TONIGHT IN REYKJAVIK

DON'T MESS WITH ICELANDERS!

Thousands of angry voters congregated outside the Icelandic Parliament on Reykjavik’s Austurvöllur Square tonight (Monday) to demand the government’s resignation in the wake of yesterday’s Panama Papers revelations. In the meantime the BBC go on about Putin and #thearchers is trending.

Update: The prime Minster of Iceland has said he will not resign. Opposition leaders say they will call a vote of confidence in parliament.

CASANOVA OF ROME WINS TO FIGHT ANOTHER DAY

London is not the only city where “ordinary people” have protested about the blindness of the political class, living in a world of their own.

Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi today scraped a vote of confidence in the lower house of parliament by 314 to 311, sending Rome into the worst street violence in many years and making people wonder how on earth the BILLIONAIRE managed it.

Clashes have left 50 police officers and more than 40 protesters injured. Cars were set on fire as protesters threw stones and overturned bins. Streets were closed in an attempt to keep the protesters away, but they enough got through to throw paint and eggs at the parliament building. Police used tear gas on the crowds. Doubtless Theresa May was watching very closely.

But it was not just in Rome that the protesters were out. In Sicily 500 students occupied the main airport runway whilst in Turin students occupied the railway station and in Venice they held a demonstration on the Rialto Bridge. All are demanding a change in government.

Berlusconi, who is 74 and half way through his 5 year term as Prime Minister, has become a figure of ridicule over the past few years. His alleged corruption is epic; he has been involved with “young” girls and prostitutes; his wife very publicly left him because of his philandering; he bawled something at President Bush in a photo call after some event in Britain causing the Queen who was in the room, to be heard saying that she wished that man would keep his voice down. And only last night at a dinner he was blowing off about how he was unable to say 'No', and had ever bee thus. He considered himself lucky that no gay person had ever come to proposition him. As if!

His opponents say that he is too mired in scandal to continue as Prime Minister. He is certainly a figure of fun in the rest of Europe, and probably not what Italy needs right now as the economic crisis continues and Italy is in the line of countries at whose door the markets are barking.

What on Earth is it with these people? Like Brown (and Blair before him and Thatcher before him), they hang on and on and on to power. Does he think the women will like his less when he is not longer Prime Minister?

For heaven's sake you silly old fool, everybody's laughing at you. Just Go.


Pics (1) Protestors in Rome burned cars and threw paint on the parliament buildings; (2) The result is announced. None one knows how this very rich man managed to squeeze through by a whisker; (3) Syvio, in the lower house is taking a call on his cell. He’s never been able to say no and what with his expensive hair dye job, and the thickly applied make up to try to hide the deep canyons on his face, and his bulging....er wallet... you can imagine how incredibly appealing he would be to a certain type. He even makes Brown look a little less loopy!

PROTESTS AT PARLIAMENT: WELL NO ONE IS LISTENING, WHAT DID THEY EXPECT?

I watched this video of the demonstrators outside the English parliament building tonight with mixed feelings.

I deplore (I really mean that) violence of any kind and I’ve spent my life trying to avoid it and discourage other people from it, but I guess sometimes you have to ask yourself, what else is there to do?

We live in a democracy, people say, so what you do is you wait till the next elections and you vote for the other lot. (Of course the other lot is just as useless and have almost identical policies so that’s a bit of a non starter.)

But what if you have a situation where one of the parties voted into government said that they would not do ‘something’. In fact they said that to do even half of that ‘something’ would be a disaster, never mind the whole thing. They even went so far as to sign a pledges not to do this “something”. They achieved a deal of publicity about swearing and promising that they would not do this ‘something’.

Then, lo and behold, and quite unexpectedly, they found themselves in government, with flashy cars, and massive offices; with staff bowing and scraping; with people calling them “Minister”, or “Secretary”, or, in one case, “Deputy Prime Minister” and every principle they ever had went flying out of the big posh office windows.

And what of this pledge that they had trotted around every university town in England? What of the photographs in the local press the length and breadth of the country? Well, at the first sniff of the Ministers’ Dining Room Wine List, they scrunched it up and dropped it into the ministerial waste paper bin to be emptied by the ministerial lackey.

So... what’s the option? Wait till the next election? Vote for the person who signs a pledge to repeal the law? Take the word of the prospective MP?

Huh?

What happens if he too drops his pledge into the ministerial waste paper bin as soon as he is comfortably ensconced in his ministerial armchair?

Peaceful protest is fine, indeed it’s right, except that this far from an election no one pays any attention to it.

The only time that the people in England have managed a change in the government’s policy was when they turned London upside down over Thatcher’s Poll Tax. The government listened then, just like the French government does.

Do you see where we are going with this? It’s not a pleasant picture, is it? But what is the alternative?

Tonight there will be arrests, but the real criminals will ride out of the building with their fat, self satisfied, lying bottoms on the rich upholstery of a ministerial car paid for by us, safe in the knowledge that they had their university education for free. Paid for by us!

Fair? Thought not.


Pics: (1) Qu'ils mangent de la brioche. Ex-Saint Vince laughing it off, after all he got his car and his office...and his doctorate; (2) Fires near the Westminster parliament. It will soon be the only way many of us can keep warm; (3) His magnificence Charlie and Mrs Parker Whatist’s car was hit by missiles and daubed with pain as they tried to get to the theatre. I can just hear his “ghastly people”. Don’t worry Chic, the feeling is mutual. Nice car by the way. Who paid for it? (4) Nick the Dick doing an advertisement for furniture polish. It’s clearly the only kind of pledge he knows.

FMQs totally devoted to snow today, can be viewed here.

TELL YOU WHAT TOM, WE'LL ASK THE TORIES NICELY TO SORT IT OUT FAIRLY

Tom Harris makes me laugh.

He was on the Today Programme this morning waxing lyrical about how diabolical it was that protesters shut down the “flagship” Topshop store in the London’s Oxford Street because he has a little tax wrinkle which, rather conveniently, involves him not paying any...

Our Tom was puffing and blowing with indignation. It was unjust to target Mr Green who provides jobs for thousands of people and clothes for millions more in his (Tom’s) beloved United Kingdom. If we were to blame anyone for Phil’s tax avoidance it should be the government, and he happily conceded that that mean the Labour government too! (Well he would, I suppose. I’ve wondered why Tom doesn’t cross the floor and join the Tories, and the only answer I can come up with is that they are too left wing for him.) Tom, the government won't begin to listen and you know it. So people either take this action or do what MPs would love them to do, and go back and watch Coronation Street and Brucie and his dancing Widdecombe. Or maybe you think we should picket MPs' houses as we can't protest outside your parliament?

UK Uncut the pressure group organizing the protest that shut Topshop, says that Green, who is a government advisor with the task of helping the government make economies in public services, allegedly avoids tax by having his companies which include Burton, BHS and Dorothy Perkins, registered in Mrs Green’s name. She is Monegasque and pays no tax here (or in Monaco, where the Casinos provide the money to keep the microstate going).

Activists from UK Uncut also picketed other shops from the Green Empire and warned of a list of hundreds of other companies which can expect the same treatment.

Figures vary, but at a conservative estimate tax avoidance and evasion cost the Treasury between £70 and £100 billion a year. If everyone paid their taxes there would be no need for the draconian cuts in public service spending announced by the government. And indeed we might be able to pay our senior citizens a living pension... Huh, fat chance.

The Tories come to power with big plans to wipe out malfeasance at the lower end of the social scale vis a vis benefit cheating and no plans at all for tax cheats. The Liberals have managed to convince them to do a little but at best we shall see up to £7 billion recovered.... A drop in the ocean.

More power to UK Uncut’s elbow. It’s time to stand up for ourselves. I’ll gladly join a protest in Dundee if there are any to be joined.

If anyone has any suggestions as to an appropriate home for Tom Harris’s views, please don’t hesitate to let the rest of us know.

Pics: (1) Tom, who, it seems, doesn’t use Topman himself; (2) Topshop’s no stranger to controversy. This protest in Edinburgh is about the use of “slaves” picking cotton in Uzbekistan for Topshop garments; (3) Saturday’s protest at London’s Oxford Street. Pay your taxes Green, or we’ll shut you down.