A Fair Point - Worth Remembering

Now, I'll admit that i don't necessarily keep myself up to date with the minutiae of council affairs. I have my expectations on the service levels I expect to be delivered for the tax I contribute. Most of my expectations revolve around the norms for a civilised society that wants to avoid outbreaks of bubonic plague and likes to see the young educated to a point where they will make a decent contribution to our continued existence. I have my issues with the various services offered and might just contend that some of the council workers could do with a reality check, but just to be clear, I have never in my life before this con-dem government even heard even mention of the 'issue' that is people on welfare having more rooms than the government or council think they realistically need.

I have never considered it unfair that some welfare recipient, housed by the council in the first place, might be in a gaff that is deemed to have more rooms than the recipient actually needed-I'm just delighted they have a roof over their heads and hope it isn't too horrific a neighbourhood.

I have never, ever heard any council ever complain that the difficulties they have could be made easier by suddenly having to re-house thousands of the poorest people in society just so that they can continue to receive the benefits they need to survive.

Let noone forget that the Tory argument here is that the £1.31 billion pounds raised by the 50p tax limit is being cut - in order to gift those of us (it is us, as we're all in this together apparently) lucky enough to earn over £1million, at least an extra £42,295 per annum, whilst an estimated 660,000 of the poorest households will be denied an average of £14 per week - the argument is one of fairness. (figures courtesy of the excellent Ian Bell in his most recent Skewering of Millibland and the Clones).

 

Given that the 3 mainstream political parties have essentially become identikits of one another, vying for the centre-right spot owned by Blair, managed by public schoolboy, media, politics & marketing graduates who've never held down an honest job in their lives, but who all hope to emulate the illustrious
non-war-criminal former leader, to ultimately access similarly lucrative after-dinner speaking careers once they've embued us with their brilliance, I had almost forgotten what a shower of cunts the Tories actually are...  Hopefully none of us will be making that mistake again too soon.

Nexus 4

Haven't blogged in. quite some time, despite having had plenty of opinions to air. 2013 has a few events in the pipeline that I'd like to capture though, so with my snazzy new Nexus 4, I've installed the blogger app. Get ready for all sorts of poorly formatted and barely proofed rants, made possible by the enormous step forward in technology that is the android swipe keyboard.

That Doosan thing...

I'm not going to try to defend or castigate the SNP government for the Doosan thing last week, I think it looks bad on them, but what bothers me immensely about the whole subject is how a massive company in Renfrewshire could postpone a proposed investment in a Renfrewshire site (MP Jim Sheridan, Labour), including a large number of engineering jobs and Labour miss it entirely for 4 months. I mean if there was one area in which you might have thought Labour would have some interest or perhaps even activists involved it would be in Industrial relations and any plans for employing large numbers of people on Clydeside engineering would be right on their radar. But no, nothing, nada. It's all a big surprise to then that Alec Salmond didn't highlight it for them (really??). I mean if Labour aren't able to keep their eye on the ball in the one area where you might have thought they could be halfway competent, what the devil would they be like in areas in which they are less expert, such as hospital PPI contracts... oh!

Gone Cyclin'

Scottish Politics... yawn!
Scottish Football... yawn!
Scottish Rugby...... sob ;-(

Jim has gone cycling and is going to be racing Finlay over 81 miles of Highland Perthshire roads (no tacks this year you miserable f*ckers!) in May.



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Economist's explained

I think the Daily Mash tends to do a rather good job with the news, but if you're not a fan, here's an excerpt from the latest spat between people who think cuts are bad and those who think they're good, which I particularly enjoyed.

The people who signed the letter stressed it was a very important letter because they were not just people who did not like the cuts, they were economists.

Blanchflower added: "We feel it would help raise the level of debate if you could pretend that this time we have got it absolutely right."

But their plea was rejected by people who read articles instead of headlines.

Helen Archer, who usually gets all the way to the end and then has a thought, said: "People seem to have this idea that economists are motivated by facts and evidence instead of raw political prejudice. It's very queer."

She added: "They're not scientists. They're not even astrologers.

"They are like a drunk priest trying to explain the immaculate conception with a broken Etch-a-Sketch."

See!

The Vatican gets it right!!!

As a lapsed Catholic who had found in his antipathy towards the church in recent years growing towards disdain I'm shocked to find this morning that only the Vatican have been able to find an appropriate response to the news that the USA undertook a military operation within the boundaries of an independent country, resulting in the death of their great adversary - I wasn't aware that Osama Bin Laden had been through a trial and had verdict passed upon him, but apprently we're told in great cheer that Justice has been served... We'll see!

Still, amongst all the bluster we get this from the Vatican.

But the Vatican warned that no Christian should celebrate the death of the al Qaeda leader.

“A Christian should never rejoice” over the death of a human being, said Federico Lombardi, the Vatican spokesman, although bin Laden would have to answer to God for spreading hatred and ordering the killing of so many people.

“Osama bin Laden, as everyone knows, had the grave responsibility of having spread division and hate among people, causing the deaths of an innumerable number of people and exploiting religion for these purposes,” Father Lombardi said.

He said the Vatican hoped that the death of bin Laden “would not be an occasion for more hate, but for peace".

Quite so! but I hae ma doobts!

Infinite Monkeys...

...clattering away on an infinite number of keyboards will at some point produce the correct sequence of keystrokes to reproduce a Shakespearean play.

I often feel like my blog efforts are a wee bit like an effort from some of the other less 'lucky' monkeys.

What am I saying and why am I saying it?

When I try to say one thing I say too much and someone jumps in to argue about the thing I was really just using as a prop for my main argument and we get dragged into some semantics.

It's not just me though. If I indulge in some discussion with the Labour webbie chaps, I often find after I've addressed the bit that annoyed me about what they've said it turns out that's not what they were wanting to talk about anyway... ho hum!

It's a frustrating business, but this blogging lark is definitely good exercise for the mind and a worthy way of honing your own arguments (well, the nasty extremists aside!). Sometimes though you find yourself in the company of true wordsmiths, such as the esteemable Mark MacLachlan who writes of the Labour party...

"I believe that a profoundly honest social movement that mobilised to help the working man and woman has been subsumed from within by careerists desperate for power and willing to do almost anything to hold on to it."

With this one paragraph the monkeys can stop their key-bashing antics and go back to swinging on the trees - for I've found the paragraph I needed.