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.
**********

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. 
**********

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.
**********

**********

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.

THE WAITROSE QUESTION

Guest Post by "Annie"

Do you shop in Waitrose?  

If not, why not?  

If you live in Scotland it could be because you don't have one near you. Even if there was, could you afford to shop there?  

Waitrose is well known as a high-end supermarket where a £50 bag of messages will set you back £50 for the groceries plus £10 for the privilege of shopping in Waitrose.  

There are only 3 in Scotland.  Unsurprisingly they are in the upmarket environs of Edinburgh, Newton Mearns and Stirling (wonder if the people from the Raploch go there).

Now London Labour has taken up the cudgel on behalf of the downtrodden.  In a recent Financial Times article it is reported that the latest salvo against “big business” they have Waitrose in their sights. Their attack is focused on the myWaitrose loyalty scheme which they say is having a bad effect on small coffee shops on the UK’s high streets.  

The scheme allows shoppers with a "myWaitrose" card to have a free daily tea or coffee, even if they don’t buy anything else in the store.  Fair enough you might say.  

But the Labour Party’s view certainly accords with that of Waitrose customers who don't like the scheme because it attracts the “wrong type” of customers.  (This will be why they don't have many shops in Scotland – too many plebs!). 

But wait a minute, is Waitrose not the food retailing arm of John Lewis – an employee owned company and previously hailed by the same Labour Party as the acceptable face of capitalism?  Is it not the sort business “red” Ed wants to encourage in his drive against “big business” – the companies that treat their customers and shareholders with contempt?  

Or it could just be that the high heid yins in the Labour Party, who live most of their lives in London, have suddenly noticed whilst shopping in their local Waitrose that there are all these people there drinking free coffee, and they would rather not rub shoulders with them outwith their constituency surgeries. 

If this is the sort of thing that the Labour Party in Westminster think is worthy of a campaign it is one more reason to think that their view of Scotland, where “The Waitrose Question” does not arise, remains that it is a far off place of which they know little.  

Yet another argument for Scotland being run from Scotland by the Scots.

I wonder what Keir Hardie would think of this storm in a coffee cup and more importantly, would he be shopping at Waitrose? 

SMART SCOTS GIVE IT ALDI (AND LIDL)

I remember hearing about a woman who used to take her neighbour shopping in her car. The neighbour liked to buy some of her weekly shop from one of the bargain supermarkets, but driver (a bit of a snob) informed everyone that she didn't even get out of the car.... The thought of being seen shopping in a cheap supermarket put her off.

I remember thinking that it was a shame to be so strung up on image, because the quality of the products in both Lidl and Aldi is pretty high.

Not being the kind that worries about being seen poking around in Oxfam or Save the Children (and having laid my hands on some fine brand names at a fraction of the cost of their new price, who can blame me), I've never been shy about shopping in the German supermarkets.

But until recently I wondered how they managed to make any profit. They were nearly always more or less empty, and even on a Saturday morning there was never a crush in the small car parks.

Now things are different, I suspect as a result of the 'neverendession' (to paraphrase one of the very few genuinely funny things that David Cameron has even said.

The car parks are full; the tills are all open and goods, far cheaper than the main British/American supermarkets are selling, are flying off the shelves.

Indeed according to this Yahoo article Aldi made £56.8 million in profit last year, having recorded a loss the previous year. They opened 29 new stores and plan to continue opening new ones in the coming year, creating over 4,000 new jobs (welcome, albeit most of them will probably be part time).

Lidl and Aldi concentrate on selling their own brands to the almost total exclusion of big brand names. This means no premium paid to the big names, and the savings can be passed on to the customer. In the other supermarkets only around 50% of their products are own brand.

Frequently supermarket own brands are of much poorer quality (some custard I bought at Asda was so inedible it had to be thrown out). Aldi and Lidl's brands in contrast are of very high quality. Indeed, recently a taste test organised by "Good Housekeeping" magazine found that Aldi's Christmas Pudding was the second best brand behind Waitrose. Fortnum & Mason came 29th!! And Aldi's pudding cost £7.99, whereas Fortnum's was around £29.00.

And a study by Grocer magazine found that on a shopping basket of 33 items Aldi was 16% cheaper than Asda, 20% cheaper than Tesco and 40% cheaper than Waitrose! And there is not a lot of difference in price between Aldi and Lidl.

Judging by the readers'  comments on the Yahoo article, Aldi's rise in the ranks is due in part to price, but also to the quality of service you can expect. Tesco's (the worst of all the UK chains, in my opinion), Asda, Morrisons, Sainsbury and Waitrose, have all been working hard to try to maintain their market share in the straitened economic times. 

It seems they have no room for slacking.

**************
On rather a different topic I see from comments at Wings, and an article by Rod at Auld Acquaintance that there has been a debate in London about Scottish Independence, and that 336 - 5 found that Scotland would be better off in the union. 

Now, somewhere between 30 and 40% of the population wants independence, and around 20-25% is undecided, so it occurs to me that the presentation of Scots' views in the English parliament is very unrepresentative.

I understand that a further proposal put by the SNP that Scotland would enjoy a special relationship with the UK, rather like that enjoyed by Canada, Australia and New Zealand, was defeated by a similar number.

So it appears that the English (and the Welsh and Irish) don't really like us. If we go they will not be friendly towards us. But they want us to stay. 

Weird.

I can only conclude that that is because, according to them the North Sea has the potential to be the World's Global Energy hub. 

In other words they want our money.

Incidentally the 5 were the SNP members in the Commons chamber. (According to Rod, Stewart Hosie was not there due to illness. Get well soon, Stewart. You will surely be missed in London.) 

I was surprised not to have the support of the Welsh Nationalists.