929 days ago
I suspect that very few investors and surprisingly few PLC directors have any idea what a recession looks like. For starters most folks in both camps are rich but in a recession, it is the poor or lower middle classes who get whacked hardest. That is especially so when it is an inflationary recession as those lower down the order tend to have the least ability to “play catch up” by forcing through pay rises. And secondly you have to be of a certain age to remember a savage inflationary recession as an adult – the last one was ended with some fairly painful medicine by the blessed Lady Thatcher forty years ago.
1170 days ago
There is an opinion poll out today showing Labour leading the Tories whose support is collapsing. Why vote Labour Light when you can vote for the real thing? Or if you are a Thatcherite, as I am, how can you bring yourself to vote for a Tory party that would disgust and repel every bone in the body of the blessed Margaret. The Tory party of the serial liar Boris is corrupt with party donors paying for his home furnishings and picking up soft sinecures and lucrative PPE contracts but, as bad, it has abandoned so much of what Thatcher believed in, including basic common sense. My day job is exposing fraud. How can I vote for such obvious frauds? The article below first appeared in my free weekly Tomograph newsletter which you can sign up to receive HERE.
1203 days ago
The soon to be ex wife of Michel Gove, Sarah Vine, is – for reasons I have never been able to fathom – paid vast sums to serve up a weekly diet of complete bilge in the Mail on Sunday. If Mr Gove is looking for an excuse for his historic drug use, I’d suggest that having his Mrs read her column to him each week is one that would gain the sympathy of many. Today, Vine deals with Thatcher, coal and global warming prompted by Boris Johnson telling an unfunny and factually inaccurate joke last week.
1557 days ago
The peak years for state school entrance to my old University, Oxford, were in the 1960s. Then, successive Governments and Education ministers including, in a rare error of judgement, the blessed Lady Thatcher, started to scrap grammar schools. That ladder which gave bright working-class kids educational and social mobility was whipped away as they went along to comprehensives. Comprehensive schooling has, almost entirely, failed both the bright poor and the not so bright poor who, on most measures, fail in later life as badly as they did in the “bad old days”. But one institution has a solution… an establishment where most of the senior staff went to public schools and Oxbridge. Yes, you have guessed it…
2350 days ago
Is Mrs May the worst Tory PM since Heath, since Chamberlain or ever? That would be my suggested question for this summer’s A level politics students and her weekend pledge to give a £384 million a week Brexit dividend to the NHS might just be a central case study. At every level it shows why this wretched woman will tell whatever lie she thinks will win her votes in a desperate attempt to keep her job. It is truly pitiful.
2419 days ago
Yesterday was the 5 year anniversary of the death of Lady Thatcher. I celebrated by publishing a short video of the Iron lady explaining a few home truths. There have been numerous comments made by those ignorant of the facts of life in the UK in the 1970s and 1980s. In this podcast I set them straight.
2625 days ago
My pay has fallen by 14% thanks to austerity says another lardbucket public sector worker. The fake news channels report this as fact and pathetic Mrs May finds another money tree and prepares for public sector pay rises all round. So what if the deficit is £50 billion and going to rise? So what if the National Debt is already the largest Europe and rising? So what if inflation busting pay increases across the public sector will only fuel inflation so pushing up interest rates? Who cares? Well lets start with facts, the inconvenient truths that show how the lazy, overpaid bastards in the public sector who are lying to you about pay.
2721 days ago
As I have noted many times, killing frigana is very therapeutic. To date this year, the weapon of choice has been poison and as you can see below, that has worked in places to very good effect. This is a patch I sprayed about a week ago and it is already on its way out. Leaves that were a shiny green are now visibly browning and pretty soon this whole patch will be a golden brown. But sadly that is not the whole story.
2819 days ago
We are waiting at Warwick Hospital for a scan and to help pay the bloated wages of the greedy doctors there is a mini second hand bookstore - buy any volume for just 50p. I spot Margaret Thatcher, the Downing Street Years and hand over three 20p pieces saying "keep the change". Bargain and double bargain.
2867 days ago
This was a treat organised by my dear wife for myself and Joshua: a visit to an abandoned Welsh coal mine which is now a museum - the "Big Pit" at Bleanavon. Suffice to say we appeared to be the only visitors and as I arrived I took a call from a City pal Mazza and we discussed things you do not say loudly in such a place. "Where were you when you heard the tragic news that the blessed Lady Thatcher had been ousted by her spineless colleagues/had died?"
Or perhaps
2874 days ago
Jeremy Corbyn has today announced that he would like to cap the pay of the very rich. He did not specify exactly what the cap would be but he made it clear that this included top businessmen and soccer players.
This will no doubt win great plaudits from vast numbers of public sector workers who, these days, are the bedrock of what little support Labour has. A few - but too many - of these folks are in the 1% that Corbyn is believed to be targetting (those earning more than £164,000 a year). but most are not. They are however well paid and with far better job security and pensions and shorter hours than similarly educated and skilled folks in the private sector. And the non risk taking, state funded affluent middle classes buy into the politics of envy.
2890 days ago
David Cameron's rich, tax-dodging, stockbroker father paid for him to go to Eton from where he went to Oxford. One proper job ( well sort of) was arranged for young David after Oxford, a stint as the PR man for Carlton Communications. Then he started to climb the greasy pole. With a Mrs who was even more minted by dint of inherited wealth, the Camerons were clearly in the 1% not the 99% and never had to worry about money.
2919 days ago
When Lady Thatcher died many on the left could not hide their delight. The BBC and the liberal media went out of their way to cover street parties by sick individuals celebrating the demise of a fellow human being. The liberal media failed to show the widespread sense of loss many of us felt. Maggie had made ordinary Briton's far better off, turned a country that had been bankrupt in 1976 into an economic powerhouse, had restored a sense of national pride but left wing intellectuals and the liberal media did not care about such things. It just hated her all the more. And in doing so it showed how out of touch they were then, as they are now, with how ordinary men and women actually feel.
And so today the evil bastard Fidel Castro of Cuba has died.
3002 days ago
I used to have a girlfriend from India who arrived in this country convinced that the entire British establishment and anyone who went to a public school (with the exception of myself, naturally) were closet homoseexuals. If she is reading the tabloid press today she will no doubt be concluding that she was right all along.
First there is the Bishop of Grantham
3111 days ago
I had rather forgotten about Michael Heseltine, the man who stabbed Lady Thatcher in the back, but apparently the old egomaniac is still alive and today weighed into the Brexit debate saying that Boris Johnson was a reckless man and that we should all vote to stay in.
Before anyone takes the old fool too seriously on the EU you might ask
3118 days ago
I cannot remember when I first described David Cameron as the heir to Blair. I think it was in 2012 but it may have been at the time of the funeral of Lady Thatcher, whose shoes Dodgy Dave is not fit to lick. Today's comments on Brexit are fantasy lying league stuff which is right up their with with the war criminal Blair's comments on Weapons of Mass Destruction.
3120 days ago
The first time I encountered the woman who is now known as the Mrs but was formerly "The Deluded lefty" she made her views known by passing me her copy of The Guardian saying there was an article in it that I might find interesting. Since I fancied her big time, and still do, I did not respond "you must be kidding you daft lefty" but dutifully read the complete and utter piffle and feigned interest. On our second date I did not hold back as we had a big row over affirmative action.
But our relationship has survived. Her pals who are even more deluded than the Mrs quickly branded me as "the fascist boyfriend" for thought crimes like going to Lady Thatcher's funeral rather than having a party, for voting Tory and for believing in capitalism, Israel, freedom etc, etc.
The Mrs is this morning cheered by her news that the University Lecturers - greedy and lazy bastards - are going on strike to get even more money for doing sod all work. They better hurry up as pretty soon their 10 week summer vacation starts and they might actually have to cut into their Tuscany break to head back to Britain to man ( sorry, person) a picket line.
As a sociology lecturer, the Mrs has mad left views hard-coded into her DNA. She has never voted anything other than Labour. Until today.
Okay
4002 days ago
Reflecting on the UCL Libertarian dinner at Real Man Pizza last Thursday and on a chat with its guest speaker my mind turns back to Lady Thatcher and wondering what were her greatest failings as Prime Minister. Thinking off the top of my head my top seven would be:
1. A failure to reform the world’s third largest employer, the NHS so that it cared for patients in a cost effective manner rather than looked after over-paid and unaccountable staff
2. A failure to privatise the BBC
4002 days ago
Still with no internet at the new house of the Mrs, I spent the whole of Sunday working in what I thought was the local hostelry in our new Neighbourhood. At ten o’clock I started wandering home and as I reached the top of the quite steep hill and about two thirds of the way back I started wondering how I will cope with this trek in the snow. But then I saw a bright light burning across the road. It called me towards it….
In a rather tired looking Victorian building there it was. The Conservative Club. With the Mrs away I thought “why not?” and buzzed my way inside. This place is less than 250 yards from my front door with no hills involved. It has Wi-Fi (although the barman did not seem to know what Wi-Fi was all about), snooker and pool tables and very, very cheap booze indeed.
It was just £5 to join and £16 a year to be a member (an extra fiver in the unlikely event of the Mrs, the woman formerly known as the Deluded Lefty, deciding to join as well). I rapidly worked out that at £2a pint/glass of wine I will get my money back very quickly indeed. All I needed was a proposer and seconder who had known me for 5 years and an understanding that I supported the principles of the Conservative party.
Hmmmmmm,
4054 days ago
Darren Atwater arrives at Real Man Pizza with great news, the Po-0Go collectively run Marxist vegan café round the corner from him in Hackney has ceased trading. Its business model was simple: charge high prices for its rabbit food and pay staff nothing. Hope that deluded lefties will keep you going.
The last time Darren was in there (naturally as a subversive capitalist information gatherer) it had a sign up saying “37 shifts available this week.” It seems that the Comrades were not exactly lining up to work for free.
And now this place has ceased trading. What went wrong? No doubt the blame is now being firmly placed with the usual suspects: Thatcher, the wicked bankers, Mossad, evil Tory cuts and Thatcher again.
As the Iron Lady once said: “celebrate.”
4172 days ago
For younger readers, a UB40 is the piece of paper you got in the 1980s if you were on the dole. It was also the name of a rock group whose members thought that it was all Thacher's fault. I dod not like their message and I loathed their music. My friemnd Matt sent me an email saying that he was watching some great 1980s videos of UB40. I hit the link for reasons that I cannot remember and Windows 8 being Windows 8 I cannot now stop this awful sound from blasting from my PC drowning out what I want to listen to, Small Town by John Cougar Mellencamp. Very frustrating. I suppose the UB40 song cannot last forever. Even if it feels like it is.
4358 days ago
Zak Mir is an old friend and godfather to my daughter. He is a very funny man. He can be incredibly cool and he can also be Geek of the Year – ask him about his fascination with weather patterns. That is train spotting for the middle classes. The one chink in his armour is his deprived education background. Not a reference in a PC way to the oppression of a you Asian lad growing up in a post industrial Glasgow decimated by the evil Thatcher. Oooooo all those nasty white racists and bloody English. Thatcher! How they suppress my fellow Celts. Nope, Zak lived in a posh bit of Glasgow ( I gather there is one) and went to Harrow which is clearly a dreadful school as I have never met an Old Harrovian who could write more than three words (they all seem to be able to manage f*ck off pleb) without introducing some spelling mistake or grammatical error.. .And so we come to Zak’s latest ebook – an ideal TA Chistmas gift.
