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11th September 2013: The world's gone mad and I'm the only one who knows
13th August 2013: Black is white. Fact. End of.
11th August 2013: Electric cars, not as green as they're painted?
18th June 2013: Wrinklies unite, you have nothing to lose but your walking frames!
17th May 2013: Some actual FACTS about climate change (for a change) from actual scientists ...
10th May 2013: An article about that poison gas, carbon dioxide, and other scientific facts (not) ...
10th May 2013: We need to see past the sex and look at the crimes: is justice being served?
8th May 2013: So, who would you trust to treat your haemorrhoids, Theresa May?
8th May 2013: Why should citizens in the 21st Century fear the law so much?
30th April 2013: What the GOS says today, the rest of the world realises tomorrow ...
30th April 2013: You couldn't make it up, could you? Luckily you don't need to ...
29th April 2013: a vote for NONE OF THE ABOVE, because THE ABOVE are crap ...
28th April 2013: what goes around, comes around?
19th April 2013: everyone's a victim these days ...
10th April 2013: Thatcher is dead; long live Thatcher!
8th April 2013: Poor people are such a nuisance. Just give them loads of money and they'll go away ...
26th March 2013: Censorship is alive and well and coming for you ...
25th March 2013: Just do your job properly, is that too much to ask?
25th March 2013: So, what do you think caused your heterosexuality?
20th March 2013: Feminists - puritans, hypocrites or just plain stupid?
18th March 2013: How Nazi Germany paved the way for modern governance?
13th March 2013: Time we all grew up and lived in the real world ...
12th March 2013: Hindenburg crash mystery solved? - don't you believe it!
6th March 2013: Is this the real GOS?
5th March 2013: All that's wrong with taxes
25th February 2013: The self-seeking MP who is trying to bring Britain down ...
24th February 2013: Why can't newspapers just tell the truth?
22nd February 2013: Trial by jury - a radical proposal
13th February 2013: A little verse for two very old people ...
6th February 2013: It's not us after all, it's worms
6th February 2013: Now here's a powerful argument FOR gay marriage ...
4th February 2013: There's no such thing as equality because we're not all the same ...
28th January 2013: Global Warming isn't over - IT'S HIDING!
25th January 2013: Global Warmers: mad, bad and dangerous to know ...
25th January 2013: Bullying ego-trippers, not animal lovers ...
19th January 2013: We STILL haven't got our heads straight about gays ...
16th January 2013: Bullying ego-trippers, not animal lovers ...
11th January 2013: What it's like being English ...
7th January 2013: Bleat, bleat, if it saves the life of just one child ...
7th January 2013: How best to put it? 'Up yours, Argentina'?
7th January 2013: Chucking even more of other people's money around ...
6th January 2013: Chucking other people's money around ...
30th December 2012: The BBC is just crap, basically ...
30th December 2012: We mourn the passing of a genuine Grumpy Old Sod ...
30th December 2012: How an official body sets out to ruin Christmas ...
16th December 2012: Why should we pardon Alan Turing when he did nothing wrong?
15th December 2012: When will social workers face up to their REAL responsibility?
15th December 2012: Unfair trading by a firm in Bognor Regis ...
14th December 2012: Now the company that sells your data is pretending to act as watchdog ...
7th December 2012: There's a war between cars and bikes, apparently, and  most of us never noticed!
26th November 2012: The bottom line - social workers are just plain stupid ...
20th November 2012: So, David Eyke was right all along, then?
15th November 2012: MPs don't mind dishing it out, but when it's them in the firing line ...
14th November 2012: The BBC has a policy, it seems, about which truths it wants to tell ...
12th November 2012: Big Brother, coming to a school near you ...
9th November 2012: Yet another celebrity who thinks, like Jimmy Saville, that he can behave just as he likes because he's famous ...
5th November 2012: Whose roads are they, anyway? After all, we paid for them ...
7th May 2012: How politicians could end droughts at a stroke if they chose ...
6th May 2012: The BBC, still determined to keep us in a fog of ignorance ...
2nd May 2012: A sense of proportion lacking?
24th April 2012: Told you so, told you so, told you so ...
15th April 2012: Aah, sweet ickle polar bears in danger, aah ...
15th April 2012: An open letter to Anglian Water ...
30th March 2012: Now they want to cure us if we don't believe their lies ...
28th February 2012: Just how useful is a degree? Not very.
27th February 2012: ... so many ways to die ...
15th February 2012: DO go to Jamaica because you definitely WON'T get murdered with a machete. Ms Fox says so ...
31st January 2012: We don't make anything any more
27th January 2012: There's always a word for it, they say, and if there isn't we'll invent one
26th January 2012: Literary criticism on GOS? How posh!
12th December 2011: Plain speaking by a scientist about the global warming fraud
9th December 2011: Who trusts scientists? Apart from the BBC, of course?
7th December 2011: All in all, not a good week for British justice ...
9th November 2011: Well what d'you know, the law really IS a bit of an ass ...

 

 
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"We deserve what we tolerate" - Mike Rothenberg


 
It's difficult to see how any society could manage without a tax system of some sort. There will always be public services to pay for, and the apparatus of government. Few of us would object to paying for roads, hospitals, schools and the like. However, in Great Britain as in many other countries round the world, it might be said that things have got a little out of hand.
 
There is nothing we do in this life that isn't taxed, often many times over. Let's see ….. a simple trip to the supermarket, for instance ….
 
• ... you travel there by car. You paid tax when you bought it, you pay tax to use the road, you pay a tax element when you insure it, and you pay a massive tax on every litre of petrol it uses ...
• ... while you shop you are taxed directly on each item you buy, through the VAT added to the price. But you also have to bear the cost of layer upon hidden layer of tax, on the wages of the people who made the product, on the diesel fuel for the lorry that brought it to the shop and so on - it's all passed on to you ...
• ... and when you go home to your heavily council-taxed house, unpack the shopping and settle into an armchair to relax, don't forget as you turn on the television that you've paid tax on that as well, not just when you bought it but in your Television Licence.
 
If all this seems a bit much, I suggest you soldier on anyway, because the alternative - giving up and dying - is even more expensive. If your house is worth more than about £260,000 - as many are these days - your estate may be liable for Death Duties when you snuff it, and if you were prudent enough to put some savings aside too, well, it's only fair that the government should take its slice. This was a tax brought in deliberately to hit the wealthy, and as inflation has brought us all closer and closer to being semi-demi-millionaires or even semi-millionaires, no government has thought to adjust the threshold to stop it hitting ordinary folks like us. Funny thing, that.
 
And as for the tax forms they want us to fill in …..
 
And it's now an offence not to have kept written records. What's that all about? Why should we keep written records, if we have an ordinary salaried or waged job? If one were running a multinational business I could understand it, but teachers? ... office workers? ... nurses? ... vicars, for God's sake? Our employers tell the taxman how much we earn. Why the hell should we do their jobs for them?
 
Any sensible person would assume that the logical thing was one single, simple tax - an income tax, presumably. The rate would be high, of course, because it would have to collect all the revenue needed in one go. But at least we'd understand it.
 
Wait a minute, though ….. how would that work? A system where every citizen understood his tax? Where any Tom, Dick or Harry could tell instantly if he'd been ripped off by the taxman? A system that was simple, clear and transparently honest?
 
No, it'd never work.
 

 
We're not alone. Have a look at Tax Payers' Alliance and FuelProtest.
 

 

 

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