SNAPS ON SUNDAY

He should join the progressives on that bench.
He's so out of place in Labour.

Hold the front page. Jackie Baillie lied.

Pretty much sums up the London Government

Hi there Dave.
THIS is the BIG SOCIETY and we want a word with you.

"Man" might be a bit flattering in this case.
Well, OK, a lot flattering.

Remind me, why is he the secretary of state?
Oh yeah... Duh.

Back to their old tricks.
English Labour is hiring staff for Scottish Labour.
How fraternal.

Well, at least one part of their government listens.

Like that's gonna happen. Give up a seat in the big boys' club?
There'd be no point in being a politician unless you could shmoose Obama and be seen in the White House.
Talking of which...d'you remember how proud Dougie Alexander was
when he was there with Miliband. Awwww.

They have Michael. They just can't contemplate obscurity

Well, old boy, they're British. It's quite different from being foreign
don't you know. What!

 If you can't work that out you dumbass,
I'm not sure you should be let out alone.

Isn't that place falling down? Wouldn't it be dreadful if it slid into the Thames with all these fine people in it?

Thank goodness that these great minds are pouring over the legislation, picking out all the flawzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Just shows what a meritocracy the UK is though.
Even oinks like this long haired beardy rebel
can get his fat butt on a red bench
for being a greasy establishment lick-spittle .

Got it.
Move parliament to Buckingham Palace
and find a council house for the Windsors.

That pretty much sums it up.

So yeah, Francis, Scotland is on it.

Yep, of course you will, but no one believes anything you lot say
any more, so take your millions and sod off.

Thank goodness you're nothing to do with our policing. It's in enough of a mess without your interference.

SNAPS ON SATURDAY

They need the money...see below

Come again

But he doesn't mind. It's the Big Society working. I wonder what he gives to lis local foodbank...

Good choice then, Alistair

That would be a proper Labour Party, not the right wing joke New Improved One Nation ToryLabour

Even Alistair, the Darling of the right, talks at their conferences

This is what they spend OUR money on.

IT'S NOT ALL BAD NEWS, JUST MOST OF IT...

In the news today I noticed so many things that make living in Britain today what it is...a pain in the ass.

First story to catch my eye was about the committee of MPs who have looked at government plans for the railways, which will, at least in part, affect Scotland (not that we have that many trains). The findings are that trains will become more crowded, more expensive and that there will be fewer of them. Just what we wanted to encourage us out of our cars and on to the public transport.


An early day motion from MPs has noted that the cuts to funding the railways will "worsen passenger services through the loss of thousands of frontline workers from trains, stations, ticket offices, safety-critical infrastructure and operational roles", and "will result in higher fares, cuts in services and more crowded trains". So good news for us then!


Then I noticed that while the rest of the country's workers are getting rises of around 1%, the FTSE chief executives, most of whose companies have lost a vast amount in the past few years, are hauling in rises of around 11%. With inflation at around 4-5% (at least officially), they seem to do rather well out of their failure.

The next story that I read won't affect me personally, but it will affect friends of mine. It is that the cabinet of the UK government, operating as the English government (and therefore I hope that Scottish MPs didn't vote), have decided that they will NOT publish the risk assessments involved in their semi-privatization plans for the English Health Service. 


Lansley's excuse for the veto, after a 19 month campaign by the public to be told, is something to do with allowing officials to give ministers candid opinions, but of course the real reason is that in making vast amounts of money for the companies that will bid for this business, there are going to be huge risks to people's health. When cutting a corner can result in turning in a bit better profit, let's not be in much doubt as to which the private sector will chose. God help the poor English under the Tories. Still, I imagine it will cut the number of people making it to pension age. So that should please them.


It was depressing reading about the incompetence and insensitivity of the DWP writing to families with disabled children warning them that their benefit would be reduced, when it won't.... and I was about to give up on the news when I saw a few cracking good laugh stories...

It seems that Dave and Nick decided to relaunch the coalition today. And they chose as their theme, the economy... you know...creating more jobs and that sort of stuff... unfortunately they chose to do it in a company which is outsourcing jobs to China, from whence executives had to rush in order to meet up with the prime ministers. Nobs or what?


And then there was yet another community leader saying that the good old Big Society, better known by most of us as BS, was a complete shambles. And this was reportedly the reason that Cameron came into politics. Struth, don't you wish he'd not bothered.


So it wasn't all doom and gloom after all.

韋鳴恩. POOR MAN THOUGHT HE WAS TO BE PAID, BUT HE'S WORKING FOR FREE AS A GOOD EXAMPLE TO US ALL

When he was offered the job of “Big Society Tsar” for 3 days a week, Nat Wie thought he was to get a salary. (Apparently it’s revoltingly common to talk money, so no one mentioned it at all, until the day before he started the job, when he was told it was a voluntary post.)

He had a desk in the Cabinet Office, and a peerage, but no salary. Part of the Big Society. That'll teach him to go around trusting government ministers.

So the noble lord has had to reduce his commitment to the Big Society to two days a week instead of three, because he needs to earn some money to feed his kids, pay his mortgage and...stay alive.

Much of Mr Wei's work involves how to free “ordinary” people (that’s like you and me) from the daily grind, so that they can devote more of their time to charity or voluntary work and get involved in their communities under David Cameron’s "Big Society" plans.

But no one much in the ranks of us “ordinary people” has heard of him, and it seems that he has not actually made much headway in the job of selling the idea of the “Big Society” to the public. After all who really knows what it is about? The scheme is, it is said, facing Whitehall resistance and the stretched capacities of local authorities.

One of the problems that strikes me is that by and large “hard working British families” are very busy working hard, bringing up their kids, digging their gardens, keeping warm, trying to find enough money to get by, without starting some new voluntary activity. People with jobs are trying hard to hang on to them in an atmosphere of overwhelming “presentism”, and those who don’t are working hard to find one.

There are people, of course, who already do get involved in the local community. Community councillors “up and down this country" are working for nothing; and many people very quietly go about the business of looking after elderly neighbours, doing a bit of shopping, visiting with them, taking them out for a run in the car...

And in the leafy villages of the counties and in the suburbs there are ladies and possibly some gentlemen who serve on the bench (in England), organize the girl guides, the gymkhana, the dog show, the village fête and the local hunt ball, and join the RSVS or work for the church or for a charity shop.

Most people who have the time to do something, do something.

But not everyone has the luxury of that time. Working families (especially the HARD working ones so beloved of the politicians) have little spare time.

I hold out very little hope of success for the “Big Society” because of this. But as this is David Cameron’s own vision of Britain based, I suppose, on what he has known all his life; people with enough money to leave the drab tasks of daily living to servants, and enjoy organizing local events.

Given that I read somewhere (Daily Telegraph columnist Heffer, I think) that David Cameron had appointed around 25 personal staff to the civil service (including one for his wife, if you please), you would have thought that he could have managed a full time post and salary for the man who is supposed to make his one actual idea in government actually work.

Pics: 韋鳴恩 in his robes; How the Big Society works; For the thick ones, another explanation of how the Big Society works; Call me Big Dave Society; Nat Wie, out of fancy dress, who is, I'm told, actually a nice bloke despite the company he keeps in the Cabinet office.

YOUR COUNTRY NEEDS YOU

So, my country needs me. And if I help David Cameron create the Big Society, then within a few years we can reap the rewards and we can all be rich and successful.

But we must ALL pull together in the (British) national interest and soon everything will be peaches and cream.

Right.

And then the fairy god mother gave me a big kiss and, in keeping with the season, I turned into a pumpkin.

Jam tomorrow. I’ve heard it all my life. It never happens.

This afternoon Mr Cameron gave his conference speech which even his biggest fans would have been hard pressed to call stirring. He told the faithful (and the not so faithful, still angry that they were going to lose some money in the child benefit) that "The big society is ................ an attempt to create a citizenship that is not simply a transaction in which you put your taxes in and get your services out. When we say 'we are all in this together'", he intoned in a serious voice, "that is not a cry for help, but a call to arms."

A call to arms? What on earth is he on about?

I had no part in causing any of this mess. It is a mess caused by bankers, finance people, government and a compliant parliament. It’s all very well blaming Labour, but where was the opposition to credit gone crazy? Did the shadow chancellor not realize it was happening? Did he not understand it? Or was he making too much money from it all?

In a mad rush to get rich bankers and their management took wild mad gambles and made obscene amounts of money. The government truly believed its own spin, in a mind blowing conceit and incredible stupidity, that it had delivered the impossible: an end to boom and bust, and the back benchers were too busy filling in their expense forms, buying, selling and flipping their houses to bother with that kind trivia.

They got us into this mess. I, like everyone else, will have to pay, through higher taxes and fewer services, but that’s an end to my participation in whole nasty mess. I’m certainly not taking any part in his Big Society. So he can stuff it!

.........

PS: Is it me, or does Mrs Cameron have a hole in her dress?

IS MR CAMERON'S BIG SOCIETY REALISTIC?

“It’s my hope and my mission that when people look back at this 5, 10-year period from 2010, they’ll say: ‘In Britain they didn’t just pay down the deficit, they didn’t just balance the books, they didn’t just get the economy moving again, they did something really exciting in their society’.”

So said the prime minister today launching his Big Society scheme in Liverpool, England.

He said that he wanted forward-thinking, entrepreneurial, community-minded people and neighbourhoods in the country to come forward and ask for freedoms, and support, to run services in their areas.

“If you’ve got an idea to make life better, if you want to improve your local area, don’t just think about it, tell us what you want to do and we will try and give you the tools to make this happen.

But there are worries that there is just no money for this project. Councils are cutting back on funding voluntary groups, and the Big Society Bank set up by Mr Cameron and funded by bank accounts which have not been touched for 15 years has only £60 million in funds, a drop in the ocean when it comes to running services.

It is also not clear how much this will cost, with dedicated Civil Servants (are there any left?) being appointed to help groups with applications for money and aiding them through the inevitable bureaucratic nightmare that funding always involves.

Additionally there are doubts as to how effective (and cost effective) some of the projects would be.

I’m also concerned that the Big Society will see money going to well organized middle class groups in leafy suburbs (the four pilot areas are leafy suburb, rural or gentrified). The scheme seems perfectly suited to people who may have time on their hands to take over the running of various and sundry parts of a council’s remit for their own benefit.

And good though this may be, it seems like it may leave behind areas desperately in need of help People with low-paid jobs and hard lives often tend to be poor in time as well as money, and my concern is that the money will find itself in the hands of those who perhaps least need it.

If Mr Cameron’s wish is to fix broke Britain with his Big Society, I fear he may have to come up with ideas that create jobs in sink estates, deal with the horrendous problem of drink and drugs which render so many people unemployed and unemployable, repair the low quality of housing and infrastructure that make life so grim for people, and encourage everyone, not just the leafy suburbs, to feel that they are part of society.

The tragedy is that today’s Britain has so little of that.

Mr Cameron’s dreams are laudable but hardly realistic. When people look back at this 5 - 10 year period they are more likely to say that, just as under Labour, the rich got richer, the poor got poorer and broken Britain got completely smashed.