Two muddles

The first muddle is entirely unforced, entirely avoidable. It seems that a Welsh pub keeper who discovered a body in his toilet at the start of a busy weekend thought it best to move the body to an upstairs bedroom for discovery after the busy weekend. The body involved is said to have died of alcoholic poisoning, so perhaps one of his regulars. The pub keeper has now been sent to prison for 15 months for perverting the course of justice or some such. Which seems completely disproportionate; hiding the body in this way was a stupid and crass thing to do, criminal even, but is it necessary to waste so much public treasure on the business? Don't we bang up quite enough people as it is? One can only suppose that the pub keeper's attitude must have really peed someone off, a someone in a position to get the book chucked at him. Complete failure to recognize that he sold the booze that killed the boozer when perhaps he should not have. Complete failure to eat lot of  humble pie from a position of weakness.

The second muddle is more complicated and arises from a desire to bash all those rich bankers who claim child benefit, a benefit which is presently cheap to administer because if you have a child you get the benefit. No pack drill about income or need. It was also handy in that it funneled money direct to the mother who might spend it on the child, rather than going through the father who was more likely to spend it on himself.

Lots of ink being spilled in the newspapers just presently about all the dreadful tax forms decent middle class folk are going to have to fill in in consequence of this change - although it also seems that if they simply elect not to bother with child benefit at all that they get let off. A nice illustration of the difficulty of both being fair and sensible at the same time - especially if you have the DT in red top clothes breathing down your neck. Will anybody come clean about what proportion of the benefit being saved is being gobbled up by increased costs - including here those of those of us filling up all these extra forms? Perhaps it will all get easier if they ever get universal benefit off the ground.

I hope that lots of said decent middle class folk will simply elect not to bother with child benefit. Benefit which is small compared with their income and which government could probably make better use of elsewhere. Depressing how few people in pubs seem to look at things in this sort of way. Even people who are otherwise intelligent, educated even.