It doesn’t matter whether you’ve spent the past 17 days weeping under a purple blanket of sadness or sitting in your bedsit seething with rage that a big-eared man who can’t operate a fountain pen is now our head of state. Because we must all now come together and face up to the fact that this country is in a right old pickle.
The main problem, as I see it, is that people have recently got it into their heads that the government has access to a magic money tree, which can be harvested of its low-hanging banknotes whenever things go a bit awry.
We’ve seen that banks get bailed out when they make a mess of everything, and we think that we should receive the same treatment when we can’t afford to pay our heating bills, or if our holiday is cancelled, or if we need to reclad our flat.
And to make everything worse, we now seem to have got it into our heads that doing an honest day’s work is entirely optional. You down tools when you want to be at home mourning the loss of the Queen, and during Covid, and when you want bigger wages for sitting in a train’s driving seat as it goes along. And it’s all OK because the government is there to make everything all right. And you don’t need to be an economist to see that this can’t possibly go on.
I’m definitely not an economist. I studied it for an A-level, but it was so monumentally complicated that I used to spend my entire time in the classroom either looking at Lockheed Martin spy plane adverts in The Economist, or doing the Melody Maker crossword, or yawning.
All I can remember is that a bunch of dead people like Keynes, Smith, Mill and Marx had all studied economics very carefully and come up with a wide variety of answers. So how was I supposed to work out which was correct?
How was anyone? We like to think that the world’s economic system is run by people with tall foreheads who have this gift — but if they did, we wouldn’t constantly lurch from crisis to crisis. We wouldn’t have had the crashes of 1929 or 1973 or 2008, and we wouldn’t be sitting here now with inflation on a full combat power-climb towards 20 per cent.
This brings us on to our new chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng. People in the know say he’s an “extremely good friend” of Truss and that he has the sort of financial mind that knows how to balance interest rates and quantitative easing. But does he? He went to one university, got a first and then went to another. Which suggests that this is a man who liked university life. Which means he likes scarves and supper clubs and having a lot of debt.
Sure, one of his degrees is in economic history, but so what? I have a certificate that says I can do Teeline shorthand at 110 words a minute, but that doesn’t mean I should be entrusted with writing Hansard every day.
The truth is that the economy is un-understandable, and completely un-runnable without a functioning crystal ball that can accurately predict wars and crop failures. Which means it’s all guesswork, and anyone can do that.
Even The Guardian. It says that a net wealth tax on the richest 1 per cent of the nation’s households would generate between £70 billion and £130 billion. That’s a big spread, because it’s a guess, but let’s go for the middle ground of £100 billion. Which isn’t even enough to pay for that silly railway line from London to the north of England.
Even if the government taxed the country’s top 20 billionaires 100 per cent of every single thing they own, it’d still only get £266 billion. And it’d waste it on something stupid. And it’d only get it once.
The fact is that the richest 1 per cent already pay 30 per cent of all income tax revenues. Yup, a third of every single penny the government gets from the working population is coughed up by just 300,000 people. So let’s not be daft. We are all paying enough tax as it is, and it’s not enough to pay the bills. So we need another solution. Which isn’t printing more money, because, for reasons no one understands, that makes inflation worse.
Luckily, I have one. Instead of asking us for more cash, the government should spend less. Like The Guardian and Kwarteng, I’m only guessing now, but I can’t imagine it’ll be hard to achieve because I’m constantly amazed by how often we are forced to engage with government employees.
They’re there in a flash if a parent smacks the bottom of a spoilt child or if a member of the Women’s Institute tries to sell jam at the village fete without a best-before date on the label. They live on every motorway gantry and in every school and every hospital. Watching us. Monitoring us. Bossing us around. We’ve never wanted them and now we can’t afford them.
But there’s a trick I’ve learnt over the years from making TV shows that turn out to be too long. You know you have to make cuts, so you make a nibble here and a nibble there, and you keep on doing this until eventually the story you were trying to tell is so garbled, it no longer makes sense. It’s far better, I’ve discovered, to lose an entire story arc rather than endlessly slice away at all of them.
So to solve the economy what we need to do is make sensible cuts in all government departments, cutting their staffing levels by, say, half. And then, rather than reducing them still further to the point where they don’t work at all, we get rid of one entire department altogether.
I have an idea on that too. Many people are now saying that we should rid the country of the monarchy because this ancient institution is no longer relevant. I respect that point of view, and I hope they respect mine when I suggest the department that has to go is the NHS.”
That’s a whole lot of words to say “No-one understands economics, I shouldn’t pay more tax, **** the NHS and you should respect my opinion on that because I listened to yours about the monarchy”
I didn’t think it was possible for me to dislike this guy any more, but he just proved me wrong
>I’m not an economist
This one sentence explains the rest of the article.
Best stick to driving cars fast around tracks, Jeremy, because there are a thousand different things in this article that are both wrong and totally at odds with what the public think. I mean, he was terrified by the potential effects of covid yet here here he is decrying the very necessary lockdown measures and those taken to ensure people could afford to survive in a world where going to work was made illegal for most people on grounds of public safety.
If there’s a debate to be had arising from this article, it’s what we want the government to do, monitor, regulate or set policy on going forward. Indeed there might be room for some [quangos](https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations) to be dissolved or their responsibilities merged as it looks like there’s some duplication.
An interesting debate might be which of them we think have mission-crept or think could be scrapped or merged.
For instance, can someone explain why we have the Office for National Statistics *and* the UK Statistics Authority? It strikes me that their roles overlap (of course I’m not suggesting for one minute that binning off one or the other or any other public body could solve our country’s fiscal woes – just interested in what the point of some of them is).
> I have an idea on that too. Many people are now saying that we should rid the country of the monarchy because this ancient institution is no longer relevant. I respect that point of view, and I hope they respect mine when I suggest the department that has to go is the NHS.”
Fuck you. If it’s a choice between monarchy or the NHS, the NHS wins every time.
Well, everything works when media coverage is needed. All generalizations are false including this one.
There are two types of people who think the NHS should go.
1) those people who have never been sick/ill/injured or suffer from a chronic condition and believe that they are never likely too
Or
2) People with enough money to gamble on not being sick/ill, but if they do they can afford to pay for it.
For everyone else, they appreciate what a massive safety net the NHS is when things to go wrong.
Anyone who thinks the NHS should ‘go’ *really* needs to subscribe to a few general US subs or search Reddit for posts containing “medical bill American”.
*Edit: yes, yes there are other forms of social healthcare. I am aware, but Clarkson isn’t saying let’s swap one form of socialised healthcare for the other. He appears to imply social for private by ‘getting rid of the NHS’ rather than ‘adapting the NHS’.*
And these are not rare outliers. Too often people with *decent* insurance policies talk about still receiving bills that are financially ruinous (tens or hundreds of thousands) – often the first +$10k isn’t even covered by insurance.
I really don’t think enough British people understand the extent of costs.
Rich guy unconcerned about abolition of free healthcare. More at 10.
From the guy who threw a fit and assaulted a member of his staff for not getting him the food he wanted.
For this he suffered no long lasting repercussions.
Windfall tax energy suppliers now. I don’t fucking get it! The most recent decisions by Truss and her minions are destroying the country faster than even Bojo managed it.
Jeremy clarkson revealing that he’s still a politically illiterate arsehole to the suprise of absolutely no-one
Oh look – Jeremy Clarkson has a controversial opinion just in time for his paid column again.
Better idea: charge Jeremy Clarkson 100% tax and use it to fund basically anything he dislikes.
Hear me out on this.
Firstly the NHS is great but it is failing in so many ways. The issue with the American system is that the hospitals and GPs are made to make money and that’s it. So the insurance companies are then made to make money and try to avoid paying out. Problem is that it’s far to gone now to recover it’s best to stick with how it is.
Privatising the NHS would be in its best interest but there should be no get outs for insurance companies not to pay out for treatments. If you’re paying for it then you get it. No different levels of cover, no arguing saying it is a cosmetic surgery even though it’s part of a surgery. No avoiding paying out for cancer treatments because you smoke/drink/drugs etc. You pay a premium to cover it and you pay more if you do drugs/drink/smoke to cover the cost. Just like you do on cover for your mortgage if you have it.
The other thing is that our wages would need to increase as well in order to cover this cost. So if that means the average rate for a 24-40 year old is £100 pcm then your wage should go up by this a month. Otherwise the system will fail as no one could afford the insurance. You also shouldn’t be paying any taxes on the insurance premium.
As I said I think the NHS great and it’s one of the best things about the UK. It doesn’t care if you are homeless, rich, poor or whatever. It provided the care you need and you don’t have to worry about it.
Stick to talking about motors Clarkson, lest you embarrass yourself further.
I always knew he was a moron but this is a push even for him.
Who gives a shit what this wealthy dinosaur thinks really?
The £ was at 1.40 to the $ before Brexit – then crashed. It’s stayed low since.
Kwasi and Truss are desperate for growth – but won’t join the single market to get the growth!!!
Remember that Amazon paid his production company over £100m for his Top Gear spin off show. He can afford private medical – so what does he care about the NHS?
Also – in the USA the largest private medical insurance company is UHG. It was $20-60 a share 15 years ago. It’s now $500 – the company is worth $500bn. It’s got very very rich off the poor and workers of USA, overpaying for medicine and healthcare. That’s where a lot of the money has gone – private medical insurance companies.
Average cost of healthcare per person in the US is £7000/yr vs £3000/yr in the UK. If we can’t afford rising gas prices then we certainly can’t afford to scrap the NHS.
Having worked in the US and seen colleagues laden with debt through no fault of their own and payroll/managed insurance plans, you see quickly it’s a far inferior system. Yes, Jeremy would be better off but at the expense of everyone else.
It is really odd as such a decent individual, and you do see being one, can be such a self absorbed, obtuse, arrogant twat.
I bet this idiot voted for Truss in the Tory leadership race so he could pay less tax and doesn’t care about anyone else at all. Go back to your farm Clarkson and stop bragging about how ignorant your opinions are while inflicting them on us regardless.
Just because you lack the IQ to grasp economics doesn’t mean Keynes was wrong and the whole thing is unsolvable. It just means you don’t get it.
Those of us who don’t have private health care and didn’t get a massive tax cut need the NHS.
He didn’t look to me to mind the NHS when he was gawking into my Nan’s hospital room when she was at the end of her time , whilst wheeling his son in a wheelchair after an accident (of course it may have been private at JR but doubt it 😂)
23 comments
Article contents:
It doesn’t matter whether you’ve spent the past 17 days weeping under a purple blanket of sadness or sitting in your bedsit seething with rage that a big-eared man who can’t operate a fountain pen is now our head of state. Because we must all now come together and face up to the fact that this country is in a right old pickle.
The main problem, as I see it, is that people have recently got it into their heads that the government has access to a magic money tree, which can be harvested of its low-hanging banknotes whenever things go a bit awry.
We’ve seen that banks get bailed out when they make a mess of everything, and we think that we should receive the same treatment when we can’t afford to pay our heating bills, or if our holiday is cancelled, or if we need to reclad our flat.
And to make everything worse, we now seem to have got it into our heads that doing an honest day’s work is entirely optional. You down tools when you want to be at home mourning the loss of the Queen, and during Covid, and when you want bigger wages for sitting in a train’s driving seat as it goes along. And it’s all OK because the government is there to make everything all right. And you don’t need to be an economist to see that this can’t possibly go on.
I’m definitely not an economist. I studied it for an A-level, but it was so monumentally complicated that I used to spend my entire time in the classroom either looking at Lockheed Martin spy plane adverts in The Economist, or doing the Melody Maker crossword, or yawning.
All I can remember is that a bunch of dead people like Keynes, Smith, Mill and Marx had all studied economics very carefully and come up with a wide variety of answers. So how was I supposed to work out which was correct?
How was anyone? We like to think that the world’s economic system is run by people with tall foreheads who have this gift — but if they did, we wouldn’t constantly lurch from crisis to crisis. We wouldn’t have had the crashes of 1929 or 1973 or 2008, and we wouldn’t be sitting here now with inflation on a full combat power-climb towards 20 per cent.
This brings us on to our new chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng. People in the know say he’s an “extremely good friend” of Truss and that he has the sort of financial mind that knows how to balance interest rates and quantitative easing. But does he? He went to one university, got a first and then went to another. Which suggests that this is a man who liked university life. Which means he likes scarves and supper clubs and having a lot of debt.
Sure, one of his degrees is in economic history, but so what? I have a certificate that says I can do Teeline shorthand at 110 words a minute, but that doesn’t mean I should be entrusted with writing Hansard every day.
The truth is that the economy is un-understandable, and completely un-runnable without a functioning crystal ball that can accurately predict wars and crop failures. Which means it’s all guesswork, and anyone can do that.
Even The Guardian. It says that a net wealth tax on the richest 1 per cent of the nation’s households would generate between £70 billion and £130 billion. That’s a big spread, because it’s a guess, but let’s go for the middle ground of £100 billion. Which isn’t even enough to pay for that silly railway line from London to the north of England.
Even if the government taxed the country’s top 20 billionaires 100 per cent of every single thing they own, it’d still only get £266 billion. And it’d waste it on something stupid. And it’d only get it once.
The fact is that the richest 1 per cent already pay 30 per cent of all income tax revenues. Yup, a third of every single penny the government gets from the working population is coughed up by just 300,000 people. So let’s not be daft. We are all paying enough tax as it is, and it’s not enough to pay the bills. So we need another solution. Which isn’t printing more money, because, for reasons no one understands, that makes inflation worse.
Luckily, I have one. Instead of asking us for more cash, the government should spend less. Like The Guardian and Kwarteng, I’m only guessing now, but I can’t imagine it’ll be hard to achieve because I’m constantly amazed by how often we are forced to engage with government employees.
They’re there in a flash if a parent smacks the bottom of a spoilt child or if a member of the Women’s Institute tries to sell jam at the village fete without a best-before date on the label. They live on every motorway gantry and in every school and every hospital. Watching us. Monitoring us. Bossing us around. We’ve never wanted them and now we can’t afford them.
But there’s a trick I’ve learnt over the years from making TV shows that turn out to be too long. You know you have to make cuts, so you make a nibble here and a nibble there, and you keep on doing this until eventually the story you were trying to tell is so garbled, it no longer makes sense. It’s far better, I’ve discovered, to lose an entire story arc rather than endlessly slice away at all of them.
So to solve the economy what we need to do is make sensible cuts in all government departments, cutting their staffing levels by, say, half. And then, rather than reducing them still further to the point where they don’t work at all, we get rid of one entire department altogether.
I have an idea on that too. Many people are now saying that we should rid the country of the monarchy because this ancient institution is no longer relevant. I respect that point of view, and I hope they respect mine when I suggest the department that has to go is the NHS.”
That’s a whole lot of words to say “No-one understands economics, I shouldn’t pay more tax, **** the NHS and you should respect my opinion on that because I listened to yours about the monarchy”
I didn’t think it was possible for me to dislike this guy any more, but he just proved me wrong
>I’m not an economist
This one sentence explains the rest of the article.
Best stick to driving cars fast around tracks, Jeremy, because there are a thousand different things in this article that are both wrong and totally at odds with what the public think. I mean, he was terrified by the potential effects of covid yet here here he is decrying the very necessary lockdown measures and those taken to ensure people could afford to survive in a world where going to work was made illegal for most people on grounds of public safety.
If there’s a debate to be had arising from this article, it’s what we want the government to do, monitor, regulate or set policy on going forward. Indeed there might be room for some [quangos](https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations) to be dissolved or their responsibilities merged as it looks like there’s some duplication.
An interesting debate might be which of them we think have mission-crept or think could be scrapped or merged.
For instance, can someone explain why we have the Office for National Statistics *and* the UK Statistics Authority? It strikes me that their roles overlap (of course I’m not suggesting for one minute that binning off one or the other or any other public body could solve our country’s fiscal woes – just interested in what the point of some of them is).
> I have an idea on that too. Many people are now saying that we should rid the country of the monarchy because this ancient institution is no longer relevant. I respect that point of view, and I hope they respect mine when I suggest the department that has to go is the NHS.”
Fuck you. If it’s a choice between monarchy or the NHS, the NHS wins every time.
Well, everything works when media coverage is needed. All generalizations are false including this one.
There are two types of people who think the NHS should go.
1) those people who have never been sick/ill/injured or suffer from a chronic condition and believe that they are never likely too
Or
2) People with enough money to gamble on not being sick/ill, but if they do they can afford to pay for it.
For everyone else, they appreciate what a massive safety net the NHS is when things to go wrong.
Anyone who thinks the NHS should ‘go’ *really* needs to subscribe to a few general US subs or search Reddit for posts containing “medical bill American”.
*Edit: yes, yes there are other forms of social healthcare. I am aware, but Clarkson isn’t saying let’s swap one form of socialised healthcare for the other. He appears to imply social for private by ‘getting rid of the NHS’ rather than ‘adapting the NHS’.*
For example:
[friend got his medical bill for cancer AFTER fighting with them because they claimed chemo therapy was “cosmetic” this is after they slashed what he owed in half… he had good insurance too, for the American standard](https://old.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/comments/wn0to9/friend_got_his_medical_bill_for_cancer_after)
[American redditor posts medical bill for his daughter staying in the NICU for 12 days Queens County, New York](https://old.reddit.com/r/ThatsInsane/comments/wkfhy5/american_redditor_posts_medical_bill_for_his)
[More Than 100 Million Americans Have Medical Debt. People with medical debt were two to three times more likely to be unable to pay rent or utilities and experience eviction than those without health care bills](https://old.reddit.com/r/science/comments/xj4cdc/more_than_100_million_americans_have_medical_debt)
And these are not rare outliers. Too often people with *decent* insurance policies talk about still receiving bills that are financially ruinous (tens or hundreds of thousands) – often the first +$10k isn’t even covered by insurance.
I really don’t think enough British people understand the extent of costs.
Rich guy unconcerned about abolition of free healthcare. More at 10.
From the guy who threw a fit and assaulted a member of his staff for not getting him the food he wanted.
For this he suffered no long lasting repercussions.
Windfall tax energy suppliers now. I don’t fucking get it! The most recent decisions by Truss and her minions are destroying the country faster than even Bojo managed it.
Jeremy clarkson revealing that he’s still a politically illiterate arsehole to the suprise of absolutely no-one
Oh look – Jeremy Clarkson has a controversial opinion just in time for his paid column again.
Better idea: charge Jeremy Clarkson 100% tax and use it to fund basically anything he dislikes.
Hear me out on this.
Firstly the NHS is great but it is failing in so many ways. The issue with the American system is that the hospitals and GPs are made to make money and that’s it. So the insurance companies are then made to make money and try to avoid paying out. Problem is that it’s far to gone now to recover it’s best to stick with how it is.
Privatising the NHS would be in its best interest but there should be no get outs for insurance companies not to pay out for treatments. If you’re paying for it then you get it. No different levels of cover, no arguing saying it is a cosmetic surgery even though it’s part of a surgery. No avoiding paying out for cancer treatments because you smoke/drink/drugs etc. You pay a premium to cover it and you pay more if you do drugs/drink/smoke to cover the cost. Just like you do on cover for your mortgage if you have it.
The other thing is that our wages would need to increase as well in order to cover this cost. So if that means the average rate for a 24-40 year old is £100 pcm then your wage should go up by this a month. Otherwise the system will fail as no one could afford the insurance. You also shouldn’t be paying any taxes on the insurance premium.
As I said I think the NHS great and it’s one of the best things about the UK. It doesn’t care if you are homeless, rich, poor or whatever. It provided the care you need and you don’t have to worry about it.
Stick to talking about motors Clarkson, lest you embarrass yourself further.
I always knew he was a moron but this is a push even for him.
Who gives a shit what this wealthy dinosaur thinks really?
The £ was at 1.40 to the $ before Brexit – then crashed. It’s stayed low since.
Kwasi and Truss are desperate for growth – but won’t join the single market to get the growth!!!
Remember that Amazon paid his production company over £100m for his Top Gear spin off show. He can afford private medical – so what does he care about the NHS?
Also – in the USA the largest private medical insurance company is UHG. It was $20-60 a share 15 years ago. It’s now $500 – the company is worth $500bn. It’s got very very rich off the poor and workers of USA, overpaying for medicine and healthcare. That’s where a lot of the money has gone – private medical insurance companies.
Average cost of healthcare per person in the US is £7000/yr vs £3000/yr in the UK. If we can’t afford rising gas prices then we certainly can’t afford to scrap the NHS.
Having worked in the US and seen colleagues laden with debt through no fault of their own and payroll/managed insurance plans, you see quickly it’s a far inferior system. Yes, Jeremy would be better off but at the expense of everyone else.
It is really odd as such a decent individual, and you do see being one, can be such a self absorbed, obtuse, arrogant twat.
I bet this idiot voted for Truss in the Tory leadership race so he could pay less tax and doesn’t care about anyone else at all. Go back to your farm Clarkson and stop bragging about how ignorant your opinions are while inflicting them on us regardless.
Just because you lack the IQ to grasp economics doesn’t mean Keynes was wrong and the whole thing is unsolvable. It just means you don’t get it.
Those of us who don’t have private health care and didn’t get a massive tax cut need the NHS.
He didn’t look to me to mind the NHS when he was gawking into my Nan’s hospital room when she was at the end of her time , whilst wheeling his son in a wheelchair after an accident (of course it may have been private at JR but doubt it 😂)