Archive for wonkotsane

Thank you my Lords

October 13, 2008 Police State, Terrorism 6 comments

The House of Lords has rejected 42 days internment for “terrorist” suspects by 309 votes to 118 – apparently the biggest defeat in the House of Lords in living memory.

If proof was needed of the importance of an independent upper house, unaffected by the whims and whips of party politics, this is surely it.  Despite the hysterical wailings of Jacqui Smith, the power-mad fascist Home Secretary, the Lords’ vote not only reflected the will of the majority of the electorate but it was also the right thing to do.

Career politicians like Jacqui Smith will quite happily throw away centuries old civil liberties to appear to be doing something about the supposed threat from terrorism and to tighten the British government’s stranglehold over us.  Thank god the unelected House of Lords once again showed our elected representatives how to do the right thing.

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Christmas adverts … in October!

October 13, 2008 General 6 comments

Heard the first Christmas advert on the telly last night – the 12th of October and they’ve got a Christmas song on an advert already.

WTF?

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Function over form

October 12, 2008 General 12 comments

Quite often companies favour form over function – they design something to look good rather than work well.  A bit like Cat Deeley – looks great but then she opens her mouth and she sounds like Ozzie Osbourne.

Our tumble drier broke on Friday which is a bit inconvenient because, with two adults and four kids in the house, it takes the whole weekend to do the weeks washing.  So I nipped up to Curry’s yesterday and bought a new one.

I pushed the boat out and went for the second cheapest drier available (I don’t like spending money) which is made by a company I’ve never heard of called Beko and it’s great.  The door isn’t round like they usually are on tumble driers and washing machines, nor is it a tiny porthole through which you have to surgically extract anything larger than a sock.  The door takes up nearly half of the front of the machine and it’s a square hole (with rounded corners of course) so the clothes don’t get wedged at the bottom as you’re pulling them out.

All in all, it’s a very well designed tumble drier and at £149 it’s a bargain as well.

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Mum, I’m on the telly

October 12, 2008 General 7 comments

Lucky readers in the Peoples Republic of the West Midlands have the opportunity to see my ugly mug on the telly today.

It’s not Crimewatch, Britain’s Most Wanted Terrorist or a documentary on devastatingly handsome young bloggers (for obvious reasons).

I was interviewed the other day by the West Midlands edition of the BBC Politics Show on the Tory pledge to abolish the regional development agencies.  I’ve only got a bit part but the main guest is Mick Laverty, the current unelected Chief Exec of Advantage West Midlands – the man who decides how they spend their £300m budget (yes, three hundred million – about £100 for every taxpayer in the West Midlands).  I got interviewed because of the anti-regionalisation campaign I started a couple of years ago.

The programme is on at 12 noon today on BBC1 and it’s the usual BBC current affairs format – national programme with regional variences part way through.

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? What a difference a Dave Makes ?

October 11, 2008 England, Sport 2 comments

The second half of tonight’s game against Kazakhstan couldn’t have been more different from the first.

It took 7 minutes of the second half to score the first goal and they came thick and apart from a lucky goal by Kazakhstan, England dominated the second half.

But England still looked like they were going through the motions until Beckham came on and the team was transformed.  Smiles on faces, a new-found confidence and they worked like a machine.

Beckham should have been on from the start, England would have made Kazakhstan look like Accrington Stanley.

Rooney was named man of the match and he deserved it, if only for shaving off his ginger hair!

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Half Time: England 0-0 Kazakhstan

October 11, 2008 Sport One comment

Three LionsKazakhstan?  Kazakhfuckingstan?

What a bloody shambles.  We should be 5-0 up by now at least but no – half way through the game and it’s still 0-0.  Not only that but Kazakhstan look like they have about 30 men on the pitch.

There have been moments when England looked like a World Cup winning team but they’ve been few and far between.  Very bloody far.

England have looked like amateurs for the whole first half.  So amateur you’d be forgiven for thinking you were watching a Scotland match.

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Petrol Rip-off

October 11, 2008 General No comments

Just spotted this on Telford Live …

Last time Oil was $80 / Barrel, petrol was 76p / litre

Bastards.

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My name is Gordon Brown and I’m a fucking hypocrite

October 10, 2008 Economy One comment

For the last year or so El Gordo has been encouraging fuel prices to increase, rubbing his hands gleefully at the prospect of an extra few billion in bonus cash flowing into the slush fund.

But now the arse has fallen out of the economy and he’s spent a decade’s worth of slush fund on bailing out banks, he suddenly wants fuel prices down.  The one-eyed wonder of wankistan decided to take five minutes off from rearranging deckchairs to feign concern for us peasants who are spending an increasing percentage of our income on electricity, gas and petrol.  Hypocritical twat.

The price of oil is down to almost $80 a barrel but the price of petrol has only crept down ever so slowly and nowhere near in line with the drop in the price of oil.  Of course, El Gordo wouldn’t think about dropping tax on fuel.  Something like 80% of the price of petrol and diesel is tax but why would he care?  He gets a chauffeur-driven limo paid for by the taxpayer.  Thanks to Federal Europe we’re getting charged VAT on gas and electric but why would he care?  He gets his gas and electric paid for by the taxpayer.

Reducing the cost of fuel will give the economy a bit of a kick but it won’t work by itself.  Throwing taxpayers money at banks, paid for by increasing taxes, isn’t going to fix anything.  What is needed is a wholesale cull of taxes and government.  So much money is wasted shuffling round bits of paper and moving money from one place to another when what is needed is to get back to basics.  Government has become like a cancer, multiplying at a terminal rate and spreading throughout society.  Less government, less waste, less legislation, less tax.  That’s a message that will stimulate the economy but until this bunch of faux-Marxists are dragged kicking and screaming out of Westminster, it’s never going to happen.

Come the revolution …

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Federated Academies are the future

October 9, 2008 Education 6 comments

My eldest is starting secondary school school next year and we’ve been doing the school open day circuit.

Sunday was the Thomas Telford School, one of the best independent schools in the country.  We won’t find out until March if he’s been selected to go there.  Last night was the Lord Silkin School, the closest one to home and tonight was the Abraham Darby Academy.  Monday it’ll be the Madeley Academy.

The Thomas Telford, as you would expect, had amazing facilities and the Sixth Formers that showed us round were really confident and genuinely seemed to love the place.  The Ab Dab was great too – it’s got good facilities too and it’s a Haberdasher school so they’re really into good, traditional values.

About three quarters of an hour into the principal’s “20 minute” speech tonight my mind started wandering a bit and it occured to me that the Academy approach to failing schools is actually one half of a good idea.  The only thing that’s missing from it is federation with a selective school.

The Abraham Darby is an academy which is partly funded by the local authority but mainly by the Haberdashers and is almost entirely free to run itself as it wishes.  It’s federated with the Adams Grammar School, a fee charging selective school which is also a Haberdasher school.  What it means is that the schools are run seperately but along the same lines, sharing management and facilities.  For the Adams Grammar and the Abraham Darby, it means that the Abraham Darby sends their internationally-renowned music teachers to the Adams Grammar to train their teaching staff in music whilst the Adams Grammar send their languages teachers to the Abraham Darby to improve their language teaching.

The school we’re going to see on Monday is federated with the one we saw on Sunday.  They went from being threatened with closure to the best performing non-selective school in the borough since being turned into an Academy and federated with the Thomas Telford.

I don’t know if these are exceptions to the rule but it’s clearly working here.  If this success can be replicated throughout England then let’s start encouraging all schools to adopt the same approach!

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Darling loans banks 50% of GDP

October 8, 2008 Economy, WTF? 18 comments

Alistair McDarling has announced details of his master plan to save the banking sector.  He’s going to loan them 50% of the GDP of the UK.

I kid you not.  The taxpayer is stumping up £50bn now for the eight biggest banks and building societies and another £200bn is being given to the Bank of England for short term loans.  That’s a quarter of a trillion pounds in cash now.  Then a company is going to be set up – presumably along the lines of the DTI’s Small Firms Guarantee – to offer guarantees on £250bn of loans to banks and building societies.

Half a trillion pounds.  In 2006, the purchasing power parity GDP of the UK was $1.93 trillion – just under a trillion pounds at todays prices.  The Chancellor is loaning 50% of the Gross Domestic Product of the whole country to the banking sector.

Official national debt is £512bn.  The Centre for Policy Studies says that if Northern Rock liabilities and state pension liabilities (they’re taking money to pay into the state pension, it should be reasonable to expect it to be paid out) are added to the official figure then it’s more like £1.3 trillion or 103.5% of GDP.  Add this half a trillion on top and national debt is more like £1.8 trillion.  Count the zeroes – 1,800,000,000,000.  That’s 180% of GDP, 22% higher than Japan at the height of recession when banks were failing every few days and they were knocking zeroes off the Yen every couple of months.

What was it El Gordo said about not magicking money out of thin air?

But you know, when it comes to public spending you can’t just wave a magic wand to conjure up the money – not even with help from Harry Potter.

Quite.  So where the fuck did you find half a trillion pounds to give to the banks, eh?  Just to put a piggy bank-raiding session into perspective – half a trillion £1 coins weighs 2,090,000,000lbs.  That’s a seriously big piggy bank.

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Will RBS be the next bank to fail?

October 7, 2008 General 5 comments

Talking to a colleague about the money troubles this morning, I suggested that RBS might be the next big bank to fail in the UK.

Since then RBS shares have lost nearly 40% of their value and they’ve had to issue a statement denying that they’ve asked the Chancellor for a few billion to tide them over.

I worked at NatWest when RBS took them over and it came as a shock to a lot of people. RBS was a relatively small bank at the time but they were cash rich and the money was burning a hole in their pockets so they spent it. Quite a lot of it in fact and they threw in a boat load of shares to sweeten the deal as well. This was their first mistake – trying to absorb a banking group the size of NatWest was never going to be easy and NatWest was a traditional banking group, concentrating on banks and branches, whereas RBS was a more diverse group with distinct brands offering different services. Despite spending millions on rebranding for the last few years, the NatWest brand is still more recognisable and valuable outside of Scotland. Merging RBS into the NatWest brand would have made more sense and built a stronger brand but vanity prevented that from happening.

Their second mistake was over-extending themselves buying the Dutch bank, ABN Amro, with Santander and Fortis. They took on too much too soon after buying NatWest and divesting themselves of profitable non-core assets like Tesco Finance didn’t bring in enough cash so they had to spread themselves even more thinly and issue more shares.

RBS’ problem is that they’re a huge group with a weak brand. They’re quite heavily exposed to the US sub-prime problems – 20% of their turnover comes from the US. They’ve spent too much money and spread themselves too thinly and they’re losing the confidence of institutional investors. Standard & Poors have downgraded RBS’ credit rating which will make it harder and more expensive for them to obtain credit. I don’t know what odds Guido is offering on RBS surviving intact but they won’t be good enough to tempt me to have a flutter.

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Germany shuns EU for unilateral action on economy

October 7, 2008 Federal Europe No comments

Our beloved leader, President McBrown, threw carbon footprint to the wind and jetted off to Europe at the weekend to decide on a common EU response to the economic problems but when push came to shove, national interest came first for our federalist colleagues over the water.

The Republic of Ireland announced it was guaranteeing ever last penny cent of savers’ deposits and the EU started flapping. Then Greece followed suit and announced that it, too, would guarantee all of savers’ money.

How very un-European of them not to adopt the common EU policy of doing bugger all.

Then it got interesting because the German Chancellor, Reichsführer Merkel, announced that Germany would also guarantee all deposits. Quiet panic spread round EU governments – the EU’s Minister for Propaganda has done something without telling them what they should do!

Now Austria and Denmark have guaranteed savings and the European Bundesbank Central Bank has said that it will give the European banking sector whatever liquidity it needs for as long as it needs.

None of this has helped though – stock markets around the world are taking massive hits. The FTSE has dropped well below the 5,000 mark for the first time in years and the UK economy is in recession. Major banks have failed and governments are still throwing billions of pounds at them in the vain hope that things will get better. They won’t, not for a year or two.

If the current economic troubles have shown us anything, it is just how weak the EU is. The federalists claim that we are stronger together, united in our aims, yada yada yada. But when it comes down to a straight choice between national interests and EUish interests, the whole thing falls apart. Eurosceptics should draw small comfort from the duff economy – money is going to be tight, some people are going to lose their homes and jobs; but the EU has been exposed for the sham that it is and our economic recovery will be a damn sight quicker without interference from our masters in Brussels.

Institutional Racism in the Met Police … against white men

October 6, 2008 General 2 comments

Boris is launching an inquiry into allegations of racism at the Met Police from the Metropolitan Black Police Association.

The Met BPA says that it will be discouraging black and asian people from applying to join the Met Police because of the “hostile and racist situation there”.

Yes, so fucking hostile and racist that they allow a Black Police Association.  Strangely enough, there’s no White Police Association.  Not because they don’t need specific representation – they do because white male officers are the most discriminated against section of society – but because it simply wouldn’t be allowed.

A spokeswoman for the Met Police Association said “At least 20% of all new recruits into Hendon police training college are from black and minority ethnic backgrounds”.  What percentage of applicants are from black or ethnic minority backgrounds?  In 2005/06 it was 19.2% so that indicates that black and ethnic minority recruits have, if anything, a slightly higher chance of getting into the force.

Here’s an interesting quote from the Met Police 2005/06 employment report:

Over the 2005/06 financial year there were 104 corporate recruitment campaigns designed to encourage black and minority ethnic community members and women to apply to the MPS

104 recruitment campaigns run specifically to target black and asian applicants.  Presumably these were coupled with “no white men” recruitment drives that seem to be increasingly common in the police.

The problem with the Met and the police as a whole is that they are obsessed with race.  The Met wants the ethnicity of their force to be proportionate to the ethnicity of London.  But applications from white men are disproportionately high so potentially excellent white male recruits don’t even make it through the selection process whilst black, asian or women applicants that have far less potential are recruited in their place just so they can say they have a “diverse” and “representative” police force.

It takes the fucking piss.

The Black Police Association excludes white officers and then accuses the Met Police of being racist.  The Black Police Association has successfully lobbied for recruitment campaigns that exclude white males and then accuses the Met Police of being racist.  The Black Police Association has successfully lobbied for quotas on the number of white male officers allowed in the force and then accuses the Met Police of being racist.  The Black Police Association has successfully lobbied for disproportionate promotion of black and ethnic minority officers and then accuses the Met Police of being racist.

The Met Police bend over backwards to show favour to black and ethnic minority officers to the detriment of the native white male population but it’s never enough.  If you give them an inch they’ll take a yard.  The Black Police Association is am exclusive, divisive and racist organisation that shouldn’t just be ignored, it should be banned along with every other pressure group that restricts its membership to one race or colour.  If white-only groups aren’t acceptable then neither should BME-only groups – no exceptions.

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Morris Dancing!

October 5, 2008 England 6 comments

Child #4 isn’t very well today and I don’t do ill children (if you don’t know, I’m not telling!) so Mrs Sane dispatched me with #1, #2 and #3 to Ironbridge.

Regular readers may recall that I got a passport allowing unlimited access to all the Ironbridge museums for the bargain price of £24 through my employer. We’ve certainly made full use of the passport since getting it – we’ve been to Blists Hill a couple of times and Enginuity about 5 times.

Enginuity is brilliant but there’s only so many times you can go to the same place and play with the same stuff so we went for a look around the Tile Museum and then went to the Ironbridge for a look round the toll house. That’s when we came across these guys:

I’ve lived no more than 10 minutes away from Ironbridge my whole life and didn’t even know there was a morris dancing group in Ironbridge! These lot are called the Iron Men and Severn Gilders. It was really nice to see some traditional English public entertainment – even the obligatory 5 million Japanese tourists that frequent Ironbridge every weekend (ok, there were actually about 10) found it most entertaining.

Here are some pictures and the original 3gp video file which is much better quality than the YouTube version above …

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CEP rally – 18th October at Shrewsbury

October 4, 2008 General 2 comments

The Shropshire branch of the CEP is holding a rally on Saturday the 18th of October in Shrewsbury.

We’ll be meeting somewhere central – probably Pride Hill or near the hideous Market Hall – at around 10am and hand out leaflets.

The theme of the rally will be the NHS. Just over the border in Wales they have free prescriptions and free hospital parking. The Welsh government doesn’t even pay the going rate for their treatment in English hospitals, costing the hospitals in Shrewsbury, Oswestry & Telford over £1m per year in lost revenues. In Scotland they will all be entitled to free prescriptions from April next year and in Northern Ireland prescriptions will be only £3 next year and free for all from 2010.

Please get in touch for more details.

Another Cabinet of all the Talentless

October 4, 2008 General No comments

No Mandate Brown has almost finished rearranging the deckchairs on the SS New Liebour and so far successfully produced a cabinet that promises to be as ineffectual, incompetent and sleaze-ridden as the last one. More so, in fact, thanks to the addition of Peter Mandleson.

Mandleson has already had to resign from the British government twice – once for allegedly taking a dodgy loan and a second time for allegedly abusing his position to get passports for two of his mates. He then did the only thing a corrupt, criminal politician can do – he got himself an unelected job in Federal Europe.

Mandy’s appointment was described by David Blunkett, who also resigned from the British government twice for abusing his position, as “a masterstroke”. Too right it’s a bloody masterstroke – not because Mandelson is anything other than a corrupt little shit but because it’s deflected attention away from what a corrupt little shit El Gordo is.

There are some positives, other than those I mentioned yesterday – Tom Watson, the MP for Glasgow South, has been evicted from the Department for Transport which makes way for an MP elected in England to take his place. Transport is devolved in Scotland so Watson’s constituents in Glasgow South were largely unaffected by what he did as a Transport Minister.

The Flint woman has been made Europe Minister where she can’t do too much damage and Ed the Millibeast has been given the new Energy & Climate Change Ministry where he can happily waste days and days coming up with pointless and futile climate change policies that will piss off more and more people and hasten the demise of Liebour.

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Good news day

October 3, 2008 Labour 4 comments

Not one, but three pieces of good news from the Liebour camp.

Firstly, Liebour’s pet Police Commissioner, Ian Blair has resigned blaming a lack of support from Boris Johnson for his resignation. Jacqui Goebels-Smith has had a whinge saying that Boris didn’t follow correct procedures by using his first day as Chairman of the Met Police Authority to tell Ian Blair it was time for new leadership. Meanwhile, Red Ken has forgotten that he’s a nobody – not a councillor, not an assembly member, not an MP and not the mayor – and nobody really gives a shit what he thinks. Apart, that is, for the amusing claim that Boris is making the role of Met Police Commissioner “much more political”. To be quite frank, I think the only way it could be made more political was if Boris took the job on himself. Ian Blair is a card-carrying Labour Party member and the most politically motivated and controlled puppet that’s ever been in the job. Good riddance to bad rubbish I say.

Secondly, Ruth Kelly, the psycho Opus Dei fanatic and Transport Secretary for England is not only resigning from the Cabinet to “spend more time with her family” (a traditional euphemism for “done something really bad but don’t want my face on the front page of the Sun over it”) but she’s also standing down as an MP at the next election. Which is rather academic really because, like most Liebour MPs, she would have been spending a lot more time with her family after the election anyway.

Thirdly and finally, Lord Digby Jones, part of El Gordo’s “Cabinet of all the Talentless”, is resigning from his unelected appointment. Digby Jones is such a successful ambassador for Birmingham that he hosted a conference to tell local businesses how to out-source their businesses abroad. He’s also a former lobbyist for the tobacco industry.

The day has got off to such a good start, now watch some bastard spoil it.

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Deported for committing thought crimes

October 2, 2008 Federal Europe, Police State 4 comments

Via an Englishman’s Castle, an Australian holocaust denier has been arrested in the UK to be extradited to Germany to stand trial for breaking their holocaust denial laws.

Dr Toben runs a holocaust denial website which is illegal in Germany but not in England. He was in transit from the US to Dubai, stopping off in the UK, when police boarded the plane and arrested him for German thought crimes.

Toben will be extradited to Germany under a European Arrest Warrant – another anti-terrorism law that’s being abused – which requires only that the subject of the warrant has been accused of something that is a crime in an EU member state. No evidence is required, or even requested. There is no right of appeal and extradition is granted automatically. Most importantly, the offence that the subject is accused of doesn’t have to be a crime in the country it was supposed to have been committed in.

Under EU rules, Germany would have been within its rights to have demanded the extradition of Prince Harry for breaking their laws banning the glorification of Naziism when he dressed up in an SS uniform because, despite being a prince and 3rd in line to the throne, under EU rules he is an ordinary EU citizen.

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Shropshire Star: Kind of PM to think of England

October 1, 2008 Health, Letters No comments

The following letter was published in tonight’s Shropshire Star. Unfortunately, whilst editing it they took out “in England” from the end of the first line which makes the whole letter ambiguous.

Kind of PM to think of England

How kind of Gordon Brown, the MP for Kikcaldy and Cowdenbeath in Scotland, to find some loose change down the back of the sofa to pay for free prescriptions for cancer patients.

I remember when my own mother was recovering from cancer the last thing she needed was the worry of how to pay for prescriptions when she was unable to work.

However, when considering Mr Brown’s generosity, it should be remembered that in Wales nobody has paid for a prescription for nearly two years now.

And any of Gordon Brown’s constituents in Scotland suffering from long-term of permanent illnesses haven’t paid for prescriptions for some time. Already 92 per cent of prescriptions dispensed in Scotland are free of charge.

Stuart Parr
Telford

Ghurkas win court case

September 30, 2008 General One comment

A group of retired Gurkhas brought a test case against the British government in the High Court for the right to live in the UK today. The judge ruled that we owe a moral debt to the Gurkhas and that it is unlawful to deny them the right to live in the UK.

The fact that, after putting their lives on the line for this country, the Gurkhas had to go court to win the right to live here is a national disgrace. Especially when you consider that the British government lets tens of thousands of gangsters, rapists, terrorists, crooks and other undesirables and wasters into the country every year who bring absolutely nothing of any value to our society.

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