This is your mission impossible...you can't choose not to accept it...

Your tax, your responsibility

Set up to fail. That's what we are. Despite the world's most complex tax system, we're responsible for ensuring we pay the right amount of tax to the thieves at HMRC.

Taking that apart a bit:

Ours isn't among the most complicated, or more complicated than most, or more complicated than it needs to be, it's the most complicated in the world. Number one. Top of the pops. The bottom line we're working to (that's us, you and me, not HMRC's responsibility, oh no) is equivalent to several times the complete works of Shakespeare in length. I can't see how it's reasonable to expect the population to take responsibility for their taxes when doing so would take all their time, so they can't earn any money and so that the whole exercise becomes irrelevant. Several times the complete works. All about tax rules. That's dry and dreary enough to make you want to escape to warmer places with lower costs of living and a more sensible, straightforward approach.

We're responsible. Not HMRC. They have offices, staff, and, no doubt, some pretty extravagantly paid (extravagantly overpaid? I think so) civil servants supposedly heading the whole thing up. They've got the data handling capacity, the software, everything at their fingertips, but still want to treat the population as their unpaid skivvies, doing their donkey work for them, at their beck and call. Not the employers, their payroll, their HR departments, their resources, their software.

Say we're taxed at 25% of income. That income tax thing. Then say we're taxed at 20% VAT on everything. That's generous, I think, because although some things are zero-rated, some things, like petrol, booze, fags, etc, attract outrageous and punitive levels of taxation. Tack on a bit of NI and we're stopped around 48% of what we earn. The thieves at HMRC are stealing (at a conservative estimate) almost half of our hard-earned, and somehow, if anyone, our employers or HMRC makes a mistake, it's down to us.

One last question:

The prime minister, the chancellor, and the taxman are drowning.

You can save only one of them.

Would you carry on with the crossword or head off for some lunch?

Goodbye to a free press

There's a long rant here. One I need to avoid. Some short points:

Lawrence Wright has written a detailed, researched, expose of Scientology. Published in America. Accurate and properly underpinned. The Scientologists would make UK publication too expensive to defend in our courts.

It's all about phone hacking. A crime our anti-crime forces failed to deal with. It affected a small minority of the rich and famous and loud. They've driven knee-jerk responses.

News, apparently, is what someone, somewhere, wants to suppress. The rest is advertising. That figures.

Goodbye Private Eye.

Thank god for the Internet, hello a world of guerilla online publications tugging the tiger's tail.

Hugh Grant? You're a selfish, spoilt, odious little man. Pity they hacked your phone, and not your body.

No-one's emerged with a scrap of dignity. None of the major political parties. None of the pressure groups. Not the popular press. Not the phone-hacked blubbering celebs.

Anyone who genuinely wants investigative, critical, risk-taking journalism to live on will be dismayed.

The Leveson Report has been described as 'tedious' and 'unreadable'. A tedious and unreadable report on journalism?