Showing posts with label World Cup. Show all posts
Showing posts with label World Cup. Show all posts

Thursday, 15 July 2010

DID YOU KNOW YOU PAID FOR HIM TO GO TO THE WORLD CUP FINAL?


We have been told to expect a 25% reduction on all public services, excluding health care. The UK government has dictated that for England, and as a consequential, we will get 25% less money to run what we are allowed to be responsible for.

According to an article in yesterday’s Independent, that reduction will only skim the top off the massive £4,000,000,000,000 debt that has been racked up, not only by New Labour, but by a series of unaffordable decisions made over the years since the Second World War, including public sector pensions, nuclear power stations, PFI, and allowing banks to gamble with ordinary people's savings, so that they have to be rescued by the taxpayer, despite taxpayer being as broke as a completely broken thing.

In the midst of this catalogue of miserly stands the BBC, clearly blissful unaware that anything untoward is happening despite its supposedly being the best news broadcaster in the world. Oh yes, poor thing, it has to publish its top people’s expenses, but that doesn’t seem to have bothered it one tiny little bit. According to the latest figures, various BBC executives are keeping small taxi companies in a champagne and truffles lifestyle, because they’re clearly far too important to take the metro or the bus like ordinary little people.

BBC deputy director general Mark Byford spent almost £5,000 flying to South Africa for a World Cup Final visit at the weekend. He used the visit to hold meetings with bodies such as Fifa, which invited him, as well as visiting news bureaux in the region, the BBC said. Well now, there’s a surprise. He went all the way to South Africa at our expense, the very weekend that the final of the world Cup was due to take place. Coincidence probably.

What irritates me is that this bloke couldn’t fit his lardy arse into a normal seat in Tourist class, nor even a roomier seat in Business.... oh no, the big cheese had to take himself, at our expense mind you, First bloody Class, and be treated like a movie star. Furthermore while he was there he was obliged to take another First Class return flight to Kenya, again at our expense. Not sure why.. but Kenya is very nice.

The BBC's chief operating officer Caroline Thomson claimed £3,389.69 on taxis during a three-month period for the first quarter of this year. BBC controller of vision Jana Bennett claimed £2,736.02 on taxis during the claim period. And the BBC's director of future media and technology Erik Huggers made taxi claims for £2,940.98.

Where did they go? The moon?

OK, so it’s time the BBC got a drift of how things are in this sadly mismanaged country. They might try listening to their own news programmes occasionally for example (although, of course, they will only find out what is happening in the south east of England if they do.

I await the announcement that as of today the licence fee (or poll tax) of £145.50 will be reduced by £36.38, or 25%, and that the likes of Byford and that self important idiot Yentob and all the many and various other highly paid, brilliantly pensioned and ridiculously titled executives move their privileged backsides into the world. You know, the one that is round ....

Thursday, 24 June 2010

CRASH AS THE STAFF OVERLOAD COMPUTER SYSTEM WITH ENGLAND MATCH....IN SCOTLAND


Some people just ask for it, don’t they?

Yesterday, at the start of the Slovenia v England game, the staff of the Dundee City Council crashed the whole computer system and the Council site was unavailable to tax payers for transaction of business.

The management (and I use the term loosely, because it implies some sort of foresight, forward planning and control, none of which has been in any way evident) quickly blocked the BBC website which was live streaming the match.

What?

The action they took was to stop the match being shown. Right.

The only councillor they could find to comment was a Liberal Fraser MacPherson (without whom the pages of the Courier would be decidedly bare). He rather lamely said that he would speak to Council chief executive, David Dorward, to make the point that they should not be watching sport in council time. But he pointed out that because of flexible working practices some staff may have saved up time and might have been watching in their own time.

What?

Don’t they have homes to go to?

MacPherson continued: “The bottom line is no one is going to object to staff watching sport in their own time as long as management is Ok with it. We would have to be sure that there were sufficient staff to maintain services and particularly those staff in public facing positions.”

What? Again. If they were doing it in their own time, but on our equipment why would there not be sufficient staff in public facing positions (whatever that is?)


If staff are at work, they should be working. If staff are finished work, they should go home, or to an internet café or whatever to watch the match. No one should be watching the match in the office. If we allow people to watch sport why can’t they watch Emmerdale or Strictly Come Dancing? What nonsense.

How could other staff do their job effectively with the distraction of television entertainment? That’s not what the computers are for.

A council spokesman has said that measures have been introduced to stop this happening again.

So let me just enlighten him or her to the fact that we, the people who pay for this, are incandescent. Why aren’t the people who were logged in to the BBC website being disciplined? It would happen to me if I did it.

Ironically the very next day, the Dundee Trades Union Council, in the form of Mike Arnott, its secretary, has suggested that as many as 660 jobs may be lost in Dundee City Council in the cutbacks. Apparently 600 were due to go before the Budget and that has been revised upwards because of the austerity measures announced by Mr Osborne.

The council’s administration leader, Ken Guild, refuted this saying that the figures had been “plucked out of the air”. He declined, however, to say if the figures were in any way realistic. He said that he didn’t know how many people would be going, but rolled out the usual platitudes about avoiding compulsory redundancies. It seems, however, that there will be many more unemployed in Dundee in the near future.

Whilst I hate to see people made redundant, I really can’t help but wonder what we, the Council Tax payers, get for our money.