Ranting Stan's Irrational Hatred Of The Week: Double-barrelled names

Actually, it's not double-barrelled names I hate so much as the way they've proliferated over the last 20 years or so with the rise of single mothers and unmarried couples.

Thirty years ago or so, a double-barrelled name was an indication that the person came from the upper crust of society. If you came across someone with a double-barrelled name it was likely to be something like Lord Arbuthnot Tuffington-Smyth or Lady Lucinda Rumpole-Bailey. A generation later and you're more likely to find children with double-barrelled on the playgrounds of the local sink estate than you are on the playing fields of Eton.

When I was a kid there wasn't a single child in my school year with a double-barrelled name. In my youngest son's primary school class there are at least three - possibly more - with many more sprinkled across the rest of the year. Where it was once a sign of a privileged upbringing it is now more likely to be an indicator of an underprivileged child.

I hate it.

Lies, responsibilty and hypocrisy

So after all the buildup and hype, Tony Blair's appearance in front of the Chilcot inquiry turned out to be one great anti-climax. I'm not really sure what people expected - perhaps they thought he'd break down sobbing as he confessed to deliberate lying to parliament and the people. Was that really likely from "Teflon Tony"?

Personally, I always thought this inquiry was a monumental waste of time and money. We've learned nothing new and the only thing that has come out of it is that civil servants and politicians will say and do whatever they think is necessary for them to save their own skin. Having Blair appear in the dock was really nothing more than a stunt.

What it did do, however, was give those professional protesters a chance to come out on the streets again with their pre-prepared placards, slogans and chants to voice their "disapproval" of Blair's actions.

Which is fine - except .......

Well, how many of those protesting voted for Labour? I suspect that most of them did - and I suspect that most of them will do so again. I suspect that the majority of "anti-war" protesters are Labour supporters who celebrated with gusto when Blair walked into Number 10.

These people are convinced that Tony Blair and the Labour Party lied about going to war against Iraq. They are all convinced that Tony Blair and the Labour Party systematically deceived the people of Britain to pursue personal ambitions for their own ends.

And yet, these same people are prepared to accept that, apart from that, everything else Tony Blair and the Labour Party did was above board and scrupulously honest. Whether it's on the subject of health, education, economics, poverty, immigration or what have you - they all swallow the rhetoric, statistics and "evidence" as indisputable fact as long as it supports their own personal bias.

How can they be so stupid? If Blair and the Labour Party were prepared to lie about something as monumentally important as going to war, don't they realise that they are even more likely to be lying about issues that are less important?

The people who voted for Labour are the ones who elected Labour to power. They are the ones who put Tony Blair into Number 10. If there were warmongers in government, it is they - the Labour voters - who put them there and they are as guilty and as culpable as anyone. For them to then wave banners and chant slogans criticising the government that they chose reeks of hypocrisy.

Not in their name, but only with their help - and those self same people will do it all again on May 6th 2010.

Nothing to worry about

As universities face tough budget cuts, the Higher Education Funding Council (who?) says that, although more children from "disadvantaged" backgrounds are entering university, the gap between those and the number from "advantaged" backgrounds has grown in the last 15 years.

Hey guys, don't worry.

At the rate our living standards are going to fall over the next ten years, by 2019 99% of children attending university will be from "disadvantaged" backgrounds.

It's official - progressive liberalism has failed where conservatism worked

The official government report into inequality - commissioned by Harridan Harman herself - has concluded that the gap between rich and poor has actually widened since Labour came to power and is now greater than at any time since the end of the Second World War.

So it's now official - fifty years of progressive liberalism has created a more unequal society and decreased the possibility of social mobility.

Progressive liberalism has failed miserably. In comparison to conservatism it doesn't even rate as a contender - but are the liberals likely to admit defeat and give up on this grand and destructive experiment.

No - they never do. They'll just pour more of our money into the pit and dream up more and more harebrained, micro-managed schemes for more and more victim-groups of ever decreasing scope and numbers.

Why do we continue to vote for these losers? Are we a bunch of masochists or something?

I wouldn't hang out the bunting just yet

You could hardly have not noticed over the last week or so that various economic forecasters were predicting that the latest figures would show our economy coming out of recession.

Well, they were right. According to the ONS, the British economy expanded in the last quarter by a whopping 0.1%!

Yeee hah!

Come, on - get real. That is a pathetic result given that it was driven by several factors - the boost of Christmas sales, a boost to general sales to avoid the restoration of VAT rates. car scrappage, and a considerable fiscal nudge from HM Government and the Bank Of England.

As results per investment goes it is about as good as Manchester City managing a 0-0 draw with Accrington Stanley.

Personally, I wouldn't get too excited about this news - even though I've heard several news reports today in which various commentators seemed to be on the verge of wetting themselves with barely contained ecstasy - which seems odd, given the dire state that our economy remains in, but more about this in a moment.

The reality is that this "recession" is far from over - and in my view, we are yet to see the worst of it. The budget deficit remains immense, our balance of trade remains sickly, our total debt is staggering in its vastness and nobody - and I mean nobody - has a plan to put it right.

Because to put it right will require a decade or more of deep cuts to spending, Savage cuts - not the piffling £100 million here and the billion pounds there which the Lib Dems claim to have identified (I'm sure they could identify far more if they looked a bit harder). It will take a complete re balancing of our economy in favour of manufacturing and production - we can not continue allowing the hundreds of billions of pounds to flow out of our country each year as it does now.

This money does not come back - once it is out of our economy it is out of it for good. The only alternative is to create more wealth to fill the void and that means growing GDP at a faster rate than we've managed over the last decade just to stand still - or resorting to more and more debt as we have done in that time, but that is, clearly, unsustainable.

So, given that our economic outlook remains grim to say the least - why have these news reports and commentators been reacting with such glee to the news that our economy has grown by 0.1%?

I confess that I do not know. I know that thirty years ago they would have reported such news with considerably less fervour than they do now. As such, I suspect is is symptomatic of an increasingly childish and dumb-downed society, but that's just my opinion.

Secrets and lies

So now we all know that the General Election is scheduled for May 6th.

Thanks to the inability of Bob Ainsworth - the Defence Secretary - to keep his stupid mouth shut, the date has been revealed long before Labour would have liked. I'm really not sure why the election date should be such a big secret, - I can't think of any advantage that could be gained by the opposition by knowing in advance - but the government seemed to think it was.

It's something of a feature of this government - their obsession with secrecy. Like deciding to keep the report into the "suicide" of Dr Kelly secret for 70 years or refusing to release the damning report into the failure of social services in Doncaster to prevent two well known and vicious young thugs from torturing and almost killing two brothers while at the same time using secret courts to enable social services to wrench children from the bosom of loving families for the flimsiest of reasons.

Or the secrecy that results in the government announcing that the "terrorist threat" level is to be raised from one subjective and undefinable level to another, but prevents them from telling us why they do this.

Of course, I'm not suggesting that it is not necessary for a government to have secrets - of course it is. But those secrets should only be things that could, if known to our enemies, compromise national security. That doesn't apply to the date of a General Election, the failure of a local authority department or the reason why a child who is happy with his family who love and cherish that child is taken away and never allowed to see them again.

And, of course, in the interests of national security, it would help if we had a Defence Secretary who knew how to keep his big mouth shut - but this government's obsession with keeping secrets that have nothing to do with national security is symptomatic of something else.

And let's be clear about something else. National security is not intrinsically linked to the fate of the Labour party, the Prime Minister or anyone in government - so national security does not include information which could be damaging to the Labour party's election prospects.

But a government that uses the pretence of national security to keep secrets that have nothing to do with the security of the nation is suggestive of a government with something to hide and, possibly, something to fear.

Ranting Stan's Irrational Hatred Of The Week: Camouflage clothing

Camouflage clothing is fine if you're a soldier patrolling the jungles of Borneo - but why are fat forty year olds wearing it on shopping trips to Basingstoke?

I hate it.

An awful lot of Balls

Is it just me or does it seem that almost every time I listen or watch virtually anything relating to politics on radio or TV they have that dreadful man Ed Balls on? I forget what his job title is - it's not called "Education" anymore is it - something like Secretary of State for Children and Families? How long before we get a Secretary of State for Left Handed Lithuanian Lesbians I wonder ... maybe we have already - I dunno, they seem to create new ministerial roles virtually every week.

Anyway, why was Balls being asked for his opinion on the (pathetic) sentence of those two sadistic thugs in south Yorkshire on Radio Five earlier today? I'm pretty sure he's not with the Home Office - or whatever that once great ministerial post is called this week - so his opinion on the sentence is hardly important.

And from what I know about his wife - the hard faced cow whose name escapes me for the moment - I'm pretty sure that his opinion wouldn't dare to be different from hers, so why not just ask her? It's clear to me that the only Balls with any balls in the Balls household is his missus - and with that in mind, why would anyone trust such a henpecked waste of space to run a government department anyway?

I've had enough Balls to last me a lifetime. The man is a spineless, charmless twerp who lacks the ability to string two coherent sentences together - I can see why his missus married him. The last thing a leftist harridan like her would want was a man who might talk back.

The Chinese puzzle

I watched the BBC news last night and particularly enjoyed a puff piece about how China is now poised to overtake Japan as the world's second largest economy. In the year of "global" economic recession, China's economy grew by more than 8%. The biggest economic concern for the Chinese government is not falling tax revenues and a massive trade deficit - it is the worry that the economy may "overheat" - usually a sign that it is, if anything, growing too fast.

Why is China surging ahead economically while the rest of the world stutters along? Well, various commentators have various points of view, but they are - in my opinion - all wrong. China is surging ahead of the rest of the world because it has, outside of a few "closed" states, the most protected industry in the world.

Oh, they don't use anything as transparent as trade tariffs (except in retaliation) but while US food giants buy up British chocolate makers, Indian steel producers close down the remnants of Britain's steel industry and German car manufacturers snap up failed US auto brands, the Chinese government protects their industries like a mother bear protects her cubs.

They don't need to put up trade barriers because nobody can make things as cheap as the Chinese can. Instead, they prevent foreign firms from buying into their industry - whether it is German companies trying to buy ball bearing factories or US fizzy drink giants trying to buy juice producers.

So, when the Chinese government poured in its "fiscal stimulus" it knew that every penny will go to help Chinese industry and Chinese people while Britain spent a fortune keeping Japanese, French and German car manufacturers happy.

Protectionism has a bad name these days, but the lesson we can learn from the Chinese (and, to a lesser extent, Germany and France) is that it works.

Over indulgence

I'm not known for my indulgences. I am, if anything, rather cautious with my money (miserly, Mrs Stan would say) and if I can do without something then I do without it. I don't smoke, I don't drink very much and I don't have any expensive hobbies.

But there is one indulgence which I do have - Cadbury's Bournville dark chocolate.

I first got a taste for Bournville chocolate when I was a very small boy in junior school. It was considered a bit of an oddity for a child my age to like dark chocolate, but the first time I felt that marvellous smooth dark chocolate melt in my mouth I was hooked.

Of course, as a child growing up in the sixties, a bar of Bournville was a rare treat (particularly as my dad was an employee of Mars!) and generally restricted to Christmas and birthdays. Every time I got a bar I'd make it last. I'd have just one square a day and I'd sit down and let it melt in my mouth for a minute or so - savouring the sensation - before biting into the shrinking lump and releasing a burst of flavour that was, for me, heavenly.

And I still do the same today. Although buying a bar of Bournville is a far more regular occurrence than twice a year these days, the habit is the same - one square a day and the same routine to eat it. And part of the enjoyment I get from eating my little bit of Bournville was the knowledge that it was so British - because Bourville is unlike any other dark chocolate.

Over the years, various people have given me the occasional gift of a bar of dark chocolate which wasn't Bournville. "I know you like dark chocolate" they say and I usually smile politely and thank them kindly - but I don't "like dark chocolate" - I like Bournville. I'm sure the chocolate snobs will sniff at it and say that the quality isn't anything like as good as Lindt or what have you - but for me no other dark chocolate comes even close.

Bournville is British and it is unique - and I am devastated that Cadbury's is now going to be owned by a foreign firm. They will ruin it. They will move production to somewhere in eastern Europe and Bournville will become just another dark chocolate. I don't blame the board of Cadbury's - they got a very good offer and they did what they thought was best for them - but I do blame the government who still fail to understand that a country that makes nothing is worth nothing.

For now, I'll keep enjoying my indulgence. I might as well make the most of it while I can.

Promises, elitism and moral standards

I have to admit that I did laugh out loud when I heard that David Cameron was promising to make the teaching profession "blatantly elitist". As promises go, it is one of the easier ones to keep as the teaching profession has been blatantly elitist for decades - so he can tick off that promise as kept the minute he walks through the door of Number 10. It's a bit like promising to make the NHS blatantly bureaucratic.

The reality is that anyone entering the teaching profession will find their options extremely limited if they don't hold the correct "right on" world view on various subjects. The teaching wing has been the elite wing of cultural marxism since the 1960's and is quite probably the most elitist profession in existence today - even the SAS is less discriminating about who it accepts into its ranks.

On the subject of David Cameron, I noticed a couple of TV news reports over the weekend described his marriage tax proposals (which aren't proposals - just vague generalisations) reminded us of John Major's "disastrous" Back to Basics campaign. I think it was rather odd to focus on that for two reasons. First of all, Major's Back to Basics campaign as I understood it at the time was primarily about his government concentrating on the basics of government. It was turned into a moral campaign by the media more than the government.

More importantly, as a moral campaign it may have proved popular with voters if it had been tried - but what made it "disastrous" wasn't the electorate not liking the idea of good moral standards, but the fact that so many Tory MPs were indulging in immoral behaviour such as cavorting with call-girls in Chelsea shirts and taking back handers from dodgy foreign businessmen.

One of the main reasons New Labour won the election in 1997 was Tony Blair's (broken) promise that his government would end all the sleaze and be "whiter than white". As this seemed to strike a chord with voters - and following the recent furore over MPs expenses - it is apparent to me that the electorate would welcome a return to good old fashioned morality standards.

It is unfortunate that successive Tory and Labour administrations have proven to be so amoral and so self-serving that the electorate is now as cynical as the media - but for different reasons. The media were cynical because the industry is a breeding ground for amoral behaviour which it promotes incessantly, whereas the public are cynical because they no longer believe there is such a thing as high standards in public office.

Burka ban is the wrong approach

I gather that UKIP are planning to ban the burka if they achieve power - which isn't very likely.

But whether a UKIP victory is likely or not, I don't think the correct approach to the rise of militant Islam is to ban the visible symbols that remind us of its oppressive and illiberal nature. Instead, what we need is the freedom to be allowed to discriminate and make personal judgements the way we once used to.

The reason things like the wearing of the burka have become commonplace is due to the enforcement of "tolerance" and "multiculturalism" by liberal progressive governments. Laws brought in to force us to "celebrate" this "diversity" have restricted our ability to make personal judgements about what is or isn't acceptable to us.

The thing is, equality and anti-discrimination laws sound good in theory, but in practice all they will do is entrench feelings of injustice and favouritism on both sides. What we have here - with this UKIP proposal - is the law saying on one hand that you and I may not discriminate against people who wear the burka and then the law discriminating against people who wear the burka!

The right thing to do is to peel pack the layers of anti-discrimination laws as it is those that cause racial, religious and ethnic tensions far more than anything else. Moslems should be free to wear the burka if they wish, but non-Moslems should be just as free to shun those that do if they so wish.

It should never be the job of the law to tell people what it is they may or may not tolerate. It is ridiculous in this age of "human rights" that the government use the law to suppress one of the fundamental human rights - the right to exercise free will.

The clue is in the name

I had planned to write this post a couple of days back which is why it is rather old news now, but I think it's still pertinent. Unfortunately, thanks to the attentions of the driver of a German 4x4 I've spent most of the last two days sorting out a replacement car while the Alfa sits on my drive with its rear end in a very sorry state.

Anyway, the issue that came to my attention was regarding the response of Fiona Pilkington's local council who deemed that her problems with "anti-social behaviour" were a "low priority". To understand why they would do this it is necessary to understand what motivates local councils these days,

The reality is that Fiona Pilkington killed herself and her disabled daughter because she was abandoned by the local authorities whose job it was to protect her from what was actually persistent victimisation and criminal behaviour - not anti-social. Anti-social means urinating on the street or swearing loudly in a pub - i.e. it is not behaviour aimed at any individual, just something that society should not be expected to tolerate. What happened to Fiona Pilkington went far beyond "anti-social".

However, the thing is that most - if not all - local councils consider this sort of thing to be low priority these days. For some daft reason, most local councils don't focus on local issues anymore - their priorities are on global, and often very contentious issues. They are more concerned about the plight of some distant native of the Maldives than they are worried about the growing rat population in Acacia Avenue due to the fact that the bins haven't been emptied for six weeks.

For most councils, dealing with the issues of the people is an unwanted distraction from their real priority of "saving the environment" - but perhaps the biggest irony is that while they supposedly strive to make the environment better for people in Bangladesh or Bangalore (striving that make absolutely no difference whatsoever, by the way) the local environment descends into a chaotic morass of filth and despair. Hence bins are overflowing, rats roam the streets which are covered with broken glass and graffiti and the pleas of Fiona Pilkington go unheard while local councils worry about the plight polar bears.

Local councils and authorities need to remember what and who they are supposed to be working for. The clue is in the name.

It's no wonder they scoff - they aren't the ones paying!

The bunch of Moslems who hurled abuse and defamed British soldiers returning from active duty scoff at their £500 fines and use the television cameras to claim that they will continue their foul and vitriolic abuse of British men and women no matter how many fines they get.

Seeing how they are all living on benefits and that, ultimately, it is us - the British taxpayer - that pays their fines this is hardly surprising. Personally, I can't afford to keep paying the fines for other peoples wrong doing.

Welfarism at work. Don't you just love it?

Quality reporting

Overheard on BBC Breakfast this morning while discussing excess winter deaths.

Expert: There are more excess winter deaths in England each year than in Scotland.
BBC Anchor: (Sharp intake of breath) Why is that?
Stan: (Shouts at television) Maybe it's because there are 55 million people in England and less than a tenth of that in Scotland!

Jeez - sometimes I could weep.

Why trust a liar?

Whenever I talk to Conservative Party supporters it always amazes me how they tell me that Cameron is really one of them and that he is just pretending to be a liberal progressive until the Tories win the election. After that he will reveal his true colours and emerge as a true blue Tory through and through.

This, to me, seems an incredible attitude to take towards the man - a man that none of those I have talked to have ever met or are ever likely to meet - however, let's suppose for a moment that they are right. What then are the consequences of what they are saying?

If they are right then they are proposing to support a man who is planning to perpetrate an enormous fraud on the voters and people of Britain. If Cameron does win the next election and does turn out to be the sort of conservative they seem to think he is then he will have lied his way to power.

And at what point does he reveal his true self? As soon as he enters No. 10 Downing Street? A year later? Just before the next election? When? Even if they are right and Cameron does turn out to be a true conservative, what needs to be done can not be done in one term and if he reveals his true colours in that first term and begins to implement the changes that are required - most of which are not laid out in any Tory policy document - then he is unlikely to survive even that first term let alone win another!

Cameron will not turn out to be the saviour of conservatism, because he is not a conservative. He is a progressive liberal through and through. The only hint of conservatism about him is his wealth and accent - which is why that is where the Labour party focus their attacks on him. They can not and do not criticise his politics too harshly because they are more or less the same as the Labour Party politics - so they make attacks on "Tory toffs" instead of Tory policy.

So, to all those conservatives who are planning to vote Tory simply because they have not yet grasped the reality that the party they support is no longer a conservative party at parliamentary level and who cling on to the belief that Cameron is playing some sort of trick I ask this .....

Why are you placing your trust in a liar?

The proper response

I understand that the Somali pirates who captured a British couple are threatening to kill them.

The proper response of the British government should be to demand their immediate release and tell the pirates that were they to kill them or harm them in any way then the British will consider it an act of war, bomb the crap out of their shit hole towns and the Royal Navy will blockade their crappy little ports and destroy anything that tries to leave them.

At least, that would have been our response back in the days of Don Pacifico.

It's a start

So some British soldiers in Afghanistan are going to be issued with more powerful rifles to replace the SA80 popgun. It's about time - I've been banging on about how ineffective the SA80 is in a theatre like Afghanistan for ages. It should be a national scandal that the Army's most effective infantry weapon in Afghanistan is a machine gun that first saw action in WW2.

Now all we need are some proper armoured patrol vehicles, decent close air support aircraft, a properly defined strategy and around 100,000 extra troops to implement it and we might start to win this war.

They don't make 'em like they used to

Perhaps the most startling revelation coming out of the latest attempt to unseat Gordon Brown is the sheer incompetence of the former secretaries of defence and health in organising the coup attempt.

Hoon and Hewitt who once headed up two major government departments responsible for the annual spend of tens of billions of pounds of taxpayers money, but it is evident from this debacle that they could not be trusted to organise the proverbial booze up in a brewery.

What this tells us about the quality of the modern politician is actually quite frightening. If Hoon and Hewitt were once considered to be amongst the ten best available men and women to lead our country then we are in an even more dire situation than even I thought.

Changing the guard

It's no secret that Cameron's mantra for the upcoming election will be "change". Why not - it worked for Obama so it should work for the Tories, right?

Well .... maybe. I'm not convinced myself that a Tory landslide is as certain as so many seem to think. In fact, judging by the sounds coming from the Cameron camp, it is apparent to me that the Tories are downgrading their expectations to a slim majority or even a hung parliament.

However, suppose that the change mantra does do it for Cameron and the Tories do succeed in achieving a working majority - what sort of change are they offering?

Well, on the face of it they are promising a different approach to tackling our economic troubles - but this isn't as clear cut as it seems. The fact is that whoever wins the next election will have to make significant cuts to expenditure at some point in the next couple of years - that or risk having our credit rating downgraded leading to more expensive lending and rising inflation. Even with significant cuts a change to our credit rating is possible - without them it is almost certain.

But leaving that minor squabble aside, the goals of the Tory party are not much different to the goals of the Labour party or the Liberal Democrats. Whether it is health, education, industry, environment, crime or what have you they all have the same aspirational aims for Britain. They all want to keep us subservient to the EU, they all plan to change the constitution in some way or another, they all want to keep the NHS intact, they all want to persist with the current education system even though it is a demonstrable failure and they all want to persist with the cultural cringing that is leading to the destruction of British society, tradition, heritage and history - and will ultimately destroy this nation.

The only change the Tories are offering is a change of face guarding the liberal progressive ideology. Like the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace, the faces may be different, the uniforms might have minor discrepancies but the edifice they protect will be the same.

Provocative spite

I don't believe that the rumoured march by Moslem extremists through Wootton Bassett was ever anything more than a spiteful provocation by the group who are alleged to be planning it, but I'm also pretty sure that the man who floated the idea was not expecting the sort of backlash it has brought.

I'm sure he realised it would cause controversy - that was the whole idea - but I think he underestimated the depth of feeling that this would stir up in the British people. The British are famously tolerant, but there have always been limits to it and if you try and rub our noses in the dirt you can usually be sure that the response of the British people will be robust to say the least.

However, I'm not so sure about the British establishment these days - particularly the new "Supreme Court" - and I suspect that the organiser of this march - a man trained in law - will, if needs be, take this to the highest authority claiming that any attempt to prevent this march will be a breach of his "human rights" and I suspect that if he does, those judges will find in his favour.

However, if they do get the go ahead it would represent the perfect opportunity for all those "moderate" Moslems we hear so much about (but rarely see any evidence of) to make their stand. The march, if allowed, will feature 500 protesters marching through Wooton Basssett. Wouldn't it be nice if they were met by a cordon of 5000 Moslem protesters who refuse to allow them to pass?

Will that happen? Somehow I doubt it.

And they're off!

We're barely into the new year and the Labour and Tory parties have already begun electioneering while the Lib Dems petulantly stamp their feet and grumble on the start line because the starter hasn't fired his starting pistol yet.

Actually, the starting pistol isn't even loaded yet and the starter isn't in the stadium because Gordon Brown refuses to say when the election will be even though we all know it has to be held in the first half of this year.

It's as if he fears he will be handing his opponents some advantage by naming the day, but he's got to do it sooner or later - and the longer he leaves it the more the nation feels like it is in limbo and effectively drifting without anyone at the wheel.

But that is typical of modern politics where the personal and party ambitions of the politicians are put ahead of national security and prosperity. The only certain thing we can be sure of in this election is that the future of the people and nation of Britain will be the last thing the mainstream politicians of Labour, Tory and Lib Dems think about.

A failure of leadership

So our esteemed leader has ordered an immediate review of airport security following on in the wake of the pants bomber. The result of this "review" will be yet more security checks, yet more inconvenience for all air travellers and yet more laws to eat away at our rapidly receding liberty.

And for what? Because as sure as night follows day, whatever system you impose the terrorists will find a way to circumnavigate it before you can say "chip and pin". When are we going to wake up to this?

Unfortunately, our leaders will never wake up to the problem because they refuse to acknowledge what the problem is. The problem is Islam - but they will never ever admit it, so they'll never do anything about it.

So we'll keep subjecting your little old Granny Smith to full body searches even though we know damn well that little old Granny Smith isn't likely to try and blow the plane up. We will do this because our leaders bow down to the twin gods of secular progressivism - equality and diversity.

If you have a cancer you want it cut out. You want a cure that will target the cancer and either destroy it or neutralise it. How would we feel about a "cure" that, rather than attacking the cancer cells attacked all cells in the hope that by doing so it will kill the cancer? Not very good - especially if you knew that there was a cure that actively targeted the cancer itself, but the doctors refused to use it!

Right now, the body of western civilisation has a minor infection in its little finger. The doctors - our leaders - are fighting this infection by concentrating on every part of the body apart from the little finger. Don't worry - the body might die, but they are going to do their best to save the little finger.

Ranting Stan's Irrational Hatred Of The Year: Fireworks at midnight

I'm old enough to remember when the only time you would hear fireworks going off was on November the 5th - bonfire night.

These days it seems to be a year round thing with people letting off fireworks for various foreign religious festivals and even private parties. For some reason most of these new firework displays don't take place until sometime after 10pm - which is annoying enough.

But by far the most annoying is the recent tradition of letting fireworks at midnight of New Year's Eve. I think it started with the millennium because I really can't recall that the sound of explosive detonations ushered in the new year before that 1999 event - and at the time I thought that was OK. After all, a new millennium is quite an event, but a new year isn't.

It went on last night for more than an hour after midnight last night. There was the usual cacophony of explosions from the strike of twelve, but it actually seemed as if some people waited until there was a quiet moment before they set off their own.

It used to bother me when the kids were younger, but they were up till late with the rest of us seeing in the new year - we had a modest little party with a few close friends. Even so, it still bothers me that this is happening today even though it isn't keeping me or my kids up.

The thing is, it symbolises the lack of consideration that now exists in Britain today - a perfect representation of the "I'll do what I want and sod the rest of you" society that doesn't care that what they do may bother someone else.

I hate it.