Actually, I was woken up by a phone call from an excitable Mrs Sane rather than my alarm this morning to tell me that the internet was working again in our house.  It stopped working Friday night/Saturday morning and if it wasn’t for repeated phone calls arguing with “higher level technical support” people at Sky about what the problem was, I would still be without internet now.

Anyway, I haven’t put in my expenses and compensation claim for 5 days without internet, hours of phone calls on my mobile and doing their bloody job for them yet so I’ll save the details for another day.  They’ve also messed up my phone line in fixing the broadband because the phone number rings out but the line is dead.  They’re saying someone will call me in 24-48 hours to do some diagnostics, I’ve told them I’ll be phoning Virgin if it’s not working by the time I get home tomorrow.

So, back to this morning.  I’m already feeling a bit crap – tired, aching, homesick – so what I really needed to cheer me up was a phone call at half 11 this morning to tell me my grandad had died.  He’d been ill for a while having had a couple of heart attacks, emphysema, pleurisy, and asthma and had a couple of weeks in hospital a couple of months back but as far as we knew, he was waiting for a chest infection to clear up so he could have a blocked artery sorted out.  He was taken into hospital overnight with a bad chest and died this morning at half 10.  Bit of a shock and pretty gutting, especially as I’m away from home and having to make do with phone calls to family.  Listening to my daughter crying her eyes out when I phoned home telling me “I didn’t want grandad to die, I wanted to go and see him again” was horrible and I couldn’t be there for her.

We weren’t close in the way that some people are with grandparents – in fact, I hadn’t seen him for a few years until he went into hospital a couple of months back – but that’s how it was when we were kids and other than my parents, my sister and my nan, I don’t see most of my family for years at a time even though most of them live within 20 minutes’ drive.  But he was my grandad and I loved him even if he was a cantankerous old bugger (not to mention being Welsh).

I went to see him a few weeks ago and we talked for a long time – probably more that one day than I’ve ever talked to him before.  That was the last time I saw him and that’s what I’ll remember.  He was smiling and joking, I didn’t see much of that side of him as my grumpy grandad when I was a kid.

I didn’t see him as often as I should, especially when he only lived a few miles away but I’m glad we spent a bit of time together this last couple of months.  He told one of my aunties the other day that he was fed up of feeling ill and that he’d had enough.  Yesterday he had pictures of my nan out on the table with her things that he’d kept (she died years ago).  I guess he knew what was coming and I think he wanted it.  He died with his wife and four of his daughters around him.

But I’m not going to write today off just yet.  My mother-in-law is in Shrewsbury tonight for the Pride of Shropshire awards where she’s in the final three for the carers award.  She’ll find out in a couple of hours if she’s got the award.  Hopefully she does and I can end the day on slightly less of a downer.

I’ll be glad when today is over and even more glad to get home tomorrow.  Today has been a thoroughly shitty day.

My father-in-law has an über-rare disease called superficial siderosis.  As of 4 years ago there were only 270 confirmed cases worldwide so as you can imagine, there’s not much known about the disease or what is likely to happen in the future.  He started losing his hearing about 20 years ago, the last thing he heard was a firework about 6 or 7 years ago (it certainly surprised him!).  When I first met Mrs Sane her dad was walking with a stick, driving by himself and going fishing.  Now he needs a wheelchair outside, a big walking frame in the house and he can’t go anywhere on his own.

We won’t know if she’s won until next Thursday but just being in the top 3 is an achievement even if she doesn’t.

The expected anti-LibLabCon backlash didn’t materialise with people voting for the LibLabCon coalition.  The Leaders “Debates” shown on Sky, ITV and the BBC successfully deflected attention from the local candidates and onto the party leaders even though only a few thousand of us could vote for them and the anti-hung parliament propaganda in Tory newspapers scared a lot of people into so-called “tactical” voting.

The BBCs partiality in this election needs to be investigated and steps taken to ensure that the privileged and powerful few aren’t given an unfair advantage over the already disadvantaged smaller parties.

And when the Tory media complains about the fact that Gordon Brown is still Prime Minister despite losing by 2m votes and 50-odd seats, they have only themselves to blame for interfering in the election.  If they’d left people to get on with voting for who they wanted instead of peddling propaganda about a hung parliament the result could have been very different.  If they’d stuck to slagging off Liebour and the Limp Dims instead of telling lies about a hung parliament they wouldn’t have motivated the LibLab voters.

It looks like UKIP’s hopes are all pinned on Nigel Farage.  The result has been pretty disappointing nationwide for UKIP but it looks like a lot of deposits have been retained and UKIP have beaten the BNP in almost every seat contested.

In Telford, David Wright managed to cling on to his seat with a reduced majority of about 1k, reduced from 5k.  Denis Allen got almost 2.5k votes, keeping his deposit and effectively depriving the Tories of a victory.  That was certainly the general consensus anyway – the Tories were fuming with us and the Liebour lot were shaking our hands blinking away the tears in their eyes, thanking us for seeing the Tories off!

In the Wrekin constituency, Mark Pritchard increased his 500 majority to 9k.  Malcolm Hurst for UKIP got 2,050 votes and missed the 5% needed to keep his deposit by about 350 votes.

As I type, there are over 2m more votes for the Tories than there are for Liebour and a difference of 47 seats.  There are 1.6m votes between the Limp Dims and Liebour but the difference in seats is 189.  The electoral system is fundamentally wrong and needs changing.  Under proportional representation, based on current vote share with 43 seats left to declare, the seat allocation for the main parties should be something like:

• Con: 235
• Lab: 185
• Lib: 149
• UKIP: 20
• BNP: 12
• SNP: 11
• Green: 6

Tens of millions of votes will be ignored no matter what the outcome is because we still have this medieval first past the post electoral system.

For too long, English politics has been about the same tired old parties – the dishonest Conservatives, the illiberal and economically illiterate Labour Party and the weak and ineffectual Lib Dems.  We’ve seen our country bankrupted and sold to the EU and our trust abused by thieving politicians.  Today we have a chance to break the stranglehold the corrupt LibLabCon have over our country and change the way it is governed.

It might not seem like it with the media’s obsession over Brown, Cameron and Clegg and the exclusive “Leaders Debates” but today we are voting for an MP, not a Prime Minister.  If you listen to the LibLabCon and cast a so-called “tactical” vote then you’ve cast a wasted vote.  If you vote for somebody you don’t want to try and stop someone else you don’t want from winning then all you’re going to get is someone you don’t want representing you for the next 5 years.

You know that feeling you get when you’re choosing a new mobile phone?  You look at all the features and read the reviews and think “Can I live with this phone for the next 12-18 months until I’m due my next upgrade?”.  That’s the feeling you should be getting when you look at your ballot paper multiplied by a thousand.  The person you vote for today (if he or she wins) is going to represent you in Westminster for up to 5 years.

Forget about the Leaders debates – unless you live in Kirkcaldy & Cowdenbeath, Witney, Sheffield Hallam or Bangladesh, you’re not voting for any of them.  Forget about a hung parliament – a hung parliament is healthy for democracy, it’s only the megalomaniac party leaders that have anything to lose from a hung parliament.  Forget about the “big picture”, it’ll look after itself.

There is no such thing as a wasted vote, us it wisely.

At half 8 tonight I finally had enough of listening to the incessant revving of a car engine and went to investigate.  Surprise, sur-fucking-prise, if it isn’t the same arsehole from up the road that I had to go over to a few months ago when he was hammering the shit out of the car at night.

I was polite and told him that I could hear him revving his car over the top of my telly in my house.  Then he shrugged his shoulders and revved the engine again so I practised some anglo-saxon words on him, got out my phone and made a point of counting the numbers to his house.  He stopped.

If you live on a housing estate, you have to accept the fact that you can’t batter cars with hammers or rev your engine at night when your neighbours’ kids are in bed and you also have to accept the fact that if you do batter cars with hammers or rev your engine at night when your neighbours’ kids are in bed, said neighbours are quite likely to come round to your house and shout at you.

But there has been a change lately and immigration is no longer the taboo subject it was.  It seems that the more full the country gets, the less jobs and houses there are to go round the people that already live here, the more people talk about the proverbial elephant in the room.

The facts are quite simple.  At this point in time, according to the Office of National Statistics, there are 2.45m people living in the UK that don’t have a job whilst there are only 480k job vacancies.  That’s 5 people currently living here, relying on unemployment benefits, for every job vacancy.  In 2004 there were half a million homeless people in England alone and the figures are rising year on year.  According to Property World, we need to build a quarter of a million new houses every year just to keep up with population growth and currently about 100,000 per year are being built.

So there aren’t enough jobs for the people already living here, nor are there enough houses.  But the British government still allowed a quarter of a million immigrants to move here in 2008.  Where will they live?  Where will they work?  Or, as they have to have somewhere to live and work before they can move here (EU citizens excepted, of course), where are the homeless people already living here going to live and where are the unemployed people already living here going to work?

We cannot sustain economic immigration and it will be a number of years until we are able to do so.  Unemployment and homelessness needs to be down to the 10′s of thousands before we can sustain economic immigration.  It’s not about race or religion or skin colour or any other minority qualification, it’s about maths and logic.  The country is full.  The country is broke.  We can’t afford to pay people not to work because the jobs they could have been doing have gone to people moving here from another country.

The LibLabCon are talking about a fairer society in their general election campaigns but there is nothing fair in increasing the already unsustainable competition for the woefully inadequate supply of jobs and houses.  It’s unfair on everybody who lives here, whether they can trace their ancestry back to the Anglo-Saxon settlers or whether they’re first generation immigrants who’ve been here barely 12 months.  The unemployment and homelessness crisis that’s exacerbated by immigration affects us all.

The BNP and their racist clones aren’t the solution to this problem.  Closing our borders to all immigration and “sending the darkies home” isn’t the answer.  The only party with a sensible and fair policy on immigration is UKIP – ban all economic immigration for 5 years and then introduce a points-based system for all immigrants, including those from the European Empire.  That gives us 5 years to get people already living here into jobs and houses and then allow only the people we need to come and live and work here.

Legoland was a bit of a disappointing day out because the queues for everything were just enormous.  Traffic was backed up for miles just to get in the car park.  We had to queue for ages with our advance tickets to get them changed into normal tickets to get through the turnstiles.  All the rides had long queues – the shortest queue was about 15 minutes, the longest was a couple of hours.

From an entire day in Legoland we managed to go on 3 rides because #3 has Dyspraxia and can’t queue for long enough.  While we were waiting for a Legoland maintenance person to come and help us bump start the car (accidentally ran the battery down too far while we were having lunch) a member of staff asked Mrs Sane what sort of day we’d had.  She said it had been a bit disappointing and why and the member of staff said that we should have said when we arrived there because they know children with Dyspraxia can’t queue for long and allow them to queue jump.  A bit late to find out at 6pm!

We went to Chessington World of Adventures on Saturday and headed straight for customer services.  We explained what had happened at Legoland, they took our details and gave #3 a queue jump wrist band.  They recognise things like Dyspraxia and other illnesses that can cause distress or agitation when queueing as a disability which is great and made all the difference for our day out.  The system they operate is pretty fair – on the most popular rides, if you jump the queue they write the time you would have got on the ride if you’d queued and you can’t go on any of the other most popular rides until that time.

Where Legoland was a day of dragging a very unhappy, bored and agitated 7 year old (and his sister) around the park, Chessington was completely different.  We got to go on most rides, we didn’t have to keep dragging him back into the queue or try and find ways of constantly occupying him for half an hour or more.

It’s fantastic that Merlin Entertainment recognises the difficulty kids with Dyspraxia have with queueing and offer this queue jumper service.  It made our day and we’d definitely go back to one of their attractions.  In fact, before we decide to go to anything similar I’ll be checking if they do the same thing.

He is expected to announce a May 6th election.

I can’t wait to see the smug grin wiped off McBroon’s gurning face and the deflated look on Camoron‘s face when he realises that he hasn’t got a majority.  I’m predicting 3 seats for UKIP this time round, I’ll tell you which 3 another time.

Over 4,000 people gathered at an English Defence League demonstration in Dudley to protest against the planned £18m muslim mosque which over 20,000 locals previously objected to in a petition.  The protesters were herded into a large fenced-off car park surrounded by police whilst local fascists and muslims threw bottles and bricks over the fence.  The police stood and watched them do it right up until the EDL protesters pushed over the fences at which point the police ran away.

I’ve read on another website that an EDL marshal was stabbed and another had a glass bottle put in his neck.  The EDL website reports that a marshal was hit by a bottle, which would appear to give some legitimacy to the story.

I’m still not interested in ethnic nationalism or race politics and I’m not about to march with the EDL but it pisses me off that English people exercising their constitutional right to free assembly are treated this way and put in danger by the police while violent left wing fascists and muslim extremists are allowed to roam the streets, incite violence and murder and attack people who oppose them.  I’m half tempted, next time they’re in the area, to go along to one of these protests with a camera and see what happens first hand.

And just in case you’re wondering, there were 9 arrests at the protest: 3 EDL supporters (out of 4,000) and 6 UAF fascists.  The UAF arrests were for possession of offensive weapons and drugs.

It cost £109 for a consultation – triple the normal amount – because it’s Easter Sunday.  Plus £23 for a couple of injections and some rehydration powder.

I thought Easter was supposed to be a time for Christian charity?

What rules say that a sitting MP can’t update their official website before an election has been called?  I’m not aware of any but I am aware of new rules on election expenses during a “long election campaign” which are the rules that I suspect he is misleadingly referring to.  These rules cover the 6 month period prior to an election and place strict limits on the amount of money that can be spent on an election campaign.  His website would, of course, be included as election expenditure which would limit the amount of money he can spend on leaflets, public meetings and driving tanks up the wrekin.

If those are the rules he’s referring to then I’m sure his constituents would prefer that he was spending money telling them what he’s doing for them rather than saving up a few quid for leaflets.

Let’s get this straight right now – I do not support English Votes on English Laws.  It’s an insult to our nation and a constitutional fudge that is doomed to failure.

It is, however, a recognition of more than a decade of institutional discrimination against England at the hands of the British establishment and the need for English affairs to be managed by English politicians elected by, and accountable to, the people of England.  It will also inevitably lead to an English Parliament when the impracticality and inherent flaws in the system are shown up publicly.

To that end, I would encourage you to vote for the Power 2010 pledge on English Votes on English Laws.  It is currently in 4th place but it’s still too close for comfort.  Power 2010 and various other lobby groups associated with the Rowntree Trust will lobby every MP and PPC with the top 5 pledges as voted for by the public in the run-up to the election.

My spies tell me that David has been hauled over the coals but don’t worry, the Brownshirts haven’t sent him for “rehabilitation”, he’s been seen alive and well in the Cock Hotel in Wellington (no, that’s not a pun or a Freudian Slip).

I was sitting in the Cock last night having a quiet drink with a couple of fellow rabble rousers (one of which was the road pricing campaigner, Peter Roberts, but more on that later) when in wandered David Wright wearing a fetching Liebour-red jumper.  ”I’ll get these” he said to his comrades (they’ll probably end up on his expenses as sundry items or subsistence allowance) then they had a good laugh about scum-sucking-climate-gate.

I did try to get a question or two for him out of some scum sucking pigs on Twitter but they were too slow and I had to leave so I wandered over, warned him that there was a hacker under his table and left as he had a laugh about it.

Terry Pratchett has a rare form of Alzheimers and wants to shuffle off the mortal coil on his own terms, in a chair in his garden listening to music taking an overdose of painkillers with alcohol.  And why not?

He said he detests the idea that the government can choose whether you live or die but accepts that they have a duty to protect vulnerable people and so he proposes a tribunal that will decide on whether a person can choose to die or not.

My uncle died a few years ago after cruelly being kept alive for about a decade.  He had Huntington’s which is superficially similar to alzheimers and parkinsons but it doesn’t cause dementia, it just renders the body useless.  By the time my uncle died he couldn’t speak, couldn’t move, couldn’t eat, couldn’t drink, couldn’t control his bladder or bowels. He was kept alive for years in this state – his body didn’t work but his mind did.  He must have gone insane, there’s no way the human mind could cope.

If you kept an animal alive in that state you would probably be prosecuted by the RSPCA for animal cruelty so why is it not considered cruelty to do it to a human?

People should be allowed to make living wills while they are still of sound mind setting out the exact circumstances in which they would like to be put out of their misery.  The law needs to be changed to allow people to control their own ultimate destiny and to allow friends and relatives to help them do so.  The euthanasia tribunal idea is a good one and it should be coupled with a legal definition of quality of life, making it unequivocally clear when it is kinder to put someone down, to use the veterinary term.

My uncle shouldn’t have been kept alive for all those years with no quality of life and I would hope that someone would do the honourable thing and bump me off if ever I was in a similar position.

p.s. In case anyone is wondering, my dad didn’t get Huntingtons and it can’t skip a generation so I can’t get it.

The Chinese Met Office has warned that the far north of China could be globally warmed to as much -32°C.

Airports and roads have been closed in China because of the global warming and in South Korea the global warming is causing long delays at airports where runways and planes are iced up.

My friend in Moscow tells me that the city was globally warmed to -17°C yesterday.

In November, Chinese scientists caused an unseasonal snow storm by seeding clouds with silver iodide.  Just a co-incidence, I’m sure.

The emergency services aren’t giving much information but there have been injuries.  Three people have been sent to the nearby Royal Shrewsbury Hospital and one has been airlifted to Selly Oak Hospital in Birmingham.  Three air ambulances and ten land ambulances are involved in the emergency.

Twitter is showing what a fantastic real-time news source it is.  According to people on Twitter it’s a gas explosion near Rowley’s Mansion, which seems to be backed up by the presence of a Transco van.

There’s a webcam image here from the Theatre Severn towards the site of the explosion.  Another webcam is located roughly opposite the site and pointed towards the Welsh Bridge and Theatre Severn.

An empty building has been destroyed by the explosion on the corner of Mardol Quay and Bridge Street – one of the busiest junctions in Shrewsbury.  The explosion has closed Frankwell, the Welsh Bridge, Riverside, Bridge Street and the streets in between.  The town centre is effectively closed and should be avoided.  The explosion was in a flat above an empty shop between Shrewsbury Hotel and a photo studio.

The explosion was strong enough to send rubble over the river, damaging the Theatre Severn.  It’s roughly double the distance shown from this webcam.

The BBC News channel was saying earlier that a person was trapped inside the collapsed building but that appears not to have been the case.

Hat-tips:
@jiminthemorning
@dawnuptheroad
@tootsweetshrew
@fannyfancy
@stevanegg
@clareashford
@cpritch
@andyjsmith

Below is a map showing where the explosion took place and some pictures of the site. Theatre Severn and the Sixth Form College are also shown on the map – both were damaged by debris from the explosion.

For more pictures, check out this BBC “In pictures” page.

]]> http://www.wonkosworld.co.uk/wordpress/2010/01/03/explosion-in-shrewsbury/feed/ 9 http://www.wonkosworld.co.uk/wordpress/2009/12/31/happy-new-year-4/ http://www.wonkosworld.co.uk/wordpress/2009/12/31/happy-new-year-4/#comments Thu, 31 Dec 2009 22:50:14 +0000 wonkotsane http://www.wonkosworld.co.uk/wordpress/?p=2139 Happy New Year

The English Defence League with their British flag

It’s quite a lengthy article written by a reporter who went on the same train as some EDL protesters to a protest and is therefore an expert on the EDL.  It makes much of the fact that their core activist base seems to be football supporter gangs and therefore EDL supporters are thugs.  It mentions Cardiff City’s “Soul Crew” but doesn’t make the connection that it’s a Welsh football club’s supporters gang in the supposed English Defence League.

The article starts with a picture of a bemused looking muslim woman in a hijab who was on the same train as some hoodie-wearing EDL supporters.  The caption under the picture says:

Perhaps the photo was taken when she wasn’t looking intimidated but as I said, she looks more bemused than intimidated.  And notice the word “Britain” in there – the word is used interchangeably with “England” throughout the article.  Further down the article, where the connection is less unlikely to be made, the reporters notes that a protester singing “We had joy, we had fun, we had muslims on the run” was told to shut up by his mates because of the woman in the hijab and that none of the other protesters joined in.

The article recounts an incident where a protester is told to take off a mask by a policeman.  The protester ask “Why are they allowed to wear burkas in public but we’re not allowed to cover our faces?” and is told “Just do what you’re told”.  It’s a valid point though, why is it acceptable for a muslim to be covered head to toe with only their eyes on show but a non-muslim can’t cover their face in public.  According to the article, the same protester then launches into one of the EDL’s favourites – Rule Britannia.  Again, the reporter fails to point out the bleedingly obvious: no Englishman would sing Rule Britannia, it’s a British song.

The reporter says that the EDL is linked with “far right” organisations such as Combat 18, Blood & Honour, the British Freedom Fighters and the National Front because their members are believed to have attended EDL protests.  No doubt members of a great many organisations attend EDL protests – there have been muslims at EDL marches protesting at radical Islam who probably belong to local mosques and other groups that promote the advancement of Islam in England.  Again, the reporter fails to point out that it’s the English Defence League and the British Freedom Fighters are … British.

The British English Communities Secretary has compared the EDL to the British Union of Fascists (ironically supported by the Daily Mail in the 30′s), a political party formed by a former Liebour government minister, Oswald Moseley.  The BUF was banned by the British government in 1940 and Moseley, along with most of its prominent members were interned during the second world war.  A vision of things to come for the English Defence League, perhaps?

The leader of the EDL started the group as “British Citizens Against Muslim Extremists” and many of their senior officers are member of the British National Party but the reporter again fails to point out the British/English thing.  The EDL’s youth wing apparently has over 300 members across the UK and their 18 year old leader, Joel Titus, says “We want to hit every town and city in Britain”.  Again, the British/English thing is ignored by the reporter.

A Home Office advisor, Professor Matthew Goodwin, says:

What I find more concerning is that any area should be so sensitive that a group protesting at muslim extremism should be a problem for the British government but that muslims who want to preach racial and religious hatred and intolerance or left wing fascists like Unite Against Fascism who turn up at EDL marches to cause riots are acceptable.  Not only are they acceptable but UAF actually get funding from the British government and senior members of the British establishment are members.

The truth is, there is nothing English about the English Defence League.  Why they decided to call themselves the English Defence League and then go about singing British songs and waving the British flag is beyond me but it is important that the schizophrenic nature of the British/English Defence League and the media’s reporting of them is exposed and challenged at every opportunity so that moderate civic English nationalists are not incorrectly associated with the EDL.

* Except Gordon Brown and Peter Mandelson, you’ve gone through enemy and out the other side.