Seriously, he’s doing everything they think is good.

He went overseas and built a very profitable business in a poor country, Belize. He pays the taxes that Government mandates and employs local people. What could be better than helping to alleviate 3rd world poverty?

Then he brings some of that money over here. He doesn’t have to do that, its quite voluntary. He spends that money creating jobs for printers and broadcasters and many others. This will even trickle down to the poorest in our own country. We call this Direct Foreign Invetsment and is a good thing and something Labour has campaigned fowhen it goes on those foreign tripsr. Lord Ascroft even likes to spread his money around and is spending it in Labour held constituencies.

So, all in all, I really don’t know why Labour is making such a fuss, he is doing everything they think is good.

I suspect this will be a recurring theme as we move towards the dumbed down election.

The economy is crashing down around our ears, the pound is falling so fast its defying the laws of gravity and what do we get from the Government? Another fucking war, this time on small chips:

They have been a staple of British cuisine for more than a century.

But traditional chips are the latest target in the Government’s war on obesity.

Chip shop owners are being encouraged to produce thicker versions because they contain fewer calories and less fat.

As the old saying goes, you really couldn’t make this up.

Even the Daily Mash has difficulty satirising the bastards, now.

It wasn’t going to be long until a landlord was jailed because someone was smoking in his pup, his private property. You can read all about it and donate here:

There has been a fair amount of comment in the blogosphere regarding the six month jail sentence given to Nick Hogan for flouting the ‘no-smoking ban’.

Outrage has been duly expressed, here, there, and everywhere. Perhaps we can do better than just express outrage?

Nick was actually jailed for non-payment of the fine originally imposed for a ‘mass smoke-in’ on the day the ban came into force in 2007 in his pub, the ‘Swan and Barristers’ in Bolton. He no longer has that pub. He was fined again when council inspectors walked into his present pub and discovered a group of customers smoking – Nick wasn’t even on the premises.

His wife, Denise, is now managing their present pub in Chorley herself. Their trade is so low that they don’t even bother to open the downstairs bar. Nick is bankrupt, and had gone to court intending to argue that he could not afford the £500 a month payments demanded by the council towards their £11,600 bill for prosecuting him. He has already paid off £1,600. The court gave him a six month sentence instead, and he is currently in Forest Bank prison in Pendlebury, unable to help to earn the money which would ensure his release.

Denise has not even been able to speak to him since he was sentenced. She has merely been told to phone the prison on Monday to enquire when she might see him. She is confused, frightened, and feeling very lonely.

Or (and) you can wath this video of the story and what it means for the death of liberty:

and then go and donate.

I don’t normally do these, when they are in vogue I never seem to have an idea. Watching the Tories with their vote for change rubbish over the past few weeks has been toe curling  cringe-worthy,  in a watching your parents dance at a wedding way. When will they come out with some real policies?

Remember that fatuous lie back in 1997 – “24 hours to save the NHS“:

On the eve of the 1997 election, Tony Blair famously told voters they had 24 hours to save the NHS.

So did the patient survive?

People really believed that phrase. Labour had banged on about the NHS for so long that people really believed that the Tories wanted to privatise health care and that it would be a lot worse than having our beloved NHS run  as the biggest state run organisation in the world.  I really don’t know what it will take to lift the scales from the eyes of the vast majority of this country and make them see that the NHS is a disaster. It isn’t the “envy of the world”, except for the populations of third world countries that get no health care.

For the past couple of days I’ve been searching for the words to express my outrage at the latest revelations:

An independent inquiry found today that there were “shocking” systematic failures of hospital care in Mid Staffordshire that left patients routinely neglected, humiliated and in pain as the trust focused on cutting costs and hitting government targets.

And just in case you think this is a one off I refer you to the National Death Service blog, a truly depressing read. But before you go there stick with me because I haven’t finished yet. Back to this report on mid Staffs hospital, and bear in this isn’t from a public inquiry so we may not be getting the full story:

The appalling picture painted by the commission – which described how some patients drank water from vases because they were so thirsty and how many had to rely on their families for food – was not exaggerated, Francis said today.

If that didn’t move you to tears then how about this:

Francis found that for many patients the most basic elements of carewere neglected while others were left humiliated and sobbing. The report found that:

• Patients were left in sheets soiled with urine and faeces for considerable periods of time.

• There was striking evidence of the incidence of falls suffered by patients, some of which led to serious injury. Many took place unobserved by staff

• The attitude of nursing staff left much to be desired

• Relatives took to taking sheets home to wash

• There was insufficient care for patients’ dignity, with some left in degrading conditions and others inadequately dressed in view of passersby

• Families were forced to remove used bandages and dressings from public areas and clean toilets themselves for fear of catching infections.

This sounds like one of those Radio 4 Christmas appeals for a disaster struck third world country, not something happening in our own beloved NHS, an NHS that can do no wrong.

So what was the Government doing whilst this was all going on you might ask? This would be the same Government that promised to save the NHS:

In an exclusive interview with The Slog this afternoon, Julie Bailey the Head of campaigning site Cure the NHS* blew the lid off The Big Secret behind Andy Burnham’s refusal to hold a public enquiry: as Junior Health Minister in June 2007, Baily claims, Burnham signed off Stafford’s third-stage process of elevation to Foundation Trust Status.

For some reason, if he did do this, Burnham signed off stage three of the four-stage process despite the hospital having FOUR high-alerts for negligence against its name.

He was too busy scamming us with his expenses to worry about whether this hospital was actually looking after patients:

Andy Burnham, the Culture Secretary, was involved in a secret eight-month battle with the fees office after making a single expenses claim for more than £16,500 to buy and renovate a new London flat.

The authorities finally agreed to pay the money — after rejecting the claim on three separate occasions — following a series of increasingly desperate pleas from the minister and his wife.

Shortly before Christmas 2005, Mr Burnham even wrote to the fees office that he “might be in line for a divorce” if reimbursement for his expenses was not forthcoming within days.

In July 2007, Mr Burnham attempted to reclaim the costs of buying a £19.99 bath robe from Ikea.

I’m still burning with rage but fortunately someone far better then I has written a masterpiece. The problem is reading it again just make me angrier. It starts off by listing all the incompetents who have had responsibility for the NHS since Labour came to office**, demolishing each and every one in turn:

instead they are stuffing their faces and shitting in ours. Alan Milburn, former layabout, amazingly became health secretary, resigned to patch up his common-law marriage, cops a hundred grand a year for “advising” firms trying to privatise many aspects of the NHS. Also drawing a full-time salary as a part-time MP.

NewLabour’s Health Secretaries have turned the NHS auxiliaries into paupers, the greedy bastard doctors into idle, dirty tyrants, abandoning their patients to shell-shocked, European locums, the managers into millionaires and the hospitals into full-steam ahead extermination camps for the vulnerable.

[...]

Patsy Leatherface Hewitt, former Kinnock Babe, married to a judge, son’s a junky; gobby, patronising, useless career shitbag, jointly responsible with the Postman [Alan Milburn] for national epidemic of HAIs, deaths of hundreds, thousands. Couldn’t even see to it that the hospitals were as clean as the local chippy. Wouldn’t wanna eat round her gaff. Now working full-time for Boots the Chemists, honest, not invent, and drawing full-time salary as part-time MP

Thats all great knockabout stuff, and there’s lots more of it, but then he really hits home:

But the worst, the very worst of it, what is unspeakable and unthinkable and intolerable is that people, relatively unsophisticated, came back from Europe and the Pacific and wandered around their bombed-out homes and communities and for themselves and for the dead voted for something different; emaciated POWs, miraculaously surviving the Nasty Nips’ work camps, frightened and traumatised, their mates beheaded and starved, voted for something different. And they built houses and they built factories and they suffered rationing and delay and privation but they banished rickets and for a time, unemployment and hunger. And the schools worked. And there were to be pensions, at sixty and sixty five. And health care, from cradle to grave. The people bootstrapped themselves, from shattered, ruined communities, they built homes and hospitals and futures, when lesser people might have merged into, gone along with an uber-Europe, as had the French and the Dutch and the Danes and the Poles and the rest, these people, scorned by Uncle Sam, drip-fed a little aid , a little materiel, a few rusty ships, these people kept the world free and now they and their children enter hospitals built with their taxes and are murdered; their leaders, standing on the shoulders, but shitting in the faces of the post-war reformers, too busy fellating Russian gangsters in Strasbourg, oil billionaires in Kabul, treat them with contempt, No, they shriek, we must have more, the Kinnocks, the Blairs, we must have more, how else will you attract people of our calibre, unless we have more and more and more.They have now betrayed everything for which people fought and died and went without;

[...]

That old people go into hospital, die through avoidable neglect, indifference and cruelty and that those paid to ensure the opposite happens receive golden handshakes, peerages and yet more positions of responsibility, this is not hyperbole, this is organised crime, this is not a government at its fag-end, part of the merry-go-round of party politics preached by shitbags like the self-fellating Mr Nick Robinson, this is much worse; sharpen your sticks, fill your cupboards, buy some seeds and get tough, this is Ruin.

I’ve only touched on his post, go and give the guy some much deserved traffic for this masterpiece, and then get angry. Point this out every time some Labour scumbag tells you the NHS is safe with them, better still, print off this post and the report, roll them up very tightly and thrust one end into their solar plexus. That should disable them long enough for us to get the hempen rope and find a lamppost.

H/T Old Holborn

* It can’t be cured, but at least they recognise there’s a problem.

** I do wish peoplle would stop saying “power”, it just encourages the fuckers

Have you noticed that whenever problems are uncovered in public service organisations we are assured that “lessons have been learned” ? The implication being that we don’t need to worry our silly little heads, we should move along and that our hard earned cash is secure with them. These lessons are never cheap and the latest one has cost us a cool £110m:

The ambitious redevelopment of Broadcasting House in central London cost the BBC more than £100m extra than it had originally planned.

[..}

It means a total extra overspend of £110m resulting from delays and complications on the redevelopment of the 78-year-old building.

Note that the BBC is saying £100m on their news bulletins and making the claim about lessons being learned.

Now I’m not daft enough to believe that mistakes are never made and that on a project as long and complex as this changes have to be made which inevitably means more money; that’s why we always budget for contingencies. So I’m going to assume that this £110m is over and above normal contingency budgeting, because I can’t be arsed to read the report and because that is how it should be read in the real world.

In this case the lessons learned argument isn’t good enough and heads should roll. The time to learn lessons is when we are junior managers and our mistakes aren’t that costly. As we make these mistakes we build up what we call experience. As we increase our experience we move up the management ladder and apply that experience to make sure that big mistakes don’t happen. We do that by supervising our juniors and making sure their cumulative mistakes don’t get out of hand and by not fucking up our selves.

The way we are prevented from making big mistakes is by having  reporting mechanisms so that project boards and finance teams can keep a constant eye on project costs and timescales. This way there is always a chance to either nip problems in the bud, sign off on any new requirements or sack the project manager(s) and bring in someone with more experience and discipline.

So, someone, somewhere screwed up big time. Either in the original appointments of the senior project teams of in supervising them. Either way that someone should be singled out and fired, however I suspect they are long gone and hiding in some other dark corner of our public service organisations.

The only lesson that has ever been learned is that public bodies are incapable of conceiving and implementing grand projects, but that doesn’t stop them happening.

Perhaps a clue to why these lessons are never headed is given by the way the BBC has put this in its entertainment section.

Every schoolboy of my generation  will know what I’m getting at, the history may not be accurate but the tale is a salutary warning about how those need to be careful in who they employ and how they issue orders:

Henry ll is supposed to have cried out the words above words in frustration at Thomas a Becket’s deeds. Four knights overheard this and took it as a command and set off to arrest Becket and ended up killing him. Henry was said to be enraged when he heard the news of Becket’s death as that wasn’t his intention.

I was reminded of this account of  history when I heard the latest story of Gordon Brown denying stories that he set his henchmen his own Chancellor:

Gordon Brown has denied ordering any briefing against his chancellor, after Alistair Darling said “the forces of hell” had been unleashed against him.

Mr Darling said No 10 and the Tories had given him “a weekend you could have done without” after he had forecast the worst recession for 60 years, in 2008.

Anyone who follows Guido Fawkes will know that Gordon Brown has surrounded himself with some unsavoury characters who think nothing of lying and cheating in the furtherance of their bosses career. Some of it even hit the MSM when Damien McBride resigned.

So whilst it might be strictly accurate that Gordon Brown didn’t actually order the attacks on Alistair Darling, I think we can be certain that he didn’t tell them not to. Its also easy to imagine a rantiong Gordon Brown shouting his frustration at what Alistair Darling had said and this being overheard by his loyal aides who, knowing their boss, took the law in to their own hands beleiving that this is what he wanted. Gordon Brown does have a track record after all.

Generally I don’t go much for politicians or anyone else apologising for past policies because it tends to be politicians apologising for something they had no control over, to people who weren’t directly affected and all done for PR purposes and with the benefit of a PhD in hindsight. This time it is different:

Gordon Brown is set to apologise for the UK’s role in sending more than 130,000 children to former colonies where many suffered abuse.

The Child Migrants Programme, which ran from the 1920s to the 1960s, sent poor children to a “better life” in countries such as Australia and Canada.

But many were abused and ended up in institutions or as labourers on farms.

It is different for one reason – the people who were directly affected by a policy that had tragic unintended consequences are still alive and able to accept an apology. However I still believe it is a PR stunt aimed at Gordon Brown to trying to polish his tarnished reputation.

Am I being cynical?  If there are still people alive affected by the policy there must be someone alive who was involved in implementing and continuing that policy, or who represented one of the Governments that maintained the policy even if in some junior capacity. They are the ones who should be making the apology, not because they are directly culpable, but because they can genuinely speak on behalf  of those who were involved and any apology they make will have more resonance.

I reckon that if the PM facilitated the meeting, say in Downing Street, then they would far more qudos as old cynics like me would be marginalised.

Before getting to the point I should make my position on H&S clear – it is a GOOD thing. I have worked on the fringes of the construction industry and because I commissioned work and sent employees in to potentially dangerous situations, roof tops and building sites, I  have taken a keen interest in Health and Safety at Work legislation, partly because I had personal responsibility and could face criminal charges in the event of something going wrong. But personal culpability wasn’t the main reason, I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t involved in someones death or injury through omission, whether legally culpable or not.

Back in the 90’s, before a lot of the current legislation and working practices came in to force, I was on the fringes of a project that went horribly wrong. Whilst no single person was to blame a father of two young children was killed in an incident that was preventable. Part of the problem was that no single person had responsibility and the idea of “risk assessment” and clearly defined project H&S responsibilities wasn’t clearly defined. Under current legislation this death shouldn’t happen because roles and resp0nsibilities are very clear as are processes, if it does itwill be clear who hasn’t done their job. Its also worth noting that even with all the legislation in 2007/8 there were 69 deaths in the construction industry so even with H&S there are still risks.

With this in mind I am genrally skeptical of those who dismiss H&S out of hand through ignorance and those who use it as a crutch or a way of preventing something being done. All H&S requires us to do is think and take all reasonable steps to prevent injury and death – not an unreasonable imposition on employer and employee. Yes, it does put a lot of onus on employees to think before they act and not to unreasonably endanger themselves or fellow workers. (A few years ago a rigger who was trained, provided with all the right equipment and given clear and concise processes and procedures fell off a tower and broke his back and was crippled for life. He hadn’t used his safety equipment and was dismissed immediately without compensation. He lost his case because it was his fault.)

So when I saw this, via the Magistrates Blog I was appalled (my emphasis):

If you think that this is ridiculous imagine a nightmare scenario whereby the Government is able to give the HSE and other regulators the power (by Henry VIII order and with little parliamentary scrutiny) to bypass the criminal courts (with their inconvenient burdens of proof and rules of evidence and independent juries and JPs) and hand out civil sanctions (a bit like expensive parking tickets) for criminal offences which the recipient would have a right to appeal to an administrative tribunal (where the civil burden and standard of proof would be on the wrongdoer to prove that he had done no wrong).  Oh sorry that’s not a nightmare – but is actually on the statute books

I really don’t know where to start, it is just so wrong and dangerous in so many ways, but lets have a go:

We have appointed bureaucrats as prosecutor, judge and jury. There’s are good reasons why we have an independent judiciary and criminal courts with trained judges and juries of our peers. One them is to protect us against an overbearing state in the form of its functionaries. Lets be kind and assujme that those functionaries are genuine people who mean well. The problem is that like all of us they become subject to group think when in an environment surrounded by like minded peers. Their judgment becomes clouded and there is nobody to reign them in and they believe their own judgement. This will lead to injustice and petty prosecutions.

How can anyone prove their innocence? Its like asking them to prove a negative, it a logical fallacy and can’t be done. Its also against natural justice, the accuser should always have to prove their case and the accused given the protection of presumptive innocence and the protection of trial by jury when when their liberty or livelihood is at stake.

Giving bureaucrats this amount of power leads to third world type corruption. It won’t take long before the easily corruptible realise that they can extort money or for those who really are guilty to avoid severe punishment by bribing officials. Its therefore counter productive as it negates all the good work that H&S legislation has done over the past few years by allowing bad and corrupt employers to wilfully endanger employees and the general public.

It puts up costs for business and increases risk of something going wrong. They will find it difficult to get goog people to work in managerial roles and will need to pay higher wages, if they can get people in the first place. The best way to improve H&S is to have good people  in managerial positions and the risk of trial by bureaucrat will put many people off.

Just another example of this how this illiberal Governement really has lost the plot.

PS Whilst I have used the construction industry as an example this all applies to every work place.

Heard on the Today sports report about Jose Mourinho:

He’s the sort of person who joined the navy so the world could see him

Apparently he could son be back managing an English* football team – I hope so because he was a breath of fresh air in news conferences. Much more fun than most of the dour incumbents.

*That would be a club that plays in England, not necessarily one the has any English players.