A futile exercise

I understand the deputy head boy - sorry, Prime Minister - Nick Clegg, is setting up a web site to allow the people of Britain to tell him what laws we want to get rid of.

Why is he doing this? He knows full well that he has no intention of paying the slightest bit of attention to it unless the suggestions coincide with his own particular views - so why bother asking?

Let's say, for example, that millions of people asked for the smoking ban in pubs to be lifted - does anyone think he would do that? I don't.

On top of that, the vast majority of laws which have come into effect over the last decade or so originate from the EU and are passed without any debate, discussion or serious consideration by parliament. They're simply rubber stamped and that's it - because we are not permitted to refuse or repeal them. They are directives - i.e we are directed to introduce them by our political masters in Brussels.

So what would Clegg do about those if people said they wanted to get rid of them? Absolutely nothing - because he can not do anything.

The whole idea reminds me of my school days when the teachers - along with the sixth form prefects - would tell us how they wanted us lower forms (in both senses) to be "more involved" in school decisions. There would be huge enthusiasm for a couple of days, hundreds of suggestions and, at the end of it, the teachers would do what they wanted to do anyway.

Not only does Clegg look like a sixth form collaborator - sorry, prefect - he still behaves and thinks like one too.

An angry young man

That's Nick Clegg - apparently.

Nick Clegg is angry with Gordon Brown. Nick Clegg is angry with the Labour Party and the Tory Party.

Good! It's about time one of the party leaders got a bit of fire in his belly. So what's got that nice Nick all hot under the collar?

Is it the way that successive Labour and Tory governments have destroyed the British economy?

No.

Is it the destruction and dismantling of our manufacturing and industrial sector?

No.

Is it the dire education systems which fails more and more young people leaving them barely able to read or write and incapable of holding down a proper job?

No.

Is it the way Tories and Labour have committed our armed forces to more and more overseas operations while systemically cutting their equipment and resources?

No.

Is it the way successive Tory and Labour governments have sold more and more of our sovereignty to the European Union?

Of course not.

Is it the way our town and city centres become virtual war zones every Friday and Saturday night as drunken louts rampage through the streets?

No.

Is it the way the police have switched from protecting the law abiding majority to using them as a means of raising extra revenue?

No.

Is it the fact that the police and criminal justice system have given up on trying to deal with the massive levels of crime in favour of "managing" the statistics?

No

What bothers Nick is nothing to do with British people - he's worried about the way we treat immigrants.

Yep - there are a thousand reasons why Nick could be angry for the sake of the British nation and the British people, but all he really cares about are foreigners and sod the British.

And people are going to vote for this idiot?

And this helps how, exactly?

To be honest, I don't know the details of the dispute between Birmingham council and the unions over equal pay for women. It's something to do with bonuses being paid to "men" which were denied to "women".

It doesn't sound quite right to me, because, as far as I can make out the bonuses were paid to people doing different jobs - for example, refuse collectors got a big bonus while care workers didn't.

I don't actually see what that has to do with equal pay for genders myself. After all, there are plenty of men working in social care and they didn't get the big bonuses either - and there is nothing to stop women working on bin collections which means they could have got big bonuses if they'd decided to do that job - but hey, I've given up trying to make sense of the equal pay rubbish (I can't make sense of it, because there is no sense to it).

What I do wonder is who has actually benefited from this court case. As I understand it, Birmingham City Council have stopped paying bonuses to people doing "man's" work - so they lose out. The women who are supposed to have lost out will get a couple of grand each maybe - but they've probably all lost their jobs by now or seen them transferred to a private care company who will give them even worse pay and conditions and Birmingham City Council don't actually have any money other than that they take off the taxpayer.

So the men working for Birmingham City Council lose out, the women working for Birmingham City Council lose out and the people of Birmingham City lose out. As far as I can see, the only people to benefit from this are the lawyers who now see an opportunity to milk councils up and down Britain for more cash.

And all this at a time when we are facing the biggest cuts since the nineteen seventies according to some think tank.

It's a bit like handing a glass of water to a drowning man.

So much for that idea

As the government prepares to ban the "legal high" mephedrone at least there is some good that has come out of the whole sorry saga.

It puts an end to the fallacy that legalising drugs will make them safe.

Digital switch is dogma, not choice

I'm not a fan of the digital broadcast revolution.

We did get Sky Digital early at the start of this millennium, but got rid of it as soon as we could following a year of varying quality of service - varying between appalling and abysmal. After a year of putting up with pixelating programmes and frozen screens that required a complicated reboot of the set top box we were only too glad to get rid of it.

Of course, we have Freeview now which is tolerable - but only because we don't pay for it. Anyone of my age will remember the frequent interruptions to television programmes caused by technological breakdowns, faulty transmitters and "atmospherics" in the sixties so we're fairly used to that sort of thing now.

It's just a shame that just as they'd got the kinks ironed out of analogue TV to the point where it was generally reliable they then decide to junk it for more troublesome technology. It also means we have a TV aerial that wouldn't look out of place atop a battleship superstructure, but at least it gives somewhere for the magpies to roost.

The switch to digital is supposed to be about more "choice". It's true that there are more TV channels to choose from, but they are all showing the same dross that the main five channels chuck out anyway - just repeated ad infinitum. They even seem to schedule the same dozen films again and again and again and again. How many times have they put Terminator 2 on in the last six months?

So digital TV has hardly brought more choice and I doubt that digital radio will either - but yet again we're not going to get the choice. They're just going to turn off analogue radio from 2015. The question is ...why?

This isn't driven by the market - it's driven by some government obsession with the digital revolution. Why can't they just let the market decide? If digital proves good enough then people will switch to it - if they don't then it's not appropriate to switch off the analogue choices.

If it was really about "choice" then they'd let the market decide.

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.

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?

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.

The offside rule

Have the rules of the road changed? Or are they just not teaching people properly anymore?

When I was learning to drive, the golden rule drummed into my head by my instructor was "keep left". Nowhere was this impressed upon me more than when it came to turning right - "always remember the golden rule - keep to the left unless directed otherwise" - meaning that you should always pass a car offside to offside (i.e. go around the back of it, not across the front.

I don't drive a lot of miles these days - but when I do I am amazed how few people seem to apply this golden rule anymore. I narrowly avoided an accident yesterday when I was approaching a right hand turn as someone coming the other way was doing the same - both of us with our indicators flashing away. She suddenly swung the front of her car across in front of me forcing me to brake very sharply.

Being a warm day I had the air-con going and the windows closed - but managed to convey my annoyance none the less. All she could do was gesticulate that she was turning right - which I already knew from her indicator - and seemed completely unaware of the "golden rule". It also meant that she could not see past my car nor I past hers - so I sat and waited till she moved, while she gradually inched into the traffic to try and see past me - almost causing another accident!

The offside rule in football is complex, but in driving it is simple. Unless directed otherwise by signs, lines or a policeman you should always pass offside to offside when turning right (and just in case you're not sure which is the offside - it's the side furthest from the kerb and the side you sit on).

Bath or holiday? You can't have both.

Who says so?

A certain Lord Redesdale of the all-party parliamentary climate change group.

"We can either heat our homes and have hot baths, or fly but not both. There really does need to be much tougher policies on reducing carbon emissions from the homes."

Of course, when he says "we" he means you and me - not him. I really can't imagine his Lordship giving up his hot bath and foreign holidays - sorry, I mean fact-finding missions to the Caribbean - can you?

What is all this about? "Tougher policies on reducing carbon emissions from the homes"? That sounds suspiciously like compulsion to me - i.e. we (the ruling elite) have to force you (the mug electorate) to use less energy because we (the ruling elite) can't be arsed to have an effective energy policy.

So we're going to be forced to use less energy - and for what? Man's CO2 contribution is but a drop in the ocean compared to the amount of CO2 that enters the atmosphere naturally - and Britain's contribution to that drop is negligible. If everyone in Britain stopped producing C)2 tomorrow it would make absolutely no difference whatsoever - so why are we to be forced to use less energy?

The answer, of course, is that it isn't about using less energy - it's about raising more money through taxation. We'll be forced to use less by being taxed more on the energy we do use - one way or another.

Partly it will be through the general taxation - money taken from the taxpayer to pay for the largely useless and heavily subsidised wind farms which are not economically viable without huge subsidies from the state.

And then they'll be the money raised through indirect taxation - taxes or costly requirements placed on energy suppliers which they will recoup by charging us more for using less energy which is increasingly unavailable when we need it anyhow.

And all this for what? An imagined problem that exists only in the minds of "green" fools and the computer programs of climate models and which real world data tells us does not exist.

Truly, the world has gone mad

Popeye to be X rated.

NHS managers at Liverpool's Primary Care Trust says its plan to ban the promotion of smoking in films, including cartoons, could mean problems for the spinach-loving sailor if he ever makes a return to the screen.

And who put the NHS Nazis of Liverpool's Primary Care Trust in government? I don't remember voting for them or even seeing their name on the ballot papers - do you?

It is truly a mad world we live in when films aimed at children as young as 12 feature graphic scenes of extreme violence and even sex without censure, but a cartoon caricature of a sailor puffing on a pipe is considered too extreme for the eyes of people under 18.

No sympathy ....

.... for this very stupid woman.

Kimberley Vlaeminck says she fell asleep during the procedure, and only realised what had happened when she woke up.

Yeah, right! There's this big ugly tattooed brute looming over you, with his tool buzzing inches from your ear and inflicting pain over sensitive areas of your face - and you fancy a little doze? Either drunk or drugged up - or both - then sobered up and realised what a fucking mess you look.

Liberal inspiration

I'm fast running out of appropriate adjectives to describe Mary Riddell's scribblings in The Telegraph - ludicrous, ridiculous, preposterous, inane - all of them apply, but none really sums up this piece of garbage satisfactorily.

To be fair, I agree with some of her comments - such as this.

Besides, Parliament, marginalised by Tony Blair, has also had its reputation diminished by forces other than sleaze. The sparsely filled Commons benches resemble a rural station waiting room, circa 1950: Bills, which tend to be pernicious or unnecessary (or both), are so poorly drafted or under-scrutinised (or both) that the legislative process must constantly be salvaged by an upper chamber where reforms have been abandoned.

Well, let's leave the "reforms" for a moment and concentrate on the main point - that the failure of our political system has occurred almost entirely in the elected chamber. Blair did not marginalise Parliament - he marginalised the Commons and, when the Lords refused to play ball, bypassed them by using the Parliament Act indiscriminately.

The Commons benches are empty because there is little for MPs to debate as most of the "pernicious" and/or "unnecessary" Bills originate not from our Parliament but from a foreign organisation which drafts law in secret and is completely unaccountable, but one which Riddell is a keen supporter of - the EU Commission.

Overall, though, Riddell appears to be conceding that the half-reformed Lords is the only bit of Parliament which is more or less working as it ought to - which makes her next statement so ridiculous.

We need an elected House of Lords and a Parliament whose bywords are efficiency, modernity and accountability.

Sooo, her solution to the problem is to take the one bit of Parliament that is working, throw it away then replace it with a model of the one bit which, by her own concession, is failing?

I wonder where she got her inspiration from? The education reforms of the sixties, perhaps?