Posts Tagged ‘david cameron’

After David Cameron’s official response to his father’s questionable tax avoidance practices, I decided take a tip from him, and the internet meme that followed the statement, when submitting my tax return this year.

Unfortunately, HMRC would not accept it.

Dear Reverend Worfolk,

I am writing to you to confirm that we have not accepted your Tax Return (SA100) form, which seems to have been submitted as a joke. We can only accept a fully completed form. The deadline for paper submissions for the 2015/2016 tax year is 31 October 2016.

Yours faithfully,

I wrote back to explain there was no point me filling one in, as I wouldn’t be paying any tax.

Dear HMRC,

The thing is, I wasn’t actually planning on paying any income tax. I spend the money I earn on lots of cool stuff, which I pay VAT on. Therefore, like Starbucks, my “total tax contribution” is very high, even though I won’t actually be paying any income tax.

Yours faithfully,

Again however, they were not happy.

Dear Reverend Worfolk,

As you will no doubt be aware, you are required under the law of England and Wales to submit a tax return and pay any tax due. I now consider this case closed.

So I thought I best settle up.

Dear HMRC,

Okay, I’ll pay. I notice you recently cut sweetheart deals with Apple and Google. Given that they are massive multi-national corporations, and I am just an honest Joe (except I’m called Chris), I assume you will give me a much better deal. £10 and call it even?

Yours faithfully,

I have yet to receive a reply.

Following the popularity of his poem on his blog, Jonni committed it to video last weekend. Here it is…

For my fifth project in the Toastmaster’s Competent Communicator series, I presented a talk entitled “A Humanist Soup Kitchen?”

This referenced my open letter to David Cameron, inviting him to come and see the Humanist Action Group doing its thing, after he had suggested that no such humanist enterprises existed.

Despite the talk creeping up on me somewhat (mainly due to being ill all the previous weekend), I managed to get everything in shape and took home another Best Speaker ribbon. Good times.

David Cameron unveils his new proposal for structuring government.

David Cameron recently addressed the Conservatives at their party conference, which has never been his strong point, but he make some points that really hit the zeitgeist.

The two phrases I think are notable are that he wanted to “get behind people who want to get on in life” and that he did not have a “hard luck story” but said that “I am not here to defend privilege, I’m here to spread it”.

This has been a topic of much debate in recent times, given the rise of the victim mentality that plagues increasingly more people as they define themselves by the disadvantages that we demand should automatically entitle their opinion to credence.

This is a strange concept – the idea that you can solve privilege by granting yourself the privilege to hold opinion while refusing to grant others such a privilege, but it never the less one that has been widely adopted and as a result, caused a strong backlash.

It also potentially opens up an avenue for the Tories to try and position themselves as the new workers party. With Labour being a sad joke and the Lib Dems being the sniveling sell-outs that we currently are, I don’t think we should rule out the possibility that people will be sold on this message (I also grow tired of fellow Lib Dems constantly tweeting about what the Tories are doing – it’s our fault their in government!).

Cameron knows his audience, and it isn’t us, so he isn’t trying to appeal to us. He knows who he can win votes from and he is going after them aggressively. So maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t a particularly bad speech after all.

I seem to be writing a lot of open letters these days. It’s mainly for two reasons. The first is that it’s a lot cheaper to write an open letter than one you post in the traditional matter – the cost of a stamp may not seem much but actually I need to buy a book of stamps and a pack of envelopes, I then use one of which and the rest eventually get lost which is a waste not to mention the huge cost of my time for doing all this. The second is of course that Royal Mail would probably lose the letter at the end of all that. But anyway…

Having read the recent BHA e-bulletin, Pepper kindly pointed me in the direction of this Conservative blog post in which David Cameron is quoted as saying

take me to a humanist soup kitchen

Given that David was at the time talking about religiously-inspired volunteering (as opposed to volunteering carried out simply because you have good morals and care about your fellow human being) it seems appropriate to use the Biblical quote “ask and you shall receive.”

As a consequence I would like to extend an invitation to Mr. Cameron to spend an evening with the Humanist Action Group here in Leeds which regularly go out to offer soup and hot drinks to the homeless living on the streets.

Come spend some time helping out – not because your god or your holy book tells you to but purely on the basis that it’s the right thing to do. I’m sure many religious people volunteer for the same motives but the suggestion that volunteering is purely the pursuit of the religious is simply beyond laughable.

Even a quick glance at statistics show that the non-religious give more to the charity than the religious do. But of course that doesn’t even begin to paint an accurate picture because most non-believers don’t give to charity in the name of atheism so the actual higher is much higher.

So come down, spend some time volunteering in Leeds, see how it’s possible to give out a cup of coffee without a verse from a holy book cleverly inscribed on the lid.

Looking forward to hearing from you,
Chris Worfolk