The buck... just gets lost. in the shuffle

One has to really seriously doubt the competence of both the Ministry of Defence and the current British 'regime'. Are either actually fit for purpose?

The harrier jump jet is a highly effective fighter jet with very useful capabilities not found elsewhere. The British government has seen fit to spend money on them and then scrap these fighters.

It seems however others recognise a perfectly good piece of newly renovated kit fit to last another 10 years or more even if the cretins in charge of the UK don't.

The US military, who seem to be capable of supplying their armed forces properly, unlike the British MOD, have snapped up the whole lot of them as a bargain.

Still it is hardly unusual, there are NHS managers who have committed their NHS 'trusts' to crippling public private finance deals no one but a naive idiot would have contemplated, like a stone round their necks, driving them into virtual bankrupsy and then flitted off to bigger and better things. Others who have presided over appalling unnecessary loss of life who flit off to some similar role apparently without any real cost to themselves.

What amazes me is the fact that there are whole divisions of "Sir Humphry's" out there of one stripe or another warming civil service seats and collecting a generous wage who never - ever - seem to be held accountable for their utter incompetence. Incompetence one can't help but feel verges on criminal.

This all presided over by Ministers with one suspects, ill thought out schemes who seem to have a tenuous grasp of things at best.

The buck never seems to stop with those responsible, there hardly ever seem to be any consequences for them.

Lost & Found

“Who is it in the press that calls on me?”

“I hear a tongue shriller than all the music Cry ‘Caesar!’ Speak, Caesar is turn'd to hear.”

But the trouble is I can’t help feel that he is not turned to hear. Or are you?

Lately I have almost given up blogging. It is not as if there are not plenty of things well worth writing about. Far from it.

But it seems to me that the average citizen seems to be lurching through life like some zombie paying little attention to things that vitally affect their well being. Missing, or failing to understand warning signs. Missing the called warning about the ides of march entirely in the press, Football, celebrity gossip and TV soaps occupying much of their attention.

It is difficult not to feel as if I am wasting my time blogging. Perhapse I should renew my subscription to Murdoch’s Sky sports? :-)

Still. Nil desperandum.

We should all be well aware by now of the sheer incompetence of and off hand contempt many elected officials appear to hold both us, the electorate and their own office in by now.

We see many examples, such as the fiddling of expenses and junkets. The election promises they go back on.

Most recently, lest we begin to forget for a moment, several MPs have been kind enough to remind us.

Oliver Letwin, a Government Minister, for instance, dumping correspondence in a park. He is not alone, Vince Cable Secretary of State for Business is a little careless with his correspondence.

How little these oh-so-important people must think of their constituents who write to them as their represenitive in parliament. How little that the private details of what the writer, no doubt, would fondly imagine to be confidential are left for just anyone to find.

Apparently he has not risked national security – they say. One suspects more due to luck than any judgement.

Don’t they have office shredders? I expect they could get one on expenses. Rather that than hot and cold running High Definition home theatre flat screen TVs in every room of a “designated” second home.

It is not the harm actually done… more that it is a symptom. One that gives an insight into how little “they”, those in power, regard those who entrust them with that power. And how reliable and competent they are to weald it. And how well they protect all our interests.

New Labour's Child Catchers

The UK Orwellian NewLabour state is desperately rolling out the quite sinister National Children's Database designed to contain details of and track everyone in the UK under 18.

One wonders how long it will be before they decide to keep the details for life...

The alleged reason for it is to enable "more co-ordinated services for children" and of course to ensure none slips through the net like Victoria Cimbie.

It is questionable if such a database would in fact have prevented her death, or that of baby "P", local co-ordination, lower case loads and effective working practices would almost certainly have far more impact and cost far less.

In the same way they try to uses the fear of terrorism to justfy a national ID database. It is well known thatID cards would never have prevented the London Tube suicide bombers. Or those who attempted to bomb busy London clubs and attacked Glasgow Airport.

This governemt though seems to have only one kneejerk reponse, cataloguing, regimentaion and control of the ordinary citizen - and it seems their children too.

It is terrifying to think of the numbers of people who will have access to what should be private details of our children. Will all council employees be vetted in the same way as youth workers? No. The potential vulnerability that access to this data lays children open to is truly concerning.

Then there is the potential to just loose the details releasing them into the public domain.

The way local councils have misused anti terrorist laws gives an indication they are not to be trusted with our children's details, that are effectively also our details. How long before they routinely check them to establish where you live for instance?

Those who take comfort that these are the twilight days of New Labour and hope the scheme will die a death with their electorial demise are probably fooling themselves. Once rolled out could an new incoming governemnet be trusted to remobve such a big state friendly tool of control?

Maybe the economic facts of life might make a difference. The database is currently slated to cost £224 million, as with all such things this will be underestimated by a whole order of magnitude. Perhaps in the end it will prove to be too expensive.

Bumper stickers

I was driving through our nearest town today.

I noticed a bumper sticker on the vehicle in front. It said: “I love my country - I just don’t trust it’s government.”

It made me chuckle.

UK’Stamp Duty’ suspended for 12 months

Has anyone noticed?

New Labour’s much trumpeted partial holiday on ‘Stamp duty’ (for non UK residents this is a sales tax imposed by the state on house sales) is, if it is of benefit to anyone, mostly likely to be of benefit in the north, which at least historically was demographically more New Labour friendly.

New Labour are talking about a holiday for stamp duty under £175K This should cover quite a few properties for sale in the North and proportionately far less in the South, due to regional differences in house prices. Any figures the Government states one suspects will be 'spun' averages.

Could it be that they calculate they have terminally burned their bridges already with the South, so they want to minimise the coming electoral debacle for at least some of their sitting MPs

House sales depend on chains, with new time buyers going in at the bottom of the market and the others in the chain trading up, How far up the chain will theis make a difference?

Of course if you can't get a mortgage in the first place – and that is the major actual problem with the housing market, mortgages having effectively dried up because of the credit crunch. Then what difference will reducing the sales tax of around £1.7K imposed on a few of the sales make?

And let’s not forget that any improvement in the housing market that may actually be had from this piece of spin will have to be paid for in reverse, at the end of the ‘holiday’ in a year’s time, when ther will be a corresponding rush then a step back down in sales.

Gordon Brown blames UK consumer for rising food prices

OK. I heard this on the radio news today. Apparently, according to Gordon Brown, the reason why food is much more expensive of late is because of… wait for it…

The consumer wasting vegetables, buying them and then throwing them away because they don’t know how to look after them properly and have gone off - and the evil supermarkets making ‘two for the price of one’ offers tempts them into it too.

I am now waiting for Gordon’s performing seals on, say the GMC, to start calling for VAT on vegetables to be doubled to eliminate this problem. Or maybe consumers to be licensed to purchase food, license cost £25 renewable yearly, 2,500 civil servants to administer.

Next they will be quoting little old ladies on how a robust national ID card system will help curb the wastage and prevent illegal immigrants from depriving 'hard working families' of their carrots.

I am so glad it has nothing whatsoever with the drop in the value of the pound against the Euro that by weird coincidence happened about the same time as food costs rose

Or the cost of oil rising and therefore petrol rising (most of the cost of which is due to punitive taxation) and therefore transportation rising in turn. Also coincidentally happening at the same time.

Oh and we must not forget Gordon’s Government slavishly following the EU dictat of pushing bio fuel production, that takes acres and acres of productive land out of food production and into fuel production.

Does he really expect anyone to believe it?

One can hardly imagine even one so stupid as to sell off half the nations gold reserves when the market had bottomed out to believe such complete nonsense himself.

Gordon’s pork pies anyone?

Still, thanks to all his New Labour cronies, he and they, have just secured access to new 'John Lewis' fridges in all their second homes, to help keep their veggies and pork pie collections fresh in...

Is the UK state just too big?

Is it too big? If you have visited this blog in the past then my opinion will be quite clear to you - Of course it is..

This article By Iain Martin in the Telegraph examines the matter intelligently and is well worth a read.

Time to roll back the state.

Police threaten to shoot legal team seeking order to release election results in Zimbabwe

Things do not look good for Zimbabwe.

Clearly its ruler Robert Mugabe and his cronies have no intention of giving up power. They have used the police to prevent opposition legal representatives entering court to apply for an order forcing the release of presidential election results. They went so far as threatening to shoot them if they went into court.

Zimbabwe is effectively close to being a police dictatorship, masquerading as a supposed democracy, where the results can be faked, as it’s ruler wishes. He seems to be taking a leaf out of the EU's book having presumably noted how they handle referendums.

Something went wrong this time, maybe Mugabe and his government actually believed their own lies, they misjudged the strength of feeling against them, the people briefly actually got a chance to really express their will and they lost badly. They are now working out how to correct that.

Sadly all this is apparently being silently colluded in by South Africa’s President Thabo Mbeki, as the man most in a position to actually do something to actually help the poor people of Zimbabwe. Also to a greater or lesser extent by most of the other African states.

Things do not look good for the people of Zimbabwe.

Royal Mint monkey with UK coinage

The Royal mint has proudly announced a complete re design of Britain’s coins. To which the immediate response is why?

It is the first change in coinage since decimalisation was imposed on the UK in 1968 and will no doubt be accompanied by similar confusion in the elderly.

Clearly this will be more expensive than simply leaving the coinage as it is and appears to bring no benefit whatsoever. Business as usual for the British State under New-Labour then.

The Royal Mint’s chief executive Andrew Stafford, came up with the pathetically inadequate excuse (I bet he’ll get an unreasonably huge productivity bonus at the end of the year too) that:

"We had to make sure that the coin design was true to the heritage of British coins and gave fresh inspiration and modernity to something that has been in existence for 40 years."

Doh! No - You didn’t: “Fresh inspiration”? “Modernity”? I am not usually drawn to using such language in ‘print’ but... What absolute Bollocks!

As far as I know there was no universal clamour to change the existing coinage. It works perfectly well as currency, we all recognise it. How about changing all the road signs while you are at it, or switching to use a different alphabet while you are at it.

Apparently they had a competition (a pretty quiet one by the looks of it) and someone came up with re cycling the idea they used to use with card collections like the ‘Man from Uncle’ and ‘Batman’ ones of yore, part of a picture on one side that you need the complete collection to assemble.

Apparently the winning design was inspired by the thought of drunks in pubs trying to assemble the image.

So presumably Stafford feels that the heritage of the British State is fractured , maybe he is not so wrong there.

How about Britannia? That is certainly true to the heritage of British coinage, maybe with a raised hemline and a kick ass attitude a-la girl power?

Or better still - how about not wasting taxpayers money on an utterly pointless exercise? How about, just for once, not 'fixing' something that isn’t broken.

‘Natural England’ advocate abandoning large swathes of Norfolk to the sea.

Thanks to the cult of Anthropocentric Global Warming (AGW) the idiots at ‘Natural England’ are planning on abandoning huge swathes of Norfolk to the sea.

Why? Because they apparently believe some of the more alarmist predictions that proponents of the AGW theory make about possible huge rises in sea levels. They seem to have decided that they will be unable to defend against, or more likely to afford to defend against these possible rises. So they don’t even intend to try and are attempting to make a virtue out of this.

I don’t intend to get into if the theory of AGW is right or not, the fact is that some degree of climate change has been going on since long before the advent of humankind. It has been responsible for periods of greater cold and greater warmth than we currently take as normal, even within the last few thousand years.

The fact is that sea defences have protected these parts of Norfolk, the villages and broads and the unique environment they contain for centuries. There is no guarantee that sea levels will rise to such an extent they are impossible to defend against at all.

It is stupid, even bordering on criminally irresponsible, to just throw their hands in the air and just abandon large swathes of the country to the sea until we are absolutely forced to - and there is no guarantee that this will in fact happen.

If Natural England and the Environment Agency are unwilling to do their job and make a reasonable fist of maintaining our sea defences, as they are charged to do, then they should be divested of their authority and resources and these should be allocated to someone who will.

Zimbabwe’s 'elections'

The results of Zimbabwe’s elections have still yet to be announced. The longer they take the more one worries.

It is clear that the old fraud Mugabe has stacked things as much in his favour as he can get away with - but will that be enough to keep him and his cronies in power?

The much abused opposition are certain they have won, but that is based on the counts at the polls, the results after they have been 'officially counted' may not necessarily be the same, or reflect reality.

Mugabe has managed to turn a country that was the breadbasket of Africa when he first became it’s ruler into the basket case of Africa. South Africa has been reluctant to intervene or criticise his regime. Most other African states have taken a similar or even more equivocal stance.

It would probably be the best result for Zimbabwe if Mugabe did the decent thing and stepped down. If the country could begin it’s probably long recovery, free of his corrupt racist incompetence.

I am sure the ‘Islington Tendency’, don’t even want to think such a thing – but he is clearly racist and/or cynically uses and panders to racism for his own purposes. I am not sure what is worse.

If this does come to pass, the UK should be very reluctant to become involved.

Zimbabwe was in a very strong position when it declared UDI. The UK worked to try to ensure a peaceful transition of power to majority rule, the country was prosperous and had an honest fair and functioning legal and political system at that point.

The terrible state of the country today is entirely due to the dishonesty, incompetence and corruption of it’s rulers since the advent of majority rule - and not the responsibility of the UK.

Though one feels for the ordinary people, when the time finally comes that the country gets the chance to recover, let Zimbabwe make reparations to their citizens who they have driven off their farms and let Africa repair the damage in their own backyard. The UK should not become any more involved than any other country.

Zimbabwe should not expect any more from the UK than any other country, except perhaps their immediate neighbours.

New Report critical of UK asylum system

The independent Asylum Commission haspublished a report critical of the way asylum seekers are treated in the UK.

The system does seem to be far from satisfactory. It takes far too long to make decisions and implement them, keeping people in limbo. It does not appear to consistently implement those decisions when they are made. The decisions do not always seem to make sense to a ‘layman’. It is actually illegal to employ ‘illegals’ and the punishments for doing so appear to be becoming increasingly draconian, so they cannon provide for themselves.

It must be said that many of the cases of asylum seekers that one hears about look far more like economic migration than actual genuine asylum seeking.

This impression is bolstered by the undeniable fact that the UK has many more‘asylum seekers’ than any other state in the EU. The natural question that arises is: If all these people are genuine asylum seekers, then given that many have to travel through large areas of Europe to get here, why do they not claim asylum at the first opportunity, as they are supposed to?

One can’t help but wonder if the welfare state is part of the attraction - and part of the problem. It is the nature of the system that actually makes it a problem. The chance of enjoying the ‘benefits’ of they system is an undeniable magnet. The drain on the system caused by large numbers of people who have never contributed to it is a problem, a serious one in certain areas.

If there were no welfare state, or broadly it could not apply to those who had not significantly contributed to it, this would remove the ‘drain’ and much of the problem. It might also make the UK less likely to be a preferred destination. In addition those who came in reality as economic migrants could be honest about it either working and contributing to society, or go elsewhere, possibly back home.

Surely those willing to work hard to honestly obtain a better life and who want to become British and adopt our values might be considered to be more of an advantage than a disadvantage.

It seems it is only under a social welfare system like ours, designed as if it operates in isolation, that this would be a problem at all, before the advent of the welfare state it would not have been. One wonders if this might be a main driver behind New Labour’s desperate desire for a compulsory national identity card system, that and their apparently compulsive desire to regulate the population, in as many aspects of their lives as possible.

Before the advent of the welfare state incomers who did not contribute to, or preyed on society, would have found it uncomfortable, even impossible to stay and left, or fallen foul of the law and been forced to leave. The Honest and hardworking would have settled and become British. In any even there would have been no ‘drain’.

Now Shops that contain Post Offices may be forced to close

One wonders what exactly is behind the current round of post office closures.

There is evidence to suggest that the Defra is closing viable post offices. Now it seems they also want to ensure that those Post Offices they have earmarked for destruction, that they ‘withdraw the whip’ from, actually do go under and close.

They refuse to allow the shops to continue to act as Post Offices and are making any compensation offered for the withdrawal of the ‘franchise’ dependant on crippling their businesses by preventing them providing the likes of lottery tickets, Offering any bill payment services, foreign currency services, or reselling stamps, etc.

They appear to want to force as much as possible of the ‘business’, the soon to be ex Sub Post Offices, have, to use the remainder of the network - Regardless of the cost to the customers, or the Sub Post Offices they are casting aside. Or indeed competition laws.

Clearly if anyone cares about the Post Office’s customers it is the Post and Sub Postmasters and Postmistresses - The staff that interact with their customers, not the higher management of the Post Office, or New Labour.

They seem desperate to shuck off as much as possible of the actual service to the public that the Post Office, as an institution, has provided for us all for so many years.

It seems to be yet another example of a valued institution (probably unintentionally) ultimately destroyed by an inept state trying to turn it from something valuable to British society, part of the glue that holds it together, the hidden infrastructure, into something it never was, nor could be - and retain the value and values it had.

PM’s “Brown Bottom” exposed

The other day Gordon Brown said to Andrew Marr on the BBC: "Events come and they go. The question is... are you making the right long-term decisions for the country?"

I wonder if old “right long-term decision” man is aware that Gold is at a very long term high right now at $850 an ounce and gold stocks are making new highs?

In 1999 the Gold price was stagnant. Despite being warned that gold prices moved in decades long cycles Gordon Brown, for some insane reason, decided to sell off half the UK’s gold stocks .

He clearly knew it would not meet with universal approval, as he tried to bury the news by timing the release for a Friday afternoon, when most MPs were away from Westminster and news coverage was dominated by the outcome of the elections for the Scottish Parliament, Welsh Assembly and English local councils.

He was probably dancing to the tune of the he European Central Bank, which administered the euro - in the hope of joining the euro. The bank had been encouraging countries in the single currency to sell off some of their huge gold reserves, believing gold to be ’a bad investment’ and Gordon viewed it as a ‘barbarous relic’.

Not content with just making an ill advised sale of our gold he decided to dump it by auction, thus telegraphing the sales and helping depress the price and reduce what he could hope to get for it further – clearly demonstrating a lack of a real understanding of the gold market.

Gordon idiotically dumped the gold at a 20-year low in the market - now derisively known as the “Brown Bottom” by dealers.

The 17 auctions only achieved prices for the gold of between $256 and $296 an ounce, with an average of $275. It handed the professionals the opportunity on a platter to boot down the market and then scoop up the gold cheap at the auctions.

New Labour couldn’t even be straight when they told parliament. The government really intended to sell over than half the country’s gold before 2002- 400 tons, but Patricia Hewitt misleadingly claimed in parliament that:

“The Treasury intends to sell 125 tons of gold, 3% of the total reserves, during 1999-2000, with the Bank of England conducting five auctions on the Treasury’s behalf. Auctions will be held every other month starting in July.”

Since then the price of gold has increased massively. The loss to the taxpayer due to Gordon’s financial incompetence has been calculated at around £3.4 billion, based on dollar, euro and yen bonds.

That might have come in handy to defray some of the costs Gordon has committed the taxpayer to over Northern Rock.

The decision to sell 400 tons of gold is seen in City circles as a financial bungle to rival the Tories’ “Black Wednesday”.

So Gordon the question is not so much... “are you really making the right long-term decisions for the country?” more… “are you even actually capable of making them?”

Innocent until proven guilty? Not in the UK anymore it seems

I was channel hopping last night and I saw one of those ‘enforcement’ programs where they follow police and bailiffs.

One incident struck me. Liverpool police were trying out this piece of kit that appeared to combine an automated number plate recognition camera with a database, or databases.

A car registered on their system driven by a woman on the way to help arrange her mother’s birthday party, she had the cake and children with her.

This wonderful piece of kit flagged her up as uninsured, the last one had recently expired.

When they spoke to her she was adamant they had cover. Her husband had arranged it with a different insurer. What insurer? Could she prove it?, they asked. Not right there and thenshe couldn't.

There did not appear to be any doubt as to her identity. They knew where she lived. The vehicle had current tax and you can’t get that without insurance.

Given her strenuous and obviously sincere insistence that they had insurance the sensible thing would surely have been to ask her to produce her documents within seven days at a police station and let her go on the way to arrangeing the party.

Not these boys though. Maybe they were performing for the camera - maybe not.

The computer says No!

So I presume the presumption of the law of the land is no longer ‘innocent until proven guilty’, certainly not according to the Liverpool Police.

They turned her out of her vehicle together with her children and the cake and stuck big stickers all over the windscreens saying the vehicle was uninsured.

At the end of the program it was mentioned that she had been insured all along. Her husband had changed companies and the new details had not found it’s way onto the clearly inadequate database.

So here we have a perfectly law abiding person forbidden from lawfully going about her business, on the whim of a police officer with a discretion (and common sense) bypass, on the basis of an inadequate incomplete database.

Presumably causing her considerable inconvenience, stress, embarrassment and some expense. Her only 'crime' bing her husband changed insurance companies.

A database is not definitive proof someone is uninsured. She could and did easily prove she was insured given the opportunity, but surely it should be the job of the police to prove she was uninsured, not the other way round and their precious database did not and could not do that.

I remember thinking as I watched the segment unfold, that if the family had changed insurers the new details may have been slow finding their way onto the system. Why could the police officer not have worked that out.

More worryingly, one fears it is a taste of things to come. God help us all if New-Lab do introduce their precious Fascist ID cards and almost certainly unreliable (just like other systems they have introduced) database to go with it.

“Don’t have your ‘voluntary’ ID with you card? Can’t prove who you are then, can you? Must be an illegal immigrant. You’re nicked.”

UK Homeowners take a double hit on ‘searches’ costs because of HIPs

It seems that major mortgage lenders do not trust searches contained within HIPs (Home Information Packs) because they are commissioned and purchased by the sellers.

Some mortgage lenders are now insisting that they will only offer mortgages if searches are carried out by the buyer's solicitor, others will accept the HIPs but only if the buyer’s solicitor guarantees them, against anything that might threaten the marketability of the property the searches fail to turn up.

This is effectively resulting, in lenders legal representatives commissioning their own searches and passing the cost on to the purchaser.

So the searches are being paid for twice. Once by the seller, because the government is forcing them to and then again by the purchaser.

The party formerly known as the Conservative’s housing spokesman, Grant Shapps, noted that: "This is yet more proof that HIPs are almost completely and utterly worthless.” “Gordon Brown cannot claim to be on the side of homeowners unless he scraps this disastrous scheme."

The Fib Dems’ housing spokesman, Paul Holmes, lambasted HIPs as: "a shambles", saying "It is unbelievable that the Government did not foresee these problems," "The packs are clearly not worth the paper they are written on."

Unbelievable indeed, considering that concerns about possible partiality and reliability of information and searches contained within HIPs are by no means new.

In fact the government were perfectly aware of the potential problem, as exactly that concern was expressed in a report for the office of the (then) Deputy Prime Minister old ‘Two Jags’ himself, in March this year.

Concerns were raised in it as to how independent the report would be if it was commissioned by the seller - and tellingly, concern over whether or not the report would be acceptable to mortgage providers.

So Nu-Lab did have an idea the problem might well surface but chose to chance it anyway…

Parents left with limited options now make more use of A&E

This one is an absolute classic. Dr Patricia Hamilton head of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, is complaining that parents in the UK are now more willing to take their child to A&E with a minor problem, such as a fever, instead of dealing with it at home or calling their GP.

Oh really! She might try the experiment of calling NHS direct out of office hours herself. She could claim she had a small child and they were running a fever. She would find that the advice she was given, especially if it is filtered through non-medical parental perceptions, was effectively to go straight to A&E, do not pass go, do not collect £200.

Now most people are very reluctant to go to A&E. Despite the frankly untrue claims of being seen within some fictitiously tiny amount of time, we all know that it can only be counted as a personal miracle if you are really seen within 2 hours, as opposed to being assessed by someone - possibly a cleaner :-) - and then put to the back of a very long queue behind a retarded thug barely retraining their natural urge to random violence and a 15 year old single mother with a flat head and one continuous eyebrow. Recent personal experience you will no doubt deduce…

So the average parent, or indeed anyone sensible, would have to be pretty desperate to use the average A&E at all and would probably be more that happy to take even advice from their own GP as an alternative if it were actually possible to speak to them.

So then not more willing then, just faced with fewer opportunities to avoid it.

So perhaps she really needs to direct her comments to the incompetent Governmental department in question or ditto hospital ‘manager’. Then she could be given duff advice and told to wait uncomfortably for and indefinite period.

Whilst complaining about parents actually using A&E she also took the opportunity to get in a plug for the Government’s propaganda line on the (probably soon to be crime) of childhood obesity and on the ever encroaching ‘menace’ of child binge drinking.

At least the latter has regulations and laws, that if actually enforced would work well enough to prevent it, though this is unlikely to stop the government from passing a whole raft of entirely pointless unnecessary legislation that will cause some unexpected consequences far worse than the so-called problem.