What’s the world coming to if you can't eat a pie, buy a loaf of bread or buy your lover some saucy knickers without funding the Tory party in the process???

Hello & thanks reading this. I'm writing this to promote a petition I started on change.org asking for a ban on corporations being allowed to donate money to political parties.

Currently the petition has 63 signatures; hardly the ringing enthusiasm I was hoping for when the House of Commons receives petitions with tens if not hundreds of thousands of signatures.

The current system for party funding is hardly fair - parties who are liked by the rich & powerful become major parties, those who have to rely on cold hard logic and public spirited-ness get side-lined and rarely get noticed.

Even more unjust is that it is there customers themselves are the people who are funding the Tory party - we are, each and every one of us, I am not a Tory yet by buying from businesses that support them I am funding them; in what world is that democracy?

Corporations take our money and they then donate it to the party that they want to win. Under the current system we are funding the Tory party buy buying from there corporate sponsors. I really don't want to have to start vetting who I buy my ties, my bread, my pastries and my fluffy handcuffs from based on who the shops and brands are funding so I'd much rather that big business and the state were separated, and businesses weren't allowed to donate at all.

We are funding Cameron's road back to number 10, each and every one of us, every time we buy a pie, a loaf of bread or decide we want a night of kinky sex according to this Mirror article, because of the number of big businesses and sheer quantity of money they are donating:

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/ampp3d/buying-12-things-means-youre-5391826

Enough is enough, please sign:

https://www.change.org/p/house-of-commons-totally-ban-businesses-from-sponsoring-or-donating-to-political-parties-cap-the-amount-an-individual-can-donate-to-a-political-party-each-year-apart-from-party-membership-to-what-a-person-employed-full-time-on-the-minimum-wage-would-

#DemandDemocracy

Dear Tory’s… Don’t you trust us with all the facts about tax?

Something that really pissed me off on an episode of BBC’s Question Time was opposition to the 50% tax rate, because when national insurance contributions are added this means that a person would be paying 52% tax, which might apparently be a hindrance to an individual’s aspiration to try to earn a salary over £150,000.

Well most people don’t pay 2% national insurance contributions they pay 12%; only people earning over £797 per week pay 2% and people earning under it pay 12%. £797 per week equals 41,444 per year. However as the 40% tax band kicks in at £31,886 per year, this means that when 40% income tax plus 12% national insurance are added, people are paying 52% tax on all earnings between £31,886 and £41,444 per year already.

This also means that people earning between £41,444.01 and £150,000 are paying 42% on earning’s in this range and people earning over £150,000 are at present paying 47% tax on earnings over £150,000.

And I always thought that a progressive tax system was where richer people paid more not less because they could afford it, but as we see here people earning over £41,444 are paying a lower rate than people earning less than £41,444. The only thing which is even more stupid than this is that the people who reduced the 50% tax rate down to 45% didn't think we’d notice this.

This proves where the typical Tory’s priorities lie; making middle earners pay more to give a tax cut to their millionaire mates…

Well I have an idea; instead of increasing the 45% tax rate back to 50%, increase tax on the rich by replacing the regressive national insurance bands with a flat rate of 10%, then people earning between £31,996 and £41,444 won’t be paying a higher rate than the minority earning a six figure salary; thus nullifying in the process the argument that high taxes on the rich are bad for business because thousands of smaller business owners will have been given a slight tax cut in the process. The tax difference may be small, 2% opposed to 5% but it would positively impact far more people so there’s a much better chance of someone being able to do some good with it, and the reduction would (at least partly) be cancelled out by the fact that people who were once paying 2% would now be paying 10%. 

30 hour week: we'd get more done

I completely agree with this article: I have the luxury of setting my own working hours as I work as an author; however I know that a lot of other people don’t. Firstly working more than 40 hours a week and in my view your taking work away from someone else, working more than 48 and your being taken for a ride. A cut down from a 5 to a 4 or 4.5 day week in my view would better our productivity. We’d be less tired at work, we’d get to spend more time with friends and family so we’d be happier and to top it all off the unemployment figures would fall through the floor.

http://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/working-longer-is-costing-us-all-135453511.html

This is why the economic crisis is ongoing

http://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/20-workers-earn-below-living-073724996.html

20% of British workers are living of a wage below the ‘living wage’, that’s about £7.20 if you live outside London. And I can recall that the government considered things like giving smaller companies a lower minimum wage and various other things which would save money for companies such as making it easier to hire and fire which would in this climate probably mean easier to fire.

I say again what I have said before and that is that the capitalist system is relent on a comfortably wealthy workforce to survive, the capitalist system needs money to remain in circulation in order to function otherwise there is less money going round being actively used to keep capitalism going. Ergo we need a high minimum wage, so that people have the spending power to buy stuff, in order to keep businesses going with the trade from selling stuff. Ergo as long as a large chunk of the population are in poverty the economic cr4isis will continue.

It's the economy stupid: why capitalism is reliant on a high minimum wage

You know I think it’s absolutely stupid claiming that increasing the minimum wage would increase unemployment: Which western nation managed to cope with the global recession the best? Australia; and what is the national minimum wage in Australia? AU$16 per hour or AU$20 for casual staff. When translated into British currency that equals £9.42 per hour for contracted staff and £11.79 for those of us on those highly exploitative Zero-hour contracts, quite an increase on the £6.19 we get over here in Blighty.

For American readers; there is only about a 10-12% difference between the Australian and American dollar so after doing a currency conversion check: if you American readers were living in Oz you’d have the equivalent of a $14.59 minimum wage if you had contracted hours or $18.25 if you’re a casual worker.

Poverty makes a recession worse because in a capitalist system there is a reliance on spending power to improve the economy, if people don’t have spending power then the economy can’t grow. So if an economy exists where poor people are allowed to exist it will always have a fragile economy, subject to crashes and recessions. This means that the rich need to learn that economic stability is reliant on money exchanging hands – not being horded in a bank account that is full beyond any possibility of it ever being needed, yes people should have a reserve and money for retirement, but not to excess.

All that does is take large amounts of money out of circulation, which means it’s not actively being used to support the capitalist system. This means that there needs to be a fundamental change in the way we view money: we need to look at money as resource first and not as private property. Don’t get me wrong people who work hard should be rewarded for it. But that should mean that NOBODY who works for a living is living in poverty. It means that keeping excess money once you’ve got it should be just as hard as earning it in the first place.

I think we’ve all heard the phrase that money is the root of all evil, well thanks to capitalism it’s the lifeblood of western if not global civilisation: and who ever heard of someone being able to buy and hoard dozens of times more blood than they could ever need from a blood bank and keep frozen somewhere ‘just in case’ while clinic operations ground to a halt: well that is what is being done with low minimum wages and excessive wealth in the hands of the top 1%, because people are suffering a level of poverty in the west not known for decades, and there are people going hungry while a very small minority receive each year more than some earn in a lifetime.