Dear David Cameron...

Dear Dave,

I've just had my invitation to renew my membership of the Conservative Party. I'll bite, but only at the same level, which means my contribution in real terms has fallen by 2.8%. If you want it index-linked, here are the three things I believe you've got to start shouting about when not mushing huskies or hugging hoodies. (I can do without firm policies until 2008, but no later, please.).

1. Simplify, simplify, simplify! All the billions New Labour have grabbed in tax are being utterly wasted, thanks to its addiction to red tape, Band-Aid legislation, and setting targets instead of solving real problems. The gushing river of funds into the NHS has produced few visible benefits - and some incredibly ham-fisted problems, such as job losses and resource shortages. The endless giveaways to public servants - who now enjoy higher equivalent salaries plus index-linked pensions and an earlier retirement age - mean there is now no incentive for young people to enter the private sector; we'll end up like France with worse wine and weather. I don't mind paying taxes, but I DO mind that so many of them are being wasted.

Here's an idea: for every new law or initiative you introduce, pledge to destroy TWO old ones. And make each new measure based on sound economics instead of populist pandering: do some cost-benefit analyses (almost unheard of in New Labour), risk profiling (don't spend £30m on Race Crimes legislation when a grand total of 56 such incidents, mostly minor and over 50% by ethnics against whites rather than white-on-ethnic) were reported across the entire UK in 2005), and measure performance rather than target it. All targets do is force people to subvert the metrics. I want a concrete pledge to chop away at the red tape, and keep chopping.

2. Promote personal privacy as the natural state. Thanks for opposing ID cards, but that's not nearly enough: New Labour has built the most intrusive, nannying, over-surveilled state in British history. Complex means-testing instead of a simple child allowance; speed cameras that raise revenue rather than increase safety; vast banks of DNA that cover 10% of the British population, most never charged with any offence; and unequal extradition treaties that allow other countries access to confidential data without needing permission or sanction. Dave, please start mocking that 'if you've got nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear' mantra of Blair's. (This isn't about what I've done wrong, it's about mind your own business. Snooping on me 'just in case' is the action of a police state, not a civil society.)

3. Attack Gordon Brown. Why are you giving your competitor such as easy ride? This Chancellor has somehow created the impression among the unthinking proletariat that he's competent. In 1997 Britain had a £55bn surplus; it's now a £25bn deficit, DESPITE a consistently rising economy (with concommitant increased tax take), masses of new stealth taxes (including a £5bn pension fund raid) and increased tax burdens due to fiscal drag. (Such as inheritance tax and higher-rate stamp duty now hitting even lower-middle-class families). Taking the overall tax take as share of GDP to its highest (39.1% and rising) in history. Hey, Norman Lamont got sacked for losing one little billion on Black Wednesday; you've wasted an absolute minimum of 80 times that and NOBODY REALISES IT. Start whacking Brown, Dave. Are you man enough?

Saddam takes a dive

"As the noose was tightened around Hussein's neck, one of the executioners yelled long live Muqtada al-Sadr, referring to the powerful anti-American Shiite religious leader.... some witnesses and the executioner could not resist celebrating by dancing around the body after the hanging."

(And he refused to wear a black hood. Somewhat ironic, given that one of 2006's main media frenzies revolved around Muslim women demanding the right to wear one.)

So, the guy responsible for the deaths of slightly more Iraqis than Dubya is dead. (Although I can't get that image of hooded hangmen dancing around the gibbet out of my head. Talk about gallows humour.) Although when you do the maths, Saddam is only slightly more evil than George Dubya, and Bush is gaining fast.

I'm marking Saddam's scorecard with 500K Iraqis who died in the Iran-Iraq war, the 60K who died in Kuwait, and the 200K who 'disappeared' during his 23-year reign. Against the 655K estimated to have died since 2003 as a result of the disastrous neocon-led invasion, all down ultimately to the dunderhead in the White House.

And if you adjust for batting averages (Saddam's 23 years at bat vs Bush's 45 months) it means Dubya's scorecard is actually far higher than Saddam's, by a factor of five-plus. Saddam's batting average: 2,753 people a month. Bush's: 14,500 a month. At this rate, Bush will have presided over more Iraqi deaths than Saddam by late 2007, even if the insurgency doesn't get any worse (which it will).

There IS justice in this world; it's just a little unevenly distributed.

Seasonal dreams again

Now THAT'S what I call a decent dream. Was buying a Starbucks in a tropical island paradise, and the Barista girl was finishing work, so took me out on a date. The rest of the dream consisted of a long, slow float around a labyrinthine waterpark seemingly half the size of the Atlantic, sipping at cold drinks (not sure what happened to my latte, but that's how it is in dreams) with the Starbucks girl frequently naked. Momentary problem with the ex-girlfriend who turned up having grown a third breast, but you can't have everything.

Shuttle to land in New Mexico

What, could they not wait any longer for tacos or something?

Person of the Year

Let's get this straight. TIME magazine's Person of the Year is ME?!! What a cop-out. Didn't they do 'The American Soldier' last year or something? I mean, how much broader a brush can you sweep? Next year, will they expand it to the higher primates or something? At this rate, by the end of next decade they'll have to include deep-sea volcanic bacteria.

I much prefer the UnNews version. "Normally the editors of Time Magazine select the Person of the Year in the positive sense. However, the overwhelming mediocrity of your life was simply too remarkable to stifle. Your lack of accomplishment, shabby looks, disastrous financial situation, and stagnant love life are more shockingly bad than any good done by an individual this year."

I blame reality TV. It's no longer enough that everyone gets the chance to be a star; these days, everyone feels they have an automatic right.

My dreamworld needs a little landscaping

Whoa. Last night's dream involved me ransacking a flat in a building called Urban Labyrinth, then carrying someone's severed arm down the steep hill outside while watching famous actors go in and out of the building. Where did THAT come from?

At least it beats the previous night's adventure: eating toast and chocolate cake with two members of Blue Man Group.

Scandal at La Scala

No doubt in my mind: Alagna is in the wrong. Tenors aren't prima donnas. Even prima donnas shouldn't behave like prima donnas. Not when people are paying up to £700 a ticket.

So Alagna's Aida didn't go down too well with a small section of the audience - let's face it, the voice casting wasn't perhaps the best. And they booed. A bit. Rude of them - a bit like letting your mobile phone go off during a performance - but it's understandable at La Scala; this isn't amateur night at the Karaoke Palace.

You're before a live audience, damnit - your duty is to the whole audience, not to your own sense of dignity. If you don't do so well (and he'd had a shaky start) it's your job to battle through, not storm off in a fit. Alagna didn't just moon his detractors; he disrespected the entire audience.

And now he's suing La Scala for not 'protecting' him. Whatever happened to The Show Must Go On? A few years back he'd have had benches thrown at him. And nobody's going to take the risk of booking him now. Alagna may not know it yet, but his career is over.

World's tallest man saves dophin

Aside from being a headline writer's dream, some of the comments are really amusing.

THE WOMAN DIED. GET OVER IT.

Can we have an end to all this endless tax-eating nonsense now, please?

What's worse is that next year is the tenth anniversary of that drunken car crash, which means another year of toe-curling national mawkishness at least. Sheesh.

Ipswich murder count reaches five

So in the last 24 hours three murdered prostitutes have become five. But there's one tiny positive: it's no longer a race against time for the police. His work's now done; he's obviously been copying Jack the Ripper, and I bet if you compared visuals of the Whitechapel murders over a century ago with the Ipswich victims, there'd be physical resemblances.

The thing that'll stay with me about this case, though, is just how thin the line is between comfortable middle-class living and eking out a disease-ridden, drug-fixated existence on the streets. Several of the women were from normal families, had mainstream jobs, and normal lives just two years ago. Two years. That's all it takes.

The Constitution the UK really needs

In the same tongue-in-cheek sense as how to save Africa, how to obliterate crime, and how to calculate what pension you need, I have a new idea that'd solve the tax-and-spend mania enveloping Britain's government. (With the public sector now at 39.1% of GDP - higher than ever before - and rising despite the population growing much more slowly and with low inflation, it's time for serious action.)

Here's the idea: make voting rights conditional on being a net contributor to the economy.

That's it. if you're on the dole, or one of those 2m+ work-shy disability scroungers, or didn't save enough to fund your retirement - I've no issue with it, but you just can't vote any more. You're not a net contributor to society and that gives you no say in who runs the country. Harsh but fair.

(The figure given for the net cost of an individual to the Exchequer is around £5000 a year, but this obscures the fact it's a mean average. In reality the average Joe consumes far less than that; the figure's bloated by the 20% of citizens who consume 80% of public resources. My impact on the public purse, for example, is practically zero: I live in a private estate, have private healthcare and pensions, and work in the private sector. I'm a massive net contributor, and I have more right to decide who spends that money than the dole cheat down the road.)

This policy would solve numerous problems.

First, it'd let politicians take unpopular decisions and think strategic and long-term instead of tactical and populist. 63% of the northeast's GDP is in the public sector, because the way to win votes is to catapult buckets of cream into the homes of the hard-done-by. If those people can't vote, they're not important to election candidates, who can then cut public services to sustainable levels instead of pouring money down a bottomless hole. If the people want more services, they've got to start businesses, attract capital, bring more economic activity into the region - in other words, stand on their own two feet. Votes-on-merit would wean these people off the ever-lactating breast of the State and into real work.

It'd reduce the influence of those who contribute least. No loss there; they don't vote anyway. But politicians are scared of them, because they shout the loudest ... so public funding gets the life sucked out of it by ever-tighter red tape and special cases. This policy creates an incentive to continually renew the economy, keeping it nimble and robust instead of supporting dead industries at taxpayer expense.

It'd create incentives to work. Because if you're not working and paying taxes, you're not able to change your government. Similarly, it'd create incentives for private pensions and private healthcare, since these reduce your burden on public services. Which means the tax bill as a whole would shrink - lowering the bar for average consumption of public services and bringing some of the borderline disenfranchised back into the voting community.

It'd solve the trouble with Scotland. Specifically the West Lothian question (where Scottish MPs are able to vote on English matters and spending formulas allow them to raise public expenditure endlessly without having to pay for it). Addiction to public funding north of the border is so enormous that only 163,000 Scots - out of 5m - are net contributors to the Exchequer. The 4.8m Scots holding back the hard decisions the region desperately needs - irrelevant at the stroke of a pen.

It'd make people pay serious attention to the budget. After all, if the only people voting are net contributors, it forces politicians to pander to their needs - and lower their burden, by cutting fat out of expenditure at every opportunity.

And it'd give greater voice to the worst-off people in Britain: the put-upon middle classes, who pay virtually all taxes only to see their tax bills rise again and again.

Of course, the formula for calculating whether you're a net contributor would have to be simple and transparent. Say a sum per family role per household (Man + Woman + Child1 + Child2 etc) with a multiplier for postcode affluence and a few balancers like average wage by region. (And of course each person only gets one vote no matter how big a net contributor they are, to limit corruption.) But I can see no bad side effects of this idea at all. It doesn't even take away benefits from the parasites, sorry, 'net consumers': it merely creates an incentive for people to get off them, or to take responsibility for their own lives. It'd create a self-reliant society, vibrant economy, and an ever-shrinking State.

Hell, this idea is so big it needs to be Constitution, not a law.

I THOUGHT it was noisy last night

While I'm complaining about the wind keeping me awake for a while, people across town are getting the sides of their homes blown off! I'd be less worried about the missing wall, and more concerned that the contents of my living room were on show on the evening news. I mean, you could see what was on his bookshelf and everything.

Starbucks: sound the sirens!

Been surfing around looking for some some prior art for this, but the closest I came was this story and it's got nothing to do with what I noticed about the Starbucks logo today - for the first time, after being a reasonably regular Latte-slurper since 1998. Here goes....

Surely it can't just be me who's noticed that on the Starbucks logo, the Mermaid appears to be grabbing her twin tails and holding them apart in the least ambiguous of chat-up lines imaginable?



The origins of the logo have been explored - many thanks to the Dead Programmer for his logo scan - but his blog concentrates on the disappearing boobs, not the fishy pleasures to be found further south. Only a passing mention is made of the apparent porn star pose - he even wonders what 'those things to the side of the siren's head are.' Well, they're obviously her arms, and they're grabbing the tails in a come-and-get-it-boys kind of way.

I mean, if the green roundel was just a bit lower, the dubious pleasures of her aquatic party zone would be on full display. (An older logo does show the full mermaid, but anatomical embarassments have been stylised out.) As a marketing guy who once had an ad featuring a bald guy rejected because 'our buyers aren't bald' (hey, my art director was off sick and I can't draw hair!) I know precisely how many eyes a new logo has to pass under - and I can't believe something like this was missed. It must be deliberate.

Howard Schultz, shame on you. Actually, congratulations - doing that in the puritanical USA is an excellent jape - but I'm not sure it creates the right image of freshly harvested, wholesomely roasted, and above all dry coffee beans from around the world. I'll never look at a skinny latte in the same way again.

I dunno. Piscean porn poses, salty wantonness, and forcing seaweedy sex on any random male who merely appreciated a good tune. That's supposed to make me want to drink coffee? New Starbucks slogan: "It sure gets the taste out of your mouth."

You feel a bit less kindly towards the homeless when...

... you see your local 'Big Issue' seller (est. 2003) in Tesco, paying for milk/bread/beer and a newspaper, apparently using a credit card! Being homeless isn't the trial it once was.

Bye bye, Bolton

In another sign that the USA is recovering from the collective mental illness it's been suffering since 911, it's good to see John Bolton has resigned from his yet-to-be-confirmed UN post. I mean, this is a guy on record as saying 'There is NO United Nations." Even allowing for Bush, sometimes you just have to wonder what these guys are smoking. But the neocon dominoes are now falling, one by one, and it's a delight to behold.

Wind in the pillows

Whoa, that was quite a storm last night!

Winds in London must have hit 100km/h in the early hours; it was as if giant hessian sacks were being thwapped repeatedly against my door and windows. A really, really bad metal group tuning up; impossible to sleep. Still, at least I finished two outstanding issues of The Economist.

Heads up in a dream

Weird dream last night. I was in a room with a bunch of people and various animals, and there was only enough air left in the world for a few of us to live a normal lifetime. Some of us had to die. An oxygen tontine. The animals seemed equivalent to the humans; none talked but we knew they could.

I made a fist of it. Calcukating that the chickens used more than their fair share of air, twelve of them were poultry in moments amid much squawking.

And then I cut somebody's head off!

It's weird how your mind can construct the exact physical sensations of something it's never experienced. I can still feel the pressure of the string I used to sever a guy's head; there are even ribbons of pain on my hands now, somehow remembering the experiences of the dream. The guy's head came off slowly, both of us yelling, and I can recall every second of it.

I usually have pretty interesting dreams, but where'd that come from? Nobody's annoyed me that much recently. And the Red Queen was nowhere to be seen.