'Politics' Category

Is the UK Press Out of Control?

Possibly the most distasteful news item to emerge this week is the allegation that investigators working for the News of the World not only “hacked” into Milly Dowler’s phone voicemail whilst the police investigation was on-going, but deleted messages so that more messages could be received. Not only tampering with potential evidence, but also giving [...]

posted in News, Politics by The Internet Sheep

    • Surrey University to charge £9000

    Surrey University has announced it is to charge the maximum £9000 tuition fees for students, blaming the requirement on cuts to its teaching funds and capital grants. It joins Oxford, Imperial College, Durham and Exeter in announcing it will charge the highest level of fees. As covered by our earlier article “Tuition Fees: The Law [...]

    posted in Education, Finance, Politics by The Internet Sheep

    • Why do we pay VAT on petrol?

    Driving home from work yesterday, and noticing that I will have to fill up (again) soon, I was struck by the question, “why do I have to pay VAT on petrol”. VAT is considered to be a “luxury” tax, a tax on non-essential items. The only way for me to get to work and back, [...]

    posted in Finance, Politics by The Internet Sheep

    • Tuition Fees: The Law of Unintended Consequences

    The law of unintended consequences, sometimes defined as “a perverse effect contrary to what was originally intended (when an intended solution makes a problem worse), such as when a policy has a perverse incentive that causes actions opposite to what was intended.” (thanks to Wikipedia there) has swung into effect on the governments university tuition [...]

    posted in Education, Finance, Politics by The Internet Sheep

    • VAT hits 20%

    So, here we are waiting for VAT to go up to 20% and despite the Labour opposition lobbying for a delay, it’s pretty certain to go ahead. Of course this will push up fuel prices still further, as for some reason we have to pay VAT on fuel duty (where’s the value in that?). Now [...]

    posted in Finance, Politics by The Internet Sheep

    • Will the real Prime Minister please stand up?

    So here we are, post election, looking forward to a hung parliament (or a “balanced” parliament as we’re now supposed to call it, perhaps to avoid giving anyone ideas). Of course, after all the squabbling over ideology from the leaders debates, we now have the amusing situation of watching both the Conservatives and Labour pretending [...]

    posted in Politics by The Internet Sheep

  • Petrol Prices

    So here we are in an election year, and no-one seems to be talking about the price of a gallon of fuel. Despite the odd fluctuation, the price has steadily increased over the last year or so, and yet not one political party seems to want to comment publicly on this. Now, we all know [...]

    posted in Finance, Politics by The Internet Sheep

  • Politics in a Recession

    I was listening to breakfast television this morning, and two people debating who was at fault for the current economic situation (apparently it was “the other guy”), and it struck me that surely, this is exactly not what is needed at the moment. Would it not be better if politicians of all persuasions worked together [...]

    posted in Finance, Politics by The Internet Sheep

  • A New Way Of Voting

    Maybe you agree. and maybe you don’t, but one of the problems with party-based politics is the fact that it is party based, and a large part of the population seems to vote based upon party lines, rather than individual party policies, or even based upon which of the candidates for their local MP is [...]

    posted in Politics by The Internet Sheep

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