On the quiet MPs have introduced a scheme that allows them to claim up to £9,125 a year without producing a receipt!
According to the new Green Book they will be given an allowance of £25-a-night – up to £725 a month – which will be shown as “subsistence”!
The average MP now earns over £135,000 per annum while globally over 3 billion people live on less than £600 a year! Talk of “subsistence” is inappropriate to say the least. The truth is that MPs are not only greedy, but they also believe that the public are stupid enough to put up with their blatant greed. Unfortunately they have yet to be proved wrong.
What the world needs now… WORKERS’ CLIMATE ACTION!!!
July 25, 2009
It looks as if the Vestas dispute might bring a much needed dose of class consciousness to the ongoing campaign against climate change. The recently formed Workers Climate Action (WCA) have played a major role in helping the Vestas workers organise their protest. All too often climate protests have unwittingly proved antagonistic to workers and working class communities, but it is only the working class who have the power to make real, long term differences with regard to climate change. As WCA themselves say…
It will be the workers, not the bosses who are hit the hardest by the effects of climate change. And it is the workers who will be expected to pay for the disastrous effects through lower wages, worse conditions, higher prices, and regressive taxation. Organised labour is also in the best position to prevent a climate disaster. We have the power to take control of our workplaces, to strike, and to halt production. We have the potential to control and limit carbon emissions through collective action, and the power to force the Government to implement the green technology that we desperately need. Without the collective action of organised labour, we will be unlikely to make the changes to our economy we need, before it is too late.
Despite attempts by the police to starve out those occupying the factory morale remains high. Speaking to The Guardian Terry one occupier, Ian Terry, said…
“The atmosphere is brilliant. I think it’s amazing what people have done. We know there are different groups with different opinions on certain things but they’re all singing from the same hymn sheet and support is just snowballing.”
Send messages of support to:
The Vestas Fighting Fund:
Cheques Payable to ‘Ryde and East Wight Trades Union’
Send Cheques to:
22 Church Lane
Ryde
Isle of Wight
PO33 2NB
Bombard Ed Miliband with messages! Tell the government to step in and keep the factory open.
Doncaster constituency office tel. 01302 875 462
If you live near Doncaster email us at verymerrymen[at]gmail.com if you’re interested in paying Ed’s office a surprise visit?
Westminster office tel. 020 7219 4778.
Email: ps.ed.miliband@decc.gsi.gov.uk
Website:
Support the Vestas Workers – Support Green Energy!
July 21, 2009
At around 7:30 last night some two dozen workers occupied the Vesta Wind Turbine factory on the Ilse of White. Today police have said about 200 workers are protesting outside the factory after being turned away when they arrived earlier.
Danish company, Vestas Windsystems, plans to lay off 625 workers at the end of July, despite rising profits. The company blames British nimbyism, but the government has offered Vestas money to stay open and Vestas has refused.
Here is a golden opportunity for the government to do the right thing. It needs to take over the plant – or, even better, allow the workers to take over the plant – and generate it’s own order of much needed wind turbines. This would create several thousand jobs (in both the manufacture of turbines and the construction of wind-farms) and provide much needed orders for raw materials. The plant and turbines would become public assets and we would move a lot closer to our green energy objectives with less money being swallowed up by the private sector.
Get in touch with Donny MP and Minister for Energy & Climate Change, Ed Milliband on milibande@parliament.uk or 01302 875 462 to suggest that he intervenes. And show your support for the Vestas workers by texting them on 07980 703115 and 07970 739921 and 07733 388888 or emailing savevestas[at]gmail.com.
Jobs For The (Rich) Boys
July 21, 2009
A cross party report headed by former minister, Alan Milburn has illustrated the fact that the top professions are becoming increasingly closed off to all but the most affluent UK families.
Milburn argues that in the past decade the government has done much to improve results, refurbish schools and raise standards. He says the number of failing schools is falling and city academies, located in the poorest areas, are helping to improve the GCSE results of children who receive free school meals at a faster rate than those who do not. However the fact remains that the chance of children who are eligible for free school meals – roughly the poorest 15% by family income – getting good qualifications by the age of 16 is still less than a third of that of their better-off classmates.
The report makes clear that a good start in education is crucial for access to professional jobs, but they also found that more than half of all the top professional jobs were still taken by candidates who went to independent schools – just 7% of all schoolchildren!
Prats like Chis Woodhead famously think that this is down to genetics, but having met many of these high flying professionals (among others we know a creationist paediatrician and a lawyer who specialises in arguing about who’s name comes first on film credits – priceless!) we can safely say that this situation is 100% pure nepotism. In fact the level of specialisation needed to become a ‘professional’ often requires an equal and opposite level of stupefication with regard to many, if not all other disciplines; but only a truly intelligent professional will ever admit this.
For every useful professional there are dozens who’s jobs are superfluous, if not completely redundant. It’s a crazy world where lawyers and accountants receive more public money overall than doctors and teachers. Many so called professional jobs equate to little more than dole for the rich!
But we digress, the real issue highlighted by this report is the two-tier education system presently in place in the UK. With regard to this Mr Milburn has said “We have raised the glass ceiling but I don’t think we have broken through it yet.”
Never mind the ceiling, Alan, it’s the glass fucking walls that we’re worried about!
No amount of tinkering from the government – left or right – will change this situation unless fundamental material inequalities are addressed. A child’s social class background at birth is still the best indicator of how well he or she will do in school and later on in life. At the risk of sounding like Witney Houston, the children are our future, fail them and we fail, period.
A social wage that guarantees a good level of of nutrition, health and access to relevant technologies is an essential first step. Only then, with the establishment of a level playing field for all of our children, could we begin to address education itself.
Unfortunately, given a political system that favours wealth and power, the second step is even less likely than the first. Born of the same mindset that created factories and prisons our education system has as much to do with population control as it has with learning. For years it’s routines and disciplines ensured fodder for the factories of the industrial revolution. Nowadays, in our service sector society, our education system seems more concerned with creating good little consumers. The expectations of both parents and the schools in poor areas often amounts to less than zero and aspiration in children is actively discouraged – it’s a running joke in Doncaster that we have the world’s first ‘University of Hairdressing‘. What is needed is exactly what all governments fear; an education system that encourages free, analytical and creative thought.
Anyone who has a toddler – with their incessant ‘Why? What? Why?’ questioning – will know that Homo sapiens sapiens – twice wise don’t you know – have naturally inquisitive minds. We’re also an innately inventive species, but so many of us will leave education with degrees in anxiety, alienation and mediocrity. An education system that does not allow children to reach their full creative potential has failed – or rather it has failed the children, but it has done exactly what is required of it by government.
Our schools should endow us with high quality analytical and artistic skills; we should have a working knowledge of our bodies, our minds and the physical universe (this is not to say that we can all be scientists or artists, but we can all achieve a level of scientific and cultural literacy that allows us to function as independent, dare we say enlightened, beings). As wealth freed up the time needed for a privileged few to explore science and the arts to create the first enlightenment, technology should now free up time for all of us in order to create a universal enlightenment. Anything less should be viewed as a form of mental child abuse. If an enlightened population proved too smart to produce shit for lesser men, then so be it. (This, of course, is why governments fear intelligent populations, they’re much harder to control. When it comes to controlling people ‘dumbing down’ has proved even more effective than ‘locking up’; for many entertainment is now held in higher regard than education.)
So there you have it; we believe that a social wage and a humanistic education system would change the world. But then who are we to decide? We’re not professionals!
It’s worth pointing out that these suggestions are not a matter of abstract political ideology, they’re about improving the overall potential of the individual human, which in turn improves the prospects of a given country. The real key to achieving human potential is accessibility. If you don’t believe that poorer humans have the same potential as richer ones then you’re probably Chris Woodhead 
Summer of Blood!
July 8, 2009
Summer of Blood is a highly readable history book from Dan Jones. Those who are interested in the fight against obscene wealth and power should give it a go. Those in a position of wealth and power should take heed!
The following reviews (and the book) are from Amazon…
Summer 1381 has unnerving comparisons to the nearing of Summer 2009! – the commons are still revolted by the parliamentarians!! This book is superbly written and gives a fascinating insight into our tumultuous past. It was a pleasure to read it and there was never a moment when I didn’t want to turn a page to find out more! Well Done Dan Jones – I look forward to your next book!
As a medievalist with a particular interest in the reign of Richard II I approach “popular” books on the period with a sense of doom. How refreshing then to find one that is as well-researched as any academic study yet well-written and completely accessible to the non-specialist reader. This is a cracking story that should be on the summer holiday reading list of every politican to remind them that the people will only be pushed so far! In fact, it should be on everyone’s reading list.
As you’ll probably know Doncaster recently replaced a corrupt mayor with an inept* one. Some people may think that Donny has turned right wing all of a sudden, but the facts paint a different story; not a story about left or right wing politics, but of the death of local democracy…
On paper the situation in Doncaster, South Yorkshire looks really bad; an English Democrat elected to Mayor of the Doncaster Metropolitan Borough Council (DMBC) and the BNP getting 10% of the vote – has Doncaster gone mad? Let’s look at the figures…
| Doncaster Council Mayoral Election 2009 | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Party | Name | 1st Choice Votes | % | 2nd Choice Votes | Total | |
| English Democrats | Peter Davies | 16,961 | 22.6 | 8,383 | 25,344 | |
| Independent | Michael Thomas Maye | 17,150 | 22.9 | 7,840 | 24,990 | |
| Labour | Sandra Holland | 16,549 | 22.1 | |||
| Conservative | Jonathan Wood | 12,198 | 16.3 | |||
| British National | Dave Owen | 8,175 | 10.9 | |||
| Community Group | Stuart Exelby | 2,152 | 2.9 | |||
| Independent | Michael James Felse | 2,051 | 2.7 | |||
| Total | 74,966 | 100.0 | 16,223 | 50,334 | ||
Voting turn-out was 35.81%, nearly 20% down on the previous Mayoral Election. Research by the Joseph Rowntree Trust has shown that 49% of people will only vote if they feel that their particular candidate has a chance of being elected so this turn out is only to be expected in such an unpredictable election.
The winner of the ‘first choice’ round of votes was Mick Maye, the man who a lot of people rather complacently expected to be the new Mayor of Doncaster. Unfortunately he didn’t get the required ‘clear lead’ of 500 votes so it went to second round voting where the English Democrat, Peter Davies led by 543 votes (43 votes to effectively win control of the DMBC!). Interestingly enough Davies’ ’second choice’ votes correspond almost exactly with the BNP’s ‘first choice’ votes; unfortunately the BNP made some gains this election, but the Tory vote was almost exactly the same – which meant that Davies was not attracting Tory votes.
Indeed Davies, as we’ve mentioned before, is a disgraced Tory (kicked out for tax fiddling) who’s son is a Tory MP. On leaving the Tories Davies went first to UKIP and then to the English Democrats, but his real allegiances became more than evident when he announced his new cabinet (in a cabinet of five people three are Conservatives and his Deputy Mayor is Conservative group leader, Patricia Schofield).
The Conservative Party is about as popular in Doncaster as Garry Glitter is in Mothercare. They and their ilk were directly responsible for the regions economic decline – can anyone seriously imagine that ex-mining communities would welcome Thatcher’s heirs with open arms. They could only manage fourth place in the elections, but Davies has put the Tories in a position of power within the DMBC. What’s more Davies, despite his spiel about cutting back on needless bureaucratic spending, wants to expand his cabinet, which begs the question ‘who will he appoint next?’
This is the sad face of modern ‘democracy’. It is as farcical as it is unrepresentative and eveyone knows it. Talk to anyone at work or down the pub and they know exactly what’s going on – the political parasites are out to line their own pockets. We have the intelligence and the technology to build a new system of direct democracy that would better suit the diverse needs of the people of Britain. But do we have the balls to make it happen?
*For those of you who don’t yet know how ‘inept’ Peter Davies is…
Members of the public in Doncaster and Wakefield are warned to be on their guard against a highly organised gang of degenerates who go by the name of ‘The Police’. Leader of the gang is ‘Shifty’ Shakeel Ahmed (pictured above).
Detective Inspector Shakeel Ahmed has been released on bail following his arrest on Wednesday. Ahmed, a DI with Doncaster CID, was arrested along with 9 other officers on suspicion of money laundering and fraud.
During a series of raids on homes and businesses in Wakefield on Wednesday morning police uncovered £150,000 in cash, a large amount of jewellery, a suspected cannabis farm and 14 top-of-the range cars hidden at a car wash; the cars included a Maserati, a BMW X5 and a Jaguar XKR.
Bent police officers? Surely not! Next you’ll be telling us next that a tax-fiddling Tory will be elected to clean up Doncaster council!
When will the police learn their lesson. If you really want to get away with robbing people blind then you’re much better off becoming a solicitor.
‘Jackass’ Jim Beresford, stole millions and got to keep it.
