Harriet Harperson, the man-hating fascist Minister for Women & Inequality, has written to the Tartan Taxman 2.0 and demanded that he bans companies from claiming VAT back on entertaining staff and clients at lap dancing clubs because it’s demeaning and effectively excludes women.

Isn’t it a little presumptuous of Ms Harperson to assume that no woman would ever want to go to a lap dancing club?  Presumably she’s aware that lesbians fancy women, what with her husband being a porn connoisseur, so I can only assume that she is intending to discriminate against lesbians as well as men.

And is lap dancing really demeaning to women?  They earn an obscene amount of money prancing around in their bra and pants teasing horny men.  Lap dancers can retire in their 30’s or 40’s on the proceeds of their career choice.  Is that demeaning?

And notice how she’s only interested in banning events that exclude women?  She isn’t asking for a ban on companies claiming VAT back on entertaining women at Chippendales shows, for instance.  Surely they’re “demeaning” for men and exclude men?

I’ve emailed the Minister for Women & Inequality asking for clarification although I fear a smidgeon of sarcasm may have crept into my email as a result of my being unable to take the man-hating old trout seriously …

Dear Ms Harperson,

I see that you have written to the Chancellor demanding that he ban companies from claiming VAT back on entertaining at lap dancing clubs because you believe it is demeaning and excludes women.

Firstly, I don’t see what business it is of yours if a woman decides to take her clothes off for a living.  If a woman chooses to work in a lap dancing club, earning more in a week than most people do in a month, then it isn’t for you to denounce her career choice as demeaning.  Is taking your clothes off and teasing frustrated men for an obscene amount of money really demeaning?

Secondly, I notice that you don’t mention men in your demands in anything other than the negative context we’ve all come to expect from you.  Do you believe that male strippers are also demeaning and that companies should be banned from entertaining women with male strippers?  I ask merely for clarification as you appear to have forgotten that the “equality” you are a minister for applies to men as well as women.

Apologies in advance for being born male,

Stuart

Do you think they’ll notice?

Technorati Tags: Harriet Harperson, Discrimination

A number of unions, including the Fire Brigade Union (FBU), Unite and UNISON, voted yesterday to boycott Israel and disinvest from companies that profit from the Israeli occupation of Palestine.

The unions that supported the motion at the TUC conference represent 6.5m people in the UK.

The motion also condemns the Israeli trade union, Histadrut and calls for a review of the TUC’s relationship with it after it issued a statement supporting Israel’s illegal military incursion into Gaza earlier this year which resulted in many war crimes being committed, including the Israeli’s military’s illegal use of white phosphorus.

The UK’s trades union movement follows those of Ireland and South Africa which have also voted to boycott Israel until it ends its illegal occupation of Palestine.

I generally don’t have much time for the unions, not least because they keep the Liebour Party from bankruptcy, but they have served a useful purpose in his case.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Palestine, Unions, TUC, Boycott

Today is Mrs Sane’s birthday so after the presents, crumpets and bacon butties we went to Sheriffhales Village Fair.

Now, village fair usually means WI, homemade skittles and dodgy cake stalls but this is in a league of its own.  The entire village of Sheriffhales is closed off to traffic and the locals make scarecrows and display them all over the village.  Visitors vote for the best scarecrow and they win prizes – top prize is £150 this year!  There are scarecrows everywhere.

Technorati Tags: Sheriffhales, Scarecrows

About this time last year we received a statement from Engage Mutual Assurance, the company the British government “invested” #4’s Child Trust Fund in, showing that it made a 6.2% loss.  I reiterated my belief that the Child Trust Fund is “a fucking rip-off scheme designed to make rich companies richer”.

Today we’ve had the latest statement.  The British government has “invested” some more money with Engage so the £210 that was left last year after Engage took their 1.5% mismanagement fee is now worth £439.99.  Great stuff.

Unfortunately, it’s a tad difficult to track how bad the performance of the fund is because the statement we received in August last year said the fund had £210 left in it but according to this statement it had £494.48 in it.  So, at some point between the statement being produced for August last year and the end of the financial year for the fund on 10th August, the British government pumped an unspecified amount into the failing fund which has still lost 11% of its value after the mismanagement fee had been taken.

Amusingly, Engage have enclosed a leaflet with the statement inviting us to make further payments into the fund which they describe as “a great way of helping to build up a fund to help pay for further education, or perhaps help buy a first house or car, or even to start up in business”.  The only thing this scam is good for is pissing taxpayers money up the wall.  Putting the £500 or so that’s been given to this bunch of wasters into a savings account with a bank would have made more money and if all the Child Trust Fund money had been put into high street banks instead of being distributed randomly amongst incompetent investment companies then we might not have had to hand over so much money to stop them going bust.

I phone HMRC this morning to ask if they could tell me if there’s a Child Trust Fund that’s making money but they apparently don’t know and advised me to go and see an Independent Financial Advisor.  So I phoned Engage to ask them if they have another Child Trust Fund that isn’t losing money but they only have this one.  Searching for other Child Trust Fund providers, I came across HMRC’s Child Trust Fund calculator that makes the hilarious assumption that the fund is going to make a profit and could be as high as £1,270 in 13 years time even if we don’t make any additional payments into it.  The only time we’re going to see those sort of numbers on this fund is when it’s in the red.

Although I don’t think the Child Trust Fund will ever be a good investment, I’m buggered if Engage are going to carry on ripping off the taxpayer with their crap investments so I’ve done some research and decided to transfer the lot to Yorkshire Building Society’s CTF savings account which works just like a normal savings account so they’ll pay interest if they make money but don’t take money away if they don’t.  Interestingly, their stakeholder CTF account is run by none other than Engage Mutual Assurance.  The only Child Trust Fund rated higher than Yorkshire Building Society was Henley Building Society but they don’t do them over the phone, internet or by post and I’m not driving to Stoke just to open a Child Trust Fund!

Technorati Tags: Child Trust Fund, Engage Mutual Assurance, Yorkshire Building Society

This is about the fifth or sixth time I’ve done a political compass test and it always comes out pretty much the same – slightly right of centre libertarian.

Technorati Tags: Political Compass

Mrs Sane has just been watching last night’s X-Factor and spotted what can only be the product of a secret genetic experiment …

Will Young	Danyl Johnson

He’s got the Will Young lisp, he sings like Will Young, he dances like Will Young, he looks like Will Young and likes to take it up the chuff.  If you’ve ever wondered what the scientists that created Dolly the Sheep had been doing for the last few years, I think we now have the answer.

Technorati Tags: Will Young, Danyl Johnson, X-Factor

I had some sad news the other day.

A fellow Leader at the vbCity developers forum, Martin de Klerk (aka emdek), has died of cancer.

He told us that he’d got cancer a while ago and that it was terminal but it doesn’t really make it any easier.

Martin was an excellent role model on vbCity – even handed, friendly and knowledgable.  He will be sorely missed.

Technorati Tags: Sad

I’m back from my English seaside holiday.  Felixstowe was an unusual place to go for a holiday but it was nice – plenty for the kids to do, a nice town centre, very clean and well maintained and surprisingly quiet.

The caravan site we stayed on was a bit of a disappointment.  The caravan hadn’t been cleaned very well when we arrived and the children’s entertainment was rubbish.  There was no mention in the brochure of the trains that passed by all of 100ft away every half an hour some nights.  That said, it was close to the sea front with a McDonalds within walking distance, its own pool and park and only 5 minutes drive from the town centre and its truly awful one way system and traffic lights.  More on the caravan site another time, including the toilet geyser keeping us awake last night.

The sea front was clean and well looked after with a few amusement arcades, plenty of takeaway places and lifeguards.  The town was really well looked after as well, a good range of shops and a proper independent retro cinema which we visited twice seeing as how it was only £4 for an adult and a quid for a bottle of Coke.

Felixstowe was a nice place and I’d definitely go there again for a holiday but probably not at the same caravan site.

Technorati Tags: Felixstowe, Holiday

My first reaction when I read this was “what the fuck”?  The taxpayer is going to pay graduates to go on a working holiday?  The British government is actually going to hand over £500 of our hard earned money to a bunch of students so they can go on a taxpayer-funded jolly?  We’re bankrupt, do they have no sense?

But then I thought about the alternative.  What’s the alternative?  It’s a scheme for graduates that can’t afford a gap year and who don’t have a job.  So what would these students be doing if they weren’t going on a gap year?  They’d be at home claiming unemployment benefits.  There aren’t enough jobs to go around so getting rid of a few students is a good thing and £500 for a year is cheaper than a year of unemployment benefits.

The 10 week trip will give the students experience that will make them more employable in future.  Their time will be spent on projects such as building schools in Borneo, Costa Rica, India and Nicaragua.

So, rather thatn seeing it as a bad thing, let’s look at it as an opportunity.  Let’s invest £500 in sending a few more unemployables abroad to do community work and save the cost of paying them unemployment benefits.  Those that can’t afford to stump up the other £1,000 and pay for flights and vaccinations can be put to good use doing community work here in exchange for the benefits they’re receiving.  Which leads nicely back to my post from way back in October 2007 on forcing people on benefits to do community work.  Chris Grayling adopted a watered-down version of what I suggested for the Tories and this is just another half-hearted variation on the theme.

It’s a good idea but 500 students isn’t enough – it needs to be done a much grander scale which will not only save the taxpayer billions in benefits in the short term, it will encourage a work ethic in the wider population that will save money in the long term and will provide a workforce to clean up and improve our towns and cities.

Technorati Tags: Benefits, Students

Total Politics (Iain Dale‘s latest venture) are running the annual top blogs poll.

Send your top ten list of UK blogs to toptenblogs@totalpolitics.com to take part in the poll.

If you included Wonko’s World, Bloggers4UKIP or the Campaign for an English Parliament in your top 10 list that would be lovely. 🙂

Technorati Tags: Polls

Less than a fortnight, El Gordo said in his Building England’s Britain’s Future speech that he wanted English local authorities to favour “British” people when letting out council houses over immigrants.  He has been told that this would be illegal.
When refinery workers went on strike a few months ago he declared that there would be “British jobs for British people”.  He was, of course, told that this would be illegal and so he backed down.

When half of his cabinet were exposed as expenses fraudsters, he declared that there would be prosecutions and prison sentences for any MP that was caught fiddling expenses.  He was told that this would cause problems, such as MPs getting into trouble for fiddling their expenses, and that it would probaly be illegal so he backed down.

Who comes up with this stuff?  Does he just make up policy himself or is there someone in Downing Street deliberately telling him to say things he will later have to back down on?  Co-incidentally, the Inequalities and Human Rights Commission have rushed out a report based on 2 year old figures from one of their left wing sockpuppet research quangos, IPPR, saying that immigrants don’t get any preferential treatment when it comes to housing.  That was lucky, their our glorious leader might have lost face otherwise.

Technorati Tags: No Mandate Brown, Housing

This animation was made by my 11 year old son and a couple of his mates at school. Step aside Nick Park!

Technorati Tags: Animation, Animals on Ice

Just checking the referrers for Bloggers4UKIP and a strange one came up:

http://bloggers4ukip.blogspot.com/notify-Deloitte_Notify?aHR0cDovL2Jsb2dnZXJzNHVraXAuYmxvZ3Nwb3QuY29tLw==

The url doesn’t work but Google turns up the url on a lot of Blogger blogs.  The wording of the url would suggest that Blogger are notifying Deloitte whenever some or all blogs are updated.

Anyone know what it’s all about?

Technorati Tags: Blogger, Deloitte

Engineers from Shropshire Council are closing Harley Bank once again to try and figure out why rocks keep falling onto the road.

I’m not an engineer so I might be looking at this simplistically but I wonder if cutting into the rock face and turning it into a sheer cliff and removing all the trees might have some bearing on the sudden severe instability of the rock face?

My family have lived in the area for generations and my nan remembers the council employing someone to take a wheelbarrow down the road daily and clear up the stones that had fallen onto the road.

In more recent times the rock face has appeared more stable, I have seen rocks on the road once, maybe twice and travelled it hundreds of times.  But the council must have had a few million burning a hole in their pockets because they decided to “improve” the rock face, the upshot of which is that the road is closing again tomorrow for the fourth time in less than a year (the first time was a week or so after the work was done).

It wouldn’t be so bad if it was a road in an urban area where there are alternative routes that don’t involve a 30 minute diversion but this is rural Shropshire and Harley Bank is a major route.  It also doesn’t help my sister and brother-in-law who run the Plume of Feathers at the foot of the hill because there is no passing traffic when the road is closed and the unofficial diversions from the closest town are still at least 15 minutes of country roads which doesn’t exactly encourage people to make the effort to go to a pub.

Technorati Tags: Shropshire, Much Wenlock, Harley Bank, Plume of Feathers

When was the last time Caroline Flint told the truth?  Does anyone know?  Does she know?

Flint, whose greatest achievement was to be Secretary of State for the European Empire’s trojan horse in the British government, has just been interviewed on ITV.

They showed the infamous clip of her saying how proud she is to serve in El Gordo’s cabinet of all the talentless which was recorded a few hours before she resigned from the cabinet.  They quoted her slagging off El Gordo for using her as “window dressing” (don’t flatter yourself love, you might be the best looking woman in Parliament but you’re competing against wrinkly old hags and a ginger gnome) and then she said what a wonderful job he was doing.  They asked her if she’d been implicated in a plot against El Gordo, she said no and then two minutes later said she had been implicated in a plot against El Gordo.

The one good thing about all the lies and sleaze in Westminster is that it’s getting previously disinterested people interested in politics.  Mrs Sane generally couldn’t give a shit about politics (with a few exceptions) but this has hooked her.

Technorati Tags: Caroline Flint, Liar

No Mandate Brown survived a coup attempt at a meeting of the Parliamentary Liebour Party last night.  He has promised to listen to MPs more and take their views into account.

How about listening to the electorate Gordo?  How about taking the electorate’s views into account?

On Thursday the electorate overwhelmingly rejected Liebour in the English local elections.  No votes = no councillors = no mandate.

On Sunday the electorate overwhelmingly rejected Liebour in the EU imperial elections.  They are the third UK party in the EU parliament, they have no mandate.

As I type, 66,966 people have signed a petition on his own website calling for No Mandate Brown to resign.

A meeting of the Parliamentary Liebour Party is not a democratic mandate to govern this country.  The people have spoken and they have said no to Liebour, no to the European Empire and no to Gordon Brown.

Technorati Tags: No Mandate Brown

Peter Mandelson on the Andrew Marr show this morning:

What the public wants to see us doing is the new ministers getting on with their jobs, they want to see us cleaning up the expenses system in Westminster, they want to see us intensifying out focus on the economy and getting out of the recession and they also want to see us taking forward New Labour’s public service reforms.

No Mandy you smarmy dishonest fucking cretin, what the public wants – and what they told you through the ballot box on Thursday – is that they want Liebour out of power and as soon as is humanly fucking possible.

God, just hearing his condascending voice spouting complete bullshit and openly lying on national TV … I just want to punch the dishonest little shit in the face.

Deep breaths.

Technorati Tags: Peter Mandelson, Andrew Marr

More women get university places, more women get places in top universities, more women than men on professional courses such as medicine and law, women getting better qualifications than men.

Someone remind me why we need a Minister for Women but no Minister for Men.

Petition the PM: create a Minister for Men and balance the gender bias in the Ministry for Equality.

Technorati Tags: Equality, Universities

I see the Guardian have updated their spell-checker we already know it replaces “English” with “British” but now it replace “Cross of St George” with “Union Flag” as well.

English Democrat flies the Union flag in Doncaster

Doncaster starts a new life this week under a leader from a party previously associated with minuscule numbers of votes at byelections and an obsession with the flag.

[…]

His other eye-catching policies were in the same vein: reducing councillors’ numbers by two thirds to 21 (which he almost certainly has no power to do) and holding a referendum on whether his own post should exist. It was created in 2001 after a referendum with a 25% turnout. Although the English Democrats are routinely called right-wing (every public building would have to fly the Union flag) and want tight immigration curbs, they out-zeal the Liberal Democrats in wanting devolution from Westminster, election of every post in sight and the reunification of dismembered Yorkshire.

Well done to the English Democrats in getting one of their number elected as Mayor of Doncaster.  I don’t know why Doncastrians voted for him – whether it was for his euroscepticism, his English nationalism, his local policies or purely as a protest vote – but they did vote for him in large numbers and I’m sure we all wish him the best of luck in the English Democrats’ first foray into mainstream politics.

Now, back to the Guardian.  The failed communists at the Guardian hate the very idea of an English Parliament, partly because their beloved Labour Party would probably never leave the opposition benches in an English Parliament and partly because they only like the nationalism of the “oppressed minorities” on the celtic fringe.  You can expect more of this sort of thing from the Guardian and the rest of the anglophobic left wing media if Mayor Davies proves to be popular.

I very much doubt that Mayor Davies of the English Democrats will be flying the British flag in Doncaster.

Technorati Tags: English=British, English Democrats, Doncaster, Guardian

I will not waver, I will not wok away

Don’t you get it? We want you to waver, we want you to walk away.  That’s why we’re not voting for your useless party.  -200 councillors and counting Gordo, take the fucking hint!

Don’t forget, there’s a petition on the PM’s petitions website calling on him to resign.

Technorati Tags: No Mandate Brown