Peter Rhodes: Painless taxation
PETER RHODES on the Chancellor missing a trick, the passing of Alan Rickman and the irresistible tide of Corbynism
OIL? You can't give the stuff away. Latest forecast from the RAC is that the price of petrol could drop to 86p per litre. So why isn't Chancellor George Osborne slapping a crafty 2p or so tax on every litre? Motorists would barely notice it and the Exchequer would reap millions of pounds. It's the dream of every politician - painless taxation.
YOU can't argue with the box office and the late, great Alan Rickman has inevitably been referred to as a star of Harry Potter. Yet the role of Professor Snape hardly taxed him or showed him at his best. We will remember him in many different ways. For my money Rickman was at his finest as the mature, honourable and infinitely patient Colonel Brandon in the 1995 movie, Sense and Sensibility.
CAMPAIGNERS say thousands of old folk are frightened to turn up their heating during this cold snap. It's yet more proof that the £200 winter fuel allowance should be paid after Christmas, not before it. How many millions of pounds of public money, intended to keep old folk warm, have been spent on Christmas presents, already broken by the grandchildren?
A COMMON criticism raised against Jeremy Corbyn by his enemies is simply that he's not very bright. Despite a grammar-school education he gained only two poor A-levels and dropped out of uni. And yet you don't have to be Mastermind to be determined.
LITTLE by little, Corbyn is turning the Labour Party – not to be confused with the Parliamentary Labour Party at Westminster - into a full-blooded pacifist and anti-nuclear organisation determined to scrap the Trident missile system. And while his MPs and the trade unions have the power to vote him down, how many in the long term will risk deselection or the sack by his new breed of party activists? Corbyn talks of letting ordinary members decide Labour policy. While that may seem an impossibility, so did the prospect, only a year ago, of Corbyn becoming party leader. Corbynism is the tide, day and night washing away the foundations of old assumptions. I would not be surprised if history recorded how the United Kingdom found itself stripped of nuclear weapons by degrees, by a man without a degree.
TALKING of which, if we are to have a referendum to decide whether to stay in the EU, should we not also have a referendum on the crucial issue of Britain's nuclear deterrent? Some things in politics are far too important to be left to politicians.
A READER writes to complain about "credits shrinking" at the end of films shown on TV: "Some of us want to see the names of the actors and listen to the closing music. Not only are the credits shrunk to unreadable status but some clot talks over the music." Good point, although personally, I'm more offended by credits-racing when the aim seems to be to roll the names of the cast and crew off the screen as fast as possible. Who played the villain? Blink and you miss him.
MORE on Whitehall's latest alcohol guidelines and the bit about having two booze-free days per week. A reader writes: "My two booze-free days (48 hours), are comfortably covered by my eight hours a night sleep." I wish I'd thought of that.
