World War 1 and All That....

Now the centenary of 1914 has got going, we should do as Michael Gove suggests and celebrate the First World War, instead of taking notice of “left-wing academics”, who complain it was a regrettable waste of life. But a few days ago, on the radio, they played an interview with Harry Patch, the last man alive who fought for the British in the war. Harry said: “Politicians who took us to war should have been given the guns and told to settle their differences themselves, instead of organising nothing better than legalised mass murder.” Who let him on Radio 4, the dirty unpatriotic left-wing academic? It was all right for Harry, swanning about the Somme with his Marxist intellectual friends, lazing in the trenches discussing “peace studies”, but to really know what went on you have to rely on those with first-hand experience, people like Michael Gove. Because as he made clear, he’s read a book on the subject and an article in a magazine. It’s the same with these other poncey academic types who criticised the war, like Wilfred Owen and those poets. Just because they spent a few years being gassed and shot at, they thought that gave them a right to criticise it. Well, if they’d joined the real world, like Michael Gove, they might not be so full of airy-fairy pacifist nonsense. Hopefully, Michael Gove will now remove these left-wingers from the school curriculum, and replace them with proper poets of the time, such as the one who wrote: “I’ve been shot in a trench somewhere Belgian or French, I’ll not walk again say the medics, But I’ll go home in glory as one day a Tory can use this to bash leftie academics.” Gove insists it is time to reverse the “myths” spread about the war by relentless left-wing propaganda. The evidence he gives for this tide of pacifist mythology is an episode of Blackadder. And it is hard to see how anyone can counter a constant barrage of brainwashing such as a half-hour of situation comedy broadcast 25 years ago. A few brave souls over the years have tried to counter this tyranny. There are Remembrance Day parades, and the insistence that anyone on television has to wear a poppy during the month before or be denounced as a gargoyle, and prime ministers posing in tanks, and hymns, comics and computer games that glorify the war, and statues to the generals including one of Commander Haig in Whitehall. But that can hardly be expected to make an impact in the face of a comedy show from 1989. So the fightback has begun, with Gove attacking the academic Sir Richard Evans, for saying: “the men who enlisted in 1914 may have thought they were fighting for a better world, a war to end all wars ... they were wrong”. I wonder which bit of that statement Michael Gove disagrees with. Presumably he thinks that those who insisted the war would end all wars were right, and it did end all wars. He must think that the First World War was the last war ever fought, and must even be puzzled as to why it’s called the First World War, seeing as there haven’t been any since. He’s going to feel so disappointed when he finds out. His next point is that those who joined up “were not dupes but conscious believers in king and country, committed to defending the western liberal order”. Well, yes, that’s what they were told they were fighting for. So his case seems to be they can’t have been fooled because they believed what they were told. This means all those who’ve been mis-sold PPI shouldn’t be compensated. They can’t have been fooled, because they were conscious believers that they were buying an insurance that would make better protected. Those who fought were told that the war was against tyranny, dictators, terrorists, and to defend “brave little Belgium”, all the usual stuff that justifies wars, as well as the “war to end all wars” line. Most of the survivors spent the rest of their lives feeling they’d been duped. But if only they’d read that magazine article, like Michael Gove, they’d have known the nightmares and missing limbs were worth it. The war was “plainly a just war”, says Gove, because of the German attitude towards expansionism. And we certainly couldn’t stand by while another country fancied a bit of expansionism. Luckily, the one thing that you can say about the British in the century before 1914, is that at no time did it consider expanding or taking over anywhere or swiping anything from abroad. The one disconcerting element to Gove’s article is that it contains no facts and no evidence and it is based on prejudices such as “left-wing academics”. If it was handed in as an essay by a 12-year-old, it would be handed back as a piece of nonsense, but was written by the Education Secretary. So we should suppose the next exam system he brings in will be one in which you’re no longer marked for research or making a case, but for how patriotic you are. If you want top marks for an essay on how water turns into steam, just put “Ingerland, Ingerland, Ingerlaaaand, two world wars, one world cup, boils and then goes floating up. Academics academics, you’re not fit to wipe my arse, you’re not fit to wipe my arse”. Then you’re guaranteed an A-star

How about a tax cut for all of us?

Well they're at it again.

No not the Tories or the terrorists (who ever they may be this time around) but this time the minority that asks for so much but contributes so little.
Can you guess who I'm talking about? Could it be the long term unemployed or the sick? How about single parents? According to the media,they are always asking for something aren't they?.How those pesky rioters?
Well I'll tell you to save you all from guessing.

Economists.Yes that's right Economists.

Apparently a bunch of "20 high profile Economists" have got together to vent their spleen about how the 50% tax bracket that the 310,000 folks that earn over £150,000 pay is doing lasting damage to the UK economy.

Surely I cant be the only one who thinks that when they say "UK economy" they really mean "my own personal wealth which is mine so there" I must admit though I did feel a little bit sorry for them,because after they have had their tax deducted,how on earth do they manage on such a small amount?

At a time of national economic crisis like we are in now,people on high incomes can and should contribute far more in taxes.

Instead, this vicious cycle has been at work for years:

Reduced taxes on the rich leave them with more money to influence politicians and politics. Their influence wins them further tax reductions, which gives them still more money to put to political use. When the loss of tax revenue from the rich worsens already strained government budgets, the rich press politicians to cut public services and government jobs and not even debate a return to the higher taxes the rich used to pay.

How do the rich justify and excuse this record? They claim that they can invest the money they save from taxes and thereby create jobs, etc,some even going so far as to threaten to leave the country and take their money with them.But does this ever happen?
Actually cutting rich people's taxes is often very bad for the rest of us.It's been proven that the wealthiest take the money they save from taxes and invest big parts of it in China, India and elsewhere which often produces more jobs over there, fewer jobs here, and more imports of goods produced abroad!

Another thing that can be done with the money they don't pay in taxes is to invest it in hedge funds and with stockbrokers to make profitable investments. These days, that often means speculating in oil and food, which drives up their prices, undermines economic recovery for the rest of us, and produces acute suffering around the globe. Those same hedge funds and brokers likewise use part of the money rich people have saved from taxes to speculate in the global stock markets. That has recently driven stock prices higher: hence, the stock market recovery.

And that mostly helps – you guessed it – the richest who own most of the stocks.

Rioting for what? Something you really need?

As the news has moved onto other things such as Libya,I thought that the time was right to resurrect those events of a few weeks ago that had parts of the UK in terror.
That's right the riots.It seems to have completely gone of the radar for everyone apart from those poor folks that lost homes and businesses in it.

Aside from the sheer mindless ferocity and violence of those few days, one of the most depressing aspects of the protracted smashup was the nature of the looting: time and again, shops selling trainers or gadgets were targeted first. Fancy shoes and electric widgets mark the peak of ambition. Every looter was effectively a child chanting: "Give me my toys, I want more toys. Look at the idiot(I would have used a stronger word for him,but I don't want to offend) captured on video mugging the injured Malaysian student. Watch his unearned swagger as he walks away; the size of a man, yet he overdoes that swagger like a performing toddler. That's an idiot who never grew up.

Why the obsession with trainers? Trainers really aren't worth the effort. You stick them on your feet and walk around for a while util they go out of fashion. Whoopie doo. Yes, I know they're also status symbols, but anyone who tries to impress others with their shoe choice is a dismally pathetic and shallow character indeed – and anyone genuinely impressed by footwear has all the soaring spirit of a punnet of moss. There's no life to be found in "look at my shoes". There just isn't.

In the smouldering aftermath, some politicians, keen to shift the focus from social inequality, have muttered darkly about the role of BlackBerry Messenger, Twitter and Facebook – frightening new technologies that, like the pen and the human mouth, allow citizens to swap messages with one another.

Some have even called for the likes of Twitter to be temporarily suspended in times of great national crisis. That'd be reassuring – like the scene at the start of a zombie movie where the news bulletin is suddenly replaced by a whistling tone and a stark caption reading PLEASE STAND BY. The last thing we need in an emergency is the ability to share information. Perhaps the government could also issue us with gags we could slip over our mouths the moment the sirens start wailing? Hey, we could still communicate if we really had to. Provided we have learned semaphore.Hey let's just burn any books that we don't agree with either.Hang on,that's already been done.

If preventing further looting is the whole point of the exercise, then as well as addressing the massive gulf between the haves and the have-nots, I'd take a long hard look at MTV Cribs and similar TV shows that routinely confuse human achievement with the mindless acquisition of gaudy bling bullshit. The media heaves with propaganda promoting sensation and consumption above all else.

Back in the 80s the pioneering aspirational soap opera Dallas dangled an unattainable billionaire lifestyle in front of millions, but at least had the intelligence to make the Ewing family miserable and consumed with self-loathing.

At the same time, shows aimed at kids were full of presenters cheerfully making puppets out of old yoghurt pots, while shows aimed at teens largely depicted cheeky urchins copping off with each other in the dole queue. Today, whenever my world-weary eyes alight on a "youth show" it merely resembles a glossily edited advert for celebrity lifestyles, co-starring a jet-ski and a tower of gold. And regardless of the time slot, every other commercial shrieks that I deserve the best of everything. I and I alone. I'd gladly introduce a law requiring broadcasters to show five minutes of footage of a rich man dying alone for every 10 minutes of fevered avarice. It'd be worth it just to see them introduce it on T4.

If we were to delete all aspirational programming altogether, the schedules might feel a bit empty, so I'd fill the void with footage of a well-stocked Foot Locker window, thereby tricking any idiots tuning in on a recently looted television into smashing the screen in an attempt to grab the coveted trainers within.

Speaking of Foot Locker, if I were the head of Nike, I'd encourage Foot Locker to open special "decoy" branches near looting hotspots – unattended stores stocked full of trainers with soft sponge heels. Anyone pinching a pair of these would find it almost impossible to hoof in a window ever again. You'd be kicking fruitlessly at the glass for 15 years, making it less an act of spontaneous violence and more a powerful visual metaphor for your misguided existence.

But perhaps it's better to nip future trouble in the bud with the use of deterrents. Obviously a small percentage of the rioters are sociopaths, and you'll never make any kind of impression on their psyche without a cranial drill. But the majority should be susceptible to threats. Not violent ones – we're not animals – but creatively unpleasant ones. Forget the water cannon. Unleash the slurry cannon. That kind of thing.

Greater Manchester police has attracted attention by using Twitter as a substitute for the "perp walk": naming-and-shaming rioters by tweeting their personal details as they leave court.

Not bad, but maybe not humiliating enough. Personally, I'd seal them inside a Perspex box glued to a billboard overlooking a main plaza for a week, where people can turn up and jeer at them. It's not totally inhumane: they would be fed through a tube in the top – but crucially, they would be fed nothing but cabbage, asparagus and figs, and since they wouldn't be allowed out for toilet breaks, it would be getting pretty unpleasant in there after 48 hours. And it would be a cheery pick-me-up for passersby.

One for the road?

The recent news that there may soon be a minimum price per unit of alcohol (in Scotland anyway) has got me thinking...

Britain as a whole,and not just Scotland, is getting drunker than ever, apparently, with a government "consultation" expected to reveal the shocking statistic that, compared with 20 years ago, there are 80 per cent more documentaries or news items showing a clip of a girl in a short skirt being sick on a bench while a lad with no shirt makes a noise like a werewolf as he's thrown into a police van.

But what really gets my back up is the increase in pompous and self righteous doctors who come on the radio or programmes like The One Show to give us supposed guidelines, telling us, "Those of us who think we're drinking moderately may still be at risk. For example if you have one glass of wine and then later in life have another, you are technically an alcoholic and AA is the only option open to you".

Then they say, "Of course there's no harm in drinking safely. I often enjoy an Italian wine with my evening meal, by opening the bottle and pouring it all into a bush. That way there's only a small risk to my liver, as long as I do it once a month as a treat."

Websites offering advice on safe drinking are full of top tips (like the ones found in Viz) like, "If you're thinking of having a lager please consult your doctor first." Or, "One way of cutting down consumption while still enjoying a wild girls' night out, is on alternate rounds instead of having a drink have a bowl of soup, or go canoeing."

On one particular website I looked at, It said that three pints of medium- strength beer, twice a week, can lead to "heart disease, liver disease, impotence and cancer." I didn't check but I expect it went on, "and a fourth pint will cause cat flu, plague, rust, feeling like a woman trapped inside a man's body, fascism and a tendency to suddenly turn inside-out in the morning." I don't know about you,but can you name a medium strength beer? I can't...

But I digress.The website also told me, "If you consume alcohol to feel good, or avoid feeling bad, your drinking could become problematic." So it's only safe to drink if it's to make yourself feel worse.I had a can of Kestrel Super Strength and instantly felt terrible.Not because of the alcohol,just because it is awful tasting lager.

As we all know, alcohol can cause havoc, so we shouldn't be flippant. You only have to look at the demise of poor Amy Winehouse, who presumably had three pints of bitter on a Sunday and then heavens above, three pints of Mild the following Friday.

Unfortunately the campaign against drunkenness doesn't seem to have learned from the "Just say no" anti-drugs campaign, which connects with hardly anyone as it insists drugs lead rapidly to disaster and aren't fun. But if they weren't fun there'd be no need to tell people not to take them, just as there's no need to tell people "Just say no" to sticking your bare arse into a nest of wasps because no one does it anyway because it's not fun.

But people do see drinking as fun and enjoyable and in the current economic climate,why should a person who chooses to relax with a glass of something stronger than coffee be penalised by an increase in price?

Sure excess drinking should be addressed but maybe the reasons why people drink to excess should be investigated first.

The complex job of getting young people away from drug addiction and alcoholism will still be done by charities, such as Mentor UK. But they have declared that the recent cuts in rehab clinics have made that almost impossible, saying that proposed cuts "could have devastating implications".

So we're left with doctors telling us not to drink sherry on two consecutive Christmases, and if Amy was still around she could have updated her song by singing, "They tried to make me go to rehab but they said, 'Piss off, we've shut'."

Yet more rises with no extra value

Is BT desperate to lose customers? I'm no longer one of its many millions of landline users after I defected to Plusnet a while ago after seeing how much the line rental was costing,but now I see it's going up again for those I left behind.

The annual bill for just having a BT line – before you've made a single call – is now £166.80. Three years ago it was £132 a year. So line inflation has been 26% when over the same period the CPI index has gone up 8%.
I've often wondered why the cost of line rental increases. I can understand the initial cost for a line such as installation,raw materials and the expenses incurred for physically putting the line in,but after that what costs are there? Maybe British Gas,Scottish Hydro or their competitors could learn from this and start a pipe rental charge too? After all,if BT can make lots of cash doing it,what's stopping others?

I'm mystified as to what exactly BT are doing at its exchanges to justify such an increase. The obvious answer is that it's upgrading everything for superfast broadband. But surely the cost of broadband should be borne by broadband users, not by the still significant numbers of people, many of them pensioners, who are not on the internet and only use BT for landline phone calls.

BT's last reported profits, for the quarter to 31 December 2010, were up 30% to £531m. The free cash flow was up 69%, while its net debt – the money borrowed to invest in the likes of broadband and 3G – is falling fast. Chief executive Ian Livingstone (bless his heart)has to struggle on with a meagre pay packet of £2m-plus while presiding over steep cost-cutting; the last annual report said wages and salaries were down 7% at BT Group in 2009-2010, "largely due to the impact of labour resource reductions". I think that means jobs cuts to you and me, but no surprise that bonuses were available all round for the board.

The stock market loves it; BT shares have gone from 115p to 161p over the last year or so,but yet the company still feels the need to put up line rental costs not once but twice in the space of just six months. And it has thrown in some above-inflation rises in call connections costs too.

It also looks as if competition is failing in this market. There is now a well-established pattern in which BT's rivals benchmark their landline costs against BT. Within weeks or even days, they match BT's landline price rises. So maybe BT is not so desperate to lose customers. It knows that if you go elsewhere you'll pay much the same.

Now this does annoy me....

As you are all no doubt aware,this country (like many others) is seriously strapped for cash and no doubt savings need to made somewhere.
If you were in charge,what would you do? I reckon it's a pretty safe bet that those business people and global corporations who avoid paying taxes and those incompetent bankers that got us in this state in the first place would be pretty high on the list.

But it's not us who make the decisions.

Unfortunately.

Messrs Cameron and Osbourne have chosen a much more deserving group of people to contribute more.

The sick and disabled.

Have you heard of a company called ATOS Healthcare? Well,these caring people have been giving the task of deciding who will lose their disability benefit.

The method they choose is to interview each claimant, asking them a series of questions such as, "Do you look after your own pets?" Because clearly if someone can feed a hamster they're capable of driving a fork-lift truck. Another is "Do you cry?" If you do, you're probably told it's all very well being depressed but there's no reason why you can't get a job imitating actresses who've won an Oscar, or hiring yourself out to appear at funerals to make it seem the deceased knew more people than they did.

During this questioning the interviewer puts the answers into their computer, which makes an automatic calculation as to whether the claimant loses their benefit. This is so much quicker as a method of assessing health than the old-fashioned way of examining someone don't you think?

Just imagine if hospitals followed this example. Instead of faffing about with X-rays and stethoscopes, the consultant could say, "Which do you prefer, pizza or a curry? Who would you rather have to dinner Cheryl Cole or David Beckham? OK, let's see what the computer says – aah, you've got gallstones."

They could always turn the whole process into a radio panel show called "Fit on the Fiddle", in which claimants answer the questions from a panel including regular captain Gyles Brandreth. One man who might as well have done this was Larry Newman, who attended an ATOS interview with a terminal lung disease, when he could hardly breathe. So he took his medical records and ATOS ignored them, preferring their method of asking questions.

They decided there was nothing wrong with him so his benefit was cut, and a few weeks later, as the hospital attached a ventilator he'd have to wear permanently, with splendid jollity he said to his wife: "Still, at least I'm fit for work." He died a few weeks later, and I reckon that if his wife took him in again now they'd still say there was nothing wrong with him and send him for an interview to be a town crier or something.

Still, the cuts have to be made somewhere so I suppose it's only fair that the brunt of them should fall on those money grabbing terminally ill patients. But here's where it gets complicated. The ATOS system has worked so well that in the past three years 160,000 people have successfully appealed against their decision. So from now on perhaps they'll use a more reliable method, such as rolling two dice and anyone who gets eight or over loses their money. Or they could still call people in for interviews but do three at a time while the assessor lines them up and goes, "Ip dip dog shit, you are not it", and the loser has to crawl to the job centre.

The trouble is that these tribunals have cost £30m (and you'll laugh at this bit), and that money is paid by the Government, out of taxes. So they still get paid the £100m, out of taxes, and all the mistakes are paid for out of more taxes.

It's like a taxi firm that always takes you in the wrong direction, but you still have to pay them, then they charge you again to bring you back where you started. And to complete the analogy, on the way home they run someone over and shout: "If you can stroke a cat there's nothing wrong with you", as the victim is carried into the ambulance.

So here's my suggestion. On live television ATOS are called in for an interview by a panel of disabled people, who ask them to mime looking after their pet, then assess whether they're entitled to still get £100m or have to go and get a proper job.

Why don't you get a job?

The recent furore at News International which has damaged the media,police and the UK government,sees the UK getting more and more tainted by the corruption and generally crooked brush that was usually reserved for 'tin pot' Central African dictatorships of yesteryear.

The thing is though,that this is only the latest in a long series of scandals and body blows that have affected nearly every large national institution in recent years.
The bank bosses were exposed in 2008 as greedy incompetents,and as for both Houses of Parliament,I hardly have to explain about the recent expenses fraud do I?

As Britons,we've always liked to see someone at the head of society that we could look upwards with a little respect.No,I'm not talking about vacuous celebs or moronic football players.

But have the latest developments in Westminster been that very different than in the past? Let's go back a few hundred years to the period 1790-1820.Back then in a survey of 658 MPs,50 admitted having illegitimate children,220 were financially ruined,35 died in exile abroad due to having lost everything,5 were expelled for fraud.At least 19 committed suicide and 6 went mad...Makes our parliament seem quite law abiding and normal really doesn't it?

The thing that really gets me angry though about our modern day representatives in Westminster (and come to think of it the whole government)is the fact that most of them have never done anything.
What I mean is they've never held proper jobs,or served in the Armed Forces,or learned how businesses are run.Few have been tested in the fires of conflict or even commerce.Their whole adult and even adolescent lives have been devoted to the spin of politics,unlike previous folk such as Denis Healey,Michael Heseltine,Ernie Bevin and Willie Whitelaw of former generations.

They have studied polls and focus groups,TV interviewing techniques and speech writing,but know nothing about what most of us would call real life.Surely one of their many advisers must sit down at the end of the day and think " Well you've learnt how to deflect a difficult question,but if you could really know how it feels to be a typical person in today's Britain,more people would vote for you and not think of you as being a sanctimonious and aloof idiot who's fooling no one"

When David Cameron tells us that he is taking one of his holidays in the UK,are we meant to feel grateful? He tells us that "we are all in this together" and that he "feels the pinch too"

Surely his 2 weeks are not even remotely in line as the rest of us? I don't know about you,but having an estimated personal fortune of £30 million pounds to fall back on,must be a great comfort when travelling out to Spain for a week on Ryan Air? I'm sure if I was him,I would be able to manage putting up with something a lot worse (such as having to attend the Tory conference for example)knowing that after my own personal hell of having to associate with the plebs was over,I could go back to Chateau Lafite and Oysters for breakfast.....