Here’s an amendment to the Finance Bill that should be discussed today (but sadly, you can be sure won’t be):
|
Inquiry into a banking transactions tax
|
Another report, this time in the Independent, reveals the real callousness at he core of the ConDem cuts:
Thousands of people will be made homeless as public spending is slashed because of a dangerous combination of higher unemployment, increasing repossessions and cuts to housing benefit, housing experts have warned.
The retired, disabled people, carers and working families will be hardest hit and charities predict it will trigger the steepest rise in families living in unsuitable accommodation and individuals sleeping rough since the 1980s.
Those in London will be the worst affected, forcing an exodus of poorer people from the centre to outer boroughs, and adding to the financial pressures on local authorities, which are obliged to find homes, school places and social care for the newly arrived families.
The homeless charity, Shelter, said that some households in London currently receiving housing benefit will have to find a shortfall of up to £1,548 a month to meet their housing costs. The result, say opposition MPs, will be "social cleansing" of poorer tenants from richer areas.
Campbell Robb, the chief executive of Shelter, said: "The consequences have not been thought through by the Government. If this support is ripped out suddenly from under their feet, it will push many households over the edge, triggering a spiral of debt, eviction and homelessness."
To put it in context, some facts:
There are 4.72 million housing-benefit claimants and 1 million of those receive Local Housing Allowance, the housing benefit for tenants in the private rental sector. In his Budget, the Chancellor imposed caps on housing benefit of £400 a week for a four-bedroom property and £250 a week for a two- bedroom home. Future increases will be linked to retail-price inflation rather than actual rents, which will further erode the value of the benefit.
Since 2000, average rents in London have increased by 65 per cent while the CPI has increased by just 17 per cent. There will also be a 10 per cent cut in housing benefit for those unemployed for more than a year, criticised by the independent Institute for Fiscal Studies as a blunt and "punitive" instrument to encourage people to find work.
The consequence:
Some fear a return to almost Dickensian conditions in London in particular. James Murray, a cabinet member for housing at Islington Council, said: "In Islington we have thousands of families on the waiting list for housing, many living in desperate overcrowding. It is not rare to see seven or eight people in a two-bed flat – with the children often unable to do their homework, unable to have any privacy, and with the whole family suffering under the stress.
And as James Murray said:
"A cap on housing benefit could put a third of Islington’s private-sector tenants who are on housing benefit at risk of eviction," he added. "This will only increase the pressure on social housing, and so more than ever we desperately need more investment in social rented homes. "
The Green New Deal is the only programme to suggest such a policy that I know of.
But instead of investment and enlightened problem solving we have a government intent on creating social division, injustice and poverty – and with every indication that unlike most governments this one will succeed in achieving its goal (bar budget reduction – which is just a cover).
Andrew Lansley will announce a plan to save £1 billion in the NHS today – by cutting what he calls central bureaucracy.
The plan as I understand it is as follows. First, the primary care trusts that currently coordinate GP services will be abolished. Their job will go to GPs – who will coordinate themselves.
Second, strategic health authorities will go.
Third, all hospitals will be encouraged to become not for profit companies.
Fourth, and maybe incidentally, some organisations such as the Food Standards Agency will be abolished – assisting release of an epidemic of obesity.
I have some interest in this issue and should declare an interest: my wife is a part time GP.
So let’s first of all applaud some good news in this. GPs will no longer have differential contracts – some on something called GMS and some on another contract called PMS, that latter paying £10,000 pa more than the former, for no difference in services. That was always illogical.
Second, GPs will not longer be allowed to own pharmacies. That’s very good news indeed. Thee pharmacies have been abused by some GPs for personal gain at cost to the NHS. It is very welcome that this conflict of interest will go. But some practices will be £30,000 a year worse off as a result.
Third, GPs will no longer be able to set up service companies they own to provide minor operations to the NHS, undercutting hospitals, creaming off profit and (I think) sometimes prejudicing patient care on the way. I am very pleased that this change is happening: it always created a conflict of interest in patient care that had to be abolished. But of course many GPs will be worse off as a result.
I’d add, my family is unaffected by these welcome changes. My wife has left practices because of concerns about prescribing and independent treatment centres. She now works in a GMS practice that does neither. There’s no personal gripe on income going here.
That’s the end of the good news. From here on in there is only potential disaster to relate.
First, these cuts are almost bound to mean more than 20,000 job losses. These people will simply add to the register of the unemployed – even if some made redundant get new work others will be deprived it as a consequence. But on this occasion that’s not the biggest deal (amazingly). The big deal is the assault this represent on the NHS – for it is nothing else.
The claim is that GPs will now direct some £80 billion of funds to hospitals through commissioning groups they must set up and manage by next April. let me assure you – GPs are quite unable to fulfil this task. I have met a lot of GPs. I doubt some can run their own personal bank accounts – and the lack of information most have on running their practices is staggering. Nor do they need much: they have fixed income (near enough) that they expend. To suggest that GPs have the skills to manage budgets of the size suggested is ludicrous: they don’t, they don’t have the training to do so, and what is more they don’t have the inclination to do so. That is, after all, why they became GPs. That is not something that happens by accident: it takes years of hard work where conscious decisions to reject easier and much, much less stressful ways to make a living (accountancy, law, the City, public health physician, being a politician) are rejected along the way.
They also have no time to do so. Good GPs (and many are: not all – but many) work very hard. A typical day will include 32 to 36 patient appointments – at over 10 minutes each on average (especially if a woman GP – and more than 50% of GPs are women now – because they tend to see women who need more time). That’s 6 hours of patient contact time. Then there are at least 8 patient phone calls a day – another 40 minutes or more. Plus three visits, taking up to 90 minutes of time. That’s over eight hours before the GP then has to deal with all the correspondence arising from that lot, reviewing results and actioning follow up, dealing with training (of junior doctors, which most GPs do), staff management, practice management, NHS interaction e.g. with the PCT and other parts of the NHS, personal training and reading needed to keep up to date, and even occasionally getting time for sandwich. For a good GP that’s at least an eleven hour day, on average, to then come home and worry most of the night about the patient they did not send in to hospital and they now wish they had done – who they will call in the morning just to make sure “they’re all right” – but which is actually to make sure they’re still alive – and I promise you, they all do this.
Sure they’re well paid. But make no pretence – before 2004 when the contract changed you could not get new GPs for love nor money. Even now a considerable number of new GPs are foreign graduates because it is incredibly hard to get UK medics to manage the enormous uncertainty which is the normal daily fare of the GP.
To suggest that there is time in this day to manage £80 billion of budget is ludicrous. It is not possible. My wife has been asked to be on one of the new commissioning boards. There will, I gather, be six doctors on it. She has been allocated a maximum of 4 hours a month to do this job, if she wants it. So that’s (after holiday allowance) 40 or so hours a year – and just 240 hours for all the GP’s involved. That’s about 1.5 months a year to allocate the budget for a large area. So let’s not pretend this is going to be possible. It isn’t. And if no pay is going to be allocated unsurprisingly GP services will come first. Of course. That’s the bit she can be personally sued for if she gets it wrong.
Anyone with any sense and the time to ask can find this out. I presume Andrew Lansley. He must know this cannot work.
So what’s really happening? I suggest it is this. He is setting up a system that is intended to fail: a system which will result in outsourced contracts to the private sector in two years, which will contract with NHS hospitals that will by then be limited companies and ripe for takeover within another two or three years so that by 2016 those hospitals will be up for sale at knock down prices – “essential to clear the deficit” will be the argument.
And what will happen to NHS services? Broken legs, routine operation and the like will do just fine. The private sector can deal with such certainties, drop them into a spreadsheet and allocate funds to match. But what of the 30% of all people who present to the NHS, even with long term chronic illness, who never get a diagnosis because they fit into no known box – simply because medical knowledge has not yet found one? What for them?
Or the depressed?
And the old (often called the “crumblies” I note by those doctors most keen on the market)?
And the lost and the lonely for whom the GP is the only advocate – but who now cannot advocate for fear of running out of budget?
What of the conflict of interest every GP will face – and be sued for – when the patient claims they were not referred because the GP was seeking to preserve the NHS budget by not doing so – and as such had compromised medical judgement? What then for the risk that GPs face – already enormous and crushing for many? This is the treason for the difference between primary and secondary care as I see it.
I could quietly weep at the injustice of all this – and the callousness of it – and the blatant lies that will claim this is about efficiency when it is about private gain for Lansley’s friends.
But I don’t do quiet weeping. I get angry. And I’m very angry indeed. For the people of the UK, and the fact that yet again public good is going to be captured for private gain. Which sickens me.
It’s pretty frustrating watching Michael Gove announce cuts to the school building programme.
Seven hundred communities will not get the schools they need.
As Andrew Rawnsley in the Observer puts it:
The furore around Michael Gove ought to serve as a caution to his colleagues. It illustrates how easy it is to swagger your machismo as an axeman when you are talking abstract percentages and how hard it is when you have to bring down the blade. It is one thing to type some numbers into a Whitehall spreadsheet and quite another to translate them into real cuts to real services used by real voters.
The turbulence around the education secretary is but a light squall compared to the dark tornadoes of trouble coming over the horizon.
Oh, so true.
But what is worse – none of this is needed. As the Green New Deal has shown now is the time for serious investment – not the time for cuts. Cuts will increase the size of the government deficit. Investment would reduce it.
Yes I know that sounds perverse, but remember first at last one Nobel laureate agrees and second, we’re talking about a country here, not a company or a household. Countries are very different beasts – and basically work the opposite way to companies and households. So if a company sacks someone the cost has gone away. If a country sacks someone the problem is still there, but now it’s not doing anything useful to pay its way. And that makes them more costly than when they ere employed.
Confusing? Maybe. But right, all the same. And that’s why the ConDems are going to be offering trauma for no good reason at all. Unless William Keegan is right when he wrote today confirming another argument I have presented here – which he summarises as follows:
Now, I have never been a believer in the politics of envy, but it seems to me that, from the insouciant way they are going about the cuts, and the savagery of their approach to the public sector, the coalition is in danger of reviving an old-fashioned class war.
I have no doubt: the only explanation for this is class war, but by those with privilege on the rest.
And that makes it particularly sickening.
Paul Krugman’s latest column makes an argument I made here more than a year ago – that cutting government spending by making people redundant can have the effect of producing no savings at all, or even increasing the deficit (here pretty much in full, because it is so important to note that he’s saying this):
There’s a quite good case to be made that austerity in the face of a depressed economy is, literally, a false economy ‚Äî that it actually makes long-run budget problems worse.
People like me have been hesitant to make this argument loudly, for fear of being cast as the left equivalent of Arthur Laffer ‚Äî but the heck with it, I’m going to lay it out.
So here’s the outline. Suppose you slash spending equal to 1 percent of GDP. That looks like a budget saving, right? But if you do it in the face of an economy up against the zero bound, so that the Fed can’t offset the demand effects with lower rates, it’s going to shrink the economy. Let me use a multiplier of 1.4; you can adjust the numbers as you wish.
Now, a weaker economy means less revenue. Assume that every dollar up or down in GDP means $0.25 in revenue, which is conservative. Then the fiscal austerity reduces revenue by 0.35 percent of GDP; the true saving is only 0.65 percent.
Now, the government has to borrow those funds; let’s say the real interest rate is 3 percent (it’s actually much lower now). Then the long run impact of the austerity on the fiscal position is to reduce real interest payments by 0.0195 percent of GDP.
But wait: what if there are long-run negative effects of a deeper slump on the economy? The WSJ piece showed one example: workers driven permanently out of the labor force. There’s also the negative effect of a depressed economy on business investment. There’s the waste of talent because young people have their lifetime careers derailed. And so on. And here’s the thing: if the economy is weaker in the long run, this means less revenue, which offsets any savings from the initial austerity.
How big do these negative effects have to be to turn austerity into a net negative for the budget? Not very big. In my example, the real interest payments saved by a 1 percent of GDP austerity move are less than .02 percent of GDP; if the marginal tax effect of GDP is 0.25, that means that a reduction of future GDP by .08 percent is enough to swamp the alleged fiscal benefits. It’s not at all hard to imagine that happening.
In short, there’s a very good case to be made that austerity now isn’t just a bad idea because of its impact on the economy and the unemployed; it may well fail even at the task of helping the budget balance.
It’s important to realize that I’m not saying that government spending always pays for itself, and that saving money is always counterproductive. These kinds of effects are specific to a liquidity trap situation. But that’s the situation we’re in.
The last point is important: this only works in recession, of course.
But that’s precisely what I said too.
And note why he hasn’t said it before – because of fear of the right. Even Nobel Laureates suffer it.
Well, it’s time we stood up and said enough.
I’m glad Krugman’s with me on that too.
The government is running what I consider a pretty mindless PR gimmick where they are asking the public for ideas on how to save money. The web site is here and you have to register. But if you do please search “lvcr” and then add your voice to those asking for the Channel Islands’ VAT abuse to be stopped.
Thanks.
The last Tory government collapsed, completely discredited by lies, scandal, misinformation and a loss of credibility.
George Osborne’s spectacular mishandling of the so called independent Office for Budget Responsibility is leading them down the same path already. This blog from the FT is just too important not to reproduce in full (so I hope they’ll forgive me):
The Office of Budget Responsibility faces a big credibility test today. Chris Giles, the FT’s economics editor, has an agenda-setting story that raises doubts over its very purpose and independence. It is far more significant than any speculation over Sir Alan Budd’s departure.
Through persistent questioning, Chris uncovered that the OBR tweaked its Budget forecasts at the last-minute to erase around 175,000 public sector job losses by 2014/15.
The political result? David Cameron was able to claim in the Commons that his Budget would cost fewer job losses than if Labour had been in power. Cameron was comparing apples and pears.
The OBR predicted that there would be only 30,000 extra public sector jobs lost over the next four years compared to if Labour was in power – 490,000 against 460,000 – despite the coalition’s much deeper spending cuts. This figure would have been vastly higher if the body hadn’t made these last-minute changes to its modelling.
The reasons for the revisions are even more surprising than the end result. Without telling anyone about the changes, the OBR assumed that George Osborne would:
1) Cut state contributions for public sector pensions (an assumption that pre-empts the conclusions of John Hutton’s pension commission)
2) Put the brakes on promotions in the public sector (even though the chancellor has never announced such a policy)
There are three possible explanations: the independent OBR is taking orders from the chancellor; practising economic telepathy; or inserting random policy into its forecasts.
Meanwhile actual coalition policy announcements that would lower long term growth under the original OBR model — such a limiting net-migration to 1990s levels — were excluded. Hmm.
The scandal is, of course, is that all of this lying (because that is what it is) disguises the fact that this budget was deliberately designed to create mass unemployment.
That’s the scandal.
And who knows who will pay the price for it?
The Appleby Message: Not Digestible
The law firm of Appleby provides offshore legal, fiduciary and administration services. Appleby and its Group Managing Partner, Peter Bubenzer in Bermuda, issued in June 2010 an article entitled“OFCS [Offshore Financial Centers] in the Crosshairs — But Not Alone in Their Struggle to Survive.” Since Appleby operates from many offshore financial centers: Bahrain, Bermuda, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Guernsey, Hong Kong, Isle of Man, Jersey, London, Mauritius, Seychelles and Switzerland, the article merits a reply. Our full reply, prepared by a senior adviser to TJN, can be downloaded here. What follows is a summary.
First, the Appleby article states that “One of the issues raised in more recent onshore discussions has been the absence of tax in the major OFCs. Of course this is not true, as most have, for their small size, relatively sophisticated infrastructures, which are funded by taxes or fees,” such as for example, in Bermuda custom duties and payroll taxes. However, the real issue is that OFCs permit foreign persons to use those financial centers free of tax: free of income taxes and all other taxes. The fact that purely local activities within the OFC might be subject to customs duties and payroll taxes, is really not relevant to the role of OFCs.
Second, the Appleby article states that “The sovereign right of countries to determine their tax system seems to be overlooked in many discussions on OFCs’ own tax structures.” True, countries have the sovereign right to determine their own tax systems. But those tax systems should not encourage nor facilitate residents of other jurisdictions to evade taxes in their country of residence and violate the tax system of their country of resident.
Third, Appleby refers to “tax competition” and argues that“[tax competition] is still alive and well in the onshore world (examples are the differential tax rates among the various States of the United States of America or the different tax rate that people across the European Union).” However, the states in the United States and the countries in the EU provide different tax rates for activities within their respective jurisdictions. The offshore financial centers provide tax free benefits primarily to non-residents and foreign corporations who/which have no real economic activity within the respective jurisdictions, and which in many cases are not permitted to do business locally. Offshore financial centers, all of which are “financial secrecy jurisdictions,” do not merely provide tax competition. Because of the confidentiality those jurisdictions provide, they facilitate and encourage tax evasion/tax fraud.
Fourth, the Appleby article states that “Many OFCs have now been added to the OECD “White List,” each having entered into a considerable number of TIEAs [Tax Information Exchange Agreements] or DTTs [Double Tax Treaties].” However, the OECD requires that a jurisdiction enter into only twelve (12) such agreements in order to be on the White List. Twelve such agreements is hardly “a considerable number.” Further, some low tax/zero tax jurisdictions have entered into such agreements with (1) other low tax/zero tax jurisdictions, or (2) jurisdictions which have hardly any economic activity or personal wealth (such as the Faroe Islands and Greenland, and those insignificant agreements count for OECD purposes, toward the minimum of twelve. Read more here
Fifth, the Appleby article, in discussing automatic exchange of information, states “At present, the only automatic TIEAs that I am aware of consist of arrangements between the USA and Canada, and those partial arrangements that exist under the Savings Directive implemented in the European Union.” This clearly is a misstatement. The Tax Justice Network prepared a memorandum in December 2009, entitled “Memorandum on Automatic Exchange of Information and the United Nations Tax Committee” which indicated that at least some information is exchanged automatically:
(a) Between Mexico and the United States
(b) Between Mexico and Canada
(c) Between Australia and New Zealand
(d) Between the Nordic countries (Denmark, Faroe Islands. Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden), according to their Convention on Mutual Assistance in the Tax Matters
(e) By Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Japan, Korea, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, United Kingdom, pursuant to income tax treaties (See the March 2000 OECD report,Improving Access to Bank Information for Tax Purposes, page 40.)
TJN believes that in the ten years since that report was issued, at least several other countries are exchanging information automatically pursuant to applicable income tax treaties or in other agreements administrative assistance.
Further the United States enacted in March 2010 the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (“FATCA”). When FATCA enters into effect, it will in effect require all foreign financial institutions and other foreign entities which invest in the United States their own funds or their clients’ funds, to provide automatically to the U.S. Government information about U.S. persons with financial accounts at those foreign financial institutions or other foreign entities.
Sixth, the Appleby article states “It should be noted that the major OFCs do not receive financial and or grants from onshore governments or global monetary institutions.” Presumably the author was not referring to major OFCs like London, Luxembourg, Zurich and such-like which rank among the top ten secrecy jurisdictions on TJN’s 2009 Financial Secrecy Index. But for the record we would note that the Cayman Islands, which continues to resist British government requests that it adopts a more sustainable tax regime, including direct and land taxes, has its considerable external debt guaranteed by the U.K. taxpayer, see here.
Seventh, the Appleby article states that the “global economic crisis did not have its origin in the offshore world.” However offshore financial centers contributed to the global financial crisis: special purpose entities and special purpose vehicles in tax free offshore financial centers were treated “off balance sheet” by major financial institutions, and much of the shadow banking activity that underlies the build-up of unknown systemic risks was driven by opportunities to use complex offshore structures for tax and regulatory arbitrage.
Eighth, the Appleby article does admit that the offshore/world has facilitated “crude tax evasion, such as hiding assets by non-declaration or under-reporting to onshore tax authorities.”
Ninth, Appleby states “OFCs view themselves as responsible financial centers providing a base for companies and individuals seeking, with proper advice and disclosure onshsore, to structure their affairs as tax efficiently as the applicable onshore and offshore laws allow. The majority of offshore work in the major OFCs consists of providing services to companies and individuals who are operating in full compliance with their own tax laws, and these OFCs would not want it any other way.”
When a company is organized in an offshore financial center (or other financial secrecy jurisdiction), the local government authorities generally do not know whether the owners of that company “are operating in full compliance” with the laws of the jurisdiction of residence of those owners. Normally the Appleby office in the offshore financial center (or other secrecy jurisdiction) would act only as registered agent of the locally organized company, and therefore that Appleby office would not really know of the activities and the assets of that company.
Also, TJN researched in 2005 the amount of assets held by individuals in jurisdictions outside their country of residence and not declared by them in the country of residence (TJN, “The Price of Offshore”). Tax justice Network’s conservative estimate: US$11.5 trillion, which results in an annual loss of tax revenue for governments of about US$255 billion. TJN believes that the US$11.5 trillion figure has increased substantially since then, resulting from additional undeclared income on such undeclared assets, and substantial additional capital flight.
Tenth, Appleby states that “it has been suggested that the offshore world must move to the automatic exchange of tax information rather than the present treaty-based request system, with its checks and balances too protect the legitimate rights of taxpayers that exist in all civilized countries. In the context of the worldwide system of automatically exchange tax information, where there is a global standard applicable to all, it must be right to expect such rules to apply to OFCs. In the absence of an equal application of such requirement onshore and offshore, requiring it solely for the OFCs would clearly be unfair and discriminatory.”That statement merits two comments: First the “request system,” that is, exchange of information/upon request which is the official OECD promoted policy, is not effective exchange of information. Under the “request system,” in order for a government (“Requesting Government”) to make a valid request for information of another government (“Requested Government”), the Requesting Government in effect must already know substantially all of the information being requested. That is why the number of effected requests has been minimal. An attorney for several offshore financial centers, including some jurisdictions where the Appleby Group has offices, noted that “Bermuda [where Appleby was originally, and still is, headquartered] has had such arrangements [exchange of information upon request] with the US for twenty years, and over that time [Bermuda] has effected less than fifty exchanges [of information]. (Richard Hay, “Beyond a Level Playing Field: Free (R) Trade in Financial Services.”) Offshore financial centers and onshore financial centers support exchange of information upon request because such method is not effective exchange of information.
Eleventh, Appleby states that “A number of these [offshore financial centers] jurisdictions, for example the Cayman Islands, have been subject to an examination (by the General Accounting Office of the USA [GAO]) as to their co-operation in the effective use of their agreements and were declared to be fully co-operative.”
The report of the U.S. Government Accounting Office, GAO, cited in the Appleby statement indicates (pages 5 and 37) that the United States has used only “a small number of times” the Tax Information Exchange Agreement (ITEA) between the United States and Cayman since it went into effect in 2004, to exchange information related to civil and criminal tax investigations.
Twelfth, Appleby states “‚Ķ..as noted in Transparency Internationals published lists, the world’s worst offender according to its assessment of global transparency was the state of Delaware in the USA.” Two Comments: Tax Justice Network, not Transparency International, prepared the Financial Secrecy Index published in December 2009, referred to in the Appleby statement. Also as noted in the FSI, many jurisdictions suffer from the lack of financial transparency and TJN readily acknowledges that secrecy is endemic, but not all countries make it their business to actively attract deposits and other financial assets of non-residents whose primary goal is tax evasion.
For the record, nine out of the twelve Appleby offices are located in jurisdictions which are in the top twenty financial secrecy jurisdictions according to TJN’s Financial Secrecy Index.
In summary, the Appleby statement is not “digestible.”
NB: cross posted from Tax Justice Network with permission
I commented yesterday on right wing libertarian bullying. As if on cue this morning someone from the right wing libertarian camp turned up with these comments on the blog (both deleted in the place where he originally sought to post them):
Richard – a quick check with the Valuation Office Agency suggest you are not paying business rates on your Norfolk premises.
Is this tax planning, tax avoidance, tax compliance or tax evasion?
Either way, I’m sure one of the dreaded far right libertarians will be reporting it.
Followed by:
I can confirm that someone has now reported you for non-payment of business rates on your Downham Market premises!
It’s quite true I don’t pay business rates on my Downham Market premises. I don’t pay because they’re not due. I followed VOA guidance. It’s here. I also looked at the legal precedents. The most important is referred to here. The reporting seems accurate.
And using those criteria these no chance at all my premises should be business rated. For the record:
- There is no external signage of a business at my house;
- I have no business visitors to the premises;
- The office is not suitable to receive business visitors because it is not set up as an office;
- The room where I work is shared with my sons’ model railway – which takes up as much or more space as I do for my work – and they’re in here almost as much as I am as a result;
- The same room also is host to gardening and other domestic equipment;
- Nothing has been especially adapted for business use (although it has been for railway use) the room is (apart from fitting railway baseboards) as it is when I moved in;
- I do – admittedly – have a business telephone line – but mainly for broadband use. I’ve recently pondered getting rid of it as almost no one calls it any more – modern willingness to call mobiles on all occasions has made it irrelevant.
In other words – there is no chance these are business premises for rating purposes. Which is why they are not recorded as such.
But in that case the whole point of these comments was to harass and bully. Thy had no other purpose.
I rest my case: these people will use any method they can to harass, bully and intimidate. No wonder the Climategate scientists reacted as they did. And that’s why action is needed to protect those who are harassed, bullied and intimidated by them when making fair comment in public.
PS – Discussion with the local Valuation Office confirmed my logic was completely correct
