July 2008 Archives

Perhaps the time has arrived when we should draw a line in the sand and say enough is enough. Democracy is a sham. Birmingham has started a battle to keep its post offices but that same battle is being repeated all over the country. We even have the brass necked hypocrisy of ministers voting to close everyone else's post offices while- with one very personal eye on the next election - campaigning to save those in their own constituencies.

The fact the outcry and battles are nationwide should perhaps suggest that the people - that's you and me, the people who pay MPs and the business diploma-laden bosses of Royal Mail - do not want to lose a service which can be traced back to 1516 and has served the public well - or at least until the current lot took over - since 1635. It really does take some doing to lose money for the first time in almost 400 years.

But what we want does not seem to count. First private firms, Dutch and German, were allowed to stick their snouts in the profitable bits of the postal service with help from the unelected in Brussels, then Royal Mail management decided to see themselves as some sort of private equity outfit, turning a profit at any cost to keep shareholders happy.

Forgotten amongst all this is the fact that we are the shareholders and I defy anyone to find it writ in stone somewhere that the Royal Mail has to make a profit. The whole point of a public service is that it serves the public, providing for their needs and if that involves a cost to the public purse - our money again remember - then so be it. If MPs don't like it then they are always free to seek alternative employment after the next election.

Back from a few days off - didn't go anywhere in case you ask - and it is as if I have never been away. The banks - who, let us not forget, caused the credit crisis - are still moaning, Government figures on anything are still works of fiction and there are still more new ways to squeeze yet more money out of us.

Latest wheeze it appears is parking more than 50cm from a kerb will carry a £70 fine and I am sure local councils and the cowboy outfits who crack the whip on traffic wardens in this age of outsourcing will have their rulers ready sharpened as we speak.

Forget any notion that this is to stop nuisance parking, it will be turned into yet another money maker if the proposals go ahead. Give it less than a week before enterprising wardens are seen pushing some car parked close to the limit or measuring where kerb stones are broken or missing. It is a whole new area for fulfilling quotas. Common sense, like the idea of public service, will go out of the window.

It seems officialdom will not be happy until everyone has a criminal record and has been fined for something or other.

Perhaps the R&A could consider a new rule for their next meeting. Should any member of the gallery shout "In the hole" or anything similar at any hole of any golf tournament then the request would be fulfilled using a suitable club which would then require surgical removal.

It is an American import which is creeping into our game and one we could well do without. How anyone can watch a drive at a par five and shout "In the hole", the hole being 500 yards or so away, defies logic. Perhaps at events such as The Open it means the brain dead can tell their mates watching on TV that the shout at the 15th was them.

I suppose it is the same need for attention that guarantees that any hint of a live recording at a concert will result in a section of the audience developing regular coughing fits interspersed with whistles and the odd shout. It's a sort of immortality - "Yeh, I was the whistle that ruined that really quite bit in that Springsteen song."

So Gordon and his chums knocked up a bill of near enough £6 million of our money on special advisors last year. That is spin on an industrial scale.

Look around at the chaos they have managed to create with taxes, prices and unemployment rising, a couple of knifings a day, wall to wall drunks every weekend in every town centre, a whole generation choosing benefits as a career option, exams being marked by people who are still waiting for their own exam results and on and on and, let's be honest, a reasonably well trained cocker spaniel could give better advice and all for the cost of a few cans of Pedigree Chum.

It seems that the Standard Assessment Tests, SATS, are all a bit of a Fred Karno's if Moss Side Primary in Lancashire is anything to go by. It would stretch incredulity beyond the limit to assume that this example of incompetence was a one-off, isolated case in a garden overpowered by the scent of roses.

The fact a collection of seemingly unrelated letters masquerading as words had been marked higher than someone who was at least writing in English and that both, Scrabble letters in a box lid and literate essay, were marked the same for sentence construction, throws doubt upon the whole farrago and renders any results paraded by a Government trumpeting our world class education system as somewhat worthless.

What is more concerning than marking sloppy enough to make blancmange appear diamond hard is the fact that an 11-year-old in a mainstream school asked to write an essay about Pip Davenport, a fairground inventor, produced:
"If he wasent doing enthing els heel help his uncle Herry at the funfair during the day.
"And had stoody at nigh on other thing he did was invent new rides."
Could it be that our 'world class education system' is perhaps in a different world to everyone else's?

Anyone else infuriated by shop staff who find customers an inconvenience?

I was in Selfridges yesterday with my wife who had found a particular watch she was sure would go with her outfit for our son's wedding . After asking an assistant a question about the said timepiece she then watched him vanish off to serve a couple who had just arrived and presumably promised a higher commission.

The couple then proceeded to ask slightly more questions than you would expect in a whole series of Who Wants to be a before walking off without buying anything, so at long last, my wife, who was the only other customer and was starting to lose interest in the whole affair, was finally expecting to be served.

But no, along comes a second assistant telling her they will be with her in a minute and the two sales staff proceed to have a chat, whereupon my wife, a guaranteed sale, walked off declaring she did not want the watch that much

What a rag-bag of back-of-a-fag-packet, knee-jerk ideas the Government has come up with to tackle knife crime. Mind you I suppose that we should be grateful this lot have avoided their usual response to anything from global warming to dying which is to slap a tax on it - we could have been looking at sliding scale knife tax paying by the inch.

Government policy driven by dubious dogma has devalued the family and community to the point where society is breaking down. Exams and syllabi are about targets and tables rather than education these days. I suppose you spotted youngsters could soon get an English qualification by reading nothing more taxing than a travel brochure - and this from a nation which gave us Chaucer, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Dylan Thomas and now . . . Thompson Holidays.

Kids are given endless rights with no responsibilities, indeed they are protected from having to be responsible, while at the same time youth facilities and playing fields are sold off and youth organisations are decried while any attempt at school or social discipline usually results in arrests or suspensions with the child ending up as some perverted version of a victim.

So the solution to knife crime is to arrest kids under 16 out after 9pm which strikes me as yet another liberty floating down the Swannee. Curfews used to be something you saw in black and white war films involving the Gestapo not something which could be used to target law abiding kids on their way home from the cinema, theatre, rehearsal, footy or netball training, seeing grannie or a friend or even after a night at a youth club if such a thing is still allowed to exist.

There is also a call for parents to grass on their kids but as the last parent to do that saw his son jailed for three years for having a gun there might just be a bit of work needed on the PR front for that one.

And as for giving the public a say in how knife wielding criminals should be punished? Sign away our national heritage to the unelected and faceless shadows lurking in the corridors of Brussels, despite pledges to the people there would be a referendum, and our views are too much of a threat to even contemplate.

But with a sniff of a few populist votes in the offing about something of little real consequence and our views are important again. Sadly the public's record when they get involved in crime and punishment votes is not that good - remember Barabbas.

And as for taking those carrying knives to see stab victims? As you lie in A&E doing a fair impression of a pin cushion I suspect a social worker with some snotty nosed, pimply youth in tow, pointing out the consequences of carrying a drum and fife will go down really well with the paracetamol.

At long last someone has stood up against the PC mafia. Lillian Ladele is a Christian and a registrar who refused to officiate at same sex unions because they went against her religious beliefs.

The paramilitary wing of the left cannot have that of course, someone not agreeing with their alternative agenda, so she was hounded and threatened with the sack. We even had the bizarre suggestion from Islington council that her religious stance was akin to refusing to marry black people - didn't anyone notice Miss Ladele was actually black?

Now at last a tribunal has stood up to the PC stormtroopers and pointed out the more fundamental right that Islington had tried to steamroller out of the way. You can't have equality if the rights of one group trample on the rights of another.

Why do we bother sorting out our rubbish into colour coded containers? I came home yesterday to see our friendly, neighbourhood binmen bunging everything from green and blue boxes into the same refuse lorry.

No doubt it helps hit some Government target imposed by some EU rubbish directive we never had a say about but it doesn't really do a lot for recycling does it.

Is there no end to the cack-handed attempts at social engineering by the PC busybodies of the meddling classes? The NCB, that's the National Children's Bureau not the National Coal Board for older readers, who soak up £12 million of our cash each year, has now set itself up as the thought police for toddlers.

Their propaganda department has produced a 366-page guide for anyone running pre-school playgroups and the like called Young Children and Racial Justice which aims to identify racisim in toddlers. Things to look out for, apparently, are such heinous crimes as pulling a face when offered foreign food. Once latent or even overt racist tendencies are identified zey vill be stamped out!!!! Sorry I got a bit carried away there. Must be the weather.

Nurseries are then encouraged to grass up, sorry, report as many incidents as possible to the local council. Why and for what is not quite clear unless SWAT indoctrination teams have been set up without anyone noticing.

Mind you if we chuck in sex education, advice on contraception, abortion and same sex marriage, give 'em all 12 GCSEs and four mixed A* A levels, you could complete the entire Government education programme by the age of five.

The kids could then be packed off to university to complete their world class education allowing schools to be converted to prisons and eco-towns.

While we are on about toddlers and racism I took my twins to the US where they celebrated their second birthday in St Louis zoo. One Sunday lunchtime in the deep, deep South we found a pleasant looking restaurant on a country road in Mississippi and went in to find we were the only white faces in a very crowded establishment.

There was silence and scowls as we walked in followed by smiles and hellos when it was realised we were English. My children were fascinated by a huge moose head on the wall and an equally large black man who was telling them about racoons, bears, snakes and all manner of critters in the forest.

As we were leaving at the end of an excellent meal people were saying goodbye and my children turned and said very loudly "goodbye moose" and then to their new found friend "goodbye black man." Everyone laughed. My boys just said it as they saw it.

The NCB would probably have still had them in racial awareness classes.