Taxing questions

The tremendous hoo haa re the National Insurance seems to have gone over my head. Whilst I am/was not a Business Leader of the status recruited by Boy Dave I did have a quite hefty departmental budget that included costs for over 5o people. The Company was swallowed up by a larger company and, as usual, reductions in head count were called for. I escaped that by taking out a complete layer of job titles - no more 'assistant' whatever. After about a year, things improved and I thought I'd try and flesh out my team. This was fully supported - with the condition that my payroll budget would not be allowed to increase!

I cannot see that increasing cost of an employee by hiking up the NI contribution is a great problem. I would determine a hire or not on the basis that if any new worker cost me £X in NI costs but brought in or saved £X+a bit, that would make sense.

The fact that the increases would impact upon employers who could not make this calculation is accepted. No use in increasing payroll costs of NHS or the Armed Forces whilst demanding serious savings. OK - exempt them from the increase. Clicking noise from Alexis Meercat.

I seem to have it that the saving of no NI increase is about £12 billion. Not to be sniffed at. We could get better savings. The two serious players in destruction of the world by atomic weapons have just signed a down-scaling and, so long as they both play together nicely, there may be further reductions. Still enough to blow us all to Kingdom come several times over and the MAD concept will still apply - you launch and before they hit we will launch and we both end up charred and glowing in the dark.

So, why the heck does some tin pot almost 3rd world country like the UK need to spend billions in the hundreds buying Tridents like 5P fireworks? And then there will be calls for the launch pad submarines - more billions. Who is going to get around to attacking us without drawing attention from one or other of the superior nuclear powers? I remember that at the time of the Falklands, Maggie forced the French to give us the abort codes for the missiles they had sold to the Argies. I would not be surprised if there were some such remote disabling facility in the US technology associated with Trident anyway.

The people who say there is a case for Trident have a vested interest. Work for dockyard mateys. Command of so many sailors that they have to be Admirals at least. Defenders of the Realm bigging it up. No one in their right mind would want such a useless toy as Trident. If the penny pinchers could not justify total abandonment, get just a couple so that the MAD process could still be achieved. Sick thinking I reckon.