Grombles

I'm still fuming about our local council deciding to close a gap a couple of years ago in the central reservation of the A3 (a dual carriageway) which linked my village Thursley to Milford. This handy cut across the opposing direction of the main road enabled the residents of my village of Thursley (and beyond) to reach our local shops, schools, doctors surgeries and train station without having to travel several miles further North on the A3 as can be seen on the map below, and then doubling back - negotiating several busy roundabouts and traffic light junctions in the process. Google Maps has not been updated around here for nearly 10 years, so this image usefully shows the filter lane and the gap in the central reservation as it used to be (remember we Brits drive on the left, so the top carriageway is travelling from bottom left to top right). Today the slip lane and gap in the central reservation has gone. The filter lane is now part of a widened and continuous central res...

It keeps rearing its head. Tax the rich! Make them pay their 'fair share'. It's the rich that got us into this mess. And all those other 'make them pay' soundbites designed to grab votes from our ever more squeezed population. The net effect is that wealthy people are pouring money into the Conservative party to help them fight off the scary wealth taxing parties. But all wealthy people aren't the same. What's important is not what they have, but what they spend their money on. And what the UK badly needs is for the people who know how to create jobs and wealth, to do more of it. I've written previously about why mansion or wealth taxes are both impractical and counter-productive in terms of helping the economy to recover. They are also unlikely to reap vast rewards for the treasury, but popular soundbites put left-wing parties into power. It's not about whether it actually makes money for the country, it's about whether it's popular and s...

I can't believe I decided to sponsor a political party - and particularly one that seems hell-bent on self-destruction. But I'm filled with terror that the Labour shower will get in again, no doubt assisted by their hard-left Liberal chums. Blair/Brown didn't scare me as much. They got the unions to put up and shut up by getting the enterprise/worker balance about right. Miliband/Balls/Clegg probably also understand enterprise has to come before labour (small l), but they need votes from people with short memories. And those people, who need little reminder their wealth is declining day by day, are being goaded by journalists who are relentlessly forcing us to believe that making money ('cos they don't and can't perhaps) is bad. Fat Cats, bonuses, evil millionaires sunning themselves in the Caribbean while wage-slaves work themselves to the bone to line their pockets.... And what about our growing fear of immigrants 'taking our jobs' while costly dole qu...

Billions of our taxpayer pounds have been spent on totally useless form filling websites. I am typing this post while waiting for the twentieth time (yes I really mean 20th) for the damn gov website not to time me out. Again. They need an up-to-date photo of me on my drivers license. Fair enough. Years of having to complete endless forms for everything imaginable have savaged the way I look, amongst a myriad other grombles of course. In fact should I ever manage to complete this particular process, I will have aged several more years than the photo I am trying to upload. So it's instantly going to be out of date. But that's not why I'm grombling. What really gets my goat is the dreadful state of our central IT. Why on earth doesn't the government sack every bastard in Cardiff and all the other agencies employing millions of bean-counters, form-stampers and useless IT consultants, and give the whole bloody mess to Google to sort out? They already know far more about each...

I've blogged before about this, but now Sir Howard Davis (appointed to oversee government analysis and recommendation)  is about to read my blog, I thought I'd better bring it up to date. So in case you missed it, here's the earlier post . My plan is simple. It can be actioned immediately (not in 20 years after countless enquiries and consultations). It needn't cost anything. And at a stroke it instantly starts boosting our sorely needed export drive. Why is this so urgent? Because the people we want to export to can't get here by direct flights (but they can get to most of our competitors in Frankfurt, Paris, Amsterdam and New York). And we can't quickly and cheaply get to them. Do you remember the brilliant British Airways ad where a British businessman is talking by phone to a prospect in New York who is flicking through a document and making positive noises. The call ends and the Brit excitedly announces to the team clustered around him "he liked ...

I'm typing this on a train between Guildford (the wealthiest city in the UK) and London, 35 miles away. Mobile signals (forget 3G) drop out between 10 and 15 times during this popular 45 minute journey through mostly built-up areas. And when I am connected, I'm hanging onto 1 bar (did you know that means 1 bar for reception, not transmission). Where I live, in SW Surrey, we rarely get a mobile signal at all. So much for the UK being in the vanguard of technology. We're in the dark ages compared to most developed countries, and many more far less economically successful. Why? Get used to it (notice the bars mean nothing) There are four major mobile networks competing for our money in the UK (now that Orange and T-Mobile have combined). In 2000 the British government had a wheeze. 'Lets have an auction for the mobile 3G bandwidth'. So every company who wanted to provide a 3G service tried to outbid each other for a slice, and ended up paying billions of pound...

No wonder we're all in the shit. How I hate bloody form filling, especially when there's clearly no point in the activity whatsoever. Wastes my time, wastes paper (assuming it's not yet interneted), and even more off-pissingly, keeps some civil service twat in a job, paid me, that could be done by a waste paper bin or NEEDN'T BE DONE AT ALL. This morning I received a letter from the Specialist Personal Tax Employee Shares & Securities Unit. My company takes advantage of an HMRC employee share option scheme that basically encourages business owners to share any gains in the value of their companies with their management. Excellent idea which has enabled me to share in the good fortunes of previous companies with several of the people who helped me build them. What works for them, works for me. So far, so good. I originally filled out the necessary forms to advise HMRC about the scheme I had set up for a company I own. I told them who was registered on the scheme,...

We can easily and very quickly solve our capacity problems at Gatwick and Heathrow in order to boost our economy. But it needs government intervention and imagination. We don't have enough runways for jumbos or immigration processing hubs to make it easy for the people we need to attract to do business here. For example, the UK has no direct flights to and from China's largest city, Guangzhou and its 40m people, let alone all the other places hoping to do business with us. Amsterdam, Frankfurt and Paris all have many direct flights there for the Chinese to choose from. I expect the same situation exists for most other fast growing cities in India, Vietnam, South Korea etc. The UK is stuck in the past with respect to where we make it easy to travel to and from - and look where this got Greece, Spain and Portugal (once great trading nations). If we are serious about encouraging trading relationships with the world's richest nation (China now has over $3 trillion in reserv...

and the latest news is that the police have just released some of the details about the fatality that stimulated all this wasted expense. The accident apparently happened at night, in high winds and in a snow storm! It could have bloody well have happened anywhere. So the council effectively lied to us by claiming this massive inconvenience to all residents of Thursley was necessary in the interests of safety. The journey we all now have to take to reach our nearest doctor surgeries, schools and shops is 4 miles longer, includes several roundabouts (including a busy and dangerous leap into the flow of traffic heading from the A281 North onto the A3), a few traffic lights and all that extra traffic - all because the council needed to spend their full road works budget before year end.

I live in a small village off the A3 in Surrey UK which is a dual carriageway that runs from London to the South coast. About 300 yards North of the slip-road from our village is a lane in the wide central reservation (what Americans call a ramp) enabling you to slow down and wait for a gap to turn right across the opposite carriageways into a side road. That side road leads to our neighbour village and local train station. The only other way to reach that village (together with a couple of local schools, 3 doctors surgeries, post office, pubs, shops etc) is by heading several miles further North past the village, then take a slip road off the A3 up to a very busy roundabout (which cars join very fast from the right, meaning you take your chances leaping onto it), over a bridge crossing the A3 to another roundabout, down to 2 traffic lights (slow ones at that) and then back to where you would have been at least 10 minutes earlier if you'd taken the shortcut. Some total twat on th...