It could be on any desk in any country.

My two dogs had minor operations today. Both are doing fine and have just eaten heartily. I don’t mind the vet’s bill, but 20% VAT on top? It seems rather callous of the Government to penalise us like this when we want to get our pets well again.

Surely paying VAT on their food is tax enough?

VAT was 8% in the 1970s, then went up to 15%, then 17½% and now it’s 20%. Not only that, but the product range widened to include restaurant meals, takeaway food, confectionery, pet food, etc.

Now there are extra taxes on flights, insurance premiums, utility bills… it goes on and on, and all these are taxes on already taxed income!

And I dread to think what ridiculous lengths politicians will go to with their “green” taxes.

When does enough become enough?

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So, how much is that doggy in the window?

Dogs are often bought for children and valued by the elderly and lonely, but don't expect the government not to fleece you any way it can.

Cost of puppy: £600

Cost of lifetime’s food @ £1 per day: £5,113

Cost of vet’s bills (vaccinations; estimated other): £800

The VAT element (@the 20% rate) of the total is £1,085.50.

And I haven’t included the cost of toys, kennels and grooming, which are at least a more legitimate target for VAT, if we must have it.

But no wonder the dog licence was stopped. The small amount wasn’t worth collecting. This VAT racket is in a different league.

Would it be inappropriate to call it organised crime? Well, we seem to have the Mafia running things.

Whoop-di-doop.

That’s the good news. It is only because my earnings have been quite a bit lower than usual that I will especially benefit from the increase in personal allowances.

I wonder if the Chancellor will be making the pilgrimage to the Bilderberg Conference again this year to get more instructions from the globalist cabal on how best to destroy the rest of our economy.

Beans and silly sausage?

No, it’s not a gripe about the Tories increasing the overseas aid budget to help regimes like Pakistan’s that buys weapons of mass destruction (real ones) and puts people on death row for talking about Christ.

Today is the BBC’s annual attempt to get the land’s couch potatoes to phone up and donate money to “good causes”. To the Children In Need viewer, charity begins at home – and ends there in most cases – in the sense that they are “entertained” in their living rooms during the 36 hours the show runs (it only feels that long!) and don’t even need to leave the chaise longe to telephone Pudsey’s special “give us yer effing money” number. Not that the loveable, perpetually injured bear would use Geldoffian profanities.

While soap opera “stars” make fools of themselves on the telethon, the real heroes of the hour are those brave men and women all across the land being sponsored for sitting in baths of cold baked beans – not thinking that they are wasting an awful lot of food which could feed the hungry.

I think the problem is that, with an increasingly dumbed down population, we need to be told when to give and to whom. I have lost count of the number of charities who write to me with literature whose text and pictures are aimed at making me feel guilty. I have news for them: I don’t! Many of them are big businesses with highly-paid staff in some cases – I don’t mean the many faithful volunteers, but the chief execs, directors and area managers.

I had written more about specific charities I have studied, but have decided to keep it for another post as it has ended up longer than expected.

Have we lost the real meaning of “charity”?

I have made the effort to talk to some of the alcoholics who stay at one of the town’s hostels (called bed and breakfasts) and invited a couple into my home for cups of tea and meals and given practical help with such things as dealing with the “authorities”.

Not that everyone could do that, but being a reformed drinker myself, it is easier for me to understand them and not be afraid. It would be easier if I gave £20 to an alcohol charity to employ someone to go to the B&B to make a cup of tea and offer advice!

Not nearly as rewarding though.

If we as a nation have to be either made to feel guilty or “entertained” in order to give money or help to people/charities then something has gone badly wrong with our attitude towards others less fortunate.

The tax of between five and seven per cent would add up to £14,000 to the cost of buying an average newbuild property, with this figure increasing as the housing market recovers.

First-time buyers are already struggling to get on the housing ladder because mortgage lenders are demanding deposits of up to 25 per cent.

Young couples have traditionally looked to buy newbuild ‘starter homes’, which are cheaper than older properties and attract special deals cutting the costs of stamp duty and deposits.

Alistair Carmichael, the Lib Dems’ Scottish affairs spokesman, risked infuriating first-time buyers by saying they should buy and improve older properties.

Of course they should. While working and bringing up a family. Stupid man. Notice how all the parties pretend to care about the young and the old, families, the sick and disabled and unemployed and yet poop on them endlessly. People have to start taking their lives back and stop trusting politicians to deliver them into a paradisiacal Britain: all fair and equal and pink and fluffy.

But developers described the plan, which is buried in the Lib Dem manifesto, as “sheer madness” and said it would worsen the deepest housing crisis since the Second World War.

I would call it sheer sickness rather than sheer madness. They know what they are doing, so they aren’t mad. Just a nasty party like the others.

The Home Builders Federation, whose members build 80 per cent of new homes in England and Wales, led criticism of the proposal.

Stewart Baseley, the organisation’s chief executive, said: “The Lib Dems’ plan is an extremely poorly thought through proposal that would constrain much needed housing development still further and potentially increase the cost of housing.”

Homes for Scotland, which represents the house building industry north of the Border, said its members had already lost half their directly-employed workforce.

Jonathan Fair, the organisation’s chief executive, said: “Any measure increasing the cost of new homes is sheer madness and will simply exacerbate the problems we as a country already face.”

Opposition parties have vowed to increase scrutiny of Lib Dem policies since Mr Clegg’s victory in the first television debate and the surge in support that followed.

Oh good. The masses might be treated to some policy for a change. Will it matter?

The party’s general election manifesto promises to “equalise VAT” on the cost of buying a new home, which is currently zero-rated for the tax, and repairing an old property.

It’s our old friend equality aimed at messing up lives again.

This would require VAT to be charged on the sale of all new homes, the average price of which in Scotland is £201,701.

If the levy was set at seven per cent, at the highest end of the scale allowed, this would increase the cost by an average of £14,119.

Scottish Executive figures show there were 2,346 new private homes built between April and June last year, barely half the 5,853 total in the same period two years previously.

First-time buyers in Scotland had to find £15,016 more for a deposit last year than in 2007.

Launching the Scottish Lib Dem manifesto, Mr Carmichael said no decision had been taken on what rate of VAT would be charges but conceded it would be at least five per cent.

“It’s going to be an extra cost,” he conceded before adding: “It will be an opportunity for first-time buyers to come into the market buying existing properties and adding some value to them by doing them up.”

I would love to buy an old property and do it up (or have others do most of the work!), but it’s only an opportunity if that’s what you want, have time for and can afford.

But David Mundell, Tory Shadow Scottish Secretary, said: “Like so many Lib Dem policies the closer you look at them, the less they stand up to scrutiny.”

Among the other proposals in the manifesto are introducing road charging across the UK after 2015 and re-establishing the Bank of Scotland in Scotland.

The Lib Dems plan to keep Britain’s nuclear deterrent but think the Trident replacement is unaffordable and want a cheaper version.

They would spend £400 million refurbishing Scotland’s shipyards to build wind and wave farms and ban medium-sized and large firms from asking for people’s names on job application forms.

…and they all lived happily ever after.

Children as young as five will receive lessons on managing their piggy banks as a means of improving financial responsibility among the public.

From what I remember of my childhood, the whole savings thing involved the entire family. Receiving money, putting it in a piggy bank, then spending it once enough had been raised. And counting it every week or two!

The proposals come as part of a frantic set of policy announcements from both the government and the opposition today, as the general election campaigns begin with a vengeance.

If this is what frantic produces, I recommend some calm, clear thinking.

Ed Balls also promised a £50 million fund for early interventions where six or seven-year-olds are falling behind in maths or English.

Strange how they started falling behind just before an election.

A new personal, social, health and economic (PSHE) curriculum will begin in September 2011 under the government plans, and would focus on teaching children how to manage their current and savings account.

Sponsored by Barclays, probably. Judging by the failed sex ‘education’, money education will tell the children they can have all the things they want on credit and worry about the consequences later.

We didn’t heed the call to spend, spend, spend our way out of the recession when Mr Brown asked us, so the next generation must be taught better manners.

Between five and seven, children would be taught how to identify different coins and notes, and how to save money, while seven to eleven-year-olds would be taught how to manage their bank accounts.

Eleven to 14 year-olds would be taught about credit cards, mortgages and basic household finance.

Sixteen-year-olds would be given classes on the effect of money and debt.

I got into quite serious debt and finally paid it off in 2005, so I am not against educating older children to prepare them for the real world, but I smell a rat, and when you smell a New Labour rat, there’s probably a sewer full of them.

Will the government be sending out teams of bedtime storytellers next? I wouldn’t bet against it.

It sounded like it might now be a crime to have savings, so I investigated further. It seems that some people are still financially independent and that even some of the middle classes still exist. This has upset Harriet Harman because it’s just not equality. There are plans to make people in large houses pay even more Council Tax than they do already and suggestions that private education should be taxed, but this in itself will not bring the middle classes to their knees, begging for state assistance and pledging allegiance to New Labour and globalism, so more must be done to make everyone ‘equal’, i.e. dependent.

The problem, of course, is that there is ‘wealth inequality’, but this is not a helpful way of looking at the problem. When I was on benefits, I was genuinely poor, because 90% of my money went on alcohol. Other people spend half their money on cigarettes. Other people paying off debts. Some people manage to live reasonably well on benefits. I had to decide whether I was going to eat a proper meal or put money in the electricity meter to have some heat or buy enough booze to last till the giro arrived. The booze invariably won. Squeezing better off people for more money wouldn’t have lifted me out of the poverty trap, especially when governments are so frivolous with the money people generously give them under threat of imprisonment.

While the Government gives away billions to the EU and is poised to give billions to the Climate Change Fairy, even more tax must be raised.

Why not SPEND more carefully and morally instead?

How much has it cost to support George Bush’s wars for empire?
How much does it cost to maintain New Labour’s underclass?
How much do unnecessary and immoral procedures on the NHS cost?

There is so much scope for reducing the tax burden, but New Labour must continue to attack the middle classes because they remain the most independent and effective barriers against the enemies within who are taxing us till the pips squeak in order to then spend that money to destroy our customs and freedom.

I would once have said, yes, let’s keep taxing the middle classes (as I’m not one of them), until I realised that they do perform a vital function in society. They have the money, the brains and positions of influence in society, so tend to make sure that the government of the day does not get too much power.

That’s why the traitors have it in for them.