My Bermuda Cablevision TV connection has failed again, and the company can?t send anyone to fix it for six days. This has put me in a bad mood, so what follows, though having nothing to do with TV, is unusually bile-laden, even by my standards. Send all complaints to Cablevision, thanks.

Truth is stranger than fiction, it is said. Certainly, you could not make up some of the deranged logic of those who think that it is a government?s job to tax citizens until they lose the will to live.

Three news reports out of Britain in the past couple of weeks will give you some idea of how lucky you are (fiscally) to live in Bermuda, even without TV.

One story is old news updated, the second is so completely wacky that I had to triple check to make sure it was true, and the third would be funny if it weren?t so depressingly stupid.

Tax Freedom Day in Britain this year was June 3. That is the day of the year on which the average Brit stops working for the Government and starts working to pay the rent and all the other living expenses.

Taxes, as we know, are levied all year round, but what the calculation of Tax Freedom Day does is to theoretically assume that the average person has to pay his taxes first ? which is not so far from the truth, in a grand sense.

So the average Brit is taxed just under half of everything he or she earns, to pay for a government that supposedly serves the people. (The reality, of course, is the other way around.)

Tax Freedom Day comes later in the UK almost every year. As the baby boomers retire, and smaller numbers of taxpayers replace them, there would come a point when Tax Freedom Day would be December 31 each year.

In the 1960s, tax rates in Britain were so high that Tax Freedom Day would have been sometime in September the following year, i.e. every day you worked, you moved almost two days further behind, just to pay the tax. The economy collapsed.

That won?t happen this time around because the pension entitlements of the boomers will be pared away, and finally cut out altogether, if the British economy is to survive.

The villain of that piece, practised in Bermuda too, is called ?pay-as-you-go?, although it has other less publishable names, too.

It?s the principle by which government deducts from our pay what it calls ?pension contributions? and then, instead of keeping them separate to pay pensions later on, spends the dough on GP cars and salary increases for politicians and any amount of fol-de-rol ? anything, in fact, except pensions.

When it?s time to pay the pensions, the British Government won?t have the money. Nor will the Bermuda Government, for that matter.

For those to whom those governments made a sacred promise: too bad. We?re the Government. We lied. You have no pension. In fact, you can?t even retire. You?ll have to keep working until long after you die. Get over it. Stiff upper lip and all that.

We have war crimes; we should have peace crimes, and every politician who has ever subscribed to pay-as-you-go should be charged under it and summarily sent back to do actual work until he or she is 100.

Of course, against that, it should be said that few politicians are actually capable of doing any work, or they wouldn?t be politicians.

Government accountability, in the UK, Bermuda or anywhere else, falls into the category of things that will never happen. The second news report I dug out apparently falls into the category of things that will happen, and also belongs in Ripley?s Believe It or Not.

The British Inland Revenue has decided to tax employees on the benefit they derive from personal use of the Internet when they are at work. I kid you not.

In a world where a government can take money for your pension and then not give you a pension, this won?t sound so far-fetched, but the mechanism the Inland Revenue wants installed is indistinguishable from sheer madness.

The Revenue has decided that every company must appoint or hire an internal officer whose responsibility will be to measure private use of the Internet at the office. That person will have to track the use of the Net by everyone in the company, and read all their e-mails, so as to be able to calculate how much time each employee spends doing personal business online.

A report will have to be filed with the Inland Revenue for each employee, who will then be taxed accordingly.

I?m constantly amazed that anyone operates a business in the UK. The cost of maintaining a ?personal Net use? staff will decrease competitiveness, sap morale, and generally slow things down, if that were possible.

As bad an idea as the whole business is, its worst operating effects could be mitigated if everyone were charged a standard amount of tax for their personal muse of the net, say ?10 a year.

No chance, the Revenue said. That wouldn?t be fair. Slowing down every company in Britain, and putting some of them out of business, would apparently be fairer.

Big Brother, it is said, is watching you. And that brings me to an even less feasible piece of tax news emanating from Britain.

You probably know of ?Big Brother?, the TV show where people live together and are then ejected, one by one, until only one person remains. He or she then wins an electric toaster.

Well, John Prescott, the deputy prime minister of Britain and the Lollapalooza of catastrophically inept politicians, decided that, since people are living in the Big Brother house while they are on TV, they should pay poll tax on the house.

Poll tax is a head tax, payable by every UK citizen and every non-UK citizen who owns a home in Britain, even if they never visit.

That?s a form of taxation without representation, as would be the ?Big Brother? tax. That kind of tax ? money in and no responsibility out ? is the very favourite of taxmongers everywhere.

Resist, Bermuda! The higher your government raises your taxes, the greater the chance you stand of losing your job, your home, your competitiveness, your sanity and, for that matter, your cable TV.