Tax cuts for the wealthy? We can't even afford a second range-rover

One of the cycling troublemakers -a northerner too, we should add, is running a weekly caption competition -last week's was won by one of the team members, Rhode Long.

This week Karl has a photo of Samantha Cameron, descendant of King Charles II of England and wife of David Cameron (bastard descendent of King William IV) in search of a caption.

Here is our submission:

 "Tax cuts for the wealthy? We can't even afford a second range-rover"'

The cyclists probably think it is something witty, but no, it is the truth.

For someone earning a modest £250K a year, say someone who writes a weekly article for a murdoch newspaper,  a cut in the top rate of tax from 50% to 45% will only generate another $17K a year of income. That's not enough for a second Range-Rover, so we'll have to make do with something smaller.

 
This completely misses the point is that the tax cuts are to let us trickle-down some of our wealth. If we can't afford to buy high end British-made cars, Range-Rovers, Jaguars, etc, then who will?

A second Range-Rover would have been an investment in the country to bring much-needed wealth to the midlands. Now it is not going to happen. We are not getting much of a tax break, and shall certainly be cancelling our premier-league relationship with David Cameron. David: consider yourself relegated to the scottish premier league; you can be rangers.

On the topic of tax, can we discuss fuel prices. The AA have been saying in interviews that fuel prices were "forcing more and more people who need their cars off the road."

Sorry, this just shows the AA are making things up again. If fuel prices are forcing people off the road -well, they clearly didn't need them, did they? It would have been better to say "forcing people who cannot conceive of a life that doesn't involve driving everywhere to discover what it is like"

This is better, because then the AA spokesman can go about how miserable it is. No more AA membership. No more AA insurance. No more need for the younger generation to take lessons from the AA driving school. Such a nightmare scenario threatens the entire leveraged purchase of the AA, so we wish they'd come out and say it. Something like "fuel prices may impact AA revenue to the extent that we cannot sustain our highly leveraged debt and we will collapse as dramatically as a US bank, only with less people caring".

That  would be a statement worth making.

Not selfish: more important

One of the socialist papers has an article saying  "Higher social classes more likely to lie, cheat, cut up other road users and not stop at pedestrian crossings".

Looking at the study in more detail, they looked at the behaviour of drivers, and the so-called scientists ranked the driver's class on a scale of one to five according to the model, age and appearance of the car. They noted that people driving more important cars were less likely to give way to pedestrians or wait their turn at junctions. Then they made a wild inference -that the importance of the car was a metric of social class -and therefore that "Upper class people are more likely to behave selfishly".

That's what we want to critique. If look at our Range-Rover dataset, you can confirm that yes, range rover drivers do appear to park more selfishly than anyone else, putting BMW and yes, even Audi to shame, though Audi does seem to have the worst drivers.

What you can't do is jump from that fact to "social classes", whatever that means. All it says is "people with the money to own expensive cars drive and park selfishly". Or more precisely, as not everyone with the money may do so, "people with expensive cars drive and park selfishly".

Expensive cars are a visible display of wealth and hence success in our society. Owning one is measure of importance. Important people drive Range Rovers and Audis. Everyone else is unimportant. It doesn't matter whether you are a hereditary peer in the house of lords or as a schoolboy at Eton you lost your virginity to David Cameron -if you are waiting to cross a zebra crossing you are, by the very act of walking, showing that even you consider yourself unimportant -so of course everyone driving does to.

Value of car is only a metric of importance, and important people are in a hurry. That's all the study shows. And that's nothing to be ashamed of. Some of us are important. And you, the little people who read this site in an attempt to discover what it is like to be important -you aren't. We'd feel sorry for you -except we don't. Because you aren't important enough to feel sorry for. Sorry.

Anarchists. Maybe

The elusive "Bristol Citizen" asked us why we forgot to mention anarchists as the cause behind the riots. Good question.

It's hard to see theft of LCD televisions as somehow aligned with the Anarchist cause. Indeed, it's hard to see a complicate blackberry-and-facebook based Command-Control-and Communication Infrastructure being operated to co-ordinate such thefts. Sitting in a pub like The Hare on the Hill cheering on rioters out on ninetree hill -that we can accept.

Planning a mass rising of the population in Croydon. Unlikely. Croydon? It's not exactly the Bastille or the Battleship Potemkin, is it. If you are going to plan a revolution, pick somewhere dramatic to be celebrated in cinema and art for centuries. Not Croydon.

Who then? Well, we also forgot to mention Rave Music. - music described in the 1994 Criminal Justice and Public Order Act as "sounds wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats". A music so dangerous that they had to ban rave gatherings, out of fear of groups of people wearing lime green t-shirts dancing to A Guy Called Gerald threatened society -or at least the alcohol revenue of clubs, pubs and national supermarket chains.

There's another issue: where did all the balaclavas come from? There's only one group of people who go round the city with Balaclavas and facemasks, geared up for a mass uprising and already showing an affectation for consumer toys. Yes, the cyclists.

With the face gear, the fingerprint-protecting gloves and the riot-ready helmets, along with the nimble wheeled subversion-mobiles, these are the real criminals in our society.

What to do? The obvious answer is to show that we aren't intimidated, to place our range rovers firmly in the cycle paths and say "we will not be intimidated!"

Praise L008YXR for being the first of the true citizens of our streets to drive over to the bike paths of Montpelier and show they are not afraid. Already you can see how the passing cyclists look threatened and unhappy!

Tesco would like to us to remind you that they are still open.

Crossing not in use

Classic anti-pedestrian scenes on Gloucester Road on a Saturday morning.

The gas digging has stopped, but the crossing not in use signs have been left up all weekend. Why? These people on foot are not important. Not even to the shops

Important people drive to the shops, even if the only place to park is by another crossing, as the Range Rover 284RAF is doing. But by doing so it ensures that no cyclists sneak up the inside lane and run the red light, so the woman barely visible pushing her child across the road is safer.

On this topic, just think how much parking space is wasted by pedestrian crossings of one kind or another! It probably takes up more space than all the cycling city improvements. This is yet another argument in favour of removing traffic lights in the city: every pedestrian crossing we take away not only saves time, it provides more parking opportunities!