What's The Difference Between

An ex-Nazi and an ex-Trotskyist? Both subscribed to equally loathsome, intellectually and morally bankrupt ideologies but only one sort is able to continue in public life. Guess which.

Im all for rehabilitation of offenders and forgiveness, but can we be absolutely safe from the propagation of pernicious dogma hidden in plain sight under another agenda?

Perhaps a better occupation would be drawing up lists of ex-Trotskyists in public life to enable their quarantine.

On Page 3 Of Today's Mail on Sunday

Was this article on the Garrison Girls who have posed for a nude calendar to raise money for treating post traumatic stress for those who have served on the front line. A great cause and nice pictures. If you want a copy, they cost £10 fom www.garrisongirls.com

I have a couple of questions:

1    Would the calendar be allowed to be displayed in the Mail on Sunday offices -isn't it sexual harrassment of female employees?

2     Is this the sort of article that an ex-Trotskyist columnist who resigned from the Daily Express when it was acquired in 2000 by Richard Desmond (whose other business interests included pornographic titles) because it represented a moral conflict of interest would want to share a newspaper with?

And a third, why was the above commented moderated by the Daily Mail when I attempted to post it?

Why Not Try The Badger Cull In Inner Cities?

It's all very well for the Centre for Social Justice to propose more intervention to tackle the problem of street gangs, but wouldn't it make more economic sense to reduce the numbers first?

(For the benefit of people "with reduced ability to see the bleedin' obvious", this is a satirical* post along the lines of Dean Swift's Modest Proposal).

Deference

Deference has a pernicious effect on society. Respect your betters, keep your head down, your nose clean, "Theirs not to reason why", allow the evil and the incompetent in positions of power over others to continue unpunished.

Deference must be replaced with assertiveness of the individual to create a healthy society  in which freedom can flourish. Sovereignty, ie power, springs from the individual and it is for the individual to grab it back from the adoptive hierarchies that stole it.

Destroying deference will not harm respect for others, it will increase it because equal individuals will only be distinguished by their achievements instead of their rung on the ladder.

With deference defeated, individuals will treat each other equally and fairly, simply because of their respect for the inherent dignity of every human being.

Why do care home staff mistreat vulnerable adults in their care? Could it have someting to do with care workers being paid the minimum wage with few employment rights - if they are treated unfairly, won't they attempt, wrongly, to offload their frustration at their status on anyone they perceive to be of a lower status?

And without deference there wouldn't be the willingness by organisations and their managers to protect high status talent from the effects of their wrongdoing by ignoring complainants or threatening them with career suicide.

No2HS2: John Maynard Keynes

"Two pyramids, two masses for the dead, are twice as good as one; but not so two railways from London to York. "

The General Theory on Emploment, Interest and Money, 1935 Book 3, Chapter 10, Section 6, p. 131

And also two railways to Birmingham from London. H2S stinks. £32 billion would be better spent digging holes, burying wine bottles filled with £50 notes and filling them in again with wind turbine scrap and then auctioning off the commercial exploitation rights of the holes to the highest bidder.

You've Got A Friend, Anna Raccoon

You've got many friends on the interweb, many, many more than those nasty trolly things, so stick in there until the sun shines again.



That being said, I hope you'll understand my reasons for remaining on the soap-using side of the English Channel.

You Won't Read This Dave Because I'm Not A Professional Lobbyist

But I know how to help people get the cheapest tariffs on their energy bills.

Every year, say 1 June, the utiliy bill contains a box with the kilowatt hours of gas and electricity used over the past twelve months. Based on this and the postcode, the next line will give the cheapest appropriate tariff of any energy supplier together with a website address or a phone number. It will be up to the consumer to switch.

Saying that everyone will be on the cheapest tariff simply means there will only be one tariff and that tariff will probably be the expensive standard tariff,. Tariffs are different because it costs different amounts to supply energy depending on volume supplied or the method of payment to name only two factors. Put simply, dual fuel direct debit medium to large consumers fixed duration in cities are the cheapest to supply hence their unit prices are the lowest. People who don't use much energy or want to pay in cash/cheque in arrears or by meter are more expensive to service because the costs of supply equipment are spread out over a smaller amount of product and because the cost of collecting payment is higher. But if we all have to pay the same then the prime customers will be forced to unfairly subsidise the sub-prime just like women will pay more for car insurance and men more for  life insurance or annuities.

I Don't Like Andrew Mitchell. However ....

The GateGate Saga boils down to he said, he said. The Official Police Log has been published and that appears to damn (or d*** to use the asteriskinessof the media) Mitchell. Mitchell claims he didn't use the word plebs (wish I'd been called that rather than some of the other four, five, six, or seven -letter words that have been directed at me).

But the Police and Labour hold that words of the Official Police Log are as if writ in stone, as unchallengeable as the particular religious text of any group of fundamentalist religious nutters. Excuse me, but I believe the Police tell the truth, but I also believe the Public tell the truth. Just as I believe that everyone remembers things differently. No group has a monopoly on the truth. It is a vital part of our judicial system that Police Officers may be cross-examined in court instead of the court simply reading the relevant page of the Police Notebook into the court record, case closed, guilty.

According to a report in the Daily Telegraph:

"Chris Jones, secretary of West Midlands Police Federation, who will meet Mr Mitchell today, said the Tory whip was effectively accusing the police of lying about what he said.

“I accept the fact that he has apologised for the offensive language used. But the issue remains open that he in effect has intimated that those officers were untruthful. Their integrity now is not in tact. That extends to every police officer in the country because he has disagreed with their account.”

Mr Jones said police records of incidents could be increasingly challenged in criminal court cases as a result of Mr Mitchell’s stance"

Well, excuse me but Harwood forgot to write in his PNB that he had pushed over Ian Tomlinson. It appears that other members of his TSG serial alongside him had similar lapses of memory or writers' block. It was three officers from Hammersmith & Fulham Station that informed their Inspector of the incident a couple of days later.

I have no idea what went on during GateGate and make no judgement about either side but I am extremely reluctant to ignore the testimony of one party to the incident and give the other a privileged credibility status. The Police are the People and the People are the Police. If we abandon healthy sceptism and give the Police carte blanche, then we all might as well learn French and lose our freedom. We are not sheep.

Update 21:34 18 December, 2012 here

Abebooks Satisfaction

An update on an earlier blogpost.

I have recently ordered two more books via Abebooks and am pleased to recommend Bookbarn's excellent customer service. The other book is making its way over the Atlantic and expected delivery is towards the end of this month. I hope I'll be able to report equally favourably on the American bookseller.

Update 18 October: Atlanta Books have come up trumps.

Fingers crossed, those two bad experiences were merely blips and Abebook sellers are back on their previous best behaviour. Like the Skibbereen Eagle, however, I won't stop watching them.

Instruction To Government

Hello Government,

I'm your Boss, the Taxpayer and Voter.  I've been reading again the works of Sir Robert Thompson, the expert on counter-insurgency warfare who set out five basic principles in his famous 1966 book Defeating Communist Insurgency: Experiences in Malaya and Vietnam. His first principle, that:

The government must have a clear political aim: to establish and maintain a free, independent and united country which is politically and economically stable and viable

can be expanded into the government developing a strategy addressing  every aspect of the insurgency, whether social, political, economic, government or law-enforcement and that the they must be tackled holistically.

My simple instruction to My Government this weekend is to imagine the strategy that you would implement to win the hearts and minds of the population and restore peace if an insurgency were to occur in the UK. To point you in the right direction, the golden thread running through all successfully concluded insurgencies is a shift of power from the Establishment to the People.

And then ask yourselves why you haven't done that already. Prevention is cheaper than cure.

How The UK Media Must Operate In Future

I'll keep this Press Notice short to ensure every journalist and editor reads to the end.

1.  Report on stories about Blair, Savile, corruption etc.

2.   Ignore Hugh Grant, Charlotte Church and X-Factor.

3.  You will then work for newspapers and news bulletins instead of cut-n-paste publicity advertorials and you will regain your status as the Fourth Estate helping to keep an eye on government for the benefit of the People. Isn't that better than scribbling the same inane tosh about Cheryl Cole? Don't you want to tell your grandchildren that your job was worthwhile?

The BBC and Savile

I'm not surprised that the truth about the vile man was ignored for so long. After all, a recent BBC4 documentary "Tales From Television Centre" chortled about stories of shagging in deressing rooms and pot-smoking so prevalent that Saint David Attenborough, then Controller BBC2, pleaded  "Look, please, don’t smoke that stuff openly so we can all smell it. Just be sensible.”  Er marijuana is and was a Class B drug.


Organisations don't like washing their dirty linen in public and will deny, deny, deny until the evidence buries them. Lord Leveson must reopen his Inquiry and haul the BBC before him, without coffee. This scandal is bigger than Fake Competition gate.

Gap In Blogging

Sorry, but the news recently has been too depressing to write anything lately.

My thoughts are with the families and friends of PC Fiona Bone and PC Nicola Hughes.

And with the family and friends of April Jones.