1646 days ago
Abby first sprang to fame starting an online campaign for Ed Miliband. Then she went to University and her dissertation was in how wicked Tory austerity hit vulnerable women hardest. You know that austerity which saw Government spending go up every year. That one. Now loaded down with student debt she wonders why employers are not rushing to give her job offers, Mind you it seems she has penned a few articles for The Guardian and the Huffington Post whiuch she waits for a well paid post suitable for a woman with her skills and talents.. Surely there is an NHS Trust out there with a £50,000 a year post as a diversity consultant where Abby would fit in really well? No? Abby would be a great hire for the BBC Human Resources department would she not?
2230 days ago
I see that London’s hapless Mayor Sadiq Khan is tweeting like a man possessed, pleas for folks to travel to his great City this weekend for a mass exercise in anti Brexit Remoaning. I would have thought he has more important things to do.
2314 days ago
The headline in the Independent, an online publication which was once a newspaper but is now a little read comic is clear: “Biggest rise in UK poverty since Margaret Thatcher was in power, experts claim”. In lefty bingo terms it gets better with a claim by the Indy that “The figures show the extent to which a combination of Brexit and government austerity is imposing a serious squeeze on living standards.” Thatcher, Brexit, Austerity – House! Of course it is 100% fake news
2558 days ago
The Taxpayers Alliance has produced a fascinating 51 page report explaining why so many of us are "just about managing" to quote our useless Prime Minister. In short it's hard evidence that Ronald Reagan was right when he said that the scariest words in the English language are "I'm from the Government and I'm here to help." We feel poor not because of wicked Tory austerity (fauxsterity), but because of how a bloated state has distorted the economy.
2558 days ago
I wandered up to the Greek Hovel this morning and saw, at once, that something was not quite right. Yes there were olives on the trees as you can see below but not vast numbers.
2573 days ago
The tweet below refers to the Paradise Papers not the Panama Papers but that is not the glaring error. The error is to say that austerity is caused by tax evasion. It is wrong on so many counts.
2620 days ago
As my parents' generation encountered the punk rockers their hearts must have sunk. My father can remember hearing that his uncle had been killed in the war and the heroism of that generation. As children, he and my mother suffered real austerity, that is to say rationing. My father's brother suffered National Service. Looking at a youth who enjoyed only the good life without any sense of responsibility and were still angry for some reason, my parents generation must have despaired. With hindsight the 1970s was a golden era.
2628 days ago
Top administrators at even piss poor universities earn more than the Prime Minister. We are told by the, usually sound Louise Richardson that footballers earn more. Surely Louise understands how much revenue a Rooney generates and market forces and how lame is her excuse. But on such salaries at least that should ensure that as they combat evil Tory austerity the Universities spend what cash they have wisely. Er...
2682 days ago
As you can see in a tweet below from a regional organiser of the UNITE Trades Union, which bankrolls Labour, the vicious Tories are at it again, trying to raise the pension age. This is all because Tories hate those who are not so rich that they do not need a state pension. So bangs on the left in a post fact era chorus. So what are the facts?
2700 days ago
On Saturday we supplied the picture below of two food bank using victims of evil Tory austerity marching to make the world a better place. We asked you for suitable captions and many were supplied as you can see HERE.
2816 days ago
In the budget yesterday, hopeless Chancellor Hammond stated that he did not expect to be running a balanced budget until 2025 - his even more hopeless predecessor had - without much justification - predicted he'd be in balance a few years earlier. Channel 4 Fake New seized on this as a statement that the wicked Tories planned eight more years of austerity. Time and time again this mantra was repeated without challenge. It is, of course, just a fake news invention.
2927 days ago
I know the area at the bottom end of Fleet Street, where it turns into Ludgate Hill and you wander up to St Pauls, like the back of my hand. Twenty years ago I worked around there at the Chronic Investor and used to walk home Eastwards. For two decades, at Christmas I would go to midnight mass at the journalists' church, St Brides. The area has changed a lot over the twenty five years that we have been acquainted. Unlike me, it has smartened itself up. But it is still familiar territory.
3120 days ago
It was meant to take three months but took closer to a year but who cares? We now have a forestry permit received for the Greek Hovel. It seems that I failed to (illegally) cut down a few wild olive trees but most of my good works of the summer before last in clearing 2000 square metres of frigana have not been noticed and so we can now.....
3214 days ago
The BBC's Question Time was from Bradford last night and my heart sank as I looked out an audience comprised largely of fat people who pretty ssoon showed that they were also - almost to a person - just plain stupid. It was all too predictable what followed as a questionner asked whether George Osborne's pre-election talk about a Northern Powerhouse was just vote grabbing waffle.
A silly Labour MP said how some Government department had just been moved from Sheffield to the South and asked how this would help the Northern Powerhouse. The audience lapped it up. Shuffling desks in the great State apparatus has nothing to do with creating wealth and prosperity but that was a point no-one in the room seemed to appreciate.
A woman in the audience who appeared to have an almost negative IQ and thus boasted that she worked in local Government talked of savage cuts in her employer's budget and austerity and the rest of the audience wet themselves with joy.
The odious careerist Amber Rudd for the Tories talked about investing in trains in Manchester & Liverpool but that seemed only to irk the audience from the other side of the pennines even more. One assumes that Ms Rudd, like myself
3352 days ago
The pre-election purge of Comrades who might actually believe in Socialism is over and thus I now feel able to admit to greatly liking the works of Billy Bragg without fear of expulsion from the Labour Party. As I drove to and from London yesterday Bragg was my constant companion and there was a particular pleasure in blasting out and singing along to "Between the Wars" as I passed the former Labour HQ under Comrade War Criminal Blair on Millbank and the Houses of Parliament. Listen to the words and remember that this classic was written is 1985.
Today many on the left talk of austerity but here Bragg uses the word three decades before most Comrades regarded it as fashionable. The Bard of Barking
3423 days ago
61% of the people in the country that invented democracy last Sunday voted to reject an austerity deal. Five days later, the new Ephialtes, PM Alex Tsipras strong-armed the Parliament to allow him to propose an even worse deal. But it is this weekend when Greece really needs to lube up as the Germans and the Troika prepare for the final humiliating shafting.
For it is clear that as EU finance ministers meet that many of them (the Dutch, Latvians and especially the Krauts) as well as the Troika seen the new Tsipras capitulation (ooops I meant plan) only as a basis for negotiations. That is to say they want even more concessions.
3444 days ago
There is no austerity in Britain under the "wicked Tories". Since 2010 Government spending and the national debt has risen year on year. The burden our children will inherit as a result of this profligacy mounts daily.
Yet today in London a couple of hundred thousand folks - c0.36% of the population to be exact - have gathered to protest against "austerity". Why do they want exactly? They want the Government to create a bigger debt which will have to be serviced and paid off one day, by spending more. These folks do not appear to realise that the Money Tree really does not exist.
The money will be spent on more pay for public sector workers who already earn more than their peers in the private (wealth creating) sector yet have more job security, throw more sickies, get longer holidays and get cushier pensions. The money will be spent on bloating a welfare system that is already out of control, not a safety net but - for many - a lifestyle choice which includes booze, fags, SkyTV and playing the lottery.
Among the headline speakers are millionaires
3450 days ago
Next week it is a party organised by the maddest lefty among the mad lefties who the Mrs counts as her friends. The last time I met this woman she was celebrating the application of an academic colleague to obtain taxpayer funding on a project "how black women have suffered under austerity". You really do not know where to start with such nonsense but I am booked in for another dose of it a week today.
But as a bit of a warm up, the Mrs has arranged a treat for this afternoon, visting the Bristol refugee fair. I somehow think that I may be the ideological fish out of water. I brace myself.
I should note that though my Mrs may be a deluded lefty she has numerous plus points among which is her amazing tolerance of my views. Free speech denier she is not. Although, to avoid getting duffed up this afternoon, I suspect that I may be biting my lip on a number of occassions.
3467 days ago
I wonder if it was his years at the BBC which saw my pal Comrade Malcolm Stacey infected with the mad lefty virus. Becuase the old Money Tree worshipper does talk some awful rot and today's column from him HERE is a classic. I feel forced to point out in the interests of balance why he is spouting total gibberish.
The old leftie states:
The new British government will continue austerity. Sadly, that is not good news for the less well off, but it won’t affect the wealthy very much. And it will bring the national debt down.
So the wicked Tories will continue austerity will they? I wish they would. In fact I wish they had started austerity five years ago but they have not. Government spending has risen year on year since 2010 under the wicked Tories and will continue to rise. Some austerity.
And it gets worse
3485 days ago
A few reflections on Greece - where it is now almost 30 degrees - and on who austerity really hits out here. Then onto 3 companies that issued key news at no-one is watching at all O'clock yesterday: Ubisense, EMED and Daniel Stewart.
3491 days ago
We continue our series on why various ShareProphets writers are voting for a range of parties on May 7th. I asked for a postal vote and so I have already voted and I voted Tory. Since I view the entire political class with contempt the main reason for voting Tory was to annoy my Labour voting wife. But there are actually three more serious reasons why everyone should vote Tory in the General Election.
Come May 8th the Government with either be a Labour/Scottish Loons coalition or Labour propped up & blackmailed on a vote by vote basis by the Scottish loons. Or it will be a Tory led coalition with the Lib Dems.
Britain is hurtling towards bankruptcy. All the talk of austerity
3860 days ago
Wandering through the streets of Athens today I happened upon a book stall set up by the side of the road. Pride of place at the top of the heap was the Greek version of one of Jamie Oliver’s works.
Youth unemployment at 65%, unemployment at 30%, massive cuts in the standard of living, corrupt politicians, German imposed austerity, the music of Nana Mouskori, Nazi Occupation in World War Two, a bitter Civil war afterwards and now Jamie. Surely it is time to say that poor Greece has suffered enough and that it does not need this one last misery heaped upon its suffering people?
3926 days ago
White Dee is a character from the Channel 4 shows “Benefits Street”. Until 2007 she worked for Birmingham City Council but was then sacked for stealing £13,000. Has she repaid that dosh or gone to prison? Of course not, this is Britain in 2014.
Today she rakes in £200 a week in benefits tax free and is unable to work because she is “too depressed”. Of that £200 she reckons that £120 goes on junk food for her and her family and then there are the 20 cigarettes a day. I expect they are bought “under the counter” but that will still be another £35.
She cheerfully admits that there are folks out there working really hard to clear £100 a week but White Dee is too “depressed” to join them. Heck £200 a week tax free is the equivalent of £12-13,000 a year working and so why the hell should she work. I do not blame her for choosing a life of being a scrounging parasite, I blame our welfare system for not forcing her to work. That would make her depressed.
Instead she is apparently planning to trouser £60,000 appearing on celebrity Big Brother or to run for parliament as an MP (she supports Labour natch). At least as an MP she would feel at home with the other state fund parasites and thieves at Westminster.
And so I invite you to look at this lazy lardball below and as you think about getting up early tomorrow morning to go to work, think about how she is living off your taxes. Post a suitable caption in the comment section below by next Friday:
For what it is worth my entry is:
“Another victim of the austerity programme of the wicked Tories contemplates how she is being made to suffer."
3959 days ago
The weekly video postcard this week looks at food banks where Edwina Currie is getting it in the neck for making a perfectly valid observation. Indeed the mammoth growth of food banks is based on a lie and spawns more lies – this goes to the heart of the austerity & welfare debate.
Colleagues of the Mrs don’t get it but this video explains why food banks are an unnecessary evil.
3966 days ago
The Scots it would appear have negotiated the deal of the Century with England for post-independence financial Armageddon. They get the freedom. The English get to pick up the tab.
The Scots would be able to set their own budgets, their own tax rates and spend as much as they want yet the English taxpayer c/o the Britsh ( or post independence English) Treasury has agreed to underwrite its debt. This is sheer insanity.
87% of Scots take from the State (in terms of services, welfare, etc.) more than they give. And thus Scotland has found itself with an electorate which things that austerity means deep fried mars bars all round on the State being cut back to only 6 days a week. Or only giving free cigarettes to Primary School Children only on alternate days.
Given that you have more chance of finding a heterosexual non child molester presenting a Top of the Pops edition from 1977 than you have of finding a Tory voter in Scotland, its three political parties that matter ( Labour, The Nationalist loons and the Lib Dems) are all committed to more spending and more tax but the ultimate funder is always seen as the great Money Tree.
Scottish economic policy and the prevailing ethos of a land that once gave us Adam Smith is akin only to Greece. Edinburgh is the Athens of the North.
And so post-independence
4334 days ago
Are you getting a pay rise this year? Not many folks are. Some like those on welfare are, in real terms, getting a cut. Pensioners are worse off thanks in part to low interest rates. The Government needs to slash its spending. To sack people. To make them unemployed. As Call Me Dave said “we are all in it together.” Er… not quite. Some folks are more equal than others. MPs are demanding a pay rise. A 32% pay rise. Where is Guy Fawkes when you need him? These pigs are beneath contempt.
An MP already gets paid £65,378 a year plus expenses. Those were meant to have been reformed but
4502 days ago
You were working as a waitress in a cocktail bar when I met you. Blah Blah blah. Well actually Petra is working as a waitress in Zorba’s taverna and after she clocked off work at midnight we hit the town. I am feeling a bit jaded as a result. It is not that I had too much to drink, just too little food before it. These days three glasses of wine and I am anybody’s. But for the record not Petra’s. Anyhow I suffered for you dear readers. It was all in the name of research.
You see the riots in Athens. You hear the dreadful economic stats. So how about a couple of real lives. You have, I suspect, no idea of how the basic rules which you and I take for granted have just broken down completely. Thus trust and faith in anything is no longer possible.
