July 28th, 2010 § 0 comments § permalink
What a crock of shit.
Am I supposed to feel something towards the characters?
These cunts go fishing in an unseaworthy trawler and then ignore the weather reports about a once in a generation storm and then, guess what? They fucking drown!
Yeah, what fucking heroes.
July 28th, 2010 § 0 comments § permalink
My shiny new MP on the axing of Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme…
Miss Blackwood said she sympathised with the disappointment of the schools which had been promised funding.
But she added: “It was a flawed programme and an enormous amount of money was wasted on bureaucratic processes, rather than the schools they’re supposed to help.
An enormous amount of money may have been wasted on the admin of it, but does that justify the stopping the funding? Have bloody big shake up of bureaucracy, which rightly should be blamed on Labour, and make some savings that way.
“At a time when we have to deal with the horrendous financial legacy of Labour’s Government, we couldn’t justify continuing the programme.”
Couldn’t be arsed thinking how to keep improving schools whilst not spending a shed load on admin, more like.
July 27th, 2010 § 3 comments § permalink
There is a story in the Guardian about some Gypsies and travellers that are going to be evicted from thier homes.
I feel a bit dirty writing this post as it feels very right-wing to me, but there are themes that keep coming up when this happens. This isn’t a comment on this specific case.
A number of Gypsies and Travellers have lived at Dale Farm entirely legally since the 1960s.
Gypsies have been there since the sixties or some specific individual Gypsies have been there since the sixties? Either way, if they have been there for forty-odd years, why are they being evicted now? Surely the legal process isn’t *that* long winded.
But the land the newcomers bought at Dale Farm is protected greenbelt, making development on it illegal. After a five-year court battle with the council, bailiffs have been appointed to evict nearly 90 families from the unauthorised plots.
First of all, if there have been Gypsies there since the sixties, they’re hardly ‘newcomers’.
It’s greenbelt, nobody is allowed to develop it. although others are probably subtler at getting round the planning laws. How long has the area been greenbelted? When was the land bought? If the Gypsies were there before is became a designated greenbelt area, surely they can be exempted or at least given some sort of leway.
a 69-year-old grandmother who has lived at Dale Farm with her family for eight years.
Eight years on one site? Isn’t she supposed to be a traveller?
The Travellers say planning laws are biased against them, and that they have nowhere else to go. “There are some really sick people here who can’t go back on the road,” McCarthy says. “Without an address you can’t get doctors, our kids can’t go to school. The camps we used to pull in to have been closed and barricaded up. Travelling life is finished for Travellers.”
Are planning laws really biased or do gypsies just pick unsuitable land? If a housing development isn’t allowed in a greenbelt area, why should an estate for travellers be allowed? I’m not going to generalise and say *all* the sites where gypsies settle are turned into housing estates, but some are, with bungalows and mobile homes.
You can get a doctor without an address and if you travel around your kids will miss school. If you want your kids to have a good education and you’re not up to home schooling (this isn’t a slight, god knows I couldn’t do it) then maybe you have to sacrifice something, perhaps not travelling might be an idea.
Unfortunately the loss of pitches is very real, due to the loss of common land and possibly land owners, due to the behaviour of a small minority, not wanting to risk being unable to get travellers off the land again or the devastation that they leave behind when they do move on.
Just one square mile of land would be enough to provide all Gypsy and Traveller families in the UK with a place to stay, according to a report by the Equality and Human Rights Commission, but there is a shortage of authorised pitches. The government, however, has just cut £30m of funding for new sites.
If you choose to move around and not settle in one place, you put yourself at the risk of whoever owns the land you want to stop on, unless you own the land yourself. Even then you have to abide the law. Is there any difference between a traveller buying a plot of land on a greenbelt to develop and a non-traveller that buys a plot of land to build a house on? Not really. In fact, non at all.
I am not going to say anything about the government funding of pitches as this could be equated to the provision of council housing.
“They’ll just keep moving us on from other places, so what good will they have done anyone by putting us out of here?” McCarthy asks. “Everybody has to have somewhere to live, somewhere to go. Why can’t we be left to stay in peace and quiet on land we bought and paid for?”
Yes, everyone has to have somewhere to live, but if the plots bought for development were picked with a bit more thought or research maybe developing them wouldn’t be a problem and the gypsies wouldn’t get into such confrontations.
July 24th, 2010 § 4 comments § permalink
This is getting fucking ridiculous.
Surely an opinion is not legally fucking actionable? Calling someone or something stupid is subjective and so not a fact.
When Councillor John Dixon called the Scientologists stupid, that was his opinion. If you put Scientology up against, ooh, I don’t know, any religion I could come up with, then it doesn’t look quite such a stupid thing to be dicking around with. Compare it to atheism and yes, it’s fucking stupid.
The same goes for design. The old addage of beauty being in the eye of the beholder is true. Take a look at this site. It’s Gordon Browns’ place on the web. Y’know, the ex-prime minister.
What do you reckon to it? I think it’s a bit shit and agree with this chap, Luke Bozier…
I apologise if I’m blunt, but this website is not befitting of a former Prime Minister. It has an unprofessional feel to it, and doesn’t portray the image of a statesman and one of Labour’s biggest figures.
Some other people think differently, like Tangent One who make the template for it. In fact they like it so much they are threatening to try and find a judge that likes Gordons’ site and fuck Luke for all he’s worth in a libel suit.
What the fuck has happened to make these people and entities think that a subjective opinion is actionable? Isn’t libel supposed to be about the mis-representation of facts? How can a design be factually good? Like hasn’t tried to present Tangent as trying to con Gordon Brown or any of they’re other customers, he’s just stated his opinion that they’re website template isn’t suitable for an ex-prime minister. Luke even states that Tangent make “some brilliant websites for the likes of Levi’s, Channel Five, Cadillac & Borders…”.
Tangent PLC’s executive director…
I really don’t like the prospect of either a public slanting match or legal action, but if I need to protect my company’s business and reputation, I will.
May humbly suggest two ways of protecting Tangents reputation, and hence business…
July 23rd, 2010 § 2 comments § permalink
Without mentioning any names (cos I’m a chicken shit and Mrs-O would kill me if I got a nasty-o-gram) why would an organisation, officially recognised as a religion or not in the UK behave in an aggresive way?
The whole point of such organisations, benign or otherwise is to increase membership. Whether that is to spread ‘the word’ and save all the unfortunate souls or to accumulate wealth for the people at the top, litigation is the wrong route to take and self-defeating.
Sueing people or organisations for the slightest er, slight is just going to make it look aggressive, a bully, insecure and have alterier motives that it wants to hide.
Which is probably why the ‘religion’ isn’t officially recognised as a religion.
July 19th, 2010 § 3 comments § permalink
Think about it. The couple have a successful (for ITV2) fly-on-the-wall documentary series on ITV2. ITV gets it’s revenue from advertising. Why have the audience watching one programme about these two muppets when they could be watching two?
Why does the hair on your legs/arms/pubes have hair that grows to a certain length and then stop?
July 18th, 2010 § 2 comments § permalink
I’m terribly sorry, but here’s another post about a Daily Mail story.
Nurses are being given spa breaks, casino gambling lessons and cocktail-making master classes simply for turning up to work.
As usual it’s not quite as simple as that and the Mail debunks it own story in the next few paragraphs.
The Department of Health agency NHS Professionals, which supplies shift workers to about 80 NHS trusts, is giving away these and other activity breaks to encourage nurses to sign up for work and attend.
But the taxpayer-funded scheme has attracted criticism at a time when the public sector faces savage cuts.
Nurses aren’t being given freebies just for turning up for work, that would be ridiculous. In case you didn’t know, NHS Professionals is an employment agency. It supplies nurses, doctors and admin personnel to the healthcare ‘industry’.
These freebies aren’t being given away to every nurse. The nurse has to sign up to, and actually do, 10 shifts a month goes into a prize draw. Nurses aren’t given casino classes “simply for turning up to work”. These are incentives to get nurses to want to do shifts, with an obligation to fulfil before one is elligible to be considered for the prize draw. It’s not like the nurse is contracted to do the hours and they’re being given this offer, NHS Professionals are trying to get staff in to fill empty shifts.
Nadine Dorries, being the only ex-nurse rent-a-quote in the commons worth speaking to, chips in with…
To offer incentives when we should be watching every penny is madness. Just give the nurses a decent wage.
Which is saying stop spending money on nurses and spend more money on nurses.
The thing that Nadine, and to be honest most of the comments below, seem to miss is that this is to get nurses doing shifts that they don’t have to do.
Looks like mission accomplished for this article then.
July 17th, 2010 § 1 comment § permalink
Fucking criminals. Hangings too good for them.
What an easy life they have in prison. Spoiled they are. TV, excercise, three square meals a day. *We* feed them. Out of *our* taxes and they dare moan and whinge and complain when they get poisoned.
Never mind that they do not have a choice about where their meals come from, they should be lucky that they are getting fed at all. Fucking ingrates.
Half a million pounds of *our* taxpayers money. That’s what the wasters are going to get. Not each, thank Christ. but shared between 300 prisoners and “quite a few of the prison wardens”. So in reality that’s less than £1,600 each. Still, if you’re a prisoner that has been poisoned by some twat who can’t cook properly, that’s quite a windfall.
If those lackies had been on the straight and narrow they wouldn’t be getting any money at all. Who says crime doesn’t pay, huh?
*Writing this post brought to mind Tom Lehrer…
July 17th, 2010 § 2 comments § permalink
(source)
Doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in his behaviour with regard to his election spending, does it? I wonder what he will be like as an MP once he gets settled with his feet under the table good and proper. Oh, and what a lovely little threat, too…
Either they [the electoral commission] will decide not to look at it – in which case you want to watch it. Or they will decide to look at it and give me a green light – in which case you want to watch it.
July 17th, 2010 § 1 comment § permalink
A government efficiency drive aimed at slashing spending in town halls and boosting productivity in the health service is likely to deliver billions of pounds of new business for private companies, the Guardian has learned.
Outsourcing firms are preparing for a bonanza of local authority contracts to provide everything from bin men to back office bureaucrats and have reported a doubling in the number of deals on offer this year. Private health companies are also expecting to earn billions of pounds from the planned overhaul of the NHS in which GPs would take over responsibility for spending £70bn.
Executives at Capita, the UK’s largest outsourcing firm, said the number of opportunities for local authority contracts has already doubled this year and they see the healthcare market as “vast and potentially lucrative”.
Richard Marchant, head of local government strategic partnerships at Capita, an FTSE-100 company which already works for councils in Harrow, Swindon, Southampton and Sheffield, said: “A major problem for the public sector is, we feel, a significant opportunity for us. Opportunities are at their highest level in two to three years. This year we have probably seen a 100% increase in opportunities [compared with 2009] and I suspect we will see another 50% increase in the following year.”
The private companies are rubbing their hands together, then. The money to pay for these services still has to come from somewhere, and at the end of the day it’s us. Me and you. The taxpayer. We either pay it as a tax or direct to the supplying company. Or more likely, in taxes that then get paid to a private company that’ll provide an inferior service that’ll seem cheaper to begin with but will sooner or later cost a fuck load more than expected. PFI anyone? (New Labour may have enjoyed all the off the balance sheet perks of the scam, but they were a Tory idea.)
First off, and I’ve probably said it before, why can’t a local government provide services as cheaply as a private contractor seemingly can? I understand economies of scale and all that jazz, which local governments and councils should able to achieve if they get their shit together work together as some sort of buying union. But just as local governments don’t generally have the buying power of these big companies that take on the contract, they also don’t have the shareholders to look after either.
A lot of these companies that provide public services after privatisation or are contracted out are foreign, too*. This means not only are profits being given out that could instead have meant the service could be provided cheaper or more of it even, but the profits are going abroad and helping to keep another nations economy in the black.
What is needed is for councils to get together and sort their shit out rather than at the first sign of trouble start flogging stuff off and handing out the contracts.
*I am prepared to be shot down in flames at this statement, but even if ‘a lot of’ is a little er, generous, the point remains.
