Sitting next to a couple at a Burger King after a boozy night out in the city this evening, I overheard a rather disturbing conversation that I fear may be being repeated around the country as I write this.
The man concerned was describing his cashflow for the month and attempting to persuade his partner of the merits of lending £200 to a friend for Christmas present purchases. The woman was gently attempting to persuade him to pay more than the minimum payments on his credit cards and reminding him of various debts he owed relatives. He proudly recounted all the payments he had to make this month (including a mortgage) and decided he had £80 to tide him over until he received his earlier than usual December pay.
Their conversation then moved on to the financial situations of their relatives including the sister who — working full time whilst on full benefits — was conning the housing benefit out of £1600 a month.
I was horrified and decided despite having put away a skinful and being surrounded by drunk people on the penultimate train home I ought to write about it here.
My horror is threefold. First, a man living £80 per month from insolvency has a mortgage. Second, he feels quite at ease discussing his sister’s theft from the state in a public place surrounded by people. Third, I am going to have to pay for this sorry shit show when it all goes to shit.
I didn’t buy a house whilst house prices were rising out of control because I decided I couldn’t afford one. It was too risky. I didn’t buy a 4×4. I didn’t build up balances on credit cards. I saved.
I did all the things I should have done. I acted with prudence. I acted sensibly. I did everything that Gordon Brown should have done for our country and what this pair of good-for-nothings should have done for themselves to avoid people like me having to bail them out.
No one bailed me out when the housing market was running away from me. No one bailed me out when I couldn’t afford a 4×4 because I didn’t have a house to remortgage.
Unfortunately a bailout funded through my taxes is exactly what these people are going to be begging for in the next few months.
They should be rounded up and put in a modern equivalent of the Victorian poor house.
George Osborne broke the “convention” that politicians should always tell lies with regards to currency strength. I say give him a medal of the realm. It is so frustrating to see Labour brand someone “irresponsible” after selling off the countries gold reserves in 1999 and then taking the country into an abyss of debt over a period when tax revenues could have been used to build a nice surplus instead of blowing it and then some on illegal wars, asylum seekers, diversity police, Olympics etc etc ( see previous posts )
I am aware that the moment an official hints at the weakness of a currency it automatically lowers its value and believe me a decrease in Sterling strength hurts me financially but you have to be objective and listen to what GO is saying because if we had not been told a pack of lies over the last 10 years we may not be in such a bad position.
I think GO saying this is a lot more sensible that a certain someone in 1997 saying he was going to end boom and bust….
“A father is demanding an apology from police after he spent a night in a cell for smacking his son.
Mark Frearson, 47, was arrested on suspicion of assault after he slapped his seven-year-old son Harry on the back of the legs.
Mr Frearson, a company director, punished his child for leaving his side and wandering off on his own in the dark.
A witness called the police and three hours after the incident, four police officers and a specialist child support officer arrived at Mr Frearson’s home in Plymouth, Devon, to question him and examine Harry for bruises.
They then drove the boy away in a police car and took his father to the station where they locked him up in a cell overnight.
Mr Frearson later found out that he should have been questioned immediately but was locked up because the ‘witness’ was ‘in no fit state’ to be interviewed.”
“It used to be a simple matter of look right, look left, look right again.
But one new road is supposedly so complicated to cross that the council has spent £15,000 of taxpayers’ money on a seven-minute DVD explaining how to do it.
Six thousand copies of the jargon-filled film are being handed out to adults.
In it, they are informed the road is a ’shared space’ for pedestrians and cars, urged ‘to use all their senses’ and directed to grey and white ‘courtesy crossings’ where they ‘will be more obvious to traffic’.”
If they take our privacy away, they will have to add a few more terrorists to the list I can assure you of that.
“Internet “black boxes” will be used to collect every email and web visit in the UK under the Government’s plans for a giant “big brother” database, The Independent has learnt.
Home Office officials have told senior figures from the internet and telecommunications industries that the “black box” technology could automatically retain and store raw data from the web before transferring it to a giant central database controlled by the Government.
Plans to create a database holding information about every phone call, email and internet visit made in the UK have provoked a huge public outcry. Richard Thomas, the Information Commissioner, described it as “step too far” and the Government’s own terrorism watchdog said that as a “raw idea” it was “awful”.“
Further to my article of a week or so ago, I am petitioning the Prime Minister to put an independent body in charge of administering the taxpayer’s stake in the recently nationalised banks.
In one of Gordon Brown’s finest moments, he made it the responsibility of the Bank of England to set interest rates. This took politics out of what is essentially an economic concern.
However, after nationalising the banks he now seeks to put pressure on them to return lending levels (and therefore the lax practices that begot them) to 2007 levels.
This political meddling is interest rate setting by the back door and must be stopped.
Thank you to our reader, BoiledBunny, for turning up this piece of Broken Britain.
Politically incorrect facts regarding road safety cameras are being withheld from public debate by the BBC.
Whether or not safety cameras increase road safety is open to debate. At least it should be open to debate but instead the BBC are doing what they can to prevent that debate taking place.
According to Motorcycle News’s report, here, the BBC and the owners of the footage in Norfolk are even rejecting Freedom of Information requests for the footage.
So, it turns out that Broken Britain’s political elite on both ends of the political spectrum were being courted by the Rothschilds and the richest man in Russia this summer.
Judging by reports over the past few weeks, talk was loose and George Osborne cosied up not only to a wealthy Russian billionaire but “the prince of darkness” himself: Peter Mandelson.
What are Broken Britain’s to make of this?
First, we need look to where the power is in all of this? Is it with our shadow chancellor? Or with our business minister, perhaps? Unfortunately, it would appear all the power lies with the Rothschilds who arranged the meetings and who are unelected, unappointed and unaccountable.
Next we should consider judgement: Osborne is a Tony Blair-like figure, in awe of the big boys with their big toys, having made a blunder of gargantuan proportions to have even mentioned donations in conversation with a Russian oligarch. Mandelson is a schemer: in the thick of it, mixing it up and emerging stronger for it.
And now media timing: funny that this should be dripped out whilst the credit crunch has temporarily fallen out of the limelight. Is it Mandelson playing his old tricks? Or have unseen forces (led by the Rothschilds, perhaps?) decided that Osborne can’t cut it after his lacklustre performance handling the recent banking crisis?
Fundamentally, there is a scandal here: the rise and fall of our politicians is being orchestrated in private by a political elite who are unelected and have the ear of the media.
Osborne did perform badly during the banking crisis and he should have paid for it in public through informed debate in the media. The public have been refused their say by a political elite who have decided unilaterally to oust him.
I have to post a link to this story again as it is nice to see people making a stand for our freedoms.
This issue is nothing to do with Left or Right. I would rather duck and dive a couple of bombs than have the likes of Jacquie Smith/Council Drones monitoring every aspect of my private life.
We have had unchecked immigration in this country ( Tories and Labour both to blame ) so is it any wonder that some of these people have been undesirable to say the least.
Did anyone see “Traffic Cops” on BBC1 a couple of weeks ago, I saw 2 fresh of the boat Iranian ILLEGAL immigrants get stopped by Police for walking along a motorway. I then saw the Police let them go after giving them a print off with directions to the nearest Home Office Welcome Center. Apparently it is no longer policy to arrest. Now Mrs Smith, are you telling me that you need to bloody monitor MY phone calls,emails,dna and trace my movements with an ID card when the borders are 100% open and you let illegals walk around unchecked?
No this simply does not add up does it. They want to monitor us not “Terrorists”. ( I am not suggesting Iranians are terrorists by the way )
“Government plans to build a giant database holding information about every phone call, email and internet visit were last night dealt a major blow after the man in charge of prosecuting terrorism in England and Wales warned of the dangers posed by a “Big Brother” security state.
Sir Ken Macdonald, the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), told ministers not to “break the back of freedom” by creating irreversible powers that could be misused to spy on individual citizens and so threaten Britain’s hard-won democracy. “
“Sir Ken chose to issue his tough warning about the perils of the “Big Brother” state in his final speech as DPP, days before he leaves his post at the end of this month.
He warned that MPs should “take very great care to imagine the world we are creating before we build it. We might end up living with something we can’t bear”.
Sir Ken, who has held the post for the past five years, said: “We need to take very great care not to fall into a way of life in which freedom’s back is broken by the relentless pressure of a security State.”
“Technology gives the State enormous powers of access to knowledge and information about each of us, and the ability to collect and store it at will.”
“At the last estimate, there were 4,285,000 cctv cameras in Britain.
Last week Miss Smith said the Government was examining ways to “collect and store’’ records of phone calls, emails and internet traffic.
Plans for the new snooper databases, which will be held by the Government or by phone companies, will be included in a draft Communications Data Bill, which will go out for consultation in the new year.
The new law was necessary to allow officials to keep track of potential terrorists who use social networks, such as Facebook, to plot attacks free from detection, she said”
How have they been allowed to blow all our money and burden us with such a debt during one of the biggest booms ever? Well it is because people just do not care..
“Borrowing was £8.1bn in September, taking the total to £37.6bn in the first half of the year, some 75pc higher than at the same point last year, and the highest since records began when Britain started rebuilding the country after the Second World War.
It was significantly higher than the £6.6bn monthly figure expected by economists, who described the unexpected jump as alarming.
Borrowing rose as tax receipts from stamp duty, corporation tax, national insurance and excise duties were all weak as the UK stood on the brink of recession. Receipts rose 1.9pc from April to September compared with the same period a year earlier, well below the 5pc level required to hit the Chancellor’s Budget forecast.”
I saw quite a spectacle on my way into work yesterday.
A convoy of perhaps five police cars (Land Rovers, Pursuit vehicles etc) and a Prison van chased through the City of London with a police helicopter hovering overhead. Each car was occupied by at least two officers.
Surely it would be much cheaper to hire a coach to take judge, jury and court support staff to a prison rather than the tens of thousands it likely cost for yesterday’s jaunt.
But then New Labour wouldn’t benefit from making people feel safer when they see “terrorists” being sped through small city streets with gun-toting police in tow.
I have just seen Yvette Cooper defending the government on Newsnight tonight on their commitment to restore mortgage lending to 2007 levels.
What on earth are they thinking?
If the profit motive managed to create the credit bubble that burst in 2007 then the political motives of a band of New Labour politicians desperate to turn around an enormous poll deficit less than two years before a general election will wreak economic Armageddon. Let us remind ourselves: 2007 saw 125% mortgages amongst other “innovative” mortgage products. And the high street banks failed as a direct result. To loosen credit back to those levels is unthinkable and yet it is the policy of the Broken British Government who now own much of our banking system.
We clearly need an independent body, like the Bank of England, to administer, manage and govern our stake in the high street banks. Politicians can’t be trusted to do it in the interests of the long term prosperity of our economy: they have an election to win within the next year or two.
I am so appalled I have written to both Vince Cable (Libdem economics spokesperson) and Chris Grayling (my MP, Conservative, Epsom & Ewell).
I beg you to write to your MP and anyone else who can make a difference on this.
Iceland saw its assets in Britain frozen over the past few days as the British government put anti-terror laws in to action in reaction to Icelands’ banks’ insolvency.
Broken Britons out there should mark this event in their minds. Anti-terror laws in our country are used for many things: keeping hecklers out of Labour party conferences, checking to see whether families live in the catchment areas of particular schools etc, etc.
A woman in Acton is receiving 170k per annum in benefits. The enormous sum includes 12k per month in housing benefits and outstrips the income of the majority of workers in the City of London despite their bad press recently for the city’s bonus culture. Taxpayers will be proud to learn some of their hard-earned taxes have been blown the woman on a 50″ television set.
