Abolishing the Tax disc

So next month the Vehicle tax disc will be abolished in favour of a fully digital system. There are good and bad things about this;

Firstly, the fact that you will no longer need to display a tax disc is a good thing. It always confused me that it was an offence not to display a disc regardless of whether or not you’d paid for your car tax. The automatic recognition system that the police and the traffic authority use has been able to tell whether you have tax by looking at your registration plate for years. So you can now drive safe in the knowledge that you’ll be able to drive as soon as you’ve paid tax and not have to wait for a new disc to be delivered.

However, as with every change their seems to be (by any government, to any form of tax) there are a couple of bad things being forced through with it. The biggest of which is that tax can no longer be transferred to a new owner. If you are selling your car privately, you will have to cancel the tax, and then reclaim it at the end of the tax year.

Firstly, this is a tactic that the Coalition government have used a lot. Yes, they have to give the money back, but until April of the year after the car is sold, they get to hold onto the money and make it appear as though the Treasury is far more healthy than it actually is, as not only do they have the cancelled tax money to hold in their account, they also have the new tax which the new owner of the car will have to pay instantly.

On that point, in order to pay tax on a vehicle, you must be the registered owner of that vehicle. This is done through changing the name and address on the vehicle’s V5 document; a process that takes 6-8 weeks for the DVLA to process. So what they seem to be suggesting here is if you buy a car from anywhere other than a dealership, you could be facing as a long as two months of not being able to tax it.

It’s almost like the government is trying (under the guise of getting rid of an old piece of bureaucracy) to make it appear as though the UK second hand car market (made of dealerships) is being stimulated by their policies, when really it’s just through unfair changes to the law. Oh wait, actually it’s exactly like that.

The only way that you will be able to sell your car, without knocking off a massive chunk of the value, on account of the lost tax and the inconvenience of having to wait for a new V5, is if you do it through a dealership and pay them a percentage on top of it.

There is absolutely no need to have a physical tax disc is the modern world; there hasn’t been for a long time, but the idea the idea of car tax not being transferable doesn’t make any sense and is simply there to make the government look better than it is.

Lawyers Ad Campaigns

So I’ve just seen the latest advert from National Accident Helpline, continuing their long running theme of an underdog fighting against a massive corporation for compensation for an accident involving them.

One word sums up this ad campaign: “misleading.”

Let’s look at Tesco for a second; a large company, with many huge and comparably small stores all across the UK. If you happen to fall over in any of these stores, Tesco will near instantly offer you a settlement. That’s the way that a massive corporation views personal injury; something they can deal with straight away. A massive corporation doesn’t bother wasting time, effort and legal fees money on an open-and-shut personal injury case.

National Accident Helpline are suggesting that you need to instruct a legal team in order to get a pay out that any massive corporation is about to offer you anyway. The only difference, is that they get paid for (in the majority of cases) writing a letter asking for compensation that had probably already cleared that corporation’s bank account, by the time the postman arrived.

 Injury Lawyers for You has another great campaign, based around a solid foundation of deceit. As the good looking actors in that ad will tell you, they look at an injury “from the perspective that matters; yours.”

That’s what any solicitor you instruct will do; all they are saying is “if you instruct us, we won’t flout the solicitors code of conduct, by advocating for the other side as well and get struck off as a result.”  This is the same as any solicitor you go to; there’s nothing special about them.

In summary, when you are injured in an open-and-shut manner, you don’t need a solicitor to tell a massive corporation to pay you for it; they were planning on doing that anyway. Additionally, solicitors aren’t snobbish, arrogant people who are going to look down on you and take up some sort of broad academic perspective when you tell them how you were injured. If you buy into the adverts of these “legal experts” you are in the early stages of being conned.

Legal Aid Post

So we’ve now seen an unprecedented joint protest by both solicitors and barristers, in respect to the further cuts to legal aid planed by the Justice Secretary Chris Grayling. The planned reduction in legal aid fees (of 30%) will save the government £220m and the only people who will have to suffer for it is everyone who doesn’t have the money to pay for both a barrister and solicitor. I don’t want to get into specific rates for trainees solicitors and junior barristers, but suffice to say, if you’re not well off, the amount it costs constitutes a shedload.

But that’s ok, if you need to pay for defence in a criminal case, you can just dip into your trust fund or ask for a loan from mummy and daddy – oh sorry I momentarily slipped into Mr Grayling’s frame of thought there.

These proposals are impossible to fathom; the saving is very obvious, but the clear interference with the Human Rights Act 1998 and by extension Article 6 the European Convention on Human Rights (which guarantees a fair trial) is just as clear.

The fact that this doesn’t seem to have even slowed the government down, shows a shift in their perception of the public at large. When they began, they didn’t care about the people of Britain, but needed us to think that they did. Now, they care so little about us that they’ll openly gut our human rights in front of us and not even attempt to even look as though they’re doing something beneficial.

Doctor Who: Worst post-2005 Episode

In Autumn of this year, Peter Capaldi’s Twelf Doctor will be taking the show in a “new and raw” direction, so now seems as good a time as any to look at what new-new-new who must not do.

So here we go; lets look at what I think is the worst episode/s to be put to sceen since the return of Who in 2005. But before that some honourable mentions are in order. so in no particular order:

1    Fear Her

A bad episode, defended by it’s writer as not for the older fans. It lacks the spirit of the show, with the Tenth Doctor frequently departing from his most important characteristic (his humanisation) and acting tactless and rude (not to mention his suggestion that anything that's not human isn’t a person and shouldn’t be treated as such  - a very weird thing for an alien to say). There’s also a repeated joke about the council that wasn’t funny the first time and should have been trimmed from the script on the first reading.

  2     Dinosaurs on a Spaceship

In the preproduction stages of series 6 Steven Moffat presumably asked for an episode that could simultaneously use up a huge chunk of the special effects budget and waste a pretty good supporting cast. Oh and special effort seems to have gone into making sure it was poorly directed and edited too.

3    Doomsday

I’m with Colin Baker on this one; enough with the Doctor romance plots; it’s a sci-fi show. I’m not saying there should be no romance in the show at all, but this episode marked the point at which it took over completely and it became very evident that Russell T Davies didn’t want to be writing sci-fi, but drama instead.

4    The Curse of the Black Spot

Why the hell did Moffat feel like it was necessary to shamelessly rip off the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise? Are we seriously supposed to believe that ideas in the writing room were running so dry that this episode got the green light? It was poorly developed, uninspired and utterly stupid.

5    Journey’s End

This is where Davies’ writer’s block became very evident. Every companion from the Tenth Doctor’s run thrown into one episode. This meant that none of them had enough screen time to say or do anything significant one of them (cough – Martha – cough) was stupidly out of character for the convenience of the plot and the Dalek plan  was so stupid that even someone who’s a fan of a show involving a time travelling police box couldn’t swallow it.

6    Voyage of the Damned

After and overall refreshing series, the Christmas special was an unwelcome present. With laughable slow motion sequences and a co-star who was there just because of her pop-music career, this episode squandered a great opportunity to go after James Cameron’s crowning glory.

Now here we are, the worst episode of revived Doctor Who.

Daleks of Manhattan/Evolution of the Daleks.

This two-part episode stands as the massive blemish on the only series of Ten’s run that I actually liked. Series 2 and 4 have their individual episode that I enjoyed and there’s no denying that Tennant was a great Doctor, but as far as I'm concerned the majority of his tenure was a massive misfire.

There’s a story from behind the scenes of Tennant’s run that would have had an episode of the show, where the world had become Harry Potter as a result of some massively powerful alien merging with J K Rowling’s imagination. If you think that’s a really stupid idea, you’re on the same page as David Tennant who refused to take part in such an episode.

Now I don’t know whether that story is true or not, but if it is, why the hell did Tennant agree to this episode?

Main Points:

At one point in the episode the Daleks attack a homeless village that’s been set up at the height of the great depression. The Doctor’s there and after the man who’s apparently the leader of the camp gets killed, he gets up and starts shouting at the Daleks, demanding that they kill him (their greatest enemy) in exchange for sparing everyone else at the camp.

When did the Doctor start being a moron? These are the Daleks; they live to kill anything that isn’t a Dalek, the Doctor knows this, so why would he offer himself up as a sacrifice when he’s fully aware that they’ll kill everyone there anyway?

Then when the Doctor learns of the Dalek plan to make hundreds of kidnapped and comatosed humans into walking Daleks  - well I’ll run through the dialogue when the Doc is shown one of the victims.

Doctor: “Is he dead?”

Dalek Sec: “Near death with his mind wiped, ready to be filled with new ideas”

A few lines later.

Doctor; “so you’ve got shells; empty human shells ready to be converted; that’s gonna take a hell of a lot of power”

WHAT!? Where is the Doctor’s  outrage at the kidnap and effective murder of over a thousand people, why is the worst thing he says about the whole plan that the logistics of powering it are impractical? This is a massive violation on a planet the Doctor loves and he doesn’t even care about all the people who are dead.

Then we get to the resolution the Daleks are going to use a sun flare and the resulting gamma strike to power the conversion of the humans to Dalek. This gamma strike will occur in the form of a lighting strike…which is a completely different thing to a gamma strike. Ok I don’t expect the best science from a show that’s avoided explaining how it’s time machine works for fifty years, but in an episode that’s already so bad, this abuse of scientific principles (worthy of Star Trek Voyager) sticks out like a sore thumb.

So there it is the worst episode of the revived series of Doctor Who. Belated Happy New Year everyone.