Life in the past 18 months

If you were following this blog back in 2014/5 I may have seemed to disappear.  Well, in a way I did.  We had brought my dad back to the UK because he wasn't feeding himself and then we moved home, only five miles away, but the changes in our lives meant I put the thoughts of blogging away.

In the time since we last met, I have begun a course at my church, the Catholic Certificate in Religious Studies, it's thought provoking and I am learning more about my religion than I ever knew!  Also, my dad had a stroke!

The "Awesome Turtle" moniker should pass to my Granddaughter, eight years old and autistic, she reacted marvellously when she found him on the floor in his bedroom the morning after his 87th birthday. The only drawback, she's not a Turtle.

We've had a referendum to show that 51.8% of the country either didn't want to be part of the EU or believed the lies, half-truths and scaremongering that the Leave Campaign spouted.  We've had the Prime Minister resign and, the new PM, who said when Tony Blair resigned that there should be an election, go back on that thought.

At the time of writing this, we have a challenge to the leadership of the Labour Party, and now the front runner in the challenge has stepped down, what next?  Watch this space, or one near here!

Please Burn The England Flags!

I will freely admit I am a patriot, I love my country, I respect the monarchy and I respect the flags.

The title of this blog is not asking everyone to grab their nearest cross of St George and set fire to it, but to set light to the tautological flags.  Those that have the word England across the middle of it.  We all know that the N in PIN stands for the word number, and should not call it a PIN number as that would be a Personal Identification Number number.

The red cross on the white background already says "England", so why write the word across the middle of the flag?  We are the only country that does it, I have never seen "USA" written across the Stars and Stripes or "France" across the French Tricolore.

Why?

Is it that our country is so apathetic about teaching our population about the flags that represent us?  Thanks to Doctor Who we were all reminded that the flag that represents the United Kingdom is the Union Flag, when not on a ship.  Why do we not teach our children the flags of foreign nations and our own.neighbouring nations?  As a child I was taught the evolution of the Union Flag, the four flags of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales (For the Welsh dragon, look in the middle of the Union Flag).  I was taught a few of the neighbouring countries, the red, white and blue vertical stripes of France; the horizontal arrangement of the same colours said "Netherlands"; red, yellow and red of Spain and so on.  Does this happen in schools today?

The flag is the descendant of the coat of arms of the lord of an area and then the arms of the king.  For when the king was not on the field something was needed to give the troops to follow.  So all the troops knew that they were fighting for the right side, they had to know their flag.

So again, I say burn all the England England flags.  If you want to look stupid, fly them on your car or in your window but my recommendation is that you burn them!

Here goes for the Indignity!

Coming to a computer screen near you, the final degrading step that a person who is already ground down by the benefits system in the UK has to undergo.  

I have been poked, prodded, lied about, forced to travel near enough 200 miles to fight my case and now I'm called for a Work Focussed Interview.  This is an interview that will most probably be carried out between me and a twenty-something slip of a girl (or man) who has had one job in their life, other than a paper-round while still at school.  

The idea of this interview is to tell me that I should be doing this, that and the other to find a job where the employer will not employ me, or if they do, they will most probably ask me to leave after a week because of my disability.  I mean, what employer wants an employee that has trouble concentrating in the morning and has trouble staying awake in the afternoon, needs to get out of a normal chair after about 15-20 minutes to loosen his knee joints, can hardly climb stairs (and so is a fire hazard), cannot lift his hands above his head and cannot stand for more than a few minutes.  

Yet this is the indignity I have to face on Tuesday.  I have to pray that I can park near the DWP office on the other side of town and that they do not want me to go upstairs to an interview room.  On top of all this, I have to hope that I do not do, or say, the wrong thing and have the DWP "sanction" me.  For those outside the UK, this is where the Department for Works and Pensions arbitrarily decide that I have breached their rules and stop all of my benefits.  Not some of my benefits, we are talking, for a first offence (supposedly), all of my benefits.  This will mean that my wife and I will have no money for food, heating or light, but we will owe our landlord £200 for the two weeks of rent that will not be paid, if not more if the council do not restart the payments after the fortnight.

The standard working period for the DWP is a fortnight, as, in the past, unemployed people had to sign on for their benefit and then get paid this often.  This is not a problem for the clerks in their centrally heated offices who can mark off two weeks on a calendar easily enough.  For businesses and banks this is unworkable.  It seems that direct debits and the like can only be paid monthly, that is, on the same date every month, days do not come into it unless the 14th falls on a weekend, in which case it used to be paid on the Monday following.

Now, I think to normal people, the problem will be becoming obvious, some months have five weeks in them, in fact, the only month that is an exact four week period is a non-leap year February.  So, although the 14th of January is on a Tuesday this year, it is not an even number of weeks from the 14th of February, and so on and so on.  This means that budgeting on benefits is an amazing feat of accounting, and if the Chancellor of the Exchequer needed to do it, he would fail unless, as he does, he had a large bank balance in the black.

So, the Minister for Works and Pensions has decided to bring in a system whereby benefits claimants will be paid monthly.  It has already cost £50M of lost money already to prepare the system to do it, but it doesn't work.  So will future sanctions be for a minimum of a month?

The government, which, yet again, has been caught in a PR lie, is trying to pull the wool over the eyes of the public by making every claimant guilty of "shirking" and cheating the system by use of the media.  This government by Upper Class Twits who only have the needs of themselves and their own classmates from Public School or University in mind.  These cheats who started by preventing themselves being voted out in the first days of their filling the seats of power with a bunch of sycophantic cronies who are all filling jobs for which they have little or any qualification for.  

The people are getting fed up with the austerity package they are being forced to undergo - pay rises capped to 1% while MPs vote themselves a massive pay rise; high paid people get tax cuts in their favour; power companies raise prices by 3% and train companies raise fares by 6%.  There will come a time when the people can take no more hypocrisy.

The lies that men tell live on in infamy!

The Second of May 2010 a day that should live in infamy alongside the Attack on Pearl Harbor (7 dec 1941).  A day when a prospective Prime Minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland appeared on British National Television and promised within the space of seven sentences 

" I don't want to leave anyone behind. The test of a good society is you look after the elderly, the frail, the vulnerable, the poorest in our society. And that test is even more important in difficult times, when difficult decisions have to be taken, than it is in better times. "

So there you have it David Cameron promising the nation that he would protect those at the bottom of the social heap.
 

 
Now, three years later we have
 

• Disabled people are dying because they have been told they are "Fit For Work" while they have serious heart defects or disabilities.   Is this something to be concerned about?
• The attack on the Disabled was started to reduce fraudulent claims, even when the DWP admit only 0.7% of claims were fraudulent.  Is this something to be concerned about?
• Disabled and Unemployed have had their basic benefit capped at a 1% per year rise with inflation running at over 2.5% this is a 1.5% per year reduction.  Is this something to be concerned about?
• Mobility assessments are being slashed to keep disabled people within their homes as they won't get enough to run a car, use taxis, busses or trains.  Is this something to be concerned about?
• The complex quantity of benefits that are being changed, combined, renamed or scrapped is so confusing that it takes a battery of people to explain them.  Is this something to be concerned about?
• The poor, vulnerable and frail of our society have had their right to legal representation for many actions removed from them.  Is this something to be concerned about?
• The number of disability fora and marches opposing the cuts and changes are rising.  Is this something to be concerned about?
• The changes in disability calculation and benefits are being challenged in some of the highest courts of law in the country.  Is this something to be concerned about?
• The unemployed and disabled have been branded as scroungers, it's no good retracting the statement, it's still in the general psyche.  Is this something to be concerned about?

And now, as part of a stealth attack, the government, formerly a supporter of the NHS are trying to privatise it, at the same time the previously privatised railways and steel works are failing.
 

 

 
To protest the cuts to the NHS, there's even a protestor pushing a toy pig through the streets of London using his nose.  A bit pointless, any Conservative worth their membership is too dense to understanding the symbolism.

And all along, government ministers have been misrepresenting, manipulating and massaging the truth with the use of percentages rather than numbers. 

The thing that the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition is that they have forgotten the power of the people, and the internet that they are insisting the unemployed, handicapped and elderly should all have.  Or, did they underestimate this power and this record that is the internet?

Every word that people in (or soon to be in) power is recorded, written down and saved, the interview on the 2nd of May 2010, given to Andrew Marr on the BBC is transcribed, you can find it by following this link. Photographs of posters that parties use are saved on the net and the people who are being hurt by these draconian cuts are saving them on their computers.

So,

How many more lies do we have to put up with?

How many more U-turns?

How many more people dying on our shores when we send billions abroad in Foreign Aid?

Oh, and the one thing that he could have done, had he had an economist in the Treasury instead of his Bullingdon club pal History student, keep the higher rate of tax where it was.  I've said it before and I'll say it again, if you have a shortage of money, why take a pay cut at the same time you cut your expenses?  Or in plain English, tax the rich and cut benefits.

No Ta! I want None Of The Above

In the 1995 film "Brewster's Millions", Montgomery Brewster, played, in this incarnation by Richard Pryor, gets an idea to waste money by running for public office.  He is so fed up with the corruption that fuels the other contestants he launches his campaign to "Vote None of the Above"!

It is too late, in the film, to have the ballot sheets reprinted, so, thanks to an American voting law, the electorate is allowed to write on the sheet the party they want to vote for - NONE OF THE ABOVE.

At the conclusion of the election, even though Monty has resigned from the campaign, the electorate have responded with a massive majority for "None of the Above". 

Would this work in the United Kingdom?  Without a charismatic leader to take the peoples imaginations and spin them through myriad hoops, could the electorate get off their backsides and vote None of the Above?

The electorate in this country are disenchanted with the politicians that we have.  One bunch is doing all they can for their mates in big business, so that when they retire from politics they will have a lucrative consultants fee; the other lot lining the pockets of their rich mates so that they will employ them in a consultancy position in their big businesses and pay them a large retainer.  Which lot do we, the people want?  None of the Above!

If the country, full of apathetic voters, like the mother of the Downs Syndrome child shown on the news in the run up to the Eastleigh by-election showed, people do not vote because they get cardboard cutouts of the last lot in if they vote for the other lot.  As soon as candidates become MPs they seem to forget about their constituents and focus on their bank balance, squeezing expenses, getting paid their £1000 a week.  What do we the grass-roots voters want - None of the Above!

We want no apathy, we want people to use their vote, to elect a government that can make this country "Great" again, we are fed up of living in Britain, we want it to be Great Britain again.  We don't want these sycophantic university brats who have had little or no experience of life outside Public School and politics running our country, we want, nay need people who know what they are doing. 

Do we want a history student in charge of the Exchequer?  Do we want a soldier in charge of Benefits and Pensions?  Do we want a TV presenter representing the disabled? Do we want a director of a house building company in charge of the Armed Forces? No, we want None of the Above.

Although the Registration of Political Parties (Prohibited Words and Expressions) (Amendment) Order 2005 stipulates that no political party can be registered in the UK under the name "None of the Above", there is no legislation against a person changing their name by deed poll and appearing on the ballot paper as "None Of the Above".  This does, however, bring about problems of order on the ballot paper as "Above, None of the" would be at the top of the paper, not the bottom!  If the candidate was to change their name to "Of The Above None" they would end up in the middle.

My thought, although there can be no political party named "None of the Above", does this exclude the option being given on the ballot?  Does this preclude the option of voicing one's dissent to the political system?
I believe that a wake up call should be sent to the political parties of the United Kingdom that the time has come to stop thinking of themselves and start thinking of the well-being of the country and the people in it.  As John F. Kennedy said "ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country".  

I believe that a vote of no-confidence, not only in the Government, but also the political parties and their politicians is needed.  At the next by-election for a Constituency Seat at Westminster, or, if it comes first, a General Election, the electorate should, in all decency, spoil their ballot papers with the words "None of the Above".

So, to vote None of the Above, do not stay sat in your house on election day, this just says you are apathetic and lazy, you do not want to take part in the election process.  Get up, get out of your house, go to the polling station and vote - "None of the Above". 

Then, to highlight the choice of people in your constituency, send a letter to the returning officer of your constituency asking how many spoiled papers were spoiled with "None of the Above".  (This may be better being asked in advance of the day, so that they have a chance to set up the count for it.)  Ask your local paper to enquire how many papers were spoiled in this manner and if the constituency had in fact elected "None of the Above".

If the movement to vote "None of the Above" were to become prominent enough, it might be that the returning officers would look for this statistic to be included in their returns.  It might be that rather than using half-truths or manipulations of the truth, that Members of Parliament would again earn the right to be called "Honourable", an appellation that makes me laugh when I hear "The honourable member for Chingford and Woodford Green" mentioned.

So please, remember, when you are called to vote, get out of your house, go to the polling station and vote -

NONE OF THE ABOVE!