Poor MPs

Sir Nicholas Winterton, Tory MP for Macclesfield really deserves our sympathy.
He has just been told he can only claim the cost of a Standard Class train ticket when travelling between London and his constituency.
Bless him!
In the hope I cam be of some help to the beleaguered gentleman, I have done a minute's research.
Standard Class from Euston to Macclesfield after school at Westminster throws out on Friday evening (peak time) will cost £52.50 whereas First Class will cost £74.00.
That's a difference of £21.50! Scandalous!
Actually, what is really scandalous is that this croaking comes from someone who is apparently well versed in the art of milking the public purse.
He and his MP wife were recently rumbled, having claimed £41,508 and £41,584 respectively in rent on a flat which was owned by a trust controlled by their children. Trustees? Sir Nicholas Winterton, his wife and their solicitor.
Out of all that wonga, you would think he would be able to stump up the additional £21.50 without our help.
On the other hand though, it is not merely a matter of funds. As Sir Nicholas pointed out; he needs to travel First Class as the people that travel in the other parts of the train are riff-raff.
To be fair, he didn't actually say that. What he did say was:
"They are a totally different type of people. There's lots of children, there's noise, there's activity. I like to have peace and quiet when I'm travelling."
Riff-raff, in other words!
He also said:
"They want to stop Members of Parliament travelling first class. That puts us below local councillors and officers of local government. They all travel first class. Majors in the army travel first class. So we are supposed to stand when there are no seats. I’m sorry, it infuriates me.”
Sir Nicholas, think on this; people such as Majors and local government officers have trained and worked hard to achieve their status. You didn't; you were elected by a group of citizens who were possibly fooled into thinking you were off to Westminster to do them some good when it transpires you wheedled your way into the job in order to line your own pockets and to satisfy some narcissistic compulsion to be seen as an "important person".
You are not.
Now, sod off quietly into the sunset. Roll on the general election when you retire and give us a break.
Come to that, why wait? Retire now.
Go!

Ali Dizaei; part 2

It seems it never stops, once something begins to unravel.
In this instance, the unravelling relates to the strange nether world inhabited by Dizaei and his ilk.
A few years ago, the Met Police spent an awful lot of money on Operation Helios.
This operation stemmed not from the fact that they jsut had a few quid left over in the kitty. This operation stemmed from some serious concerns raised by the Serious Organised Crime Agency about his conduct. The concerns were passed on to the Met's anti-corruption unit. Shortly after that, Dizaei went up for his second promotion board and "got the job". This despite the observation by a Deputy Assistant Commissioner following his interview as "the most rude and arrogant man she had ever met".
While serving with Thames Valley police, a Met Police informant told of allegations that Dizaei was "involved in drugs, interfering win court cases for money and consorting with prostitutes. Nothing came of these allegations and Dizaei was allowed to go on his merry way. Soon after this, he was transferred to the Met.
Again, allegations were made to Thames Valley about his conduct and these were passed to the Met. Operation Helios began soon after that.
The allegations and concerns about Dizaei were taken seriously enough that over 1,000 wire-taps were put in place, from which evidence arose of Dizaei's involvement with foreign embassies.
He was a frequent visitor to the Iranian embassy where he apparently had meetings in a high security room.
He also allegedly drove a car belonging to the Liberian embassy, with the accompanying diplomatic plates no doubt.
During Operation Helios, Dizaei had a good laugh at the investigating officers regarding the Iranian embassy visits. He claimed they were all announced by him before hand.
Yeah, well, if that was the case, why is it that one of the triggers for Operation Helios was an allegation of him spying for the Iranians? Smoke...Fire...?
Operation Helios suffered an ignominious defeat somewhere between all the thousands of hours of surveillance and the case's arrival at CPS and the High Court.
Subsequent to that collapse, an inquiry was held into the operation and found that the Met had been rather jolly unfair cads and bounders. The good, honest and upright citizen Dizaei had been prosecuted because of his race. Still laughing about that conclusion are we Sir William Morris?
During the trial and again during the inquiry and yet again in a attempt to get a High Court injunction on Dizaei's behalf prior to the court appearances resulting from Operation Helios, the CPS had the following to say:
"When one looks at the fruits of Operation Helios: cocaine, steroids, threats to an ex-girl friend, admission of wrong-doing apparently violence to the boy friend of an ex-girl friend, concerns that he had connections to the Iranian Intelligence Service, assisting the xxxx sisters to remain in the United Kingdom for payment of money, a cheque identified from one of them to be paid into his account, an envelope given to him in the course of his assisting xxxx with the arrangement of police assistance at a Fulham hotel, £500 paid to him for assisting xxx with her visa application, associating with xxx thought to be involved with smuggling illegal immigrants into the United Kingdom, associating with xxxx, yyyy and zzzz, suspected advance fee fraudsters, his very close friendship with xxx who had tried to deposit £2million in a bank in the most suspicious circumstances and agreeing to assist xxx by adding his legitimacy to a conference, interfering with police investigations and disclosing information from those investigations, suggesting to xxx the various options available to xxx accused of damaging a car, interfering with that investigation by bullying yyyy, agreeing to assist xxxx who was under investigation for assaulting a traffic warden, ineterfing with xxxx licence application by deliberately flouting a command not to be involved, but going on to do so.
Receiving £800 from xxxx in return for advice on providing a defence on a drink-drive charge, and meeting that accused person while on bail and receiving 7 free concert tickets each of which was nominally worth £500 when he was responsible for policing that concert."
They then go on to say that this was "some, but not all, of the material received during the Helios investigation".
The Morris inquiry has published most of its findings on line. An interesting Appendix is this submission by Dizaei himself:
http://www.mpa.gov.uk/morrisinquiry/downloads/evidence-axd-00.pdf
It is heavy going, reading through the whole bloody thing but at the end, you will be left with the impression that here was a barrack room lawyer of the first order. A whinging, so and so who looks as if he was weaving the strands of potential rabble rousing, even as a police probationer.
As for the Iranian embassy connection, how about this for a potent brew:
NBPA and their alleged "values" (anti-racism); Dizaei's use of the NBPA as a platform for his tub thumping; Iranian president, Ach Me Dinner Jacket and his pronouncements that Israel must be wiped off the face of the planet. Now, it seems to me that a view such as that held and publicly declared by the Iranian president is somewhat racist. The very thing Dizaei and the NBPA vow to fight against.
Well check out this picture:
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2010/02/10/article-1249775-08320287000005DC-352_468x398.jpg
Our good old friend Dizaei, addressing a conference in Iran in support of Ach Me Dinner Jacket's presidential "election" campaign. This at a time when he was suspended from the Met.
Thanks to the Daily Mail for that snap. It is part of a larger item on the outrageous behaviour of Dizaei:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1249775/The-day-General-Dizaei-met-Iranian-president-guess-paid-trip.html
Finally, yet another Daily Mail link (and I thought I was crusading!):
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1249613/Ali-Dizaei-faces-sack-weeks-receiving-year-term-framing-innocent-man.html
PS All the xxxx, yyy etc above is a result of names having been blacked out in the transcripts.
London in nto infested with hordes of people with the surname xxx!

Ali Dizaei; the Shahrokh Mireskandari connection

Now, here's a little bugger.
Shahrokh Mireskandari (or Dr Shahrokh 'Sean' Mireskandari BSc (Hons), MA (Hons) JD (Hons) as he likes to style himself) was pretty closely involved with Commander Ali Ba Ba.
In September 2008, Dizaei was suspended for, among other things, his allegedly advising a defence team in the prosecution of an East European woman who was charged with killing a cyclist in a hit and run accident.
The lawyer representing this woman was Shahrokh Mireskandari.
In 2007, the lawyer was a guest at Dizaei's wedding (well, one of them) as was this East European woman.
As far as I can gather, this woman was on bail for the alleged offence.
And Dizaei, a top cop, had invited her to his wedding!
It was alleged, in the Daily Mail, that Dizaei was briefing the defence team on how to pick holes in the prosecution's case, which was being prepared by his colleagues in the Met.
The defendant's sister later said "'Sean told us that Dizaei would be a consultant and would guide us about the police work and whether they were right or not... whether they had done something illegal.' (Sean is another of the dodgy brief's names).
Anyway, back to the dodgy brief.
As can be seen in the opening lines, he has a pretty impressive string of titles, degrees etc.
Except they are all bogus!
He does have a long experience of the law though, beginning with his conviction in Los Angeles in 1991 for operating a telephone marketing scam.
Read this item in the Daily Mail from 2008:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article........
This article also covers how the Solicitors Regulation Authority investigated this dodgy brief and discovered how he acquired the string of letters after his name.
He claimed to obtained a law degree at the American University of Hawaii. This was shut down by the courts in Hawaii in 2005, with the owner, Hassan Safavi under investigation.
Hassan Safavi? Another bloody Anglo-Iranian!
The dodgy brief, when questioned, refused to disclose where else he may have obtained his "law degrees".
Eventually, at the end of their investigations, the dodgy brief's law firm, Dean & Dean, was shut down by the SRA.
Guess what his next move was? He was, in 2009, suing the SRA and the Law Society for "race & religious discrimination". I don't know if this has been resolved at this time but the SRA web site still carries the notice of "Intervention" which closed him down.
I don't know the full extent of his case load over the years he has been in business here but I can say that an awful lot of his work seems to have involved the Met's Black Police Association. He appears to have been central to a number of high profile cases, generally encouraging anyone of an Asian background to sue the police for "discrimination".
Ali Dizaei; enough said about that piece of work!
Tariq Ghaffour; having finished his 30 years in the force, he decided he wanted to be the El Supremo at the Olympics in London in 2012. At the instigation of Dr Dodgy Brief, he accused Sir Ian Blair of having reneged on a promise to give him this plum job. It had been made very clear from a long time before this that the government would be taking charge of this, not the Met Police. It didn't stop the accusation of racism and the Met (quite wrongly and irresponsibly) paying out £300,000 as compensation for the "hurt he had felt". On top of that, this bloke goes away with a pension-related lump sum of £525,000 and an annual pension of £85,000.
It seems this deal went through in order to smooth the handover from Sir Ian Blair to Sir Paul Stephenson as Commissioner. Bloody spineless and irresponsible!
Commander Shabir Hussain; he sued the Met Police for ....well you know very well what for.
He claims he was overlooked for promotion in 2006. It transpires that, during the selection process he was one of 7 candidates. One other candidate scored the same as Hussain, the others all scored higher. Nobody scored lower. He didn't get the job. Now, that was in 2006. What happened between 2006 and the date the spurious claim went to a tribunal in 2008? No idea but probably Dr Dodgy Brief became involved.
He lost his case.
Yasmin Rehman; This woman was a senior manager with responsibility for "promoting racial and religious diversity" within the Met Police. In 2008, she lodged a claim of racial discrimination, making all manner of outlandish allegations. In December of that year, she withdrew the allegations and has since quit the Met. (probably a fair indication there was nothing to her claims). Throughout this fiasco, she was advised by the MBPA. This organisation often employed our friend Dr. Dodgy Brief; I wonder what, if any, involvement he had in this trumped up nonsense?
It goes on and on, usually with this fraud somewhere in the background, apparently orchestrating things.
Have a listen to him attacking Sir Ian Blair in a radio interview in 2007:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/7589568.stm
Last heard of, this numty was suing the Solicitors Regulation Authority for £10million.
Again, last heard of, there were rumours he had legged it to the USA.
Nice!

Ali Dizaei Saga; NBPA

As a result of the recent conviction of Ali Dizaei, I started looking into some of the things with which he has been involved and one of these is the National Black Police Association, of which he is a past leader.
I do not like racism of any sort and an organisation that restricts its membership, aims and agenda to exclude any other group is racist.
This is regardless of which ethnic group is restricting others, black, white, brown or purple.
For some time, I have wondered how this nation can tolerate the idea of an organisation which seems to boast of its own brand of racism in its name.
Let there be a White Police Association and there will be bloody uproar!
I read a post somewhere in which some mis-guided person wrote that membership of the NBPA is open to anyone, regardless of ethnic origin. I actually believed it, for about 5 minutes.
First I looked up the NBPA's web site and found that none of its leaders, prominent members etc are white.
I looked a the constitution to see what it says about membership.
They skirt around that somewhat by saying membership is open to any of the national Black Police Associations. So that means looking up the membership requirements of the various associations around the country.
At the outset of the NBPA constitution, they include a handy re-definition of the term "Black":
"1.3 The definition of "Black" is one that emphasises the common experience and determination of people of African, African-Caribbean, Middle Eastern, Asian or Asian sub-continent origin to oppose the effects of racism and victimisation".
This tells us 2 things:
1. It is a racist organisation
2. They are thick. "Middle Eastern, Asian and Asian sub-continent origin" all means one thing; "Asian".
Come to that, people of African-Caribbean origin can also be deemed to be of African origin.
Anyway, I checked the Merseyside BPA for their membership criteria, to see if they were a little less woolly about membership requirements. They say:
"Full members must be able to satisfy our constitutional definition of ‘black’. Contrary to popular believe this does not mean you must be must be black as commonly understood, but rather have the ‘common experience and determination’ of people who are, because it is they that are typically far more likely historically and currently, to be on the receiving end of racism. Indeed we have a number of white full members, one of whom is currently an MBPA Executive Committee member."
Which proves 2 things:
1. It is a racist organisation
2. They are thick. Check the spelling and the grammar. Trust me; I copied this directly from their web site: http://www.merseysidebpa.org.uk/
I don't think I need any more convincing that this organisation is anything other than racist.
If they called their club something along the lines of the "Anti-Racist Police Officers Association" and opened membership to any Police Officer who was determined to stand up to racism in any form, they may get a bit more sympathy.
As they stand, they are to be condemned as racist. Nothing more and nothing less.
Incidentally, did I mention that they are thick?
Here's another gem from one of their affiliated associations, the Met Police BPA:
"The Metropolitan Black Police Association (MetBPA) were very surprised to hear the verdict given on 08.02.2010 regarding the case of Commander Ali Dizaei."
No shit, Sherlock!
To be fair, they do go on to say "It is imperative that we recognise and respect the decision of the Jury - no one should be above the law." but the damage is done in that first sentence.
(By the way, why does the word jury require a capital J?)
Nice guys that they are though, the web page does include an invitation to their MetBPA Social Dance.
Don't you love these "Social Dances"? Far better than the "Unsocial Dances"!
Tickets are available to all police officers, regardless of ethnic origin (apparently).
Tickets are £12.00 for BPA members and £15.00 for non-members.
Hang on, isn't that discriminatory? Doesn't that mean that officers who don't fit the membership definitions will be obliged to pay the higher price?
I smell scandal!

Got you, you toe rag!

At last, the bane of the Metroplitan Police, Commander Ali Dizaei has been well and truly rumbled.
Yesterday, he was sentenced to 4 years in prison for perverting the course of justice.
Now let's hope the Crown Prosecution Service will go back in time a couple of years to see what
really happened on the numerous occasions this nasty piece of work was "cleared" of other charges.
The National Black Police Association, headed by Ali Dizaei himself, has constantly claimed that
there has been a conspiracy against him.
In the past, he has been accused of knowingly employing an illegal immigrant, of attempting to
pervert the course of justice, of misusing his police credit card fraudulently etc etc.
On each occasion, he has been cleared but it is gradually becoming obvious to any who care to see, he has relied upon the "race card" every time.
The problem has usually been that the police have had treat this barrel of laughs with kid gloves,
scared to death of the race issue being raised and driven by political correctness.
Generally, this cowardly attitude has arisen from the inquiry into the Stephen Lawrence murder. The inquiry declared that the Met was "instituionally racist".
An absurd term that, I think, will come back to haunt a few people.
My understanding of the term would imply that there was a policy in place in that force that
dictated a policy of racism that should be followed as a regular procedure in much the same terms as, for example, the policy that lays down what uniform an officer must wear or how an officer fills in a notebook etc.
I have, a long time ago, worked briefly at Scotland Yard, the home of the Met Police and I know of the "canteen culture" that McPherson's inquiry referred to.
Yes, there was the odd officer or two who was possibly guilty of racist remarks but in no different
ratios than can be observed in all walks of life. Policemen (and women) are ordinary people and
ordinary people do have their own, individual, characteristics. Some are good, some less so.
My observations in Scotland Yard were that the people I saw there were no different from people I met elsewhere; some were possibly racist, others were "pissed on power", while others were just pretty decent, common or garden people.
So, to use the term "institutionally racist, all McPherson did was to create a new weapon that
would come in handy for a bunch of miscreants. Every time anybody who was not obviously white was accused of anything by the Met, they could all cry "racism" and the powers that be were too cowardly to stand up to them as they were scared to death of the prospect of either being racist themselves or of propping up a racist organisation.
Now, with the conviction yesterday, it may be time to look at some of the events in this crook's
recent past.
Only 2 months ago, the News of the World newspaper paid "damages" to Dizaei after reporting that he had hired an illegal immigrant.
The person involved, Ace Bakhtyari, was indeed an illegal immigrant who was in this country on a fake French passport.
Ali Dizaei did indeed employ him, first as a photographer, taking photographs at Dizaei's second
wedding.
Ali Dizaei did indeed take this person into the House of Commons, allowing him to bypass security on the grounds that "he is with me". It would be a brave constable who would say to a superior officer of Dizaei's rank "I don't care who he is with, where is his ID?"
According to Bakhtyari, now back in Iran following his deportation, he became Dizaei's odd job man, staying at Dizaei's house (well one of Dizaei's 3 houses). He was so close to and trusted by Dizaei that he used to carry Dizaei's credit card for purchasing bits and bobs for his little jobs around the house.
When he was arrested during a routine police stop, Bakhtyari was found to be carrying Dizaei's credit card, along with the fake passport which led to his arrest and deportation.
Did I mention 3 houses? Indeed I did. Dizaei, allegedly, has homes in Acton, Henley and Chiswick.
Not bad going for a bloke who was on an income of £90,000.
Another bit of Dizaei's "previous" was involvement in allegations of helping a bent solicitor,
Shahrokh Mireskandari, in a case involving Dizaei allegedly helping an East European woman get off a case by showing her lawyers how to pick holes in the prosecution's case.
In fact, come to think of it, this ex-lawyer Mireskandari is such a bill of goods, he deserves his
own page!
As does Dizaei's best mate, Ali Ghaffour who is another walking travesty.
It is rare I say this, but I actually do feel sorry for the bog-standard, run of the mill policeman
in this country.
The race relations industry (for that is surely what we have here) has the police authorities by the throat and are not going to let go easily. The effect this has on your ordinary, honest policeman must be a sapping of morale.
Under the stewardship of the previous boss, Sir Ian Blair, the Met Police seemed to have become
toothless in the face of any challenge using the race card.
Hopefully, the successful prosecution of Dizaei might indicate a new willingness to face up to the
sharp practice brigade in the Met.
Finally; the government recently overturned hundreds of years of history and scrapped the "Double Jeopardy" rule which meant that, should you be found not guilty of an accusation, you could not be prosecuted again.
Now, if the prosecution don't like a not guilty verdict, they can drag you back to have another go
at you.
Well, let's see if they have the guts to use this new found power to resurrect some of the apparent miscarriages of justice surrounding the likes of Dizaei and his ilk.

How long does it take to learn a lesson

Many years ago, I was a soldier. During my time, we had 2 main weapons; the 9mm Sterling sub-machine gun and the 7.62mm Self Loading Rifle (SLR).
Shortly after I left the Army, there was much talk about a shift away from these to smaller bore weapons.
The theory went that it wasn't really necessary to kill people, it was good enough to merely wound them. Someone had calculated that it takes 2, 3 or 4 (don't remember the number) extras to take care of the wounded, thus putting a serious strain on the enemy's resources.
Bollocks! shouted Kelvin. I have never heard such twaddle.
At the time, the big emphasis was on the potential Cold War opponents, USSR & China.
If the generals had read their history thoroughly, they would have noticed that this pair had a history of wasting their own soldiers' lives wholesale. Well, with the huge populations each have, they could afford to.
The "let's wound them and grind their efforts to a halt" theory thus goes right out of the window.
If a soldier of the USSR or China was wounded then he would be left where he was. In fact, if he was a Russian soldier and he managed to crawl back to his own lines, he would probably be shot by his own comrades for running away!
Regardless, the hierarchy pressed on with their "good idea" and eventually came up with the SA80, which fires a 5.66mm round. When they had added all the high tech gizmos, it weighed around the same as the old SLR so was no benefit to the poor bloody soldier who had to cart it about (about 10 lbs with a loaded magazine).
It did have a nice high-tech telescopic sight though. Fat lot of good that was as the weapon was not expected to be used much above 300m from the target. If you couldn't see the target without a telescope at that range, you were possibly in the wrong job.
When the SA80 was introduced, it was plagued with all manner of problems with bits falling off, breaking etc.
God knows how many years later, these "issues" were fixed.
Good! Now they had a rifle that worked. Except for this 300m range thing.
Throughout the time of the adoption and development of this wonder weapon, all of our real and potential foes have stuck to the good old Kalashnikov, good for 400M or more.
The net result is that our troops have to get a bit closer to the baddies, either by sneaking up on them or through the good old fashioned typically British tactic of charging the bastards.
Now some bright spark has determined that what we really need in places such as Afghanistan is a weapon more comparable to the Kalashnikov, so they have produced a new weapon.
Guess what? It is a 7.62mm self loading rifle.
Well, bugger me!
Isn't that where we came in?
Twenty odd years and who knows how many wasted lives later, we are back where we started.
Anyone who has served with the old SLR will tell you that when you get shot with a 7.62mm round, you stay shot. At any distance up to 600m or so.
Why do we need to re-learn all old lessons every few decades?
Why do we need to fix something that wasn't broken?

World's biggest collection of Chavs

Has anyone been watching the darts tournament currently under way in Frimley?
I have seen a couple of games, mainly because there was bugger all else on telly.
I am amazed at the collection of enthusiasts, families etc that gather there. I have a suspicion that if anyone turns up dressed like an ordinary person, they will quickly be shown the door.
The players turn up as bloated as you like showing yet another possible aspect of the dress code. If you aren't covered in tattoos and loads of bling, you don't get a game.
The audience seem to favour a collection of flashing, plastic tiaras for the women and jesters' caps for the men.
Then there is the commentator, can't remember his name now, possibly it is Tony Green, but he goes on and on and on about players' families, girl friends etc. "There's Fred's wife, lovely lass is myrtle". "Young Griselda, Bert's lady, is looking in fine form this evening. Lovely lass is Griselda". Every bugger there is great, lovely or smashing according to Mr Green.
Come on, they are a bunch of chavs and pikeys!
I used to play a lot of darts myself, both in the Army and while working in places such as Saudi Arabia etc and I used to enjoy it. It was looked on as a game, not a sport, and as a great social event, bringing people together for a good old laugh, booze-up and some social sandwich eating.
What have we now? A collection of very strange people, dressed in some really strange garb and calling for darts to be recognised as an Olympic sport!
Give me a bloody break!

Weather and Whingeing Brits

A couple of days ago, the BBC News web site quoted a prat at Gatwick airport, saying "Why is it whenever we get a bit of snow, this country grinds to a halt?" He then went on to describe the country as pathetic because of the effect the recent bad weather has had on transport etc.
I hereby declare this berk as "Empty Head of the Year".
He has probably been to Torremolinos a couple of times and considers himself therefore qualified to make sage comments on how this country compares in various fields, including dealing with the weather.
Well, Mr Empty Head, how about this?
I have lived and/or worked in plenty of locations where I have experienced cold/snowy weather, including Sweden, Norway, Germany, USA, Finland, Russia, Czech Republic, Hungary etc.
Take it from me sunshine, they all have difficulties when the weather takes a turn for the worse, despite all of the above countries being much more familiar with severe cold and snow.
Look at Germany this weekend; roads closed left, right and sideways, trains & planes cancelled, more than 300 car accidents reported in one State alone (Baden Wurttemburg) and 108 more in Nord Rhein-Westphalia and a major motorway, the A5, closed.
In Poland, more than 140 people have frozen to death.
Eurostar have reduced their services through the Channel Tunnel, allegedly because of "traction problems".
Twaddle! It is because their trains are crap in the cold weather. Shuttle trains are running on the same tracks, with the same iron wheels. How does that work?
Tell you what, Eurostar's locomotives are desinged and built in France, while the Shuttle locomotives are built in Peterborough. Crap in the UK when the weather is bad then?
I spent time in Dallas in the winter of 1977 which was their worst in 100 years. It was entertaining to watch cars doing pirouettes on the icy freeways. Although the deep snow and ice remained until Easter, I don't remember seeing a gritter out on the roads once! Snow ploughs, yes but not gritters.
So, Empty Head, shut up and get some more travelling done. Try somewhere that doesn't thrive on Watneys Red Barrel, fish and chips and drunken British dick-heads.

Treason?

When watching the government's recent announcement regarding the granting of licences for wind farms in British coastal waters, I was struck by some of the ridiculous statements concerning the additional benefits these farms would bring. ('Additional' only applies if you believe there are any benefits to begin with!)
Gordon Brown said: "This new round of licences provides a substantial new platform for investing in UK industrial capacity".
On the other hand, the British Wind Energy Association said the UK would only truly benefit if the turbines were manufactured here.
Another spokesman from the same association said more or less the opposite of that.
Recently, a successful manufacturer of turbine blades, based on the Isle of Wight, was closed by its (foreign owned) parent company. Not enough money in it, apparently.
Now that is rubbish, the Vestas plant exported all its production, thus earning foreign currency and contributing to some extent to the perennial balance of payments issue.
These blades were not particularly small either, have a look at this load leaving Southampton (for Canada) in 2008: http://kelvindavies.co.uk/kelvin/details.php?image_id=2692
And I have seen plenty of these.
So, in order to examine the claims of more jobs etc, let's look at what is actually happening.
The licence areas are:
Moray Firth Zone; licence granted to EDP Renovaveis and SeaEnergy Renewables. The first of which is a Portuguese company and the second is a newly renamed company, previously known as Ramco, based in Scotland. Ramco shares are largely held by Lanstead Capital PL, a venture capital mob run by a couple of Americans, Lampe Conway of Delaware and Stephen Remp, an American.
The Firth of Forth Zone; licence granted to SSE Renewables and Fluor. Now there's a can of worms. SSE refers to Scottish & Southern Electricity, a company which is in to all sorts of other ventures beside just plain selling of electricity. If ever you played one of the myriad scratch-cards available in the UK, there is a chance it was one of theirs. Other products they offer include broadband and internet services. Try looking at their web site; it doesn't bloody work! If they handle the offshore wind issue with the same technical skills they apply to the internet side of their business, there could be bumpy times ahead.
The Dogger Bank Zone; licence granted to SSE Renewables, RWE Npower Renewables, Statoil and Statkraft. Christ! More SSE Renewables! Plus RWE, Statoil and Statkraft.
Now, in Norwegian, 'Stat' means 'State' and Kraft means (in common with many other European languages) 'Power'. So there we have 2 Norwegian state owned concerns, 'State Oil' and 'State Power'. Meanwhile, let's not forget RWE Npower Renewables. This is a subsidiary of a subsidiary of RWE, otherwise known as 'Rheinisch-Westfälisches Elektrizitätswerk'. A German company.
The Hornsea Zone; licence granted to Mainstream Renewable Power, Siemens Project Ventures and Hochtief Construction. Mainstream Renewable Power was formed by the Irish company Airtricity in 2008, and Airticity in turn was acquired by SSE in 2008. Siemens and Hochtief are both universally well known German construction companies.
The Norfolk Bank Zone; licence granted to Scottish Power Renewables and Vattenfall Vindkraft. Scottish Power Renewables is owned by Iberdrola Renewables, a Spanish based multi-national. Vattenfall Vindkraft is a Swedish company that does ...well.. Swedish things.
The Hastings Zone; licence granted to E.On Climate and Renewables UK. We probably all are aware the E.On is a German company.
The Isle of Wight Zone; licence granted to Eneco New Energy, a Dutch company owned by 61 Dutch municipalities.
The Bristol Channel Zone; licence granted to RWE Npower Renewables. Done them, see Dogger Bank above.
The Irish Sea Zone; licence granted to Centrica Renewable Energy and involving RES Group. RES is part of the Robert McAlpine Group. Bloody hell, it is British! As for Centrica, they may well have been out of a demerger with British Gas but have in the past been the proud owners of the AA, Halfords, Goldfish credit cards, OneTel etc. etc. Not really a construction company then.
So, having had a look at that lot, I can see a couple of companies that qualify as engineering/construction companies, in particular Siemens, Hochtief and Fluor. None of these are based in Britain so why does anyone think they would be falling over themselves to generate jobs here?
There can only be one possible answer to this; the UK government will offer massive subsidies to "encourage" them. The EU will probably then block such subsidies, the engineering companies will, quite naturally, ensure those jobs are created in their home countries and the UK government will shrug their collective shoulders and say "we tried but EU regulations foiled us".
Balls! If this government was as serious about creating jobs here as they are about the fairy stories surrounding wind power, they would apply any subsidies to British engineering companies, helping regenerate at least a section of our manufacturing industry, creating jobs for UK residents and keeping our taxes here.
They would rather see all the assistance that this move would provide go to foreign industry.
That is why I headed this rant "Treason".
Definition of treason: a violation of allegiance to one's sovereign or to one's state.
Also defined as: the betrayal of a trust or confidence; breach of faith; treachery.

Newspaper? Really?

Being a staunch supporter of Liverpool FC, I never buy the thing called "The Sun". I know the proprietors of this rag class it as a 'Newspaper' but they are taking the wee wee.
The Times used to be a fine newspaper but has fallen into a new category now; a sort of broadsheet tabloid. Being part of the same stable as The Sun, it was inevitable that the standards of this publication would fall from its pervious position as the yardstick by which other newspapers would be judged.
However, it is that other rag, The Sun, that is the subject of my attention today.
At work today, someone left a copy of this paper on a table in the lunch room, so I thought I would have a look (as surely it is a 'look' that one has, not a 'read') and what an eye-opener that was!
Some samples;
Front Page Headline: HATE MAIL CLERIC. This refers to a proposal by the leader of a bunch of Islamic fascists, Anjem Choudary, to write an open letter to families of soldiers killed in Afghanistan. He plans to publish this (it is an open letter, after all) on the internet. He is mailing nobody but don't let that get in the way of the Sun's front page rant. "Bugger the facts lads, it's the headlines we want".
Fast forward a few pages, past all the tits and bums etc. and, on page 11, is the headline "Killer Dad in suicide ahead of Vickie trial". This refers to the father of a murdered girl who had been remanded in custody, awaiting trial for the girl's murder. There's the catch; he was awaiting trial. He had been found neither guilty nor not guilty. Once again, the cry in the editorial room goes up; "Bugger the facts lads, it's the headlines we want".
On page 12 we see the headline "Family's Brit plea". What the bloody hell does that mean? It is not English as I understand it, it is merely a lump composed of two English words with an American slang word stuffed in the middle. What does it refer to? It refers to the family of the British man executed for drug smuggling in China recently. The article explains; the family want the UK government to hold an inquest. (Can't help wondering why, even I know how he died). My question to The Sun is "How does this headline give an inkling of what the article was about?"
On page 21 we see, in a massive font "DRUGS TERROR POTTER STAR IN HOSTEL HIDEOUT". I can't be bothered reading it, the headline tells me all I need to know. It will be gibberish, written by a moron with little or no actual 'news' content. So let's move on.
A item on page 22 refers to women being likely to return an unwanted gift from a partner.
The headline "Gift Rapped". ???
Page 26 brings the following gem; a man serving life for killing gay people has lost 7 stones in prison. There you go folks, that is what you hand over your hard earned cash for!
And so this rag goes on. Crap from cover to cover!
And to think, people happily hand over 30p for this!

And in the news...

A few items in the news recently have caused a few eyebrows to be raised. Well, 2 at least.
First there is the execution of the British man in China for drug smuggling.
Now, I personally stopped supporting the death sentence about 15 years ago but it has to be said:
China makes and operates Chinese law. If the Chinese government was to kick up a stink because a Chinese man in London was going to prison for eating his family's dog, the British government would be bloody quick to tell the Chinese to keep their beaks out.
Secondly, there has been a lot of stuff about this man having Bipolar Disorder (Manic Depression as it used to be known). A bit of digging reveals that this seems to be the diagnosis of a forensic psychologist, hired by the charity Reprieve for whom I have the highest regard. His diagnosis came not from interviewing the man but from speaking to Chinese Embassy staff and talking to people who knew Mr. Shaikh. Almost as good as the on-line swine flu diagnosis service.
Third, this man had 4Kg of heroin in his bag and he claimed he knew nothing about it.
Hang on. 4Kg in my money is 8.5 lbs. Imagine if someone had stuffed 4 bags of sugar in your bag without you knowing about it.
Isn't it likely you would think "Hmm. This seems to be a bit heavier than when I packed it"?
Bipolar Disorder causes extreme mood swings. It doesn't cause terminal stupidity.
Anyway, what about the shrieking from the British government about rights, liberty etc?
Who the bloody hell are they to shout, having turned this easy-going, freedom loving nation into what is possibly the most repressive regime this side of Iran?
Get arrested for taking photographs. Get your face on one of the umpteen million CCTV cameras now decorating the country. Get your DNA placed on the police database, guilty or innocent. Get arrested for making a peaceful protest on the grounds it is too close to Parliament.
Better yet; live in London and be shot dead at point blank range for looking too foreign or walk home from work, through a demonstration, say something out of order to a police officer and be dead within the hour.
Note to our government: Get your own house in order before getting high and mighty with Johnny Foreigner!

Next item to catch the eye; Metropolitan Police (Met for short). To anyone out there who is not familiar with the name, they are the people who populate Scotland Yard. They police London.
Today, it was revealed that last year the Met spent more than £6m on air travel.
Most of these flights were domestic, within the UK. They averaged 5 flights per day from London to somewhere within the country. A country which is less than 1,000 miles from end to end. 11 of these flights were from London to Southampton, a distance of 90 miles. This journey can be made by train and will take around 90 minutes. The trains leave from Waterloo which is a quick tube ride from Scotland Yard. Now figure out the time needed to get to Gatwick airport, check in, go through the security business, fly there and then get from the airport into Southampton.
A bloody sight more than 90 minutes! They are buggered now though; I believe the airline that used to run flights between these 2 cities has given it up.
Just remember; the Met Police is the police force responsible for policing London.
Not the entire continent of Europe!

Nuclear Power is creeping back into the headlines. Today, it is in the form of a group or two who want to stop the proposed new power station at Hinckley Point. One lot says it is unsafe, the other lost say it will be a nuisance.
You can't win, can you?
There is a huge clamour to get rid of coal, oil and gas fired power stations on the grounds they .... well they do all sorts of things. Acid rain, global warming, stop the hens laying etc etc.
Now here is a real example of the lunatics running the asylum. These Luddites have persuaded governments everywhere that bloody big, ugly, noisy wind turbines are the answer. Wrong! What they fail to mention is that these things are so inefficient, they can only be commissioned with the help of big, juicy government subsidies. And, just when you have decided to ignore the subsidies, along comes another problem. It doesn't blow gales of wind every day which tends to leave these monsters looking rather limp and useless. Ah ha! There is a solution to this problem; they have generators on stand-by to fill in the gaps. These generators are coal, oil and gas fired power stations which can not be switched on like a bathroom light. They need to be brought into operation over a period of time as they all need to do the same thing, boil a bloody big kettle to generate steam to turn the turbines. The only way for these power stations to be available to compensate for a flat calm is for them to be running 24 hours per day. Which puts us right back where we were at the beginning. Except we now have the enormous cost of the "wind farms" to bear.
Yippee! Everyone's a winner! Well, except for you and me, the gullible tax payers.
For Christ's sake government, stop fannying about and build the nuclear plants, rip out these turbine plantations and be done with it.

Finally, a headline that caught my eye this evening was on the BBC web site. It referred to a feature thus; "The sights and sounds of well-known figures who passed away in 2009".
They (whoever they were) didn't pass away. They died. What has become of our language that we are now scared to say "died"?
It gets worse, doesn't it? Today, we refer to certain school kids as "special needs" kids. In my day they were known simply as twats. Having been a rather well known exponent of the art of being a disruptive bugger at grammar school, let me tell you something. We never had disruptive disorders or attention deficits. We had tossers. Anyone whose attention was found to be wandering or deficient in any way was quickly snapped out of it with their desk lid being slammed smartly and loudly (or a well aimed board rubber), causing a sudden awakening, accompanied perhaps by an "out of bottom" experience.
Goodnight.
Note to any UK politicians reading this; watch out, you are about to feature in these pages in the coming week!

What goes around....

I am not sure whether the global loony tunes quotient is increasing or my grumpiness is becoming more acute.
Whatever, here's a spot more for you.
Tell you what; I shall begin with a spot of schadenfreude, otherwise known as "what goes around, comes around".
An item in today's news says that the government of the Yemen is appealing to the West for help in the struggle against Al Qaeda. Small, smug smile crosses my face.
They say there may be around 200 to 300 Al Qaeda members in the country. Well, who let them in? I have checked my diary and it certainly wasn't me. Was it then you, dear reader? No, I thought not.
But why a smug smile, you ask.
Back before a lot of you were born, this boy arrived in the port of Aden (in 1966 actually) as a teenaged soldier, just out of training. I then spent most of the next year putting up with the antics of the local bad boys, who threw bombs, rockets, AK47 rounds etc at us on a daily basis.
This was done with the open support and connivance of the government of....Yep! Yemen.
Sadly, the purpose of our being in the bloody dump in the first place was to try to help the locals organise a proper government, with democratic ideals and all that other fancy Western stuff.
The Yemen government was pretty much a collection of tribal oiks, who frankly had not moved much beyond the 18th century. In their endeavours, they were supported, quite openly, by that other bastion of civilised, democratic behaviour in the Middle East, President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt. Nice lad, President Nasser; in addition to his years of interference in Yemeni affairs, keeping the civil war well stirred, he was responsible for gassing as many as 1,500 Yemenis, mainly in 1967. Not much said about that at the time, nor later.
Still, while the local numb nuts were throwing their hardware at us, including tactics such as throwing hand grenades into school buses, we also had to tolerate the bloody Yanks interfering.
At that time the USA was on a Brit Bashing drive, mainly at the UN. The cry was heard over and over again from the Yanks; dismantle the British Empire (they hadn't noticed this had already been done some years earlier). Independence for all British colonies etc. (Don't anybody mention the colonisation going on under the Stars & Bars at this time!).
It didn't matter what we did, the cry was relentless; end British Imperialism. An eerie foretelling of what was to come in 1982 when we fell out with Argentina over the Falkland Islands.
Well, some years later, that smug smile crept out for an airing. In October 2000, the USS Cole was attacked by a suicide bomber in the port of Aden. Now, I do not condone this sort of attack, nor the loss of life and injuries caused by this kind of action but I had to smile to myself as the first military unit to come to the aid of the Americans was a frigate of the Royal Navy, HMS Marlborough.
How ironic! The US government spent ages telling us to get out of Aden, turning a blind eye to the daily terrorist attacks that we suffered, then they move in and get some themselves! Terribly sad for the US servicemen who were killed and maimed. (Having had mates killed and maimed in that same place, I can sympathise with those guys). Better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick for the American politicians.
So there we are; a good example of what goes around, comes around. In both cases, governments which had spent a lot of time and effort deriding and, in the case of Yemen, killing, British servicemen, come to the British for help.
Err Why?
I know the phrase "sod off" doesn't translate at all well into either American or Arabic but surely it is time our politicians discovered a diplomatic term to cover this?
This and other current cock ups are of your own making. You didn't want to listen when the Brits tried to explain the facts of Middle Eastern life to you.
Get on with it!
More ravings tomorrow.

Mad as Bloody Badgers

Well, someone out there is stark raving mad. The sad thing is, the numbers seem to be rising.
Within the last few days, a nutcase tried to blow his leg up on an aeroplane heading into Detroit.
Of course, this has prompted reactions from the various authorities, including the following:
Canada has decreed that all arriving aircraft will have to sit on the tarmac for an hour before anybody can get off. Oh! That is clever! Exploding leg nutcases will never figure out that the time and place to detonate his leg will be somewhere other than on the runway in Canada.
The President of the USA has ordered a review of airline security. This apparently includes a ban on leaving your seat in the final hour before landing. Hello! These headbangers have no particular desire to leave their seats, unless it is through a gaping hole in the fuselage which they had recently created.
Not only can you not leave your seat; you are banned from having a blanket on your lap during this final hour. So; you can't go to the toilet for an hour but, should you piss yourself as a result, well you can't hide your shame under a blanket either!
The UK, at the behest of their American masters, has introduced matching restrictions which include a limit of one piece of hand baggage. Well, that will fix everything, won't it? If the next nutcase should try a similar stunt, he will be thwarted by the fact he will be unable to hide his exploding leg in a briefcase.
The British authorities, again at the behest of their American masters, have announced that Britain would consider having "more in-flight air marshals". Just the job, eh? If the exploding leg fanatics don't get you, the stray bullets whizzing around the cabin will!

It is not only the aviation/security sector that attracts loonies. Far from it.
Look at the example in the news today of a bingo caller in East Anglia being told to adjust his vocabulary to suit political correctness.
I kid you not! For years, people have become used to the cry of "Two fat ladies" when the 88 ball is drawn.
A spokeswoman (bloody hell! shouldn't that be 'spokesperson'?) from Sudbury Town Council said "In particular with John being a councillor we have to be politically correct."

Other items in the news today include an item about a heroin user being tested for anthrax.
Be honest; who actually thinks we should give a toss whether this herbert has anthrax or not, as long as he keeps it to himself. If you are stupid enough to stick needles full of crap into yourself, what possible difference could the odd spot of anthrax make? (Other than saving us tax payers a bloody fortune on your fruitless re-hab courses).

Not only does the UK have its share of nutters; I see in today's news that eunuchs in Pakistan are to "get their own gender". Where does that line get drawn? Will we end up with a selection of genders from which we can choose, regardless of what biology says we are:
Male; Female; Eunuch; Undecided; A bit of this and a bit of that; Jedi?????

Global Warming/Cooling/Warming Oh I don't know any more!
A documentary film on BBC2 the other day began with the story of how a scientist had been examining ice cores, drilled from the Arctic.
The findings revealed massive and sudden changes in the region's temperatures over thousands of years.
The data showed that there had always been fluctuations in the earth's temperatures and this was more or less predicted by theory.
Analysed over a long period, this was shwon as sort of wave shape, with gentle rises followed by gentle declines.
However, on occasion, the temperature had suddenly plummeted and then climbed quickly back up to normal. The theory didn't explain this, so the scientist set out to discover what had actually happened.
Eventually, the programme and the scientist came to the "Atlantic Conveyor" theory. This has nothing to do with a ship of that name but rather refers to the Gulf Stream.
Warm water from the Central/South America region of the Atlantic flows north, via the Gulf of Mexico and along the eastern coastline of the US, across the Atlantic toward the UK where it backs to a more northerly course as it passes the UK & Ireland on its way to the Arctic.
Upon reaching the Arctic region, the water is cooled (presumably all those ice cubes floating around there have something to do with that). As the water cools, it becomes more dense (as salt water will do), and sinks. As it sinks and nears the ocean floor, currents down there take the water pretty much back the way it came but at a much greater depth, until it reaches warmer waters off the Caribbean/South American area.
Warming up decreases the density so the water rises toward the surface where it is warmed even further and off it goes once more in its Gulf Stream guise.
So, the scientist figured, it seems that, for some reason, this "conveyor" must have stopped at some point in its history.
As the Gulf Stream delivers warmth the equivalent of a million power stations to the UK, the sudden loss of this would be catastrophic. The UK would enter a big freeze and the climate would be more like that of Labrador (now, that would make the Jocks put some prpoer trousers on, wouldn't it?).
Then for some reason, the current started to flow once again and we all warmed up a bit.
Now came the panic mongers' bit.
If the Gulf Stream's salt content was to decrease at the point where it gets cold and dives down to the ocean bottom, the change in desity would be much reduced so the sinking of the water wouldn't happen.
The Gulf Stream would stop.
And we get back to the sudden and dramatic decrease in our temperatures in the UK.
Now, remember that bit. The next ice age cometh if the Gulf Stream takes a rest.
Fine, thinks I, that explains everything then. It seems like the old wags were right; "what goes around, comes around".
Cut now to the panic mongers busy gathering data in Greenland, Siberia and the Arctic Ocean.
These scientists are showing in detail how certain glaciers in Greenland are moving at a much faster rate than ever recorded before; how much the rivers flowing from Siberia into the Arctic have increased dramatically in volume and how much the salinity of the water at the Gulf Stream's turning point has decreased radically.
OK, got that, what's next?
Well, they pointed out how how global rainfall patterns would change. There was some good news in this bit as it showed the equatorial rainfall moving north. Sadly, they say this will mean the equatorial rain forests would disappear to be replaced by grassland and bush. Sad for equatorial tree collectors, I suppose but what about the poor sods in Sub-Saharan Africa? Currently, they suffer from repeated long droughts which cause massive crop failures and terrible famines in the region. Well, now it seems they may be in for some heavy rain for some years to come. Bonus!
They will then be able to grow crops and feed themselves. They will be able to thrive and prosper. They will cease to be recipients of billions of pounds worth of aid every year so that money can be invested elsewhere in the world economy. We are all going to be winners! Hurray!
Back to the Greenland glaciers et al for a minute.
Why are they seeing these changes? Easy; global warming is causing the ice to melt thus releasing more fresh water into the Arctic Ocean.
This causes temperate climates such as the UK to become big ice boxes (remember that bit earlier?).
When we get cold, we light more fires to get warm again, thus adding to global warming and speeding the cycle up.
Now it all gets a bit tricky.
Global warming causes the ice to melt and for the resulting fresh water increase causes the Gulf Stream to give up the ghost. When clouds form, they will retain their water content until such time as they become too dense to be able to carry all the water. This increase in density causes all that water to fall as rain. Generally speaking, what causes this increase in cloud density is a drop in temperature so most rain falls as clouds move northwards and cool(I am talking only about the northern hemisphere here; the reverse applies down under).
As the scientists predict that northern Europe and the Arctic will have become much colder as a result of severe Gulf Stream failure, what happens to all this rain?
It falls as snow and is frozen when it lands on the sub-zero ground below. It all piles up in massive ice sheets, glaciers and ice bergs etc.
So what's your point, Kelvin?
Simple; all that fresh water comes from the ocean. Take out fresh water from the ocean and you cause the salinity to gradually rise.
Keep that fresh water locked up on the ground in glaciers etc and it doesn't get back into the ocean to balance the change in salinity.
The water becomes more dense and, somewhere around the Arctic, it will begin to sink. As it sinks, it will draw more water from the south and bingo!
The Atlantic Conveyor is once more up and running, we all warm up again and so it goes.
I realise the yoghurt knitters and tree huggers will probably scream out in anguish but they may have to one day face the fact that this is the way it goes.
The earth's climate has been doing this on its own for millenia, since before MR and MRs Ug lit their first fire.
So why do the panic mongers think they can change the earth's climate when it is obvious the earth has had its own way of doing this since the creation of the planet?
Anyway, I thought this was God's job, not Ian McKaskill's!

Loss of Liberty.
A generation before mine saw the rise of Adolf Hitler and his henchmen.
Some of the policies they introduced to Germany were never questioned at the time as they were seen by people both inside and outside of Germany as generally sensible and good for the country.
Most of these measures related to registering people according to their race, religion or long term illness or disability.
No problems; "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear". We have heard this and the arguments surrounding it many times recently.
After the end of World War 2 when it became apparent what the German authorities wanted with all that information on their registers, civilised people expressed their horror and said "never again".
Well, good folk, the term "never again" in terms of the United Kingdom at least, actually seems to mean something like "that was a good idea really. Why don't we do it too?"
We have had the controversy over the proposed ID card nonsense for some time now and I suspect that argument will rumble on and on and I will predict a fair amount of civil disobedience when the government tries to force us into registration etc.
However, we shouldn't allow that one issue to take all our attention.
The last few years have seen a lot of other attacks on our liberty.
Taken separately and singly, they seem to be rather innocuous and a lot of people have fallen into the "nothing to hide, nothing to fear trap".
Registration of your personal details for the ID card system: "Nothing to fear, nothing to hide".
CCTV cameras all over the place, watching your every movement: Again "nothing to fear.." etc.
Then came the draconian measures such as keeping people suspected of acts related to terrorism to be either kept in prison without any charges being brought or being kept under virtual open arrest at their homes.
Now the government is proposing to bring in similar measures to curtail the liberty of anyone they say is suspected of being involved in serious crime.
Although I would agree that the threat of terrorism is, on the face of it, the more serious issue when compared to serious crime, it is the latter proposal that worries me the most.
Under this proposal, the government wants to be able to rummage through a suspect's bank accounts, ban them from associating with certain people, restrict their ownership and use of a mobile phone etc. They will even be able to ban a person from using the internet and to restrict a person from accessing his own bank account.
Herr Hitler would have been proud of this government!
It seems to me that we are being deprived of any shred of liberty that we may once have enjoyed in this country.
If people are suspected of terrorism or of serious crime, then the evidence should be gathered and placed before a court for a court to decide whether or not an offence has been committed. The appropriate punishment would then be meted out to the offender.
I believe this government are running "knee jerk" policies which are probably dictated by the shrieking headlines in our daily rags. They can't be bothered, or are not clever enough to focus their efforts on the detection and prosecution of crime as we, as a civilised society, are used to.
What is difficult about that?
Now the government has seen their control orders, as applied to alleged terrorist suspects, fall into disrepute, they are proposing to use similar powers against organised crime suspects but this time via civil powers.
In other words, they will skip the normal criminal court procedures and their rigid application of rules of evidence etc.
What will happen under the new proposals will be that the authorities can go to a magistrate and have a discussion something like:
"This bloke is a real bad bugger. He has a flash car and some really dodgy mates and we think he is probably involved in organised crime. We would like you to issue one of these control orders on him"
"Oh really" says the magistrate, "Well prosecute him then"
"Ah, well the evidence is a bit thin at the moment"
"Well, what evidence do you have then?"
"Well, not a lot actually but honestly, this bloke is a bad 'un, believe me"
"Oh OK then, order granted".
"Thanks Mr Beak. That'll piss on his bonfire!"
I think the Americans refer to "due process". Well, whatever one calls it, we no longer have it.
We have a police force that regularly walks around with weapons. Not satisfied with issuing pistols such as other police forces around the world use, our police forces walk around with machine guns.
If the police were to be armed with side arms, then people would be able to say we now have an armed police force, just like all those foreigners. Just give a lot of them a machine gun and then the government can say "Oh no, these are exceptional circumstances".
Now the government want to short circuit some of the work that should properly be done by the police.
They are more or less saying to the police "Look, don't bother too much about this tedious evidence gathering business, just apply for a control order. Then we can reduce your budgets as you won't need the same levels of manpower".
Once they have a series of control orders in place to cover terrorism and serious crime, there will no doubt be a chorus from government ministers of how successful these are so let's extend the deplorable practice to other issues.
Drivers suspected of bad parking can be made to scrub the cathedral steps perhaps.
Or how about an order to force people who snore loudly to surrender their passport and weekly shopping lists until they have had their noses amputated?
Parents of kids who are badly behaved can be subject to an order to humiliate them. (Oh, I forgot; we have that arrangement already!)
Returning briefly to the issue of CCTV; this country is covered by the largest concentration of CCTV cameras of any country in the world. It has been calculated that the average citizen in this country can expect to be filmed something like 300 times per day, just while going about your lawful business.
If you are in your home for say 30% of the day, you will be filmed or photographed once every 3.2 minutes. Or put another way, you will be snapped once every 200 seconds!
All well and good, I suppose, providing all this leads to a dramatic reduction in crime.
There is absolutely no evidence at all to support any claims of any sort of reduction in crime.
In fact, despite official government lying (or manipulation of data, if you prefer) about crime rates etc., the evidence shows that violent crime is on the increase. Presumably, CCTV cameras along your high street would be put there to deter or detect theft and violent crime. They are not there to catch you fiddling your taxes!
So, as the number of CCTV cameras increases, so does violent crime.
The inevitable conclusion is that CCTV cameras are as much use as a chocolate tea pot when it comes to deterring crime.
There must be a good reason then for the authorities to persist in spending so much money on these intrusions.
Well, don't let's look at these things in isolation. Try looking at them in concert with the other gimmicks, tricks and wheezes.
Add the CCTV cameras to the automatic number plate recognition systems, cameras along our motorways, bogus control orders that enable the authorities to snoop into your bank accounts, a proposal to allow all the many government agencies to share your personal details willy nilly, the collection and retention of your fingerprints and DNA data, regardless of whether you are a criminal or not and of course the grand ID card scheme and the answer becomes a bit more clear.
It is quite simply so the government can keep tabs on every single aspect, no matter how trivial, of your life.
Then what?
That is what worries me.
Where do we go from here?
Why, back to 1930s Germany of course!
PS Did you know that, if you fly to the USA, the government of the USA gets access to over 50 pieces of data about you?
If they don't get the data they want, including your meal preferences, you don't get in!

The Mangling of the English Language.
I am sure many of you will have noticed how people in the public limelight are apparently on a mission to mangle, modify or even destroy the English language. I for one am very conscious of the fact the English is possibly unique in the way it is constantly developing and adapting. One thing that probably helped kill Latin was its total failure to even recognise words and phrases from other languages, never mind absorb them. The French language will probably go the same way as long as the French government is so determined to keep that language "pure".
The English language is capable of absorbing words from other cultures to suit circumstances and to reflect events. Probably, it is possible to trace the history of the British people by studying the changes in the language over the centuries. The English we now speak is not greatly different from that spoken by our ancestors a thousand years ago. It made no difference to the language in general when the Normans popped in for a spot of ruling and insisted on French being spoken. That may have worked at court but the vast majority of the population (the good old yeomen and peasants) stuck to English, thank you very much. Some French words sneaked in (notice that? "Sneaked", not "Snuck". Pay attention!) and we ended up with words such as 'garage' and 'envelope' etc. and there are the Indian and other Asian words such as 'bungalow' and 'char' etc. All that is good stuff and has served only to enrich our language. We probably have more ways of saying the same thing than any other language. We can use the language skilfully to deliberately say as little or as much about a subject as we would like, just by altering the choice of words.
As I said, all good stuff, so what is my grumble about?
I shall list a few:
Football players and managers; they now constantly refer, in interviews, to their club as the "football club" and they will refer to a good "football game". Do me a favour, drop the 'football'. We know it is bloody football, that is why we are watching you talk nonsense on Match of the Day, not Gardener's Question Time!
Once upon a time, it was enough for the players or managers to say "This is a great club". They didn't need to constantly say "football club" as they knew we are not so stupid as to make the mistake of thinking they were talking about the local social club or the working man's club down the road.

TV news readers; they pay so much attention to their pronunciation that they overdo it. Hence, we now hear about Islamic population going to Saudi Arabia for the "Harzzhh". Sod off! It is pronounced "Haj" with the middle letter being what is known as a short 'A' and the third letter sounding like the initial letter of the name 'John'. Haj!
The same people have, on occasion, been heard to talk about "Parkistarn" and to refer to that 4 yearly feast of athletics as the "Erlimpics".
For God's sake! For a £2Million a year salary, you should be able to do a lot better than that!

They also share a speech impediment with many of our current crop of politicians; they can not pronounce many old English words in a manner which is remotely recognisable to the majority of the population. Some examples include 'magistrate'. Mr. Blair is the chief culprit here and he, along with news readers, insists on pronouncing this as 'magistrut'.
I have noticed recently a number of occasions where the word 'decade' has been mispronounced with the emphasis being placed on the last syllable. When you do that, you change the word from one meaning a span of ten years to one that means rotten, in other words, the past tense of the verb 'decay'.

Anyone on the radio or telly; "on the back of" is a stupid, vacuous expression which means sod all to the average person who spends 10 milliseconds thinking of a suitable word to describe an event. Nothing comes "on the back of" other than chaps riding elephants. If one of those turned up at your front door, you would rightly be able to say "he came on the back of an elephant".
A rise in the bank rate does NOT come on the back of whatever. Maybe it follows something else or perhaps it is either subsequent or even consequential to something else but never, ever on the "back of". Drop it!

Had to buy new boots?
A message for the small but vocal minority of our armed forces who give the profession of soldier (or sailor or airman) a bad name: "Shut up. Just shut the *&*& up!"
First we heard non-stop moaning about having to buy your own boots. Are you telling us you were never issued with boots? Did you do all your square bashing in those lovely trainers? Or did you not fancy the boots you were issued because the Yanks you were serving alongside had "the Gucci kit"? Do you think there is no other generation that has done the desert bit before you or did someone tell you that you were the first soldiers in the Army to go somewhere hot?
Well, let me tell you they were wrong. When I was told my first posting, a lot of my mates laughed their heads off and couldn't stop saying "Sand, shit and flies!". Fair enough, that wasn't a bad description of Aden but they had overlooked the other elements involved; "RPG, mortars and Kalashnikovs" (oh, and hand grenades).
When I reported to stores to get my kit, I found I was going to have to wear some rather baggy shorts, longs in the evenings after sunset and God help any man who is in the wrong trousers either side of that time, along with a rather natty little number in khaki cotton bush jackets. As for boots, well we just had to soldier on with the same old boots that you had brought with you from England. In my case it was a pair of ammo boots and a couple of pairs of "Boots DMS". To go with the shorts (remember, only after sunrise and before sunset!), we were given the strangest pair of woollen socks you had ever seen; they had no feet! Hose tops was the official name for these things and they were worn from the ankle upward. The boots on your feet, along with either gaiters or puttees round your ankles, made them look like dark blue school socks.
What spoiled the whole thing was the dhobi wallah using half a bucket of starch for every jacket he washed and ironed. Oh, they looked smart enough when returned from the dhobi with every crease looking lethal in its sharpness and they could be stood in the corner of your locker until needed. Putting them on was not a comfortable task and was absolute murder if you happened to have been sun burned recently. Still, once you had stepped foot outside the billet, the sweat made them nice and soft and pliable again, even if they did stink a bit by the time you got to work. another nice touch was the addition of webbing. In the case of my regiment, it was 1937 pattern which was scrubbed and blancoed to a parade ground standard with the result that, when going out on patrol at night or when doing your stroll around the camp perimeter fence on guard duty, you had a brilliant white cross right in the middle of your back. I have to say though, in defence of the old style webbing, the ammo pouches were of just the right size and shape to carry a tin of Tiger!
Oh, and one other thing; it was hot. Hotter and more humid than you could imagine. And I don't want to hear that it is hotter in Iraq. I have been there (and Aden and Oman and Dubai and Abu Dhabi and Jeddah and Riyadh and Bahrain and Damascus and Amman and Dhahran and Qatar and last but not least, Kuwait). Believe me, Aden was the worst.
Now, back to those boots (oh, I almost forgot, we were also issued with "Boots, Jesus" but nobody ever wore them as far as I can remember). Our boots didn't cause mass purchases of replacements. We wore them, we polished them and we powdered our feet and changed our socks regularly and my couple of pairs lasted more than a couple of years.
So what was wrong with yours?
Second; Accomodation. Oh what a contentious topic! I actually heard someone calling a radio programme recently to complain that her son said that when he lies on his bed and stretches his arms out on either side, he can almost touch the walls of his room.
Hang on! Did she say "His room"? Is he the RSM then? No, of course not. He has one of these recently built or refurbished barrack rooms that comes with quilt and built in ablutions etc.
No doubt some misguided person in authority somewhere thought that what the troops need (perhaps to take their minds off their boots) is some "4 Star" accomodation. That would be nice, little single rooms with built-in khazi, just like Holiday Inn.
Well, that was a cock up in someone's thinking.
Single rooms with all mod cons might sound a good idea but I am sure that, one day, some highly paid psychologist or sociologist will work out that what would really be excellent for the morale of the troops would be to have large barrack rooms with lots of men in together. Just like the old days, in fact. I see the government has just finished spending an arm and a leg refurbishing the old Vimy blocks at Catterick. To any of my readers who have spent any time there recently, think back to how the blocks look as you approach from the modern gate. The first block was known as Vimy C. The first room that you see on the ground floor on the end nearest the gate is where I spent a couple of years, living with 13 other men. Next to that room was a small room which was officially designated a study room. The use to which it was actually put was as a convenient place to play cards and scoff the leg of lamb you had just nicked from the cookhouse at 01:00. The point I want to make about the barrack room however is that it served a purpose other than giving you a bed with a roof over your head. Being stuck in such close confines with a bunch of your workmates, there was a spirit of camaraderie which made you more of a unit than a mere collection of soldiers. You soon got used to the non-stop farting and the smell of someone else's boots permeating throughout the barrack room. (Ventilation didn't work in those Catterick winters as it consisted of two options only; Window Open and Window Shut). You quickly learned to get on with each other and become a part of a team, particularly in the mornings when trying to get the place looking good enough for the SSM's inspection. I know it is typical of a grumpy old fart to say "it was character and team building" but it was and there's an end to it.
I suspect that a lot of today's whingers (I don't make the mistake of thinking that the Army is permeated with whole battalions doing "whingeing by numbers") would have positively crapped themselves if they saw the accomodation I was given in Botswana.
While the infantry detachment there had taken over a school and lived in the classrooms, I and 3 other mates, had to make do with the school's pig sty. I kid you not. It was a pig sty made up of 6 vertical poles stuck in the ground in two ranks and some timers along the top to make what was essentially the frame of a building. The roof was straw and was full of gaps. There were no walls. And when I arrived there, it was raining for the first time in 7 years. Everywhere was knee deep in water, including our little shack. We improvised walls and roof with canvases pinched off a couple of Bedford three tonners. Unfortunately, this wasn't enough to stretch to 4 walls so the entrance wall/door was two army issue blankets that were literally nailed to the timber lintel over one end. I was living in that for 5 months and have no complaints at all. After all, I only caught malaria once!

To provide a little balance here, regardless of what I think of the current complaints culture, I have to say I have some sympathy with the blokes in Iraq.
The government had no right to send you there, with or without the "right kit".
Afghanistan is a slightly different story and I think it is right that we should go and sort out the loonies over there. Just think, if the dip sticks in London had not squandered so many people and resources in the pointless and illegal invasion of Iraq, perhaps the job in Afghanistan would be over by now and you could all be down the boozer before last orders!
To the lads (and lasses) serving their country quietly and proudly, from one old soldier, hats of to you and we are all proud of you.
To the malcontents that have discovered this new sport of running to the press with your gripes, petty or large, real or imagined, shut up. Get out of the mob and let the professionals get on with their job. You will be doing your country a service.

Fraud.
I have seen and read of cases coming to court where the defendant was accused of something along the lines of "Unlawfully obtaining pecuniary advantage" or something like that. Maybe "Obtaining money by false pretences" would have the been the charge.
Whatever the terminology, the cases I have in mind have been people who have lied about qualifications, previous experience etc in order to gain employment in a job for which they are not at all qualified.
Well, serves them right.
But, what I have in mind just now is this: "Where are the boundaries when deciding whether a person should be charged in this manner? What is the dividing line between criminal and not criminal in these dodges and wheezes?"
The reason I am thinking about this is this:
If it is fairly clear cut when deciding whether or not to charge a person with a criminal offence if they are thought to have obtained a job, particularly a well paid job, by mis-representing their qualifications and making promises they have no prospect of honouring, when will the House of Commons be up before the beak? All 600 or so of them.
Hands up who is tired of hearing prospective members of parliament promising everything from free Mars bars to allowances to enable one-legged persons to buy new toilet cleaning fluid and then seeing those promises quickly forgotten once we have given them a job.
Make no mistake about that last phrase, "given them a job", for that is exactly what happens when we vote for a wannabe MP. The process works like this. Lots of people are taken in by a set of promises, all nicely wrapped up in some fancy rhetoric, to place an 'X' against the Job Seeker's name on a ballot form. If there enough of these 'X' marks, then the Job Seeker is given a job. If you were one of those who marked that person's name with an 'X', then you and your like minded citizens have granted that person a job.
The job is generally expected to entail doing a spot of work in their constituency and a spot of work in Westminster. The people who allocated the 'X' to that person's name quite rightly expect the winner to go off and as part of their new job, to battle to fulfil promises they made in exchange for the much sought after 'X'.
("You've got the job, based on what you have told us, so go away and do what you said you would").
Well, we all know what comes next, don't we boys and girls?
The new boy reports for work and for the first few weeks, sits and watches how the others do their jobs, hopefully learning from them along the way. During this settling in period, he or she will watch the antics of the old hands and quickly realise that there is a clique here or there to which he would like to belong.
Bugger the vacuous promises! The new employee wants nothing more than to be liked by his new mates in his new work place and will wag his tail, roll over and have his tummy tickled or whatever it takes to become accepted among the old hands.
Then, when his initial contract of employment is up for renewal, off he or she goes, back to the suckers who so willingly gave him all the 'X's needed to get the job and starts all over again.
When tackled on the question of why most, or even all, of his promises have not been kept, there will be a fantastic series of "reasons" and the blame machine will immediately engage high gear. Out will come the tired old clap trap about "the other parties" and how they thwarted new boy's efforts to introduce the free handbag exchange bill or how the speaker exercised a guillotine and cut him off just as he was about to introduce that legislation that would have seen all his constituents have their houses re-roofed in gold leaf.
"Damn the other lot! We must keep faith and maintain our pressure on the others at Westminster who would thwart our every effort to honour our pledges. Vote for me and strike another blow for freedom and democracy! Don't let's lose heart at this critical juncture; we will take the fight to the other lot's back yard".
And like lemmings, we will probably all just do the same thing we did last time. Dish out those precious 'X's and send the bugger off to disappoint us all again.
Well, I have a proposition.
For each promise that a potential MP makes during the pre-election campaigning and then fails to honour, let them be prosecuted for "Unlawfully obtaining pecuniary advantage" or however it is termed. Let us see the courts full of miscreants who have conned us (for that, surely, is what it is, a great big con) into giving them a well paid job, regardless of whether they were suitable for the job or whether they had any intentions at all to do the job with which they were tasked when hired.
Anyone who lies through his teeth in order to get a job that may pay him in excess of £200,000 per annum ought to have those lying teeth removed. Preferably by Basher Bloggs that well known man about town, currently doing a 10 year stretch in Walton for GBH.

Some more things that annoy me:
Weather forecasters; experts in two word alliteration!
Why can they not speak the same sort of language as the majority of the population?
Why do they seem to have some sort of compulsion to show off their education (GCE English Language, Communications & Media Studies etc) when trying to describe the weather?
Some examples are..."Damp and Dismal"..."Damage & Destruction"..."Misty & Murky"..."Wet & Windy"..."Spits & Spots" (of rain).
How about this for an idea?
Why don't they have a go at describing the weather with the following terms?
"Sunny"
"Raining"
"Windy"
I think we all understand those terms well enough (and if you don't, you are obviously not British!).

PFI.
What does PFI really mean? We are led to believe it means “Private Finance Initiative” but I have a suspicion it really means “Please Fiddle Indiscriminately”.
But then, you have to bear in mind I am just a grumpy old cynic so maybe I am wrong.
Before condemning me though, let’s have a look at some of the evidence.
I should also mention that PFI has a bastard brother named “PPP”.
I think it is supposed to mean “Public Private Partnership” but it probably has some other, more sinister meaning. “Pass the Port Please”?
I noticed in a BBC report today that Suffolk County Council are being asked to back plans to negotiate with private firm the Land Group over a possible Private Finance Initiative which would see the refurbishment of various fire stations across the county, along with the provision of two new stations.
I am sure the good people of Suffolk will be pleased to see improvements in their Fire & Rescue services but…
Oh dear! Here comes the cynic factor. Five of the proposed new fire stations will be for retained fire fighters. To you and me, these are part timers who carry on their normal way of life, jobs etc and who turn out when the alarm is raised. I am not sure of the ins and outs of the arguments over these but I get the feeling that this is a different version of the “Bobbies on the cheap” philosophy. I know retained fire fighters have been around since the dawn of the fire services but I know of one Sussex village that probably wishes the county would pay up for a full time fire service. I don’t remember the name of the village but local TV news programmes in the South of England recently showed a video of a thatched cottage blazing away while, in the foreground, there was a parked fire engine with the driver sitting in his cab watching the fire.
He was unable to do anything as his retained crew had not turned up. Meanwhile, the hapless owner of the cottage had to wait for a full time crew to arrive from the next town.
Still, full time vs retained fire fighters is another argument.
What bothers me is this PFI fiddle.
The Suffolk fire services example is just one of literally hundreds.
All over this land, we see examples of new hospitals, schools, roads etc being built and operated by private companies.
The government’s professional PFI cheerleaders will say this is the way to get new hospitals etc quickly and efficiently.
When it is pointed out to them that these projects are generally over-priced, shoddy and inefficient, they stick their collective fingers in their ears and go “Nah nah nah , can’t hear you!”
There are two things about this PFI scandal that bother me; first is the cost, efficiency and quality issue I already mentioned. This then leads me to the second; corruption.
If we accept that these PFI projects generally are as bad as I say, then surely one has to wonder why the government insists on sticking with them. Why do politicians persist in writing lucrative contracts for companies that produce rubbish projects that are going to cost the end users a damn sight more than the traditional methods would?
Yes, yes, I have heard their arguments and protestations to the effect that these PFI schemes are good for us but I do not accept a single word of what they say. And because I can not accept their lame reasoning, I am forced to conclude that there must be more to this policy than meets the eye.
I have just been reading a very large spreadsheet, issued by the government, detailing current PPI/PFI “initiatives” and it is very depressing.
For example, Canterbury seems to have got a new secondary school. The contract covering this was for £3.5M and lasts for 10 years.
This means that the good citizens of Kent will be paying a private company an inflated sum of money each year for the next 10 years to provide a school over which they will have very little control. If the classroom wall is falling down and needs to be replaced immediately, the school will have no right to get a contractor in quickly to put it right. (Did you read that? NO RIGHT!). They will be forced to have the “owner” of the school (the PFI mob) organise a contractor of their choice who may or may not do a good job. Eventually. The cost of this work will be lumped onto the school’s ongoing bill. So, the school would get the work done when it suits the PFI contractor, at a cost which suits the PFI contractor and by a contractor which suits the PFI contractor at a cost which won’t stay still; it will be added to an account that attracts interest so they will pay for the work. And pay for the work. And pay for the work….
What about “Armed Forces Personnel Administration”?
This is another of these PFI/PPP scams. This sees the government paying some fat cats £254M for a contract that will run for 25 years. I have no idea, by the way, of whether these stated sums include the interest and are therefore a final figure or are a nominal amount used at the start of the project, to which interest is added frequently and regularly.
Whatever, why could the government not give the Armed Forces £254M and tell them to get their personnel administration sorted out? Hang on, the United Kingdom has had “Armed Forces” in one form or another for getting on for one thousand years; how the hell have they managed to get along for all this time without fat cat companies coming along saying, in the words of Harry Enfield, “You don’t want to do it that way”?
How about transport for the armed forces?
Currently, the RAF are operating 4 (yes, I have counted them!) C17 aircraft for long distance or heavy lift transport. These are the aircraft you used to see (until it became too embarrassing for the government) bringing home British corpses from Iraq or Afghanistan. When they are not being used as flying hearses, they transport troops and equipment to far off places.
Note, I said the RAF were “operating” these aircraft. They don’t own them. They are leased from Boeing (and no doubt a pile of other sticky fingered suppliers).
Can you imagine where we would be now if the RAF had to lease Lancasters or hurricanes during WW2? Now the government is coming unstuck with these aircraft; they have exceeded the number of air miles originally contracted for. It’s a bit like car rentals; if your employer operates a car lease arrangement, there will be a fixed life of, for example, 4 years or 100,000 miles. If you exceed the 100,000 miles during the life of the lease, there will be a hefty penalty to be paid for those extra miles.
And the C17 aircraft deals are into this territory now!
Who remembers the good old RFA? (Royal Fleet Auxiliary). This organisation ran a fleet of ships for and on behalf of the Ministry of Defence. Although manned by civilian crews, they worked exclusively for the MoD, getting supplies etc to troops, ships and aircraft all over the world.
They also carried troops into battle when needed; remember the Sir Galahad?
Well, a couple of years ago, the government had a better idea. Some of the older vessels were getting rather expensive to maintain and replacements were going to be needed.
So, being clever, they put together a scheme to have a mini-fleet of 6 ships built to replace some of the older ships. Being really clever, they also decided these ships would not actually belong to them or the RFA. They would be owned and operated by Foreland Shipping. When the MoD need them, they would be free to ply their trade wherever and whenever they felt like it.
Picture the scene:
“Hello, Foreland chappies. B. Liar here. I was wondering if we can use our ships for a few weeks.
Oh! I see. They are in Australia at the moment eh?
Well, OK, have a chat with your scheduling chaps and let me know when they can see a slot for us to use them.
Well, now that you ask, we will need them to support an invasion of England from Scotland, just to complete the take over and Gordon had hoped to achieve this some time this month.”
Staying with defence related projects, I see there are something like 11 “projects” being undertaken for the MoD.
These are for either Voice and Data systems of IT projects. They have a total value of £1.8 Billion (of which £1.5 Billion is for Skynet 5 whatever that is).
Projects include:
Royal Navy; Fleet VLF voice and data communications. The RN already has VLF communications, as does any other navy that operates submarines. £58M
Army; Defence Intelligence Information System. £5M
RAF; Guaranteed Power Supply at RAF Fylingdales. £8M.
Look at that! They want to spend only £5M on defence intelligence which would presumably be useful to us as a nation and at the same time they allocate £8M to guarantee power supplies for an American radar and electronic eavesdropping facility!
Does anyone know what “TAFMIS” is? Whatever it is, it is getting £41M worth of software.
Most of these projects could have been handled by existing establishments such as the Royal Signals and Radar Research Establishment and the equivalent in the Royal Navy and RAF.
The projects would benefit from having people who understand the military needs working on the project which would go a long way toward ensuring the finished product would work in the way the military expect it to work. Similarly, the military would benefit to the extent that their uniformed personnel would be involved and would be able to fix things in places such as on the front line in Iraq or Afghanistan. Rest assured, the “whiz kids” of the typical latte drinking sort that hang around software houses, talking in multi-syllabic words which generally boil down to whether or not something is “cool”, will not want to go to Helmand province in a hurry.
How about the NHS?
Government keeps telling us they are spending more and more on the NHS every year.
Maybe. But they are not spending that money with the NHS. They are spending it with their PFI mates who, in turn, exact a toll from the Health Authorities, otherwise known as NHS Trusts. Each year, these NHS Trusts are billed for the cost of their new hospital, with interest at greatly enhanced rates. This results in a net loss from their overall operating budgets and this loss could have gone toward providing nursing care, medical equipment etc.
Instead, it is going to line the pockets of God knows who. Foreigners probably.
So, the NHS Trusts suffer from a severe case of “what the Lord giveth, the Lord shall also take away”. Or, as David Nixon might have said “Now you see it, now you don’t”.
The bottom line is that the government, instead of borrowing at favourable rates to finance projects the traditional way, allow private organisations to borrow money at inflated rates to finance a project and then to pass on the huge additional cost burden to the supposed beneficiaries.
Well, if this policy means someone goes without proper cancer care in order to stuff the fat wallets of some overpaid company director, it stinks!
If it means a soldier in Afghanistan is not getting the weapons and support that he needs in order to ensure the safety of the overpaid company director, then the policy is beneath contempt!
If the policy means some poor kid in a blighted inner city area has to sit in a draughty classroom because the overpaid company director would rather appease his share holders than spend the money on the school, then a lot of people in public life should be not only ashamed of themselves but gaoled! (Oh, I seem to have overlooked the fact that we will presumably need a PFI scam to proved the gaol in the first place).