I have tried a dozen different ways to communicate with you and failed to get the message through that you have stopped giving me access to my accounts, you continued to send threatening emails demanding money I have been paying.
I informed you some time ago I no longer wanted to receive any 'service' from you and proposed to cancel my ransom payments of £5 a month. Today you send me a demand for £25. You cannot be serious.
Save the Children turned down a donation of £750,000 to help Ukranian refugees because it came from a North Sea gas producer. As a result I have cancelled my monthly standing order and sent the following email:
I wanted you to know that I have today cancelled my monthly standing order to Save the Children in protest at your rejection of a £750,000 donation because it is linked to fossil fuels.
If you can afford to refuse so much money, and deprive potential beneficiaries of that amount, you certainly don’t need my chicken-feed contribution.
I have for many years believed your
highly-politicised organisation, with its excessively over-paid executives, was
squandering the money it received from poor idiots like me but I am now quite
convinced you are more interested in feathering your own nest,
virtue-signalling and playing to the Guardian-reading gallery than you are to
saving children.
I do hope you will forward this email to some of those exalted powers-that-be, not that it will make any difference but it would at least alert them to how contemptible they have become in the eyes of at least one long-term supporter.
Mili Sargeant from the alleged charity replied:
Thank you for getting in touch and sharing your thoughts on this matter.
Save the Children is committed to making decisions that are in the best
interest of the charity but ultimately in the best interests of children. Our
Donation Acceptance and Refusal Policy ensures we do not compromise on our
mission and values when it comes to raising income. This policy governs the
acceptance and refusal of donations by Save the Children UK where there is
perceived risk to our programming, staff, reputation, financial position or
brand in accepting the donation and is reviewed regularly by our Board of Trustees
and Executive Directors.
Our work is focused on meeting the immediate needs of children in crises
around the world, as well as protecting their futures. We will take tough but
calculated decisions where needed to achieve this. This means raising and
spending funds responsibly, but also turning down funding where we believe
doing so could have a greater long-term impact for children. Climate change is
one of the biggest threats to children’s future and now is the time to do
everything we can to minimise the impact of this.
We are in the process of reviewing our global policy on accepting
donations from fossil fuel companies to ensure it reflects our position on the
threat the climate crisis poses to children.
We understand that not everyone will agree with this decision, though I
hope this goes some way to explaining why we have chosen not to accept funding
from Neptune Energy.
Thank you again for all the support you have shown Save the Children. As
you mentioned your regular contribution to Save the Children via standing
order, you will need to cancel this at the bank. If possible, please can you
kindly provide me with your address so that I can update your records with us
and log your complaint.
I look forward to hearing from you again soon.
I responded:
Thank you for your cut-and-paste reply. I can't believe anyone takes this
guff seriously.
The long-term impact of climate change is all very well but the immediate
and necessary needs of refugees from a war zone surely take immediate priority.
Either that or Save the Children now has so much money it doesn't know what to
do with it all.
It is deeply regrettable your organisation has such delicate sensibilities
it cannot see the pain and suffering before its very eyes.
If, and it’s a bigger if than we might like, but if we all survive without being vaporised in a nuclear war, then Vlad Putin has done us all a favour.
The monstrous invasion of the Ukraine is the drastic wake-up call the West has needed for some time.
We have been sleepwalking into this disaster ever since the fall of the Berlin Wall.
We have complacently assumed Russia and China would more or less accept our liberal, capitalist, freedom-loving values and we could all live peacefully side by side.
Their true, sinister, aims have always been visible but we preferred to look the other way.
We have allowed the Chinese to devastate our manufacturing industry and steal our technology.
We have encouraged ultra-rich Russian crooks, thieves and murderers to launder their money through London.
The disgusting sight of gold- and blood-dripping oligarchs, their vile women and entitled offspring flaunting their ill-gotten gains around our country has been one of the most appalling developments of recent years.
We enrich their dictators’ regimes by lapping up cheap goods made by slave labour in mega-cities like the one responsible for unleashing coronavirus on the world.
The Chinese and Russians between them are destroying civilisation, democracy and innocent lives – genocide or invasion, murder and incarceration, it’s all the same to their barbaric leaders.
What has the West being doing instead of recognising our enemies and dealing with their many threats?
We have spent our time banning free speech in universities in case some non-woke feminist might upset a bloke who wants to pretend he’s a woman.
We have been chucking statues in the sea because someone over 200 years ago did something reprehensible.
We have abandoned any idea of fuelling our own power needs in exchange for ineffectual windmills, Russian gas and Chinese-financed, French-owned nuclear power plants that may never be built.
Oh and we have saved money by giving up on the idea we might one day need to go to war again to defend ourselves. It’s far more important our soldiers and spies recognise their white privilege.
If we see the invasion of the Ukraine as an opportunity to get a grip, recognise what’s really important and realise our way of life is under constant threat from countries which would love to destroy us, some good may yet come out of this terrible war.
Tragically, I doubt if we have the strength of will to recognise just how ridiculously complacent we have become. Meanwhile, the destruction of our freedoms will continue apace.
I hope we recognise the urgent need to change before it really is too late.
Otherwise, the era of peace, freedom and democracy may be coming to an end. Do our leaders – and the rest of us – have the guts to hold back the tide of chaos, dictatorship and destruction? I doubt it.
We all know Prince Andrew is an obnoxious, entitled nob who deserves zero sympathy for bringing the Royal Family into disrepute but what illegal activities did he actually engage in?
His critics bandy about words like 'rape' and 'paedophilia' but he is guilty of neither. At the absolute worst, he may - if we choose to disbelieve his denials - have had sex three times with a 17-year-old girl.
Nobody has claimed this was anything but consensual. She may, perhaps, have been 'trafficked' but she was old enough to make up her own mind whether she wanted to jet around the world with millionaires. And by all accounts she boasted of having sex with the Prince.
So if it was consensual, and she was 17, where is the crime?
The Prince and Virginia Roberts allegedly had sex in London, New York and the US Virgin Islands (oh the irony).
It is quite legal to have sex with a 17-year-old, no matter what the age of the other participant, in London and New York. In the Virgin Islands, the age of consent varies from 13 to 18 but, supposing the latter applied in this case, the Prince might be guilty of statutory rape on that occasion.
However, Ms Roberts or Giuffre as she is these days, alleges their passionate embraces took place during an orgy involving nine other girls as well. Are we supposed to take her allegation seriously in such circumstances?
The hatred directed at Prince Andrew - much of it fomented by those who loathe and detest the Monarchy - is over-done, misplaced and unfair.
Now he and his mother are £12 million the poorer, it is difficult not to conclude that Prince Andrew, not Virginia Roberts, is the real victim.
British Airways used to claim it was the world's favourite airline. It must now be the worst.
I have never had a trouble-free flight with them and it is now impossible to talk to anyone in the entire organisation.
It doesn't deserve passengers. It is an abomination.
Our new multi-million pound GP surgery in Broadway, Worcestershire, might be a marvellous new facility - as long as you don't want to see a GP. Getting a face-to-face appointment is impossible.
As a result, I wrote a review on the NHS website about the New Barn Close Surgery:
If you want to see a doctor, go elsewhere. If you are thinking of being ill, go elsewhere. If you want to see a nice new building but no GPs, this is the place for you.
In case anyone might think reviews on a website run by the NHS might somehow be uncensored, I received the following email this morning:
PLEASE NOTE THIS EMAIL IS NOT MONITORED. IF YOU RESPOND TO THIS EMAIL YOU WILL NOT GET A RESPONSE.
Thank you for taking the time to leave a review for Barn Close Surgery on the NHS website.
Unfortunately, we are unable to publish your review as it does not contain enough information regarding your experience at the service.
See our comments policy.
Please provide more details about what you liked or disliked about the service, including the reasons you have come to this conclusion.
Consider adding as much information as possible to help assist others in making decisions about their choice of provider or allow the provider to take the feedback and use it in a constructive way.
Kind regards,
The NHS website ratings and reviews team
PLEASE NOTE THIS EMAIL IS NOT MONITORED. IF YOU RESPOND TO THIS EMAIL YOU WILL NOT GET A RESPONSE.
The ratings and reviews team are unable to offer health advice. For life threatening or emergency medical issues please dial 999. For other urgent medical concerns, please dial 111, or visit 111.nhs.uk
Review reference number: 1190242
‘Our’ National Health Service is a national disgrace.
Our overpaid, lazy, part-time doctors won’t see us face to face,
They prefer to fob you off with a random telephone call
Which takes place at a time of their choosing if it takes place at all.
In the queue at the supermarket when you’ve gone down the shops,
With a basket filled with baked beans, biscuits and lamb chops,
Your doctor will call you and make you explain
In front of an interested crowd of people where exactly you feel the pain,
Why you have these embarrassing lumps
And what is leaving you so down in the dumps.
When they have finished they’ll no doubt fob you off
With a pill and some tests and something for that cough,
Then they’ll get into their personal-registered four-by-four
While the BMA campaigns for more money, more, more more.
And this was written before it took an ambulance almost 24 hours to collect a friend who needed to go into hospital.
Is Michael Gove going to row back on the Government’s plans to concrete over the countryside? He should do if he wants the Conservatives to win the next election.
The disco-dancing, nerdy new Secretary of State
for Everything Important to Re-election has supposedly been told to do
something to stop property developers decimating this green and pleasant land.
First off, he’ll have to abandon the Tories’
proposals to deny locals any say in what happens in their back yard and drop
the idea that local councils are ordered to build X-thousand new homes whether
they like it or not.
Sadly, even if the Government does trim its sails
a bit and refuse to provide a blank cheque for property developers, not much
will change because the planning system itself is in the hands of bureaucrats
who will ensure it cannot change.
The local authority ‘experts’, the planning
lawyers, the civil service command-and-control policy and the developers
themselves will ensure nothing really puts the brakes on a rotten and corrupt
system.
Yes, we need more homes (though we need fewer of
them now most EU migrants have gone back home again). Yes, they need to be
affordable for young people. And yes, they might as well be as
environmentally-friendly as possible.
This can be achieved by re-purposing redundant
town centres, unwanted office blocks and abandoned factories. It’s just a bit
harder for the developers to do that and there may be a little less money to be
made.
But the alternative of ploughing up the Green
Belt is worse. And if Mr Gove does not realise that then he need only remember the
Chesham and Amersham by-election when the seat was won by the Liberal Democrats
with 57 per cent of the vote on a swing from the Conservatives of 25 per cent.
An idiot’s guide to commentating on the Lions tour if you work for Sky TV. All you need to do is repeat these meaningless and increasingly irritating phrases at irregular intervals throughout each game:
1. The get-goI've made a new video about my book 'Close of Play' to the tune of the Kinks' 'Village Green Preservation Society' because it seemed appropriate.
Just had an email titled: 'UK Planning Laws Have Changed - Find The Best Opportunities Before Anyone Else!'
It's promoting some free webinar promising:
This is a
significant word. ‘Collaborator’ has an infamous ring to it. Mostly it brings
to mind Vichy France and the Governments of other countries willing to work
with the Nazis during World War Two.
And I
suspect, without meaning to, Boris Johnson was subliminally thinking of Nazi
totalitarianism when he imposed his latest nationwide lockdown, promising
bigger fines for misdemeanours and threatening to call in the army to police
the streets.
It won’t be
long before your average shopping centre looks like Belfast in the 1970s with
armoured cars on street corners and soldiers toting machine guns glaring with
hostility at every passer-by (not to mention probably shooting on the spot
anyone who dares to chat with an acquaintance let alone fails to wear a face
mask).
To what
purpose this novel coronavirus clampdown? To save us from ourselves, of course.
We’ve been eating out to help out; we’ve been down the pub; we’ve even taken a
brief holiday, probably in this country and certainly after self-isolating
before, during and afterwards.
But it seems
the supposed ‘rule of six’ imposed only a week ago was, within days, apparently
‘not working’, at least according to the demented statistic-peddlers Boris put
before the nation to scare the children.
Chris Whitty
and his sidekick Sir Patrick Vallance, the Tweedledee and Tweedledum of the
coronavirus pandemic, displayed a bogus graph claiming that, without drastic
action, the spread of the virus would double every seven days. By mid-October,
the total would reach 50,000, they claimed.
They did
admit this graph and its scary number was ‘not a prediction’. But it was
misleading, dangerous and irresponsible for them to concentrate on a
nonsensical statistic which, if we were to give them any credit, could be seen
as a ‘worst-case scenario’.
Sadly,
throughout this pandemic, the first casualty has been the truth. Nobody is
prepared to admit they really do not know what might happen in any given
situation. They bandy about numbers like the 50,000 - or, more terrifying
still, the 500,000 originally doomed to die unless lockdown was imposed in
March - without real evidence to support their claims.
Yet the
health doom-mongers and their captive politicians, led by Mr Johnson who is
half the man he used to be, are allowed to run wild.
They have
been so successful in terrifying us all that, in some polls at least, a
majority of the population even now thinks the Government has not gone far enough
in protecting us.
We have a
Government determined to sacrifice everything on the altar of the pandemic. The
economy is shot to pieces. Much of it will never recover. Shops, pubs, clubs,
restaurants, theatres, airlines, even football clubs - some of them will never
re-open. Any business or pastime where people get together and socialise is
doomed to decay and, in many cases, death.
Meanwhile
the National Health Service has abandoned the idea of caring for the nation’s
health. You can’t see a GP. You can’t get a flu jab if you’re under 65. You
daren’t bother A&E. You can’t get early warning of cancer or many other
fatal diseases.
Hideously,
you are now much more likely to die at home of some treatable but ignored
condition than you are to catch, let alone die from, coronavirus.
In one week
earlier this month, according to the Office for National Statistics, one of the
less untrustworthy sources of numbers, 99 people died of Covid-19 while a
needless 830 died at home of other causes.
The virus
panic, not the pandemic itself, is killing us and killing our economy and
hardly a voice is raised to question what’s going on let alone protest.
Take, as a
small example, the 10pm curfew on pubs. Even the Government itself admits there
is no evidence this will do any good, reduce the rate of infection or save a
single life. Yet we accept the decision with scarcely a murmur.
The
totalitarian imposition of what is almost martial law across the United Kingdom
- thanks to the ‘collaboration’ of the First Ministers - is taking place with
the supine, unquestioning acquiescence of our politicians.
The long
list of Government failings - from the shortage of PPE at the outset to the collapse
of the virus testing system under Dido Harding, the staggeringly inept wife of
a Tory MP who was at university with David Cameron - makes it impossible to
believe a word they tell us any more.
We cannot
believe what we are told. We watch with incredulity at the imposition of
curfews, house-arrest, swingeing fines and a new authoritarianism we have been
browbeaten into believing is for our own good.
We need
fewer collaborators. We must question every statement and assertion. We must
trust nobody in any position of power. They are lying to us.
I've just written a piece for a cricket blog. Read it here: https://cricket-cup.blogspot.com/2020/09/played-and-missed.html
'Close of Play', a book about plans to build on a village cricket ground, explores what happens when the planning process goes haywire and local opinion counts for nothing.
BOOK OUT NOW ON KINDLE AND IN PAPERBACK
AUDIOBOOK COMING SOON.
I’ve been banned by Facebook.
Why? I’ve no idea.
What can I do about it?
Nothing.
What have they said?
‘You can't use Facebook because your account, or activity on it, didn't follow our Community Standards. We have already reviewed this decision and it can't be reversed. To learn more about the reasons why we disable accounts visit the Community Standards.’
Can I talk to them and ask for an explanation?
Of course not.
Do I care?
A bit. It’s not nice being banned especially when you genuinely do not have a first clue what your transgression might have been.
Will I miss Facebook?
A bit. But as I rarely used it, I don’t suppose it matters all that much.
The point has finally come where I am not prepared to defend Boris
Johnson and his government any longer.
The decision to impose a face mask on the entire population is the last
straw. This camel’s back has broken.
The medical evidence for the use of face masks is not overwhelming. There is
some suggestion they may help prevent the spread of the coronavirus and it
would seem logical that an airborne disease would be less virulent if it’s
spread were to be inhibited.
Yet only a few weeks ago the Government claimed masks were more or less useless
and should not be worn by ordinary people.
This, too, was based on medical advice. Not advice about whether masks prevent
the spread of disease but advice that encouraging ordinary people to wear them
would restrict their availability to the NHS.
This suggests that, back in March, the Government knew masks helped slow the
spread of disease and wanted to protect those most at risk.
Fair enough, you may think. But it must mean the Government lied and lied and
lied again about the use of masks.
Only now, when infections have fallen, the risk has lessened and supplies of
masks are plentiful, does the Government change the law and make wearing face
masks compulsory in shops as well as on public transport.
This represents an attack on our very humanity, never mind the fact that it is yet
another imposition on our long-lost, late-lamented freedoms.
And why are face masks suddenly necessary? Supposedly to give us more
confidence to go shopping without fearing the proximity of other people.
It is yet another attack on civil liberties, like the laws which made it a criminal
offence to attend a loved one’s funeral or banned lovers from spending the
night together.
And yet the number of deaths from Covid-19 is still lower than the number of
people who died from flu just three winters ago when no precautions were taken,
no impositions on our liberty were thought necessary and, in reality, nobody
noticed.
Whatever happened to common sense? Of course we must avoid situations where
infection might be spread, such as Black Lives Matter demonstrations, rave
parties or football celebrations.
But as next to nothing is done to prevent such potentially calamitous
situations, why launch an out-and-out assault on ordinary people going about
their daily business?
For months the Government has been criticised over its response to the virus.
It failed to prepare. It reacted slowly. It has squandered billions. It has
presided over the unprecedented, totalitarian destruction of our civil
liberties.
And yet we have the highest death toll in Europe. So, on any measure, the
Government failed to protect us or mitigate the consequences of the virus.
I have so far argued Boris Johnson and his ministers were doing as well as
could be expected in these strange times.
I don’t believe that any longer. They are lost, flailing around in the dark,
timid, uncertain, so terrified of their own shadows they are clueless and they
have exposed their own incompetence for all to see.
The face mask fiasco is a fine example of their failure. Either we should have
had them all along or they are a mere cosmetic decoration imposed for no reason
other than to make ministers feel they are doing something.
The threat of a £100 fine for not wearing a mask in the shops may give some of
us more confidence. Others, me included, will merely avoid the shops as much as
possible so I do not have to wear a mask or encounter other dehumanised
automatons in their full timidity.
How can we hope for the world to return to normal when we are supposed to walk
around in these grim reminders of the great plague?
Boris Johnson and his unimpressive chums have wrecked our economy, destroyed
lives and ruined the education of an entire generation of young people.
And in exchange they have allowed the NHS to desert its post so anyone with an
illness that’s not coronavirus is neglected while elderly patients have been
off-loaded onto care homes where they have spread the infection far and wide.
The scandalous way this government has dealt with the outbreak is beyond
belief.
The confusion over face masks is not, in itself, a reason to revile Mr Johnson
and his inept administration. But it is symbolic of their utter failure at
every stage.
There has been, and will continue to be, a heavy price to pay for their
shambolic incompetence. I don’t see how we can ever trust this lot again.
