Daily Headline – 17/04/13

Corporations to continue stifling free speech

The House of Lords amendment to the UK’s ‘defamation bill’ has been removed by the Conservatives in the House of Commons.

The bill would have prevented large companies ranging from McDonald’s to Tesco from suing their critics unless they could prove financial losses.

The Tories (Conservatives) won the vote 298 to 230 showing that it is not just Thatcher that was divisive but rather that it is being a Conservative that is divisive.

The Tories will always put big business before the people.

Daily Headline – 16/04/13

Government hiding true Thatcher funeral costs

From The Guardian:

The Labour MP John Healey, the former housing minister who boycotted last week’s parliamentary tributes to Thatcher, said military personnel and policing costs were likely to be a large part of the taxpayers’ bill. “The public have a right to see a full account of the costs of the funeral. Any attempt to cover up part of the costs of this funeral is indefensible and likely to be unsustainable.

“This is a state funeral in all but name without the consent of parliament for funding and without the consent of the people. Churchill, who was the only PM over the past 100 years to have a state funeral, unified the country, while Margaret Thatcher divided it.”

George Galloway, the Respect MP, is due to try and force a commons vote to prevent the cancellation of prime minister’s questions to allow MPs to attend the funeral. He told BBC2’s Daily Politics: “We’re spending £10m on the canonisation of this wicked woman, this woman who laid waste to industrial Britain, to the north, to Scotland, to south Wales. We’ve already had the recall of parliament last week, with MPs being paid up to £3,700 to fly back from the Caribbean holiday that they were on and then fly back to start their holiday again, for a totally unnecessary fawning over this woman. And now they want to cancel prime minister’s questions. It’s absurd.”

The scale and the cost to the taxpayer of the funeral has been criticised by public figures including the Bishop of Grantham, Lord Prescott and George Galloway. It has been widely reported that the event will cost £10m. Previous ceremonial funerals have included “opportunity costs”, which would have been incurred anyway if staff were assigned to other operations.

The Queen Mother’s funeral – the last grand ceremonial funeral in Britain – cost £8.16m to the public purse, according the Guardian’s calculations. Policing cost the Metropolitan Police £4.3m of which £2.3m was defined as “opportunity costs”.

Daily Headline – 11/04/13

Tory donors switching to Ukip

The Guardian has an interesting article today about Tory donors giving large and small sums of money to UKIP for them to fight the upcoming local elections that takes place on the 2nd of May.

Elections will be held in 35 English councils, including all 27 non-metropolitan county councils and eight unitary authorities, and to a single Welsh unitary authority. Direct mayoral elections will take place in Doncaster and North Tyneside. A total of 2,362 seats will be contested.

From the Guardian:

Stuart Wheeler, the gambling tycoon in charge of Ukip’s funds, said former Tory backers had promised big donations for next year’s European elections. Some had already made smaller donations that would contribute towards the £200,000 to be spent on advertising in local elections over the next few weeks, he said

Wheeler, who himself gave more than £5.5m to the Conservatives before being expelled from the party three years ago, said Ukip was taking the local elections seriously while aiming for a bigger push in the 2014 European elections.

“Some of [our new donors] were Conservatives but many are unwilling to go public. Any donation of more than £7,500 has to go on the electoral commission website. Quite a few give us exactly £7,500 because they don’t want [their identities] to be known,” he said.

UKIP, by big business, for big business.

In the latest opinion polls:

YouGov: CON 33%, LAB 41%, LDEM 10%, UKIP 10%
TNS-BMRB:  CON 25%, LAB 40%, LD 10%, UKIP 14%

Not sure who you can vote for? Click here to see the list and click details for who is standing. For example I chose the first available on the list Cambridgeshire County Council which has the following parties standing:

Conservative
Liberal Democrat
Labour
UKIP
Green
English Democrats
TUSC
Monster Raving Loony
Independent
Cambridge Socialists

Cambridgeshire County Council is divided into 60 ‘electoral divisions’ and not all parties listed above are standing in all of the electoral divisions.

Disappointing to see in the Romsey electoral division of Cambridgeshire that Cambridge Socialists are standing against the Greens but glad that TUSC is not standing against   Cambridge Socialists or the Greens in any of the divisions.

Good luck to the three of them, Greens, TUSC and Cambridge Socialists.

Margaret Thatcher – obituary

Only the good die young – Thatcher, dead at 87

Margaret Thatcher died this morning… no don’t celebrate… save that till after you’ve read The Underground!

The wankers in the press piss me off, what a spineless bunch! The Iron Lady this, the Iron Lady that, she saved the UK, defeated Brussels and freed the Falklands!<
Can these media morons not pass a negative comment towards someone when they have died? Are all people who die saints?

It seems that reality and historical fact go out of the window the day someone dies with all the crap that comes with ‘respect’.

I look forward to Nick Griffin’s or Nigel Farage’s obituary! I’m sure we’ll hear how they kept Britain independent or how they nobley stopped the Islamic cultural invasion!
Thatcher, founder of ‘new racism’ and promoter of greed and selfishness whose term in office is noted for its high unemployment and social unrest.

“I deplored her contempt for social values, for citizenship and her brutal indifference to human suffering.” Tom Robinson

“Scotland’s communities suffer the brutal legacy of Margaret Thatcher to this day” Tommy Sheridan

“A lot of her legacy was disastrous – an enormous increase in unemployment, the collapse of manufacturing industry and the doubling of inflation.” Lord Healey

Daily Headline – 07/04/13

Private employment agencies costing the NHS ‘hundreds of millions’

Short staffed UK hospitals are being forced to resort to using employment agencies to shore up the numbers.

It has been reported that agency doctors are being paid up to £15,000 per week.

Hospitals spent more than £2 billion on locum doctors in three years – a sum which could have paid the wages of 32,000 junior doctors or 10,000 consultants over the period.

Health Minister Dr Dan Poulter, a capitalist scum-bag, has blamed the EU’s working time directive (WTD) which set a maximum 48-hour-week for doctors. What the dumb-ass forgets is that the UK has an opt-out option for the agreement and that Doctors can legally work up to 56 hours per week.
By attacking the European Working Time Directive (EWTD) he seems to think that it’s a better idea to have life-saving doctors working more than 48 hours a week than, for example, employing more Doctors and medical staff.

Do we really want tired doctors trying to carry out life-saving actions? Do we want to pay private companies billions for staff?
No! Less hours, refreshed staff, employed directly by the NHS.

Green Party hits out at welfare cuts

From the Green Party via the BBC

The Greens say recent welfare cuts in the UK will lead to a rise in people needing these emergency food supplies.

“What we want to do is to ensure that welfare benefit payments meet people’s basic needs. We’re here in the sixth richest country in the world and what we’re seeing is more demand for places like this every week.

“We’ve got the bedroom tax, council tax benefit cuts, cuts in the Disability Living Allowance. We believe we should have a minimum wage and we should have sufficient benefits and that should be paid for by making sure that rich people and multinationals pay their taxes” she said.

Despite a lot of people wondering how long the Green Party could last, it has just celebrated its 40th anniversary, shaking off its tree hugging, eco-warrior image. “We have the same basic principles – a fair society in which everyone has sufficient, within the limits of our one planet” says Ms Bennett.

These days you’re more likely to hear about the fight for a living wage than saving the rain forests. Even so, will people struggling to make ends meet automatically think of the Green Party offering them a practical alternative?

Ms Bennett does not believe the party is a luxury for easier economic times and denies they are struggling to make their voices heard.

Wind power

She’s a strong advocate of wind power, which she believes will help bring down the cost of energy, despite news that bills will rise to pay for greener electricity.

Ms Bennett claims renewable power is vital for the future: “we need that renewable energy”, she says.

“We have choices, we do need to replace some of our power plants. What we’d like to promote is community owned energy where turbines are owned by people living there and profits flow down to the community.”

She also criticised incinerator plans in the county: “they’re a 20th century idea that shouldn’t continue into the 21st century. We should be concentrating on reducing waste instead of locking yourself into decades long contracts with incinerators.”

Norfolk has more Green county councillors than anywhere else in the country and they are keen to improve on that.

“We are hoping the east will elect a Green MEP at the European elections next year”, she says. “We got 15% in the last general election in Norwich, we want to build on that.”

Tough times put the Greens under pressure and the protest vote appears to moving elsewhere, so these elections will be a significant test for this party that has seen consistent growth for more than a decade in the eastern counties.

Daily Headline – 05/04/13

HBOS bank execs ran company to collapse

A report entitled ‘An Accident Waiting to Happen’ HBOS (Halifax & Bank of Scotland) bosses have been found to be incompetent and guilty of colossal mismanagement that led to the near collapse of the company that was rescued by Lloyds in 2008/2009.

The report went on to say that even had there not been a global economic crisis the company would have still collapsed such was the ineptitude of the three executives running the company.

HBOS is/was the largest lender of UK mortgages.

The government expects the working class to be responsible but what about the ruling elite?! Where is their punishment and condemnation? Jeopardising people’s savings and homes with absolutely no regard to them at all. Disgraceful.

For more details click here.

Daily Headline – 04/04/13

‘Children accessing porn should cause moral-panic’

An article in the UK’s Telegraph newspaper claims that children, as young as 11 watching pornography is widespread.

A study from Sue Berelowitz, deputy children’s commissioner has said that in one school the entire year of 14 year old boys had seen porn and half of the girls (apparently they didn’t want to watch but the boys made them).

Miss Berelowitz added: “No one should be panicking – but why should not there be a moral panic?

She goes on to say… some boys now felt they had an “absolute entitlement to have sex with girls, any time, any place, any where, with whomsoever they wished”.

The watchdog was so concerned that it had more research to see if boys actually understood what “giving consent” to sex actually meant.

Summary

So, teens watching porn has the very realistic possibility to turn then into rapists? What a pile of shit. How can anyone make such a huge leap?

Before such easy access of the internet, when teens had to huddle round an actual physically printed porn magazine, did that turn them into people of ‘entitlement’?

Daily Headline – 03/04/13

Class rethink

When we think of class we tend to categorise it into the following groups:

Working Class
Middle Class
Upper Class

Or possibly:

Working Class
Lower Middle Class
Upper Middle Class
Upper Class

Marx would define these groups by people’s relationship to the means of production and labour power, for example:

Working Class (proletariat) – Worker
Middle Class (petit-bourgeoisie) – Small business owner, cannot employ anyone
Upper Class (bourgeoisie) – Business owners who employ others

For some time now there have been people saying that this classification is too outdated and no longer has relevance in the 21st century.

A new survey in the UK (the largest study of class in the UK) has created a new system involving 7 classes:

Elite – the most privileged group in the UK, distinct from the other six classes through its wealth. This group has the highest levels of all three capitals

Established middle class – the second wealthiest, scoring highly on all three capitals. The largest and most gregarious group, scoring second highest for cultural capital

Technical middle class – a small, distinctive new class group which is prosperous but scores low for social and cultural capital. Distinguished by its social isolation and cultural apathy

New affluent workers – a young class group which is socially and culturally active, with middling levels of economic capital

Traditional working class – scores low on all forms of capital, but is not completely deprived. Its members have reasonably high house values, explained by this group having the oldest average age at 66

Emergent service workers – a new, young, urban group which is relatively poor but has high social and cultural capital

Precariat, or precarious proletariat – the poorest, most deprived class, scoring low for social and cultural capital

There is a test you can take to see what class you are under the newly defined criteria, click here.

Daily Headline – 02/04/13

Support the troops!

US and UK troops are always in the press it seems for the wrong reasons, the constant abuses carried out be these representatives of their respective countries.

Support the troops? Support abuses.

It has long been known of the human-rights abuses carried out by the US and UK at Camp Nama in Baghdad but now for the first time two UK military personnel have spoken out to the Guardian about the abuses they personally witnessed.

The abuses they say they saw include:

• Iraqi prisoners being held for prolonged periods in cells the size of large dog kennels.

• Prisoners being subjected to electric shocks.

• Prisoners being routinely hooded.

• Inmates being taken into a sound-proofed shipping container for interrogation, and emerging in a state of physical distress.

For full details on the story click here.

Iraq; an illegal war carried out by thugs under the orders of callus morons.