Scandal-less

I'm left distinctly underwhelmed by this Vince Cable story frankly. I was all geared up to wade in and it's just such an anti-climax. After all the hype of Cable as a tax dodger, avoider, evader and possibly invisible ninja I read through the sun article and find this (later on of course, the later something is in an article the less attention people pay to it):

"They said an error was discovered by his personal accountants in January while his tax return for the previous financial year was being finalised. The accountants immediately alerted HMRC officials"

Now I'm a long way from being any sort of accountant, let alone an expert on any sort of elusive manoeuvring on the grounds of tax. But I'd have thought that one of the main rules to do it would be to well, not call up Revenue and Customs to tell them you haven't paid enough tax. Seems a bit of a giveaway, maybe it's one of those double-bluff things.

Really the most interesting thing is the Sun's line on it, namely that the knives are out for Vince Cable and I suspect Lib Dems in general. Not a surprise certainly, hostility from the newspapers generally and especially the tabloids is mostly part and parcel of being a Lib Dem, but still a concerning indicator. We're clearly well above the parapet for the rest of this parliament (a good thing) but while the other two usually have at least some of the press fighting their corner (although there doesn't seem to be much enthusiasm in the Red-Ed corner) we may have to face down years of being fired upon from all sides.

The Huhne story seems to be going nowhere very slowly and repetitively, this is likewisea very small spark fanned into an awful lot of smoke, but all mud hurled leaves a little bit on its target and another 3 1/2 years of this could build up enough to make a difference.

Or in short the story doesn't worry me, its delivery does.

Cable fails to pay tax bill

Handy government hints for drug drivers

I'm not a fan of most of the British government's advertising efforts that we get bombarded with regularly, most of them seem more aimed at convincing potential voters that the government is doing a good job (i.e. effectively a government funded advert for the Labour party) rather than having any positive effects (especially the "we're closing in series").

To its credit this latest effort doesn't seem to be in that mould and is actually aimed at reducing the numbers of people drug driving. The downside is that it is mindblowingly stupid. Here it is from youtube for those lucky enough to have escaped seeing it.



As I said, on first watching I was vaguely pleased that at least it wasn't a covert Labour PPB. Then another thought struck me, the message that you get from that advert is not "don't drug drive". What you get is "here's how the police might spot that you've taken drugs" and what this leads on to is the obvious strategy of: if you have taken drugs and there's police around then don't let them see your eyes. Whether that's not staring at a police car as it goes past or not looking them in the face if they're talking to you for another reason.

In short not only is the advert unlikely to stop people drug driving, it's going to help them avoid detection for it. I don't know what the creators were on when they dreamed this up (all bad puns are as ever completely intentional) but hopefully they'll think their next advert through properly.