Potentially we are all refugees

Imagine if we let the thick of neck, knuckle dragging, beer bellied, spotty, low IQ, shouty white blokes take over. Think about that. Think it couldn’t happen? Think again. The Brexit vote happened because filthy rich white blokes exploited the intellectually challenged members of society. Those simple souls who can only think in black and white. The filthy rich could take back even more control! Think!

If that were ever to happen what would you do?

Under fascism no one is safe. Not even the fascists. Fascism rules through fear. Fear breeds distrust. Distrust creates purges. People, yes real human beings, are vapourised. A knock on the door in the dead of night, a scuffle, and you are spirited away. Your name erased from history. Think!

Imagine this happening, then imagine having to get out of your house as quickly as possible and fleeing in fear of your life. What would you take with you? What of your most prized possessions would you love into your single solitary suitcase? This is the dilemma that hundreds of thousands have to face each year. Your life in a suitcase.Think!

What would I take? I really couldn't say. A change or two of clothes I guess. But what else? Important financial records/papers perhaps, a small momento or two, relevant medication, travel kettle, iPod and perhaps a travel radio might fit in two. I guess it would also be useful to take small things of high monetary value like jewellery. Things that could be sold to raise some cash. Have I forgotten anything? Probably. Think!

What would you pack in a solitary suitcase? Could you cope with that? You'd have to. It would be cope or die. Think about that!

Being a refugee as far as I can see is no fun. You don't upsticks just because you fancy a change of scenery. Refugees are people. People fleeing persecution. Put yourself in their shoes; you've escaped persecution or death, wouldn't you hope to be welcomed when you reach a safe haven? What if there were no safe havens? Where would you go if you needed to?

We all have a responsibility to help refugees.

Think!

My arrogance is fuelled by anger

I'm angry, angry because a country I actually like living in is being destroyed by fascist tendencies. Fascism is ignorance. That's not arrogance by the way, that's fact. Fascism is irrational; it's not based on any moral philosophy or code, just hatred and stupidity. To consider someone as a lesser being because of their ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation or superstitions has no place in a civilised society. Bigotry is destructive, divisive and counterproductive to human progression.

I'm still angry about Brexit, and as a result I lash out sometimes and refer to those that voted for it as idiots. This suggests a certain arrogance on my part. A valid criticism. But in my defence I've yet to hear a non-moronic justification from anyone who voted for it. All I hear is ill informed opinions and gutter press sound bites that crumble in the face of any informed counter argument. There are no sound philosophical arguments to defend the Brexit vote. It is an act of mass-stupidity not seen in this country since Thatcher was elected. And even then she never had the support of even half of those that vote.

My challenge to you Brexit voters out there is to give me one good and credible reason for why Brexit is a sound proposition. Until the day that this happens I shall continue to call you idiots. For idiots you truly are. And to add to the charges of arrogance I will state that I don't believe you can help being idiots. You've been conditioned to be that way. Decades of government policy and manoeuvrings by the elite have created an underclass of Epsilons open to manipulation.

Welcome to our brave new fascist world, or wake up to your ignorance turkeys, and stop voting for Christmas.

If you tolerate this then your children will be next

I like many people have become very alarmed by the way the fascist agenda has appeared to have come to the fore in recent months, and particularly in the last week or so. Hate, which is essentially fascism, is being displayed more and more openly. A worrying trend that has to stop. How do the decent majority stop it? We stand up to be counted, we challenge it whenever we can and we make it known by whatever means available that HATE is not acceptable.

The key is to realise that you, each and every one of you can make a difference. You can help affect change. If we all do small things to counter fascism we will overcome the hate. We can drive it out. We can reaffirm that hate has no place in a decent society.

What can we do?
• Today I have sent postcards to the editors of five of the main culprit newspapers that have been encouraging hate. I've also complained to the BBC about their Marine Le Pen interview on the Andrew Marr Show. Next I shall start contacting those companies that fund adverts to the 'hate monger' newspapers:

• You can do the same
• And you can ask others to help to
• If you're on social media then follow the Stop Funding Hate campaign on Twitter or Facebook
• Follow Unite Against Fascism on Twitter and Facebook
• Print out some of the anti-fascist images on sticky paper. Stick them up in public places
• Print them out on plain paper. Shove them through people doors.
• Spread the word on social media
• Anything to get the message across

Now is a good time to remind you of Martin Niemoeller 'poem':

First they came for the Communists,
but I was not a Communist,
so I did not speak out.

Then they came for the Socialists and the trade unionists,
but I was neither,
so I did not speak out.

Then they came for the Jews,
but I was not a Jew,
so I did not speak out.
And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me.

– Martin Niemoeller (1892-1984)

The title of this blog posting comes from a poster from the Spanish Civil War:

Think!

It inspired this Manic Street Preacher's song:

Think some more

These are seriously troubled times. It's time for all decent tolerant people to get up off their arses and do something, no matter how small.

Please feel free to share this picture

The postcards to national dailies

Welcome

#compassion

Friends lovers mothers fathers sisters brothers daughters sons grandparents cousins nieces nephews aunts uncles wives husbands just because we are victims of geography doesn't make us different. We are all human we are all connected we all bleed. To be civilised is to be compassionate to be civilised is to offer our brethren shelter from the storm to be civilised is to welcome.

on a wall in Amsterdam

Tory politics - beating the masses with a big stick!

The raison d’être of the Tory party seems to be to make shed loads of money for themselves and their mates and beating the shit out of the 99% of the population that aren’t wealthy. And working-class* people vote for them!

*you can call yourself middle-class if you like, but if you don’t own the means of production you are working-class!

Be very, very afraid

I’m always frustrated when people defend not voting or not taking an interest in the political system by claiming that all politicians are the same. I’ve never believed that they are. I am convinced there are some of them driven purely by altruistic political belief and are not just there to line their pockets. I hope I’m right.

Last week’s report on the Hillsborough disaster frightened me probably more than most of the ‘revelations’ of the past few years. It seemed to me that ‘corruption’ in public life had spread further than many imagined in a way that was quite insidious and fascist in nature, and, it started with Thatcher as I’d often suspected. It made me realise that politics is still riddled with vested interest and corruption and it permeates all levels. The ‘Establishment’ rules like it has always ruled. Very often the ‘Establishment’ is made up from a smallish number of families and interlopers, all public school educated and hell bent on preserving the status quo. They fight tooth and nail to keep what they have. They play dirty. Very, very dirty.

Perhaps it is time to just kick everybody out from top to bottom and start all over again?

Half socks, an obstacle to world peace

I am convinced that the half sock or trainer sock is a significant obstacle to world peace. That and narrow minded oppressive violent ideologies. Oh and injustice.

Camel goes through eye of needle shock!

As you age it becomes very tempting to inhabit the past. I try not to. I try to be forward thinking. Progressive even. But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t learn from the past. As long as we don’t view that past through rose-tinted spectacles that is. It can be argued with some confidence that the 1960s were a golden age in the UK. Sgt Pepper was released on my twelfth birthday. It was the decade that working classes flexed their muscles and many broke free from the chains that bound them. It was a decade when many working people experienced a relative affluence that could only have been previously dreamed of. Our family did. It was a decade of major innovation and thought. So many of the thoughts on equality and respect came to the fore during the 60s. We had, in modern terms, a progressive Labour government. And with that came high rates of tax for high income earners. Sadly Thatcher blew a lot of the good away, and given half a chance this fucking Tory government will do the rest.

I don’t buy this nonsense about how you need to pay obscenely high wages to attract the right sort of people, or that taxes need to be kept low so as not to de-incentivise or drive talent abroad. It is all capitalist spin and bollocks. If you control excessively high pay and people go elsewhere so what? Plenty more very apt people to take their place. British industry and commerce is littered with over-paid ignorant shits who operate in a poor or mediocre fashion. It is a total myth that they are somehow special. Most of them aren’t. Excessive pay is way out of control and the only people who can stop it, apart from the perpetrators are the government. Shareholders won’t. In the main shareholders are either in the same ‘fat-cat’ boat or they have been neutered by the system.

Today’s announcement of the RBS chief Stephen Hester's £963,000 bonus is an insult to all those suffering up and down the land. This is public money we are talking about. Tax-payers money. Tax that thing that every man, woman, child and hermaphrodite contribute to. Robert Peston has been “...reliably told that they feared Mr Hester and much of the board would have quit, if the payment had been vetoed by the government as the majority shareholder.” So? Let the selfish bastards resign. Good riddance I say. We are talking about the sort of people and their ilk that are responsible for the ‘high-pay’ culture and the ‘persecution of the average person’ culture that we find ourselves in. Let’s enforce extreme pay restraint at the top and cull the parasitic and obese leeches that have caused us all these financial woes. We’ll be all the fitter financially for it. All we need is the courage.

The wages of sin

For every £1 million that is paid to some fat-cat executive you could employ 40 people at £25,000, 50 people at £20,000 or 66.6 at £15,000. If you raise the wage rate from the minimum wage (£6.08) to a living wage (£7.20) it would cost, per person, £1.12 per hour, which is £44.80 for a 40 hour week, or £2329.60 per annum. For every £1 million that is paid to some fat-cat executive 429 people could benefit from an increase from a minimum to a living wage. Now I realise that a living wage is still far from ideal and that any company that is serious about their business would pay more but it would be an improvement on what many have now.

Now I realise that the above is an oversimplification and that the costs of employing people are not directly proportional to their salary but it is accurate enough to highlight how unbalanced and unfair most businesses attitude to wages and staffing are, in that one person’s wage can be so high that it is the equivalent to 40, 50 or several hundred people’s wages put together.

Do bankers, footballers and multi-million pound earning captains of industry et al actually work any harder than the poor soul on minimum wage working as a cleaner care assistant or other equally valuable job? I think we know the answer to that, don’t we?

The minimum wage should be a living wage!

The living wage:
"An idea whose time has come"- David Cameron

What is the point?

No society can call itself civilised whilst it has poverty in its ranks. We in the UK are not a civilised society. Most of the population seem to tacitly accept poverty, if it is not happening to them. Presumably it is on the grounds of ‘I’m alright Jack’. What is wrong with us? Have we been so ground down that we no longer have the will to fight it? Is it just mass stupidity? Have the capitalists so brainwashed Ms, Mrs and Mr Average that they are incapable of questioning the immorality of the regime we live under? How do we get the message across that it doesn’t have to be like this? How do we get the message across that not only is financial equality desirable on moral and humanitarian grounds but it actually makes a whole heap of sense on purely a financial basis as far as the vast majority of the population is concerned?

Young and old, urban and rural dwellers alike are suffering terrible hardship, and collectively we do nothing, apart from turn a blind eye.

I’m not sure I can answer any of the above questions. Some days my faith in ever building a fair and just society is seriously challenged. I despair at the Great British public and the fuckwhats that they have become.

What is the point?

What the dickens?

The recent Dickens season on the BBC has caused me a certain amount of unease. I have a distinct dislike of period costume dramas, particularly those based around Regency and Victorian times. In fact I will often go out of my way to avoid them. In many ways that’s a shame as no doubt some of them will be very well written. The trouble is that they make me want to vomit. The only exception to the rule is A Christmas Carol which I never tire of and which invariably leads to a modicum of tear-duct leakage. I’m sure that somewhere in this land some very good ‘alternate’ productions of his work are being performed, but I would so much prefer it if by default Dickens could be treated in a similar vein to Shakespeare. I know that there is a whole world of difference between the novels of Charles Dickens and the plays of William Shakespeare but I do feel that the approach could be equally as exciting by relying solely on the prose of Dickens and its dramatic interpretation. Does it really need to be reduced to lack-lustre entertainment gift wrapped in frilly dresses, starched collars and sideburns? I‘d like to see Dickens interpreted with some stripped down gritty realism.

Sadly much of the subject matter in the works of Dickens is still very relevant. Presenting his work cosseted in a cloak of mawkish sterility detracts from its power. Charlie boy highlighted the horrors of poverty which sadly are still all too real today; you would have thought that over the last 142 years* it would not have been beyond the capacity of the peoples of Great Britain and their successive governments to have eradicated it by now. But clearly to date it has beaten us. Poverty is very much alive and thriving. So far we have failed. When will we make poverty history? Until that day we are nothing!

“Dear mother it’s a bugger...”

*Dickens died in 1870

#N30

I work in the private sector. I don’t begrudge what public sector workers earn or the pension benefits that they receive. It shouldn’t be about reducing pensions so that we are all poorly provided for. It should be about improving living standards and pension provision across the board. There are some extremely wealthy people in this country. People in power, the rich got us into this mess. It is down to the rich to get us out of it. They need to dig deep into their pockets.

Are we all totally fucking mad in this country?

Yesterday the BBC reported that “Former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher has claimed £535,000 of taxpayers' money over the last five years, government records have shown.” She is not alone of course, other ex-PMs are at it as well, milking the expenses scam that John Major set up when he was in office. Thatcher’s claims are particularly galling because of what she did to this country and its people, bringing large swathes of the population to their knees. It’s as if our noses are being rubbed in it! I don’t actually have a problem with ex-PMs claiming expenses in principle, like I don’t have a problem with MPs claiming expenses, as long as they are fair and reasonable, but £535,000 over five years is taking the piss big time. I suppose it’s a case of once an evil cow, always an evil cow.

As if that wasn’t bad enough we awoke this morning to the news that “Pay for the directors of the UK's top businesses rose 50% over the past year, a pay research company has said.” Whilst most of us have suffered minimal pay rises or none at all, which has effectively eroded our real income, company bosses have been dipping into their proverbial tills with gay abandon. Thanks to the recklessness by the financial institutions of the world we are in a recession, profits are down, companies are making thousands redundant and yet company directors see fit to up their pay by an obscene amount. It is immoral. But not only that, it doesn’t make good business sense either; there is no logic in upping the pay of those that are measured by results when they are currently not performing. Just remember every £1Million of bonus paid out to some festering fat-cat could pay the wages of 50+ people; food for thought.

These are just two examples of nest feathering at their most offensive. The rich and powerful are raping and pillaging this nation. The majority of us aren’t filthy rich. The majority of us don’t hold public office. The power and wealth in this country is held be an elite few. And, we allow that!

Yes, we allow it. We must be mad to do so. But it doesn’t have to be like that. Ultimately it is us, the majority, who hold the real power. We just need to wake up and exercise that power.

Oh yes, now, what was that ConDem motto again? Oh, that’s right, “we’re all in this together”. Like fuck we are!

Frankenstein’s Britain

Listening to the radio at lunchtime one couldn’t not help but be moved by the accounts of so many unfortunate folk that have been injured, threatened and had their possessions and livelihoods ruined by the rioting in London and elsewhere. These are real people really suffering; innocent law abiding citizens. As a pacifist I could never excuse or wish to justify any violent act. But, to dismiss those who are rioting on the streets of London and other cities in England merely as gangsters, looters and thugs is to totally misunderstand what is going on in this country. When David Cameron used the term ‘Broken Britain’ in many respects he was right. Oh dear that’s twice when I’ve agreed with him lately. I suspect where we differ though is on how we perceive ‘Broken Britain’ and how we would ‘fix’ it.

For my sins I travel on public transport most weekdays. At either end of my journey from Norwich to Thetford I walk to and from both stations. Almost on a daily basis I see people whose behaviour is just so alien to my neo-polite upper working class sensibilities that I often cringe and wonder how they can be so, quite frankly, horrible, selfish and rude. The dysfunctional behaviour that is displayed by an increasing percentage of the population is both staggering and horrifying. I’m not just talking about what is increasingly and sadly being referred to as an underclass but right across the socio-economic divide. Too many people are just too bloody selfish.

It would be so easy to say that it is all Thatcher’s fault! And I fear I might have been guilty in the past of such a comment. But whilst the seeds of society’s decay were sown in the Thatcher era, “There is no such thing as society: there are individual men and women, and there are families” both Tory and Labour governments have perpetuated and allowed the decay to continue. We live in a me, me, me society where I’m alright Jack sod everyone else prevails. It would seem that in this pseudo-libertarian age it is okay for individuals to break the rules. They apply to everyone else but not me. This approach pervades all sections of society; breaking the rules is now acceptable. It doesn’t matter if it is rudeness, dropping litter, queue jumping, never switching your mobile phone off, driving whilst holding you phone to your ear, speeding, phone-hacking, awarding yourself large pay rises and bonuses, or good old fashioned looting and rioting people, right across society so many individuals just do not give a shit about anyone else or the consequences of their actions. To a certain extent we are all guilty of perpetuating this downward spiral into anarchy. But it doesn’t have to be like this. If enough people want it to change it will. Thankfully we still live in enough of a democracy to make it happen.

The big challenge is to persuade the majority that it is in everyone’s interest to try and improve social cohesion and that equality is the key to improving the society that we live in. It is easier said than done of course as so many people take a burying their head in the sand approach and will just dismiss it as liberal Guardian-reading woolliness. The bigots will call for short sharp shocks, more police and other oppressive solutions, but these are sticking plaster solutions to deal with society’s broken limbs and slashed arteries. Unless we have a society where everybody has genuine opportunities in housing, health, education and employment we will never progress. Unless we recognise that equality really does make a difference and recognise that the wealth gap between the top and the bottom of the economic scale impacts on the quality of life that we all live nothing will change. Looting is going on at both ends of the economic scale. A small minority of undereducated, undernourished under fulfilled poor kids are grabbing all the headlines with cries from the general public of “something must be done” whilst quietly company executives award themselves ridiculously high salaries and ridiculously high bonuses and at the same time making thousands redundant and paying too many others the minimum wage. Looting on a grand scale, causing hardship and ruination to so many good people, and there is simply nothing that anyone seems to want to do about it. Most rich people don’t get rich through pure luck. They get rich through exploiting a situation, people or both. We are not yet a civilised society me thinks.

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs illustrates what most humans strive for in their lives. But if you take away the opportunity and the hope of ever improving the human condition from millions of people there are bound to be consequences. More equality won’t solve all this country's ills over night. In fact it’ll take a generation or two before any substantive change will be noticed. But if we make no attempt to even things up matters will just continue to get worse and worse.

These two articles, one from the Guardian and, surprisingly, one from the Telegraph that hint at some of the many complex reasons for what is going on.

I worry about Twitter.

Not just Twitter I might add, but social media in general. The likes of Twitter have enjoyed, of late, what might be described as some success, with the super-injunction debacle, and this week playing their part in the attacks against Murdoch and the News of the World. Is this all good for democracy? I have mixed feelings.

Whilst it feels good when popular victories are won against the forces of evil, like Murdoch, and I must say I have a mild Twitter addiction, I do worry that there is a fine line between justified protest and a sort of herd/lynch mob mentality. My concern would be if the latter were to prevail.

A free press is important in a democracy (not that we necessarily live in a true democracy) but we don't really have a free press. We have a press owned by a small number of very rich and powerful individuals. Most of whom have a vested interest in the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. If we really had a free press it would greater reflect society as a whole.

I have no love of the rich and famous or an interest in the cult of 'celebrity'. I really don't care who is shagging who and in what orientation or denomination. So from that point of view I think that I would possibly welcome privacy laws but on the other hand I fear that those same laws could be used to gag journals and journalists from reporting on matters that in my opinion would be matters of genuine public interest. It is all quite a dilemma. I do quite like the idea that Hugh Grant has been advocating. He feels that newspapers should be subject to the same rules as television in terms of impartiality etc. Would this work? Possibly. It surely would be better than what we have at the moment; where papers just print out and out lies that smear an individual or a party. Once a story is printed in a paper that story is treated by many as fact. It is very hard for innocent individuals to clear their name and refute allegations. It is the total opposite to our justice system where individuals should be presumed innocent until proven guilty. As far as newspapers are concerned if they think you are guilty or your face doesn't fit or they don't like your politics then they will condemn you. Newspapers are never going to let fairness or justice get in the way of a 'good' story. Yes we have libel laws. But justice is slow and expensive and really only open to the rich. Innocent people have their characters besmirched and destroyed just to sell newspapers. That really can't be fair. The press do need a regulatory body that is truly independent and with the power to fine, order prominent retractions and apologies and to suspend publication if necessary.

There is no doubt that the mass circulation newspaper is on the decline. Electronic media will take its place. The gutter press thrives on rumour and innuendo. My fear is that Twitter could well go the same way, if it has not done so already. I do hope that it doesn't become lowest common denominator saturated.

This last week's events have reminded me of a John Cooper Clarke poem 'Suspended Sentence'. No prizes for guessing why.

Everybody must get stoned!

There are a couple of lines in Moving On by the Oysterband that go:

“We asked the man for justice

Well, he handed us a stone”

Last week’s stoning by the Taliban was rightly condemned for the barbaric act that it was (although it raises so many other questions and comparisons) but we in ‘the west’ don’t really have grounds to criticise when we are guilty of acts of collective barbarism ourselves. I am appalled by the posturing, whining and intolerant belligerence (is that partial tautology?) on the part of the lynch mob that is the voice of the American Establishment. Their continued howls for the head of Abdelbasset Ali al-Megrahi are quite sickening. If ‘the west’ wants to criticise the behaviour of the rest of the world then we need to put our own house in order first. If we are to prove to the rest of the world that ‘our values’ are the best then they need to be so in reality. The Lockerbie bombing was a cowardly and evil act and we may never know if it was committed by al-Megrahi or not, but in many ways the issue of his guilt is irrelevant. We are also not to know at the moment if there were murky dealings regarding his release, and again in many ways this is not the issue. If we take what the Scottish executive and the doctor concerned are telling us at face value then what they have done in releasing al-Megrahi on compassionate grounds was the right, honourable and compassionate thing to do. Compassion should be always be one of the USPs of any civilised society. If we are to place ourselves on the moral high ground we need to act according to those morals. Something the loud-mouthed pseudo-Christian American establishment right-wingers should adopt. ‘Tit for tat’/’eye for an eye’ actions just perpetuate the downward spiral of the retribution cycle.

The white American Christian establishment right (WACERs) need to answer the following questions honestly:

• In the case of al-Megrahi what would have been the Christian response to him being diagnosed with terminal cancer?
• Why do they think Lockerbie and for that matter 11/9 happened?
• When are they going to stop supporting injustice?

As an atheist I accept that everyone has a right to follow the religion of their choosing but I despise anyone who hollowly wears a religion as a badge and uses it to oppress others.

Thatcher

A while back on my RealAleBlog I referred to a beer brewed in honour of Thatcher, and called ‘Iron lady’, as a ‘fuck-awful name for a beer’. Some ‘commenters’ couldn’t understand why I hated her so much:


A lot of lefties will cite the miners’ strike as one of the many disasters of the Thatcher era. I don’t get quite as emotional as many about what on one level was indeed a human tragedy, but on another level was an example greed and gross stupidity. I felt quite sick when Thatcher came to power, sick and betrayed. I didn’t understand how working people could effectively cause self-harm by voting that way. No doubt some will argue, citing the popular vote, that the working class didn’t vote for her, but they did. I was there, and those Sun reader types were just so behind her.

Thatcher’s legacy is quite pronounced, and whilst it is difficult to fully comprehend what His Vagueness the Shallow David Cameron means when he talks about ‘Broken Britain’, he is clearly referring to that section of society written off by Thatcher’s work. A part of Britain is broken it is a section of the population that might well be best described as the disenfranchised white out-of-working-class. Those second and third generation Burberry wearing no hopers who can trace their creation back to Thatcher’s reign when their forefathers, and mothers, were consigned to the scrap heap as the Tories laid waste to vast swathes of British industry. Thatcher didn’t believe in ‘society’ but just in case it existed she put measures in place to see that it wouldn’t survive past her Reich. Those measures were most successful.

It is so sad that we have a defined underclass that has no manners, no idea about social responsibility, considers unemployment to be the norm, reproduces from teenage years onwards, is poorly educated, poorly housed and with no doubt very few if any aspirations. It may sound patronising and belittling to say that they can’t help it because they don’t know any better, and I’m probably guilty of that, but they really don’t seem to know any better. You could even say I’m making excuses for them in a condescending middle-class liberal valued woolly and judgemental way from my safe ivory tower. But think about it. If you were brought up in the same sort of run-down area that your parents were brought up in and your grandparents lived in. Received the same sort of education as your parents. Had the same sort of job ‘opportunities’ as your parents and grandparents, were subjected to the same cultural deficiencies generation after generation, then it is little wonder that we have spawned these communities of ‘broken’ individuals. Then to have that all reinforced by the professional classes, with their self-centred, money grabbing, the ‘individual is king’ attitude, along with the ‘do as I say not as I do’ approach, just seals it.

Many people never twigged what a cultural change the Thatcher administration brought about. It was quite a fundamental and seismic shift. The Britain that I was born into ten years after the Second World War ended was a society where Britons were culturally individual but economically collective. A society where people had a sense of neighbourhood and community. Where people took pride in the work they did. Post Thatcher and it’s all about looking after number one and screw everybody else. The attitude, ‘I’ll do as little as I can, take no pride in doing anything well, and expect loads of money for it!’ pervades. We are now a nation that is culturally collective and economically individual. This is why bankers and captains of industry continue to get richer and richer whilst at the same time pissing on the little people below. The little people are mostly anaesthetised by ‘celebrity’ worship, Big Brother, East Enders and the X Factor, so they don’t notice that they are getting wet. They’ve got us exactly where they want us and there is no easy way back!

Religious schools - licensed child abuse

Whilst I abhor physical abuse, messing with people’s minds is equally abhorrent. ‘Brainwashing’ is evil, inexcusable and surely has no place in modern society. I’m quite firmly of the belief that there is no god, although I do accept that it should be a basic human right to be able to practice the religion of your choice. Equally it should be a right not to practice a religion if you so choose. It should be down to the individual,  a matter of personal choice.

Selfish parents are those who choose indoctrination instead of education for their children. Sending a child to a religious school is barbaric and really has no place in the twenty-first century. Teach children about the religions of the world by all means, but imposing a religion upon them is an act of fascism. Religion is something for adults to follow through their own volition. Children’s minds are not sufficiently mature to be able to make choices of this kind. How any self-respecting government could permit religious schools is really beyond comprehension.

How fucking barbaric is this?

Muslim woman to be flogged in Malaysia over beer

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia ‘ An Islamic court in Malaysia has sentenced a Muslim woman to be flogged with a rattan cane for having a beer in a nightclub, a court official said Tuesday."

read more

What makes it even more sickening is that it's in the name of something that doesn't exist.

There is no God, so drink as much beer as you like!

Fascists

You do wonder if the heart and soul has been ripped out of this country of ours when you hear about the likes of Ama Sumani’s plight.

Regardless of the rights or wrongs of our immigration laws, for the state to sentence someone to death is totally and utterly wrong. Ama is a 39 year old Ghanaian woman who had lived here for a number of years. She is terminally ill, and was effectively taken from her hospital bed and expelled from the UK. The immigration service claimed that she would be able to obtain the necessary treatment in her home country. It appears not to be true because she can’t afford to pay for that treatment. Why does it have to be so cruel and so despicable?