Archive for Come the revolution

It’s been a while

I really don’t have time for blogging any more, what with the reality of work, kids and a new partner but I’m sat here on a train in Euston station waiting for one of Richard Branson’s minions to find a driver who can get us home and some things have been annoying me recently. So, time to unload.

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Nurses

There is a shortage of about 40,000 nurses in England according to the Royal College of Nursing. The British government’s response is to launch recruitment campaigns in countries where they spend lots of money training nurses who would love to come and work in England for the paltry amount we pay. But that’s really not the right answer, is it?

A nurse in England can expect to earn about £23k a year on average. They make life or death decisions every day. They might start the day watching a baby die and end it disposing of a bowl full of shit. Be under no illusions, it’s a tough job and they do it for little financial reward.

So, a few years back the British government decided that nurses in England must have a degree. Merely learning how to care for patients, dispense medication, perform medical procedures and save lives isn’t good enough, they must also be able to write thousands of words on a variety of subjects that nobody will ever read again after it’s been marked. And the British government abolished the bursary for nursing degrees in 2016 so to pursue their £23k a year career nurses in England are expected to pay between £18,500 and £37,000 in tuition fees (depending on whether they stop at two years or complete the optional third and fourth years) plus tens of thousands in living costs whilst they study. For a job that has an average wage so low that most nurses won’t ever reach the threshold for loan repayments. Is it any wonder NHS England can’t recruit enough nurses?

HS2

Where do you start with something so utterly and fundamentally flawed as HS2? It was supposed to cost £56bn when it was first announced – a figure that was already ruinously expensive – and just a few days ago the chairman of HS2 told the British government that estimated costs have now risen to £86bn. This time last year they had already burnt through £4bn without laying a single mile of track, who knows what it is by now. This is money that could be spent on electrifying and increasing capacity on existing lines, investing in electric vehicle infrastructure (including busses) and increasing capacity on motorways. The M6 toll road could have been nationalised twice over with the money HS2 had spent not building HS2 up to last year.

Of course, a big chunk of the cost of HS2 isn’t actually related to building HS2 at all but comes from Barnett Consequentials. Which leads me nicely on to …

The Barnett Formula

How is the Barnett Formula still a thing? It genuinely astounds me that any politician or civil servant can justify the continued existence of a funding formula that is in no way based on need, is predicated entirely on the redistribution of English taxes and enshrines the principle that any money spent in England must also result in money being spent in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland.

For those who don’t know what the Barnett Formula is, it was a formula created in 1978 by Labour MP Joel Barnett to calculate how much the British Treasury should spend in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. It was a temporary measure whilst civil servants came up with a more appropriate way of working out who should get what share of taxes after the Scottish devolution settlement that was expected the following year. It allocates whatever is spent per head in England plus a percentage extra for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland multiplied by the nominal population of the country in question. It is inherently unfair and unjust, a view shared by its creator now Lord Barnett who has called for its abolition many times.

Whilst the whole basis for the Barnett Formula is wrong, it is the Barnett Consequentials that really hurt. Barnett Consequentials are one-off increases in funding to the other member states of the UK given to them whenever the British government spends money on capital projects in England. The £30bn increase in the estimated cost of HS2 will result in as much as £5bn extra in Scotland’s block grant from the British government. They don’t need it, it’s just money they will get because the British government are spending money on a capital project in England. The same happened with the British Olympics in London – the British government spent money on capital projects so their Olympic games could take place and Scotland, Wales and NI all got extra money. It pushes up the cost of any capital project in England, eating into the already inadequate budget the British allocate to England.

Brexit

Finally, Brexit. It’s been three years since we told the British government to get us out of the EU. It was the biggest turnout in British electoral history and against all the odds the Leave vote was secured. There was state interference in the referendum, the state broadcaster beamed 24 hour propaganda into every home, nearly £10m of our taxes were spent posting a booklet full of what have been shown to be outrageous lies through every letterbox in the UK, every government website carried adverts promoting a Remain vote, taxpayer-funded universities and quangos campaigned against a Leave vote, EU-funded organisations promoted their paymaster and the Remain campaign outspent the Leave campaign by many millions of pounds. Yet despite the referendum being very much rigged in favour of Remain, 17.4m people voted to Leave. And we still haven’t.

The sheer hypocrisy of the so-called People’s Vote campaign is beyond parody. Not satisfied with the result of the people’s vote to leave the EU they now insist we have another people’s vote to give us an opportunity to vote the right way and if we’re all still awful racists and vote to leave again they’ll definitely respect the decision. Just like they said they would before and after the referendum three years ago. It is, they say, undemocratic to respect the result of the referendum because we didn’t know what we were voting for. Only Remainers knew what they were voting for – things like the EU army that Nick Clegg described as “a dangerous fantasy” or removing the veto on tax policy and handing over control of tax raising powers to the EU which they said would never happen.

The insistence by EU nationalist politicians and campaigners that we must accept a deal from the EU before we can leave is nonsense. There was no mention of having a deal on the ballot paper, it was a vote for what is now being referred to as “no deal Brexit” (in reality, a whole raft of bilateral deals rather than no deal at all). Nothing the EU will offer us will be to our benefit. EU negotiators openly gloat about how they are out to punish us for leaving and send a message to other EU member states about what happens to anyone who tries to leave. It is a national insult and my hope is that one of the first things Boris Johnson does is cancels all negotiations with the EU, only agreeing to reopen channels a fortnight before 31st October to consider the EU’s final offer and pass any necessary legislation but with the default position being that we leave on WTO terms.

Theresa May’s Brexit Betrayal

Theresa May took her majority Remain-supporting cabinet to Chequers at the weekend and would you believe, they agreed to support a Brexit position paper that keeps us as members of the EU in all but name.

I know. Shocker, right?

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This paper sets out Theresa May’s opening offer to the EU on our future relationship with them and represents complete capitulation. It proposes to keep the jurisdiction of the EU courts, the adoption of every EU present and future law on trade and maintains privileged immigration rules for EU citizens.

This proposal is just the opening gambit which the EU will reject and as we get closer to what should have been independence day will use as the basis for a much worse deal. The bulk of MPs have already ruled out a no-deal Brexit and will vote for whatever last minute deal is offered. And it will be a bad deal. Much worse than what is being proposed now.

There have been several resignations over the Brexit betrayal starting last night with the Brexit Secretary, David Davis. His resignation was quickly followed by Steve Baker and Suella Braverman who were junior ministers in the same department. Today Boris Johnson resigned as Foreign Secretary and Chris Green has resigned as private secretary to the Department for Transport. It is believed that the 1922 Committee that is responsible for leadership elections in the Conservative Party has received 42 of the required 48 signatures to call a vote of no confidence in Theresa May. A meeting of the committee was held this evening with conflicting stories emerging about what actually happened in there. Theresa May has survived this meeting but the publishing of the paper has been delayed by a week following it which would suggest she has been given an ultimatum by her backbenchers. She may survive the week after all but she is still on borrowed time.

There is only one good deal and that is no deal. Nothing the EU offers us will be in our national interest. The EU’s negotiators are petty, vindictive and have delusions of adequacy. They would rather the UK leaves with no deal which would be seriously damaging to the EU economy than come to a mutually beneficial agreement. With a no-deal Brexit forecast to provide a big boost to the UK economy we should have the strongest negotiating position but we are being led by a Remainer Prime Minister who has willingly given all that advantage away.

Theresa May has to go and sadly the future of Brexit is in the hands of 320 Tory MPs, most of whom are Remainers. It’s looking pretty bleak.

Weather Channel founder says man-made climate change is “no longer scientifically credible”

The co-founder of the Weather Channel has said that man-made climate change is “no longer scientifically credible”.

John Coleman

John Coleman says:

The ocean is not rising significantly.

The polar ice is increasing, not melting away. Polar Bears are increasing in number.

Heat waves have actually diminished, not increased. There is not an uptick in the number or strength of storms (in fact storms are diminishing).

I have studied this topic seriously for years. It has become a political and environment agenda item, but the science is not valid.

There is no significant man-made global warming at this time, there has been none in the past and there is no reason to fear any in the future.

Efforts to prove the theory that carbon dioxide is a significant greenhouse gas and pollutant causing significant warming or weather effects have failed.

There has been no warming over 18 years.

Princeton University climatologist, William Happer, supports Coleman’s comments:

No chemical compound in the atmosphere has a worse reputation than CO2, thanks to the single-minded demonisation of this natural and essential atmospheric gas by advocates of government control and energy production.

The incredible list of supposed horrors that increasing carbon dioxide will bring the world is pure belief disguised as science.

The global warming scam has made a lot of “scientists” very rich, not to mention the politicians and scaremongers who have promoted the scam to get rich off their “green” investments. Authoritarian politicians have seized on global warming as a way of extracting more taxes out of us and controlling more of our lives. Smart meters are being installed in millions of homes and it’s only a matter of time before a law is passed to make these government-controlled remote control kill switches mandatory. It has always been about greed and power and those that are benefiting from it won’t give up that power and wealth willingly.

Anti-terrorism police try to intimidate 12 year old youth club protest organiser

A 12 year old boy has been pulled out of class and interviewed by the police for organising a protest about the closure of his youth club outside David Cameron’s constituency office.

David Cameron

These kids is disrespectin’ me init?

The police told the boy that anti-terrorism police were investigating him and that he would be held responsible and arrested if there was any trouble at the protest. They also told him that anti-terrorism police would be watching his posts on Facebook and tried to talk him out of holding the protest.

The protest went ahead on Friday with 13 people and six police officers.

Portsmouth betrayal should be a rallying call for English independence

The British government is closing Portsmouth’s shipyard to protect jobs at the Clyde shipyards in Glasgow in a transparently political move to placate the Scots ahead of their independence referendum.

Portsmouth shipyard workers betrayed by the British

Just look at these comments from some of the English workers the Brits are sacrificing to protect Scottish jobs:

It’s definitely a political decision. All to do with Scotland and Scottish independence; it’s disgusting. They don’t care about us.

This is simply pandering to the Scottish government before the independence referendum next year.

Even the MP for Portsmouth is unhappy:

It’s a massive and grave error on the part of the government to put more shipbuilding in Scotland. It’s political. It always has been.

And then there’s the comments section in the Express …

Disgusted that our weak government is letting this happen – to shut Portsmouth and give new contracts to a Scottish port is despicable.

What a disgrace, blatant politically inspired bribery for the jocks…well what if they say YES to independence anyway…I do hope they do vote to leave and let the politicos explain why we are buying ships off a foreign country?

i hear that its portsmouth yard that will close rather than the scottish ones..i wonder why that is. is there a referendum coming up

Even some Guardian readers are having a pop …

Scottish jobs saved at the expense of English workers.

Portsmouth is being sacrificed for saving Scotland ahead of a referendum

A thousand workers in Portsmouth thrown on the scrapheap just so project fear can keep making a spurious point about the “benefits of the union”. Playing politics with peoples lives yet again.

Helps the campaign to keep Scotland in the UK I suppose…

Then there’s the Telegraph …

Why give it to the Scots? Are their unemployed more deserving. Sadly, they are never going to vote for independence so shafting the ENglish YET AGAIN is horrific.

This is little short of treason by Cameron to the English in a futile political sop to the Scottish. If he had any balls at all he would preserve the English yards, scrap the Scottish yards and state that the decision would be reviewed after the Scottish referendum on independence.

Why are they trying to buy Scottish votes, the Glasgow yards are hotbeds of socialism and militants, they should take the hits and not the English yard, kill two birds with one stone.

Short term daftness to rely on warship building in a country that is not committed to the UK. This has Cameron McFudge written all over it. The lads in Portsmouth should have been supported, not the would-be defectors in Govan. Salmond will be laughing yet again.

A disgusting sop to the Scots nationalists. What ought to have been brought home to them is that even the threat of independence costs Scots jobs. As if a separate UK government would ever build ships in a foreign Scotland . . . Should it ever happen Portsmouth will need rebuilding from scratch. I’m a Conservative Party member but if there was an election tomorrow I wouldn’t vote for them. They’ve just sold England down the river for short-term and disguided political reasons!

If this isn’t a political decision, I don’t know what is. But in the unlikely event of Scotland voting for independence next year, I trust that this decision will be reversed in double quick time.

The sacked workers in Portsmouth know they’re being sacrificed by the Brits to keep the Scots happy, politicians know the workers in Portsmouth are being sacrificed by the Brits to keep the Scots happy and the general public know the workers in Portsmouth are being sacrificed by the Brits to keep the Scots happy. There is no price the British won’t pay to keep the Scots in the union as long as it’s the English that are paying.

I used to think there was a place for England in a reformed British union but it’s pretty clear that England will never be important to the Brits. It’s time for English independence.

EDF suing eco-terrorists for £5m

French electricity company EDF is suing 21 eco-terrorists who shut down one of their power plants for a week last year.  The 21 activists from “No Dash for Gas” have been convicted of aggravated trespass.

The eco-terrorists are complaining that it’s not fair for a number of reasons which can largely be summed up as “EDF can afford the £5m loss” and “the police helped EDF”.  Naturally the extremist Green MP, Caroline Lucas, is supporting the “No Dash for Gas” eco-terrorists.

Let’s have a look at some of the things they say …

The amount of the claim represents just 0.3% of EDF’s annual UK profits, which rose by 7.5% this year to £1.7 billion.

Whether the company can afford to lose the money or not is irrelevant.  They have an obligation to make as much money for their shareholders as they can whilst staying within the law.  If a group of eco-terrorists shaves £5m off their profits by engaging in criminal activities then they don’t have much choice but to try and recoup some of those losses.  It’s not just EDF that stand to lose from the £5m cost of closing their plant down for a week either – the pension funds that earn money from investing in EDF will also lose out, hitting pensioners in their pockets.  It’s not just big business that loses out when big business loses money.

This is the first time an energy company has attempted such a claim, and campaigners say it represents the opening of a new front against peaceful direct action protesters

This is nothing to do with peaceful direct action protesters, it’s targeting eco-terrorists who committed criminal trespass and shut down a power station for a week costing the owner of the power station £5m.  Any peaceful direct action protester who stays within the law has nothing to worry about.

Sixteen campaigners occupied two chimneys at West Burton for a week in October 2012, stopping nearly 20,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions

That might be impressive if it was proven that CO2 causes changes to climate cycles which it doesn’t.  Quite the opposite in fact.  But regardless of whether you believe in the global warming claptrap this lot do, producing CO2 isn’t an illegal act so you can’t use it as a necessity defence.

The campaigners believe that Nottinghamshire Police’s support for the civil claim is part of a larger strategy to crack down on environmental protest, as evidenced by the use of extremely onerous bail conditions on the activists after their arrest. They were not allowed to associate with each other and most were subject to home curfews from 9pm to 7am.

What the eco-terrorists did is terrorism according to the Terrorism Act 2000 and they were treated no worse than any other terrorist suspect.

In another incident, Counter Terrorism Command officers visited an activist at her home to ‘remind’ her of her bail conditions and caution her against going within 50 metres of E.ON’s Grain Island Power Station.

Counter-terrorism police visit terrorist suspect to remind her she’s not allowed near a potential terrorist target.  Well there’s a shocker.

The police are meant to be working in the public interest, not acting as EDF’s private police force. If I wanted to sue EDF over their pollution or their price hikes, would you expect the police to deliver the legal papers to EDF on my behalf, or hand over the names and addresses of their top executives? Somehow, I don’t think so.

Perhaps if the EDF executives were suspected of terrorist offences and they’d cost you £5m they might.

The Committee also point out that a greater reliance on gas would increase household bills by up to six times more than a shift to renewable energy

Windmills are the most expensive form of electricity production we have and cost the taxpayer billions in subsidies to only produce enough electricity to power a large town.  It is the “green” electricity industry that is bumping up bills and all because some self-proclaimed “experts” have concocted some bullshit stories, repeatedly proven to be inaccurate, about global warming to access millions of pounds of government grants.

The case is reminiscent of the record-breaking “McLibel” case, when the fast food chain McDonalds sued two activists from North London from 1990-1997

No, it’s really not.  That was a libel case for a leaflet that was ruled to have made largely unfounded claims against a fast food chain that lost McDonalds such a little amount of business that they would probably have struggled to quantify it while this is a criminal act of terrorism that shut down a power plant and cost the operator £5m.

Two governments gives Scotland “the best of both worlds”

I read this, got angry, used some traditional Anglo-Saxon words and then sent the following email to Cowardly Cameron …

I see in the news today that you believe that Scotland having 2 government’s is “the best of both worlds” and that because Scotland has its own devolved government they can make decisions needed “to meet the specific needs of Scotland”.

Can you please explain why you feel that England doesn’t deserve the best of both worlds and why England shouldn’t have its own government to meet the specific needs of England?

You are putting so much effort into making the case for the British union in Scotland that you’re forgetting that the 85% of the population lives in England where we have no self-government, where MPs elected in a different country make our laws and where the case for being part of the British union has never been weaker.

I urge you to end the institutional discrimination against the English and give us the devolved English Parliament that 7 out of 10 English people want.

Slavery hypocrisy

I saw a Facebook comment this morning from a local Labour councillor criticising the use of unemployed people bussed in to the centre of London to marshal the Jubilee concert.  This is “slavery” and of course, all down to the evil Tories.

I actually have some time for this councillor who, despite his politics mostly being fundamentally wrong to me, is doing a reasonable job in trying circumstances but this was a bit hypocritical really because I remember writing something a couple of years ago – April 2009 to be precise – about Gordon Brown proposing to force English children to do 50 hours of community service, threatening exam failure for those that refused.

There is nothing wrong with unemployed people doing community service and I’ve previously written various pieces on why unemployed people should be made to work in exchange for their benefits.  As it happens, the people the aforementioned councillor was referring to weren’t treated particularly well but that doesn’t make the principal wrong because it isn’t.  But what is interesting, though, is that forcing adults claiming unemployment benefits to do some community work for the benefit of those paying the benefits is considered to be wrong whilst an MP elected in Scotland proposing to force English children to do community service and threatening them with exam failure for not complying is apparently ok.

Isn’t it interesting how the moral compass is so often guided by the colour of someone’s rosette?

£30m Olympics bribe for Scotland, Wales & NI

On Wednesday the British government finally announced the West Lothian Question commission that they promised over a year ago, yesterday they gave a practical demonstration of why it’s so desperately needed.

Olympic BribesScotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have negotiated a £30.2m bonus from the British government because the British government have spent money in London for the British Olympics.  No extra money will be spent in the rest of England where local authorities are facing cuts of about a quarter over the next few years.

The money is being handed over because of what is called Barnett Consequentials – the technical name for giving Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland a big wedge of cash just because the British government have spent some money in England.  Barnett Consequentials are part of the balancing mechanism to ensure Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland continue to get the same outrageous level of subsidy at England’s expense no matter how much capital investment the British spend in England.

Paying Barnett Consequentials because of the Olympics is a bloody liberty though because they’re not the English Olympics, they’re the British Olympics.  England doesn’t have a Olympic team and the British government’s investment in London is for their Olympics, not for London or for England.  Some of the facilities that are being built for the Olympics are going to be relocated to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and some of the events are even being held in those countries.  They will “benefit” from the British Olympics as much as the rest of England.

The British government shouldn’t have paid any Barnett money to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland for the British Olympics but there was nobody at the meeting representing English interests.  As a consequence (excuse the pun), £30.2m of English taxpayers’ money is going to be handed over to the Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish for no other reason than because the British spent some money in England for their Olympic vanity project.  This has only happened because there is no English government to represent English interests, saying “no, this is your Olympic games, we’re not paying your bribes”.

There are no details as yet on who will be on the West Lothian Commission, what they will consider and whether an English Parliament will be ruled out immediately or when they report in 2013.

Jeremy Clarkson apologises to unions for poking fun at BBC

Jeremy Clarkson has caved in and apologised for making a joke about the anti-government strikes.

Jeremy ClarksonDuring an interview on the One Show, Clarkson was asked what he thought of the strikes to which he replied that they were brilliant, he could dart around London and there was no traffic and it reminded him of the 1970s.  He then went on to joke that because it’s the BBC there has to be balance and said that he would take them outside and shoot them and would have them executed in front of their families.

The joke was actually at the expense of the BBC and its charter obligation to remain balanced and impartial which sometimes makes for bizarre statements from newsreaders and chat show hosts.  The unions, however, were consumed with mock outrage with UNISON actually going as far as taking legal advice as to whether he could be reported to the police for incitement to hatred!

Clarkson has now apologised to the unions for making a joke at the BBC’s expense and UNISON have magnanimously accepted his apology and won’t be trying to get him arrested for being funny.

Just in case anyone from any of the unions is wondering, if I was in charge I wouldn’t have you executed, I’d take your leaders and agitators and put them in a hard labour camp until they stopped being such bloody stupid pricks.  When people like Dave Prentis (UNISON), Mark Serwotka (PCS) and Bob Crow (RMT) hand over some of their huge salaries (they all have pay and perks of £100k+)  to set an example they might deserve some respect but until they do, they deserve all the contempt that’s directed at them, the useless champagne socialist troublemakers.

Apparently the BBC received a large number of complaints which they believe have been made as part of an orchestrated campaign (no doubt organised by the unions).  I have made my own complaint tonight at the BBC’s decision to apologise to the unions when they were obviously taking the piss for publicity:

I am disgusted that the BBC and Jeremy Clarkson have been forced to apologise to the unions over Clarkson’s joke on the One Show.  No offence was intended and none was caused – the unions were expressing mock outrage at a joke that was made at the expense of the BBC, not the unions and not strikers. The BBC should have told the unions to grow up and do something useful, not waste everyone’s time pretending to be offended by a joke aimed at the BBC for publicity.

Wednesday’s strikes are anti-government, not anti-cuts

The head of Unison says there is no way a public sector strike on Wednesday can be avoided, even if the British government wanted to do a deal.

UNISON placard: Tell the Tories to stuff the pay cutsThis is hardly a shock announcement – the strikes would have gone ahead whether they caved in to every unreasonable demand the unions issued because this isn’t about pay and conditions, it’s a union protest against the Tories.  Even the BBC can’t avoid showing pictures of anti-Tory slogans on official union placards because they’re everywhere.  The protests are being backed by the far left extremist Socialist Workers Party and senior Labour politicians.

This is a party political campaign, not a grassroots one.  The public sector have pensions that most of us can only dream of and perks like guaranteed pay rises and being paid by the mile to drive to work are a public sector invention, the majority of us that work in the sector don’t get anything like the pay and conditions the public sector get.  The strikes on Wednesday aren’t about keeping the pay and conditions – even the economically illiterate unions understand that it’s simply not sustainable – they’re about trying to overthrow the ConDems and installing a puppet Labour government in its place.

Not all public sector workers are highly paid of course – cleaners, lollypop (wo)men, dinner ladies, etc., don’t get paid a great deal – but that doesn’t mean that all public sector workers should keep their gold-plated pensions and expensive perks at the expense of some of the poorest, low-paid workers in the country.  The public sector and unions are infested with communists who bang on about wealth redistribution and capitalist greed so I’m sure the highest paid public sector workers such as the 447 civil servants that earned more than £100k last year will be more than happy to redistribute their wealth to the low paid public sector workers they’ll be striking with on Wednesday.  As, I’m sure, will the champagne socialist union bosses who earn at least three times the median salary for the public sector workers they are supposed to represent (the list is out of date – the head of the FBU is on £82k per year).

I wish I was in Telford this week instead of away on a training course so I could find a picket line to cross just for my own little protest.  I object to having so much of my money taken off me on pain of forfeiture and imprisonment to to fund pay and conditions for “professional” public sector workers that I could never realistically expect in the private sector.  The country is broke, we are too highly taxed already and it’s time the public sector got a dose of reality.

Virgin Money snaps up Northern Rock on second attempt at huge discount

I’ve written about Northern Rock quite a few times since they were brought down by Saint Robert of Peston in 2007 and looking back at what I wrote and what others said is quite interesting.

When Saint Robert of Peston whipped up a frenzy of consumer panic with his misleading reports on Northern Rock’s request for an emergency credit line from the Bank of England (misrepresenting it as a loan rather than the offer of a loan if they needed it) he caused a run on the bank which deprived it of its working capital.  The inevitable happened of course and the Northern Rock ran out of cash and was nationalised.

Northern Rock has now been sold to Virgin Money at a minimum loss of £400m but possibly as much as £653m on the amount the UK Treasury spent nationalising the bank.  Those of you who have taken an interest in the Northern Rock affair and with good memories for these things might be getting a touch of déja vu at the mention of Virgin Money and Northern Rock in the same sentence because Richard Branson tried to take over Northern Rock before it was nationalised and on much better terms for UK plc than what has just been agreed less than a fortnight after Saint Robert of Peston embarked on his career-making hatchet job on the bank.

The original Virgin Money offer was to buy Northern Rock’s entire operation, pay back £11bn of the £25bn Bank of England emergency loan that Northern Rock was forced to take immediately with the balance to be paid within 3 years.  The UK Treasury hadn’t spent any money nationalising the bank so the taxpayer’s exposure to Northern Rock would have been repaid within 3 years, Northern Rock’s operations would have remained intact, Northern Rock’s investors would have had a chance of getting a return on some of their investments and the ripples that Northern Rock’s collapse and nationalisation sent through the banking sector could have been avoided.  The UK Treasury instead chose to nationalist the bank, costing the taxpayer billions and contributing to the virtual collapse of the UK banking sector.

Whilst I hold Saint Robert of Peston significantly responsible for the collapse of Northern Rock, some of the blame has to fall on the EU because Saint Robert wouldn’t have found out about the credit line if it wasn’t for the EU Monetary Abuse Directive (MAD) that required the Bank of England to publicise the fact that it had been offered.  The previous governor of the Bank of England, Eddie George, said at the time that if he was still governor when the EU MAD was brought in he would have resigned over it.

Ed the Millibeast has had a pop at George Osbourne about him selling the Northern Rock off at such a loss for no apparent reason but it turns out that he had no choice because the last Chancellor, Alistair McDarling, had to agree to sell off Northern Rock within 3 years to get permission from the EU to nationalise the bank.  And which government department did Ed the Millibeast work in at the time of the Northern Rock nationalisation?  Erm, that would be the Treasury – he was a minister in the Treasury when his boss agreed to the 3 year restriction on the nationalisation!

Richard Branson’s purchase of Northern Rock is only for the “good bank” – the “bad bank” was merged with Bradford & Bingley which was also nationalised.  The “bad bank” is still slowly paying back the billions of pounds it owes the taxpayer.  What happened to the Bank of England loan is anyone’s guess.  Northern Rock has cost the taxpayer a lot of money – a lot more than necessary so far and the Virgin Money takeover will cost hundreds of millions more.  The mismanagement of the economy and the banking crisis is nothing short of criminal.

The whole Northern Rock saga started with gross incompetence and unnecessary wasting of taxpayers money and it’s perhaps a fitting end for the Northern Rock brand that it will finish with a loss-making sale to the bank that tried to buy it before it cost the taxpayer billions of pounds and precipitated the near collapse of the banking sector and at a snip of the price offered in 2007.

Come the revolution there will be a special part of the wall marked out for Saint Robert of Peston, Alistair Darling and all the other criminally incompetent and irresponsible idiots that have cost us so dearly.

Four ISPs agree to censor internet

Four ISPs have agreed to censor the internet on behalf of the British government.

Sky, BT, TalkTalk and Virgin have all signed up to the agreement to automatically block “adult content”, requiring customers to specifically ask for the block to be removed.  The agreement has come about following a report from the religious pressure group, the Mothers’ Union, which said that censorship is necessary to protect children.

We have a reliable way of preventing our children accessing adult content on the internet without state-organised censorship – the computer is in the living room and we watch what they’re doing.  Not a very high tech solution but it’s a damn sight more reliable than censorship.

This is just the thin end of the wedge.  Today it’s blocking whatever a panel of Mary Whitehouse wannabes determine to be “adult content” for the good of the children (won’t you think of the children, it’s for them), tomorrow it will be what a panel of career politicians decides are “extreme views” and then it will be anything that’s critical of the British government and before long the internet will be censored according to the whims of whichever illiberal clone happens to be in power at the time.

The erosion of civil liberties is one-way, we will never get them back if we allow them to be taken.  This isn’t about porn, it’s about the principal of uncensored and unrestricted access to information.  It’s not about saving children from the ignorance of their parents, it’s about the state establishing the principal of censorship of the internet.  Once you’ve agreed to the principal, the rest is just haggling about the price.

Trades Unions counter-protesting against EDL in Telford

The English Defence League are coming to Telford next weekend to protest in Wellington, motivated by the (alleged) muslim paedophile gang currently standing trail for grooming teenage girls.

Labour councillors have come out in opposition to the march and are getting behind Councillor Mike Ion’s campaign to deny the EDL their right to peaceful protest on the basis that he doesn’t agree with them, rather than concerns about them causing trouble.  Councillor Ion does, however, express concerns about violence erupting if fascist left wing thugs like UAF come out to hold their usual violent counter-protests.  Councillor Ion’s campaign has even attracted the support of the new leader of Telford & Wrekin Council, Kuldip Singh Sahota which doesn’t bode well for the next four years.

Now Shropshire & Telford Trades Union Council has organised a “unity” counter-protest to celebrate multiculturalism which will be held in another part of Wellington at the same time.  Most members of the vicious left wing fascist group, UAF, are union activists as well and will undoubtedly be out in force in Wellington to incite violence.

I have three questions about this counter-protest:

  1. What the fuck has this got to do with workers’ rights?  Trades unions are there to promote workers rights, not organise protests against activities that have nothing to do with workers rights.
  2. Is this kind of activity compatible with the constitution of the unions represented by the trade union council or the council itself?
  3. Have union members voted to support the action?

The EDL have a legal right to peaceful protest – it’s in the Human Rights Act.  Similarly, union members, UAF, Socialist Workers Party and other left wing fascists have a right to peacefully protest against them.  But trades unions?  If it’s not in their constitution then the organisers of the protest are acting ultra vires and are leaving themselves open to prosecution from any union member who opposes their action.

Petition the British government (not that it’ll make much difference!)

The British government’s ePetitions site has gone live today and failed spectacularly.  Even this late in the day it’s still crashing more often than not as it’s not been scaled adequately for the feeding frenzy that was inevitable for its launch.  Should have hosted it in a cloud with some other online services that have an annual peak later on in the year and used the latent capacity.

Sorry, should have posted a geek alert.

I’ve signed a few petitions tonight.  Obviously I think they’re all important in one way or another otherwise I wouldn’t have signed them but these are my top three so please sign them too!

  • Britain wants referendum to leave EU
    The Daily Express is crusading to end Britain’s membership of the European Union. We want the Government to arrange for an orderly withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the EU either by means of an enabling referendum or directly so that the British people are once again placed in charge of their own political destiny. We would like this matter debated in parliament.
  • Creation of an English Parliament
    That England be given within the framework of devolution the same national political institutions as Scotland, including the creation of a Parliament, the office of First Minister, of a Government and a dedicated civil service for all of a united England. At present, England has no purely English national political institutions and thereby suffers from unfair treatment within the UK. The creation or revival of a English Parliament will answer the question ‘Who speaks for England?’ and should ensure that the interests of all the people of England are given higher priority and greater care. As John Bright famously said: ‘England is the Mother of all Parliaments’. It is well time that England regained her own Parliament.
  • Reinstate the hereditary peers
    A petition for the reinstatement of the hereditary peers to the house of lords, whos right to sit and vote in the upper chamber was abolished under the house of lords act 1999.

The reasons why we should have a referendum on membership of the EU are obvious.  We’ve given away our sovereignty, our wealth and our resources to the EU.  The sooner we’re out of it the better.

The reasons for an English Parliament are similarly obvious.  It is a travesty that English still doesn’t have a government of its own and a national insult.  England is the last colony of the British Empire, we need to throw off the British yoke and start running our own country for our own benefit.

Reinstating the hereditary peers is something I’ve written about several times.  I have always believed it was a regressive step to abolish hereditary peers and the fact the the House of Lords is now full to bursting with politically appointed peers as reward for donations and services rendered backs that belief up.  Only hereditary peers can give us the randomness and independence of though that is needed in government.

If any of these petitions reach 100,000 signatures then it will be debated in the House of Commons.  100,000 sounds like a lot but the road pricing petition started by Peter Roberts on the old Downing Street petitions website got almost a million signatures and according to the bods that ran that service, the petition did actually get well over 1m signatures but the site couldn’t cope with the demand and they weren’t all counted.  100,000 signatures is a lot for a petition but it’s not a number that can be dismissed easily.

Of course a debate doesn’t mean a change of policy and one MP (I forget who it was and where I read it) said that MPs should “lead on policy” not listen to what the people want.  One thing’s for sure – if they don’t already want to change policy a 100,000 signature online petition certainly isn’t going to make them!

Devine released after serving quarter of his sentence

Former Labour MP and convicted fraudster, Jim Devine, has been released from prison after serving just a quarter of his sentence.

Thief

Devine stole over £8k of taxpayers money by submitting fake invoices and was banged up for 16 months ago for it.  Releasing him after only 4 months and tagging him is a disgrace but seems to be the the way these thieving MPs are going to be treated.  David Chaytor and Eric Illsley have both been released after serving a quarter or less of their sentences for stealing from the taxpayer.

MPs have the lives of millions of people in their hands.  They are in a unique position of power and trust and any abuse of that power or trust should be punished severely and without mercy.  Devine, Chaytor, Illsley and the other MPs and Peers who’ve been convicted of stealing from the taxpayer should have received longer sentences and they should have been forced to serve the full amount.  No time off for good behaviour, no release under licence.

And when they were released from prison they should have been forced to carry out community service in every deprived neighbourhood in the country so they can give something back to the people living below the poverty line that they forced into paying tax on threat of imprisonment who they then stole from.

ConDems: Tough on crime, tough on the consequences of crime.

Another Steve Uncles libel: I do NOT support his anti-Northern Ireland campaign

Once again I have to defend myself against the de facto leader of the English Democrats, Steve Uncles.

Some time ago Uncles wrote a letter to Sinn Féin offering to change English Democrats policy (that’s how policies are made in the EDP – Steve Uncles comes up with some batshit idea and hey presto it’s policy) to one of kicking Northern Ireland out of the UK and forcing them into unification with the Republic of Ireland in return for a bribe from Sinn Féin for his bankrupt party.

Naturally, Sinn Féin ignored him as he and his party are both non-entities and even convicted terrorists have some standards when it comes to dealing with lowlifes.

But as part of his fascist campaign against Northern Ireland, Uncles started a Facebook page called “Campaign to get Northern Ireland out of the UK”.  I wanted to make sure everyone who came across it knew who was behind the page so I posted the following comment on the wall of the page:

This page is the work of Steve Uncles of the English Democrats who wrote to Sinn Féin offering to adopt a policy of uniting NI with the Republic of Ireland in return for them bankrolling his party. There’s not a lot Uncles won’t do to get his £26,241 back from the party which isn’t surprising given that they are so heavily in debt and still got beaten by the Monster Raving Loony Party not long ago.

Steve Uncles doesn’t speak for England, most English people wouldn’t force a nation of 2m people to join another country against their will in return for a bribe from the political wing of a terrorist organisation.

As users of Facebook will know, before you can post a comment on the wall of a page you have to “like” it.  Which I did for as long as it took me to post the comment and then I immediately clicked the “unlike” link and removed myself from the page, leaving the comment exposing this terrorist-appeasing lowlife on the wall.

Predictably, the comment was soon taken off the wall of the Facebook page by Uncles but in order to try and damage my reputation, he has taken a screenshot of his status update showing me “liking” the page so I could post the comment and posted it on his English Passport blog without telling people that I only did it to post the above comment on the wall which he has deleted and telling them that I support his fascist campaign.

And of course he has mentioned the fact that I am in UKIP (which he tried to defect to this year but was knocked back) and the Campaign for an English Parliament (which he got thrown out of this year for bringing the campaign into disrepute) to try and damage their reputations with his lies as well.

Here is the comment I posted in response to Uncles’ libel on his English Passport blog which he still hasn’t approved (and probably never will because he’s a dishonest little turd):

Comment Pending on English Passport libel

And here is a screenshot of the wall of the Victims of Steve Uncles page on Facebook posted straight after I commented on Uncles’ page:

Victims of Steve Uncles Wall

So will Steve Uncles, the lying, fascist, terrorist-appeasing lowlife failure be man enough to admit that he has deliberately mislead people and libelled me?  A complaint has been made to WordPress about the libel Steve Uncles has made in contravention of their Terms of Service and an email will be sent off to his attack poodle, the ineffectual “technically” leader of the English Democrats (and practising solicitor) Robin Tilbrook who I assume is Uncles’ personal solicitor as he is the one who makes all the threats and complaints against anyone who criticises the terrorist-appeaser nowadays.

Update:
Not content with libelling me, the terrorist sympathiser is now impersonating me rather than publishing my comments exposing his deception.  This is the best thing about terrorist sympathising scum like Steve Uncles – give them enough rope and they’ll hang themselves.  I think you’re going to need a better solicitor than Robin for this one Steve.  He couldn’t even manage to win a racial discrimination case for his own party when the bank admitted to racially discriminating against you, I don’t fancy his chances of getting you off this one!

Uncles Impersonating Me

Google shuns St George

St Andrew’s Day …

Google Doodle St Andrew's Day

St David’s Day …

Google Doodle St David's Day

St George’s Day …

Google Doodle St George's Day

Now I can guess what the excuse will be – St George’s Day has been postponed until the 2nd of May by the church because it clashes with Easter and Easter is more important in the religious calendar than a saint’s day – but it’s not good enough.

It doesn’t matter whether there is congestion in the church’s calendar, St George’s Day left its religious roots behind a long time ago and is a national day for our country.  I don’t care what the Pope or the Archbishop of Canterbury says, England’s St George’s Day is on the 23rd of April every year.

So, to Google and Asda (who have decked out their Telford stores in British flags) and all the other shops around England that have ignored St George and stocked up on the butcher’s apron, I have only one thing to say: how dare you insult my country, fuck you.

The left shows its true colours once again

201 people were arrested during the TUC’s protest in London on Saturday.  All 201 of them were still in custody today according to the BBC.

The protest was meant to be about opposing public sector cuts but as usually the case whenever you get more than a handful of left wingers, it descended into a riot with damage to both public and private property and attacks on the police.

Class war? First Class war more like.Sadly the left is pretty much economically illiterate which is why we have this boom and bust economic cycle where socialists get into government and bankrupt the country and then capitalists spend the next few years getting us out of trouble.  I’m generalising a bit by calling Labour socialists when they’re more accurately described as social democrats (with less emphasis on the “democrat” bit) and calling the Conservatives capitalist when they’re more accurately described as social market capitalists but they still adhere to socialist and capitalist ideologies.

The simple reality is that the UK is insolvent – more money is being spent than is being paid in taxes.  National debt is over a trillion pounds (£1,000,000,000,000) and will realistically never, ever be paid off.  The “cuts” that the economically illiterate left are opposing are reductions in the increase in spending, not real cuts.  But the “cuts” aren’t enough, we really have to cut spending in real terms and quite savagely.  This doesn’t have to result in swingeing cuts to services though, or at least not to essential services.  Spending on health and education can continue as it is or even increase.  Spending on roads and social care can continue as it is or even increase.  What we need is to start all over again with state income and expenditure.  There are so many taxes and public expenditures that it’s just a complete mess and countless billions are spent on merely administering this behemoth.  We need to go back to basics and simplify and cut back the whole public sector and tax system.

The tax handbook produced by HMRC every year which details all the tax rules is now over 10,000 pages long and comes in seven volumes.  Inordinate amounts of money are spent on administering the tax system and trying to find out whether people are evading tax, let alone trying to make them pay what they owe.  The tax credit system is the very worst of  a tax system that has been allowed to grow out of all proportion – in what alternate reality does it make sense to spend money collecting tax off people and them spend even more money giving it back to them rather than just not taxing them in the first place?  The tax system needs scrapping and starting again.

Public services also need cutting back.  There is too much bureaucracy in the public sector wasting money that should be spent delivering services.  You need management in the public sector just as much as you do in the private sector but you need management that can do things, not just talk about them and a lot less management is needed.  People are assets but they’re also liabilities – the private sector understands this better than the public sector which is why private sector organisations are a lot leaner than comparable public sector organisations.  The public sector needs to be run more like a charity (a proper charity, not one of the taxpayer-funded lobby groups that call themselves charities like Common Purpose or ASH) with a constant eye on value for money and an over-riding goal of providing services to people who need them.  Public sector organisations go too far one way or the other – they’re either run as profit-making companies or they spend money like it’s going out of fashion.

The left are wrong to be campaigning for no “cuts” and maintaining the status quo in the public sector.  The only way to keep spending at the current rate is to put up taxes and that’s not a sustainable way to run the economy because the economy needs people to have disposable income to stimulate growth and without growth you have recession and then you enter the economic doom cycle of people having less money to spend which send the economy deeper into recession.

So, back to Saturday’s protests.  What were they actually about?  It was supposed to be a march and rally against “cuts” organised by the Trades Union Congress (TUC) but I saw more banners and placards for completely irrelevant issues.  There were gay pride flags, religious placards, anti-capitalists, anarchists, banker-haters, CND flags, environmentalists, anti-Tory slogans, Palestinian flags, anti-Trident posters, “class war” placards, anti-tax avoidance posters and those are just the ones I remember seeing.  The TUC are claiming it as the biggest protest since the second world war but at the upper end of their 250-500k attendees (you can’t get much more vague than a 100% margin of error) it’s about the same as the 400k+ who descended on London to protest against the ban on fox hunting and all of those 400k were protesting against the hunting ban whereas a sizeable proportion of those in London yesterday were protesting about all sorts of things.

The TUC and the media tried to play down the violence and attacks on the police yesterday, saying it was a small group of about 125 people who weren’t there for the TUC protest.  As 201 people have been arrested so far, the 125 people is obviously wrong.  I will accept that the so-called anarchists (another form of socialism) weren’t there for the protest against the “cuts” but were there to cause trouble but you have to ask yourself why it is that they only ever turn up to left wing demonstrations and not, for instance, EDL marches?  The answer is that they are they are the true representatives of the views of the left, the only difference between one of the far left extremists attacking police officers and breaking into banks and businesses and the middle aged teachers and council workers and street football co-ordinators is that they have the balls to go out on the rampage.

I have often said that we need to be more like the French (how that sticks in my throat) and learn to protest better when we don’t get our own way but these people go too far.  The like of the EDL and the Countryside Alliance protested for change in policy, these “anarchists” are protesting against society.  I don’t want a communitarian society like these left wing nutjobs.  I want a society where things get made that I can buy, where stuff happens and I don’t have to worry about it and where I can come home and look at all the shiny things I’ve got and think “yes, it was worth going out to work for all this”.  If I wanted to live in a society where everyone ignored the law and things only worked when people could be bothered I’d move to France or Spain or Greece.

There is a certain amount of irony in these protests.  The unions paid for first class train tickets for their class war warriors and the cost of cleaning up and making good the damage caused by rampaging anti-“cuts” terrorists will take even more money away from the services they supposedly want to protect.  And the money companies like Top Shop, Santander and Fortnum & Mason’s spend cleaning up and repairing their buildings after they were attacked by people demanding they stop legally avoiding paying some of their taxes can be set off against their tax liabilities.  Well done lefties, way to score an own goal.

I am sick to death of the workshy, hypocritical left demanding more and more of my money to fund their addiction to the state and the state’s addiction to my money.  I want less tax, less government and more cuts.

Equality for all (women)

She'll make someone a lovely wife one day

Today isn’t just Pancake Day (or Shrove Tuesday as it’s occasionally known), more importantly it’s International Women’s Day.

To celebrate International Women’s Day, the British government’s two Ministers for Women & Equality (both women of course, the position isn’t open to men to ensure equality) have announced a number of official events involving British government ministers:

  • Launch of Violence against Women and Girls Action Plan (only women and girls are subjected to violence)
  • Strengthening Women’s Voices (because women need listening to while the rest of us are ignored)
  • House of Lords International Women’s Day debate (hosted by a Baroness of course, a man couldn’t be trusted)
  • International Women’s Day Newsletter (telling “women’s organisations” what the British government is doing)
  • A new strategic vision for girls and women: stopping poverty before it starts (how the Department for International Development is spending English men’s taxes on women abroad)

I have complained before about the institutional discrimination in the Ministry for “Equality” which shows no signs of abating.  There is no International Men’s Day and there isn’t and never will be a Minister for Men in the Ministry for Inequality.  The only men’s rights group that ever came into existence was Fathers 4 Justice and they were quickly ground into the dirt by the establishment.  I didn’t support Fathers 4 Justice based on my own experiences but the reason they were infiltrated and undermined by the state was because they were a men’s group.