Jack Straw, the British Minister for Justice and dead-ringer for the Demon Headmaster, has accused the Tories of trying to make English people jealous of Scotland.

Earlier in the week Jack Straw told English MPs to show restraint on the English question in an unintended admission that English MPs are getting considerable flack from their constituents on the subject.

Once again, by trying to shrug off or ignore the West Lothian Question, Jack Straw admits that it is a problem.

So what is there for English people to be jealous about? How about we all pay the same taxes put the Scots get £1,500 per head more in public spending than we do in England? What about the free care for the eldery, free cancer drugs that we can’t have in England, free alzheimers drugs that we can’t have in England, free central heating for the elderly and free travel for the elderly on public transport any time of the day anywhere in Scotland paid for by the English taxpayer? How about having legal and constitutional recognition of their nation instead of having it broken up into artificial regions and called “the regions of Britain”? What about having your own government with politicians elected just to look after your country. How about being able to elect an MP that can completely balls up education, health, housing, environment and transport in another country but who can’t do the same in your own country? What about having your own representation in Federal Europe as well as being represented by the British government? I could go on for another few pages but I won’t.

Can’t see any reason why we’d be jealous, can you?

Alex Salmond, the First Minister of Scotland, wants the Scottish Executive to represent the whole of the UK at Fisheries talks with the European Federation.

Under the anti-English devolution settlement Liebour brought in in 1997, this is possible – something the CEP objected to from the outset.

Scotland has 70% of the UK’s fishing rights and Salmond thinks that the Scottish Executive should therefore represent England and Wales’ fishing interests instead of the British government.

One question and one suggestion:

Why has Scotland got 70% of the UK’s fishing rights?
Go fuck yourself Salmond.

Historically, VAT has never been charged on food, childrens clothes or domestic fuel. They’re not luxuries, they’re essential items and should therefore be VAT free.

Then the European Federation demands that VAT be introduced on domestic fuel – coal, gas, electricity, fuel oil – and the British government conceded. It started of at a couple of percent and now it’s about 7% or somewhere in that region.

The latest plan is for VAT on food but, to make it more palatable (excuse the pun) it is only to be introduced on unhealthy foods. A morbidly obese MEP of John Prescott proportions was in the news yesterday because he told the EU that it needed to legislate to stop people from eating unhealthy food and getting fat. Hypocrite.

Anyway, the British government has decided that very shortly, unhealthy foods as decided by “experts” will carry VAT. Hopefully these aren’t the same “experts” that last week were horrified that a sandwich from Pret á Manger contained one third of the daily recommended allowance of salt. Imagine – one of your three meals a day containing one third of your daily allowance – how do they get away with it?

So, these health nazi’s “experts” will decide what food is unhealthy and the British government will charge VAT on them. The VAT will be paid to the Treasury and forwarded on to the EU … what, you didn’t know that the Treasury’s VAT receipts are forwarded on to the EU? Gosh, I wonder why nobody ever told you.

This is a very dangerous precedent to set. Food is one of the few zero-rated VAT items that we have and the EU is very keen to abolish all zero-rated VAT items. It might start with a small rate of VAT (the estimated cost is 70p per person per week) on unhealthy food but once the cash comes rolling in it’ll spread and if the “experts” are horrified when one third of our daily meals contains on third of our salt allowance, everything barring nut loaf and lentil soup (the staple diet of the “experts”) will end up carrying the full 17.5% VAT rate before long.

BEUrocrat: Emporer Barroso, the people cannot afford to buy bread.
Barroso: Let them eat rice cake.

History has a habit of repeating itself …

I’m using the Safari Web Browser for Windows now on both my Laptop and my Desktop.

All in all, I’m happy with the browser. It’s fast and it’s not prone to the hijacks and trojans that Internet Explorer and, to a lesser extent, Firefox are targetted by. However, it’s not without its bugs.

• There is a memory leak somewhere in the application – a few times I’ve had to kill the process as it gobbles up more and memory until the machine grinds to a halt.
• The Windows Media Player plugin leaves a lot to be desired – number one on the list would be a pause button!
• It has a problem with the tinyMCE WYSIWYG editor that is found in many web applications, including WordPress – because it trashes Safari as soon as it starts the browser simply blocks tinyMCE. The tinyMCE people say it’s a Safari bug and nothing they can do about it.
• Occassionally a link stops being “clickable” (but only occassionally).
• Some websites (my bank’s online banking site being one) refuse to load in Safari because it’s not a “supported browser”.
• There doesn’t appear to be a keyboard shortcut to navigate tabs (I like keyboard shortcuts).
• There doesn’t appear to be an option to open all pop-ups in a new tab instead of new window without holding down control when clicking a link.
• You can’t insert “special” characters using the Alt+ASCII code into textboxes because Safari loses any text after it. Even if you try and do a copy+paste from the browser windows into Notepad it loses the text but bizarrely you can copy special characters from Notepad and it’s fine with those. Go figure.
• You can’t insert an e with an acute accent using the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Alt+e (as used in Deja-Vu or Cafe) because Safari has hijacked it for clearing the cache.

I think that’s all my gripes – if anyone from Apple wants to get in touch I’m happy to elaborate on them. So, bearing in mind the above list of irritating bugs why do I keep using Safari?

• As I said above, it’s fast. Much faster than Internet Explorer and despite what the PC magazine’s say, you can tell the difference.
• It’s more secure because producers of scumware haven’t bothered targetting it. Apple’s are pretty tough nuts to crack, especially now they’re built on a proper operating system, and Safari has a smaller market share of the Wintel market (about 5% so Apple claim).
• It makes a very good attempt at CCS2 compliance – better than Internet Explorer and Firefox – and even has a bash at rendering CSS3. For example, most elements have a hover pseudoclass in CSS3 – check this demo out. If you’re using Safari and hover over a menu on the left of the screen it will expand with more options. If you’re using Firefox or Internet Explorer you’ll see a normal link.
• Textboxes on pages can be resized whether they’re coded that way or not. Sure, it messes up the page layout quite often but instead of typing into the 4 or 5 line textbox Blogger comments give you, you can resize it to fill half the page if you want. Small things please small minds I guess but it’s a nice touch.

Regular readers of Wonko’s World will remember the absolute disaster that is Evesham … or Eveshambles as I like to call them.

Last year I got an Evesham laptop, it broke, they didn’t attempt to repair it on-site even though I have an on-site warranty, they lost the laptop, they lied repeatedly for weeks and then sent me a replacement laptop that was supposedly newly built but mysteriously thick with dust.

Anyway, all has been well until tonight when I turn my laptop on to find the keyboard has stopped working. F**king marvellous. Here we go again.

Yellow Swordfish is feeling the strain of attempting to blog about every shitty thing the British government does.

It’s just not possible. It’s a bit like painting the Forth Bridge – you get to the end and then you realise that the rot’s been setting in behind you so you have to start again. The upshot, of course, is that it does get demoralising with no end in sight – even more so if you are genuinely disturbed at the way things are going in a country that you love.

Political blogging is hard work, demoralising at times, but if we don’t keep tabs on the establishment, who will? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

The incompetent, bungling idiot who headed up the Rural Payments Agency (RPA) when the decision was taken to introduce the computer system that messed up farm subsidies has been given over £1.4m of taxpayers money so far since being sacked and may be in line for some more.

The RPA – part of DEFRA, a byeword for ineptitude in the farming world – decided that it would change the way subsidies were paid in England and introduced a new computer system to handle the payments. It was an unmitigated disaster but neither Johnston McNeill or the Millibeast would pull the plug on the system. Farmers were left destitute with subsidies being paid more than a year late in some cases. Most farmers had to run up crippling debts and incurred substantial financial penalties for unathorised borrowing to stay in business. Others simply went bankrupt, losing their homes and businesses. It was too much for some farmers who were so driven to despair that they committed suicide.

As a result of this shambles, our masters in Brussells fined the British government millions of pounds which will be paid for through cuts in DEFRA’s budget in England.

McNeill was suspended and then sacked but because “proper processes” weren’t followed he went to an employment tribunal, DEFRA were found guilty of unfair dismissal and he was given compensation of over £60k. While he was suspended he received £81k in salary (for eight months – nice work if you can get it) and a £42k lump sum when he was sacked. This is in addition to 6 months salary of £56k and an annual pension of £12,800.

This is, of course, a shocking state of affairs and a criminal waste of taxpayers money but there is the vague scent of “scapegoat” wafting from this story. It’s worth remembering that the Millibeast and Margaret Beckett, who were the Ministers in charge of DEFRA while all this was going on, have both been rewarded with promotions despite their ineptitude which ultimately lead to several deaths.

The cost of “fixing” the RPA is estimated at £55m and it could take another 5 years to get them doing their job properly. In the meantime, the Scottish Executive and Welsh Assembly who are responsible for paying out the subsidies in their own countries, are both managing to pay out on time or early in 100% of cases using the old system that was also previously used in England. Perhaps there’s a lesson to be learnt here? The current system clearly isn’t working – we can either waste £55m “fixing” the RPA and incurring millions of pounds more in fines from the EU for the next 5 years at least or we could simply roll back to the old scheme that everyone – farmers and DEFRA employees alike – were already familiar with and get it right in time for the next lot of payments.

I posted this into the comments section of Caroline Hunt’s blog and thought it was worth reproducing here:

There are a couple of misconceptions in the comments thread that Gareth didn’t pick up on.

Firstly, the “huge extra cost” of an English Parliament. There is no “huge extra cost” involved. Currently, the British parliament has over 650 MPs and handles reserved matters for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and reserved and devolved matters in England. If you were to take the devolved matters away from the British parliament and gave them to an English Executive and Parliament then you wouldn’t need 650 MPs at Westminster. The standard stock argument that it’s an extra tier of government, yada yada, is rubbish – it’s not more government, it’s different government. Personally, I think that once and English Parliament has been established, Westminster needs one MP from each county in all four home nations.

Secondly, “we only need to stop Scottish MPs from voting on English matters”. This, again, is wrong. In Scotland, MSPs handle most of the domestic affairs of Scotland. They are elected to do what is best for Scotland and to put Scotland first and foremost in everything they do (like Gordon the Goblin King pledged to do in 1998 ). The British MPs elected in England are there to represent Britain and to do what is best for Britain. If that means it’s bad for England then history – recent history, even – has shown that they will do it. Under English Vote on English Matters, MPs not elected in England will still be able to propose, oppose and debate matters that only affect England even though they cannot do the same for matters that only affect Scotland.

Here’s an example of how English Votes on English Matters wouldn’t work: the smoking ban in England. The smoking ban only applied to England because it is a devolved matter. I watched the debate on BBC Parliament (yes, I understand this makes me a very sad person). I watched MPs from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland – all of which have smoking bans in their own constituencies – debating the smoking ban for England. Most of them were opposing the full ban that was originally proposed and supporting the partial ban that had been introduced as an amendment. By an MP elected in Scotland. In the end, the amendment to make it a partial ban that had been introduced by a Scottish MP was successful – English MPs had been talked around by an MP elected in Scotland where the ban didn’t apply into supporting a partial ban when previously a majority had supported a full ban and the majority of their constituents had supported a full smoking ban. Under English Votes on English Matters, nothing would have changed other than the MPs not elected in England being barred from casting a vote. If we had an English Parliament, the debate would have taken place entirely with representatives elected in England to deal solely with English matters. There would have been no intereference from foreign MPs whose own constituents weren’t affected by the bill and they would have proceeded to introduce the full smoking ban they originally supported and that the majority of the electorate supported.