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By  David Craig, on February 13th, 2014 A couple of weeks ago someone called Sally Morgan (Dame Morgan) didn’t have her well-paid sinecure as head of Ofsted renewed. So she started bleating and blubbering that she was being culled as part of a Tory drive to remove Labour supporters from public bodies such as quangos.
Well, here are the real figures showing that Labour have been stuffing Britain’s 1,600+ quangos with Labour supporters (click to see more clearly)
(The Labour Government stopped publishing these statistics in 2006 for rather obvious reasons)
And, of course, Dame Sally Morgan’s demented rant got extensive coverage in the BBC. As the reader of a magazine wrote: “left-wing quangos spreading like knotweed under covering fire from the left-wing BBC”. Odd that the BBC never mentioned that around 75% of all quango chairpeople who declared a political affiliation were Labour supporters.
The useless, overstaffed, ineffective environment agency is headed up by a former Labour minister Chris Smith (Lord Smith). What are Chris Smith’s qualifications to run the Environment Agency? Umm, none. To quote another reader’s comment: “Chris Smith, liberal arts Cambridge, labour party professional ever since is not qualified to run the Environment Agency because this requires an understanding science, meteorology, physics, biology etc. Why put someone like this in charge? It can only be nepotism of the worst kind. He probably has hardly stepped out of Islington for 30 years. Now he looks and sounds completely out of his depth. One could probably go round most of these quangos and find the same. I am not that bothered that he is a metro leftie, they all seem to be, but could the system at least try to match some expertise to the job“.
So, what went wrong at the Environment Agency? Here’s a really brilliant article by Leo McKinstry from the Daily Mail describing how, under Fatman Smith, the Environment Agency became a bloated, overstaffed, underperforming, wasteful joke obsessed with political correctness and prioritising newts and birds over humans.
www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2557190/LEO-MCKINSTRY-Awash-cash-fanatically-PC-The-infuriating-truth-useless-floods-quango.html?ico=home^editors_choice
It’s worth reading as it describes what is happening in almost all our useless, incompetent quangos and regulators – Ofgem, Ofcom, Ofwat, Ofsted…………………..
By David Craig, on February 12th, 2014 Normally on my blog, I try to do research to bring readers new information that they might not have known about – like, for example, yesterday when I exposed just how many foreigners are allowed to vote in UK elections.
However today, I’m just going to repeat a story I read in the national press yesterday. I apologise if you’ve already read it. But it’s so good, I’ll risk wasting your time by repeating it here.
Incidentally, when I read the story in the Times, I wrote a comment “That’s cheered me up on another cold stormy day”. This was almost immediately deleted by the moderator for not being “politically correct”. So I wrote another comment “If you can’t do, teach. If you can’t teach….bang!” That too was deleted by the Times moderator for not being politically correct. Free speech or censorship?
I hope this cheers you up as much as it did me:
Suicide bombers and teacher blown up at Iraq training camp
An entire class of jihadist recruits learning to make suicide bombs at a camp in Iraq were killed yesterday after their instructor accidentally detonated a car packed with explosive.
The instructor and 21 of his students were killed in the blast at a training camp north of Baghdad run by the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, the terror network’s one-time affiliate in Iraq.
Al-Qaeda’s central command broke ties with the group last week amid infighting between rival Islamist rebel groups in Syria. The network had previously ordered the group to return to the battlefield in Iraq, leaving Syria to an already established al-Qaeda offshoot. The blast was the first indication Iraqi security forces had of the presence of an ISIS training camp 60 miles north of Baghdad, tucked away in an orchard in the village of al-Jarama.
The recruits were attending a lesson on making car bombs and explosive belts when a glitch set off one of the devices. Security forces heard the blast and arrested 12 wounded recruits along with another 10 trying to flee.
Authorities searched two houses and a garage, finding seven car bombs, explosive belts and roadside bombs.
ISIS has claimed responsibility for the deaths of thousands in a massive suicide bombing campaign that has helped push the sectarian carnage in Iraq back to levels unseen since 2008.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/world/middleeast/iraq/article4002150.ece
(Incidentally, I’m not sure these guys will get their virgins as they didn’t actually kill anyone, just themselves. Snigger snigger)
By David Craig, on February 11th, 2014 In the United States only citizens can vote in national or state elections and in Canada only citizens are entitled to vote in federal elections. In Australia, Commonwealth citizens had the right to vote in elections until 1984. However this was changed so that only Australian citizens and British subjects, (a term covering all Commonwealth citizens) resident in Australia before 1984 can now vote. In New Zealand only citizens and permanent residents can vote in elections.
Voting Rights in the UK
By contrast, the UK extends parliamentary voting rights to many millions of non-citizens. Irish citizens can vote, a reciprocal right granted to the British in Ireland. So can Commonwealth citizens whose right to vote is not linked to length of residence or permanent residency, but is granted on arrival. An address in the constituency is required, but there are no checks on immigration status. Thus even a student visitor from a Commonwealth country, who was planning to study for six months, would be allowed to enrol on the Electoral Register and vote in a Parliamentary Election if one was held during the duration of his or her stay.
Citizens of the European Union (who are not Commonwealth citizens or Citizens of the Republic of Ireland) can vote in European and local elections in the UK, elections to the Scottish Parliament and Welsh and Northern Ireland Assemblies (if they live in those areas) and some referendums (based on the rules for the particular referendum) but are not able to vote in UK Parliamentary general elections.
So, how many EU citizens are there in the UK? The EU claims there were only 2,334,400 in 2011 (click to see clearly)
But as the EU will tend to underplay the level of immigration and as many more people will have moved here since 2011, we can safely assume that there are really say 3.5 to 4 million. Studies of newly arrived (as opposed to long-term settled) immigrant populations suggest that around 3 to 3.5 million will be of voting age.
This means that in the May EU elections, there will be potentially 3 to 3.5 million people (EU citizens) who will vote for any party other than UKIP and who are unlikely to vote Tory.
Moreover, when New Labour were in power, Gordon Brown commissioned a study of how many Commonwealth citizens there were in Britain and what their voting intentions were. The conclusion – there were well over one million of them and over 90% would vote Labour. Naturally, when they found this out, New Labour were only too happy with the UK’s “inclusive” rules on who can vote here (click to see clearly)
So we have a massive block of well over 4 million people, who are not British citizens and who will tend to support Labour and vote for things like membership of the EU, who can vote in the coming EU elections.
It looks like the EU’s plan (aided and abetted by our own politicians) of destroying our national identity and wiping out our sovereignty by swamping us with immigrants is really working quite well.
By David Craig, on February 10th, 2014 Here’s a short (2 min 43 secs) video where Tory MEP, Daniel Hannan, explains with depressing clarity how the EU and Europe should develop in the future www.iea.org.uk/multimedia/video/dan-hannan-on-europe%E2%80%99s-economic-future-1
I say “depressing clarity” as what he says is so obviously right. But it will never be allowed to happen because our corrupt, unelected, socialist EU masters will never allow any reduction of their ever-increasing control over us.
And thanks to a reader for this – it’s Farage giving yet another well-deserved bollocking to the arrogant, utterly venal, unelected, implacable enemies of democracy Barroso and Van Rompuy: www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlrJNyY7o-I
And hopefully you’ll all have noticed that in a referendum, the Swiss have just voted to impose restrictions on the number of people moving into Switzerland from the EU (click on pictures to see more clearly)
Maybe they don’t want their orderly, beautiful country to be over-run by hordes of East Europeans and Roma gypsies (click on picture to see more clearly)
One group of supporters of more control of immigration held up a placard saying “No borders – no country”. If you don’t have control of who comes over your borders, then you’re no longer an independent country. I think we’d all (apart from Cameron, Miliband, Clegg, Mandelson, Clarke etc etc) agree with that.
(by the way, if my blogs make you angry and raise your blood pressure, then I suggest you take medical advice before reading what I’ll be writing tomorrow)
By David Craig, on February 9th, 2014 When the euro was introduced 12 years ago, we were promised that: “The euro will ensure full employment and make Europe the competitive powerhouse of the world”.
So how’s it going – this “full employment” in the “competitive powerhouse of the world”? Well, it seems we’re not quite there yet.
Here are the latest unemployment figures for the EU countries (click to see more clearly)
Greece, Spain, Italy, Cyprus, Portugal, Slovakia and Bulgaria don’t seem to be doing too great. And youth unemployment in these countries is at almost catastrophic levels. Moreover, I suspect these official figures underplay the real extent of unemployment, as many millions of unemployed people will have left their home countries to find jobs in places like Germany, Holland and the UK.
There are over 26 million unemployed in the EU. Of these 26 million, 19 million are in the Eurozone. So the Eurozone has 72% of the EU’s unemployed, but only 65% of the EU’s population. The unemployment rate in the Eurozone is over 12%, but is only around 8.6% in non-Eurozone countries.
But the real tragedy is, of course, youth (<25 years old) unemployment. About 3.5 million of the EU’s 5.4 million youth unemployed live in the Eurozone. Although these figures just look like statistics, in fact they represent millions of tragedies. By the time economic recovery comes, a new cohort of young people will be leaving college and university making it unlikely that the 5.4 million currently unemployed will ever get the jobs for which they have been trained. After all, why would a company give a 30-year-old, who has never worked, a job when they can get a 25-year-old with the same qualifications? So, that’s 5.4 million people thrown on the scrap-heap in order to save the Euro and our masters’ great European superstate project.
Perhaps I misheard and when the Euro was launched, they actually promised that in some countries the Euro would “lead to full unemployment”. Because that’s what seems to be happening – especially for the young.
Still, at least the EU’s unemployed millions can all move to Britain and claim up to £25,000 a year each in benefits if they have families. After all, we must show solidarity with our European friends – even if it bankrupts us.
By David Craig, on February 8th, 2014 In 2012, the Independent newspaper wrote a grovelingly sycophantic article about Blairite crony Chris Smith – head of the Environment Agency.
The hopeless Indie wrote: “Lord Smith of Finsbury, the chairman of the Environment Agency, has a clear idea of what should be done about the chronic water shortage which is already affecting southern England, and may get progressively worse despite occasional days of rainfall”.
Apparently, the excellent Mr Smith had developed what he called “a flow of ideas” to solve the droughts that would be increasingly common due to supposed Global Warming. www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/lord-smith-the-man-who-hopes-his-flow-of-ideas-will-save-us-from-drought-7536464.html
Here’s a lovely picture from the Indie of the porcine Labour placeman Smith, clearly living well at taxpayers’ expense (click on picture if you want to see his impressive double/triple chin more clearly)
Well, as much of Britain now disappears beneath floods of almost Biblical proportions, it seems that Mr Smith’s “flow of ideas” has been hugely successful. In fact, the much praised (by the useless Indie) “flow of ideas” has been so successful that there soon won’t be much left of Britain that isn’t submerged.
So, let us all give praise to Mr Smith. Let us thank him for solving the drought crisis with his “flow of ideas”. But could he please turn off his “flow of ideas” as we possibly have slightly more water than we need.
Did the EU prevent dredging?
As for the dredging that would have avoided much of the flooding – if you dig deep enough (no joke intended), you’ll find that actually the dredging didn’t take place because of EU directives discouraging dredging rivers and EU directives requiring lengthy and costly “environmental impact studies” to be carried out before dredging to ensure no snails or newts or worms or whatever would be disturbed by dredging. There are at least 3 EU directives inhibiting dredging – Water Framework Directive 2000/60/EC, Waste Framework Directive 75/442/EEC and the Habitat Directive 92/43/EEC. Though, of course, no journalist will ever mention these, otherwise more people might vote UKIP.
So, just like with selling off the Royal Mail and legalising single-sex marriage, nobody in politics or the mainstream media will dare to let people know that a stop to dredging was forced on us by EU rules.
Is it only blogs like www.snouts-in-the-trough.com that are not afraid to tell the truth that our media deliberately hide from us?
(click on title to leave a comment or see comments)
By David Craig, on February 7th, 2014 Yesterday I attended a networking event held by an exclusive group of rather wealthy people. One of the people there was probably worth over £100m. (Please note I was the only poor person there). Anyway, I chatted to a few people and explained that I was starting to give a talk THE GREAT SAVINGS AND PENSIONS SCANDAL where I expose the misleading statements and lies used by the financial services industry to get us to give them our money (remember – I’ll be doing this at the Economic Research Council www.ercouncil.org in central London on the evening of 24 February. Please come along).
As the people I talked to were rather wealthy and as several were in financial services, I expected them to disagree with my opinions. Far from it. As one of them, who had been in banking for almost forty years, said: “the whole pensions industry is a complete and utter scam“. Another lambasted the £500bn unit trust industry for charging its customers massive amounts while giving little to nothing in return. While a third commented that many of Britain’s top bankers should have been prosecuted and imprisoned. And a fourth admitted: “look we all know the whole thing is rotten, but nobody is going to rock the boat as they’re all making so much money“.
You may know that a group of private investors, who lost a fortune when Fred Goodwin’s RBS raised billions to buy Dutch bank ABN Amro, are suing RBS and in particular the RBS CEO Fred Goodwin and RBS Chairman Sir Tom McKillop. The rather disgruntled investors claim they were misled by Goodwin’s and McKillop’s statements about the financial health of RBS.
Here are some examples of statements made by Goodwin and McKillop just months before RBS became Britain’s largest ever bankruptcy (click to see more clearly)
To me such statements suggest that Goodwin and McKillop were either totally incompetent or else recidivist liars. So what punishment did they get? Fred lost his knighthood but kept his £300,000+ a year pension. McKillop kept both his knighthood and pension. And, of course, as we taxpayers own most of RBS, it’s actually us who pay these two gentlemen’s generous pensions.
I wonder who will be paying the legal costs for Goodwin and McKillop when the case comes to court. Oh, we taxpayers own most of RBS. So I guess we’ll be the ones who will also pay millions to protect these two (IMHO) lying, thieving scumbags from any consequences from their (IMHO) lying and thieving.
By David Craig, on February 5th, 2014 The Britain I came back to in 2005 seems to me to be a much harsher, more negative, more selfish country than the Britain I left in 1980 when I went to live and work abroad for about 25 years.
Just one small example. As this survey indicates, the level of “financial literacy” in the country is shockingly low (click on picture to see more clearly)
Only about 9% of voters understand that as long as the country has a deficit, then our national debt will increase.
This shockingly low level of “financial literacy” has allowed people in financial services to extract extraordinary amounts of money from ordinary savers, while giving little to nothing in return. That’s why I wrote my book “PILLAGED How they’re looting £413m a day from your savings and pensions…and what to do about it“. The book only sold a laughable 1,000 or so copies. Yet millions and millions of people are delighted to waste their money voting on supposed “talent” shows. But spend just a few quid on a book that will help them protect their money? No way!
To try and help educate people, I’ve now put together a talk about how the financial services industry rips us off – “THE GREAT SAVINGS AND PENSIONS SCANDAL…and how to protect your money“. I’ve been contacting chambers of commerce and business schools offering to do the talk for them – nobody is interested. I did find one opportunity and will be doing the talk in London on the evening of 24 February at a meeting of an organisation called the Economic Research Council (ERC)
Anyway, I did something a little naughty – to try to get some more people to attend, I mentioned the talk in a few comments on personal finance articles in the Telegraph and the Times. I was shocked and disappointed at the flood of abuse I got from other readers.
Here are a few of the more printable comments:
“Please disclose your qualifications? I’m not an IFA but do remember a similar talk from a firm selling crooked investments and how you should cut out the independent investment guy and go direct. They went broke by the way”
“I suspect you would not pretend people are being conned, unless you have a con in mind yourself!”
“Why not come along? Do you actually know what you are talking about laddie? Or are you just another socialist trying to blame your failure in life on others who have made more money than you?”
“Thank you for the invitation david dear.
But on the 24th I am washing my hair and spoiling my old Pussy with a very special rabbit supper.
But do tell”
“If you think that the ERC is anything other than a bunch of incompetent socialist fools then you are as bad as them.”
And one reader, a retired financial adviser, threatened that he would be coming with some other financial advisers to disrupt and sabotage my talk.
I don’t understand this. If people aren’t interested in attending my talk, then fine. But I can’t grasp the mentality of people who unleash so much bile when all I’m trying to do is help educate a public that desperately needs educating.
By the way, no blog tomorrow as I’ll be up in London trying (vainly?) to generate some speaking opportunities for “THE GREAT SAVINGS AND PENSIONS SCANDAL”
(click on title to comment or to see comments)
By David Craig, on February 4th, 2014 There’s a website called www.ukipwatch.com The website says: This website automatically syndicates news pages of extremism in the United Kingdom Independence Party”.
So, the aim of UKIPWatch seems to be to ensure that any negative stories about UKIP get maximum exposure in the press. I’m not sure who is behind UKIPWatch, but I’ve been told it’s a Labour MEP candidate and I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s receiving a little funding help from the taxes we pay to the EU.
On its website, UKIPWatch claims: “We accept that the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), as a whole, is not an extremist party. However, we are in no doubt that UKIP has a significant minority of anti-semites, anti-Muslim bigots and xenophobic activists. Often, senior leaders of UKIP will claim that such extremism does not exist or is party to a conspiracy from the mainstream media.We believe respected news outlets can make the case better than anyone. Therefore, whenever there is an instance of extremism from UKIP published from good news outlets, this website will automatically syndicate their work.”
However, UKIPWatch perhaps reveals its true nature on its Facebook page, where it states: “The United Kingdom Independence Party are a far right party of conspiracy nuts, racists and outright fascists. When they are not denying man made global warming they are coming out with all kinds of looney, offensive nonsense”. Wow! Slightly biased or what?
But there’s another UKIPWatch. The Daily Telegraph has recently started doing articles about UKIP under the banner “UKIPWatch”. The Telegraph claims this is: “An impartial blog by political scientists Robert Ford and Matthew Goodwin”.
Let’s look a little more carefully at the word “impartial”. Who is this “political scientist” Matthew Goodwin? It might be the same Matthew Goodwin who regularly writes about right-wing political extremism for the Guardian. It might be the same Matthew Goodwin who wrote the 2011 book “NEW BRITISH FASCISM The rise of the British National Party”. It might be the same Matthew Goodwin who wrote in one of his Guardian articles: “Our research shows that EDL supporters are more likely than others in society to view violence as a justifiable course of action”.
Hold on a minute, it wasn’t the EDL who hacked British soldier Lee Rigby to death on a London street. It wasn’t the EDL who set off bombs in the London underground and on a London bus. Yet Matthew Goodwin ludicrously claims: “Our research shows that EDL supporters are more likely than others in society to view violence as a justifiable course of action”.
As for the Telegraph’s UKIPWatch dynamic duo, Robert Ford and Matthew Goodwin, I rather suspect these are the same gentlemen who have a book coming out next month titled “Revolt on the Right: Explaining Support for the Radical Right in Britain (Extremism and Democracy)”.
I humbly suggest that readers all write to the editor of the Telegraph and demand that the editor removes the word “impartial” from its UKIPWatch articles as clearly they are not “impartial”, are not intended to be “impartial” and never will be “impartial”.
By the way, I only sold 3 (yes just 3!) copies of GREED UNLIMITED last month. Surely the many hundreds of people who read this blog could show a little support and buy a copy of the book – even if they never intend to read it.
(click on title to leave a comment or see comments)
By David Craig, on February 3rd, 2014 I’ve blogged before about how the policies being pursued in Britain and the US are making the rich richer and the rest of us much poorer (click on pictures to see more clearly)
In fact I’ve written a whole book about it – GREED UNLIMITED – but nobody seems to be interested as I only sold about 200 copies, which is pathetic.
Well here’s more evidence that the rich – politicians, bureaucrats and bankers – are having an absolute hoot while the rest of us swallow all the guff about austerity and the need to support the banks and so on and so forth. It’s a Gallup poll from the US looking at which income groups support Ben Bernanke’s policies (giving hundreds of billions of ordinary people’s taxes to his banker friends).
The result is so clear, that I guess I don’t need to say anything about it.
Meanwhile we get ever more evidence that our friends in banking are truly taking the p*ss. In the USA, the bank JP Morgan Chase has had to pay around $20bn in fines for unethical and probably illegal behaviour. So, what did the bank do? It fired 7,500 ordinary employees, imposed a pay freeze on all remaining employees below executive level and gave the bank’s CEO, Jamie Dimon a pay rise of around 74% from about $12m to around $20m. No wonder Mr Dimon always seems to be smiling.
Here the EU has tried to impose rules limiting bankers’ bonuses to no more than 100% of their salaries (and 200% in special cases). So, most banks have hugely increased executives’ salaries and have started to pay their top people hundreds of thousands of pounds a year in “allowances” to get round the new rules https://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/business/Finance/article1370353.ece
Meanwhile the taxpayer-owned RBS, which is haemorrhaging money in losses and fines, continues to pay bonuses “to attract the best people”. Yet RBS have to pay £1.9bn for fines and damages relating to mis-selling mortgage bonds in the US as well as other penalties relating to market manipulation, have £650m of losses for mis-selling payment protection insurance (PPI), £500m of losses for compensating small businesses who were wrongly sold interest rate hedging products, £4.5bn of further losses on bad loans and investments and unspecified further losses from selling off bad assets. Best people?????
The rich must really be laughing at our stupidity.
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