Welcome to Very British Subjects.

Editor Peter Troy,

Tougher for Small Businesses

A recent lead editorial in The Daily Telegraph, complains that, "Business needs less, not more, red tape". The proximate cause of its complaints is the government's new legislative programme which, it says, "will make life tougher for small firms on two fronts". The devil in the detail can be read in Dr North's excellent piece in EU Referendum

The Sunday Quote

''Justice without force is powerless; force without justice is tyrannical. ''

Blaise Pascal

New Britain under New Labour

Us Britons find ourselves now obliged to live under a system of surveillance more rigorous than at any time or place since the fall of the Stasi, with more CCTV cameras per head of the population than anywhere else in the world. The local elections are largely an irrelevance, as elected representatives have little say (or even knowledge) of what is going on. EU officials in Brussels talk to Whitehall officials who talk to local officials regardless of the wishes of local politicians.

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Meanwhile, more and more inoffensive British citizens find themselves listed as registered criminals, while the real criminals go about their nefarious business with comparative impunity. It is no joke finding yourself with a criminal record, as the headmaster who forgot to renew his fishing licence or the bus driver who over filled his wheelie bin discovered recently.

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A feature of recent ubiquitous advertising has been the '' we know where you live'' threats about the BBC tax. The authorities boast of a database with 28 million addresses. In the old days the BBC gave relatively cheap access to eminently trustworthy news, quality drama uninterrupted by advertisements, first class comedy and much edifying content. Now it is a continuum of banal prole circuses (unrelieved even by the occasional football match) punctuated by bouts of lefty-greeny propaganda posing as news, i.e. it is the central pillar of the new establishment. It is naked extortion, like Mafia insurance, pay up or you’re on the list – we know where you live. They cannot even bully with subtlety, but in an authoritarian society why bother? Three billion pounds of income per annum, greater than the GDP of, say, Nicaragua, yet they claim they cannot manage. Why? Officials! Like its host country, of which it is a microcosm, the BBC is sinking under the weight of overweening administration.

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If the wealth creating part of any enterprise shrinks continuously, while the wealth dissipating part grows relentlessly, there can be only one eventual outcome. It is not, as the ghastly cliché says, rocket science.

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Meanwhile, the powers that be in the UK withdraw into a fantasy world of imagined crimes attracting draconian fines to fund their excesses, while the rank undergrowth of society flourishes. The habitually law abiding portion of the population finds itself increasingly criminalised, while the habitual criminals go about their business untrammelled.

The Sunday Quote

Do you ever get the feeling that the only reason we have elections is to find out if the polls were right? ~ Robert Orben

A New Mayor for London

In our capital city we now have a new mayor, though many Londoners prefer not to have one at all. Nor are they all that desperate to have a London Assembly or the rest of those quangos that together make up the GLA or, more widely, “London’s government”.

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London does not need a government as it has managed spectacularly well without one for centuries. This supposed government is little more than a money-hungry incubus on the whole city.

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On the other hand, if Londoners do have to have to have a mayor, even temporarily, it is better not to have a power-hungry, self-centered, not-much-reformed socialist who brought in huge white elephants, thought of new ways to fleece the public and saw himself and his entourage as another foreign office.

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The truth of how much those many trips abroad to places like Venezuela or to conferences about so called global warming has not yet come out.

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The truth of how much the many media officers have cost Londoners will be known but shall we ever find out the money spent on endless groups and organizations that were supposed to “help” various “disadvantaged” groups in London, such as young people? Did you know that there is a whole “yoof” section in the GLA where youngsters, who should be looking for proper jobs and having a life are employed to create a great deal of useless and expensive (to the taxpayer) employment for themselves and others like them in endless groups, committees, discussions, forums etc etc?

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On the whole the '' yoofs'' are a messy lot who seem to think nothing of dropping litter on the floor and never switch off their machinery when they leave the building. Last heard of they were a little worried that their cushy and mindless jobs might disappear under the new Mayor. Let us hope so.

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The new Mayor Boris Johnson has won very handsomely. Despite the ridiculous system of three ballot papers, two preferences for the mayor and two separate votes for the assembly, which has consistently created more spoilt ballots in London than anywhere else, the victory is clear and uncontestable.

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The turn-out was around 45 per cent, about ten per cent higher than last time and about 13 per cent higher than the time before. This is still not spectacularly high but by standards of local elections, not bad.The Tories could have achieved this victory last time if they had not been so stupid in their choice of candidate. Stitching up the highly presentable Nikki Page and putting forward the highly unpresentable Steve Norris, who had lost once already, was an act of madness. And there was serious talk of doing the same this time.Unfortunately, this story wrong-foots the “local-is-best” brigade. It was the London Conservative Party that messed up last time and it was the national leadership that insisted on Johnson as candidate this time. We don’t know how the man himself was talked into doing this but if whatever he was promised means only one term as Mayor, that is all to the good.

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David Cameron must have some ambivalent feelings. It does not take too many brain cells to work out that Boris Johnson will now have a power base that is completely independent of the leader and, unlike Livingstone, he has never made the mistake of antagonizing other members of his party.

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Johnson got 1,043,761 votes on first preference, that is 42.48 per cent and Livingstone 893,877, that is 36.38 per cent. Our citizen Ken got more second preference vote but as the Evening Standard said not enough to catch up. Final count was 1,168,738 for Mayor Johnson and 1,028,966 for ex-Mayor Livingstone.

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Contrary to what the media tells us, Livingstone has not been a success in his political life. Nothing but a career local politician, he actually helped Thatcher to destroy the GLC, which he had seen as his power base. Then he became an MP, only to find that as a back-bencher and a greatly disliked one at that, he had no role to play. Now he has lost his power-base again after a couple of rather disastrous stints. His “achievements” are not precisely great. Getting the 2012 Olympics for London is a poisoned chalice for the rest of us.

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The extension of the congestion charge zone westwards of the centre of London was a highly unpopular, badly argued piece of spite against people who refuse to vote for him. Getting more people on the buses is a ridiculous claim as the buses are no more frequent or efficient than they ever were. In other words, this has simply added to the discomfort of travelling in London.Some of those more people are children and teenagers under 16, who can travel anywhere for free and hop on and of at different stops, making life difficult for other passengers and adding to the obesity problem among children. And so on, and so on.

One can but hope that citizen Ken Livingstone will now disappear from public life and go back to spending more time with his newts.

Global Cooling

Christopher Booker in today’s column, re-enforces the case for a period of global cooling all of which looks pretty persuasive. As we have pointed out in numerous posts, the policy implications for this are huge, not least the effect on the global food supply and, in turn, the implications for global security. What is remarkable, therefore, is how little coverage there is on this issue in the media.

The Sunday Quote

'' No matter what side of an argument you are on, you always find people on your side that wish you were on the other.''

Jascha Heifetz (1901-1987)

Who Makes the Laws?

The fortnightly publication, eurofacts, carries an article on the number of laws UK that originate in Brussels, which has been constant theme on ths blog. Unfortunately, there is no link to the article itself, but we can all read the House of Commons research notes from which the figures were taken. There is a piece on this key issue posted on EUReferendum .

Profit from floods

Much preening is going on in that esteemed and thoroughly worthy organisation, the Taxpayers Alliance, over its coup in The Daily Telegraph, now repeated on their website. The Alliance claims that the UK government made a profit of almost half a billion pounds from the floods that devastated parts of Britain last year, all extracted from taxpayers' wallets .

Comply or go out of business

In a specialist Manchester business magazine comes a whiff of the real world – the one that is being steadily destroyed by the regulatory avalanche from Brussels.

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The story concerns a small chemical manufacturer which produces a common and garden chemical called ADBAC (Benzalkonium Chloride, for short) – technically a quaternary ammonium compound (QAC) with biocidal properties.

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It is very widely used – and has been for nearly a century – as an active ingredient for baby wipes, skin disinfectants, such as Savlon, for sanitisers in the food industry and for veterinary use.

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The company involved, QuatChem Ltd, has fallen foul of the EU's Biocidal Product Directive, which comes into force in 2010. In order to continue marketing its product, it must produce lengthy and costly dossiers on their chemicals, including expensive testing to comply with new safety standards.A perverse feature of the directive – in common with much EU legislation – is that the cost of compliance is the same for all firms, irrespective of the size or turnover of the company. Although QuatChem's nearest competitor has a turnover 60,000 times greater than its own, it is still having to find a roughly equivalent sum on registration. So far, it has spent £100,000 and is facing a potential total bill of between £4.3m and £6.5m by the 2010 deadline.

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The Oldham-based company, however, only has a turnover of £2m, and is being forced to divert two of its own scientists to the task and is paying consultants for additional work. Plans to create ten jobs and move to bigger premises have been put on hold because of the costs. Bizarrely, although the base chemical is produced by many different companies – with identical properties – each producer has to go through the process of publishing the same dossiers and duplicating research in order to generate the data for it.

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Dr Rubinah Chowdhary, QuatCchem director and part owner, says: "It is a very severe problem. I do not know how a directive like this could have been designed. SMEs have not been factored into this. It is astounding. We have two PhD scientists working on it. They were originally employed to grow the business. The effect on us has been tremendous. This directive seems particularly wrong and unfair."

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Welcome to the real world Dr Chowdhary. You join the ranks of fishermen, small slaughterhouse owners, egg producers, dairymen, animal feed merchants, electronics designers and even financial advisors, all of whom have been caught up in the mad regulatory machine that is the EU. It cares not one whit as to whether its regulations or directives are "wrong and unfair".Your job is to comply or go out of business – preferably the latter.

The Sunday Quote

''The one great principle of the English law is to make business for it self.''

Charles Dixkens - Bleak House (1812-70)

Roadside Tax Collectors (again)

Yet more evidence today that when it comes to roads, issuing as many fines as possible for as little effort as possible is the focus. This and other like minded blogs have previously argued that we need more police on our roads because they do more to increase road safety than speed cameras ever can. But the emphasis is on raising money quickly and cheaply rather than road safty. Read the full piece posted on The Waendel Journal.

The Sunday Quote

"Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business is only sustained by perpetual neglect of many things."

Robert Louis Stevenson

Troy's Irregular Column

Published today in The Journal - distributed through out the North East an Cumbria. Click the image to enlarge and read.

''The New Religion''

Former Chancellor Lord Lawson sees parallels with the apocalyptic visions held out by certain religious movements in the past. He is alarmed by the fanatical intolerance shown by many believers in global warming to any heretic who dares question their certainties.He ends by describing "the new religion of global warming" as "the Da Vinci Code of environmentalism. It is a great story and a best-seller. It contains a grain of truth and a mountain of nonsense."We have entered," he says, "a new age of unreason, which threatens to be as economically harmful as it is disquieting. It is from this, above all, that we really do need to save the planet."Read the full interview, by Christopher Booker, here.

The Sunday Quote

Today's payslip has more deductions than a Sherlock Holmes story.

Raymond J Cvikota

As few of us need to be reminded we taxed more now than at any time in our long and glorious history

The Death of the High Street

The following article was published in The Northern Echo today.

Peter Troy first campaigned 24 years ago for better and free car parking in Redcar. Following yesterdays launch of a campaign against parking charges in four of the regions principle market towns, he predicts the long, slow death of our independent retailer and of our towns unique character.

The English Traditional High Street is in its death throes.

By Peter Troy

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Once, no two towns were the same. Their high streets boasted a range of colourfully charismatic independent shops offering unique goods and a unique take on life. Nowadays, all high streets look identical, boasting only bland links in national chains selling the same stuff that can be found in any town anywhere in the country.

Anywhere from Land's End to John O'Groats, the length and breadth of the land, and as with motorway service stations they all look alike. In fact, they always remind me of that song by Pete Seeger, Little Boxes only these are big boxes made out of ticky tack.There are many causes of this, from the rise of the motor car to Prescottian planning policies to the multi-nationals own aggressive attitudes of selling items below the cost of production, bullying small suppliers and paying them late.

United, they mean that many once vibrant and pleasant town centres are withering away due to the corporate concrete constructions in out of town sites that now form a principle part of our mundane shopping lives.

The independent retailer is being forced to the point of extinction by the ever growing retail park which always inevitably includes an even bigger supermarket.

But the death of the small shops that once dominated our market towns is in no small part aided by the draconian and expensive parking charges collected by our local councils.

As any retailer will confirm, plentiful easy car parking is the life blood of a successful business. This is one of the reasons why the out-of-town parks are so popular. The developers tarmaced over great swathes of green fields to provide plentiful parking which is free and so it is easy. You dont have to feed the parking meters and the council coffers for the privilege of stopping there instead, you trip happily inside and feed the profits of Tesco, Sainsbury, Morrison and so on.

The Commission for Integrated Transport recently confirmed that the lack of parking charges at shopping centres such as Meadowhall, Sheffield, and The Metro Centre, Newcastle, are contributing the decline of the High Street, as shoppers abandon town and city centres.

In 2007, an all party group of MPs estimated that by 2015 there will be no independent food retailers left on the high street.Now you would have thought towns which have bucked the trend, which still have high streets of individuality and character, which have had the foresight to keep free parking, would do their utmost to preserve the bargain which has proven so attractive to shoppers.

Not Hambleton District Council. It wants to raise 450,000 a year out of the pockets of its own shoppers by putting parking charges on the most successful market towns in the area. Itll charge 1.50-a-day in Northallerton and Thirsk, 1 in Stokesley and 50p in Bedale.Northallerton has two very successful markets on Saturday and Wednesday, Thirsk on Saturday and Monday, Stokesley on Friday, and Bedale on Tuesday. These towns attract people from a very large rural area to shop. There is also a large tourist influx to the towns during the summer, and during the winter a substantial exodus of people from nearby towns such as Durham and Darlington who want to escape the bland homogeny of their high streets.

Don't think that just a few cafes and a load of charity shops will bring them flocking in! The view from our high streets is indeed grim. In 2008 we have a credit squeeze, the increasing cost of fuel adding to the increasing costs of everyday items despite our dear government telling us otherwise and the Chancellor increasing duty on beer, wine and spirits on an already hard hit licensing trade.

Things could not be worse for the independent retailer unless they are in North Yorkshire where the council seems intent on riding roughshod over local retailers opinions.

Lewis and Cooper in Northallerton is perhaps the quintessential example of an independent retailer. It has been providing an individual range of high quality produce much of it locally sourced for well over a century. It has also been providing customers with a reason to come to Northallerton town centre.

But now Lewis and Cooper has withdrawn its sponsorship from Hambleton councils food awards. Angela Shuker, manager of the Northallerton store, said in a letter to the authority: "We now feel that the time has come to withdraw this support and are asking all other business in the town to do the same, as you are threatening all our livelihoods with the introduction of car parking charges to Northallerton, Thirsk, Bedale and Stokesley.

"We would have liked to have thought we could all work together as businesses and council for the good and benefit of the district, but it appears that our views are just being swept under the table."

What hope has the independent retailer when even its own council wants to put the final nail in its coffin?

Though one has to be careful of the term "stopping the march of the supermarket", we need a vibrant free market economy with as few controls as possible. Putting a tax on parking is like introducing a very expensive control on those retailers who can least afford it. It is beyond comprehension.

North Yorkshire high streets are broad and wide for the putting out of stalls and are dominated by their old town halls which were placed so that a few controls could be kept on the most unscrupulous of traders

But now the soul and the heart will go out of those traditional, vibrant high streets as the shoppers will go to the out of town superstores. The independent retailer will become a thing of the past and the mega-supermarkets will have won the day with the aid of the local authority.

Peter Troy was chairman of the Darlington Branch of the Federation of Small Businesses from 1999-2005.

The Will of the People

There is something not quite right when our current foreign secretary can stand up in parliament and glibly tell MPs that, "The international consensus is that the will of the Zimbabwean people must be revealed and properly respected," when that self-same man has done his level best to ensure that the wishes of the British people (from Trade Unionists to Small Businesss People) on the constitutional Lisbon treaty are neither "revealed" nor "respected". Read the full post on EU Referendum

The Sunday Quote

Vision without action is merely a dream. Action without vision just passes the time. Vision with action can change the world!

Joel Arthur Barker

Suing the FSB

By Peter Troy
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I have always been very frank about my view of the UK's largest business organisation, the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) of which I am a member. For many years I was both a recruitment manager and activist for the organisation. I was and remain firmly committed to the founding principles of the now 220,000 member strong organisation.

Two weeks ago I felt that had no alternative other than to issue a claim in my local County Court for £4714.50 against the FSB, an action I took after careful consideration not least because I believe that my suing could be seriously and perhaps deliberately misunderstood.

The FSB has now confirmed that it intends to defend my action. The long and sorry tale that has led to this state of affairs started back in May 2006 when the FSB North East Regional Committee passed a motion proposed by the Regional Secretary Pamela Wright and seconded by her husband (now the National Chairman) John Wright to send me to Coventry, to use a trade union term. (John Wright was for many years a NALGO branch secretary and also an NEC member) . My 'offence' was to ask too many questions concerning the policy stance of the FSB in the North East over a period of some 14 months.

My questions were centered of the issue of how dangerously close I felt the FSB had become to close to the regional government agencies in the North East of England and that I was firmly of the belief that that the North Eastern organisation of the FSB needed to be far more rigorous in its lobbying activities in key issues with elected politicians. The Policy Unit of the FSB in the NE of England despite promises failed, in my considered opinion in 2006 to undertake any meaningful lobbying of NE local and national politicians on key issues. This dispute was a long time coming since for some time I had argued that the North East of England's policy team of the FSB was dominated by Labour Party supporters to the detriment of the Federation's A-political stance.

At a committee meeting The North East Regional Committee voted to ignore any further questions or queries from me and even when told later by the National Secretary of the FSB that they could not take that action they refused to apologize. My subsequent complaint against certain (most) members of the regional committee was the subject of an internal hearing before the FSB's Disputes and Disciplinary Committee (D&DC) on 26 June last year. My complaint was upheld in a detailed judgment dated 14 August 2007 which required the respondents to my complaint to apologize to me or face suspension from office for a period of time. Curiously the D&DC also imposed a sanction which was to expel me from the FSB; despite the fact that no complaint or indeed counter complaint was ever made against me. All the respondents to my complaint, bar one, apologized to me in writing as instructed.

I wrote to the Hon. National Secretary of the FSB, David Dexter on 30 August and again later in September to protest at the absurdity of the situation. Clearly it is very wrong that when a member complains about the wrongful actions of others and when that complaint is upheld he is thrown out of the organisation without the due process of a proper complaint and in blatant disregard for the principles of natural justice. The response of the FSB to my protests was to instruct solicitors who demanded that I summit an appeal based upon a point or points of law. Well I had no problem doing that and neither did my legal team but what should have been seen by the Directors of the Federation as an obvious breach of natural justice and their own rules became an expensive legal tangle requiring me to obtain detailed legal advice and action from specialist Lawyers.

Following a learned legal submission from my Barrister the Appeal Committee of the FSB confirmed, unanimously, that the D&DC of the FSB had acted in error and was in clear breach of its own rules in attempting to impose the sanction to expel me from an organisation that for many years I had been a very active and supportive member of.

As I state in my claim to the court: '' Had I not sought appropriate professional legal advice I would have been unfairly expelled from the organisation by order of the D&DC {of the FSB} who had fundamentally ignored the rules and procedures of the organisation and also of natural justice.

Given that the Federation had clearly breached its own rules and the terms of the arrangements of the organization's complaints procedures my Solicitor was firmly of the view that it was quite unreasonable of the Federation of Small Businesses to reject my claim for costs because as the Federation's Solicitors wrote: '' it is not in the rules to pay costs in the event of a successful claim''. Well my point is that it is not right for the Federation to rely upon the very same rules that it sought to ride rough shod over. This sorry tale is not a situation where I sought to appeal the decision to expel me simply because I disagreed with the decision itself. Neither is it a situation where I felt the decision had been reached by adhering to the principles of the FSB and natural justice. It was only when confronted with the work undertaken by my legal team that Appeals Committee accepted that I had been wronged, but reused to pay my legal costs to wright that wrong.

So there we have it I was first sent to Coventry by the FSB in the North East for asking too many questions that they did not like, then threatened with expulsion after complaining about the actions of certain activists and finally left out of pocked to the tune of over £4,700 defending my right to be a member in which I was at one time a high profile activist (enter Peter Troy FSB into Google Search). The important point of principle is that as the Federation of Small Businesses is so seriously out of order in their attempt to expel me (now by their own admission) they should of course, pay my legal costs.

After all of the above am I still a supporter of the FSB? Indeed I am, provided the well resourced organisation fights (I mean truly fights and not placates) the most anti small businesses government that has ever ruled this country. By that I do not mean our government in Westminster (though its track record in helping small businesses is mostly hype) I am of course referring to our true supreme government based quite firmly in all its huge glory (and vast cost) in Brussels. Further more the package of FSB member benefits represents excellent value to the small business operator particularly in the current claimant of huge over regulation that acts without doubt as a significant barrier (erected mostly by the EU) to business growth.

However further evidence, if it is needed, that the FSB do not like to be told that they are placating our political masters in Brussels against the wishes of the majority of their members is best provided in the sorry tale of injustice above. The case continues.