Yesterday, TLW & I joined a couple of dozen thousand people and had a little walk to a park, in aid of a very good cause. That cause being trying to stop the closure of a local, and pretty decent, hospital to prop up the finances of another almost local, and thoroughly shite, hospital.

My reasons for supporting this are simple:

1. I would trust the local hospital with my life and the lives of those near and dear to me, based upon what I’ve seen of them and what I’ve hear about them. I would trust the other hospital with neither, and would happily sit bleeding on a train for half an hour to get to another hospital just to avoid a ten minute trip to the A&E there.
2. The reason that this closure is being considered is that the almost-local hospital needs more business thrown at it to fund the PFI contract that built it – but that’s already been tried, three years ago, and it evidently didn’t work.

However, a great many other people who were there annoyed me to the point that I almost changed my mind. Amongst them the local Unison convener (apparently you can never trust a tory with the NHS, never mind that it was Labour who (a) bankrupted the country, (b) thought up this particular gem of a PFI contract and (c) already tried rearranging the local hospitals to fund said PFI, failing absolutely); the head of the FBU (who really wants us to go back to the heady days of the 1980s and solidarity thatcher bastards bullshit) and the local Labour MP (failed to mention anything about why this particular bunch of bankruptcy happened).

But my particular favorite wasn’t one of the main speakers, like those mentioned above. No, it was a charming gentleman who had set up a PA on his bike, and was saying that there was a better way that we all could live without these tory cunts, and that it was being shown to work in Venezuela! Yay, we can Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! just like they do with the dear Mr Chavez. I had a read through their newspaper, and was shocked to find that apparently the murder of a prison officer in Norn Iron recently was to be applauded as he was clearly a nasty imperialist; how the situation in Syria is clearly another British imperialist plot; how the progressive immigration policy of Cuba was going to destroy the United States. Oh, and how it is a shame that housing projects begun under the previous and benevolent Gaddafi-led government in Libya are not yet finished…

I’ll be honest, it’s even worse tripe than was to be found in the Socialist Worker Student Society back in the day, and that’s saying something.

It’s a shame – this hospital campaign is a sensible one. And of the 15 – 25,000 people who were there on Saturday, there’s probably only a few dozen who think like this. But by fuck, they were among the loudest there, and people were listening.

(Anyway – ignore the twats: Save Lewisham A&E.)

That Jimmy Carr fella, ain’t he a prize chump? When faced with the public finding out that he was doing something perfectly legal to keep his hands on his money, he did something silly.

He pretended that he’d done something wrong.

What he should have said is this: what kind of an idiot pays more tax than they need to? Seriously, why would you? Why would you not minimise the amount of your money that is taken by force by the state?

We all do it to some extent; we put money in pensions rather than in bank accounts because it’s tax deductible. We buy stuff at duty free when we can. We take advantage of VAT changes where possible. ISAs exist because the state realises that many people won’t save unless the state lets them off paying tax to do so. We put in claims for tax deductions on uniforms and the like.

We all do what little we can to stop our money being taken from us. Are we so hypocritical that it’s suddenly different when someone only pays tax on £100,000; i.e., he only contributes dozens of thousands of pounds?

The answer is, of course, that we are hypocritical. We are holding double standards; these people aren’t doing anything more than we would do if we could, it’s just that they have the money to do it better.

Obviously, hypocrisy is another reason that Carr is in trouble, what with him professing to be a standard big-state lefty. But I’ve known that about him for a while…

A good many years ago, through a fairly random set of circumstances, I was in the strange position of being able to overhear the Pope conversing with a group of Cardinals. Not in a private way or anything, but in a forum where they got to share their thoughts and he got to nod knowingly. Most of the speakers were in foreign, of course, and my understanding was poor. However one spoke in English; and in my opinion he spoke out of his ass. The world must be set to rights, the rich are blighters, the sentiment was straight out of the rampant SWP playbook. It was not, to my mind, the area of focus that a leading churchman should have been concerned about at that time, nor did it strike me as being particularly wise.

In entirely unrelated news, some NIrish dude who lives in Scotland has come out with similar nonsense.

In a BBC Scotland interview, he [Cardinal Keith O’Brien] said: “My message to David Cameron, as the head of our government, is to seriously think again about this Robin Hood tax, the tax to help the poor by taking a little bit from the rich.

“The poor have suffered tremendously from the financial disasters of recent years and nothing, really, has been done by the very rich people to help them.

He is, of course, absolutely right. Honest. He’s not talking out of his ass; he’s not talking about class warfare and outright theft; he’s not ignoring the simple facts about the sheer amount of money that the rich pay in tax; he’s not parroting the standard line about the rich not pulling their weight while ignoring the Robin Hood taxes which already exist (high stamp duty – paid exclusively by the rich; death duties which only the rich pay; the 45% tax rate which is added to by NI to take real tax rates over 56%).

Oh wait, he is doing all those things. Which, I suppose, means he must be wrong…

I’m being entertained somewhat by the fun and games going on at Saint Paul’s in the last few weeks. It’s a pointless protest, sitting on land near the stock exchange and protesting against capitalism. Capitalism, of course, is not what cause the recent crises, nor is it what the people protesting think it is. Capitalism is probably the only thing that will get us out of the shite we’re in, but don’t let’s let that get in the way of a nice camping expedition.

Happily, it’s not just the protesters who miss the point of things. For example, the BBC has this to say: In an address Dr Chartres told protesters, who fear forcible removal, he shared many of their concerns on corporate greed.

Dear Dr Chartres: the protesters do not ‘fear’ forcible removal. They practically pray for it; their protest is totally pointless without being forcibly evicted. If they give up in a while and drift away¹ then they’ll be forgotten in a fortnight; if they are dragged away kicking and screaming by the grownups then they can pretend that their message is so important that The Man must beat them to stop them. As opposed to the truth: they’re messy and noisy and don’t have much to say, and they’re getting in the way of the city.

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¹ – in a permanent way, not just going home for the evening.

I don’t like politicians, I don’t like taxation, I don’t like spending more money than I need to.

Hence, I don’t like Budgets. Because they almost always leave most people worse off than they were before it. And worse than that, they pretend otherwise.

Such was the case yesterday, wherein TLW & I discovered that we’re going to be worse off by a couple of hundred quid. Which is vexing.

That said, there are two things that give me a little cheer from yesterday’s budget: scrapping the fuel escalator (which has always struck me as unbelievably blatant theft) and starting the ball rolling on joining NI and income tax – it’s long past time when NI was anything other than another income tax going straight to the pool of general taxation. Not giving thieving bastard lying politicians¹ the opportunity to raise the NI rate while claiming not to be increasing tax is clearly an improvement.

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¹ – Some redundancy in the previous four words, obviously. And if you can think of a better example of a thieving bastard lying politician in this regard than Gordon Brown, you’re a smarter person than I.