Some bits and pieces

It must be love, love, love

Two beautiful love stories from the last couple of weeks:

• A 14-year-old boy has been arrested on charges of sexually assaulting a hen in Pakistan’s Punjab province. Mansab Ali, a resident of Hafizabad, some 200km from Lahore, told police that his neighbour Ansar Hussain “abducted” his hen on November 11 and “raped” it. The hen died while being sexually assaulted by Hussain. Station House Officer Sarfraz Anjum told The Express Tribune that the suspect had been arrested after a medical examination of the hen confirming the sexual assault.

• Police have arrested a 23-year-old Syrian for allegedly raping a pony at a children’s zoo in Berlin; the man’s crime was witnessed by shocked visitors who took a photo of the incident and handed it over to the authorities. The incident occurred at the Kinderbauernhof (children’s farm) area of the German capital’s Goelitzer Park. The man was spotted by a babysitter, who was visiting the zoo with a child. “My babysitter was at Goerlitzer Park with our son when they witnessed the man carrying out a sexual act on the pony,” a woman told the Berliner Morgenpost, adding that her babysitter had informed park staff about the incident but is unwilling to talk about it anymore because it was too traumatizing.

   

  Please give generously to BBC ‘Executives In Need’

  Today is finally the BBC’s ‘CHILDREN IN NEED’ day.

  The BBC claims that “every penny you give makes a difference”. But a difference for whom? The children in need? Or the BBC bureaucrats and pen-pushers?

  Before you hand over your money, let me just tell you a few inconvenient truths about this great charitable event. Then you can judge for yourself whether you really should be throwing your already heavily-taxed cash into that great, corrupt, politically-biased, left-wing, steaming cesspit of parasitical, self-serving, overpaid, over-pensioned bureaucrats that is the BBC.

  The BBC’s CHILDREN IN NEED charity only has 110 employees. But they seem to be awfully lucky employees indeed. While the average employee cost (salary, NI and pension contributions) at our larger charities is between £20,000 and £30,000, the employee cost at the BBC’s CHILDREN IN NEED is a wonderful £42,546, slightly up from £41,270 just two years ago . That’s considerably higher than employee costs at charities like Oxfam, Save the Children, Red Cross and Age UK:

  

  Moreover, the CHILDREN IN NEED boss managing these 110 people (probably all based in comfortable offices in Salford) pocketed about £110,440 of our ‘charitable donations’ in 2015 and £119,934 in 2016 – an 8% increase in just one year. Not much austerity for him. That’s almost as much as the boss at Oxfam who got £137,773 in salary and pension for managing over 5,000 employees across the world, many of them in some of the world’s most dangerous countries and generating and spending income of over £140m, rather more than the BBC CHILDREN IN NEED’s more modest £57m.

  Current employees at the BBC’s CHILDREN IN NEED are fortunate enough to be eligible for one of the most generous pension schemes in Britain – the BBC’s pension scheme, which will give them guaranteed, inflation-protected pensions for the rest of their lives.

  Sadly for us licence-fee payers and for contributors to CHILDREN IN NEED, the BBC’s pension scheme is so unbelievably generous to BBC employees that it doesn’t have enough money to meet its liabilities. In fact, it has a shortfall of over £1bn. No problem – the BBC has decided to fatten up its own pension scheme with our money. Over the 12 years from 2014 to 2026 around £905,000,000 extra of our money (in addition to the regular contributions the BBC makes each month for each employee) will be put into the BBC pension scheme to ensure all BBC employees can have a comfortable, secure, well-rewarded retirement at our expense. So, Fiona Bruce and Angela Rippon and others of their ilk can relax in the knowledge that we will be paying for their luxury lives for many more decades.

  As for the CHILDREN IN NEED part of this pension scheme, it was also underfunded and so in 2015 got an extra £274,000 of our charitable donations which rose to £298,000 in 2016. The BBC CHILDREN IN NEED would need 29,800 people donating £10 each just to help top up the CHILDREN IN NEED employees’ pension scheme for this year.

  Do you really want your charity donations ending up in the pockets of arrogant, jobs-for-life, virtue-signalling, self-serving BBC executives and penpushers?