That Conservative Party Draft EU Bill In Full...

DRAFT European Union (Referendum) Bill

A

BILL

TO

Make provision for the holding of a referendum in the United Kingdom on the United Kingdom’s continued membership of the European Union.



Be it enacted by the Queen’s most Excellent Majesty, by and with the advice and consent of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and Commons, in this present Parliament assembled, and by the authority of the same, as follows:-


1. Referendum on the United Kingdom’s continued membership of the European Union
(1) A referendum is to be held on the United Kingdom’s continued membership of the European Union.
(1A) Oh yes it will.
(1B)  No, really.
(1C) Look, we mean it this time.  We really do.
(1D) OK, I know we said we have one like this before and didn't, but this time it's different, Nigel Farage is at the door and he's looking very smug.
(2) The referendum must be held before 31 December 2017.
(2A) Or... ummm... Douglas Carswell will get really upset.
(2B) Unless the government of the day decides not to hold it after all.
(2C) Which they will be perfectly entitled to do.
(3) The Secretary of State shall by order appoint the day on which the referendum is to be held.
(3A) Unless he puts forward a Bill to rescind this Bill.
(4) An order under this section may not be made unless a draft of the order has been laid before, and approved by a resolution of, each House of Parliament.
(5) The question that is to appear on the ballot papers is—
       “Do you think that the United Kingdom should remain a member of the European Union?”
(6) In Wales, a Welsh version of the question is also to appear on the ballot papers, as provided by order.
(6A) Scotland & Northern Ireland can cope with just an English question.
(6B) England probably won't, if someone could kindly translate the question into Polish, that'd be great, thanks.

[...]

6. Short title
(1) This Act may be cited as the Desperately Trying to Save Our Bacon (Farage) Act 2013.

In defence of free and open speech

Stephen Fry, on respect for others in the language we use and on the need to prevent language being directed and used against specific groups.

A salutary reminder.

The letter home that he quotes is chilling, and a plain example of where politically correct euphemism can lead.  So, please, say what you mean, mean what you say, and criticise others for the views they hold - not the manner in which they express themselves.  

The reality of business in the UK

My practice has now been trading for exactly a year, as of today (yay!).  So I thought I'd look back at where the spoils went.

Now, you will all know my views by now.  So I was (I admit) expecting a particular result.  But it still took me by surprise:

These are the actual figures.  Cross my heart.  They consist of:

Me - this is the net cash received by me, i.e. the cash I have drawn from the business to live on minus the cash I put in to start it off with.

Staff - a simple one, their net salaries over the year.

Government - is the total due in respect of the year, including my own personal tax due for the year in question (based on the income ascribed to me under HMRC rules), the total PAYE and NI that I have paid to HMRC in respect of my staff's salaries, the total VAT I have paid for the year, and the official fees I have paid to HMG or its proxies on behalf of clients.

Note, there is no Corporation tax in there.  None.  Zero.  I avoided it entirely by incorporating as an LLP.  So, go on - call me a tax dodger.  Accuse me of not making my fair contribution.

Go on.  I dare you.

She snatched my milk

I was at primary school in the 1970s, and I remember school milk.  It used to arrived in little half-height crates filled with little glass bottles that looked like real milk bottles but smaller - I assume 1/3 pint each.  They all had silver foil tops on, which were marked with either a "3" or a "4", I have no idea why.  I once asked my teacher if that meant they contained 3 or 4 pints, she said no it didn't as a 3 pint bottle would be much larger, and gestured how high it would be.

I liked that teacher.  She taught me to read, using the books in the series "The Village with Three Corners".  They were brilliant; they had proper stories in them, so that you wanted to get to the end in order to find out what happened to Roger Red Hat.  Once I found that I could read anything, I never stopped.  You could read brilliant and exciting stories, like "The Stepping Stones", in which Roger Red Hat has to cross a dangerous river.  Or you could read hilarious stuff like "The Cat in The Hat", I remember that book rendering me insensible with laughter on the (linoleum) floor of the classroom.  I owe that teacher a huge debt of gratitude, but I can't even remember her name.

Anyway, the milk would arrive at some point during the morning, and would wait until there was a suitable break in the lessons.  Then we would collect a blue straw and a bottle and take it back to our seat, and push the straw through the tin foil lid to drink the milk.  By then, it was always warm, and not very appetising.  I used to finish it though, because one of my Mum's frequent comments was about how good for you milk was.  Lots of my classmates didn't - I'd say about half the milk was left undrunk, not to mention the bottles that were still in the crate untouched.  Inevitably, there would be a long delay before the bottles were collected, and the other kids would spill some, so the classroom would fill with the smell of warm and off milk.  To this day, I still detest that smell.

One day, suddenly, the milk stopped coming.

None of us cared.  I stopped feeling under pressure to drink this horrible warm stuff, and the smell eventually worked its way out of the carpets.  We spent our time doing lessons instead, or reading more adventures of Roger Red Hat.

So there, in a nutshell, you have an early appreciation on my part of the effect of government initiatives.  Stuff that most people don't want or need is acquired at who knows what cost, distributed inefficiently to people who don't really need it, distracting them from doing what they are there to do and making them waste their time doing something else instead.  I was a Thatcherite by the age of 6, I just didn't realise it until I was about 22.

Thank you, Lady T.  RIP.

A thought

So, nurses are to be forced to spend a year wiping bottoms so that we can make sure that they are suitably caring people to become nurses.

I can see the sentiment, and agree with it.  But the means seems to be a little obtuse.  Is that the only way of making sure that someone is a caring person?  Can we not, perhaps, watch them in action for a while to make sure?  Do we need to take (ex hypothesi) skilled and intelligent people and make them waste a year of their time proving a point, when they could be doing something more valuable instead?

And where does the precedent take us?  Doctors work alongside nurses in delivering care, I am told.  So why not make them work as a healthcare assistant for a year before starting their medical degree?

I hear also that the working conditions in the Mid Staffs NHS Trust were unconducive to staff who wanted to warn management about problems.  Obviously the NHS managers did not care adequately about the patients.  Should they have spent a year working as a healthcare assistant first?  Surely, what is good for the nurses is good for all the other hospital staff first.

And what of the Minister for Health?  With responsibility for so many caring professionals, with oversight of the system for caring for the entire UK population,... well, the logic is inescapable.

And one last, quiet worry.  What about the healthcare assistants?  If the nurses are too posh to wash because they were never healthcare assistants, what does that say that we think the healthcare assistants are?

RIP my Mum

As the phrase goes, her long battle with cancer ended today, Mothers' Day, leaving her now in peace. But there was so much more to her life than the way it ended. A dedicated primary school teacher of the (literally) old school who believed in imparting knowledge to children and ensuring that they could all read, write and add up, she also embraced what were then new methods to ensure that this process was done gently and kindly - with the child running alongside rather than dragged behind.

At home, she brought up three children who knew that help with schoolwork would always be available, and that the suffix "It's for school" would guarantee a positive response to any "Can I..." question. To say we had an educational springboard is beyond understatement. And it worked, too; all three of us are graduates, and are now a patent attorney, a consultant radiologist, and a journalist. She was proud, and she made sure that we knew she was.

Warm and affectionate, she made our home into the safe refuge from the outside world that it should be. As a family, we were always slightly different, slightly out of place, and the security of home that she created for us was a source of strength.

She really did fight the cancer that eventually took her. She also kept her sense of humour to the end, teasing all three of us in different ways. We were blessed with over a week's warning of the end, and were able to use that, to gather, and to say goodbye. There were moments of wit that week that were uniquely her; I will not forget them.

Bye Mum xx

Why we should all worry about worrying about being tracked online

The Grauniad has published a fairly sensible article about online privacy.  Yes, relax, I really did say that, but it's a technical topic not a political one, so I'm not going soft.  They point to a new piece of software being developed by a nasty horrible private sector company (they couldn't help it...) which is very efficient at tracking people by their online persona and identifying outliers - who may merit closer inspection by the authorities.

All very easy to justify, after all most of us are normal apart from the terrorists who do different stuff.  Except that, as the Guardian rightly points out, statistics don't work like that - there are (thankfully) very few terrorists and a very large number of people, so the vast majority of the outliers will be perfectly decent citizens who suddenly start wondering why there is a big black Transit van at the end of their road...

I do of course wish the Guardian had realised this in 1997 instead of 2010, but better late than never.  I suspect they may forget it in 2015, though.  But that misses the point of this post.  The article warns us that we reveal ourselves via the online footprint we leave, and that authorities can glean a lot of information in this way, perfectly legally, and without any oversight.

So, where was the article published?  In the online Guardian, of course, with a comments section beneath it that could be used by that nasty piece of software.  On a site that uses cookies - not just site performance cookies that make the site work consistently for you, but also advertising cookies that, err, track your behaviour on the site and retain information about what you look at, what you take an interest in.

But they have a privacy policy, surely?  Of course.  And they promise that they will "do our utmost to protect user privacy through the appropriate use of the security technology".  By, for example, collecting information  about your behaviour which enables them to group it with users that show similar behaviour. Just like the software mentioned in the article.

Now, don't get me wrong, I don't think there's anything especially unusual or wrong about the Guardian's privacy policies.  But it struck me as amusing.