Though Cowards Flinch

If it weren’t for the fact that these people are actually MPs and wield considerable and increasing influence over government’s apocalyptic social and economic policy, their absurd ravings would be entertaining.  As it is, it is genuinely disturbing that these people are MPs.

I refer, of course, to the first four MPs of the eight we are promised by Conservative Home, giving us their ‘insights’ into how to ‘turbo-charge’ economic growth. 

 We have already dealt with two of them.

The first, the Honourable Moron for Dover, managed to get the very first sentence of the introductory article wrong.  He claimed that the UK was in ‘bleak recession’ when the Tories came into power.  In fact the UK was in the third quarter of recovery, and the 1.1% growth in that quarter has outstripped by at least 0.5% growth in any quarter under the Tories.

The second is the Honourable Numptie for West Worcestershire.  She managed to spend the whole of an article supposedly about economic growth focusing on how best to impoverish people.  She praised the US soup kitchen model welfare, and said that teenage parents should be punished for the attitudes she acknowledged they don’t actually have. 

So who’s next up?

It’s the Honourable Thicko for Staffordshire Moorlands.   She reckons the best way to get growth going is to cut that 50% tax rate. 

Her ‘growing evidence’ for this radical policy? It’s an article in Moneyweek magazine, which she clearly hasn’t noticed is sourced from a Channel 4 news item. which revealed that around 84 more UK bankers were living in Switzerland in 2010 than in 2009.  She reckons this will cost us £53m in lost tax revenue.

Would it be too shooting-fish-in-a-barrel to point out that 84 is not a very big percentage of people in the UK who earn money enough to pay the 50% rate? 

There are roughly 300, 000 such earners in the UK, and 300,000 is quite a lot more than 83.  The increased tax rate on this 300,000 aims to raise around £2.5bn a year in extra tax.  Even with the range of tax avoidance possibilities available, that will be still quite a lot more than £53m.  Up to 50 times as much.   

Unless perhaps she thinks all 300,000 people on the rate will go to Switzerland.  After all, that may be where she skis, and it is very nice.

And finally, (for now, there are still four more to come), there’s Chris Heaton-Harris, the Honourable Prat for Daventry.

He doesn’t like regulation.  Especially EU regulation.  Especially things to do with workers’ rights.  His main source of evidence is the not-entirely-unbiased Open Europe:

Based on over 2,300 of the government’s own impact assessments, an Open Europe study (2010) found that regulation has cost the UK economy £176 billion since 1998, a sum roughly equivalent to the UK’s entire budget deficit.

It looks like Chris H-H may have got as far as the press release on this report. Otherwise he might have seen that this is a study of benefits/costs, not just costs:

We estimate the benefit/cost ratio of the regulations we studied at 1.58. In other words, for every £1 of cost introduced by a regulation since 1998, it has delivered £1.58 of benefits (page 1).

In fact Open Europe’s benefit/cost calculations differ from BIS’s, who give a 1.85: 1 ratio.  But let’s not quibble. Even they acknowledge that regulation, whether EU or domestic, has a net benefit. 

Chris H-H’s method is like me arguing that it costs me £500 a year in transport costs to go to work, without any consideration of the fact I earn money when I get there?   My 9 year old son has been studying the concept of ratios in Key Stage 2 numeracy, and gets it, but H-H is still clearly struggling with the whole thing.

And these people are in charge of the coming apocalypse…..