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Tag Archives: Jeffrey Archer

Monster of 2012 starts the New Year as he means to go on

01 Tuesday Jan 2013

Posted by Mike Sivier in Benefits, Conservative Party, People, Politics, tax credits, UK

≈ 15 Comments

Tags

benefit, benefits, Conservative, Department for Work and Pensions, dunchurch, DWP, education, government, Iain Duncan Smith, Jeffrey Archer, Mike Sivier, mikesivier, people, perugia, politics, stranieri, tax credit, Tories, Tory, university, Vox Political, welfare


bewareIDSI see that Iain Duncan Smith is unrepentantly continuing his war against sanity.

(Yes, we can all see that it is those who receive welfare benefits that feel the pain, but it is the Secretary of State’s own lack of mental health that we’re witnessing whenever he makes a statement).

Yesterday he was banging the drum against the previous Labour government’s tax credit system. I should remind you, for the sake of clarity, that I don’t disagree with claims that tax credits were not a great way forward. The solution is for employers to pay employees enough money that they don’t need to claim social security benefits or tax credits. The principle is simple: If you’re in a job, you shouldn’t need benefits.

Insanity Dementia Smith has a different point of view. Well he would, wouldn’t he? He’s mad.

Instead, he claimed that the tax credit system, introduced in 2003, was wide open to abuse, with fraud and error costing more than £10 billion. Oh, and just for good measure, he threw in some good old-fashioned Tory xenophobia by claiming that fraudsters around the world targeted the benefit for their own personal gain.

“Tax credit payments rose by some 58 per cent ahead of the 2005 general election, and in the two years prior to the 2010 election, spending increased by about 20 per cent,” he said in a Telegraph article.

“Between 2003 and 2010, Labour spent a staggering £171 billion on tax credits, contributing to a 60 per cent rise in the welfare bill. Far too much of that money was wasted, with fraud and error under Labour costing over £10 billion.

“It will come as no surprise therefore that fraudsters from around the world targeted this benefit for personal gain. ”

Enter Channel 4’s FactCheck, whose representatives asked HM Revenue and Customs to provide the figures that support these claims. They could not.

Instead, we are told, in 2003-04, £16.4bn was paid, and the following year – the one that included the general election to which Mr Duncan Smith refers – £17.7bn. That’s an increase of 8 per cent, not 58.

The total spent on tax credits between 2003 and 2010 – under Labour – was £147bn, not £171bn.

During that time, £11.16bn was lost through fraud and error, with only 1.27bn of that down to fraud – 0.7 per cent of the total.

Regarding error, as a former tax credit recipient, I can report that HMRC was diligent to the point of harassment when it came to identifying errors and recovering the sums involved. This created considerable problems for me – and many others, I’m sure – as I received notification several times, during my claim period, that I had received large amounts in error. I could not understand this. I had filled the forms to the best of my ability. My only conclusion was that the system was complicated and its administrators had been looking for an excuse to take back money.

The result was that I had to become extremely adept, myself, at using the system. I then used it against the administrators to point out errors that they had made, and won back something like £2,000 from them. For a person living on his partner’s DLA and IB, and his own Carer’s Allowance, that’s a huge amount to have had taken away.

I wonder whether Mr Scream-at-the-moon includes money that had to be paid back after correct appeals in his calculation of error. If so, he’s wrong again because that cash was owed to the claimants (as it was to me).

The claim that fraudsters around the world targeted tax credits is completely unsubstantiated as the system does not record the nationalities of claimants.

However: Everyone claiming Working Tax Credits must have a UK National Insurance number. Everyone claiming Child Tax Credits must be able to show they are on Child Benefit, for which they must produce a birth certificate for each child, thereby proving they were born in the UK. So it seems that, while the system may not record the nationalities of claimants, those facts do, in fact, play a part in determining each claim.

Mr Smith remains a disgrace to the government. What a shame David Cameron is such a weak leader that he can’t even summon up the guts to throw him out.

STOP PRESS: What’s this, in a BBC Newsnight press release that’s just appeared on my screen?

“Aspects of Iain Duncan Smith’s CV, relating to his education, are inaccurate and misleading, an investigation by BBC Newsnight reveals.“

Do we have another Jeffrey Archer on our hands?

The investigation into the Conservative Party leader’s education and early career – broadcast at 10.30pm on BBC TWO (Wednesday 18 December 2002) – was presented by Michael Crick, author of the best-selling biography of Jeffrey Archer. It seems we do.

It seems he didn’t go to the Universita di Perugia in Italy, founded by the Pope in 1308, but to the Universita per Stranieri (University for Foreigners) which was founded in 1921 and did not grant degrees when he studied there in 1973. IDS did not get any qualifications there or even finish his exams.

He wasn’t educated at Dunchurch College of Management either. This was the former staff college for GEC Marconi, for whom he worked in the 1980s. IDS completed six separate courses lasting a few days each, adding up to about a month in total. He quite clearly was not there for a sustained period of time and never earned a recognised qualification there.

Who’s the fraud now, Iain?

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Something for the weekend?

13 Friday Jan 2012

Posted by Mike Sivier in Comedy, People, Politics

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Budleigh Salterton, Church of Scotland, comedy, double entendres, Duke of Wellington, Exmouth, Headline of the Week, humour, Jeffrey Archer, Mike Sivier, mikesivier, news clippings, News Quiz, Round the Horne, Rutland Archers, St Boswell's, UK Press Gazette, Welsh Assembly


“Monday: For sale – RD Jones has a sewing machine for sale. Phone after 7pm and ask for Mrs Kelly, who lives with him cheap.”

I was brought up on double-entendres – jokes, either intentional or otherwise, that employ double meanings that are usually orientated towards the filthy to get a laugh. The radio and TV comedies that brightened my gloomy 1970s and early 80s childhood were full of them, especially shows like ‘Round the Horne’

“Tuesday: Notice – we regret having erred in RD Jones’ ad yesterday. It should have read: ‘One sewing machine for sale, cheap. Phone and ask for Mrs Jones, who lives with him after 7pm’.”

It should come as no surprise, therefore, that this love of wordplay followed me into my working life when I embarked on a career as a journalist, reaching its zenith when I became a newspaper editor. An early headline hit was with a story about a soldier who was arrested after police found him using a statue of the Duke of Wellington as a urinal. The headline: ‘Soldier’s aim was no relief for Wellington’.

“Wednesday: RD Jones has informed us he has received several annoying calls because of an error we made in his classified ad yesterday. His ad stands corrected as follows: ‘For sale: RD Jones has one sewing machine for sale, cheap. Phone after 7pm and ask for Mrs Kelly, who loves with him’.”

Later I was to win the then-coveted Headline of the Week award in the UK Press Gazette, and praise as a “genius” from their reporter, when I headlined an article on Welsh Assembly plans to promote the Welsh language with the words ‘Cunning Linguists’.

“Thursday: Notice: I, RD jones, have NO sewing machine for sale. I smashed it. Don’t call my number as the telephone has been disconnected. I have not been carrying on with Mrs Kelly. Until yesterday she was my housekeeper, but she quit.”

With the weekend upon us, after a series of blogs on very heavy subjects, I thought it was time to lighten the mood with a few favourite double-entendre news cuttings, along with some quotes from the BBC’s News Quiz in similar vein (I was listening to old tapes of the show in order to dig out material on Peter Lilley for today’s other blog).

If anyone reading this would like to add clippings that they have found, please feel free to use the ‘Comments’ column for this purpose.

“See the bowmen of Rutland in action next weekend at the Rutland Agricultural Show, and why not have a go yourself? The Rutland Archers are always looking for new members, and are currently targeting disabled people.”

“A friend of Serena’s said David has talked of marriage. She feels she is still rather young, and he does have a long turn to page 3, column 1.”

“St Boswell’s Councillor Edward Bryden has called for action to be taken against dog fouling on a sports pitch at St Boswell’s. Cllr Bryden said, ‘I’ve had a number of complaints from residents about the amount of dog dirt found there. I’ve told them to put their concerns on paper and send them to the district council.'”

From The News Quiz: “There was a story about the Church of Scotland updating its hymnery because a lot of the old hymns are full of ghastly double-entendres which lots of young people find rather risible. Things like ‘O Mighty One, show me the size of your enormousness’. Apparently that is, verbatim, a hymn. There’s another that says, ‘Sweet Lord, I wouldn’t put that in the fridge if I were you’.
“Meanwhile, the Catholic Church is set to instigate a similar scheme after the line ‘Onward with the horn of plenty, father to us all’ provoked mass sniggers in a Galway Church.”

From the News Quiz, 1993: “Jeffrey Archer’s gardener, Richard Ovary, had a sex change. It’s a case of saying goodbye to Dick… and hello to Rachel. The transformation has been welcomed by Lord Archer, who has always claimed that his staff were a cut above the rest. Meanwhile Rachel has given the novelist her support – and the rest of her rugby kit. The Archers are keeping Rachel on to care for their grounds, although tactfully Lady Archer has volunteered to prune the plum tree.”

“At a store in Bristol, an assistant didn’t know which product should be run on which button. Each time she was unsure, she would hold the product in the air and call across the shop floor to the supervisor. There were no problems until a gentleman purchased a packet of Mates (condoms). The packet was held up in the air and the call went out, “What do these go on?” The reply was unprintable.”

“On churchyard tidyness: Would everyone tending graves kindly take away with them all relative rubbish.”

“Budleigh Salterton beach has been branded a health risk in a tough new guide to beaches in the UK. The survey claims that tests carried out on the sea water off Budleigh Salterton beach failed to meet the rigorous standards of cleanliness and water quality required by the European Bathing Water Guidelines’ standards. District Councillor Ray Franklin said: ‘It’s hardly surprising. On the one side we have the Exmouth outfall pipe, and on the other the Exe estuary pipe. Budleigh is simply caught between two stools at the moment.'”

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