RANDOM THOUGHTS

You'll love this one (well most of you will).

Suffolk Tories apparently accepted an illegal donation of £3,000 during the last election. There's no question about it. They owned up. The person who donated the money was not on the electoral register at the time the money was given.

The electoral commission ruled that they should be fined the sum of £1,100, but should not be required to return the donation.

If my arithmetic is right, they get a donation of £3,000, they are fined £1,100, so their net gain is £1,900. Not much of a punishment; not much of a disincentive to repeat the crime next time round.

Still, it's the Tories. They appear do whatever they want and walk off laughing.
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Erm, has Harriet joined the Tory party? We all know she is aristocratic and it wouldn't be stretching the imagination much to guess that she loathes Mr Corbyn, but what's this about. Don't tell us they just banged into each other.  

Waitrose I might just about swallow, but ASDA? Please!

Dodgy Dave down with people again, innit? Top button undone, not singing God Save the Queen (tut tut, what would your mother say Dodge?), but wearing a suit that cost more that the bloke he's talking to earns in a year. 
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A few months ago, the gross old duke of York was unhappy that he couldn't get through the gates at Windsor Great Park, where he has one of his houses...well, one of OUR houses. Apparently the mechanism for automatic opening had failed. So the fat boy decided that, as he had a great big 2.5 tonne, £80,000 Range Rover, he'd just smash the gates down...as you would, if a £5,000 repair to your car were of no interest.

The alternative would have been a 1 mile... yes a whole mile...detour. How utterly ghastly!

Well obviously a royal highness couldn't be expected to put up with that kind of inconvenience, so he broke the gates down. OUR gates that WE paid for.

If you lived in your own home and you decided that you would trash your gates to save yourself a little inconvenience, that would be your business. If you lived in a council house, or one owned by a housing association or the state, then it becomes their business.

Most people would call it criminal damage and charges would be brought.

Needless to say Air Miles is getting off Scot free.
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The same goes for tax pounds. 

Every so often David Cameron reminds us we are a Christian country. I can't imagine why he would do that unless he was trying to stir up bad feeling with Muslims or Jews or some other religious groups: Ya know, make them feel ill at ease, not at home?

But the very people who might be considered to know a little bit more about Christian values than Dodgy Dave, that is to say the bishops of the State Church, are rather less than enthusiastic about his policies.

Not that Church of England bishops are the only ones to criticise. The leader of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales has also laid into the Tories for their heartlessness in welfare reforms. Odd given what a devout Catholic Iain Duncan Smith is.

And even odder that his replacement is one of these OTT Christians that tells us prayer can cure anything... and apparently people with Parkinson's should just get out there and get a job.

Every year some of us (admittedly a dwindling number) listen to Her Majesty's Christmas message. It's a mixture of her family news, the stuff some folk write in long tedious letters at Christmas, but she gets to put on the BBC (ya know, Andrew losing his rag with a gate; the number of holidays that the blood princesses have taken; how little work William and Kate have done; how much money they screwed out of the people of Cornwall to keep Mrs Parker Bowles in diamond tiaras, etc) together with a religious message. 

She invariably talks about how she has tried to follow the teachings of Christ all of her life in everything she does. Clearly she misses out the bit about the rich man and the eye of the needle, given her immense wealth, and the "suffer the little children" bit of these teachings. 

Probably feeding the 5000 passes her by, as within a few miles of Buckingham Palace some of her loyal subjects are sleeping in cardboard boxes and eating out of soup kitchens. Children subjects of hers have little or noting to eat due to the policies that she reads out from her gold throne with her multi million pound hat on her head, having stepped out of a gold coach.

It's a long time since I was forced, in this Christian country, to read the bible as part of my core curriculum, but I can recall all of those things even if I maybe don't always live up to them. It's strange that the queen has such problems with them, having dedicated her life to following such teachings.

MUNGUIN JUST WANTS TO LET YOU KNOW...

...THAT HE HAS NO INTENTION WHATSOEVER OF DOING ANY CLEANING FOR THE QUEEN

Scotland, he says, is already perfectly clean enough for elderly royals. 

And if she wants it any cleaner, she can jolly well send up some skivvies from one of her many palaces in London Town and they can do the scrubbing. 

And if she has none spare then maybe Air Miles or one of his Bloody Princesses could lend a hand with a bucket and mop, if they could get back from holiday for the occasion.

We give her enough money to employ staff. 

Seriously, we've never heard anything so bloody laughable. Hello, this is 2016! 

What cloud do these people live on? 

Apparently, when the MPs had a meeting about it at Westminster, not one single Scottish MP turned up.

Too right!

Jonathan Portes agrees with Nicola Sturgeon on Austerity, and Air Miles gets an Appropriate Title

Here's a man who, despite his credentials of being from the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, you won't be seeing a lot of on the BBC in the future, given that he disagrees with the Establishment. Even worse, he suggests that the first minister of Scotland is talking sense.

You could see the presenter squirm.

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All the nice girls love a sailor...so they say.

Just to add a little levity to today's post, I read that His Royal Highness The Prince Andrew Albert Christian Edward, Duke of York, Earl of Inverness, Baron Killyleagh, Knight Companion of the Most Noble Order of the Garter, Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order, Canadian Forces Decoration, Aide to Her Majesty, has been appointed, wait for it, VICE Admiral, no really,  by Her Majesty the Queen, his mummy.

It's connected in a way to the last post in that you have to ask, did no one at the palace or the Navy consider that as His Royal Nobleness was a bit distracted recently over his close friendships with a convicted billionaire sex offender and his dubiously young prostitute, it might have been better to cheer him up with, I don't know, maybe a party or a weekend in Venice or something. 

It's just that the first thing that hit me on the page was VICE ... of course maybe I just have an unpleasant mind...

Cameron's new slogan is about a country living within its means. What could go wrong?

I mean, what could possibly go wrong with a nice sensible slogan that suggests the country should live within its means....? 

Well Murphy's law states that what CAN go wrong WILL go wrong (OK, we know, but that's a laugh for another day) and after Die Straße in Deutschland, you'd have though that someone with the most expensive qualifications money can buy, in England, would have thought twice before spouting off... after all something might go wrong...

Like this, for a start. I mean, no one expects Mrs Mountbatten to get take visitors to McDonald's, or get the Co-op in to do something like Auntie Jessie's funeral tea, but come on, Liz, for a country with £1,500,000,000,000 of debt, this could hardly be said to be living within our means. 

Canapés and a glass of Asti Spumanti from Tesco at £32 a case is enough, surely, to stop them getting dehydrated.

Then there's this little beauty of a £13 million ski lodge being bought for Airmiles Andrew, perhaps in the hopes that he'll spend a little less time with teenage girls. No one knows how Billy Bunter and his ex wife could afford the money, given that she is permanently broke and pimping herself (or him) for cash, and he hasn't any money of his own, given that he spends everything he gets and has to get his mates to bail out the ex!

So the assumption has to be that his mother is forking out for it... and where does she get her money, remind me?

We should never forget that we are still punching well above our weight militarily. You'll remember how proud of that Cameron was when he came to Scotland to tell us that we wouldn't be able to afford to do that if we were independent. Assuming presumably that we'd all turned into public school oinks with an Empire fixation and would therefore want to!

We need to take into consideration too the replacement of the Nuclear Weapons that Blair admitted were only for show and prestige. That's £100,000,000,000 and counting. Heaven forbid we would lose any prestige. I simply couldn't stand the embarrassment, darling!

Of course we could also make a small saving here and there on Mr Pickles travelling expenses. His expenditure on private hire of cars has mounted to £500,000 in the last three years. What the hell has he been doing? Taking a world tour? 

It seems Mr Pickles doesn't like public transport. Or maybe it doesn't like him!

Still, the comforting news for Mr Cameron at least is that the English Health Service is cutting the number of cancer drugs that will be available to the public. That should put us back on the straight and narrow. It's pretty rotten news for English cancer patients but that's unlikely to concern that government much.

I'm sure too, that Her Majesty will ensure that we don't waste any precious money paying the fines of errant, elderly, overweight, playboys who enjoy over active sexual appetites.

RANDOM SNAPS

If you feel rich and well enough...
vote for UKIP to get rid of the health service
Just don't go getting sick though.

That's a proud boast...
Like to mention that in your election material Gideon?

I have to say I'd be pretty ashamed to admit that I
came for the place as they elected McVile

Someone loves you, Jim.

We don't hear enough praise for John.
He is an economic giant.

NO... not a bloody chance.

Strange then that they didn't want him to lead the country.
Much prefer the half wit that would sell his granny
to win the President's favour.

Hmmm... 

Fortunate that there are people like you Liam
who aren't nationalists, nor in the least extremist.

Yes yes, we see you...

Good money advising murderous dictators on how to seem respectable
And who more perfect for the job?

I'll wait till the sales, I think

Did you ever see a stranger looking bloke than
Charlie Saxe Coberg Gotha?
I mean Mrs Parker Bowles is no oil painting
but couldn't she have done a bit better than that?

Was the target for that not 2020?

SNAPS ON SUNDAY (ON MONDAY)

(Oh, get over it. It's not like it hasn't happened before)

"Just ignore him. It's Prince Andrew again..."

Don't know how he'd feel but the rest of us would get a good laugh...

Yeah, like Salmond would believe anything Dave the Spiv says...

What can you say...?

...specially on a Saturday night! (From the Urchin)

We'll just stay drunk, maybe even you will seem funny then, although I doubt it

Indeed, still, it must have been nice for Ruth to look out and see a few people had turned up. It's not like she is used to that.

Well, what do they expect if they try to keep themselves secret?

Time he joined Allan Grogan

LOL Plonker

It will, of course cost more than the GDP of the world

So, just to chill, seeing it's Monday, here are some  relaxing pictures from Norway, Greenland and a library, somewhere!

YOU SHOULD HAVE MARRIED AIR MILES, RICHARD

The extradition request from Turkey for Sarah Ferguson (right) has been turned down. 


Well, I never! I suppose that the judge will be  looking for a seat on the red benches.


The reason given was that what she did is not an offence in the UK. (I suppose they mean England, but they probably don't know,or care that there is a separate legal code in Scotland.)


So, in England you can go around filming orphans in orphanages without telling anyone you are doing it, can you? You can film children without their guardians' approval? That's OK? Funny, I thought it was banned to stop paedophiles storing up jolly memories. 


(And before I get lambasted, I know that the conditions in the orphanage were appalling, just as I know that some of the ones run by nuns in Scotland were appalling, and it makes me weep to think of kids suffering like that, wherever it happens, and that Sarah should be commended for bringing this to out attention. But surely the reason given for excusing her extradition is nothing more than a fiction.)


Embarrassing though Ferguson may be to the Widsors, it would be unthinkable that someone who was once married to the Dipso Duke (above, making a fool of himself), friend of Gaddafi and other strange exotic dictators, and is the mother of two royal highnesses, Princesses Goofy and Podgy, no less, would be thrown into a Turkish prison.


(I'd add here that I quite like Fergie, even if she did produce these ghastly free-loaders. I particularly admire her for sticking it to the Windsors and managing to spend a lifetime getting money out of them...something which is extremely hard to do, given that they are as tight as drums with our money and ever tighter with their own.)

In other news Richard O'Dwyer (right, with his mum) will be extradited to America on charges of hosting a web directory, or search engine, for pirated films. Probably a bit like Google or Ask Jeeves. I'm not entirely sure that pointing out where pirated stuff can be purchased, as opposed to actually providing it, is, or should be, a crime in England, but it doesn't much matter. Despite both Cameron and Clegg promising to sort out the unbalanced extradition arrangement made with American by arch creep Tony Blair, they have, as we might have expected, done sod all.


Bad luck on Mr O'Dwyer, who probably should have had the foresight to marry Fatty York to ensure safe criminal activity almost anywhere in the world. Still some things are even worse than 10 years in an American prison, and close contact with Fatboy is probably one of them.