This is the real benchmark for the state of Britain
Via Daily Mail :
“Thousands of Britons leave our shores every year for a new life abroad, official figures show.
But although 75,000 ‘white British’ men and women are moving away, the population is still rising because of an influx of ethnic minority groups.
According to Government estimates, the established white population of England dropped by nearly 250,000 between 2002 and 2006.”
Obviously we have seen much of this PC insanity, it really does make you wonder.
Via Daily Mail :
“Anyone caught short at Manchester University will have to decide whether to use the ‘toilets’ or the ‘toilets with urinals’ after the women’s and men’s were re-named to avoided offending transgender students.
The change was made in the university’s Students’ Union after a number of transgender women claimed they were uncomfortable using men’s loos.”
Reported by the Telegraph here.
Yes, Hazel: the working class can manage their own lives and so can everyone else.
She argues that the middle classes patronise the working classes. It is far more worrying — and truer — that the governing class of New Labour ministers patronise us all.
If Gordon Brown had been serious about a government of “all the talents” he would have hired Vince Cable as his chancellor of the exchequer.
On Question Time tonight, Mr. Cable struck the right note when he said that the most offensive thing we have seen in the investment banking industry over the past few weeks has been the culture of reward for failure.
He has been very consistent in his level-headed economically liberal approach to the economy. He has spoken out against the nationalisation of loss concurrent with the privatisation of profit, which is quite right.
Frankly, I find Hank Paulson’s 700bn dollar undefined bailout of Wall Street quite disgusting. It is becoming clear that Hank is floundering when it comes to the detail of what he intends to do having requested the best part of a trillion dollars from the US taxpayer.
The credit crisis is very simple in essence: investment banks, in a race to take up market share in growing markets built on cheap credit, undervalued risk on an enormous scale. The chickens have now come home to roost and the banks have found that the true value of their assets is much lower than they had thought; the yields on them are too low and need to be higher to reflect the true risks that they have taken on. This has undermined the risk profile and credit worthiness of the institutions themselves and made it more expensive for them to borrow. Despite that, the rate at which they can raise short term debt is still “affordable,” to coin a fashionable phrase, and they should simply take the hit. After all, interest rates rose far more steeply in the nineties when the pound fell out of the ERM.
By capitulating to the investment banks rather than letting them be bought up by the many well capitalised institutions that are out there, Hank Paulson has introduced the US to socialism in a most unlikely turn of events and is encouraging central banks throughout the west to do the same thing.
Banks should clean up their own mess. I suggest they have a whip-round amongst all the bankers and hedge fund managers who were making 8 figure bonuses the past few years
Blackburn with Darwen Council “enforcement officers” have been caught peering into people’s back gardens and trespassing on their property to confiscate wheelie bins it has emerged.
The raids were made upon family homes where more than the registered number of wheelie bins was in use. The council justifies its policies on the basis that excess household waste costs around £17,000 a year (approximately the cost of an enforcement officer).
The Mail’s article is here.
I’d comment on this article in the Telegraph if I weren’t apoplectic with rage.
Andrea Cole, a grandmother from Cardiff, managed to make her way to Fuerteventura on her husband’s passport. It was checked twice at Cardiff International and once in Fuerteventura but she was waved through on each occasion.
I suppose Gordon Brown’s government thinks officials will get their act together before they’re asked to check ID cards. Or, maybe they’ll get rid of ID cards only to introduce RFID chip implants instead…
The Telegraph’s report is here.
Hot on the back of Sarah’s law — a law borne out of the media hysteria surrounding child abusers — the government has once again exploited media-led fear to “reduce police red tape” in “high knife crime areas” as reported here by the BBC.
Despite there begin very little clarity over whether knife crime is on the increase, Jacqui Smith has waded into the debate with her jackboots on, removing an important safeguard around police stop and search powers.
Now, I am a big believer in small government and the reduction of red tape for the police and other branches of the state. However, capitalising on fear whipped up by the media — possibly for no good reason — and then pushing forward a reduction in our civil rights as protection from crime is despicable.
Police begin piloting Sarah’s Law today. The scheme will open up the criminal records of free individuals to just about any prying individual who expresses concern for a child’s safety.
Just about anyone will be able to request the information of the police if they express concern for the safety of a child. And police will hand out information not only on convictions of the adult in question but also of “worrying behaviour” or unproven allegations made against the individual.
Although people are required to keep any information they receive secret, the overwhelming likelihood is that unruly mobs of people are going to share and misinterpret the information gained from the police and we will see a return to the scenes of 2001 when a dyslexic mob in South Wales hounded a paediatrician they had mistaken for a paedophile.
I really feel sorry for the people who are going to be wrongly accused, hounded and harrassed as a result of these awful measures. I don’t understand why people — if they are truly such a risk to society — aren’t serving longer sentences, at least until they no longer pose a danger. And if they haven’t been convicted of a crime, I don’t understand why they can’t be left alone without the fear of someone deciding they are exhibiting “worrying behaviour”.
Inner cities “face social breakdown” according to a Telegraph article here.
A cross party alliance of MPs say that social order in Britain’s inner-cities will collapse unless Gordon Brown and David Cameron work together on “early intervention programmes’ targeted at deprived children up to three years old.
I’m saddened that the Conservatives haven’t understood that it is government intervention in our lives that has led to the social breakdown they now observe. Recently a single woman with four children appeared on the BBC programme Dragons’ Den; she had a business worth £180,000 and had already sold one business for £11,000 which she was realising over time in order not to lose her benefits worth £60,000 per year! This is abhorent in a country where the average wage is less than £25,000. Our government — and the incoming Conservative government — are completely out of touch with reality if they think further “help” for “deprived” people is necessary.
At the end of the day, people will eventually behave rationally if given enough signals. No end of government meddling in and around fuel duty had very little impact on the publics’ penchant for enormous gas-guzzling 4×4 vehicles and petrol consumption. When the oil markets did their job, British people reduced their fuel consumption by a massive 25%. Similarly, a benefits system less open to abuse and more focussed on dignified survival than chav-style blinged up opulence is what is necessary. Yet another scheme, like teaching parents how to parent, is costly, counter-productive and condascending in the exreme.
If deprivation was at all painful for people in this country, they might do something about it for themselves.
This will potentially change EVERYTHING and you will have ZERO say in it, introducing…..
DEC 31st 2009
and this
How serious this is I cannot tell. There seems to be very little of it in the papers..
Via The Times :
“So now the United Nations food and health agencies are to lay down international standards for how the poppadum can be manufactured.
It will join Cheddar cheese and dried shark’s fin on a list of internationally traded food products drawn up by the Codex Committee on Food Additives and Contaminants. Such a listing would give an importer or an individual consumer a basis for legal action if the poppadum in question fell short of Codex standards.
The list — also known as the Codex Alimentarius — will specify that poppadums, or papads, should be “thin circular discs” from 5cm (2in) to 25cm in diameter, and between 0.3mm and 1.2mm thick.
They should be made from soaked rice flour, black gram or cow pea flour, mixed with salt and spices, and formed into flat cakes, according to the draft proposal from the Indian Ministry of Health and Family Welfare. “Papads shall be of pleasant taste and smell, and shall be free from rancid or bitter taste and shall not crumble,” it said.
“They shall be free from broken or frayed edges, excessive number of holes, dirt or foreign matters, insect infestation or fungal growth. On frying, papad shall be brittle and crispy to bite. They shall not give leathery, gritty, sticky or soggy mouth feel.” It even specifies that poppadums should contain no more than 3 per cent fat, have a moisture level of 12.5-15 per cent and a maximum pH reading of 8.5.”
A very worrying report here from Walesonline.
Two people dressed up as penguins in a protest about climate change were questioned by Telford and Wrekin Council “enforcement officers” because they were adults in a park without children.
The official explanation given by the council in a letter to the protesters was
Our town park staff approach adults that are not associated with any children in the town park and request the reason for them being there.
After the council were challenged by Liberty, the human rights group, they softened their stance somewhat and “clarified” their policy:
The initial letter that was sent out should have been more clear in saying that our approach is in certain circumstances where an individual’s behaviour is deemed strange or suspicious rather than as a general rule.
Of course, it’s still rather concerning that it is left up to council workers to decide what constitutes “strange” behaviour (carrying a camera has been sufficiently “strange” in recent cases) and that the council feels that it is within its remit to question law-abiding people simply because they are in a park.
In other news, a woman from Manchester has been handed a £700 bill by a court for putting out her rubbish too early. She had put the bin bags on the pavement outside her house to make room for her child to play but a council litter patrol saw the rubbish, collected it and fined her. The court upheld the decision and passed down a combined bill of fine and costs for £700.
Hilary Benn – Fabian Socalist
Via Daily Express :
“AN army of town hall snoopers could soon be telling people what they can and cannot grow in their gardens.
Fast-growing plants and even lawns could be banned, under Labour’s latest environmental blitz.
People would be forced to get planning permission to make changes in their gardens in order to help the Government hit its targets for reducing waste.”
Interesting to see that this kind of thing is creeping in all over the west
Via Groovy Green :
“Yesterday, after I vented a bit on the lack of rain barrel options at Big Box stores, a reader tipped us off to a very interesting issue in her state of Colorado. Rain barrels there, you see, are outlawed. Colorado state law mandates that any water falling from the air is not yours. In fact, according to their site, its already been “legally allocated” — so, you don’t actually have any rights when it comes to using precipitation that falls on your property.”
Rashid Ulla, a toddler tragically shot in the head by his five year old sister, has died. The five year old had turned her father’s loaded gun on the toddler whilst he turned his back on it to take a mobile phone call.
Worryingly, the police are reported by the Guardian as treating the case as a “tragic accident” rather than manslaughter by gross negligence.
This comes off the back of a case reported last year by the BBC of Ellie Lawrensen, whose grandmother was charged with her manslaughter and later acquitted after a dog she allowed into the house mauled her granddaughter to death.
We hope the police will investigate Rashid’s death with the same zeal it did Ellie’s.
