Mutton Jeff

December 21, 2011 General, Health 6 comments
Mad Hamish

Whut?

I went to the ENT clinic at the hospital yesterday to see if they could figure out why my hearing is so bad and came away being told I’ve got to have a hearing aid.  I’m 33 years old for god’s sake, hearing aids are for old people!

I must say, I wasn’t expecting to have a diagnosis (of sorts) and a cure (of sorts) on my first visit.  I’ve got to go for an MRI to make sure there’s nothing wrong with my head and I’ve got to get fitted for a hearing aid some time in the new year.  Which is nice.

My knees are buggered, my eyesight isn’t great, I get eczema and rosacea, I suffer with a bad back on and off, I’ve had asthma for years … I’m a wreck!

If I was an animal they’d put me down.

Reward sports personalities for talent, not for having tits

December 3, 2011 BBC, Sport 5 comments

Poor Harriet Harperson has got her unisex undergarments in a twist over the BBC Sports Personality of the Year panel not including any women in their shortlist of sports personalities.

Fran Matthews - England Rugby

No jokes about odd shaped balls please

The man-hating Shadow Minister for Equality and Women has demanded that the BBC include some women in the shortlist immediately and criticised the BBC for including the editors of lads mags in the panel.

The panel of newspaper and magazine editors from publications with an interest in sport chose the shortlist for the BBC and came up with the all-male list.

There are undoubtedly many fine sportswomen – Olympic swimmer Rebecca Adlington for instance or England women’s rugby player Fran Matthews who should surely win an award just for playing a brutal sport and managing to look pretty hot rather than like Fatima Whitbread.  But the panel chose an all-male shortlist and it’s not for a failed politician like Harriet Harperson to demand that their decision is overturned and the list stuffed with women in the name of equality.

The BBC Sports Personality of the Year awards are supposed to reward sportsmen and women for talent and hard work, not for having a pair of tits.

Jeremy Clarkson apologises to unions for poking fun at BBC

December 1, 2011 BBC, Bullshit, Come the revolution, Unions One comment

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.

A dose of reality for the “have not’s”

December 1, 2011 General 6 comments

The London Evening Standard had a story back in 2007 which I’ve only just seen about a cleaner who pays 22% tax on her part time wages while the people who own the company she works for only pay 10%.  It’s old news but it’s pertinent in today’s climate of fierce jealousy of anyone rich and successful.

First things first, it’s possible to reduce your tax liability through legal avoidance but not to the extent where you pay no income tax.  If you earn a wage here you pay tax on it.  What counts as a taxable income can be bent but you can’t earn the sort of money that give you a £260m personal fortune without paying tax on it.  But let’s go with what the London Evening Standard says anyway.

In the case of this cleaner and the financiers behind the company she works for, she’s paid £225 per week and pays £26.58 per week income tax and National Insurance (NI).  Her evil capitalist employer pays £11.88 per week Employers NI.  That’s £1,382.16 per year that she pays in tax and £617.76 her employer pays in Employers NI for the privilege of giving her a job.

Assuming her evil capitalist scum employer avoids all his income tax liability (which is impossible) and he only pays 10% Capital Gains Tax (CGT) on his earnings, he would have to earn only £117,000 to pay the same amount of personal tax as the cleaner which isn’t a lot for a devil-worshipping evil capitalist fat cat is it?  And his company is paying for the privilege of employing her as well as paying tax on its profits.

In more general terms, there are calls every day from the left for rich people to “pay their fair share”, fair share being entirely undefined but more than what they pay now.  The fact that the top 5% of earners contribute something like a quarter of the UK’s tax income is lost on these people who are motivated by jealousy, not common sense.  But who contributes more to the Treasury?  One man earning £200k a year or 10 people earning £20k a year?

The 10 people earning £20k will all have a tax free income of £7,475 each, the person earning £200k will have no tax free income as it reduces by £1 for every £2 earned over £100k.  So that’s £149,500 of untaxed income for the 10 people earning £20k each.

The person earning £200k will pay income tax at 22% up to £35k, 40% up to £150k and 50% thereafter.  The people earning £20k will pay £4,038 each in tax and NI in a year which totals £80,760 in gross contributions to the Treasury.  Most of the people earning £20k will also be entitled to tax credits and someone taking £50 per week in tax credits will be receiving £2,600 per year back from the Treasury.

The person earning £200k will pay £82.959 in tax and NI on his income over a year and will get nothing back from the Treasury.  So one person earning £200k contributes more in direct taxation than 10 people earning £20k each and the gap widens the more the high earner earns and more in indirect taxes (such as VAT and fuel duty) because they have a higher disposable income.

£37k of taxpayers’ money spent on painting and Coat of Arms for Speaker Bercow

November 28, 2011 WTF? No comments

The Speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow, has unveiled a portrait of himself and a lovely new coat of arms … all for the bargain price of 37,000 taxpayer pounds.

The coat of arms was clearly designed by a team of lefty liberal PR consultants with a brief to produce a coat of arms so nauseatingly politically correct and “progressive” that even the Guardian couldn’t find anything to disapprove of and therefore ignored it.  It has a ladder to show how he’s climbed the social ladder from comprehensive-educated son of a taxi driver to MP and Speaker.  It has Lib Dem gold roundels to represent his love of tennis and his position as ex-officio head of the Boundary Commissions for England, Scotland, Wales and NI.  The main part of the shield is divided half and half Labour red and Tory blue.  The motto is “All are equal” with the words separated by pink triangles with the back of the scroll the motto is written on a gay pride rainbow pattern to show his commitment to championing the rights of gay, lesbian, bi-sexual and transgender people.  It also includes two swords to represent the county of Essex where he went to university.  The use of Lib Dem gold, Labour red and Tory blue was deliberate to show his “impartiality”.

The portrait isn’t bad but it’s not worth the £22k of our money that was handed over for it.  For £22k I’d want a painting the size of my house and Vincent van Gough’s bloody signature in the corner!

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

November 28, 2011 Bullshit, Come the revolution, Unions 4 comments

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.

BNP Butler joins BNP Barnbrook in the English Democrats

November 28, 2011 BNP, EDP, Racism No comments

Eddy Butler, the former National Front, former BNP, former Freedom Party, former BNP a couple more times, former BNP national elections co-ordinator, has joined the English Democrats.

The announcement, which was the EDP’s worst kept secret since his mate Richard Barnbrook joined in January, will be a bitter blow to the handful of party activists that haven’t yet joined UKIP who had hoped to stop the BNP takeover of the party.

UKIP recently announced a revised devolution policy that would see the creation of a federal UK with devolved parliaments for all four home nations.  The final touches are being put to the full devolution policy paper before it goes to the membership for ratification.  UKIP is the only non-racist, mainstream democratic party advocating the creation of a federal UK with equality for all four home nations.

English Democrats: not left, not right, just racist.

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

November 20, 2011 Come the revolution, Economy 2 comments

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.

Bloggers4UKIP: No, we do not need a British Bill of Rights

November 12, 2011 Constitution, UKIP No comments

I don’t find myself disagreeing with Nigel Farage very often when it comes to the EU and constitutional affairs but on the subject of the EU Commission on a Bill of Rights I completely disagree with him.

UKIP’s has made a submission to this commission slating the EU Convention on Human rights which was turned into the Human Rights Act in the UK and calling for a British Bill of Rights. Throughout the submission there is a conflation of English and British which demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the constitutional laws in force in the UK which is common to all political parties and the media.

The submission is spot on in its criticism of the EU Human Rights Act which isn’t about human rights, it’s about imposing a liberal left wing ideology on the population. Human rights to any right thinking person are things like the right to life, the right to liberty, the right freedom of speech and assembly, the right not to have your possessions and money stolen on a whim and of course the most important right of all, the right to rebel. Getting married isn’t a human right, nor is the enforced religious indoctrination of children or middle aged women moving in their 18 year old Turkish husbands.

Magna Carta Memorial, Runnymede

Magna Carta Memorial, Runnymede

However, the answer is not to create a new British Bill of Rights. We have an English Bill of Rights which, in conjunction with Magna Carta, the Habeas Corpus Act, the Petition of Right and the (English) Common Law, provide us with all the basic human rights we need. The problem isn’t that we don’t have enough rights, it’s with the lack of enforcement of these rights by the judiciary and the attempted usurpation of our constitution by EU laws.

Take for instance the multi-billion pound industry around the issuing and enforcement of illegal fines, fixed penalties, penalty charges or whatever new name the crooks that issue them come up with. The Bill of Rights, which is still in force, says “any promise of fine or forfeiture before conviction is illegal and void”. Having the numberplate of your car snapped by a camera does not amount to a conviction, nor does a police officer handing you a piece of paper at the roadside. You can refuse to pay and opt for a court hearing but that comes with a further penalty in disqualifying you from the reduced fee you are offered for not challenging the illegal fine and of course the promise of a fine has already been made before your court hearing and inevitable conviction which is unconstitutional and therefore illegal.

It matters not that laws have been passed since the Bill of Rights attempting to legitimise the extortion by summary justice, Lord Justice Laws established in the 2002 case of Sunderland -v- Thoburn (aka “Metric Martyrs”) that constitutional laws could not be repealed by implication and no government has yet been stupid enough to try and repeal the English constitution. Yet here UKIP is suggesting just that!

It is worth pointing out at this point that what is incorrectly referred to as the British constitution is, in fact, the English constitution, “Free Born Britons” is a mis-quoting of the term “Free Born Englishmen” that originated from the Leveller movement and the Common Law is English, not British. The English constitution also applies to Wales because Welsh law was abolished by Henry VIII and replaced with English law. Magna Carta, the Habeas Corpus Act, the Petition of Right and the Bill of Rights are English laws and don’t apply to Scotland or Northern Ireland (with one exception).

The Criminal Procedure Act brought similar rights to Habeas Corpus and Magna Carta to Scotland in 1701 but neither of the English statutes were ever applied to Scotland or Ireland. The Petition of Right applies to Northern Ireland by virtue of its application in pre-1937 Ireland but not to Scotland and there is no equivalent in Scottish law. The Bill of Rights similarly doesn’t apply to Scotland where the Claim of Right, passed by the pre-union Scottish Parliament, provides roughly equivalent rights to those contained in the English Bill of Rights. Furthermore, in the case of Sunderland -v- Thoburn, Lord Justice Laws included the Scotland Act and the Government of Wales Act in the list of constitutional laws thus establishing the principle that Wales has a distinct constitution from England..

In order to establish an all-encompassing British Bill of Rights common to all four home nations, each of the four constitutions of the four home nations would have to be brought into line with each other or abolished and replaced with this British Bill of Rights. Since putting the Scotland Act into effect in English law or the Northern Ireland Constitution Act into effect in Scottish law would be a complete nonsense, the only alternative would be to replace the existing four constitutions with a new one. So, to establish a British Bill of Rights would require the full or partial repeal of the following:

  • Magna Carta
  • Bill of Rights
  • Habeas Corpus Act
  • Petition of Right
  • Claim of Right
  • Criminal Procedure Act
  • Scotland Act
  • Government of Wales Act
  • Northern Ireland Constitution Act
  • Northern Ireland Act

I find the prospect of British politicians who have introduced such legislative abominations as the abolition of trial by jury, the EU arrest warrant, internment and arbitrary house arrest amending and repealing our centuries-old constitutions and drafting a new Bill of Rights quite disturbing and I would hope that 99% of the population would be equally concerned at the prospect. Magna Carta and Habeas Corpus have stood the test of time so effectively that they are in force in England, Wales, Australia, New Zealand, the USA, South Africa, Singapore, Canada and other countries around the world. If a new British Bill of Rights would give us the same rights that we already have then why do we need it? If it would give us extra rights whilst protecting the rights we already have then pass a new law giving us the extra rights and leave our existing constitutions intact.

There is no need to replace our constitutions with a British Bill of Rights because we have all the rights we need. What we need is an end to the EU usurpation of our laws and for judges in the UK to be forced to uphold our existing constitutions. If it is deemed necessary to grant the Scots and Northern Irish the same constitutional rights the English and Welsh have then pass a new law giving them to them.

Assuming the foregoing was ignored and the British government ploughed on with a British Bill of Rights, there is the fundamental problem of repealing or amending any of our shared constitutional laws in that every nation using these statutes has to agree to the change. The Magna Carta on the statute books in the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, etc isn’t a copy of Magna Carta, it is the same Magna Carta as the one in force in England: there is only one Magna Carta. Would every country using Magna Carta be happy to carry out the same act of constitutional vandalism so the British government can create a British Bill of Rights?

There is a tendency amongst the political classes to believe that making major constitutional change is simply a matter of political will but it’s not. Contrary to popular belief, the British Parliament is not an all-powerful supreme law-making body. It can’t change constitutional laws that we share with other countries, nor can it ignore centuries of judgements and precedent made by judges. Creating a British of Rights would involve massive constitutional upheaval and the consent and co-operation of several other countries around the world and in all likelihood would end up depriving us of rights rather than protecting and extending what we already have, not to mention setting a dangerous precedent that our constitutions can be changed on a whim.

UKIP’s submission is wrong in both substance and concept and I hope it has been conceived out of innocent, rather than willful ignorance. It certainly shouldn’t make it into the next manifesto.

EU referendum not a priority but line of succession is?

October 28, 2011 Bullshit One comment

David Cameron told us that now wasn’t the time for a referendum on the EU, saying it was more important to sort out the economy and that most people were more interested in jobs and the cost of living than having a referendum on the EU.

Queen with the PopeSo it’s not the right time to sort out the cause of our doom-spiralling economy, high unemployment and high cost of living but it is apparently the right time to sort out the laws governing succession to the throne to allow the monarch to marry Catholics, girls to accede to the throne ahead of boys and to remove the requirement for the monarch to authorise royal marriages.

I wonder how many people have written to their MPs asking them to make these changes?  I reckon most MPs will have had somewhere in the region of zero letters about this and quite rightly so – it doesn’t matter.

But the changes that are being made are.  The monarch is the head of the Anglican church, how can they marry a Catholic?  The changes require amendments to Act of Settlement and the Bill of Rights – I just don’t trust the British government to make changes to the English constitution.  They’re already talking about a British Bill of Rights and Responsibilities again, is this going to be used as an opportunity to do away with the English Bill of Rights and replace it with an inferior British alternative?

This is a pointless distraction, an unnecessary tinkering with the English constitution and a complete waste of time and money.

HMRC demanding a voluntary tax contribution!

October 19, 2011 WTF? 2 comments

Mrs Sane registered as self employed earlier this year for her Scentsy business.

Like most small businesses, she had start-up costs and is putting pretty much all of her profits back into the business so she won’t have any taxable income for at least a couple of years.  So it was a surprise to get a letter from HMRC today demanding £60 of National Insurance contributions.

I called them up for her and asked how she could be liable for National Insurance with no taxable income.  Or no salary at all, in fact.  The answer was that regardless of whether she has any taxable income, she is still liable for £2.50 per week National Insurance contributions to ensure she is eligible to receive benefits and to go towards a state pension.

She doesn’t claim benefits and there will be no such thing as a state pension by the time we’re old enough to retire so I asked if it was a voluntary contribution.  He told me that it wasn’t voluntary but she could opt out of paying it if she has a taxable income of less than £5k per year.  So … that would be voluntary then?

Forget about the recession, let’s change the law of succession

October 12, 2011 Bullshit, WTF? 3 comments

The world is in recession, the Bank of England have had to magic another £75bn out of thin air to try and stimulate the economy, unions are threatening to bring the country to its knees and what’s David Cameron’s number one priority?  Changing the laws of succession.

Apparently what we really need to concentrate on is not sorting out the economy, making sure that people have a roof over their heads, jobs and something to eat but changing the law to make sure women can inherit the throne ahead of younger men and that future monarchs can marry catholics.  How can the head of the Church of England marry a catholic?

Unbelievable.  Well done Dave.

Four ISPs agree to censor internet

October 11, 2011 Come the revolution, Technology 2 comments

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.

Choose your charity carefully

October 11, 2011 Anglophobia 6 comments

Remembrance Day is coming up and the poppy hawkers are out already.  Normally I would buy a poppy almost as soon as they went on sale but this year I won’t be buying one, not because I don’t think they collect for a good cause but because of an objection to the way they treat England.

The Royal British Legion’s Poppy Appeal merged with Poppyscotland this year in a deal which will see “substantial additional investment” in Poppyscotland paid out of money donated in England, Wales and Northern Ireland to the Poppy Appeal while “the Poppyscotland brand will continue unchanged and the Scottish Poppy and Scottish Poppy Appeal will remain in place, with funds raised from the campaign being used exclusively to support the Armed Forces and veterans’ community in Scotland“.

The British Legion are certainly not the only culprits where this sort of thing is concerned though.  Age Concern and Help the Aged also merged this year to become Age Scotland, Age Cymru, Age NI and Age UK.  Not Age England, Age UK.

I know there are lots of organisations that do this (eg. the British Medical Association, the FA, the RFU) so I had a look at some of the bigger, well known charities to see how they organise themselves and here’s what I found:

Amnesty  International organises itself as Amnesty International Scotland, Amnesty International Wales, Amnesty International NI and Amnesty International.  The British Heart Foundation is BHF Scotland the BHF.  Christian Aid is Christian Aid Scotland, Christian Aid Wales and Christian Aid.  There is a Citizens Advice Scotland and plain old Citizens Advice.  There is a MIND Cymru and just MIND that only operates in England.  There is a National Trust Scotland and the National Trust.  Oxfam has an Oxfam Scotland, Oxfam Wales and plain old Oxfam.  The YMCA is organised as YMCA Scotland, YMCA Wales, YMCA NI and the YMCA.

This poses a bit of a dilemma.  Charities (genuine charities, not taxpayer-funded lobbyists) perform a very important function, providing services that would otherwise be out of reach of vulnerable people and financially supporting those in need.  But there’s an important matter of principle at stake here – the deliberate and insulting ignorance of England.  I mean, in what alternative reality is it acceptable for the Poppy Appeal to merge with Poppyscotland, give them a share of the money they collect in England and allow Poppyscotland to keep all the money they collect in Scotland?

I won’t be buying a poppy this year – I’ll make a donation to Help for Heroes instead if I see one of their collectors out and about.  I won’t be donating to any of the charities named above either if I see their collectors (although I wouldn’t have donated to the religious ones anyway).  It might seem harsh but if charities want English money then they should stop insulting English people.

Oh dear

October 5, 2011 Funny 3 comments

Spotted at our local school the other day …

… anti-climb paint on a climbing wall.

Geek alert … tel: or callto:?

September 25, 2011 Geekery, Technology 6 comments

Time for another geek interlude – tel: versus callto:

Taking WAP out of the equation because it’s so old as to be irrelevant, there are two ways to mark up telephone numbers in HTML.  The tel: URI (Universal Resource Indicator – it tells your browser what it can expect to find at the destination of your link) is the official standard for marking up telephone numbers whilst callto: is a proprietary URI made popular by Skype and unsurprisingly, Microsoft.

By marking up a telephone number, it makes it easier for visitors to your website to make phone calls from their phones or computers – click on the link and it launches whichever application is set up to handle phone calls.  But the problem is, which of the two do you accommodate on your website?  Mobile devices are the obvious target because they’re usually going to be mobile phones so tel: would seem to be the obvious choice but it’s not uncommon for people to have Skype phones or another VoIP phone service so callto: support would be useful.

But you can’t have both so which should you use?  Do you encourage standards compliance by using tel: or pander to the embrace and extend ethos of Sky and Microsoft and use callto:?  Do you cater for mobile devices with tel: or desktops with callto:?

With the rapid convergence of internet and phones, we need some standards compliance in the major browsers.  The last thing we need is a VHS/Betamax or Blueray/HD-DVD battle over telephone number markup standards!

Global warming alarmism from 89 years ago

September 15, 2011 Climate Change, Letters 2 comments

There was an excellent letter in the Shropshire Star (£) last night about the global warming scam …

The Arctic Ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer and in some places the seals are finding the water too hot, according to a report to the Commerce Department yesterday from Consulafft, at Bergen, Norway.

Reports from fishermen, seal hunters, and explorers all point to a radical change in climate conditions and hitherto unheard-of temperatures in the Arctic zone.

Exploration expeditions report that scarcely any ice has been met as far north as 81 degrees 29 minutes.

Soundings to a depth of 3,100 metres showed the gulf stream still very warm.

Great masses of ice have been replaced by moraines of earth and stones, the report continued, while at many points well known glaciers have entirely disappeared.

Very few seals and no white fish are found in the eastern Arctic, while vast shoals of herring and smelts which have never before ventured so far north, are being encountered in the old seal fishing grounds.

Within a few years it is predicted that, due to the ice melt, the sea will rise and make most coastal cities uninhabitable.

This report was from November 2, 1922, as reported by the AP and published in The Washington Post 89 years ago.

A J Astley
Ellesmere

The “experts” knew 89 years ago that this was happening.  35 years ago they knew that we were heading for another ice age.  Now they know what they knew 89 years ago.  Except NASA and some other American state scientific department whose name I can’t recall at the moment recently warned we are about to enter a cooling period because of a decline in the output of the sun.  Not to mention that the hockey stick graph has been shown to be a complete fiction and that global temperatures have been declining, not increasing.

The “scientists” didn’t have a clue what was happening to the climate 89 years ago, didn’t have a clue 35 years ago and haven’t got a clue today.  When “science” fails you should turn to history – the climate has changed naturally for millennia and will continue to do so until the sun goes supernova and swallows the whole planet.

Splitting up banks is madness

September 14, 2011 Economy 4 comments

The British government has announced plans to force banks to separate their high street and investment banking arms which it says will protect ordinary customers and make sure bailouts are never required again.

Some things never change. Like Labour.

The theory is that by ringfencing high street banking operations, the investment banking arms of those banks can’t gamble with (and lose) the money that ordinary customers put in their accounts and if the investment banking arm collapses, the high street bank can continue operating as normal.

Nice theory but completely and utterly bonkers.

It costs money to administer a bank account, to run a branch, pay for cashpoints, process cheque and card payments, etc.  Unless you’ve chosen a bank account with extra benefits that attracts a monthly fee, you don’t pay for any of that yourself.  I have a bank account that has a monthly fee attached to it and the value of the benefits I use (which is probably 1/10th of what’s available) far exceeds the fee I pay – it’s subsidised by the bank.  So where does the money come from to subsidise the cost of administering your bank account?

It costs money to pay out interest on your savings.  Even if your bank is only paying a nominal 0.1% interest, it’s still costing them money.  So where does the money come from to pay interest on your savings?

The money comes from the profits the banks make on investments and which bit of a bank makes the investments?  There’s a clue in the name.  Sure, the high street part of the banks make money from interest on loans and mortgages that it gives out but it just doesn’t compare to the billions of pounds the investment bankers are playing with daily.

When Northern Rock collapsed it was because of a run on the bank caused by the Bank of England being forced by the EU Monetary Abuse Directive (aptly shortened to “MAD”) to disclose that it had offered (not given, just offered) an emergency credit facility to the bank.  Robert Peston, who at the time hadn’t been elevated to sainthood by the BBC and was only useful for talking about exchange rates and zero balance credit card deals, got wind of this, made it seem like Northern Rock was about to collapse (it wasn’t) and caused mass hysteria amongst the general public.  The rest is history, I’m sure we all remember the news footage of Northern Rock customers queueing up to withdraw their money and deprive the bank of all its capital.

Had Northern Rock not over-extended itself with high risk mortgages with low deposits, they probably would have survived because they’d have had cash from mortgage deposits and the collateral for inter-bank loans but as it happens, at the time of the run they were basically a poorly-funded, badly-secured high street banking operation.  This is what will happen to all our banks when their investment arms are separated from their high street operations, particularly if their mortgage lending operations are lumped in with their investment banking operations.

Separating retail banking operations from investment banking will cost the banks billions.  You might say “good, they deserve it”, especially if you read the Guardian or listen to the BBC but those costs will be passed on to consumers.  Free bank accounts will be a thing of the past, interest rates on loans (and mortgages if they’re kept as part of retail banking) will go up, interest payments on saving will go down, branches will close, free transactions will end.  Look at the table of charges for a business bank account – that’s what we can expect when the retail banking operations of our banks are starved of the cash their investment banking arms feed into them.

Back to the official reason the British government are giving for the separation.  The theory is that it  will protect the retail banking operations so taxpayers won’t have to bail out banks and customers’ money isn’t being gambled with and lost.  The implication there is that the investment arm of a bank will be allowed to fail if it gets into trouble.  If you listen to the Guardian or the BBC (or most politicians in fact) then that’s no great loss but we’re talking about the companies that are investing your pension fund and provide hundreds of thousands of jobs.  The city accounts for about 10% of the entire UK economy, can we really afford for investors to lose confidence in our financial sector?

Allowing the investment banking arm of a major bank to fail would devastate the city and lead to the collapse of our entire financial sector.  Hundreds of thousands of jobs would be lost, billions would be wiped off the value of pensions and investments.  The knock on effects would be catastrophic – the big companies like supermarkets and manufacturing companies that invest money in and through banks to boost their balance books and pension funds will lose billions and their share prices will fall through the floor resulting in more job cuts and companies failing.  There won’t be enough money in the economy to financially support all those people who’ve lost their jobs so the Bank of England will have to print more which will lead to a further devaluation of the pound which means it’ll cost even more to import the things we need (we are far from being self-sufficient).

The pound is worth less than an Albanian Lek and you’ve lost your job and home but at least those bankers got what was coming to them, eh?

British government launches Commission into avoiding answering the WLQ

September 8, 2011 England One comment

The British government has finally got round to launching the Commission on the West Lothian Question that it promised over a year ago but why do we need an expensive commission to state the obvious?

Is it not plainly obvious that it is wrong that the MP for Thomas Telford’s constituency of Dumfries & Galloway in Scotland can vote on health, education, environment, etc. in Telford but neither the MP for Dumfries & Galloway, nor the MP for Telford can vote on the same things in Scotland?

There is clearly a problem – there are 532 MPs elected in England but 551 MPs voted on changes to the English NHS this week and 629 voted on tuition fees in English universities last year.  Tuition fees are only charged in English universities because enough MPs elected in Scotland voted for them to overturn the narrow majority of MPs elected in England who said no.

There is clearly a desire to deal with the problem – opinion polls consistently show 7 out of 10 people want to stop MPs elected in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland from voting on English laws, either by way of restricting voting rights or by creating an English Parliament.

There is clearly a solution – Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have had devolved governments for over a decade and they have certainly seen the benefits while England has picked up the bill.

So if there is a problem, the desire to put it right and a ready-made solution, what exactly is the purpose of this commission?  The answer lies in the call by Ministers for Harriet Baldwin MP to withdraw her private members’ bill that would force the British government to specify which country a bill applies to now that the commission has been established.

The commission hasn’t been set up to find a solution to the institutional discrimination against the English, it’s been set up to find an excuse not to create an English Parliament.  If the British government has been diligently identifying English-only laws while the commission is looking for excuses, they can’t use the usual one that it’s impossible to disentangle English laws from British.

Could this be the end of the Conservatives in Scotland (finally)?

September 4, 2011 Scotland, Tories 2 comments

The Scottish Conservatives could wind themselves up if Murdo Fraser MSP is successful in becoming leader of the party north of the border.

Fraser realises that the Tory brand is toxic in Scotland and wants a clean break.  He has made it clear that if he is elected leader of the Scottish Conservatives he will hold a ballot of the membership to disband the party there and reform as a new party with a different name.  His intention is that the new party would be federated with the British Conservative & Unionist Party with elected members taking the Tory whip as used to happen before the Scottish Unionist Party merged with the Tories in England & Wales to becomes the Scottish arm of the British Conservative & Unionist Party.

I don’t imagine the “Not the Tories because we’ve got a different name” Party in Scotland will see a significant revival of its fortunes just by changing its name and cutting some of its ties with the British Conservative & Unionist Party but let’s face it, they’ve got nothing to lose.

The right has been in serious decline – terminal decline – in Scotland for decades.  It’s why the SUP merged with the British Conservative & Unionist Party in the first place and it’s why the Tories now have just one British MP elected in Scotland.  It’s also why (along with pledging to abolish the Scottish Parliament) UKIP has never retained a deposit in an election in Scotland.  The state accounts for 24.9% of everyone in employment in Scotland, what incentive is there for anyone in what is rapidly descending into a communist state to vote for a party that advocates a small state and low taxes with the cull of public sector workers that will ensue?

There are those who will see this as an opportunity for other hard unionist parties to mop up Scottish Tories who want to belong to a pan-union party but it’s not going to happen.  This is little more than a rebranding exercise – they will still be Scottish conservatives, they will still take the Conservative & Unionist whip and they will continue to tell Scottish people that whatever their views on independence, they will never be granted independence on their watch.

If the Scottish Conservatives cease to exist as part of the British Conservative & Unionist Party, it won’t make any material difference to their electoral success (or lack thereof) in Scotland but it will make it very difficult for the British Conservatives to claim a mandate to govern the whole of the UK when it doesn’t even have a party in Scotland, let alone an MP.  It will also make it very difficult for the Tories to maintain the illusion of the union in England where they are fighting a losing battle against the decline in unionism that has come about as a result of the institutional discrimination against the English.

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