meritocracy

2459 days ago

My sympathy for the Grenfell Tower victims ebbs fast - demands are not rights

Of course it was an appalling tragedy. Of course ones heart goes out to those who died and to those who were injured and to those who grieve after the Grenfell Tower fire. But four weeks on the demands of the survivors grow louder and they are in many cases just plain unreasonable. Anyone who dissents from their demands for justice (on their terms), free unicorns and whatever else is their "right" is flamed as an uncaring, heartless bastard. At the risk of being viewed thus...

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2705 days ago

The Four Words that Made Me the Most hated man in the room

This was the strap on an article posted on LinkedIn. aka facebook for really boring adults. It is a great headline which arouses interest but I really doubt that "I'm an emergency surgeon" was quite the answer you were thinking of as you hit the link. I am sure you could do better. For instance, when with the mad public sector working bunch of lefties who are the friends of my Mrs, I could come up with:

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2914 days ago

Panama Papers: Tory Fat Cat Dominic Grieve: "save the banksters in offshore tax havens"

I am not sure that this shows how "in touch" Mr David Cameron's Tories are with the zeitgeist but his former Attorney General Dominic Grieve MP does not want a hasty reaction to the Panama Papers because he thinks we must protect the, now threatened, species that is the offshore bankster. 

Like many on the right, I find the idea that multi millionaires, like David Cameron's late father can pay sod all tax becuase they use offshore shell companies while folks like you and I pay the full whack a bit distasteful. It is sordid and patently unfair that "taxes are for little people". Conservatism should be about meritocracy and opportunity for all not just helping a small financial elite get even richer.

Of course one way to get the small super rich spivs back onshore is to lower UK tax rates and I am a big supporter of that.

But equally it does seem just wrong that crown colonies are allowing the uber rich to pay sweet FA and -as the Panama Papers make clear - to allow other rich folk to engage in money laundering. The former is distatsteful, the latter illegal.

Could we clamp down on what goes on in crown colonies like the BVI, Jersey and the Isle of Man? Yes we could. We could, for instance

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3543 days ago

The Greek Hovel…a Monument to Right Thinking Folk

I am pondering what to name the Greek Hovel. It really does not matter as all post in Kambos is left at the garage for us to collect, but I was pondering putting up a name board in Greek “Write Minds” – it’s a pun geddit?

Lovely Susan Shimmin from The Real Mani is not perfect. She is, I fear, a bit of a deluded lefty like The Mrs and has already twigged that I see the world in a rather different way to her. And so she was delighted to reveal to me that The Hovel, although more than a century old, was – according to our sales contract largely burned down in the 1940s during the Greek Civil war.

It seems that the inhabitants of The Hovel at the time were Royalists

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