Sim-O

Excuse me PC fucking Bastard, but we’ll be the judge of that.

Via loads of people on twitter

So. We’ve got one bunch of cunts making up shit about another bunch of cunts.

I have had a ticking off for tarring everyone in one group of public servants with the same, but I’m gonna do it again here.

Our politicians are all the same. There is no difference between them*. Is it that you need to be a cunt to rise to the top of the tree or does the system turn once good and honest people into complete wankers?

This latest debacle between McBride and Draper is just the latest in a long line of fuck ups that are unacceptable. And I’ll bet that it could just as easily have been a Conservative plot to fuck the opposite team as the Labour one that’s come to light.

I don’t know the details of the email, or much details about it at all. To be frank, I couldn’t give two shits either. All I know is that there was an email from Labour MPs’ containing lies about Conservative MPs’.

What sort of shitheads must we have running the country, if they think it is ok to do this? Think about it. These guys aren’t your drunk down the local spouting whatever comes into their head. It’s not 7 year old shouting to about someone ‘having the lurgy’ not realising what they’re doing. They are supposedly grown up, responsible people that are supposed to know right from wrong.

These. People. Tell. Lies.

The whole fucking thing is shagged. They’re only sorry when they get caught at something like this and when they do it’s a passed of as a joke or a misunderstanding or not very sensitively worded.
Are we fucking stupid? Do we look like cunts? Have we got ‘TWAT’ written on our collective foreheads?
That’s what it feels like, sometimes.

Dunno about you, but I’m fucking sick of it.

*There are a couple of exceptions, but I’ll let you decide who they are.

Guardian: Video of police assault on Ian Tomlinson, who died at G20 protest.

Would the phrase ‘police state’ be overdoing it?

The quote in the title is Jacqui Smith talking about the NHS Database.

Do not believe it. What the Tories started in 1992, Labour have embraced used it extensively. That ‘it’, is Private Finance Initiative.

The latest PFI is to widen the M25. And seeing where the money is coming from is like playing Find the Lady.

George Monbiot…

The government, as usual, is telling us as little as it can get away with. But the Department for Transport has admitted that, to make the project viable, it might have to bail out the M25 consortium(12). Some reports suggest that to make sure the consortium remains solvent during the construction phase of the contract – which is worth £1280m(13) – the government will have to lend it £400m(14,15). The European Investment Bank has already pledged £500m(16), which is also taxpayers’ money. This private finance initiative scheme doesn’t require much private finance, or initiative.

If the government underwrites the scheme, the greater part of the risk will fall on taxpayers, negating the entire rationale of PFI. But, citing higher lending risks during the recession, the banks backing PFI infrastructure projects have increased their margins, in some cases by 500%(17). The government will lend or promise to lend cheap money to the banks, which will then charge us, through the consortium, crushing rates of interest for the use of our own cash.

Weird enough for you yet? Well one of the banks reported to be backing the scheme is RBS. The taxpayer now owns 58% of it. This is likely to rise soon to 95%(18). If the government underwrites the M25 expansion, it will in effect be bailing out RBS twice then charging itself for the privilege – and for the bankers’ fees, including salaries and bonuses. RBS – in other words you and me – already has £10bn invested in PFI schemes in this country(19), for which we are paying extravagant rates. If you have come across a state spending scheme madder than this, please let me know.

It’s a fucking road. The government doesn’t have to make a profit out of making it or the upkeep of it, so why can’t it just build a fucking road?
If company A can build a road and make a profit, the government should be able to match the price and build a better road or build the same road cheaper.

The governments, and not just Labour as this was started in 1992 and won’t stop if the Conservatives get back in, fucking us over, trying to i) blag the books to make themselves look good and ii) ensure employment when they retire/ get voted out.

It makes me shit-fucking-kicking mad.

Participation in politics is well, disappointing. People do not give a toss because they think there is no point. No ones going to listen to what they have to say or what they think.

There is a lot of truth in that. and here is just one example of that…

Emails sent by members of the public to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights were deleted by the committee without even being read. Two people who happened to have enabled tracking sent me the following two automated repllies they received:

Your message

To: Joint Committee On Human Rights
Subject: Craig Murray:
Sent: Fri, 6 Mar 2009 20:51:41 -0000

was deleted without being read on Fri, 13 Mar 2009 10:46:42 -0000

and

Your message

To: Joint Committee On Human Rights
Cc: craig murray
Subject: Torture evidence on 10 March
Sent: Thu, 5 Mar 2009 14:47:36 -0000

was deleted without being read on Fri, 13 Mar 2009 10:46:42 -0000

Note the identical time of deletion. Evidently people’s emails were not even deleted individually but selected as a group and deleted en masse.

This is a shame because there was no template and people made some very telling individual points. Plainly people put time and thought into attempting to participate actively in a key part of a supposedly democratic process. It is a disgrace that these emails were deleted unread. Is the UK really a democracy now?

Follow the link for some of the letters sent.

Do you remember Gordon Browns’ Britishness ‘thing’ he had a while ago? Where we would all walk around being British and proud of it. But no-one could really define what being British was about. Every one had different ideas about being and to be British.

Well, the daily mail have had a fantastic wheeze and have come up with a very simple definition…

According to the new statistics, published yesterday, foreign-born people make up one in nine of the population of the UK as a whole.

However although the figures from the Government’s Office for National Statistics show an increase in numbers of foreign born people they still fail to record the true impact of immigration because they record their children as British rather than second or third generation immigrants.

See? Easy isn’t it? If you are fresh into the country, with your new passport in hand, you’re not British. If you were born in Britain, but one or both of your parents were born outside this country, your not British. If you were born here in this green and pleasant (ha!) land but one or both of you grandparents weren’t, you’re not British.

Some nice clean straight forward rules, with no grey areas to confuse things. It helps to identify us from them and keep them them for a few generations to come so we have a nice underclass for all the horrible low paid jobs no one wants to do and someone to blame when the shit hits the fan.

Well, I have a better, simpler idea that would even the knuckledraggers of the BNP could understand, although would not like, but who cares, huh?

Anyone with a British passport is British.

What? You want more rules? Well, that’s it. Maybe for immigration figures the amount of new passports issued could be counted, but when a baby is born to British passport holders, that baby is British. Why would it be anything else? I hasn’t gone anywhere. It may have a Pakistani or Nigerian or Polish background in it’s upbringing, but what’s the problem with that? Seriously I’d like someone to explain in a way that doesn’t either make me want to laugh or punch them in the face.

I don’t know why, but it amazes me that after 70 years and 11 editors after the Mail sympathised with the Fascist that they would still be sitting on the same side of the fence, pushing the same agenda of hate and bile.

————–

An open letter to Paul Dacre, the editor of the Daily Mail, from Sunder Katwala:

Dear Mr Dacre,

I was disappointed to read reported in today’s Daily Mail that the newspaper regards it as a mistake to consider that the children or grandchildren of immigrants are British, but rather would classify us as “second or third generation immigrants”.

although the figures from the Government’s Office for National Statistics show an increase in numbers of foreign born people they still fail to record the true impact of immigration because they record their children as British rather than second or third generation immigrants.

I hope that your proposed reclassification of Prince Charles, Prince William and Prince Harry as not British, as second and third generation immigrants descended from the foreign-born Phillip, will not distress them too much.

But it does seem most ungrateful, when Winston Churchill was voted ‘greatest Briton’, to now strip him of that status because he had an American mother. (However strongly your newspaper disagreed with Churchill’s criticisms of appeasement in the 1930s, isn’t it now time to let bygones be bygones?)

Perhaps you could let us know who the Daily Mail thinks is truly British. I can see you probably think it is too late for my children – as “third generation immigrants”, currently aged under 3 – but perhaps there might be a tip or two they could pass on to their descendants.

So, given our shared interests in integration and citizenship, it would be terribly kind if you might let us know whether there is anything that those of us who were born here as British citizens could ever do so as to become British in your eyes.

Yours sincerely,

Sunder Katwala

So, my wife and childrens’ passports and birth certificates are lying then, eh?

Via Tygerland

*Subtitled: The Daily Mail are cunts

Chris, in Justins comments:

Tony Blair

Laureates 2009 – 2009 Present Leadership
Anthony Charles Lynton (Tony) Blair, former British Prime Minister, is one of the most outstanding statesmen of our era.

From the time he assumed leadership of the British Labor Party in 1994 until he stepped down as prime minister in 2007, he showed exceptional intelligence and foresight, and demonstrated moral courage and leadership.

Having led a demoralized and struggling party to power in 1997, Blair exercised a pragmatic approach, strong conviction and personal charisma to lead his country in a period of remarkable economic and cultural growth. He helped broker an agreement between Unionists and Republicans in Northern Ireland; he engineered, against all odds, the policy that resolved the crisis in Kosovo, and he was one of the architects of transforming Britain’s position in the EEC. It was the Kosovo crisis in particular that transformed Tony Blair into an international leader on the basis of his steadfast determination and morally courageous leadership.

Tony Blair has consistently asked the important questions and thought deeply about the interconnected world of the 21st century. Early in his prime ministership, he came to two beliefs that guide him to today: first, that it is a mistake for the world to wait for America to solve all of the tough questions, and second, that there are some things a state may do within its borders that justify intervention even if the actions do not directly threaten another nation’s interests.

Upon stepping down as Prime Minister, Blair was appointed as the Middle East Quartet Representative. As envoy for the united Nations, the European Union, Russia and the United States, his goal is to bring stability and peace to the Middle East.
Throughout his career, Tony Blair has acted on the basis of what he believes to be right, a hallmark of leadership.

See what I mean? WTF?

Update: This isn’t Chris’s view, it’s the citation for the Dan David Prize. Just thought I’d make that a bit clearer.

Just as I’m posting about MPs’ plans to exempt their expenses from the Freedom of Information Act, this comes through…

The Guardian:

Gordon Brown made a dramatic retreat from plans to exempt MPs’ expenses from the Freedom of Information Act.

The surprise announcement made during prime ministers questions follows the collapse overnight of a bipartisan agreement between Brown and David Cameron, the Tory leader, to back a parliamentary order exempting MPs’ expenses from the act. The move came after he was challenged by Tory backbencher Douglas Carswell over why he was in favour of keeping them secret.

Fucking good. It’s good that it’s been, how can I put it…? Ah, postponed. But it’s not a victory for Teh Good, because look at that. The two leaders had an agreement.

Brown told MPs: “We thought we had agreement on the Freedom of Information Act as part of this wider package,” he said. “Recently that support that we believed we had from the main opposition party was withdrawn. So on this particular matter, I believe all-party support is important and…

Translation: ‘We had a pact, but something upset them conservative buggers and I’m not gonna do anything silly unless it makes us all look shit.’

we will continue to consult on that matter.”

See? Postponed.

The PM said proposals for reforms of MPs’ expenses would provide “more transparency” than in most other parliaments around the world.

This is the bit that really flumoxes me. I’m not sure what the rest of the reforms are but surely, making expenses exempt from FoI enquiries does exactly the opposite. Shit, I was forgettin’. Enclosing something in quotes makes it the make the words mean the opposite.
Jesus, these politicians are “really clever”, aren’t they?

Cameron made a late decision to order his MPs to oppose the move after learning from Alan Duncan, the shadow leader of the Commons, that Labour MPs were being whipped to back it. But Cameron’s action in turn became the catalyst for Brown’s U-turn. It left Labour, despite the chance of winning a three line whip vote, in danger of being isolated and blamed for imposing secrecy on MPs’ expenses, which is very unpopular with the electorate.

That means that Cameron was fine with the obfuscation of their expenses as long as no-one is coersed into approving the law (or whatever the fuck it is). If people do something of their own free will, they’re less likely to break away, and in this situation that means leaks. Really. Fucking. Embaressing. Leaks.
And that fucker Brown? Yes, the move is unpopular. Wonder fucking why? It’s ok to impose secrecy and be unpopular as long as it’s not just Labour that are hated. Even more. As long as politicians as whole are reviled and hated, it doesn’t matter does it.

That’s enough it’s winding me up too much, I’m just starting to swear uncontrollably.
Cunts, the fucking lot of them.

Bring on the Revolution.