Peace Party

Changing Times

2007-07-29T13:57:00.000-07:00

I was listening to the Analysis programme on R4 just now. The presenter, someone called Philip Stephens, contrasted Simon Jenkins' "gritty realism" with Jonathan Powell's "muscular idealism".

Which of them, do you suppose, had just observed that militarism was out of date? Wrong! Simon Jenkins (gritty realism). Which of them thought we should continue in the tradition of military intervention in order to promote Western Values? Jonathan Powell (muscular idealism).

Perhaps there is light at the end of the tunnel.

Zimbabwe

2007-07-10T16:30:00.000-07:00

Can I draw your attention to

http://www.zwnews.com/mediacentre.cfm

An excellent source of information about what's going on in Zimbabwe, with authoritative downloadable reports and links to other significant sites. It's surprising how outspoken people can be, given the risks involved.

Zero Tax

2007-06-27T18:05:00.000-07:00

At a recent Peace Party meeting we discussed the Party's position on taxation. I happened to mention an idea for financing public expenditure without taxation, or at least without taxation as we know it. The only flaw I can see in the idea is that public scepticism would make its implementation political suicide. Still, I'm pretty sure Keith asked me to put an explanation on the blog, so here it is.

Scenario A
Suppose I earn £1000 and my effective tax rate is 30%. This means I 'take home' and spend or save £700, and the government 'takes' £300. Let's assume for the sake of simplicity that the gvernment spends its £300 wisely and that as a result the benefit I receive from that expenditure is £300, so I haven't lost anything. (This assumption isn't essential to the argument, but I include it to avoid getting sidetracked into arguments about the principle of taxation, which this approach doesn't challenge.)

Scenario B
Now suppose that instead I earn £700 for exactly the same work, but I tell the government about it, and the government responds by printing £300 for its own use, making a total of £1000 between us. It spends its £300 wisely, as before, and there is no difference in the amount of work done, the amount of money spent, what it is spent on, or who it is spent by.

Scenarios A and B have exactly the same effect on the economy. There is one proviso - we must also end up with the same amount of money in circulation (£1000) which implies that there must originally only have been 70% as much in scenario B as in scenario A. At first sight this requirement might seem to create a difficulty, because my employer has only £700 available to pay me with - but of course that's all he needs, so everything's OK.

What About VAT?
Income tax can be described as subtractive, since it appears to be taken away from the the person who earns it. Purchase tax - i.e. VAT in those countries that have adopted it - is by contrast additive. Interestingly, it doesn't have to be like this: you could apply VAT to wages, and you could equally well levy a subtractive tax on purchases. Somehow it feels more 'right' as it is though, which goes to show what a psychological business taxation is.

Anyway, the fact that VAT is additive makes it even easier to translate into the alternative system. Where I might have priced my goods at £100 and sold them at £117.50 just so that I could give the extra £17.50 to the government (to spend on my behalf, etc., etc.), under the new system I price the goods at £100 and sell them at £100. The government prints the £17.50.

Similar considerations about money supply apply as in the subtractive case, but in reverse. However, it's getting late and I've used up too much of Keith's blog already, so I think I'll leave that, and sorting out all the other complications I've conveniently ignored, as an optional exercise for the reader!

PeaceNepal Website

2007-06-26T04:00:00.000-07:00

I've being trying to find out what happened to PeaceNepal (see Peace Work post, 7 March 2007). They were, I think, set up in 2005 and are mentioned positively on quite a number of websites. Unfortunately there's something wrong with their site at the moment and it returns a database error message when you try to access it. Apparently it was hacked in 2006, but the current problem could be a fault on the site. Is there any way we get in touch with them to find out what's happening?

Prison numbers double in 15 years

2007-05-21T09:19:00.000-07:00

"If we can manage with a prison population of 40,000 in 1991 why do we need to lock up 80,000 now during a period when crime has been falling?" asks Martin Narey, former head of the prison service in an article in the Guardian. Why indeed?

Iran - a different picture

2007-03-08T09:00:00.000-08:00

Do have a look at the slide show at www.lucasgray.com/video/peacetrain.html. Isn't this a truer picture of the country than the one we are constantly presented through the news?

Peace work

2007-03-07T21:23:00.000-08:00

Upto now the global peace movement is taking good shape under the guidence of the british peace party and the dynamic peace leader Mr John Morris. In Nepal also we are trying to make are peace party through the strategy called "Peace-cacooning". Here each peace individual creates a ring of peace members through the process of personal peace culturing.

An Ordinary Man

2007-03-07T01:56:00.000-08:00

Paul Rusesabagina is the man on which the film Hotel Rwanda is based. In the midst of the genocide of 1994 in which perhaps 800,000 people were slaughtered he managed to shelter 1268 Tutsis and moderate Hutus in his hotel at an incredible risk to himself and his family. It is a remarkable book by an extraordinary person. But he is not afraid to point the blame to those who organised the genocide and to the UN which stepped aside and let it happen. He writes "These things are not supposed to happen... Human beings were designed to live sanely, and sanity always returns... That is why I say that the individual's most potent weapon is a stubborn belief in the triumph of common decency".

Did he and others like him do more to oppose that evil than any military force?

Child Poverty in Perspective: An Overview of Child Well-being in Rich Countries

2007-02-18T03:11:00.000-08:00

This UNICEF report has placed the UK bottom of 21 industrialised countries for children's well-being. Only the USA comes near the UK's performance. Based on 40 separate indicators it is a damning indictment of our society. The Netherlands came top where children appear to be happier and healthier.
UNICEF said: "Britain is one of the richest countries and should be doing much better than it is. We have known for some time that Britain has comparatively high levels of child poverty and children living in workless families. However, the UK performance on this league table is shocking".

COUNTERING THE INSURGENCY IN AFGHANISTAN:

2007-02-16T03:46:00.000-08:00

This is a title of a report published on 15th February by the Senlis Council. Although not a pacifist organization its recommendations are radical:

1) Immediate cessation of forced poppy crop eradication and bombing raids

2) Immediate widespread food aid An end to the strategy of fear and destruction – a full assessment on the nature and extent of the bombing campaigns

3) Compensation to civilian victims of bombings

4) Military paramedics and field hospitals to aid civilian war casualties

5) The rebuilding of existent hospitals and the construction of new ones

6) Compensation for and rebuilding of villages destroyed by the bombing campaign

7) A complete overhaul of failed counter-narcotics strategies – crop eradication must stop

8) Pilot projects for an opium licensing scheme for the production of medicine

9) Compensation to civilian victims of bombings

10) Development and aid investments equal to military spending

11) To create stability by applying a robust economic response the grassroots insurgency

12) To create a shared long term vision for Afghanistan and to stop imposing ‘Western’ ideals.

The world's second biggest military budget

2007-02-12T05:21:00.000-08:00

Britain has a military budget of £33.7 billion in 2006-7. In a MoD white paper published at the end of 2003 it stated "there are currently no major conventional military threats to the UK or Nato". Yet we pay the second largest military budget in the world. The Oxford research Group argues this money would contribute more to our security if it was spent on energy efficiency, foreign aid and arms control.