Birmingham Mail - Is It Just Me

And the winner is . . . Lady who?

2009-11-20T17:33:53Z

It just about sums up the EU. The foreign minister for Europe, a post we never even had a say about despite promises, is an unelected quangocrat we have never heard of who has never stood for election and who depends entirely upon the New Labour machine for both patronage and income.

It sums up the Brown and Blair years nicely as well.

Cameron is no better. He promised a referendum on what everyone but the Government accepts is a European constitution then proves that a politician's promise is like a knock off Rolex - cheap, flash, looks good in the shop window but is worth less than the box it came in.

Incidentally Lady Ashton was not even first choice apparently. Former Italian foreign minister Massimo D'Alema, who at least had a bit of experience, was odds on favourite until the Israelis objected because they reckon he is pro-Palestinian. For those who think they must have missed something . . . no Israel is not in Europe or the EU but it seems they get a vote even is we didn't.

And the winner is . . . Lady who?

2009-11-20T17:33:53Z

It sums up the Brown and Blair years nicely as well.

Amateur stage hit by jobsworth cancer

2009-11-17T12:06:36Z

If you ever wondered what a third rate, tin-pot beau racy we have become then read John Slim's feature about children on the stage on http://www.behindthearras.com/amfeat.html.
We talk with an amused air about the nanny state but the jobsoworths and those who delight in interfering in every facet of normal activity have grown like a cancer to the point where they stifle life itself. Britain makes Kafka look like Last of the Summer Wine.
These lifeless, soulless individuals, why else would they want to share ours, are all aided by a Government whose ambition is to have a form filled in and a record kept for each breath you take with no doubt a league table, a tax and a private company monitoring it all.
We already have 800 various unelected bodies who can demand entry to your home without a warrant and now almost 700 bodies can listen to your telephone conversations and read your texts and emails which will all be stored, at a cost to us, by Government decree. No court orders, permission from a judge or anything that even hints at the rights of an individual, just the nod from a senior council official will do.
One day people might just wake up long enough from worshipping celebrity to realise we no longer have a country with any rights, justice or freedoms.
Meanwhile back to John Slim. Either we have the highest concentration of child sex offenders in the world - which is a sort of tribute to Government in itself - or we have the worst, most oppressive and least effective bureaucracy n the universe.
Whatever the future for any youngsters learning stagecraft in amateur productions is bleak while the chances of seeing the likes of Annie, Oliver and The Sound of Music as amateur productions are almost nil. The amateur stage is yet another great British tradition the bureaucratic meddlers would like to kill off.
The Government wants to cut its budget. So here is an idea. It could start by sacking, or even shooting, anyone with a clipboard or a form to fill in.

Missing out on current affairs

2009-11-14T14:21:24Z

Winner of this week's couldn't orgainise the proverbial in a brewery award is Sainbury's.

Their Mere Green store has no currants of any description and has had none for some days, which with just over a month to go to Christmas takes a special sort of management skill.

If your Sainsbury's is equally as inept with its stocking don't blame the store though - a menber of staff apologised and explained that the ordering was nothing to do with them, it was all done, or to be more accurate, not done, centrally.

Poor old HP back in the spotlight

2009-11-13T10:32:54Z

I see Virgin have dropped a clanger with HP. Perhaps if their marketing people read the news pages rather than the fashion mags they might have an idea of what happens in the real world.

HP sauce was part of my childhood, part of growing up. Brummie jobs, tradition and my childhood memories were all betrayed when Heinz decided they could squeeze out a few bob extra profit by shipping a bit of England to Holland and Spain and anywhere else they can knock it out cheap

Since the day they moved production abroad I have never touched HP sauce or Daddies, another sauce and jobs Heinz shipped abroad, and I never will again.

It is not as if there are no alternatives. Branston, made by the British company Premier Foods, do an excellent range of sauces and relishes which are cheaper than the Heinz foreign stuff and buying them keeps British people in jobs.

Their brown sauce is fry up heaven and their hot chilli and jalapeno relish is brilliant. While we are at it their baked beans are well worth a try as well.

So thank you Virgin, your clanger has opened up a whole new reason to remember Heinz and HP sauce.

If you want to find out more about British foods then try http://www.premierfoods.co.uk/

Nothing to fear but Government

2009-11-12T13:04:22Z

It's hard to believe how naïve some people are. The Government have decided the DNA taken by police from innocent people can be held for six years and some bloke was pompously chuntering on about how those with nothing to hide have nothing to fear.

Nothing to fear! This is the Government we are talking about whose record of keeping any information safe is nothing to write home about - which is perhaps just as well as they seem intent on destroying Royal Mail as the icing on the stale cake as they come to the end of what will be 13 years of disasters.

Apart from the fact DNA records are likely to be left on a train, dumped in a skip or posted on the internet we all know that anyone who makes a donation to party funds and throws a few bob at the treasury will have access.

It happened with driver information and with health records and when insurance companies and banks get their hands on DNA then the innocent will fond themselves guilty of dodgy genes when it comes to life and medical cover, mortgages and loans.

Oh, and look out for the small print. I suspect MPs will be exempt as the laws we endure somehow don't seem to apply to them.

England . . . wasn't that a country once?

2009-11-07T12:27:35Z

In the next few months and years when people discover that we have been reduced to the role of a rural district council on the fringes of Europe with the same sort of influence we have in the Eurovision song contest then remember the two Scots responsible, Brown and Blair.

Thanks to them we now live in a country where most of the important decisions are taken by people we have never heard of let alone voted for while before long we will find that far from having a place on the world stage we just have a seat in the audience where we will be told to turn off our mobile phones along with the likes of Chile, Thailand and even Zimbabwe.

It is easy to blame the Czechs for agreeing to the Lisbon stitch-up or the Irish where you feel they would have had a referendum a week until they voted yes but let's be honest it is our lot, led by the two Scots, who denied us a right to vote on our own future for their own reasons.

WIth Blair it probably did not fit in with his business plan for T Blair Ltd while with Brown who knows? Maybe he wants a seat on the European gravy train when he is run out of No 10 or maybe he knew what the result of a referendum would be - and New Labour have never been great admirers of democracy.

Whatever, just remember their names though when your children and grandchildren ask what it was like when England RDC used to be a country.

Tone for Pres - OK

2009-10-29T08:08:37Z

Poor old Gordon Brown is taking some flak for pushing the claims of Tony Blair as EU president but, if we are going to be lumbered with a federal Europe that none of us wanted which is why we were never asked about it and a President we can't vote for, then for once I actually agree with Gordon.

It is hard to think of a less democratic, more corrupt, self-serving, lying, meddling, interfering bunch of self-important rogues chasing the main chance and feathering their own nests than you will find in the EU.

So let's be honest Tony Blair would be perfect for the job.

And it does give us a little bit of revenge for all we have suffered under the yoke of Brussels for the past generation. We have had our dose of Blair so it would be nice now to to inflict him on the EU - that will teach them to mess with us.

Looking for a sign . . .

2009-10-27T16:29:53Z

I went to see the RSC's Twelfth Night at The Courtyard Theatre in Stratford upon Avon last night and it was excellent.

It came about from running my new theatrical website www.behindthearras.com with John Slim.

He deals with all the amateur stage and I concern myself with the theatre and the disciples of Thespus, who was a sort of early Greek Lew Grade.

It really is a very funny production with Richard Wilson as Malvolio, James Fleet as Sir Andrew Aguecheek and Richard McCabe as a rather flatulent Sir Toby Belch. Well worth seeing.

But beware the journey home. I was heading towards the M40 where, in the rain, late at night, in roads set out by cones which merge into a meaningless pattern in the glare of headlights on wet tarmac especially when all around are dumper trucks and heavy machinery in the glare of spotlights.

Now I am but a simple soul but even I would have thought that some system of decent signs might just warrant slightly more than an afterthought. But no. Whoever was responsible for the signs thought it would be much better to have temporary signs directing you first to the M40 north and than a line of cones directing you away so you could have another circuit of a vast building site

That way you can approach the slip road yet again - this time with feeling when you discover you are being directed to a slip road that is closed with no diversion signs or anything so helpful.

With that level of management it is not hard to see why we have no car industry, steel industry, ship building industry, manufacturing . . . the only people making anything is MPs and that's only on their exes.

Pig sticking politics

2009-10-24T11:15:17Z

Anyone see Question Time? Apparently more people watched the infamous BNP episode than Strictly Come Dancing and just as the BBC shot themselves in one foot by sacking Arlene Phillips they have blown the other leg off completely with their new sport of BNP baiting.

Having invited the odious Nick Griffin to appear the BBC could not leave it at that and run a normal Question Time when no doubt his more extreme views would have been revealed and people might have really seen what he represented. Oh no that is far too civilised and sophisticated for the chattering classes who seem to run the BBC.

Instead they installed what appeared to be a hand-picked audience who would not have been out of place cheering Madame Guillotine - it just needed a couple of old crones smoking pipes and knitting on the front row.

The questions were all loaded against Griffin and had little to do with current affairs, with many along the when did you stop beating your wife? line of interrogation, Griffin was hardly allowed to complete a sentence without interruption and everyone seemed to have been given a stick to poke the BNP leader. It was all a bit like a scene from a grown up Lord of the Flies.

Now apart from seriously damaging the standing of the programme and calling into question its impartiality in the future, the programme must have done wonders for the standing of the BNP who can now add the sympathy vote to the protest vote.

Has no one at the BBC got the wit to realise that bear baiting went out of fashion years ago. These days people tend to have sympathy with the bear, in this case Griffin, and if there is a boost in the BNP's standing in opinion polls that can be put down fairly and squarely to the BBC's crude attempts to give Griffin a good kicking on national TV.

They turned him into an underdog and even people who hate what he stands for ended up with sympathy for the man - generating floods of complaints to the BBC about his unfair treatment which must be a PR disaster of Biblical proportions.

While the mainstream parties on Question Time were all patting themselves on the back about the wonderful multicultural society we live in, by the way, and how everything in the garden is rosy, that same night Panorama was showing an item about appalling racism on a Bristol estate.

Good news on the crime rate, isn't it?

2009-10-22T19:54:45Z

Nice to see that the number of crimes committed in Britain has almost halved. There has been no Government announcement yet but I am sure there will be otherwise why would the Forensic Science Service be closing three of its seven laboratories.

Unless of course the bosses are cutting costs, axing staff and making the whole shooting match more attractive for privatisation which, on past Government record, will mean the bosses becoming rich men overnight and eventually a critical report on the sale, with all the bite of a rocking horse, produced by the public accounts committee a few years down the line.

Freedom of speech Part 2

2009-10-22T19:03:21Z

So we now have the BBC being warned that if there is blood on the streets after Question Time it is their responsibility - and obviously nothing to do with the anti-fascist protesters invading Television Centre and mounting a picket outside.

The BNP crave publicity and respectability and all the protests have not only made Question Time a ratings winner but made Nick Griffin a victim of oppression and for good measure have handed him freedom of speech as a trump card.

What's next? Everyone stick their fingers in their ears and sing la-la-la whenever Nick Griffin speaks?

You don't have to agree with Griffin, you don't even have to listen but if freedom means anything it applies to him just as much as to anyone else.

Freedom of speech is for everyone

2009-10-22T13:13:16Z

MPs and others demanding that the BBC withdraw their invitation to the BNP to take part in Question Time really should grow up. I hate to defend the BNP but democracy and freedom of speech means that people you really do disagree with have the same right to their point of view as you do.

If you are not prepared to defend their rights then everyone else's rights are eroded. Once freedom of speech applies to just people we can tolerate or agree with then it becomes meaningless.

As for Peter Hain's claim it is an illegal organisation? Why should the BBC fire the arrows handed to it by the Government? If it is illegal - fine. The Government have the means to ban it - if they want to risk months in court of course.

It should be remembered though that enough people prefer the BNP to Labour, Tory or Lib Dem to have given them two MEPs and numerous councillors. The BBC, quite rightly, want all shades of the political spectrum on Question Time, not just those approved by New Labour.

It would be foolish to underestimate Nick Griffin, the BNP leader, but to ban him makes it look as if the mainstream parties have no answer to his arguments or are frightened of him and if that is the case we are all in trouble.

Determined to make swine flu fly

2009-10-18T13:33:01Z

Remember avian flu? That was the virus that was going to mutate into the rogue killer flu that would wipe out civilisation as we know.

Meanwhile as we awaited pestilence of Biblical proportions to visit upon us along comes swine flu - which was going to mutate etc . . .

Now in the scale of things that are likely to shuffle off your mortal coil for you swine flu and bird flu combined must come somewhere between being hit by a meteorite and trampled in a stampede of cattle.

There have been 106 deaths in the UK so far and, although sad for the families concerned, ordinary, run-of-the-mill seasonal flu will kill anything between 3,000 and 10,000 or so souls in the UK this winter.

That will hardly register as a news item but have you noticed we had a little flurry of swine flu shock stories again last week? I suspect they won't be the last so brace yourself for the swine flu could become winter killer, nation braced for swine flu death toll and so on stories over the next few weeks.

I am sure that these warnings of doom ahead, no doubt followed by advice to be vaccinated or risk death and destruction, have nothing whatsoever to do with the vast stocks of Tamiflu which were originally purchased by the Government to combat bird flu and then used to show how we were the best prepared nation in the world to deal with swine flu - the usual world class and all that that this Government tags on to anything it does.

The bulk of the 14 million or soTamiflu doses reach their expiry date next year so it's a case of use them to save a grateful populous or bin them at considerable cost just before an election.

Someone has to pay the bill

2009-10-17T15:05:11Z

I was in Sutton Coldfield today and passed Blacks, which is closing down and where the staff are trying manfully to stop it looking like a jumble sale.

The staff there are all facing redundancy next week as part of the closure of 89 stores and 1,000 job losses at the group. It was amazing that the staff were still helpful and polite as customers scrambled over stock in a 70 per cent off everything sale - everything must go . . . including jobs . . .

The figures wash over us these days; 1,000 more job losses . . . but bring it down to people and that is 1,000 souls who will be wondering if they can pay the bills and the mortgage, or buy toys for the kids at Christmas.

Go back a year or so ago and the world was being crippled by the greed, arrogance and recklessness of financiers and bankers when the sub-prime bubble burst.

In a sane world the banks would have gone bust and those in charge would have been unemployable and, in some cases, in jail.

Instead it was "Yes, Sir, No Sir, Three very large bags of cash full Sir" as Governments bailed them out. Since then Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling have huffed and puffed a lot about excesses, bonuses, bonus culture and anything else that might catch the evening news but it seems that not only have they failed to blow down any of the houses of the little pigs but the little pigs are back in the trough as if nothing had ever happened. All helped of course by the fact that they have managed to sell all their junk, baggage and debts to us at no loss to themselves. To the financiers it was little more than a bad day at the office which has all been passed on to us.

All the empty rhetoric and threats of action and restraint from Gordon and Alistair seem to have had about the same effect, and indeed standing, as telling an alcoholic at a free bar not to drink too much.

Of course someone has to pay for reckless excesses and avarice on such a huge scale so perhaps the bankers will all raise their new bonuses and say thanks to the staff at Blacks, Sutton Coldfield, and of course the 1,000 staff of Blacks Leisure Group nationwide, as well as everyone else who has lost their job or had their life turned upside down, thanks for picking up the tab.