A 'WHO DONE IT' TO PUT MISS MARPLE TO THE TEST

I know this is a long piece, but it is worth the time to watch and listen to just how corrupt the English legal system and the British Establishment is. Bonus it's produced and narrated by the brilliant is Keith Allen (of Sheriff of Nottingham fame).

WE ARE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER (JUST SOME ARE MORE IN IT THAN OTHERS)... AND BREAKING NEWS, JOHANN LAMONT TO STAND DOWN

Can I be in this part of it together?

I'm probably more likely to be the hungry man...

Really can't have people of his class going to prison.
Where would it all end?

Sounds like the governor of the bank of England who said
unemployment in the north was a price worth
paying for stability in the City.

There's a lot of money in poverty and suffering
you know.

Note: English figures. You know the score
England... UK interchangeable.

Probably till 2020...roll up, roll up...

Good how Gideon has increased the standard of living of...
hmmm ...those on more than £1050,000

Please can I be reborn in  Monaco?

It's ok... the disabled can pick up the tab.

Something else when you are dying and that is
how you look back at your country.

Add to that all manner of roads and bridges all over England,
which we all subsidise.

Bless him, he doesn't want a job after politics
in North Wales does he?

With apologies to sheep, wolves and pigs everywhere.

Benefits to be capped at £18,000 for families
except this one.

Too good not to put in. But it is flattering him some.

If only they were this cute we might like them a little more.

Stop Press:

Johann Lamont is to resign as Labour leader in Scotland. 

Apparently with immediate effect.

I'd like to be able to say something constructive and nice about her, but frankly I can't think of anything.

She treated opposition as exactly that and nothing more. Whatever the government proposed; she opposed. Her obvious hatred for Alex Salmond and the SNP pervaded everything she ever said. The leader of the opposition needs to be better than that for the money we pay them!

She performed badly in the chamber; she was appalling on television and she failed completely to make any kind of mark on the mess that she took over as leader.

She appears to be angry with London Labour for failing to understand that the centre of political life in Scotland is now in Edinburgh, and for not giving her power to deal with Scottish matters.

The trouble is it's too late to be saying that now. That should have been dealt with when the problems arose. In theory she was in charge of Labour in Scotland. MSPs, councillors, MWPs and MEPs... She came over as weak and ineffectual, cowed by Ed Miliband, for heaven's sake. She should have put her foot down with London and told them to butt out!

I can say that i respect her for standing down now, and giving her successor 18 months to bed in before the general election in Scotland. There, I've said something nice.

IN THE 21st CENTURY RELIGION AND POLITICS SHOULD BE COMPLETELY SEPARATE

The ramifications of the situation at Bideford have started to be felt all over England, as councils and other organisations reflect on the ruling of the High Court that it is illegal to include prayers in the official business of the meetings of local councils.

In this case, the first item on the agenda was a CofE Christian prayer. If you were not a Christian, or didn’t want to take part for any other reason (there are lots of different kinds of Christians, some pretty much at war with others) then you had a choice: put up with it, or turn up late for the meeting.

Now it is reported that in the Commons, where the chaplain (presumably a functionary paid for out of taxes) says prayers before the start of each session, Speaker Bercow (both left), has said that the ruling will not affect them, as they are covered by the English Bill of Rights.

However, some parliamentarians are questioning this. They say that although they are not obliged to attend for the prayers... in short they, unlike the councillors, are not marked “late” if they are not in place at the session’s start, if they want a seat, they have to turn up early to guarantee that they will be able to sit. (This is one of the problems of having a chamber which is too small for the number of MPs sent to it: a problem that I for one would be happy to solve for them, by stopping sending any MPs from Scotland!)

Some MPs make a protest by taking their seats and remaining seated during the prayers when the Christians stand to pray. They urge that prayers be moved to somewhere they think more appropriate, like for example the parliamentary Chapel: not an unreasonable place given that that is what it is for, and it might as well get some use, seeing as we pay for it out of tax money.

Somewhat surprisingly one of the champions of Church of England prayers is Nadine Dorries (right).  That’s the Nadine with the dubious record on expenses, and who fiddled her money on a tvprogramme about living on the dole, and who later ran off with a married man... her friend's husband, actually.

I suspect that the good lord might have been just as happy if Mad Nad were on the other side of this particular argument.

It seems only sensible to me that no one should be expected, on a regular basis, to take part in religious observances with which they have no sympathy. It should not be a part of their job.  Christians themselves have taken strong stands on this very matter. Was not James McKay (below left) expelled from the Free Church of Scotland, after attending the Roman Catholic funerals of two colleagues? And did not the Rev Iain Paisley not scream “Antichrist” as the Pope was saying a few words of prayer in the European parliament?

Religion has for too long been a part of the state. It should not be. States cannot have religion. Religion is an intensely personal thing. It is a faith; a belief. It has to be interpreted by the individual.  By what it says to him or her, how it informs and directs his or her life. And it can only ever be respected if it is not forced upon people.

The UK state religion is Church of England, with a concession that in Scotland it is the Church of Scotland.  What nonsense that is. How can the Queen and her family be members of both? And why do politicians like Jim Murphy feel that before they even start, they have no chance of prime ministership because they are Catholic?  Why can’t any of the royals marry a catholic?

This is the 21^st century. Religion should now be put back where it belongs: in the personal life of the individual. To do otherwise is to mock religion; to use god as a tool of the state.

  

SO, WHO, OR WHAT, IS LEFT TO TRUST?

I was reflecting the other day, in conversation with my mother, that there is virtually no one left to trust.


We all know how MPs systematically cheated us out of billions over the last 30 years since Thatcher put a brake on the public perception of their greed, but let the wheels slide over the surreptitious increase in alternative income. And by now we know too that the ridiculous anachronism along the corridor did exactly the same thing. (Wouldn't this have been an ideal opportunity to rid ourselves of this bloated chamber forever)? 


We are aware that despite all the theft, only a few dismal examples at the bottom of the food chain in both houses have been charged, found guilty and spent a matter of weeks, rather than months behind bars, released early, doubtless to write books about their misfortune.


It's become plain too, that members of the royal family, most notably Andrew, have been enjoying the jet set life at our expense, and sometimes at the expense of rich dictators' families, while his daughters fall out of night clubs at 4 in the morning followed by body guards paid for by us.


The tabloid press has made a habit of providing the scandal hungry public with  salacious titbits about their favourite "celebrities" by hacking their phones... or at least the phones of the ones who didn't rush to disclose every detail of dirty doings (read Jordan and Pete). And the Met, England's finest, are complicit in this, having accepted hospitality, and employment from the press, then giving scant attentions to charges against them. (It's only fair to say that the Met aren't the only corrupt police force in the news.)


Banks, the finance industry and the City (the markets) privatised their profits and socialised their losses. Despite the billions we pumped into them, the government is having to guarantee loans to small business, and top up what they loan to first time buyers leaving us to wonder why we continue to have banks, or why we didn't let them fail. They'll all go to Mumbai .... awwww.


The story of HSBC'S selling insurance to vulnerable OAPs make my flesh creep, and despite the names of the executives responsible and their methods being known, no one has been arrested. (I heard this on the morning news programme, but it seems to have disappeared from the BBC site, so there is no link.)

Now today, despite denying it yesterday, the UK government has conceded that the lobbiests have direct access at the highest level to them and can get them to intercede and change policy, overnight in some cases (obviously only when it is in the bests interests of the country!!!). (Excuse me, must run, my hat just blew off.)


So far who is left to trust is the Scottish government.  Don't let us down Alex. If you do you will never be forgiven.

JUST WHEN THE ECONOMY WAS DOING FINE, IT HAD TO GO AND SNOW...

The economy shrank last quarter, but according to Mr Osborne it was because of bad weather. So that will be fine, you’d think. When the warmer weather gets here everything will be back to normal.

But you’d be wrong, according to Mr King, the governor of the Bank of Britain (or that part of Britain that counts). This is going to be a hard year, says he. Inflation will raise and wages will fall again (except for bankers, MPs and the royal family), unemployment will soar, apart from the aforementioned people, who appear to get a by on that too.

We need to tighten our belt and support the government on this, says Mr King (why has he not yet got a title?), because he thinks both they, and he, are right in these matters.

I, of course prefer the theory illustrated so effectively by his own people in the banking industry. When they were worried that there would be no bonuses for them, they arranged for pay rises of up to 50% to compensate; then when they found that the government had only been joking about the bonuses, they kept the pay rises and the bonuses as well.

So with higher fuel, higher taxes, higher domestic fuel, higher food prices, higher clothing prices, higher prices on imported good (almost everything) because the pound is falling faster that the snow that so upset the economy, and lower wages, life in looks like a real holiday (and even they will become more expensive as the pound plummets) as the warmer weather comes our way. A spokesman for the government said that we all have to buy into this because we are all in it together.

You could not make this up.

Pic: Poor wee Georgie can't even afford a hair cut.

AIRMILES ANDY THINKS HE'S WORTH THE MONEY

Andrew Pierce has written a full length article in the Mail on his interview at Buckingham Palace with his namesake Andrew York.

He was entertained over sandwiches and cake in the prince’s apartments where he says neither of the Equerries was about, so Andrew served the cake himself.... Imagine.....he’s 50 and he served the cake all by himself and that was newsworthy!

Andrew (York, that is) is now the UK Ambassador for Trade and Industry. Of course, without his connections it is doubtful that a man with 20 years military experience and nothing else would have been appointed to such a role, it being more ideally suited to a person with business experience and acumen, but I suppose he has to have something to do. In that role, however, to be fair, he carried out over 600 engagements last year.

Most of the criticism of Andrew is that he prefers to use private planes, funded by us, instead of travelling by rail or train. There are also legitimate concerns about the vast amount of money that his daughters cost the state, without ever giving anything back. Recently it has been highlighted that security for them costs more that £500,000 a year, and that an apartment in St James’s Palace had to be converted, at a cost of £2.5 million for one of them.

[I’m always amused when I hear of this kind of money being spent for renovations. It was the same when the Queen Mother died and Charles got Clarence House. The state paid out £5 million for the palace to be upgraded. This painted a picture of the old QM living in some dreadful slum with damp running down the walls, like some of the pensioners in my town. Not something that I can readily imagine from a woman who insisted on fresh flowers every day in every room of her house, whether she was likely to be in it or not.]

He apparently uses the royal “we” as he describes what he does, travelling across more than 20 countries in the last year, costing the taxpayer over £140,000. But it is the personal use of the Queens helicopter which draws most criticism. He insists on using it for short hops to both official and private engagements at vast cost to the taxpayer. There is also the fact that his royal status giveshim exemption from the reaches of the FOI act for some reason unknown to me, so we don't know how much this all costs.

Yet Andy feels he is good value for money. Now, strange for a Republican blog to say, but in many ways he may be right. Whether Andy knows squat about business or not, he does have huge drawing power. People all over the world are desperate to meet a British royal, and so they turn up and show interest. If this is good for trade, then it’s good for the UK, and possibly even, on very rare occasions, for Scotland. And as the BBC and politicians show, the royals have no particular monopoly on self-important, grubby greed.

However, just as with all these other organisations, it is high time that Andy Airmiles realised that belt tightening is not just for poor people. Someone has to tell him that there are trains and cars and that private planes and helicopters are the province of his mother.... and no one else.

And as for these daughters of his, he must learn to pay for them himself. Even the most ardent royalist must realise that when ill people are being refused Disability Living Allowance and being left to moulder in their houses as cuts are implemented to pay for Labour's recession, £2.5 million to do up what is after all fabulous state housing for one 21 year old girl is just NOT ON. The article is worth a read and to be fair Andrew has some sensible things to say about other people's excesses, particularly what he feels about bankers bonuses beyond the headlines. But he must learn that cuts mean cuts everywhere, and that includes him and his family.