Sim-O

I missed this the other day, Vince Cable changing his mind about granting an export licence for a drug used in some American states for executing Death row prisoners…

Mr Cable initially said he could not restrict exports – but lawyers from Leigh and Day, working with Reprieve, subsequently established that no European supplies to the US were being used in medicine – meaning that they were only going to death row.

Furthermore, one of the manufacturers identified in the legal action said it did not oppose the government imposing export restrictions.

Excellent news.

So, Legal Aid is being used pay for a Judicial Review on the decision by Vince Cable not to block an export licence for the UK company to export to the USA a drug used in executions.

The review is being brought o behalf of two death row prisoners by Reprieve who…

Reprieve uses the law to enforce the human rights of prisoners, from death row to Guantánamo Bay.

We investigate, we litigate and we educate, working on the frontline, providing legal support to prisoners unable to pay for it themselves. We promote the rule of law around the world, and secure each person’s right to a fair trial. And in doing so, we save lives.

Without looking into them further, they sound quite an admirable organisation.

But, on the the point of using Legal Aid for this review, fair enough. The UK government, in allowing this export, is complicit in the execution of prisoners. These two guys on death row do not have the means to challenge Vinces’ decision. It is a UK company, enabled by the UK government that is knowingly providing the means for these executions to go ahead. It is only right that this should be challenged.

The UK doesn’t extradite to suspects to countries when, if found guilty, the result is execution. So what is the difference between exporting people to their deaths and exporting the means when it is known it will be used for executions? None.

The reason for allowing the export of this drug?

“Sodium thiopental is a medicine. Its primary use is as an anaesthetic … Legitimate trade of medical value would be affected by any restriction on the export of this product from the UK.” Any ban would be ineffective, he added, because supplies could be obtained from elsewhere.

Try changing what’s being exported from a drug to weapons. Would the government allow the export of weapons, whose primary and legitimate use is for defence against invaders, to a country that was shooting up it’s own people? (Ok, the government probably does, but you get the idea.)

And the reason that supplies could be obtained from eslewhere anyway is just risable that it hardly needs rebutting. The point would be that we, as a country would not be part of something that we are supposedly against.

This then, the actions that Reprieve are taking and how it is funded, I think is A Good Thing.

This is a bloody travesty.

The man convicted of “menace” for threatening to blow up an airport in a Twitter joke has lost his appeal.

Paul Chambers, a 27-year-old accountant whose online courtship with another user of the microblogging site led to the “foolish prank”, had hoped that a crown court would dismiss his conviction and £1,000 fine without a full hearing.

But Judge Jacqueline Davies instead handed down a devastating finding at Doncaster which dismissed Chambers’s appeal on every count. After reading out his comment from the site – “Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!!” – she found that it contained menace and Chambers must have known that it might be taken seriously.

I’m not sure what I can add that hasn’t been said elsewhere. So I say anymore except to point you to Scepticisle and the Heresiarch.

Oh, and this business with Gareth F Compton. Yeah, I said I’d be bloody upset if someone ask for me to stoned to death, but would I call the cops? If it was on Twitter and a one off, a opposed to series of comments like that, then no. OK, Gareth maybe a dick and a hypocrit, but still, just like Paul Chambers, he doesn’t deserve more than a ticking off.

Workshy fuckers are gonna have work for their handouts, apparently…

Long-term benefit claimants could be forced to do manual labour under proposals to be outlined by Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith.

He is due to outline plans for four-week placements doing jobs like gardening and litter clearing.

He said the message would be: “Play ball or it’s going to be difficult.”

Heh. The lazy shitters are gonna have to do more than just wander down the dole office once a fortnight for their housekeeping/pub money now. They’re gonna have have to do what they’re most scared of – work.

Jobseekers will have to do compulsory work, at least 30 hours per week…

Under the plan, claimants thought to need “experience of the habits and routines of working life” could be put on 30-hour-a-week placements.

Anyone refusing to take part or failing to turn up on time to work could have their £65 Jobseekers’ Allowance stopped for at least three months.

I see a flaw.

If people are made to work, it is not voulantry. If the £65 a week job seekers allowance can be revoked if the claimant fucks up in any way with regard to this ‘work placement’, it could be argued that the allowance is wages for the work. With me so far?

£65 allowance, or wages, a week divided by a 30 hour working week equals £2.17 an hour.

The minimum wage for over 21 year olds is £5.93.

The coalition is proposing to employ people on short term contracts for less than half the national minimum wage.

Utter cunts.

For more flaws in the plan see Liberal Conspiracy.

I was thinking about this earlier. Prisoners getting the vote.

Prisoners are to get the right to vote as the government is poised to throw in the towel in a long-running legal tussle with the European court of human rights, it emerged today.

It is understood that the coalition is to confirm that it is ready to change the law to remove the voting ban on more than 70,000 inmates of British jails.

You know what I say?

Fuck ’em.

If someone doesn’t play by the rules why should they get to say what the rules are?

If it’s all about human rights, how about bringing to an end overcrowding? That’ll do more for the prisoners than the chuffing vote.

Cue nashing of teeth and much shaking of fists…

So, thousands of soldiers lose their jobs. The very people who have risked their lives every day in order that the BBC can function and fail, over and over, to support the sacrifice they make .

The BBC will only receive the equivalent of a 16% cut over five years. That just isn’t good enough.

Just what the fuck does that second sentence mean? It makes some sense up to the comma, where you start to feel the rage stoked by the army cutting the numbers of soldiers turns Dorries’ limited ability to construct a coherent sentence to goo.

5 years? 16%? Is that it? Oooh, those bloody lefties have gotten away far too lightly. Again.

The BBC has done a very good job over the last thirteen years to support the Labour Government. They have facilitated the very process which has resulted in the cuts every family in the nation has to bear. The blood which will flow from the cuts is all over BBC hands too.

And the BBC will undoubtedly be a little more bias towards the Tories, because although there is the independent board of what-ever-they’re-called running the BBC, it is still the government of the day that pulls the strings and can completely fuck the BBC if they wanted.

Although the BBC might have been a bit soft on the Labour government, I think Nadine will find that it was the Labour government and it’s love of the ‘wealth creators’ of the city that facilitated the slide down the u-bend in to the cess-pit we currently find ourselves. You can hardly say the BBC were willing facilitators. You’ll probably find the current demand to fuck over the BBC is just a continuation of the shit started in 2004 by, yes the Labour government. Bullied into submission that it is still trying to recover from.

Having displayed such bias, the Corporation should take more of the pain.

Oh? How, Nadine? Please, do tell.

We should demand to know what each presenter is paid. Because we pay. Students who have to buy a TV licence for each room in a student halls. Each person who is ill, elderly or infirm – we all pay from our taxed income.

We? who the fuck is this ‘we’? Some people might want to know what the presenters and ‘stars’ are paid. Some people couldn’t give a shit.

We know what teachers, nurses and MPs are paid. Why is the BBC allowed to function under this veil of secrecy?

We know what MPs’ are paid because they proved themselves to be extremely untrustworthy when it came down to spending and justifying the spending of other peoples money. And until recently MPs’ set their own pay. Who the fuck else got to pay themselves what they wanted from other peoples money?

We know the pay of some of the top paid headteachers, but not because of any dishonesty or lax rules, but because the information got leaked or the head disclosed it themselves. And nurses? Where can I find out how much a specific nurse gets paid? Go on, where?

The ‘veil of secrecy’ that the BBC is supposedly operating under is probably less secret than Nadines recruitment process for her constituency helper. *cough**daughter**cough*.

We need to know the exact cost of every production. How much each person on the production team receives. Every expense receipt going back over five years should be produced for everyone to see. Because we paid.

We need to know, do we? Does it really matter what the runner got paid, or the second soundman? It’s the total cost of the production that should be monitored, if you wanna go that way. It probably is already. Programmes rejected or not commissioned because of cost.

And where is the money going to come from to gather and collate and show this information in a meaningful way? From the BBC itself, so that there is less for actually producing shows or is this another job for the Big fucking Society?

That just sounds like petty vengeful snarking. ‘I’ve got to so you have to, too’ kind of thing. Oh fuck off you stupid fucking bint*.

The argument to justify the BBC licence fee used to go that the BBC made outstanding period dramas.

…and documentaries. Don’t forget documentaries, because everything else the BBC is utter shite.

I have a two word answer to that. Downton Abbey.

Man, that’s one killer argument. What’s Downton Abbey? I’m guessing it’s a period drama, but is it a shit BBC drama that proves the BBC don’t make outstanding period dramas anymore or is it an ITV one that shows that the BBC must be a shit waste of money because someone else can do good drama too?

The latest BNP newsletter slithered into my email inbox last night.

I proclaims that last Saturday, their first ‘Day of Action’ with regards to their ‘Bring Our Boys Home’ campaign an “unqualified and refreshing” success.

Obviously I don’t know if the figures they quote for the amount of signatures they got in their petition is true or inflated, but is this campaign really about bringing British soldiers back from the battlefield?

You already know the answer, I’m sure. But just incase you didn’t the newsletter urges us to contact their local branch to get involved in future days of action and…

…take part in the largest, most successful nationalist recruitment campaign in British history!

Soldiers. Just another useful tools for the BNP.

BBC…

Newly qualified young drivers should be banned from night-time motoring and carrying passengers of a similar age, Cardiff University researchers say.

They said such “graduated driver licensing” for those aged 17-24 could save more than 200 lives and result in 1,700 fewer serious injuries each year.

What an absolute cunt of an idea.

A someone in the article suggests, what about young people that work nights? People are also being encouraged to lift share, but kids at college wouldn’t be allowed to.

Surely it would be better to go along the same lines as has happened with motorcycles and restrict what vehicles new/young drivers can drive. Not that that will help, I gather during the local car of choice for the local joy riders when it was big all those years ago was the Metro. So power is not really the issue.

In a side bar on the BBCs’ story is a comment from a father whose daughter was killed in an accident with an 18 year old driver. Surprisingly, it isn’t about not letting people drive until they’re fortyfive or only letting young drivers loose in pedal cars, well most of the quote at least…

They should abolish the driving test completely.

These children are not being taught how to drive at all, they are being taught how to pass a test.

Instead, there should be a driving log – similar to aircraft – where learners have to log 200 hours with an experienced motorist.

They should drive at night, in the sunshine, in rain, snow, ice, on the motorway – under instruction at all time.

What an excellent idea. At the moment you if you learn through the summer the first time you experience adverse conditions or night driving is going to be on you’re on own. You can’t experience motorway driving whilst you’re a learner, and I’ll bet most people after their test don’t bother to book one more lesson to be taught how to drive on a motorway properly.

What’s needed, and is more practical, is better tuition for new drivers and harder penalties for people that fuck up through recklessness. Everybody, not just the young.

I heard Diane Abbott on Radio 4s’ Today programme this morning. I couldn’t believe what I heard (I can’t get a link to it from R4 now so here it is from the Independent)…

Ethnic and gender monitoring should be carried out when public bodies axe jobs to prevent planned spending cuts having a disproportionate impact on minority communities, Labour leadership candidate Diane Abbott said today.

Ms Abbott warned that a “last in, first out” approach to redundancies would hit black and female workers particularly hard and could set back race relations by a generation, risking “instability” in society.

What the fuck is she thinking? This is outrageous.

‘Last in, first out’ is a sensible way of deciding redundancies. If there’s two people in role, then it is a completely arbitrary way of making the decision. There is no chance of being accused of trying to get rid someone in an underhand manner, no chance of being accused of sexaul/racial discrimination. It is also not bad for the organisation either, by way of having to pay less redundacy money than needed.

Another way of deciding who gets the chop is my drawing up a skills matrix. Those with the higher skills stay. Again, colour of skin or whether someone has a penis or not doesn’t come into it. The matrix makes sure only what a person can do the matters.

Abbott may have a point about the cuts disproportionally affecting minorities and women, but that’s hardly a consolation to the employee, or their family that has been made redundant because of something an empoyer can be prosecuted for doing when hiring.

I think the public sector cuts have the potential to set back race relations and black and ethnic minority communities by a generation.

To use an over used phrase, WTF? The only way these cuts will fuck race relations is if a policy of deciding who gets the boot is done by race. Exactly as Diane Abbot is advocating.

Dear Fellow Patriot,

Uh-oh. Here we go.

Imagine a country where high-handed police chiefs abuse their powers to stop the native people celebrating their own culture and traditions.

OK. I’m imagining, but it’s quite hard to imagine that when the last time I went morris dancing, in the street no less, the police rather enjoyed the show. It’s quite hard to imagine when up and down the country there are folk events going on all over the place, with the police not even bothering to turn up. I wonder what traditions and what part of our culture Fat Nick thinks he can’t do that anybody else can?

Imagine a country where busybody local council bureaucrats use petty regulations to harass campaigners for the rights of the indigenous people and prevent them holding perfectly peaceful festivals at which the older generation seek to transmit knowledge of their culture and heritage to youngsters.

Those petty regulations aren’t used because of the festival per se, but because of the crowds of demonstrators that turn up as well. Creating chaos in the local area and annoying the local population even more than having wankers get lagered up in a field.

Imagine a country where it is ‘illegal’ for a band to perform a live song

Have they never talked to a landlord of a pub in a residential area that’s tried to get a live music licence? Obviously not.

or for a Punch and Judy Man to put on a show without a licence – a licence that is refused to opponents of the ruling regime.

Why would the Punch & Judy man be granted a license to perform, and that is what it is and not specific a Punch & Judy license, at an event that hasn’t been granted a license itself?

Imagine a country where the ruling elite uses taxpayers’ money to try to force a political party that stands for the survival of the native people to change its rules and policies with the intention of swamping it with hostile members of ethnic minorities who boast of their intentions to destroy that party and to deny its members the right to self-association.

Oh dear. Poor little racists. Having to change their rules to comply with the law. Boo-fucking-hoo.

And “self-association”? Surely they mean free association? ‘Self association’ sounds like a rather grubby thing to do at a supposedly family event. No wonder the BNP weren’t granted a license for their Red White & Blue festival of hate.