They've been in power for 8 weeks, now and the litany of complaints is never-ending. Well, I can understand the Tories being miffed, on account of they think it is their god-given right to be lords of creation, trouser whatever's going, snatch up the unconsidered trifles, like Shakespeare's Autolycus, and the heftier sweeteners, and assume that if they're alright, then so is the country. And why shouldn't they look at tractor porn in the Commons and send photos of their genitals, just as if they worked for the BBC?
But what did the lesser mortals think they were voting for? Oh yes, anyone but the Conservatives.
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| Rachel and Keir enjoying a good laugh at our expense. |
And now that they have got what they wanted, the removal vans have come and gone, come and gone, they find that sweetly-smiling, implacable head-girl Rachel Reeves is actually going to implement the policies she outlined and Sir Keir Remainer Starmer has popped across to cosy up to Olaf Scholtz about reinstating free movement of workers across Europe in the guise of some youth scheme to enhance the little darlings' experience of the world and nothing to do with undercutting the wages and working conditions of British men and women, honest.
The statisticians tell us that Remainer Starmer's personal approval rate is dropping like a stone - down to minus 16 points. It's mainly the proposed smoking restrictions, I reckon. The British want to smoke themselves to death,
The statisticians tell us that Remainer Starmer's personal approval rate is dropping like a stone - down to minus 16 points. It's mainly the proposed smoking restrictions, I reckon. The British want to smoke themselves to death,
He famously gave up, after smoking some 630,000 cigarettes; following pneumonia and blood poisoning, saying that: "the blood poisoning was so bad and I was so racked with the resultant rigors that I couldn’t work a cigarette lighter."
As a former trade union activist I have been especially amused by the indignation expressed in the press and by the citizenry that a Labour Government has settled the strike actions that were so disrupting the NHS and travel arrangements by making pay awards to public sector workers. Some are shocked that the Labour Party has links with the trade union movement, whilst continuing sanguine about the Conservative acceptance of massive financial donations from a "loose affiliation of millionaires and billionaires" (Boy in the Bubble - Paul Simon)
A public sector worker came to my trade union advice surgery once, wanting assistance because she thought she was being bullied by her manager. I've known many a bullying manager in my time, and was very willing to take on her case, but explained to her that I couldn't do so, because she was not a member of my trade union - nor indeed, any trade union. I told her that if she joined, and set up a direct debit for her union dues, I was prepared to waive the requirement of 6 months membership before representation. This was greeted with grave suspicion by this non-trade-union seeker of wisdom and truth, who said that she wouldn't be joining, because she thought that trade unions, like the Labour Party, were too political, but couldn't I represent her anyway? Not the sharpest knife in the drawer, this one. Not really surprised that her manager was bullying her. I'd be tempted in that direction. I couldn't help myself - I asked what her problem was with the Labour Party. She said they were biased towards the trade unions.
Well, duh, of course - the Labour Party was formed in the late 19th century to provide a Parliamentary voice for the trade union movement, and it continues to be largely funded by the trades union - £3.00 per annum per trade union member of an affiliated trade union is paid to the Labour Party, in addition to any other donations they wish to make. Adds up, those 3 quids.
So of course the Starmer government was going to settle these annoying strikes by public sector workers - don't want to jeopardise the funding. Quite apart from the fact that it makes sense to get the healing and treatment services back to work, in order to get Britain's sick back to work. And to get the trains running to get folk to work. And the more money public sector workers have, the more they spend, not being the kind of folk who have or are accumulating generational wealth. And the more they spend, the more the economy grows. The Sunak Government didn't want to settle pay claims on account of class war, although they said it was an inflation-busting principled position. No - it just galled them that train drivers are the highest paid group of oiks in the UK - earning an average of between £48,500 and £54,000 per annum, depending on which pundit you read, and they haven't been to public school, Cambridge or Oxford, for pity's sake. Whereas, MPs earn a basic salary of a mere £86,584, plus any bonuses for special responsibilities, Cabinet posts, ministers with and without portfolios, and what they can wring out of the public purse in expenses - office, staff, second homes, cutting the wisteria hedge and draining the moat.
When I was at Trade Union School, learning my employment law and how to negotiate, I got chatting with a train driver. Miserable life. They can't have an alcoholic drink or take drugs, because they are subject to scheduled, but also random, testing for drink and drugs, and with shift work, extra shifts and expectation of overtime, you can't drink because you can't guarantee how much time off you have for recovery. Now, I certainly wouldn't want my train to be driven by someone off his face on drink or drugs, but what sort of job is it when you can't have a glass of red with your steak and frites? Then there's the suicides - increasingly popular and very public way of ending it all these days. My acquaintance said you never get over having a corpse on your windscreen, staring you in the face, and having to drive miles into the next station with it looking in at you. And blood everywhere. Air pressure keeps it all in place. Apparently the driver has to phone ahead to the next station, get clearance to stop there, if it wasn't a scheduled halt, get the emergency services mobilised to remove the corpse and clean up the front of the train, and get the platform cleared so that the public aren't disturbed by the sight of the deceased. What's wrong with people that they want to do it in such a visible and undignified way? And don't they care that they are putting the driver into Post Traumatic Incident debriefing and on-going therapy at my expense? I wonder if China has the same problem with its Bullet Trains? Or if they go so fast that all the corpse-components just boil off along the track?
The other Starmer Government innovation that has caused an awful lot of dismayed outrage is the promise to remove the Winter Fuel payment. For our foreign readers, this is a tax-free welfare benefit of £200 paid to people of state pension age to help with the costs of heating their homes in the winter. It has been a universal benefit, not means-tested, so presumably King Charles III and his lovely wife, Camilla, would qualify, as well as people whose only income is the state pension topped up by pension credits. The state pension is £11,541.90 and the pension credit is an additional £3,800. Now, not wanting to boast, or anything, but I'm not hurting for £200, and I'm not keen on my taxes being used to provide this non means-tested benefit. So it seems a sensible move to me. For the poorest pensioners, there you go, £200 in winter, just in time to buy the ungrateful brat grandchildren some Christmas pressies, and keep calm and shiver on. Martin Lewis was all over the radio and tv, saying he had a better scheme than pension credits for identifying the poorest pensioners - because many pensioners don't claim the pension credits (why ever not?) he wants them identified by the Council Tax band applied to their house - if you live in a Band A, B or C house, then you obviously are dirt poor and live in a slum. If you live in anything banded over D, then you have no need for a Winter Fuel Payment. The flaw, in this one, of course, is that people can be property rich and cash poor - maybe stuck in a larger house which is unsaleable due to the conditions in the housing market, or mining subsidence or being on a toxic landfill site, and maybe their rattling, cold old house is in really poor condition because they never could afford replacement windows and cavity wall insulation. Just saying. Or, au contraire, the little Band B house is a miniature jewel, with insulation, solar panels and a heat pump, maybe a windmill in the back garden - the owners being cash rich and property poor.
No, the really interesting thing about this Winter Fuel Payment grab is that it is the Starmer Government inserting a bony toe into the cold water of abolishing the State Pension in its entirety. Think about it. There never was a National Insurance scheme - there is no pot of money labelled mrs. ishmael, which has been cleverly invested for me over the 40 or so years (or whatever- the qualifying age goal posts are sliding around) since I've been paying my National Insurance stamps and my employers have been stumping up their contributions. No - N.I. contributions went into the general fund, out of which state pensions were paid. So it is a state benefit, not an insurance scheme. It is non means tested. For many, many pensioners in receipt of an occupational pension, it is just a top-up. Pensioners vote Conservative, not Labour. Removal of the state pension and replacing it with a means-tested pension credit benefit will upset Conservative voters, not Labour voters - so why should Starmer care, if the measure doesn't affect his voter base and saves the country £134.8 billion per year? And it will placate the young people, (who do vote Labour) who believe pensioners are wealthy, privileged and refusing to die?
You heard it here, first.
Whilst on matters financial, we've been hearing about the Black Tax this week. Or, if you are Latino, the Brown Tax. Pundits have been going on about this as if it is something new and undesirable. Quick definition:
Black tax is a term that originated in South Africa and refers to money that Black workers, especially professionals and other higher income earners give to their parents, siblings, or other family members, often out of obligation or a deeply ingrained sense of family responsibility. It has been described as Ubuntu (a philosophy that humans must live in sharing relationships with each other). Sounds fair enough to me. Working class white cultures in the UK have always operated on this principle. How else would a poor family survive? Eldest kid goes out to work and hands the first pay-packet over to mum, who takes what she needs and hands back pocket money to the new wage earner who is proud that she has been able to help out the family. Nothing especially Black about it.
You've not forgotten about the Undercover Policing Inquiry, chaired by Sir John Mitting? If so, you could be forgiven, as it started in 2017 and is not expected to finish before 2026 - the longest and most expensive inquiry in British history. Sir John is investigating the Metropolitan Police's Special Demonstrations Squad (SDS). His inquiry is looking into whether a secret taskforce overstepped the boundaries when monitoring mainly left wing campaigners in what has become known as the "spy cops" scandal. SDS officers were ordered into deep cover and went as far as forming relationships and family units with the activists they were spying on, fathering children with them. How is that not rape? How could there be informed consent to a sexual act with someone leading a double life and deliberately misleading them?
The evidence of "John Kerry", police officer HN65, has just been released this week. He assumed the name and date of birth of a child who had died in infancy and his invented back story was that he had been a school drop out who had hitch hiked and travelled before forming a relationship with a young woman who had died. He infiltrated the Hampstead branch of CND with his sad story, gaining the trust of its membership, and becoming chair of the branch. He found nothing very much to report to his handlers. He reported about a film that 200 members had attended, legal protests that CND had organised, warned that St Pancras branch had "been taken over by Trotskyists" and reported that " a number of women with Hampstead CND were active at Greenham Common Peace Camp."
"John Kerry" maintained his double identity for four years. He said his time undercover came with the “great tension” of holding down two identities, “caused me a significant amount of stress” and had “an adverse effect on my career”.
What can you say? Poor thing?
Crocosmia
Tansy
There are four splendid anthologies of the writings of stanislav and mr ishmael, compiled by his friend, mr verge, the house filthster. You can buy them from Amazon or Lulu. Here's how:
Honest Not Invent, Vent Stack, Ishmael’s Blues, and the latest, Flush Test (with a nice picture of the late, much lamented, Mr Harris of Lanarkshire taking a piss on a totem pole) are available from Lulu and Amazon. If you buy from Amazon, it would be nice if you could give a review on their website.IIshmaelites wishing to buy a copy from lulu should follow these steps
please register an account first, at lulu.com. This is advisable because otherwise paypal seems to think it's ok to charge in dollars, and they then apply their own conversion rate, which might put the price up slightly for a UK buyer. Once the new account is set up, follow one of the links below (to either paperback or hardback) or type "Ishmael’s Blues" into the Lulu Bookstore search box. Click on the “show explicit content” tab, give the age verification box a date of birth such as 1 January 1960, and proceed.
Link for Hardcover : https://tinyurl.com/je7nddfr
Link for Paperback : https://tinyurl.com/3jurrzux
https://www.lulu.com/shop/ishmael-smith/flush-test/paperback/product-9yjvn7.html?q=Flush+Test&page=1&pageSize=4
At checkout, try WELCOME15 in the coupon box, which (for the moment) takes 15% off the price before postage. If this code has expired by the time you reach this point, try a google search for "Lulu.com voucher code" and see what comes up.
With the 15% voucher, PB (including delivery to a UK address) should be £16.84; HB £27.04.
12 comments:
I have no problem paying the "workers". But it will eventually be clawed back for their pensions and other benefits, as well as inflation and tax rises.
The real problem is the country is bust, with no prospects for revival evident to me, albeit viewed from afar.
Two big hols in the public purse:
1. The Treasury is on the hook required to pay the losses of the Bank of England from its past pruchases of Gilts. This was a reciprocal agreement implemented by Osborne allowing the Treasury to take anny BoE profits from the sales of Gilts. Basically arms=length money printing. On the hook to the tune of $200B of your pounds.
2. I read a shocking report last week that the Treasury has been guaranteeing third party loans to Ukraine. Unbelievable, but until then I couldn't fathom why anyone would lend to Ukraine thinking they would ever see their money again. This could be a big number now the rating agencies have declared Ukraine in default.
2. I read last week
The spending of taxation money on government-employed wages, mrs i, is the destruction of wealth - net, I guess, of taxation at the margin but plus the cost of the admin. So it's just more money gone unless thse wages are invested in something productive.or otherwise futurely fruitful. ANd being full-time employees of the state, such is unlikely.
But, yes, you are spot on. The government spends half the money and more and therefore has a client class of interested parties that will vote for it. I do not actually blame or worry about nurses or teachers etc. These are relatively poor people who will remain poor, if functional, their entire lives. I am though absolutely incandescent about BBC parasites and Whitehall fuckers earning twice what Starmer gets. I would sack them all the first day. God would know his own and find the deserving alternative solace and remuneration.
I bet btw that there is not a hospital in the land that I could not relieve of 5% of its workers spend and the place would actually work better thereafter.
Why was non of this shit we’re getting now not included in Kieth Stalin’s manifesto? Why couldn’t the transwoman Rachel Thieves read the ONS report in March? Just like everyone else. Why would there have been a ‘run on the pound’ ?according to Lucy Powell. Why would they, the govament, want the 850,000 pensioners, entitled to, but not claiming pension credits to claim. This would cost B£3.8 pounds, three times more than they’d save on the wfa.
They’ve not stopped the strikes mrs I, junior doctors are threatening strike action again, London tube train drivers are threatening strikes, bin men also.
Preemptive capital gains tax? WTF. Do you you get the tax back if the price of your home or shares goes down? They’ve had fourteen years of shouting on the sidelines, don’t understand their own history, but now are taking what they see as revenge on the working population.
Yes mr mongoose, decimate the BBC and Whitehall, with extreme measures.
For sure, mr mongoose: but only 5% ? Outrageous expenditure practices that NHS trusts have fallen into to attempt compliance with government targets have become the status quo rather than an emergency measure. Here in Orkney, our NHS trust is in Special Measures having, year by year, run up preposterous levels of debt - getting away with it by setting the current year's overspend against next year's income. Eye-watering sums are spent on agency workers because there aren't enough home-grown nurses to do all the dirty little jobs that nurses do - it's not all drama and doctors falling in love with you. Even more eye-watering are the sums spent on consultants whose base is Glasgow, Edinburgh, Southampton, or, in one case, eastern Europe. And all these off-island staff have sweet deals, in which their travel and accommodation are paid for by the Trust. Okay, Orkney is an especial basket case because of being remote, rural and a bloody island, and its trust should be immediately amalgamated with Grampian, but consultants are draining their Trusts dry in mainland UK, their lucrative pay, terms and conditions being baked in from the inception of the NHS - remember Bevan had to stuff their mouths with gold to get them to sign up to the NHS and not go on strike? And these are supposedly caring upper middle class professionals in bow ties.
Then there's the wastage on flawed computer systems, hospitals built out of RAAC and worse and an up-its-own-arse Human Resources structure that employs too many people, who use impenetrable language and draw up achingly irrelevant training and career development plans and targets and performance indicators.
Meantime, hospital beds are blocked by fit elderly people who can't be discharged into the local care home, because there isn't one, or because their relatives will use every stratagem God and lawyers invent to prevent such discharge because hospital care is free and care homes cost £1200 per week and rising. And they certainly don't want to have old mum and dad in their own home, messing the place up and confronting them with their own mortality on a daily basis.
That's the spirit, mr inmate.
I didn't know that, mr mike. Thank you. It is further evidence of Britain's surreptitious involvement in the Dwarf Zelensky's war.
The 5%, mrs i, are the ones I found spotted while walking from the car park to the CEO's office and I had them long before I took my coat off.
And it's true almost everywere, there are corridors of them in universities, in schools, in councils and "services". When the music stops, and stop it will, there will be a great reckoning.
And much of the money isn't real. So much of the asset values aren't real. And the debt taken out against these assets therefore isn't backed by anything. I sometimes think that the Ukrainian war is only kept going so tat nobody notices that the EU is dying. I do not knw wtf Starmer thinks he's doing shackling us back to its corpse. He was given a free pass and chose the burn it, silly boy. He does appear to be as talentless as he looked like being. Perhaps this will be the last Labour government we ever have. I would not be surprised in the least.
Apparently of the one and half million peeps employed by rNHS, one third are medically trained consultants, surgeons, doctors both old and young, nurses, pharmacists, radiographers etc. The remaining million, receptionists, sekataries, managers, HR walla’s, DEI ‘experts’, dance choreographers and trans trainers should be culled, by at least two thirds, save a fuckin fortune in wages and non-contributory pensions.
BTW, did you here about the poor chap discharged the other day, at lunchtime, went to buy himself a coffee at the hospital reception cafe, died at a table and wasn’t discovered for over three hours, poor sod.
That is truly shocking, mr inmate - not that he died, people are dying all around us, all the time - but that nobody noticed he was dead for 3 hours - and that in a hospital environment, where they should know about these things.
And have you noticed how truly unhealthy-looking these NHS employees are? Maybe it is just in Orkney, but, as mr ishmael said "nurses, big like elephants, thundering down the wards", and they hang around outside, smoking cigarettes, and competitively chat about their hangovers from the night before.
That's a most valid point, mr mongoose - just as America's military-industrial complex requires a neverending war, so Europe needs a war with the big bad bogeyman, Russia.
Beautiful, thank you, Mrs I.
Glad you liked them, mr b.b. - a pleasure and a privilege.
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