This may be due to its apple heritage or possibly because it is dissolving the glass.

Anyway, I digress.

Let us call our English champion Tracy.

Tracy is 5 foot nothing and weighs about 7 stone. She has a charming English rose tattoo on her upper left arm. Her hair auburn with blonde streaks. There are two pints of Old Rosie on the bar.

Tracy lifts the first pint and puts the glass to her lips. The pint of Old Rosie vanishes in less than 5 seconds.

She is still standing. A hush descends on the bar.

Then (Oh Mother of God!) she lifts the second pint of Old Rosie.

It vanishes. Tracy smacks her lips and saunters off into the night (in a straight line)

I think even Boudicca herself (Warrior Queen of the Iceni) would have quaked at such a feat.

Believe me. As long as we have girls like Tracy, England is safe.