Just received by email. Nothing to add:

An Obituary printed in the London Times…….. Interesting and sadly rather true

Today we mourn the passing of a beloved old friend, Common Sense, who

has been with us for many years. No one knows for sure how old he was,

since his birth records were long ago lost in bureaucratic red tape. He

will be remembered as having cultivated such valuable lessons as:

Knowing when to come in out of the rain; Why the early bird gets the

worm; Life isn’t always fair; and maybe it was my fault.

Common Sense lived by simple, sound financial policies (don’t spend

more than you can earn) and reliable strategies (adults, not children,

are in charge).

His health began to deteriorate rapidly when well-intentioned but

overbearing regulations were set in place. Reports of a 6-year-old boy

charged with sexual harassment for kissing a classmate; teens suspended

from school for using mouthwash after lunch; and a teacher fired for

reprimanding an unruly student, only worsened his condition.

Common Sense lost ground when parents attacked teachers for doing the

job that they themselves had failed to do in disciplining their unruly

children.

It declined even further when s

chools were required to get parental

consent to administer sun lotion or an Aspirin to a student; but could

not inform parents when a student became pregnant and wanted to have an

abortion.

Common Sense lost the will to live as the churches became businesses;

and criminals received better treatment than their victims.

Common Sense took a beating when you couldn’t defend yourself from a

burglar in your own home and the burglar could sue you for assault.

Common Sense finally gave up the will to live, after a woman failed to

realize that a steaming cup of coffee was hot. She spilled a little in

her lap, and was promptly awarded a huge settlement.

Common Sense was preceded in death, by his parents, Truth and Trust, by

his wife, Discretion, by his daughter, Responsibility, and by his son, Reason.

He is survived by his 4 stepbrothers;

I Know My Rights

I Want It Now

Someone Else Is To Blame

I’m A Victim

Not many attended his funeral because so few realized he was gone.

If you still remember him, pass this on. If not, join the majority and do

nothing.

Update: HTML crap removed. Still getting used to Wardresses idiosyncrasies!

I caught the Chancellor on Radio 4 this morning and for once didn’t turn it off as a protection for my blood pressure. Anyway, he was wittering on about something or other when my subconscious picked up something about Northern Rock becoming that bank that likes to say yes – to pissing away our more of  money:

Northern Rock is to revive its mortgage lending with extra cash from the taxpayer, it has been announced.

It is part of government plans to boost lending generally, and reverses its earlier policy of winding down the bank’s loans.

WTF  I fumed as I sat in a traffic jam on the M40.  Weren’t they supposed to be paying us back PDQ? Some research over lunchtime revealed:

Instead of running down its mortgage book, it aims to lend an extra £5bn in new mortgages this year and up to £9bn from 2010.

To help fund this the Treasury will provide an extra £10bn in taxpayers money to the bank.

“This is good news for customers of Northern Rock and for consumers generally, who will benefit from an increase in mortgage availability,” said the bank.

So my question to the Chancellor is this:

If you are prepared to lend this money, in some cases at 90% LTV, you must think that at worst house prices have only another 10% to fall, where is your evidence? And if you don’t have the evidence what do you say to the 44,000* people you are effectively putting in to negative equity?

*From the same article

With the value of all new mortgages currently averaging £112,000, an extra £5bn of lending would amount to about 44,600 averaged-sized home loans per year.

I have a lot of time for Frank Field*. He is one of the few politicians who not only understands that the welfarism practiced in this country crushes the will of those who want to improve themselves and provides too soft  a cushion for those who can’t be bothered to work, but he has the balls to say it and point out the wekness in Labour’s policies. So when he says we should consider an return to some form of earnings related unemployment benefit we should listen very carefully:

The jobseeker’s allowance ought to be graded according to the number of years that a claimant has worked. It could be doubled to £121 for those with, say, ten years’ of NI contributions and increased to £181.50 for those with 15 years. Work is part of their DNA – a more generous benefit payment will not stop them returning to work as soon as they can.

Older readers may remember that we used to have such a system but it was phased out in the 70’s sometime because it was costing too much, presumably because there was little incentive to get back in to work quickly and it was too costly. IIRC it used to pay something like 60% of salary for a few months, tapering to basic benefit after about a year.

More worringly is the rest of the article which is a destruction of the New Deal and confirms what any person who has given it even half a thought knows is a waste of time, effort and money.

Anyway, if boy Dave wants to do something really different he couldn’t do much worse than invite Frank on to his front bench team and give him a ministerial/cabinet post post after the election. Just seeing the look on Gordon’s face would be worth it but it will also divert attention from accusations of the Tories being a bunch of public school boys who don’t understand real people.

*When Labour won the 1997 election Frank Field getting the social security brief was about the only positive I could see. He didn’t last long thogh once Gordon and  Harriet put the knife in.

Update

Apologies to Raedwald for missing the nod for the story

Gordon Brown on Jade Goody:

Prime Minister Gordon Brown has expressed his sympathies for reality TV star Jade Goody, who has been diagnosed with terminal cancer.

He said people should “applaud her determination to help her family”, by selling the media rights to her wedding this weekend.

And what is she going to do with the money she raises:

‘look Max, I know I’m ignorant but I’m going to make sure that my boys get the best education. I’m going to pay for their education for the rest of their lives because that’ll give them the best chance in life.’”

That’s right, she wants to the very thing he despises, educate her children privately, yet he applauds her. Has he no shame when it comes to tryng to gather votes?

BBC TV News is reporting that BMW is laying off its contract (agency) workers with 1 hours notice, although their web site doesn’t confirm the 1 hour notice  there is not reason to doubt the claim’s veracity:

Angry agency staff have confronted union officials at BMW’s Mini Cowley plant in Oxford, after the carmaker confirmed 850 job cuts at the site.

Casual staff, who had been laid off with immediate effect, threw fruit at leaders of the Unite union, claiming they felt betrayed.

Tony Woodley, joint general secretary of Unite, described BMW’s treatment of the workers as “disgraceful”.

For once I agree with Tony Wooodley. I have employed contract workers and been a contract worker and I find it hard to believe that BMW’s management needed to act in such a callous way and perhaps they need to be removed for incompetence.

If they didn’t see this coming then what have they been doing? Every other car manufacturer has had to make  redundancies and shout down plants so its hardly a surprise that car sales are falling off a cliff. If they did see it coming and delayed the decision to the last minute because they are dealing with contractors and didn’t need to then they are a bunch of cowardly and callous bastards who should be sacked immediately.

Even 13 year olds are paying attention:

BOY dad Alfie Patten yesterday admitted he does not know how much nappies cost — but said: “I think it’s a lot.”

Baby-faced Alfie, who is 13 but looks more like eight, became a father four days ago when his girlfriend Chantelle Steadman gave birth to 7lb 3oz Maisie Roxanne.

He told how he and Chantelle, 15, decided against an abortion after discovering she was pregnant.

And if she had been a little older she would have been placed on the sex offenders register!

What a way to run a country!

From my daily techie email news  letter from The Register:

Intel Kills off IDF Taiwan

What the fuck is the Israeli Defence Force doing in Taiwan was my first bleary though on seeing it. Then I realised its the Intel Developer Forum, phew WW3 averted.

Two excellent comments in blogs I have been reading this evening appealed to my sense of humour.

First up, The Magistrate who in response to calls from the chief executive of Network Rail’s call for harsher penalties for the who ignore lights and drive round barriers at level crossings (my emphasis):

Now that’s what I call a kneejerk reaction. The idea that heavier penalties deter offending is embedded in our culture, and very often wrong. If the idea of being hit by a hundred tons of train doing 60 mph doesn’t deter you, I don’t think that an extra year’s driving ban is likely to do the trick any more than the reclassification of cannabis is likely to make stoners give up the weed. Breaking the rules at a rail crossing already carries a non-judicial penalty of death. We JPs can’t top that.

Next from an excellent post by The Fat Bigot Opines. He has a go at the Home Secretary over her rather liberal use of the rules to fleece us of another £100k or so:

The allowance exists and it is up to each MP to decide whether to use it and, if so, to what extent. In this respect it is different from tax avoidance. Tax avoidance is about people investigating how much (more accurately, how little) they are obliged by law to pay from their own pocket. MPs’ second home allowances are about how much the MP requires the taxpayer to pay. In other words, one is about spending your own money and the other is about spending other people’s money. If there is one lesson to be learned from the universally bankrupt religion of socialism, it is that nothing is easier than spending other people’s money.

Its good to laugh, as they saying goes, and I did feel better.

I really don’t know which offends me more more about the latest expenses scandal from our pig troughing MP’s – Jacqui’s Smith’s offensive abuse of expenses to line her pocket or the feeble excuse that it is within the rules. Anyone with even a shred of integrity must see that dossing down with a sibling while and claiming your family home as a 2nd residence really wasn’t in the spirit of the rules.

And this has to be the feeblest of excuses:

A spokeswoman for Ms Smith has said she spends most of her time in London on government business and has “full approval” from the Commons Fees Office for associated expenses relating to her second home in the West Midlands

Are we really to believe that some bureaucrat is going to deny the Home Secretary this fiddle? What was that threat they used to use in Yes,  Prime Minister! when a civil servant didn’t do as they were told – ah yes that it, a posting to the War Graves Commission. I don’t know what the modern equivalent is but I bet it was hanging over the conversation like a Sword of Damocles.

Which brings me back to my main point, who thought up this rule in the first place? Well here’s a surprise, its MP’s themselves on The Members Estimates Committee.

Having shown that they have the integrity of a brothel keeper in Sodom it is time that the rules were set by an independent committee comprising a few selected “men in the street” and, more importantly signed off by a responsible adult, preferable a tax payer from the MP’s constituency.

As I type a plan is formulating which needs a bit a fleshing out – we should give each constituency a budget for their MP which they can pay as they wish. Any money saved at the end of the year could be spent on a worth cause withing the constituency. The constituency budget committee would be selected from rate payers on a random basis like a jury and they would serve for, say 2 years. I need to work this one through but I’m sure it will work.

Ben Goldacre of Bad Science fame has got himself in to a bit of bother with the lawyers of LBC. Its a long story but here’s the gist of it:

Jeni Barnett, a broadcaster on LBC, held a phone-in in which she had a rant against MMR. This lasted about 40 minutes and was so full of canards, in Ben’s view, that he felt moved to post an MP3 of the section of that section of the show but also lay out why she was wrong. Anyone who follows Bad Science should know that Ben is a crusader against bad journalism of which this is a classic example.

Ben then recieved a letter from LBC’s lawyers telling him to take the MP3 down  as it infringed their copyright and in the usual heavy handed style of corpoarte lawyers “reserved their rights”. Ben has done this and is seeking financial and legal help.

In an interetsing twist Holford Watch points out that Jeni’s rants were those of an ignoramous and not someone well informed:

We are therefore pleased to see Jeni admitting that she failed to act as one would expect a responsible broadcaster to:

When tested on the contents of the MMR vaccine I [Jeni] told the truth. I did not have the facts to hand. Was I ill informed? Yes. As a responsible broadcaster I should have been better prepared

How Jeni can refer to herself as a responsible broadcaster after admitting her ignorance is beyond me.

No matter what you think of MMR, trying to surpress someone like Ben Goldacre is crass and censorial  and I urge you to go and read the story and offer support if you can.

If you would like to listen to the original piece, its about 40mins, Guido points out that the MP3 has been “wikileaked” as an and you can either download it or listen to it here