Can Cameron really be this stupid?

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Dave? Do you think that this might possibly have something to do with the fact that you haven’t stopped spunking away money by the billion as fast as you can tax it off of the current workforce and borrow it on behalf of their children? Fucking hellfire, in the last couple of days we’re told that you’ve blown half a billion on the Northern Rock sale, granted perhaps unavoidably, and that you’ve decided to throw almost the same again at the building industry while underwriting all the mortgages of first time buyers. Not only have you not cut public spending you’re actually spending even more than Labour did, and incidentally failed to get the public sector to stop thinking of that as a cut as well as failed to get them to stop hiring for bullshit jobs instead of people who actually provide useful services. You’ve carried on taking money that could have paid down some of the UK’s eye watering debt and handing it to the EU, IMF and international aid, and you’ve continued Labour’s wars at significant cost and embarked on a military adventure of your own. The bonfire of the quangos was at best a barbecue of a handful of them – one of those small barbecues made of thick tinfoil that you get from petrol stations, and for which you probably paid in cash and told the attendant to keep the change from a million quid. And you’ve failed to create growth because you’ve refused to provide the conditions for it to occur. That’s just off the top of my head and I’m sure I could think of more given time and find out more still if I started looking. And here you are scratching your arse – it apparently being interchangeable with your head – and wondering why the plan’s not working.

I’ll tell you why, David. It’s because it’s basically the same fucking plan that Gordon Brown was using, you hopelessly inept cunt. How the hell did Britain come to this? It’s had some dim politicians and not a few dim PMs, but how in Christ’s name did it get landed with you: a PM whose extraordinary dimness must surely result from being so dense that light can’t escape if it falls into his head? It’s not madness that is doing the same thing and expecting different results, it’s stupidity. And that’s actually the generous alternative because if I thought you knew what the fuck you were doing I’d be describing you as evil.

I hate to go all Private Frasier again, but if these fuckwits aren’t dragged out and chained to something solid where they can’t do any harm – the Lusitania for example – I really do think the UK is doomed.

Come back, Gordon Brown… UPDATED

All is not forgiven by any means, not even remotely. But when the Cobbleition are doing things that are just as stupid as those Gordon Clown himself did there’s a case to be made that you might as well put the lurching, snot munching, cyclopean horror with the faecal Midas touch back in charge and be bloody done with it.

The Prime Minister and his deputy, Nick Clegg, will unveil proposals to help first-time buyers of new homes by carrying part of the risk of their mortgages.

Dave, Nick, say it ain’t so. Tell us that even you aren’t so monumentally stupid that you can’t see that it’s precisely this kind of policy – using taxpayers’ money to underwrite loans for overpriced housing to people who are at higher risk of being unable to repay them – that led with grim inevitability to the fucking subprime mortgage crisis in the fucking first place. And what did that lead to in its turn? Oh, yes, that’d be adding to an unsustainable bubble with a bonus prize of a banking crisis, wouldn’t it? And you two freak shows are now standing here telling us that you want to fucking do it all over again in the deluded belief it’ll get the economy moving. Folks, I think this year’s Jeff Buckley Award for being the Public Figure Most Hopelessly Out of Their Depth may end up being shared.

They also propose subsidising the construction of 16,000 homes by giving £400 million of taxpayers’ money to property developers.

Oh, why not just round it up to a neat half billion? It’s only money, after all, and of course you don’t need to worry because it’s not yours anyway. Listen, you morons, every bloody pound of subsidies – every penny the government spends, in fact – is a pound that must be taken off someone’s disposable income either now or in the future. You’re taking money away from people who might otherwise be able to put it towards the deposit for a house, d’you see? Or a car, or a meal out, or a newspaper or any number of things. They might even decide to stick it in the bank and save it if someone gives them an interest rate that can’t be described as comical. Now tell me I’m wrong but if you want the housing market to pick up does it really make sense to take money away from people who need it to buy houses with? The very people that are currently worrying you because they’re not buying houses because lenders aren’t all that happy with the risks at the moment? Dave, Nick, please try to understand this: more disposable income + lower house prices = more houses being sold. Okay? And conversely less disposable income + higher house prices = … want to take a guess? Do you see now, you pair of utter fucktroons?

And pardon me for asking, but what the hell does the government need the housing market to pick up for anyway? It was overpriced. It still is. It doesn’t need ‘unblocking’ like it’s a toilet that Gordon Clown and his badger faced sock puppet left bunged up after a particularly nasty dump – it needs the very correction you idiots are trying to forestall. Nobody disputes that the British economy needs reviving, but if there’s a lesson to be learned from the last government, and Christ knows there’s more than just one, surely it’s that an economy that’s running on a spending boom fuelled by a combination of cheap credit and appreciating house prices making people feel richer than they really are is not an economy that will run indefinitely before hitting trouble. Yet, Dave and Nick, this seems to be pretty much what you want to do.

In a further move, ministers are working on a scheme under which billions of pounds of money in pension funds will be used to finance the construction of power stations, wind turbines and roads.

What? WHAT? WHAT? Are you fucking serious? On top of everything else have you two started channelling Robert Maxwell or something?

Treasury sources said talks had been conducted with pension fund managers for months. They are hoping to attract managers to invest in infrastructure schemes because they provide a better rate of return than government bonds.

Oh, no shit? And the Cobbleition government, unlike its predecessors of all stripes, has suddenly got good at picking winners and reckons that the best investments around at the moment happen to be the things that it does and taxes people for because… uh, because there’s rarely profit to be made in them.* Oh well, at least they’re not talking about using Labour’s idea of helping themselves to money in old accounts, even if that’s probably just because they’ve already cleaned them out.

Look, Dave and Nick, the government already lighten the pockets of the British motorist to the tune of some £45-50 billion, in return for which about a fifth of that is spent on the roads, and now you want to fill in the few zillion potholes you’ve missed with the contents of their pension funds? Oh, and erect a few more bird mincing white elephants that are, to use Malcolm Tucker’s phrase, as much use as a marzipan dildo, and so uneconomic that nobody in their right mind would build even one if not given someone else’s money to offset the otherwise certain losses. And no, I’m not just saying that because Phil the Greek thinks so. Might I suggest that if you want more to be spent on road maintenance and other infrastructure (but not bird mincers) you stop spending money somewhere else? It’s called living within your means, which is a concept that even plankton in the oceanic depths could probably wrap what passes for their heads around – in the depressingly likely event that you can’t find anyone in Whitehall who understands go out and find a real person to explain it to you.

As for power stations, again I feel there is a lesson that should have been learned from the Labour years – just get out of the bloody way and let someone build the fucking things. Seriously, it’s not like a power station doesn’t produce something that people need and for which a ready market exists – Christ, even wind turbines have got that much going for them, they just can’t produce it steadily and reliably – so there should be a return on building them providing the initial costs aren’t prohibitive. That means not having interminable inquiries before graciously allowing someone to begin work on building something that people need, and then telling them to stop again because some middle class white kid with dreadlocks and a dream of erasing the memory of the silver (plated) spoon by not washing has found a pond, and look, there’s like all tadpoles in it, dude. It means, as I mentioned, the government doing it’s best just to get out of the fucking way.

Separately, Lord Heseltine, who advises the Government on growth, said MPs should waive through critically important infrastructure projects to get the economy moving.

It pains me to agree with a man who still wants Britain to sign up to the currency version of Heaven’s Gate but that’s kind of the thing I’m on about, though as an aside this isn’t:

The former Cabinet minister said the Government could work with Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, to agree on which major projects to push through.

Yes, very good, Michael, a government of literally all the twats. Wonderful. Nurse! He’s out of bed again.

But really, why not? The Cobbleition really are as bad as Labour, and we all know Labour were pretty shocking. But I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve ranted and raved and railed at some new piece of pettiness or authoritarianism or nannying or incompetence or lack of backbone (especially with regard to the EU) or just plain epic fuckwittery. I’ve lost count how often I’ve said that it’s just like Labour never left office. I even began this rant with the observation that if this is what Dave and Nick want to do then Britain might as well give up and bring back Gordon Brown to finish the demolition job he started. And if all the main parties are bent on Britain’s self destruction and disagree only on the speed at which it should happen, if the only long term hope is to rebuild from the ashes, then it’s starting to look to me like the petrol and matches and matches may as well be given to the worst nutter of the lot.

The alternative, of course, is to get rid of the whole bloody lot of them and replace them with sane people, but for some reason this doesn’t seem to have very broad appeal in the UK. I’m sure the millions attached firmly to the tax tit and the millions more brainwashed to believe that this is how it has to be haven’t got anything to do with it.

‘Kinell!

UPDATE – Trust The Daily Mash to get to the essence of it.

The prime minister said: “This package will help to reinflate the house price bubble and give mortgages to people who can’t really afford them. Unless anyone has any better ideas?”

Wonderful caption on the picture, too: “If it’s broke fix it with the thing that broke it.”

I feel like Private Frasier.

UPADTE 2 – Also blogged superbly and without all the swearing over at Counting Cats in Zanzibar.

* That often there’s rarely profit to be made precisely because government is involved probably doesn’t occur to them.

All I’ll want for Christmas…

… is a new cognitive dissonance meter. After replacing the one destroyed by Deborah Arnott earlier this year my shiny new one has just exploded after reading Quiet_Man’s most recent post over at the Orphanage.

In a classic case of the pot calling the kettle black Labour have accused the government of intending to borrow more than they originally intended. This would be the same Labour party behind the tax and spend initiatives which have pretty much left the country bankrupt and needing to borrow in the first place.

BBC.

The government could borrow over £100bn more than it planned to up to 2015, according to Labour.
The party compared Office for Budget Responsibility forecasts from November 2010 with the latest estimates.
Labour said it showed the government’s plans were “reckless” but Economic Secretary to the Treasury David Gauke said the claims were “nonsense”.
Meanwhile, Labour leader Ed Miliband will later urge ministers to change course away from economic austerity.

So we have a case for Labour accusing the government of borrowing more and the leader of the Labour Party calling for an end to austerity economics, which I suspect would mean the government borrowing more. Clearly a case of open mouth, insert foot, after all if I can see it, what are real economists going to think?

Yep, if anyone’s going to display meter wrecking cocknitive dissonance it’s going to be politicians, and Labour are the league champions at it. I suppose it’s my own fault for buying a cheap one. While I go look for a replacement do pop over to the Orphanage and read the rest of Quiet_Man’s post if you haven’t already.

Hallowe’economics

You cannot kill what does not live… Aaaahahahahahaha. Aaahahahahahahahaha. Aahahahahahahahaha.

The Prime Minister says the government is on an “all-out mission” to kick-start industry. Nick Clegg, the Deputy Prime Minister, will announce that 35,000 jobs will be created using nearly £1 billion of public money.

That Keynes monster just refuses to die, doesn’t it? You think it’s gone, you think the horror has passed and that you’re safe now, and then it turns out that it’s right behind you. It’s like that bloodied hand punching through the soil of the freshly dug grave at the end of Carrie, or seeing two more zombies as the doomed survivor reaches their last bullet, or that wisp of smoke from a small but growing pit on the floor as an acid dripping xenomorph comes out of the walls right after everyone thinks all the xenomorphs have been killed. I say we take off and nuke the whole Treasury from orbit – it’s the only way to be sure.

He will unveil new investment in more than 100 projects that should trigger billions of pounds additional investment from private enterprise. It will include six “shovel-ready” projects, including two new power stations.

Shovel ready? Ah, this’ll be grave robbery policy horror then? Shovels for Clegg’s Igor to disinter a few policies from under a headstone marked “New Labour – 1997-2010 – Gone, not forgotten, and not fucking dead enough,” before returning them to his cackling marthter Dr Camenstein to stitch together before giving it the old bolt of lightning treatment, am I right?

Speaking on the BBC’s Today programme this morning, Mr Clegg said: “What we’re trying to do is invest public money, taxpayers’ money, into companies which can create jobs that last, and for every pound that will be invested from the Regional Growth Fund we estimate about £6 will be matched from the private sector.
“We are trying to rewire the British economy so we are less reliant on the city of London and financial services and we’re giving more backing to manufacturing and to parts of the country which for too long were basically reliant on handouts from Whitehall.”

Ah, governments trying to pick winners. Another old monster that just won’t die. Tell us, Cleggor, when your plan to reduce debt is to grow the economy fast enough to reduce the relative rather than the actual size of it but the growth forecasts have since turned out to be a bit on the optimistic side, what makes you think this magic figure of £6 of private capital being attracted for every pound you wast, er, spend now is any more accurate? Don’t strain yourself trying to answer on your own, by all means dig up a fresh brain if you need to.

The Coalition has been criticised for not doing enough to boost growth, with Chancellor George Osborne too focused on reducing the country’s deficit.

He is? Was he planning to start any time soon? Did he get distracted by that bubbling beaker in the back room of Number 11? Oh, dear God, did he try some of it? Is this a strange case of Dr Osborne and Mr Darling… except he’s somehow got stuck on Mr Darling? And if so would that actually be worse than him being stuck on Dr Osbourne? I’m honestly not sure it would.

Meanwhile, outside Castle Dracumong…

Mr Cameron will emphasise the need to bring super-fast broadband to remote areas, expecting private industry to match a £1 billion investment already announced from government and local authorities.

Is this the same billion pounds as the billion pound Nick Clegg was talking about or is it a different billion pounds? Did they clone it? Ah, yes, they just took it down to the quantitive easing laboratory and hit the duplicate button for a while. It’ll all be fine. Probably. Unless the cloned money sneaks up and strangles the original money and then takes over its life, and then you’ll try to buy something with the original money only to find that it’s dead, DEAD, DEAD.

One Whitehall source said: “It is bringing forward infrastructure investment where possible, dealing with difficult planning decisions across Whitehall.
“This is the Prime Minister’s obsession with ‘shovel-ready’ projects that could make a difference in the near-term. He has pushed for it and it is being delivered. He wants to ensure every sinew was strained to get the economy moving.”

Shovel ready again, we’re back to Dr Frankermon. Or is he just a Pinhead? Not sure, really, it’s hard to tell. No, wait, that’s it. This is John Carpenter government and there is a Thing. Or rather a State-Thing, a crawling, creeping mass of unspeakable vileness that takes over and imitates its victims but never changes its intentions, always growing and feeding, feeding and growing, taking all it can and giving nothing but false appearances. We saw it with the last government, how it started off seemingly friendly and one of us before getting increasingly creepy and growing a hell of a lot of extra arms and legs, until eventually its head dropped off and was replaced by a misshapen, twisted, screaming thing that ate snot and hurled Nokias. We thought it destroyed but part of it must have got away and infected some of the others. Come to think of it the broken promises started way back so it must have happened a while before. No wonder the Tories are all sitting around a fire staring suspiciously at each other and trying to work out who, if any of them, really is a Tory. No wonder those who love democracy and those who love liberty are eyeing the Liberal Democrats and wondering if any of them are either.

No wonder the fucking nightmare didn’t end last May. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!

Out on the street, Grandad, you don’t need this place anymore – UPDATED

In case you haven’t heard about this… well, they call themselves a charity but since what they’re suggesting doesn’t seem too charitable I’ll just call them this bloody Intergenerational Foundation mob, and their idea of ‘encouraging’ old folks to sell up and move to smaller houses I’ll direct you to the Snowolf, Longrider and Bucko the Moose, who all cover everything I could possibly say about it and much more besides. All I’ll add is that if the name ‘Intergen Foundation’ came up in a movie you’d probably assume it was an evil sci-fi corporation. How close that is to reality is probably down to how you see retired homeowners.

UPDATE – despite the strong waft of fake charity emanating from this bunch I see that they’re a new charity (like the world was fucking short of ’em) and so there are no accounts to look at yet. But it’ll be very interesting to see what proportion of their income comes from the public sector when they do produce accounts, very interesting indeed.

Hypocrites du jour

Via Max Farquar, UAF bully boys beating up a woman for being in a group they don’t like much. Max has the video, and I do recommend you go and watch it, but lacking a picture I thought I’d show one of a couple of bully boys beating up someone for being in a group they don;t like much.

From here.

So easy to become that which we purport to hate, isn’t it, UAF?

You! Yes, you with the Murray Rothbard badge. You’re under arrest.

Via the Adam Smith Institute, the latest target of the British police:

I’m not quite an anarchist – although some of my best friends are, and the works of people like David Friedman (PDF) and Georgetown legal philosopher John Hasnas (PDF) make me unsure. But saying that “anarchists should be reported to your local Police” is a pretty extraordinary command that should worry everybody. Disliking the state is now enough for your neighbours to report on you, and for plod to take notice.

Per the comments over at the ASI they probably are just referring to those who are mostly pretend anarchists, who are really just socialists, Marxists and other collectivists with perhaps the odd Bakunin type here and there, and who attempt advance liberty by smashing up other people’s property. Even so, they’ve defined anarchist well, and it’s the definition that would cover anarcho-capitalists as well as anarcho-collectivists, and possibly minarchist libertarians as well. Alarmist? Possibly, but does anyone really think inconceivable that a conversation along these lines might occur?

“Well, you see, officer, that Exile bloke I told you about keeps saying how the State is nothing but bad news and even the handful of bits worth keeping are more a necessary evil than anything else. Yes, I do know where you can find him on a Tuesday afternoon.”

This is thought-crime, no more and no less, and the worst part of it is it isn’t a first. It’s just the latest opinion that might just get you watched and spied upon, investigated, arrested, charged and even convicted. Welcome to modern Britain, the world’s first nation sized Orwell Theme Park.

‘Kinell!

Cobbleition out-Labouring Labour yet again

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Oh, here we fucking go again. Another fucking government, another fucking initiative involving another fucking database. I’m getting so fucking dog sick and fucking tired of repeating this, but it really is like Labour never went away, isn’t it?

The Police National Database, which will be launched by ministers next week, will hold the records up to six million apparently innocent people, including every victim of sexual assault and domestic violence.
[…]
According to official figures a total of 9.2 million people in the UK have criminal records, which means the new database will hold information about up to six million people who have not committed an offence.

Up to six million innocents? Orly? Because as bad as that sounds, and I think it sounds pretty fucking awful, I suspect it’s actually much worse. Because we’re told that the majority of crime – sometimes 80 or 90 percent – is committed by a hard core of persistent offenders numbering somewhere in the region of 100,000 or so. With me so far? Good.

Now count the fucking zeros.

No, I haven’t missed one, that is one hundred thousand. And 100,000 subtracted from 15 million leaves rather more than six million innocent people on the database. The only way to pad out 100,000 career criminals to 9.2 million plus six million innocents is to add more than 9 million other people who are technically not quite pure as the driven slush. You just know who’s going on there, don’t you. I’ll take a punt on everyone who’s ever been given a police caution for absolutely fucking anything from a pub brawl a dozen years ago to allowing smoking in a pub last week, everyone who’s done a week or two inside for protesting about council tax or TV licensing by refusing to pay up, everyone who’s been convicted of any victimless crime or a purely technical offence and especially everyone who’s ever fallen foul of any of the three thousand plus laws the Cobbelition’s predecessors and partners in weapons grade cunticity, New Labia, brought in during its thirteen years of savagely fucking the country into a ditch.

Advocates of the database claim that it is the nature of police intelligence that the records of people without convictions would be held.

Why? Give me one good fucking reason why. Oh, I can think of convincing reasons – too much effort to remove the non-crims plus the assumption that lying with dogs gets people fleas so there’s the prospect of a few easy collars in the future – but they’re not what I’d call a good reason.

More than 12,000 approved police officers and staff will be able to access the database when it is launched next week.

And with the track record of epic cuntishness and bastardry in modern governments we can expect that to be 24,000 a year from now, not all of whom will be police. In five years I bet there will be more cops and various level state drones able to access the database than there will be career criminals on the fucking thing.

Let me take you back to early last year. Let’s have a little reminder of things some of the key players said in the run up to the election (my bold).

“If you care about our liberties, if you want people to be free from the clutches of an overbearing state, and if you want a government with liberal values, vote Conservative.”

Said the dishonourable member for Beaconsfield and Attorney General for England and Wales, Dominic Grieve.

”Whether you’ve been a Lib Dem voter or a Labour voter or a Green voter – if you care about the environment, if you want action to improve your quality of life, if you care about civil liberties, if you care about people power, if you want a clean break from the past – vote Conservative.
“If you have a view that we need to do more on our environment, more on civil liberties, more on quality of life there is now a modern Conservative Party that can get things done.”

And that would be the dishonourable and discharging member for Witney, the Right Wanker David Wliiam Donald Cameron.

Cunt

Well, you’ve really fucking delivered, haven’t you, you disgraceful pair of hypocritical, deceitful, authoritarian suppurating cunts. Fuck your Cobbleition, fuck its twisted ideas of liberty, and fuck you all. Fuck you deep and hard and right in the lungs.

Nice to know the Cobbleition have fixed Britain’s finances – pt 2

Further to yesterday’s post about the Cobbleition spending yet more money the UK hasn’t got, I see this:

Click for linky

For one thing, while Cameramong’s call for austerity is no bad thing it’s somewhat undermined by the sums of money the Cobbleition are continuing to spunk away. For another the EU’s track record of financial probity is not exactly golden, is it? When was the last time the auditors were willing to sign the books? Yes, exactly, I had to look it up too because it’s been so long – sixteen consecutive years now. And I’m sure part of the reason is because of things like this:

Audits of EU funded projects for 2009 found “quantifiable errors” affecting £9.5billion of spending, with “non-respect of public procurement rules” calling into question contracts worth £4billion.
Nine out of 10 audited road building projects across the EU were identified as proceeding with “unlawful use of award criteria” despite the breach of rules being detected before contracts were paid.

It’d be nice to think Cameramong will tell them to go piss up a rope on a windy day but I wouldn’t bet on it. Oh, what the fuck, it’s only money after all. Have some more, why don’t you, you loathsome shower of troughing bastards. But please try to remember one thing:

IT’S NOT YOUR FUCKING MONEY!

Cunts.

Royal Air Fail

Having never served in the military I’m far from being an expert in such matters, but I’m reasonably sure that it’s considered normal practice for an air force with ground attack capable aircraft to employ aircrew who do actually know how to drop a fucking bomb on someone. This is apparently not the case with the RAF in 2011.

The Ministry of Defence announced last week that RAF Typhoons would drop bombs on Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s tanks and other ground targets.
But so far this has not happened, because the planes’ pilots are not considered to be properly trained in ground attacks.
In a further embarrassment, laser targeting pods for the Typhoons, which cost £160 million, have been left in packing crates because the RAF has not been able to pay for its pilots to train to use them.

And here I’ve been taking the piss out of Cameramong for his sabre-rattling at Mad Mo early last month with, to mix metaphors, a nearly empty gun cabinet, and it turns out that what’s left in there can’t be used because not enough people know how. Did you know that when you were talking tough, Dave? Did you actually ask the RAF what they could and couldn’t do first? Or did someone at the RAF tell you ‘Bombs? Oh, yeah, sure, we can do bombs’ without checking and let you make a complete tit of yourself? Because committing the UK to action for which it does still have the equipment but lacks the rather important component of trained personnel means that someone has fucked up.

Eat this, Gaddafi! Bombs awa… oh shit, wrong button. *

And remember that with all this scaling back and cost cutting hitting the UK’s ability to defend itself and its citizens, almost the only thing I think it’s worth having a fucking government for in the first place, money wise the country is still chest deep in the shit and continuing to sink. The national debt is, as we all know by now, both eye watering and understated thanks to the Brownian practice – a little reduced by the Cobbleition – of pretending some things don’t count despite still having to pay for them, and since overall expenditure is continuing to rise the deficit isn’t shrinking either. A huge amount of money is being spent, and clearly a fair bit of it has to be going on interest on the mountain of debt Brown ran up as PM and Chancellor, but that’s ‘only’ 47 billion quid or so.** Public spending is £702 billion and rising, and the rise is across most areas of spending (including defence, oddly enough). What the hell are they spending it all on?

Head of Quality & Efficiency Services
Salary: £57,288 – £66,762 pa
Following the realignment of Quality and Commissioning a new service area, Quality and Efficiency, has been created. We are now seeking to appoint an inspiring Head of Service to join the talented senior management team.
…

Lead Manager Policy and Strategic Partnerships
Salary: £60,192-£75,897 per annum
Part of the Chief Executive’s Office and reporting to the Head of Policy and Performance, you will lead on all corporate policy and strategic partnership issues. This will include:

• working across the Council and with partners to develop innovative ways of improving outcomes for Surrey residents while reducing overall costs; and
• maximizing the benefits of the Coalition Government’s approach to local government in Surrey.

…

Member Insight& Engagement Manager
Salary: £50000 – £60000 per annum
Morgan Hunt are looking for a Member Insight& Engagement Manager for a top government organisation until the end of December 2011.

The successful candidate will have responsibility for the following deliverables and activities:

• working with the Head of Member Engagement to develop the member engagement strategy and plan
• developing a deep understanding of key member segments and acting as a champion for their needs, both within the Department and across the organisation
• Working with the marketing communications team to brief and deliver member engagement content and products
• Planning and managing targeted communications to key member segments
• Working with the Insight & Analytics team to deliver the 2011/12 member research programme

…

Oh yeah, I was forgetting. Well, I’m sure everyone will be happy that the country can still afford these and an Associate Director of Integrated Community Services when it wants someone to empty the bins, a Media & Stakeholder Relations Manager when it wants a nurse or a doctor, a Delivery Assurance Director when it wants a cop or a prison officer, and of course 300 or so town clerks calling themselves CEOs… when it needs someone able to drop a bomb from an aeroplane without missing the fucking ground, much less the target. A great comfort, I’m sure.

Frankly it’s becoming increasingly difficult to decide whether the end of Britain is going to come as a result of being turned into the EU’s second most western district, being invaded as a result of being forced to defend itself with nukes and shotguns and having kept next to nothing in between, or being taken over after all the loans are called in. What we can be sure of is that until Cameramong and his Cobbleition chums sit down and work out what the fucking essentials are and what the UK really cannot afford as a result of their predecessors’ profligacy – QUANGOs and aid to countries wealthy enough for a space program and their own nuclear weapons, for instance – one of those situations seems increasingly likely, though to use the phrase of the late Douglas Adams, it is possible that this has already happened.

‘Kinell.

* I found this photo of a Typhoon releasing flares on a UK airshows forum. The photographer – and I can’t credit him or her with any name other than their forum ID, GyRob – has posted a number up there and to my eye they’re rather good. If you like images of fast aircraft doing their thing click the photo I used above to be taken there for a look.
** Say it fast enough and it doesn’t seem so bad. But it is though, really it is. It’s not just money they’re going to take from you to pay for their profligacy, it’s Keynesian wealth redistribution the Keynesians don’t like to talk about – taking money from middle and low income earners who are the majority of the tax base and giving it as interest payments to those who are wealthy enough to loan money to governments. Incidentally, the £47 bn spent on interest is nearly as much as is spent on the ability to defend Britain’s borders and citizens.

That white fluffy stuff appearing over your eyes is wool

Still, nice try on the part of George Osbourne.

The Chancellor said he remained focused on reducing the UK’s budget deficit, which stands at about £122bn this year, as he spoke at a meeting of European finance ministers and central bank governors in Hungary.
“I made it clear that unlike the Irish case the UK will not be making a bilateral loan to Portugal. British taxpayers’ money will not be lent directly to Portugal,” he said.

I hope everyone has spotted that the operative word Georgie Boy is using there is ‘directly’. He has to say that because he know sdamn well that he has no ability, none whatsoever, to prevent British taxpayers’ money going to Portugal indirectly as long as the UK hands over £9 billion a year to the European Union, the entity now hosing money at Portugal and whose income of course comes from the taxes of member states’ citizens. £9 bn is about 7 or 8 per cent of your budget deficit there, George, and you’re giving it to people who are in turn going to ‘lend’ about £90 bn to Portugal. Or to look at it another way, the money will go to Portugal over the next three years and Britain’s EU contributions during that time will be getting close to £30 billion, or a third of the value of the loan.

But it’s okay because George says that there will be no direct loan from Britain to Portugal. Any money that comes from the £30 billion that he’ll have taken at gunpoint from British citizens and given to the EU is indirect and somehow doesn’t count. And in a way I suppose it doesn’t since once it’s gone it’s gone and it makes little practical difference where it ends up. Doesn’t help the deficit much, let alone the actual nation debt, but presumably Georgie is hoping to save a few quid by closing some tax avoidance loopholes reducing the number of perfectly legal methods of minimising tax liabilities (with an exception clause for disHonourable Members of Parliament, natch).

New tax year, same old MPs. After Budget promises to tackle tax avoidance, Parliament is passing legislation to block several loopholes – but an obscure clause specifically exempts MPs from these new restrictions.
…

“HM Revenue & Customs says that this legislation is only there to stop ‘tax avoidance’. However, Section 554E(8) specifically exempts members of the House of Commons and the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority from the new legislation in situations where they are actually caught by it.”

Do go read the whole thing, and if you were one of the 25 million or so who voted for the usual suspects last year I hope it’s a wake up call – nothing significant has changed. Oh, about 150 troughers didn’t bother to stand again and a bunch more lost their seats, a few of them are going to prison, Labour has gone into opposition, the Speaker was replaced even before the election, and Britain now has the LibConservial Dimotive Cobbleition running things, but all the same nothing significant has changed. Just look around. The government is still spending money it hasn’t got at an ever accelerating rate (just accelerating less rapidly than under the snot munching madman), it’s still intending to make current and, in the case of the national debt, future tax payers foot the bills, and both it and the political class from which it comes are conspiring to give themselves breaks and advantages so they can continue to avoid the pain they’re going to inflict on the proles. I’m not even going to begin to cover the continuing nannying of almost every fucking thing imaginable or, in contrast to pre-election talk, the decidedly lukewarm attitude to personal liberty. There is, as I’ve said before, not three main parties but one with three wings, and with a few notable exceptions all three wings are composed entirely of cunts who can neither be trusted to look after your businesses, your welfare or your wallet.

So if you voted for the usual mob, especially if you did it to keep one of the ‘other two’ out and even more so if it was something along the lines of your parents always voted that way, I do hope you’re thoroughly fucking proud of yourself now.* This time round you had any number of independents, micro parties, and mini-parties to choose from, UKIP being only the most well known and LPUK being the one that would bring you the most freedom, but 25 million of you still chose to vote for Labour, Conservatives or the inappropriately named Liberal Democrats.*

As the man in the mask put it, if you want to know who to blame you need only look in a mirror. In the meantime if the fact that George Osbourne is removing your opportunity to pay less tax at the same time as handing over more of it to the EU so they can give it to member states whose governments have been even more profligate than any of Britain’s, I can recommend a cast iron strategy for legally avoiding UK tax entirely:

Just get the fuck out of there.

* The same applies if you voted for your parents’ party’s opponents. Fair enough if you were one of the fortunate few with a decent offering from the usual lot, and the same applies if there really wasn’t any decent independent or minor party option and you were left with the choice of the least worst candidate or not voting at all. Personally I’d spoil the ballot paper first but in any case I’m not talking to you but to the vast numbers who voted for similarity in the expectation of change, often for very poor reasons that they really hadn’t thought much about.

Is Nick Clegg on something?

Or has he just stepped off a spaceship from the planet Whut?

The Deputy Prime Minister cast doubt on the future for nuclear power by predicting that a review into existing plants – ordered after the explosion at the Fukushima power station — would recommend higher and more costly safety standards.

Or maybe it’s me finding myself on the planet Whut? having just been kidnapped from Earth. Seriously, what the fucking fuck is going on? Britain is a country noted for a lack of tsunamis and for being, tectonically speaking, as active as an 20 stone dole-monkey with a plasma TV. Why does Cleggy think higher safety standards will be recommended and who the fuck even ordered a fucking review, which will no doubt cost a metric shit-tonne of money, in the first place?

And why? Has anything happened at a British nuclear power station to warrant a review into safety standards? No. So this is because nuclear power is suddenly newsworthy, and… er… that’s about it. Fuck’s sake, guys. Either there’s been a sensible reason all along, in which case you were all sitting on your hands all this time, or this is a pointless knee jerk reaction to an event half a world away that is virtually guaranteed not to happen in the UK. And even if it did, as in Japan the damage and death wrought by a 9 magnitude earthquake and a series of 30 foot waves slamming coastal towns would make the reactor problems pale into insignificance were it not for the rampant and infectious nuclearphobia in parts of the media and politics.

Christ, would you scrap high speed rail because the earthquake wrecked a few bullet trains? Would you even consider looking into it? No, of course you wouldn’t because that would be, to use a technical term, fucking stupid. So what’s different about nuclear power apart from the dreaded n-word? Stop this incredibly wasteful fear-mongering masturbatathon and start dealing with the fact that as things stand now in a few years Britain is going to become increasingly dependent on foreign energy supplies plus a relative trickle from vast stands of giant bird mincers and some solar panels struggling to cope with the high latitudes of most of the country.

On the other hand Britain probably needed to start building new reactors several years ago, and when everybody is freezing in the dark the current mob of hand wringing wankers won’t be the only ones to blame.

One a minute

That’s apparently how many people entered the UK permanently during the NuLab years. One a minute – boggle.

In principle I’m one of those people the fearsome and ambushily predatory JuliaM refers to as the open borders crowd, and I’m not ashamed. Free movement of goods, money and people across borders is no bad thing at all subject to a couple of important conditions. First, coming for money is fine if it’s money they’re going to work for, but newcomers don’t get to just rock up and get handouts off the local taxpayers. Fuck off. Second, hanging onto your culture is okay but newcomers don’t get to just rock up and order the existing inhabitants about because their own culture doesn’t meet the migrants standards. Fuck off again. Thirdly, and this isn’t so much an issue with the migrants themselves as their countries of origins, it needs to be a two way street. If those conditions aren’t met then open or even reasonably porous are not at a good idea at all.

In recent years Britain hasn’t really met either of the first two conditions and is a bit iffy about the third, and yet we see that the grinning mutation and the snot scoffing madman who took over from him let in as many as four million people in the largest influx in more than a thousand years.

Official figures on Thursday are expected to show up to 5.5 million non-UK born people arrived in the country as long term migrants between 1997 and 2010 – the equivalent of almost one every minute.
Around 2.3 million left over the same period meaning the UK population increased by around 3.2 million as a direct result of foreign migrants.

Plus the illegals, which might be the thick end of another million. But that’s not really what I wanted to talk about.

What I want to draw attention to is the effect of me coming to Oz and Bill and Mrs Sticker going to Canada and the other 2,299,997 who all decided for one reason or another to up sticks and fuck off to somewhere better. Most of us will have had little or no expectation of benefits where we were going, which meant that to migrate we needed to bring with us either skills or money or both. In short it seems likely that Britain has exchanged 2.3 million mostly productive people plus their accrued wealth for 5 to 6 million people who, even if they were all too proud to take handouts and preferred to beaver away 16 hours a day, will often have come without a pot to piss in. And of course we know that nothing like all are too proud to take handouts. Meanwhile the Exile and Sticker households are happily contributing to the Australian and Canadian economies having already taken money with us out of the UK economy.

We’ve known for a while that this was not mere incompetence but a deliberate policy, supposedly to speed up the multiculti train wreck and possibly to fill the place up with newly enfranchised voters with a reason to feel grateful to the Labour government. And now we know the numbers too, which must be as bad as anyone suspected and probably even worse. Even I, as a believer in the ideal of open borders for free market and libertarian reasons (as very distinct from the shambolic and politically motivated clusterfuckopalypse that has been the reality), find these figures appalling.

So if, or more likely when, you see a piece in Comment is Moderated saying how Migrationwatch UK have it all wrong and they’re a bunch of heartless right-wing bastards just point out that at least one person who favours the principle of open borders, really really open borders, is utterly horrified by the stupid, lopsided way it’s been implemented by the left to suit their political agenda instead of something vaguely analogous to fucking reality. And point out that he’d be a lot more horrified if he was still there.

Kerching!

The London Olympic Games are going to be, according to Seb Coe, the greatest show on Earth. In my head I’m translating this to mean while it may be very good watching it’ll also be as colossally expensive as everyone expects despite the early assurances about not trying to outdo the Chinese, and the offer from the Irish Republicans to organise the fireworks isn’t going to make it any cheaper.

‘Kinell.

Crash landings

I can barely bring myself to write on this lunacy.

Up to 100 student pilots will be told the news on Tuesday with some of them only a few hours away from becoming fully qualified to fly fighters, helicopters and transport aircraft.
The cuts will mean the waste of an estimated £300million already paid for training the pilots, plus the cost of redundancies. The training of RAF pilots can cost up to £4million a man.

And this is not the end of the problem.

Air Chief Marshal Sir Michael Graydon, a former head of the RAF, warned that the cuts would leave the Air Force with a “black hole” of pilots in future years.
“If you don’t have a steady stream of youth, you will end up with a shortage of people,” he said.
Commander John Muxworthy, the chairman of the UK National Defence Association, said the defence cuts were now into the “seed corn” of the Services.

Which should be blindingly obvious to everyone.

Jim Murphy, the shadow defence secretary, said: “The harmful human impact of the Government’s defence plans is becoming clearer by the day.”

True, but to be fair let’s just remind ourselves which cunts spunked away all the money. Still, it must be said that it seems like an insane place to try to make savings. In terms of a sports team it would be like hanging on to everyone that has got maybe a season or two left plus the current crop of regular players, but abandoning all investment in young players and cutting loose the ones you have trained and made ready to replace those older ones soon to swap the sporting scrum for the media version. Like some American sports Aussie Rules football operates a draft system which gives the bottom placed club each year the first opportunity to pick young talent. Such is the focus on young players – and bear in mind that some may not play a senior game for a year or two – that clubs that have done particularly poorly are occasionally accused of doing it deliberately purely to get better draft picks. Such is the interest among supporters that the draft night is televised. It’s understood by everyone that youth with potential literally determines a club’s future ability to win, and while I don’t claim any military expertise whatsoever I’d be astonished if what applies on the sports field doesn’t also apply on the battlefield.

So what the fuck is Britain playing at binning these young pilots, pilots that will be needed rather than might be needed, if only to replace those older ones who leave? What’s the plan, keep them on past the time their knees can’t take the G’s and sorties hold less appeal than SAGA cruises? And why is this happening at all when, as I keep saying, the UK isn’t actually cutting expenditure? It certainly fucking needs to but this is pinching pennies when there are massive gold bars’ worth of savings that could be made elsewhere, starting with Britain’s £50 billion quangocracy that the Cobbleition’s axe largely bounced clean off without leaving a mark. And this hurts, it really does. It hurts at a time when Britain is engaged in combat operations (needless or not, it’s a fact), and will mean worse hurt in the future and beyond as you have fewer pilots both to fight if needed and to pass on knowledge to the next lot of young pilots. It certainly risks more than giving the Spanish Archer to some arts quangos and overcompensated town clerks calling themselves chief executives. Britain may end up with comical abilities as far as air power go but it’ll proudly lead the world in twinning towns and conceptual bollocks art made, perhaps literally, from shit.

Anyone ever see Aliens? Do you remember the bit when the Colonial Marines are in the tunnels under the giant atmosphere processor? When someone notices that firing their rifles in there will damage the cooling systems for its nuclear power source, eventually causing a very, very large explosion? Remember the reaction of the Marines when they have to hand their magazines in and sling their rifles?

What the hell are we supposed to use, man? Harsh language?

I suppose it’s too much to hope that any senior RAF officers have quoted that verbatim to the Defence Secretary, Chancellor or PM.