Oright orchid?

With murder and mayhem on the streets of the West Midlands, what do the law-abiding do? We stay at home and watch what one of its own stars calls the ‘disgustingly violent’ Peaky Blinders.
With gangland stabbings and shootings turning parts of the West Midlands into no-go areas and the police incapable of getting to grips with it, we would appear to be in the midst of a new crime-wave.
That’s why Boris Johnson’s temporary Government is promising more money for the police, more money for prisons and a crackdown on foreign criminals evading deportation.
Yet we are deluged with programmes like the much-hyped and widely-praised Peaky Blinders which can best be described as televised ‘crime-porn’. It makes the whole evil world of crooks and gangsters look glamorous and attractive even as it is pretending to moralise about how debilitating it all is.

There's a new series of Peaky Blinders, switched to BBC1 to get a bigger audience, with all the usual stylised violence and cruelty.
The series is so well put together - great music, atmospheric lighting, Black Country museum backgrounds and all - it invites us to look back on what supposedly happened 80 years ago with sepia-tinged nostalgia.
Next month there’s to be ‘The Legitimate Peaky Blinders Festival’ in Birmingham, so-called, it must be assumed, because someone has already tried to make an illegitimate, knock-off version, which seems strangely apt really.
Helen McRory, who plays Aunt Polly in the series, admits it is so ‘disgustingly violent’ she can’t watch it.
She goes on to defend this on the grounds that it would otherwise ‘normalise’ violence and that, in the series, these terrible crimes damage the criminals as well as their victims.
She says: ‘It should be horrifying and you should have the people who are responsible for the violence either unable to self-medicate or having mental health problems, or all the things that do happen to people, if you kill other people – because it is not a natural state of affairs.
‘And anybody who looks at the violence of Peaky Blinders and some sort of gun slashing scheme and thinks, “That exactly is what I want to do”…I mean, sick.’
She’s right to say anyone who wanted to copy the show’s violence might well be sick but the malign influence of television can’t be under-estimated. And our couch-potato willingness to embrace these shows must play a part in adding to the sickness.
It's not as if Peaky Blinders were a one-off. The majority of shows on mainstream television seem to involve criminals, usually murderers. And it is rare indeed to find any straightforward division between the goodies and the baddies.
Take Killing Eve, another widely-praised crime-porn series, where the impossibly glamourous hired assassin, who may be called Villanelle, ends up in some perverse relationship with Eve, the woman who is supposedly bringing her to justice.
Not an episode passes without Villanelle bumping off someone, often with a wry smile to camera as her victim is done-in thanks to some innovative or off-beat method of our anti-heroine’s devising.
This is all made seductively entertaining, to the point where we are far from horrified by these deaths and merely thrilled or excited by the audacity of the outrageously attractive villain.
Crime on television is seen to pay. There is no ‘moral compass’ pointing out what is right and what is not. There is a great deal of crime and hardly any punishment.
The moral ambiguity is everywhere, even in relatively straightforward, bland shows like Midsomer Murders or Endeavour.
Wherever you look on TV, the goodies always turn out to be baddies, the police are invariably corrupt while ‘the system’ is rigged in favour of the rich.
The rich themselves, as well as figures of power or authority such as politicians (especially if they are men) are always crooked.
Successful businesses are even worse - they have to be polluting, uncaring, malign money-making machines run by unpleasant, greedy selfish people.
That means even if the business itself isn’t breaking the law - polluting rivers, covering up blunders or something similar - it’s entirely understandable if criminals feel the need to rip them off.
All of this is part of the fun. These shows need to keep the viewers guessing. They have to mislead us as, in many cases, the intrigue is all about ‘whodunnit’ so there must be several plausible killers with good reasons to want one or more of the victims dead.
Out on the mean streets of the Midlands, it’s doubtful if many of the drugs gang members who go around knifing one another sit down quietly on a Sunday evening for a nice episode of Vera.
Yet the constant displays of violence and dead bodies, often in grisly detail, on our TV screens night after night must surely help to create a world in which such behaviour is increasingly seen as normal.
At the very least, like violent video games, crime-porn makes the unacceptable look attractive and without real-life consequences.
It's all very well for Helen McRory to write people off as ‘sick’ if they copy the violence of Peaky Blinders. We would all agree. But this is what we give ourselves as entertainment. Doesn’t that make us all just a bit ‘sick’ as well?
I’m not advocating censorship. There’s no point, these days, when things like the obscenity laws no longer apply. But must we be quite so fulsome in our praise for these crime-porn TV shows? Could the TV companies not tone down the violence a little? Do they bear no responsibility at all for the terrible real-life crimes on our streets?
In the end, I suppose, we get the television we deserve. But if they must keep broadcasting Peaky Blinders, couldn’t they at least employ a couple of actors capable of delivering a genuine Brummie accent?

Lying, cheating, money-grubbing bastards #8 British Airways

British Airways are a failing airline. Every time we travel with them, there’s a problem (plus the food is repulsive) but our recent experience is the worst so far.

Having recently been obliged to re-book an outward flight to Peru following a death in the family, I was shocked to learn from Cox & Kings, the travel agency, that BA insisted on cancelling both the outward and return flights and obliged me to book two new return tickets, even though we were proposing to come back on the same day as the original booking. 

Cox & Kings would not disclose the precise amount we were obliged to pay to BA in addition to our original booking for reasons of ‘commercial confidentiality’, apparently, but the total extra cost of £2,202 per person (£4,404) comprised of three elements: a pair of one-way internal flights in Peru; one night in an airport hotel; and a pair of world traveller plus return tickets from Gatwick to Lima with BA. It is reasonable to assume these BA tickets must have cost at the very least £1,500 per person and probably even more. 

I explained this to BA and asked: Can you please explain why it was necessary to buy two return tickets, rather than simply changing the date of the outward flights and retaining the original return bookings, and how this can be justified?

Their reply was incomprehensible so I asked them to explain themselves more clearly. I got no further answer. This is the original response:

Thanks for contacting our Press Office about your experience when you travelled to Lima last month.  I'm sorry you are unhappy with the cost you incurred to change your booking.  I know this must be disappointing, especially as you were looking to change this due to a bereavement.  Please accept my condolences for your loss.   

I've checked your booking and I can see you were initially booked in the lowest booking class in our World Traveller Plus cabin.  Your travel agent called us on 07 May to ask how much it would be to make a change to the booking.  Your agent was advised the booking was a trade deal and as such they would need to go by the deal fare rules.  Our Trade Support team had no further contact with your agent.

On 09 May your agent has changed the dates of the booking.  They have also changed the booking class to more flexible tickets in World Traveller Plus.  To make a change there would have been a change fee along with any difference in fares.  We can't see how much you were charged for your booking or the change however, it appears there may not have been any lower fares available.  This may explain why there was a greater cost than you expected to pay to make the changes.  Your agent should have made you aware of the rules of your ticket.  I'm sorry this doesn't appear to have been the case.  

Thanks once again for getting in touch and for giving me the chance to explain our position.  I do hope despite this experience we can welcome you on board in the future.  Please let me know if you need any further assistance. 

Best regards

Lyndsey Gaff
British Airways Customer Relations

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Lying, cheating, money-grubbing bastards #7 Amazon

Amazon claim they are becoming ‘earth’s most customer-centric company’. I’m not surprised, assuming ‘customer-centric’ means circling the customer like a vulture waiting to pounce even when the poor victim is still alive.
Amazon have taken three payments of £197.99 each for one item priced at £197.99 (a croquet set, since you ask).
One illegally stolen £197.99 has been repaid to a hitherto non-existent Amazon account which means I can only spend the money with this predator.
The other has simply been taken from my credit card and not repaid.
Naturally I have spoken at length to various Amazon operatives who either don’t understand the problem or can’t be arsed to do anything about it or maybe both.
Even when they promise to repay the money they say it will take three to five ‘business days’ for it to be re-credited to my credit card (not that it has been).
That, in itself, is a bloody cheek from this non-taxpaying behemoth given that it takes our money instantaneously and I don’t suppose there will ever be any compensation for their use of my cash since the beginning of May when I they took the first payment of £197.99 and failed to deliver the goods.
One Amazon operative said in an email: ‘On this occasion, I've now escalated this matter to the relevant department for full refund for this payment.’
That was more than a week ago. No sign of the money, of course, though this person did promise: ‘To serve you better I've created a follow up and I will contact you again, once we get an update from our billing team.
‘Please accept my apologies for the inconvenience; I hope you'll understand that we are interdependent and there are some areas that can only be addressed by another department.’
No I don’t understand and to add insult to injury the sign-off to the email declares: ‘Your feedback is helping us build Earth’s Most Customer-Centric Company’ (their capital letters).
It could be that the people at Amazon are from another planet therefore they don’t understand what a customer-centric company looks like here on earth. I presume they’re based in Uranus which is where they can stick their customer-centric service.

Lying, cheating, money-grubbing bastards #6 Apple

I started writing this while listening to some truly abominable musak and waiting for an Apple person to transfer me to another Apple person to sort out why they are refusing my Visa card payment for a renewed subscription to the ‘Express & Star’ newspaper app.

I have already spent half an hour talking to them. They said the problem was with Barclaycard even though I earlier spent half an hour talking to Barclaycard who said there was no problem at their end.

So I then went back to Barclaycard and told them Apple said the problem was at their end. They continued to deny it. Eventually a Barclaycard person, the fourth I spoke to, agreed to call Apple and the Apple person and the Barclaycard person had a conversation while I was hanging on the line.

I was then transferred to the first Apple person and 40 minutes into this call I am waiting to repeat everything all over again to another Apple person who will, as usual, want to know my inside leg measurement, the name of my great-great grandmother and the first concert I ever went to.

This is all so unutterably tedious I could scream. Now, one hour and five minutes into my third call, Apple have admitted there is a block on my card, agree they don’t know why, accept it should be lifted but don’t know how to do it. The Apple person has supposedly agreed to talk to a colleague and one of them will allegedly phone me back. I am not holding my breath.

They did call back. They said the card had been banned three years ago due to some unauthorised transactions. I have been using this card ever since. Suddenly they announce it’s banned. They cannot – that is to say, they will not – un-ban it.

I hate Apple.

Lying, cheating, money-grubbing bastards #5 Barclays Bank

Yes, you have power of attorney. Yes, you have the right to manage the money in this account. But no, you do not have power to conduct telephone banking.
Therefore we cannot stop the two cheques you want stopped, even if they have been stolen and could be cashed in by criminals.
You must go to a branch, if you can find one that’s open and staffed by someone vaguely capable of handling your request to stop a cheque.
That might take you a day or two – our opening times are not advertised widely and of course you can’t just phone up a branch and find out when they are prepared to open their doors to their victims, sorry I mean customers – and the cheques might have been cashed by then.
Hard luck.

 

Lying, cheating, money-grubbing bastards #4 Trip Advisor

Trip Advisor is not there to offer objective reviews of hotels and holiday destinations – it’s there entirely to sell, sell, sell.
Which is why it rejected my review of Nonsuch Bay Resort in Antigua. I made a point of saying we booked our holiday though an independent agency called Tropic Breeze and included a link to their website.
Trip Advisor don’t sell holidays through Tropic Breeze so they don’t get included in the review. In the end, I put up this review instead:

Banned
I wrote a review for This website about how good the hotel was but as I mentioned a travel agency they rejected it. It's a great hotel and we had a good time but trip advisor is crooked.

Here's the original review, rejected by Trip Advisor:

Don’t worry, be happy

We booked this hotel through Tropic Breeze who were really good, charged us less than we expected and secured us a room up-grade so if you're looking to travel to the Windies I highly recommend them.
As for the hotel, it was fab. Our room overlooking the beach was marvellous. It was a suite with its own sitting room, kitchen and balcony as well as large bedroom and big bathroom.
The food was exceptionally good for an all-inclusive hotel (plus you don't have to wear a hateful wristband).
The staff were among the friendliest and most helpful we have met anywhere, plus they had a sense of humour.
We particularly enjoyed the sailing, which is suitable for anyone from absolute beginners onwards. The water is warm if you capsize so don't be too anxious. And the instructors are exceptional: patient, helpful and concerned about safety.
Nonsuch Bay is not the poshest place in Antigua and it is somewhat cut off so you may need to hire a car if you want to explore. It also faces south-east so darkness descends early and there are none of the stunning sunsets to be had on the other side of the island.
But don't let that put you off. We really enjoyed our holiday and hope to return.
Several hotel staff said to us during our ten days at Nonsuch Bay: 'If you're happy, I'm happy.' It sounds a bit corny and they may be encouraged to use this phrase by the hotel management but we felt they really meant it.

Lying, cheating, money-grubbing bastards #3 BT

I knew it was a mistake. The moment I decided to ring BT to tell them how slow my superfast broadband was, I knew I would regret it.
Call me brave, call me foolhardy, I rang them anyway. Inspired by the latest attack on BT by a committee of MPs complaining about its terrible ‘broadbad’ service, I thought it was time to tackle the issue head-on.
Using BT’s own test on my computer I find I am enjoying a service of 5.09 Megabits per second (Mbps) though I am paying for somewhere between 27 to 36 Mbps.
So I call them and the first bloke I speak to says (and I quote): ‘You are not on superfast, it’s a basic copper connection you have there and 5 Mbps is the expected speed for your connection.’
He says superfast fibre optic broadband is actually available; I just haven’t got it. I point out I only switched to BT because I was promised superfast broadband so he says he’ll talk to a colleague.
‘You are on copper,’ he says again. ‘You are definitely not on superfast.’
Several minutes later I am transferred to a woman and I have to explain the whole thing once again. She listens and asks if we’re talking about a business line. I say we’re not so she tells me she can’t deal with it and I am transferred one more.
After a lengthy pause I have the pleasure of explaining the situation for a third time. I spend the next 36 minutes, followed by a brief pause to test the line, and a second bout of 23 minutes, in conversation with a woman whose English is not all that clear. This may have something to do with being based in Bombay.
Her first announcement comes as a shock as it completely contradicts her colleague. She says: ‘You are already connected to fibre optic.’
At this point I may have lost my sense of humour.
While I am waiting for her to carry out various tests and listening to something which would once have been called music but which is just a hiss and crackle down the line from India, I have time to reflect on the MPs’ report.
A couple of BT goons got into trouble for laughing at the report but with luck the Government will do something about the plan to separate BT from BT Openreach, the company which owns the nation’s broadband infrastructure. When 121 MPs agree the service is ‘dire’ surely someone will do something.
Breaking BT’s monopoly would be welcome to thousands of people whose lives are made a misery by the company’s bureaucratic indifference.
A self-employed friend spent weeks without any broadband as BT failed to effect repairs. She almost went out of business.
My hairdresser says when she complained about the slowness of her ‘superfast’ broadband she was told it was probably caused by the neighbour’s Christmas tree lights.
Worse still, another friend was visited three times by BT Openreach engineers after he complained about his ‘poor to atrocious’ broadband.
The third engineer declared the problem was the copper wires down the road being aged and fairly useless.
‘He told me to call BT Openreach,’ says my friend. ‘Even though he was from BT Openreach he couldn’t do anything about it himself.
‘I called BT and they said go to BT Openreach, which is part of the same company. Openreach said “You have got to speak to BT – only the provider of the line can talk to us”. I went back to BT who said they couldn’t help, I needed to go to Openreach.
‘This has gone on for six months. Ultimately a lady from Madras rang to ask, “Can we close this case now?” I have given up.’
BT says superfast broadband is available to 95 per cent of us and splitting up the company would leave less money for investment. It also says we’re ahead of most other countries.
If it’s so good, how come it’s so bad?
Ofcom is investigating the idea of splitting up BT but we can be pretty sure it will do whatever the telecoms giant tells it to do.
Meanwhile my friend in Bombay is back on the line saying she can’t find anything wrong so she will have to send out an engineer. If the fault is on my premises, rather than out in the road, I will have £129.99 taken from my bank account.
I balk at this so she offers yet another test which involves unscrewing the cover of the connector which brings BT into the house and plugging the router directly into the socket inside. Yet again the speed is tested.
The good news is it’s now 16.88 Mbps. Not exactly superfast but better than superslow. At the end of it all, Miss Bombay tells me: ‘You have been very patient and cooperative.’
Which makes me wonder how mad her other customers must get.

PS Six months later my BT broadband bill has soared to £26 per month and the speed is back at 3.4 Mbps. I ring to discuss the situation and half an hour later take part in an on-line diagnosis with an operative in India which gets us nowhere. Eventually she transfers me to some other department to discuss my extortionate bill and after a few moments the phone goes dead. Naturally they don’t bother to call back even though they certainly have the number.

Lying, cheating, money-grubbing bastards #2 VW

As we all know, those clever chaps at Volkswagen have duped the entire world with their baffling emissions scam so we had to take our Golf into the dealer to have it set right.

At the same time they gave it a check-up and discovered a nail in a tyre. The tyre was perfectly functional until they removed it whereupon the tyre deflated and they declared it impossible to repair.
So far, fair enough I suppose. But they then announced that, because the car has tyre-pressure sensors which only work if the tread on each tyre is the same, it would require not one but two front tyres.
The un-punctured tyre had 5mm of tread (like the punctured one) and was good for many more miles. But it would have to go because otherwise the warning light would come on, stay on and we would somehow be in breach of the warranty. Or some such cobblers.
After much argument, we submitted so we had to buy a pair of tyres and throw away a perfectly good one.
What is the point of an allegedly sophisticated system if it can't cope with something as simple as one tyre with 8mm of tread and one of 5mm. And if it's so wonderful, how come it never noticed the nail in the tyre in the first place?
This comes after VW has tried and failed on several occasions to deal with the Bluetooth phone system which means anyone speaking to the driver hears what they said echoing back to them after they have spoken. This is, apparently, standard on VW cars. So be warned.

Lying, cheating, money-grubbing bastards #1 BUPA

The Government shouldn't be surprised local authorities need more money to look after our growing population of old people. After all, part of the problem is caused by the rise in the minimum wage.
Unfortunately, given how tough their jobs are, many care home workers have to get by on £7.20 an hour rising by 30p in April.
That's not a huge amount of money for the individual but if you add together the 1.6 million care workers in the country and give everyone a 30p-an-hour pay rise, that's virtually £1 billion.
Suddenly the minimum wage starts to look quite expensive and the money has to come from somewhere.
Given that people are living longer, councils can't save the money by cutting the service, assuming we wish to treat our elderly with a modicum of dignity.
So that means it comes either from us as taxpayers, from us as care home customers, or both.
Yet the whole sector seems like a licence to print money. For a start, councils only have to foot the bill for the care of a pensioner when the individual’s assets have been whittled down to £23,250.
Until that point, a pensioner has to find the fees out of their own pocket. That almost certainly means selling their home, if they own one, and any other assets they might possess. It means losing all their hard-earned savings leaving nothing to pass on to their children and grandchildren.
This may be fair enough, I suppose. Why should the taxpayer subsidise someone's old age just so they can hand on a legacy to their family?
But there is something dispiriting about the way a lifetime of work disappears in a matter of months. The price for growing old has never been higher.
I know of one elderly couple, confined to separate care homes 50 miles apart, whose wealth has disappeared completely. No surprise, really – their fees were £10,000 a month.
If you are poor enough for councils to meet the cost of your care, homes will

charge about £25,000 a year. Pay for it yourself and it’s £35,000-plus.
And for anyone who goes private – the majority of old people – once a home has got its claws into you, there is no escape. An elderly relative incarcerated in a BUPA care home has seen her fees soar by £199.36 a week – 25 per cent – in two years. Her fees are £51,667-a-year.
The home is nothing special. A new manager every six months means the turnover in employees is bewildering. It is never fully-staffed.
Many carers are kind, helpful and willing but lack direction and seem forgetful, if not negligent. Bad management is to blame but what can you expect if the boss changes twice a year?
In its latest ransom note, BUPA says if my relative is unhappy about the cost she’s free to go elsewhere.
This nonsense is the vilest insult of all. Where could she go? The upheaval involved would be intolerable for a frail old lady, as BUPA know only too well. That is why they can charge whatever they like. They have a captive clientele.
To make matters worse, the family is now afraid to take up arms on our relative's behalf for fear they would retaliate in some way and make her plight even worse than it is already. It’s risky even to complain when they fit her with hearing aids with flat batteries, which they do with distressing regularity.
No wonder they could afford to pay chief executive Stuart Fletcher over £2 million last year. He’s now left and finance director Evelyn Bourke, who got £1.3 million in 2015, has taken over and no doubt gets a huge pay rise. Even Labour Peer Lord Leitch, BUPA’s non-executive chairman, trousers £385,000 for his part-time job.
BUPA is allegedly a non-profit-making organisation. Yet this disgusting rip-off merchant made £278.3 million profits last year which it stuffs under the mattress to top up its reserves. It has a quite staggering £3.6 billion in the bank and still whinges about the minimum wage.
And if one organisation can be this unscrupulously grasping, no doubt many others are as well.
Luckily local authorities are in a position where collective bargaining can at least deliver better value for money than individuals get.
But it's still a costly business made worse by the fact that a three per cent council tax rise in most parts of the country raises a whole lot less than it does in the rich South East.
So where is the extra money to come from? Local taxpayers will doubtless have to cough up as usual but the Government should take a look at organisations like BUPA.
In the past, Chancellors have imposed ‘windfall’ taxes on oil companies and banks which have exploited their position in the market. If BUPA can get away with imposing fee increases on customers of its don’t-care homes, it’s time the Government did the same on its excessive profits.

Down stethoscopes and save the NHS

A doctor writes:
Bruvversansisters it’s time to down stethoscopes and show the Capitalist ruling-class bosses who is really running the show. We are sick-an-tired of being taken for granted, treated like mushrooms and forced to work all hours just to scrape a living while the upper toffs swan around in their chauffeur-driven Jaguars enjoying a life of leisure on the backs of the poor, oppressed doctoring classes.
Well, I have a message for you Mister So-called Jeremy Hunt, you can push us around only so far before even the poor, oppressed doctoring worm turns and you are on the receiving end of the full working-class backlash.
One out, all out, you don’t get us, we’re part of the doctors’ union and we aren’t fighting for our rights we are fighting for human rights, for the benefit of every single user of the so-called National Health Service.
We’re fighting to overthrow the capitalist system of privatisation, the Thatcherisation of national ‘elf, Thatcher and her son Cameron. Jeremy Corbyn is right. Why should we fight other people’s wars in far off countries we know nothing about?
What’s Syria got to do with the national ‘elf? This is where the money has to go. We can’t afford to waste billions on a foreign war when we have so many ishoos here at home. Ishoos, sistersanbuvvers, which we can only resolve through a negotiated settlement to the long-standing demands of Britain’s hard-working, oppressed, taken-for-granted doctors.
We’re standing up to this ‘Elf Secretary not for ourselves but for oppressed health workers everywhere – oppressed consultants, oppressed leading surgeons, oppressed staff nurses, oppressed managers, oppressed directors, oppressed chairpersons as well as oppressed former employees who have retired early with oppressively huge payoffs and been re-employed at even more oppressively generous rates of pay.
Not to mention oppressed ‘elf service agency staff everywhere, who fulfil a very real need especially at weekends when every self-respecting doctor is out on the golf course training to become a consultant.
This is where the Government commitment is needed. Not on some far-flung battlefield any more than its money should be wasted on nuclear deterrents when it should be devoted to the crumbling infrastructure of our beloved NHS.
This service is still the envy of the world. Or it would be if it paid its oppressed doctors a living wage and did not demand long, anti-social hours from young men and women who are sometimes so exhausted when we come off a shift that we don’t even have the energy to person the picket lines or write a protest letter to our MPs.
Call this democracy? Call this freedom?
We need to stand up to this so-called elected Government and its so-called election pledges which less than 25 per cent of the population actually voted for, and absolutely no-one in Scotland or London. Or Wales.
So what if more people die at weekends than during the week? Is that our responsibility as doctors? Of course not. It’s because people who go to hospital at the weekend are sicker than Monday-to-Friday patients.
That should be obvious even to stupid Tory politicians. Do they not realise nobody goes to hospital at the weekend if they can help it?
First off, it means not taking any time off work. Who would go to hospital in their own time when they could go at a time when their employer was paying? It might mean missing the football or not going shopping. It certainly means risking poor treatment and very likely a premature death.
So you only go to hospital at the weekend if you’re dying anyway. Which means it can’t be the responsibility of our fellow hard-working doctors if there aren’t many of us actually on the wards on Saturdays and Sundays.
We – the professionals – know our patients and we know those admitted at the weekend will probably die anyway. So why should we be forced to disrupt our social lives just to pretend we could do something about this even though we know we can’t possibly?
The Government thinks more deaths at the weekend is some sort of killer argument. We have to show the boot is on the other foot. Bruvversansisters this is about so much more than pay and conditions – important though they are. This is about the future of the national ‘elf. This is about our children and our children’s children.
If we give in to the demands of this so-called democratically-elected Government we might as well sell off the hospitals, privatise the ambulances and condemn the old, the sick, the disabled, not to mention the transgender community, to a short and brutal life as oppressed, neglected outsiders.
We have to make a stand because this Fascist regime is determined to dismantle the National ‘Elf and sell it off to their friends in the City so a few fat-cat party donors can line their pockets at the expense of the working man and the doctoring classes.
The ‘elf service is great – walking out helps keep it that way.

Ajockalypse Noo! The backlash starts

Scotland's politicians may think they've got the upper hand but obviously the country's tourist industry thinks otherwise.
On the day Nicola's tartan army descended on Westminster in their stupidly-named aeroplane (Gael Force One - ha!), the Scottish tourist board felt the need to take out a two-page advertisement in the London Evening Standard extolling the virtues of the haggis-munchers' homeland.
No doubt paid for thanks to huge subsidies doled out year after year by the English taxpayer.

Milibandias

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

How Boris could be PM by Christmas

I wrote this last December for the Express & Star. Though UKIP will get fewer seats, the Lib Dems more and we probably won't win the Ashes or the World Cup, you never know....

Looking back on 2014 is all very well but what about looking back on 2015? As Charles Dickens might have said: ‘2015? It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.’
England winning the rugby world cup and regaining the Ashes were, without a doubt, the highlights of a year when the country’s past glories were proudly displayed for all to see.
Unfortunately, though, both the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo and the 800th anniversary of the signing of Magna Carta reminded us of what we have lost.
Waterloo was a famous victory over the French – the very people who, for most of 2015, were making life as difficult as possible for our various Governments to re-negotiate a deal on membership of the European Union.
And Magna Carta, the basis of our civil liberties and freedoms, was also the basis of our democracy. But what a terrible year for democracy it has been.
With no work to do, our MPs spent the first four months of 2015 going round the country ‘stirring up apathy’, as ex-Home Secretary Lord Whitelaw once said.
Most of us were bored to death of the General Election long before polling day yet, as predictions of the outcome grew more and more uncertain, the manic politicking of all the parties grew more intense by the day.
Finally polling day arrived. UKIP did not do as well as some people expected but still picked up 10 seats. Nigel Farage became an MP. The Lib-Dems did as badly as everyone hoped and were reduced to 14 MPs while the Greens gained three.
Most shocking of all was that the Scottish Nationalists won 45 seats, compared with just six in 2010.
After days of uncertainty, excitement in the ‘Westminster village’ and a certain detached curiosity among the rest of the country, the SNP leader Alex Salmond emerged as the power-broker.
After some bad-tempered negotiations with Ed Balls, Mr Salmond agreed the SNP would prop up a minority Labour Government.
He became Deputy Prime Minister and Ed Miliband tried to form a Government.
Labour’s leader did make it through the doors of Number Ten but his triumph didn’t last long.
Though Labour was shored up by the SNP and the three Green MPs, the new coalition was struggling from Day One.
Collapse was inevitable. And though this had been central to the SNP’s demands, Mr Miliband discovered his backbone and refused to allow Mr Salmond to hold a new in-out referendum on Scottish independence.
So the Queen – who this year became Britain’s longest-serving Monarch, beating Queen Victoria’s record – was forced to intervene. She asked new Tory leader Boris Johnson to try to form a Government.
He immediately abandoned David Cameron’s election pledge to hold an EU referendum – ‘the time is not right,’ he said – and persuaded new Lib-Dem leader Danny Alexander to form another Tory coalition.
UKIP at first refused to join but then Boris made Nigel Farage Minister for Europe so he pledged to vote in support of Mr Johnson’s Government.
The Unionist parties from Northern Ireland also signed up on condition there was more money for Ulster.
This uneasy and fragmented arrangement only lasted until the party conference season when it became clear supporters of both the Lib-Dems and UKIP were outraged by the turn of events.
Yet there was no easy way to call another General Election, thanks to ex-MP Nick Clegg’s introduction of fixed-term, five-year parliaments when he was Deputy PM.
The rules said there had to be a vote in the Commons requiring two-thirds of all MPs to support calling an election. At the first attempt, there was chaos as the Conservatives, with 251 MPs, refused to vote to dissolve Parliament.
This condemned Boris Johnson to struggling on without a majority and when MPs rejected his much-delayed Budget in November, there was a motion of no-confidence passed in the Government which, 14 days later, triggered the General Election.
Even that was controversial. Britain’s politicians went into Christmas 2015 in a state of high anxiety. The next election is due to be held on Thursday, January 7, 2016.
As a result, politicians are spending the entire festive period campaigning for votes.
Everyone who hopes to get away from all that political unpleasantness for a couple of weeks over the Christmas and New Year period has been disappointed.
Some MPs were even out knocking on people’s doors on Christmas Day itself. One Labour MP was mistaken for Father Christmas though she later denied she was as fat as all that and said her beard was actually a scarf.
As we look forward to 2016, we can at least comfort ourselves with the knowledge that, while one way or another we have not had an effective Government for the whole 12 months, life carries on as normal.
Perhaps the best thing to say about 2015 is that we never really had a Government at all – and nobody noticed.

Je ne suis pas Charlie

Let’s stop fooling ourselves. The poor victims of the Charlie Hebdo massacre are not martyrs to the Western belief in freedom of speech and open democracy.
They are, certainly, victims of hate and the fascist intolerance – not to mention brutal stupidity – of militant Islamists.
But for all Charlie Hebdo’s satirical stance against that religion and, as far as one can tell, against all others as well, they can’t be described as dying for the cause of Liberty.
That’s because Liberty and freedom of speech do not exist.
We pay tribute to these empty ideas and pretend they represent the cornerstone of Western democracy.
But we are wrong to place faith in such a tarnished concept.
It’s simply not true to say we enjoy freedom of speech, whether you are looking at France, Britain, the United States or anywhere else in the so-called free world.
Our freedoms are hemmed in on all sides. We are not free to say or write whatever we want.
In France, for instance, it was for decades unacceptable to reveal details of the private lives of public figures.
That’s why President Mitterrand could have a child by his mistress and nobody noticed. It’s why Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a potential President, could enjoy the kind of sex life Italy’s Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi thrived on and get away with it until he tried it on with an American chambermaid.
Most British journalists know stories about the great and good which have never seen the light of day.
Some of these stories would – quite rightly – destroy careers if they ever saw the light of day. But the laws of defamation make it very difficult to ‘tell the truth’ about people in powerful positions unless you have absolute proof of their alleged wrongdoing.
Fair enough, you might say. But sometimes that much evidence isn't readily available. It explains why Jimmy Savile and other paedophiles got away with it for years – publishing rumour and gossip is dangerous. You can't get away with it. You’d be sued and bankrupted –even if you’re telling the truth.
As for attacking Islam, well, since Salman Rushdie became subject to a fatwa for his really rather dull novel ’The Satanic Verses’, our great liberal elite has shied away from conflict with Muslims.
It’s still perfectly acceptable to attack Christianity – after all, Christians are likely to turn the other cheek rather than resort to the Kalashnikov. But other faiths – not just Islam – are much less likely to come in for scrutiny let alone satire.
Self-censorship ensures we tiptoe around the Jewish faith, for instance. It is acceptable to attack Israel for its political machinations but it would be beyond the pale to comment adversely on the faith itself or some its own fundamentalist fringe.
We cannot say what we might think on a variety of subjects. Never forget, we now have ‘hate crimes’ which mean that if, for whatever reason, we genuinely and truly loathe a particular faith, race or lifestyle, it is actually illegal to say so.
It may be morally wrong even to harbour such thoughts but the law is now so sensitive to the possibility that someone might be offended that it cracks down on anyone foolish enough to step out of line by saying something controversial.
For example, until the 1960s homosexuality was illegal. Many people still remember when same-sex relationships were simply unacceptable to the vast majority of the population.
Today we have no choice but to accept and, as it were, embrace homosexuality. Personally I couldn't care less but many people still find the whole idea of gay relationships wrong.
Even though not so long ago that would have been a mainstream view, they now have to be very careful what they say. The world has changed and sometimes people are reluctant to change with it.
So what was once mainstream opinion is not simply marginalised, it becomes illegal to express. This is bizarre in a society which prides itself on its freedom.
Meanwhile the Government wants to impose State control on the media following the Leveson inquiry. If politicians had their way, nobody would be able to express any opinion without a licence from the State.
This is mainly to protect actors and comedians from revelations about their sex-and-drugs lifestyles and politicians from disclosures about their financial affairs.
Yet we pride ourselves on our freedom.
Militant Islam is certainly a monstrous enemy. We must root it out and protect ourselves from madmen. We must cherish the freedom we’ve still got and protect it as much as possible from the ultimate silencer.
That includes resisting security service attempts to limit our freedoms even further.
But terrorists have already scored some crushing victories. Few people will risk their lives for the sake of a satirical cartoon. Censorship by Kalashnikov is even more successful than censorship by law.
But the truth is that freedom of speech is dying anyway. ‘Je suis Charlie’?
Non, nous ne sommes pas Charlie.

Sex, drugs and Cameron's £1.7 billion headache

When I issued the warning that drugs and prostitution would add to Britain’s EU contributions, it never occurred to me Brussels would try to back-date the bill.
But it seems the Commission is demanding £1.7 billion on the grounds that our GDP has been under-stated since 1995 thanks to the black economy.
We should not have agreed to measure this in the first place when it was patently obvious the net result would be to cost the taxpayer more money. And we certainly shouldn’t accept any back-dated demands from the EU.
This ludicrous farce is all our own fault for allowing illegal activities to become part of the official GDP calculations in the first place. David Cameron must reject it but he can’t possibly claim any credit if he does refuse to pay up because he allowed this situation to develop in the first place.
Why can’t we be more like the French and simply refuse to take illegal activities into account in the first place? And as for expecting penurious Greece or Italy to cough up more because of the Mafia, it’s a joke.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-29752613

Sex and drugs and the EU bankroll

When the Government announces its next GDP figures, for the third quarter of 2014, they will for the first time include calculations for the economic activity of prostitutes and drug-dealers.
These activities supposedly add up to £10 billion a year (though the statisticians admit this is more or less guesswork). Nevertheless, adjustments for drugs and prostitution together with some other changes will add something like £30 billion to Britain’s GDP.
The inclusion of illegal activities in the way we calculate GDP was insisted on by the European Union’s statisticians on the grounds that some countries add them in and others don’t so we should compare like with like.
But there is another good reason why the EU wants to boost the GDP figures of its member states and it’s not simply to make the Eurozone wasteland look a little healthier than it really is.
It’s because if a country’s GDP rises, so does its financial contribution to Brussels, because every nation’s contribution is partly based on its economic output.
Earlier this year, it was announced that reasonable economic growth in the UK would add £800 million to the £8.1 billion we already hand over to the EU.
Now, thanks to prostitution and drug-dealing, we face having to hand over yet more (even though the State does not tax, and therefore does not derive any financial benefit from, these transactions and does, in theory at least, try to limit them given that they are against the law).
Our statisticians have decided the illegal drugs industry is worth £4.4 billion a year. In addition, even though they more or less admit they haven’t got a clue, they say the country has 60,879 prostitutes raking in £5.3 billion with 25 clients a week paying an average of £67.16.
By their calculations it means the average lady of the night is on £87,000 a year which sounds a little difficult to believe.
Anyway, Britain contributes 0.74 per cent of GDP to the EU.
As a result of including prostitution and drug-dealing in the GDP figures, we will have to find another £74 million to give Brussels. Taking into account the other changes as well, our total bill rises by an extra £222 million.
Surely there is a scandal here which has not yet been fully appreciated. The EU will be living off immoral earnings to the tune of £74 million a year of taxpayers’ money.
Interestingly, France is refusing to do as it’s told and has said it will not revise its statistical analysis of economic activity to take into account these activities.

Scotland's figures just don't add up

Dodgy statistics dog the Scottish independence debate. How will an independent nation survive without North Sea oil revenue if the wells run dry? Can it survive financially even with the oil money?

I’ve had a look at some of the figures and all I can say is it’s no wonder the politicians on either side of the great divide can’t agree on anything.
For instance, HMRC has tried to split up its revenue by country.

On the basis of HMRC’s sums, Scotland delivered tax receipts of £42 billion in 2012-13, nine per cent of all UK tax revenues, if you include North Sea oil revenue (£37.8 billion, or 8.2 per cent, if you don’t).

But the BBC says Scottish revenue was £53 billion in the same year.

Curiously or not, this is the sum the Scottish Government also says the country raised in the same financial year.

There is, therefore, a huge gap between the supposed income from taxes in Scotland claimed by its Government and the sum claimed by HMRC.

SNP leader Alex Salmond says Scotland generated tax revenues, in 2012-13, £800 higher per head than the UK as a whole.

‘For every one of the last 33 years, tax receipts have been higher in Scotland than the UK,’ he said.

That’s questionable. What is less debatable is that Scotland’s public sector spends more than the rest of the UK per head. Again the figures vary wildly but one version puts the figures at £10,125 per head in Scotland compared with £8,788 in England.

Another has it at £12,300 for Scotland, £11,000 for the UK as a whole.

The UK Treasury says Scotland gets 14-16 per cent of Government spending; the Scottish Government puts it at 10-12 per cent.

What is less in dispute is that Scotland spent £65.2 billion in 2012-13. That’s a deficit of £12.1 billion (or considerably more depending on where you start from).

Still, the UK is overspending too, so what does it matter?

Well, Scotland’s deficit, even if you give the Scots all the oil money, represents 9.3 per cent of the UK national debt. Yet its population is only 8.3 per cent of the population.

That means the country is earning less and spending more than the nation as a whole. The UK overspent in 2012-13 by £2,031 per head; Scotland overspent by £2,285 per head.

It’s not a yawning chasm but it means Scotland is about 12 per cent more profligate than the UK as a whole even if you hand the country all the oil revenue.
If the oil dries up, it will have to borrow more money to balance the books – or it will have to impose the sort of spending cuts Mr Salmond rules out at every opportunity.

The Treasury’s Office for Budgetary Responsibility reckons North Sea oil revenue will fall from £5.581 billion in 2012-13 to between £3.6 billion and £3.2 billion over the next few years to 2019.

Luckily the Scottish Government has the answer.

The Scottish Government has decided its oil revenues won’t decline at all, or only by a small amount. Its statistics claim oil money will come in at between £4.8 billion (a fall of £900 million) and £8 billion (an increase of £2.5 billion).

Of course if we could predict future oil prices we’d all be millionaires. But as the Scots seem interested only in short-term pain or gain, it’s a pity, if not an impending national tragedy, that the numbers vary so wildly.

It is no wonder the two sides of the independence argument can’t agree on anything.