threegee

We are pretty used to the usual BBC "audience selection" process, and the internet is full of reports about how people were grilled about their views (and told what they could and could not say) before they were allowed into the Question Time audience. But... last night's election debate had to be one of the most desperate attempts by the BBC to sway public opinion in its history. There are even reports of the BBC paying people's hotel bills out of our licence fees so they could draw on people of suitable views. Both ITV and Sky can have proven they can stage a pretty free debate, but it seems that this is quite beyond the overpaid executives at the BBC. Apart from audience selection bias the BBC have been ordered not to use "the worm" by the House of Lords, who took compelling academic evidence that it's a very powerful tool to warp people's freely held beliefs. Yet, the BBC have ignored this and continue to use it in combination with their careful audience selection. The excuses for this are risible; they run along the lines of we hear what you say, but we know better about providing viewer satisfaction, and it's really just experimental anyway. Maybe you don't feel as strongly about BBC Bias as I do, but the petition site contains many other reasons why we shouldn't be compelled to shell out our hard earned cash to a near state monopoly, and you'll surely find other reasons you can enthusiastically support. Please sign the petition. https://you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/end-the-bbc-licence-fee

Yes, twenty acres in the left middle-ground and Bedlington Bank bottom right. We're looking NW towards the Rothbury Hills, and maybe even the Cheviots on the far horizon. A glimpse of the sea around Warkworth /Alnmouth top right.

Fourgee has recently uploaded an amazing shot of the town taken by his new drone. You're unlikely to be able to see it properly in your browser though, and it will take a short time to download due to the size. Access Sunny Skies Over Bedlington in the Gallery, then after it has fully loaded right-click on it and do a "Save Image as...". You'll then be able to open it in a local photo viewer and zoom around. Probably a lot more to come. Does he do requests I ask?

http://www.express.co.uk/news/politics/570547/Queen-Ukip-Nigel-Farage-Buckingham-Palace-Elizabeth-II-Royal-family-London Guess that's Sym's vote shot then!

I'm having smartwatch bluetooth reconnection problems with my Galaxy Note 3 since they pushed the Lollipop upgrade recently. Overall Lollipop is an improvement though, but that could be because the Note 3 has 3GB of RAM. Not that many smartwatches are currently in use, so it won't be a general problem. I'm not expecting a fix quite this week, and can live with the problem for now. Unless a tab was ridiculously cheap I'd avoid anything with 1GB RAM or less. That, of course, rules out anything Apple. Although the iPhans will claim that Apple devices don't need more it's a cop out as you can't get a quart out of a pint pot. In fact historically that's the way Apple has forced users to buy new product, as previous generations rapidly become very clunky. Anything above £100 should have more than 1GB RAM these days, and anything in the £500+ range with 1GB is a total joke. It's very easy to confuse the non-technical here by quoting the amount of flash storage, and making it very difficult to discover the amount of real working memory. If you are looking for a great budget device check out the Asus Zenfone 2. There are models with as much as 4G RAM, it's Intel powered (with 22nm silicon), and the budget end ones are relatively cheap. Snag is they are new, and in very short supply at the moment. I'd pay the extra for a 4GB RAM one. http://www.gsmarena.com/asus_zenfone_2_ze551ml-6917.php

Once again illustrating that the Labour Party and hypocrisy walk hand in hand! It's the post-democratic elitist what the plebs don't know about won't hurt them. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/labour/11540373/Ed-Milibands-US-adviser-David-Axelrod-pays-no-tax-in-Britain.html Amusingly contains: In fact a tiny rerun of Labour's PFI, and indicative of how our tax money is likely to be spent - again!

Sounds, looks, acts like a North London Jew, and even talks about North London Jews. What's he selling? Hmm... strange Google returns absolutely nothing on his princely surname except this story, and he's lived in the UK all his life, has he? Prince - I smell a szczur!

Brussels vows to block Cameron on EU treaty http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/politics/article4411647.ece Game over Dave! They are going to keep us in the Fourth Reich even if every sane person in the UK votes out! Blows a hole in your just-published manifesto promises, doesn't it? Then again, you've never really intended to keep them, and you've plenty of form here. Time to have a some serious discussions with our friend Vladimir, about how we can help him on the Eastern Front (Ukraine); we may need his help on the Western Front before too long!

But have you noticed the weasel words in Labour's glossy manifesto? We are not going to go on a borrowing spree again except... Ed's definition of "investment" wouldn't cut it with any real world investor. Ed's investment returns are as nebulous as all this "influence" we buy in the EU. What he really means is go on a borrowing spree again, at a time when all existing credit cards are maxed out. https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2079rank.html Frightening stuff that, as you've raised many times! It's only possible to run those massive levels of debt per head through our being THE world financial capital (something that went to Gordo's head). Yet the loonies want to chase the people with deep pockets away on the basis of a piddling amount of money which some scheming quasi Marxist tells them they are entitled to! Our present debt balancing act is only possible because of near record low interest rates. If we don't have a believable plan to eliminate the current account deficit our borrowing costs will soar. Ed might as well borrow his £30BN in voter bribes from Wonga!

OK, well spotted, and I should have followed my own link. But, I knew it was something stupid, especially when we bailed out the failing Irish (euro based) economy. How long before Milband bumps UK CT to 30%, to make us wildly uncompetitive again? Ah, the "undeserving rich". Are there no undeserving poor? Seems like public attitudes to that have come a very long way since Maggie T! http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/scrounging-off-the-state-hardening-attitudes-toward-welfare-and-its-recipients/ And, who could disbelieve the heavily EU funded (with our very own money) LSE? So, you want to put Britain's diamond industry out of business in pursuit of Citizen Syms revolution? A big loss of luxury product VAT, and more loss of jobs there, but I suppose if the non-doms have left it will be on its uppers anyway. I know I know - this time a Labour administration will all be different.

My personal view, based on long experience. To the left all wealth is wrong no matter how it is used. That's a recipe for impoverishing everyone. I'm not two-faced about this like Mliband and Balls - on the one hand "encouraging investment", on the other hand making cheap political capital by appealing to the worst instincts of the electorate. I already addressed tax dodging, and it's nothing like as big as politicos want us to believe at any convenient time. The world is unfair; life is "unfair; get over it and don't get consumed by it! In particular don't let politicos tell you there's a pot of gold out there - there simply isn't! I could have phrased it that everyone pays their taxes in the jurisdiction where it is due, except a few cheats who are breaking laws anyway, but I've already explained that at length. Non-doms - either unintentionally or intentionally - don't owe some of their taxes in UK jurisdiction. That's inconvenient for Miliband's jealousy and envy party, but if he pursues this nonsense that will become evident in time. By then it will be too late. But politicos get to walk away from their mistakes, and someone else gets to foot the bill - largely us! Why isn't he railing about 10% corporation tax in the Irish Republic that's parasitic on our economy and constantly draining our inward investment? Now that IS a serious and real loss of tax revenue; but he can't go there because it's politically inconvenient to him. http://www.forbes.com/sites/taxanalysts/2013/11/06/if-ireland-is-not-a-tax-haven-what-is-it/ Thing is I don't believe this is a Gordon Brown self-delusion kind of mistake. I believe this one is cynical manipulation of the electorate, those who don't understand, or (it seems to me, in our Tony's case) don't want to understand the full issue. This is the the old strategy of demonising an identifiable group of people, and blaming them for all ills. It's shabby, it's sad, and Miliband puts himself beyond contempt. David Starkey fully express my feelings on this - Miliband is poison!

That's what a Labour MP said on Question Time, and it seems to be the standard Labour response when confronted with the facts. But saying "good riddance" is exactly what you are doing by abolishing non-dom status. You are wishing a long goodbye to something of the order of £30,000,000,000 in GDP! Yes, please do post pictures of these champaign swilling scum non-doms, I can't wait! We might of course discover that they are not in fact non-doms, but some other form of lowlife in the class war! Everyone pays their taxes (though it looks like a lot more could be paying them somewhere else quite soon). Have you noticed that every LibLbCon politician, when confronted with the thorny problem of where they are going to get money from to pay for their unfunded electoral promises, cites a crack down on tax dodging raising however many millions they need? Does it ever happen? It doesn't because we are very efficient at tax collection in this country - sometimes too efficient for our own good. Of course tax dodging still goes on, but wealthier people present a far easier target than the very small and nimble domestic dodgers. However at the end of the day there's a law of diminishing returns, and (apart from tip offs) it's simply uneconomic to go after that last bit of graft. If it were that easy it would have been done long ago. Ergo ANY undertaking from ANY politico to fund ANYTHING from a crack down on tax dodging is a pure fiction, and should be treated with the derision it deserves. And, ANY promise that the super-rich will pay is equally risible - they can afford armies of accountants, can spin off webs of international companies, and generally have a large say in the matter. That's why the ARE super-rich! If you doubt this ask Tony - but then again, you probably can't afford his advice.

No, it was originally introduced for colonials - that's history! In case you haven't noticed the days of empire have gone. There are a few archaic elements to it, but they are harmless, and there are in many in our customs and laws. Today the vast majority of people who have non-dom status qualified for it on their own account. The people who benefit from it are us, because we attract investment into the country, and we lock it in here. Ditto with expertise. It's totally mad to abolish it because the exchequer will suffer. It's even dumber to be sold on the proposition that abolishing it will magically gain £2BN or whatever for the NHS. All of that is lies, and what will in fact happen - though it will take a few years to become evident - is that the country will be impoverished to the tune of about £30BN. That's money we desperately need for the NHS, especially if we have idiot politicians who insist on funding overseas dictators, and gifting ever-increasing amounts of our wealth to the the poor Germans! You want to abolish it solely for doctrinaire "social engineering" purposes, the overwhelming economic argument cuts no ice with you. You are perfectly prepared to go along with Miliband's lies that he'll collect revenue from abolition to suit your purpose. The end justifies the lies - well it never does, a lie is always lie! If you knowingly vote for liars then don't complain when you discover you've been had!

You could be right Maggie. By the looks of that coverage map there's a mast now in or very near Bedlington. Also OUR local UHF channelling is at the top end of the band which is in the 800Mh/z 4G range. First thing to get is a FREE filter. I smell money! Go for it Bedlingtonians! https://www.gov.uk/government/news/eliminating-interference-with-tv-signals-from-4g-mobile-services

Well... I have to confess not checking the RTC on the server after it rebooted last night, but a test post shows it's now within a minute or so of my Windoze lappy - which is easily nigh enough for Windoze (and pit work!). Check the time zone in your control panel (click on your name right up top, then select My Settings) and whether you are tracking daylight saving or not. The settings are there so everyone around the world can adjust all the displayed dates and times to their local.

Do plug the aerial straight into the TV for test purposes, then you'll be able to bypass any amplifier troubles, and check if the aerial is delivering a clean signal.. Cheap amplifiers and digital do not necessarily go together - cable mismatch problems can corrupt the bitstream. If the amplifier has a gain control turn it right down and step it slowly up. The lowest setting that works will likely be best. The aerial download is always suspect, particularly with digital, and particularly if it's more than say ten years old. If it's well over ten years old then it's likely worth re-cabling with good quality coax anyway.

If the cable goes straight to the aerial then pull the coax plug out of the TV or digibox and see if there is any trace of water or corrosion. Also eyeball the aerial (head) and see if it is pointing in the same direction as others.

Are any trees to your South coming into bud?

I'm on the real world Tony where only the FACTS matter. I'm looking closely at whether Miliband's explanation of where he can find more tax money to fund his spending can possibly come from - are you? Chanting "soak the rich" doesn't hack it! The rich will always have a say in whether they want to be soaked or not, and they have the ultimate sanction of telling Miliband to get stuffed. If you've lived long enough, and kept your eyes and ears open, you'll know how easy it is for a Labour government to impoverish everyone! The easiest people to impoverish are people at the bottom of the economic tree because they have little idea of what is really going on, but there are plenty of socialists around to feed them pure BS! That's exactly how Labour works - feed people false information then appeal to their worst emotions. I hold no brief for your "nasty party" (the Tories) but Labour surely is "the BS, jealousy and envy party". There's nothing like 114,000 people paying for the exemption - Miliband claims "over 114,000" and he's lying! Several thousand of those have already quit the country on the increasing fees, and probably because they can see a non business friendly party getting power. We are down to 100,700 at last count, and falling. Only 5000 currently pay the fee, and that will inevitably fall too. Like it or not those people's real wealth is effectively untouchable; they will surely leave if you push them too far and kill the golden goose. The facts illustrate that we've already gone too far in the name of social engineering, and that our aggressive tax policy has already lost more than we've gained. And yes, whether you like it or not, there are quite a few people with non-dom status who have less earnings than you or me. It's a legitimate status, not a convenient label to demonise people with. You and your militant TU chums are very quick to use the "Nazi" label on anyone who you disagree with. Labelling classes of people and demonising them is precisely what socialists do too - it's a substitute for looking at the real world and the real people who live in it. It seems than in Milibandworld non-doms have become the new Jews! You can identify non-doms in the street by their spending habits? That's amazing, there's undoubtedly a job for you in HMRC! But, there's a job for you in immigration too: because you also know exactly what professional people our economy needs, and those we don't need. Great stuff! Both you (and Symptoms) are conveniently conflating tax dodging with non-dom status. Tax dodging is illegal and the way you tackle tax dodging is enforcing existing law, which has all the teeth needed. Let's look at what happened when the original £30,000 charge was introduced. Well, you guessed it, a lot of them left the country! 16,000 of the original 130,000 left. Good riddance you say - well, say good riddance to the people they employed, the establishments they patronised, and the smaller companies they invested in. That charge is ramped in stages to the £90,000 annually you quote, and increasing it further would be idiotic, especially if you combine this with a further hike in income tax, and a wealth tax on houses valued at over £2M. The fact is that non-doms pay a lot of tax. They pay tax on ALL their UK earnings, and they pay tax on their overseas earnings too. The UK government may not see all the tax on those overseas earnings because of (very necessary and fair) double taxation treaties, but that's how the world works - other countries very rightly claim tax just like we do! At the end of the day Miliband is lying in his crooked teeth! Balls knows the truth about non-doms (and has previously told the truth), but he's keeping his trap shut during the election period and letting Miliband tell all the lies. Hey, industrial tribunals - I'd love to tackle that one some day!

Slightly more!

...and to the biased BBC!

Yes, I do know what it is Tony, and OK I won't provide any links for you, but I don't think you know what it is. I think you know what you've been told by Labour, but - as usual - Labour is economical with the truth. There are about 110,700 people with non-dom status. They pay tax on every penny of their earnings in this country. In aggregate they pay about £8,400,000,000 a year in direct tax. That's an average of about £76,000 directly to the exchequer, and if they didn't pay this we'd have to double the tax paid by the bottom 10 million taxpayers (the people who can least afford to pay it). In addition to this they pay far higher indirect taxes than the average person, provide considerable employment, and reputedly invest heavily in our country. They don't burden the NHS, or any other public services, but do spend a lot. The majority of these people are doctors, surgeons, lawyers, specialists and other top professional people who we sorely need. It's impossible to say exactly what these people contribute indirectly to our country but in direct, indirect, and trickle down economics the figure must be well over £30BN a year. However that's not the full story, not all of these people are wealthy, quite a lot of them earn less than you or me, and only a tiny percentage of them fall into the super-rich Abramovich category. What we are talking about from here on is what they earn simply from overseas sources. Firstly about 64,000 of them (in theory) declare ALL their overseas earnings, and pay full UK tax on them. This isn't necessarily a huge gain for our country because they will also be taxed in the country where the earnings originate, and it's quite likely that (under international double taxation treaties) they'll be able to deduct this from what they pay to HMRC. In an event they are pretty much on the same terms as you or me, and you have to discount all these people as a source of further higher rate taxes. 110,700 - 64,000 = 46,700 In that 46,700 people are the already mentioned poorer people who simply have inherited non-dom status and aren't good for much or any overseas earnings (taxed at source or not). Already Ed Miliband's "soak the rich" is starting to look pretty limp, but how many of them can actually yield any more tax revenue? Well the number of people who chose to have their foreign earnings exempted in exchange for an ever increasing fee is in fact a paltry 5000! Yes, we are not talking about 110,000 we are talking about 5000. And the vast majority of those 5000 flit around the world, have houses in multiple countries, and their true wealth is hidden behind chains of companies, and is, to all practical extents untouchable - because they don't own it, they simply CONTROL it (in fact just like Tony Blair!). They pay the fees because it's often cheaper than paying international accountants, or concealing, transferring, or laundering the wealth, and some of them don't want their affairs flagged up to other tax authorities. So... we do have a nice little earner of about £300M from those fees, but Ed M wants to throw those fees away (not impose further taxes "on top" of those fees, like a silly Labourite claimed at the weekend) because he thinks he can get more. Do you think this is true, or do you think that Ed B was right when interviewed earlier this year, when he said income might fall if we try to up the take? Or, do you think that this isn't a matter of money at all but a matter of "fairness" and principle (in which case you'd better tell Ed M this before he spends even more money he hasn't got!)?

If you mean that she's going to rob Red Ed of a majority then he's done that to himself, as has Desperate Dave. Dave would have walked it if he'd kept his promises on the EU vote etc. - few Tories now trust him, let alone his own back benchers. A total lack of common sense at the top of the Tory camp, to match with a total lack of any sort of sense in Labour! If Ed scrapes in with fewer votes than the Tories and with SNP support it's going to be a bleak day for our country (and I mean England) This has a lot to do with the fact that none of them have ever had to earn their own living - unlike "the dodgy broker" who actually gave up quite a good career (as a metals trader) for just about enough to scape by on, because he truly BELIEVES in Britain! Please explain to me where the Miliband millions came from? Better than that please explain who funds Blair's private jet and his web of companies, and what he actually does for his huge wealth? It's interesting that lots of Scottish people who don't want independence are voting Scot Nat regardless. That's a rational thing to do if you are Scottish, but voting for either Dave or Ed is a totally crazy thing to do if you are English and not a member of the cosy metropolitan elites! Ed however is playing the jealousy and envy card for all it is worth, banking on the fact that most of his voters are totally clueless about things like non-doms, NHS funding, and a host of other issues. That's why none of the local Labour crowd want to publicly debate any of these things - Labour thrives on prejudice, jealousy, envy, and total ignorance of the issues! [Topic split here to: The Non-Dom Debate]

8 minutes - sorry! Probably another one in the next day or three to add new hardware.

We might be off line for five minutes or so quite soon while the engineers check inside the server. Any such disruption will only be for a few minutes. The aim of the outage is to increase long-term data security.