(no subject)

[liadnan]

Ho hum. Was lying in bed this morning vaguely thinking that I ought to leave said bed, and vaguely regretting that I drank quite so much yesterday evening, when the elderly chap in this story was interviewed on the Today programme, shortly before going into court:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/hampshire/dorset/3398541.stm

At which point I said "you what?" and rang my mother as I have known said elderly chap virtually all my life (acquaintance of parents through church etc.)

There is no punchline to this story, I just didn't have anything else to write. Oh, except that the people putting in a Proper Network in our office, at a not particularly small price, were supposed to complete work today but discovered that Something Blatantly Obvious hadn't been done, so they couldn't.

I am going to see the Rocky Horror Show tomorrow evening (film that is) which takes me back about seven years. Can it really be that long since I last saw it?

No, I shall not be dressing up.

This post brought to you by Mindless Wittering Ltd, the service for those suffering from terminal lack of imagination.

There are loads more mini-reviews to do. This is beginning to feel like a chore already.

Comments

[fairymelusine.livejournal.com]

siiiiiiiigh.

oh, the rocky horror picture show. lo, for my lost youth!

I got in Very Big Trouble the first time I saw that. Very Big.

[anarcha.livejournal.com]

Said elderly chap should revolt. It actually worked out pretty well for those of us on the other side of the ocean.

[liadnan]

Can't really see Fred chucking the bins into Southampton docks somehow...

(Am quite surprised at all this as he's frankly always been a tad wet. Having said that, I did learn this morning that he served on the Atlantic Convoys, which is fairly impressive.)

[liadnan]

Big in what sense? Or do I not want to know?

Hmm. I remember the first time I saw it, on tv, with someone I desparately wanted to pull.

[fairymelusine.livejournal.com]

My ladylike demeanor forbids me to go into detail, but the short and polite version is that the very first time I was really kissed was by a fellow I met in line, there in the dark theatre, about 20 minutes into the movie ...

and other stuff. Ahem.

Which is one of the big reasons I'm SO very fond of the cinema to this day ... good memories.

[ailbhe]

On the one hand, I look at my mother's situation and say "what's he complaining about? It's not like he's living in his ancestral home, he could always move somewhere cheaper!" and on the other I can kind of see a point; it *is* a shame that old people would be put to the same inconvenience as unemployed or disabled people pre-pension age.

If my mother moves somewhere cheaper, she will lose her social welfare payments outright, because her house is in Dublin, where it's not possible to sell for less than 190,000 Euro.

[etherealfionna.livejournal.com]

I'm kind of curious about which of his human rights he thinks is being violated.

[liadnan]

I think there are a number of things to bear in mind.
First, council tax bands are set across the country (or at least England: I don't know if this is something Edinburgh, Cardiff, and/or Stormont (hah!) run themselves). That raises a significant problem, vastly increased from the days when it was set up, in that a far wider range of homes in the SE are in the top bands than in, say, Yorkshire. Fred lives in the (rather more suburbanised) village over from my parents: 20 minutes from Winch or Southampton or Portsmouth, and hour from London. So all homes are expensive: the idea of banding homes to give some relation to ability to pay is becoming a dead duck.

Secondly, take my parents, living nearby. Two pensioners living in a large victorian house where they've been for 28 years... They don't want to move, even into a small house nearby because it's been their home for so long, they've put their lives into keeping the house going, the garden etc etc. And it's still somewhere we can all go at Christmas and, usually, Easter. The fact they have a large house, probably saleable at between 300k and 500k has no connection with either ability to pay (because it was cheap in relative terms on the market when they bought it, and houses didn't have such a relative value (£7k!), and the mortgage has been paid off, and they've put their money into the place rather than savings, and large Victorian houses are quite expensive to keep going...) nor does it have any connection with their use of services (there is a big local issue about having to pay for rubbish collection separately, the local council were v. big on recycling, which is a Good Thing but expensive to set up). As it happens my siblings and I think they aought to think about moving because the house is difficult to keep up, but if they are to stay where their friends and their life have been they probably won't even move one tax band down.

Thirdly, the main issue nationally is education. As I see it, the givt. can respectably do one of two things: they can say "right, we're running the schools top to bottom, and central govt will pay" OR they can say "you run the schools, here are some broad standards you have to meet, you do the sums and pay for it". What they appear to be doing is both: we're running it, you find the money.

I don't think land based taxation is a bright idea, in this day and age, and in a country where land ownership is so expensive and widespread. (This was why the Thatcher govt moved towards the poll tax, which was obviously a crap idea, and then when it backfired essentially brought back the rates in a hurry without thinking it through.) Personally I'd go for giving local councils the option of, say, one or two points on income tax basic rate (or whatever it takes, haven't done the maths), or perhaps even on VAT.

[liadnan]

I wondered about that too. I suppose Article 8 (private and family life) And the First Protocol (protection of rights in property) might be said to be engaged as the tax is based on the value of his house but I can't really see it as a runner. People always say their human rights have been infringed.

I note generally that I carefully used the word acquaintance to describe Fred's relationship with my parents...

[etherealfionna.livejournal.com]

I got the impression from the article that he was referring to the fact that they didn't send somebody round to visit him, but that may be because I didn't consider having to pay taxes being against anybody's human rights.

It annoys me when people bandy about talk of human rights abuses, especially since a lot of the time their words are taken at face value and repeated. And I wish the media would actually be harder on some of the rubbish that gets said. *grump*

[liadnan]

On taxes.. the First Protocol Art 1 specifically says that protection of the right to property does not prevent the government from imposing taxes. But you can run it together with Art 17 of the main treaty, and poss Art 6, to argue that tax should be fair. But it would take one hell of an unfair tax to get anywhere on such an argument: tax policy, as opposed to interpretation, is quintessentially a political issue, not a legal one.