Paul's Infrequently Updated Blog

After five days, there is finally a new government in the UK. The Conservatives and Liberal Democrats formed a coalition that they have agreed will last a full five years. The Liberal Democrats will get a referendum on an alternative voting system for elections and David Cameron gets to be Prime Minister. The Liberal Democrats also get five seats in the cabinet and also 20 other ministerial positions in the government. The Conservatives get to enact their agenda of cuts to government services because of the UK’s huge budget deficit.

I doubt that this arrangement is going last the full five years. For one thing, there are too many Conservatives and Liberal Democrats that are unhappy with this arrangement and too many ideological differences. It will be interesting to see how supporters of both parties accept this arrangement. I have a feeling that a lot of people who voted Liberal Democratic will feel let down and angry. Many Liberal Democratic supporters have more in common with Labour than the Tories and may find this arrangement to be unacceptable.

I anticipate that this set up will work for a year or two before it implodes. Gordon Brown has already said that he is resigning the Labour leadership so a new leader may make Labour more popular with Gordon gone.

So we have the result of the UK General Election. As predicted, Labour lost and the Conservatives won the most seats, but not enough for an outright majority. So we have a hung Parliament, the first since the election of February of 1974.

Right now, Gordon Brown is still Prime Minster. I don’t see how he can stay in that position. He clearly lost, could not form a coalition, even with the help of the Liberal Democrats, and is personally unpopular. What will happen is that, in the next few days, there will be negotiations and the most likely outcome will be a Tory-led coalition with the Liberal Democrats. I actually think that this will stink but it looks like this it what will happen.

If you have been following the news, you may have recently heard that an oil rig leased by BP to drill for oil in the Gulf of Mexico exploded on April 20th. The explosion killed eleven workers and, after two days, the rig, Deepwater Horizon, sank in 5000 ft of water.

I do follow the news about BP a little and, to me, this does not come as a great surprise. BP has a long and poor safety record, which includes a refinery explosion down in Texas back in 2005, which killed fifteen workers. From what the media has been saying, the reason for this latest disaster is, once again, due to poor safety.

The consequences for this latest disaster are going to be severe. Oil is leaking from the broken wellhead and it appears no one is quite sure how to stop the leak. It could be months before this is sorted and, in the meantime, crude oil is spilling into the Gulf of Mexico.

This all goes to show that, yet again, a big corporation has put profits before safety and you can be pretty sure that the government has allowed them to get away with lax health and safety. It is sad that many people are now going to suffer for big oil incompetence.

As expected, the hopeless British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, called a General Election for Thursday  May 7th. My prediction is that the opposition Conservative Party will either win a small majority in Parliament or just fall short of an overall majority.

I will be glad if/when the Labour Party lose the election. They have totally run the country into the ground in the last 13 years, but, to be fair, they only continued the work that was started by the dreadful Margret Thatcher back in 1979. For the last 31 years, Britain’s political leaders have done their best to ruin what was once a great country.

So what do I expect from a Conservative government? More of the same. I see the UK continuing to decline economically, socially, and politically and none of the so-called politicians today have what it takes to stop the rot. I expect a low turnout (by British standards) on election day because millions of people think that the political parties are pretty much the same and are not worth the time or effort to to receive their vote or support.

Since I have lived outside the UK for the last fifteen years, I am no longer eligible to vote in UK elections. Even if I could vote I would not bother. None of the politicians have the best interests of the country at heart and, as the expenses scandal clearly showed last year, most of these politicians are nothing more than lying, cheating bastards.

This time of year is tax time here in the USA. What this means is that pretty much everyone who worked and earned money in 2008 has to file a tax return. Not filing a tax return can lead to serious consequences, such as interest on money owed and financial  penalties for not actually filing a return.

I always thought this method of organizing a tax system to be bizarre to say the least. In the UK and Europe, we have a system called PAYE or Pay As You Earn. Under this system the tax authorities look at your salary or wage and calculate to the penny how much to take from your paycheck in taxes. This system works very well and, if there is a problem, it is usually fixed pretty quickly. In the USA, the tax law is so complex that I don’t think anyone understands how it works. There are so many deductions for one thing or another, plus you can ask your employer to take out less money in taxes (you will owe the tax authorities money at the end of the year), or you can choose to have them take out too much (they will owe you each year).

In addition, you have to file both a federal and state tax return. Of course, I have looked at the forms and paperwork and, I have to confess, I have no idea how any of it works. Fortunately for me, Irene can pretty much figure it out, but, if it was left to me, I could not do it. In that situation, our taxes would not be filed because I cannot understand the forms.

As for the forms, each year we get them in the mail and with the accompanying instructions the whole thing is as long as a telephone directory. The whole annual event of filing taxes is just ludicrous and an entire industry has evolved to help people file their taxes. May be that is the reason why the current system exists.