Rights And Responsibilities

FIFA

Football is not everyone's cup of tea, I know, and certainly not Prime Minister David Cameron's if he thinks there is a national Britain team. But it is mine, more like my elixir of life in fact than a plain old cup of tea. And I have been very pleased with it in recent months through my persona bias as Chelsea drove their way to the Premier League title. The recent FIFA scandal has, however, considerably darkened my mood.

Sepp Blatter, who has just been re-elected as President of FIFA despite disclaiming all responsibility for the alleged corruption of a large number of his underlings, seems to me an unmitigated megalomaniac, a view supported by some of the things he said in his acceptance speech. Whatever the corruption investigations come up with I do not believe he will ever voluntarily resign. The open question is what can be done about a person in his position. I think I have the answer but I doubt whether there is the determination necessary to remove him from his post.

There is no doubt in my mind that UEFA should resign en bloc from FIFA. The consequences would be interesting. For a start, the UEFA Nations Cup would become arguably just as important as, if not more important than, the World Cup. The flow of sponsorship money into FIFA and out into who knows whose hands would be very seriously curtailed. Indeed, since 70+ nations voted against Blatter's reappointment, UEFA could potentially mount a rival World Cup to eclipse FIFA's. There would no doubt be turmoil in world football for 2-3 years but the goal, if realised, would justify that. I see no other way of reforming an undoubtedly corrupt FIFA and removing its President. But........do the European nations collectively, and the sponsors, have the stomach for the fight? I suspect it will take unflinching determination to reform FIFA and remove Blatter.

Tax Return

I've just filled in my annual tax return and want to record how easy it was. In England, as I understand it, you don't have to fill in a tax return unless asked. In France, you automatically have to. It would have taken me a lot of pain the first time I did this in France if I had not been able to make an appointment with an official at the local tax office who kindly did the job for me. That's how I learnt. Tax forms in both countries are extensive and notes to them voluminous. My last efforts in England were plagued with difficulties through my being bounced between various tax offices, none of which seemed to read any correspondence and which certainly didn't in any way communicate with one another.

France is trying to persuade its residents to file tax returns online and, I find, making it beautifully easy to do so. The online system makes a huge but almost certainly warranted assumption that most people's sources of income don't change much from year to year; mine certainly don't. Neither at my age do my personal (family) circumstances. So the online tax system here presents me with a note of the forms I filled in in previous years and simply asks: has anything changed? That, of course, is the key question. However, if anyone is going to falsify a claim then it doesn't much matter what questions are asked. I tick the “no” box and up come not the whole forms on which I entered data but just the boxes into which I entered data. So all I have to do is enter the current data into those boxes. It really couldn't be easier. Hats off to whoever designed the French online income declaration system.

Bill Of Rights

Some time ago I knocked off a not very well thought out comment on the European Human Rights Act. My rather superficial argument was that if it didn't add the freedoms that we already had why should we worry about it? On reflection that was far too glib, a point that was brought home to me in an article that I read suggesting that, although there were obvious faults, these lay with the running of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) rather than the Act itself. I now find the subject complex and difficult, as indeed it would seem does the Conservative Party in power, which is committed to producing a UK Bill Of Rights but apparently split over the issue.

For a start there is the question of whether the ECHR should have jurisdiction over the UK courts. My instinctive answer is no but...........UK citizens are technically not free people as we like to believe but subjects of The Crown. And, since several ministries are deemed to be part of The Crown, technically we can't sue them whatever they do to us. I currently have no intention to sue any UK ministry but I I did I'd like to be able to do that through the ECHR.

The nub of the problem seems to be blatant exploitation of the EHA by convicted criminals seeking to avoid any appropriate sentence. Surely this apparent loophole can be closed without ditching the whole EHA. However, at the back of my mind is the feeling that an Act that confers rights without any concomitant responsibilities or requirements for accountability must always be flawed. We curtail freedoms (rights), such as freedom of movement, when we put people in prison; so it seems to me reasonable that other freedoms could be curtailed when responsibilities and accountability requirements are not met, provided that these are associated with rights.

The Liverpool Echo

The newspaper The Liverpool Echo yesterday printed a blank front page, asking its readers what they thought it should contain. In an age when the purpose of the Press seems often to be to mislead, or lead in the direction it wants, rather than to inform, I thought this was a great initiative. I hope they get good ideas and follow them up.