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By  David Craig, on November 2nd, 2012 By far the most repulsive man in Britain must be Ed Balls. At no time has he ever accepted that he and the useless, financially-incontinent liar Brown were responsible for bankrupting Britain by wasting over £1.5trn of our money. Every PM’s Question Time, Balls sits smirking and grinning with self-satisfaction as he and his equally ghastly wife become rich at the expense of taxpayers whose financial futures he has ruined.
But who is the second most repulsive man? It could be Michael Parkinson. He’s got plenty of money and yet he uses his position as a once trusted TV personality to whore himself out to some crappy insurance company flogging highly dubious financial products to suckers.
Then there’s the vomit-inducing duo – Cameron and Miliband. Every PM’s Question Time, these two liars and hypocrites cry crocodile tears as they read the names of troops killed that week in Afghanistan, claiming that “their courage and sacrifice will never be forgotten”. Yet both must be aware that the Afghan conflict is a lost cause trying to protect a corrupt, drug-dealing, aid-thieving puppet government who will all scarper to Dubai with their stolen billions the day after foreign troops leave.
Or there are the heads of the FSA, Ofgem, Ofwat, IPSA, the Bank of England and all our other useless supposed regulators – all filling their pockets with our money while not lifting a finger to regulate those they are meant to regulate.
Or the execrable Tony Blair – preening and puffing himself up as he tries to make a political comeback, perhaps as the elected president of the corrupt, undemocratic, wasteful EU. Or Blair’s former puppet-masters Mandelson and Campbell? Or worthless lump of lard (IMHO) John Prescott, already wealthy beyond most people’s wildest dreams, but still hoping to grab one more lucrative sinecure as an elected police and crime commissioner before he has a heart attack after decades of gorging himself to excess at our expense?
Or the many sycophantic, greasy-pole-climbing, overpaid, overpensioned bosses at the BBC, all squirming and fighting like ferrets in a sack as they try to protect their own lousy careers from the Jimmy Savile affair. Or the former “stars” who claim they never met Jimmy Savile, until film emerges of them on TV grinning delightedly alongside Britain’s most famous paedophile? Or many of our former military officers, who, in spite of getting massive pensions paid for by us, would whore themselves out to arms companies as long as there was enough cash available.
In fact, there’s hardly any institution in Britain today that has not been sullied by the greed, incompetence and stupidity of those fortunate or ambitious enough to have reached positions of power where they can endlessly enrich themselves at our expense. Repulsive, greedy, self-serving, corrupt and incompetent – is there anyone in a position of power in Britain today who would not deserve this description?
By David Craig, on November 1st, 2012 A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the repulsive (IMHO) Angela Knight, formerly of the British Bankers Association and now defending our rip-off energy companies. One of my (disappointingly few) readers contacted me with his opinion which I rather liked for its colourful language:
“I agree wholeheartedly with your comments about the odious Ms Knight, Chief Apologist for the rapacious Energy Industry. A woman who could turn milk sour just by looking at it. Of course, to many people, Knight’s connection with both the Banking Industry and the Energy Industry is esoteric, and you are to be commended for shedding a little disinfectant sunlight on this area.”
“What I wonder did the Energy Industry think they were getting for their buck when appointing Ms Knight? Fairly obvious really, someone who is well versed in the dark arts of full frontal mendacity, someone who will stoop lower than a snakes belly to justify whatever egregious acts of skullduggery her paymasters may perform, and someone devoid of every fibre of moral rectitude.”
“Someone, incidentally, who was exposed and criticised by a Wikipedia administrator for using a British Bankers Association employee to sanitise and whitewash her biographical page. I suspect that the Energy Industry will come to rue crossing Ms Knight’s palm with silver. More to the point, and more worrying ….. why did the Energy Industry feel they needed someone of Ms Knight’s dubious ilk to fight their corner?”
While on the subject of admirable women, it’s perhaps worth mentioning our very loverly Baroness Ashton – someone who (IMHO) embodies all that is wrong with the corrupt, wasteful, undemocratic EU. Ashton was appointed by recidivist liar, financially-incontinent, incompetent Gordon Brown.
As head of the EU’s increasingly expensive but unnecessary diplomatic service, the EEAS, Ashton gets paid about £260,000 a year – way ahead of her peer Hilary Clinton on about £124,000 a year. In addition, Ashton has £38,000 for accommodation and probably more than £100,000 a year in expenses, drivers and other creature comforts. By paying EU tax, rather than UK tax, Ashton manages to save herself a no doubt welcome £40,000 a year. If she holds her job for five years, she will probably get a taxfree golden handshake of £464,000 plus a £64,000 a year pension in addition to all the other pensions she has picked up during her many years of supposed “public service”.
Not only is Ashton overpaid, but she is also generally regarded as totally incompetent. A fellow Labour baroness described Ashton’s abilities, “she is more suited to run a parish council than a major European institution”.
I suppose tomorrow I’d better do the two most repulsive men in Britain, otherwise I’ll be accused of misogyny.
By David Craig, on October 31st, 2012 The good news – I’m off on holiday soon to Thailand. The bad news – my dear wife is coming with me, so no fun and games for me – just looking at temples and elephants etc. Anyway, I checked out what other travelllers were reporting and came across what I think is a brilliant video on Youtube.com.
The video shows three tourists being caught by the “jet ski scam”. You may know it – you’re on a beach holiday and rent a jet ski for half an hour or so. When you get back, the guy renting it to you checks it for damage, miraculously finds a dent or scratches in the paintwork and then demands £50, £100 or even £200 or more from you in compensation. You claim that you didn’t do any damage, but find yourself surrounded by the other jet ski renters and the situation starts to turn ugly. So you pay up just to avoid any more trouble.
Here’s a video from Thailand where someone filmed three tourists getting scammed. I found it shocking and interesting how the jet ski renters ramp up their hostility and threats and even call a policeman (who is in on the scam) to put pressure on the tourists to pay up.
Hope you enjoy it and hope you think twice before renting a jet ski next time you or anyone you know head for the sun on holiday. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsPuoaktoAw
By David Craig, on October 30th, 2012 You hardly want to open a newspaper nowadays as the useless Tories stumble from one shambles to another. Child benefit is just the latest easily foreseeable disaster. You wonder if there’s anybody in the Coalition with even the slightest modicum of intelligence. Certainly Liar Cameron and Napkin-folder Osborne have shown themselves to be devoid of any understanding of anything.
So, it’s no wonder Labour are leading in the polls. In fact, the only thing holding Labour back from completely overwhelming the Tories is the repulsive, bullying, reality-denying creature Edward Balls. Balls’s latest trip into the absurd has been to deny that there was any public-spending deficit under the last Labour catastrophe. Hold on Edward, our debt shot up from £312bn in 2000 to £500bn in 2007 and £760bn in 2010 – and you claim there was no structural deficit!
I suspect that if Alistair Darling were Shadow Chancellor, then there would be no doubt that Labour would massacre the Coalition in 2015. But Miliband is the public-sector union bosses’ whore and must do what they tell him. That’s why Miliband made election-losing Balls Shadow Chancellor rather than election-winning Darling. Unfortunately for us, the Tories have been so incompetent that it looks like the appalling Balls will be strutting into Downing Street in just 30 months – God help us all!
By David Craig, on October 29th, 2012 Early next year, we can expect marches and demonstrations and strikes by furious public-sector unions demanding an end to the Government’s public-sector pay freeze. Angry union members will howl with rage about how they can no longer afford to live because of supposed austerity. But before the self-serving, cloud-cuckoo-land-inhabiting public-sector union barons launch their next grab for our money, here are a few facts:
1. The Government’s supposed pay freeze did not apply to public-sector workers earning less than £21,000 year.
2. Most middle managers and administrators earning more than £21,000 a year have managed to avoid the pay freeze by being moved up within their pay grade. When challenged about this scam for bypassing the pay freeze, public-sector bosses claim they are contractually bound to pay these increases.
3. At the top of the public sector, most bosses, hospital executives, council chiefs and others on £100,000 to £250,000 a year saw that the era of Brown’s profligacy would soon come to an end and in 2008/9 and 2009/10 gave themselves pay rises of between 10% and 20%. At the Cabinet Office, which is a key department in driving through supposed “austerity”, the average pay rise was about 12%. Then, laughably, when the Coalition came to power and demanded pay restraint, Cabinet Office bosses accepted pay cuts of 3% to 5%.
4. Another trick used by bosses (particularly council chiefs and NHS chief executives) has been the “Goodbye-Hello” – they take several hundred thousand pounds of our money for supposed early retirement and then a few weeks later take up a new public-sector job with a six-figure salary.
5. As for our politicians, here the hypocrisy is even more farcical. Our MPs complain that they have had their pay frozen for two years. But the amount our MPs claimed in taxfree expenses rocketed from around £130m in the year up to the election to about £150m last year – a 15% increase – about another £30,000 taxfree per MP. And next year the supposedly Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority is going to recommend MPs’ salaries rise from £65,738 a year to somewhere between £85,000 and £92,000 a year.
6. In the Lords, they used a different tactic to profess austerity while actually increasing how much they stole from us. The Lords “limited” the daily rate they could claim to £300 per day. But, at the same time, they changed their expenses system to a SOSO (Sign On Sod Off) one where there was no need to show any receipts to get their money. So everybody could now get the maximum, just by turning up for a couple of minutes a day to sign on.
Our bureaucrats and politicians are stuffing their pockets with ever more of our money and making fools of us all by pretending to be suffering from the same austerity as the rest of us.
By David Craig, on October 28th, 2012 (A slightly safer topic today compared to yesterday) If you have a moment, please look at the chart below. This shows what happened during a previous period of austerity – the ten years after the First World War. At the same time as the number of ships fell by 68% and the number of sailors by 32%, the number of bureaucrats in the Admiralty shot up by 78%. This led Cecil Northcote Parkinson to conclude that bureaucracies increase by 5%-7% a year “regardless of the work (if any) to be done”.
We may laugh at this now. But precisely the same thing is happening in our bureaucracies under the Government’s supposed “austerity”. At the same time as the number of low-paid, frontline workers is being cut, our bureaucracies keep on growing. At £197m a year, the Treasury costs us £27m more than just before the financial crash. In 2007, the Cabinet Office cost us about £323m a year, now it’s an incredible £494m. The FSA – up from £260m in 2007 to £526m now and staff numbers up from 2,665 to 3,953 (even after it was told it was being abolished, staff numbers went up from 3,431 to 3,953). Ofgem up from £38.8m to £78.7m. Ofwat up from £11.5m to £17.4m. I could go on, but you probably get the picture by now.
When told to cut costs, bureaucrats believe they are indispensible and so always slash lower-paid frontline staff while increasing their bureaucratic empires. The tragedy is that, after the cuts are made, our public services will be decimated, but the armies of pointless, overspending, highly-paid, highly-pensioned bureaucrats will still be siphoning off our money in ever greater quantities. What a disaster for Britain!
By David Craig, on October 27th, 2012 I believe Islam is a religion of peace and tolerance. Of course, some neanderthals might disagree that Islam promotes peace. They might point to the the fact that in Iraq and Syria, Muslims are enthusiastically slaughtering each other. In Indonesia and Nigeria Muslims are forever fighting with Christians. In Egypt, murdering Coptic Christians seems to be a bit of a national sport. In Thailand and Myanmar, there is repeated violence between Muslims and Buddhists. In India/Pakistan, when Muslims aren’t bashing each other, they often have huge punch-ups with the HIndus. In the Middle East, most right-minded Muslims want to obliterate Israel and finish the job our German friends started by wiping out the Jews. And across the world, hundreds of millions of Muslims loathe the free West and would dearly like to see the Great Satan America destroyed.
But apart from these unfortunate situations, Islam is clearly a religion of peace.
It’s also a religion that is admirably tolerant. Of course, there are a few small issues – the way Islam treats women and homosexuals. Then there’s that quaint Islamic tradition of raping any female virgins who are sentenced to death for political dissent, as it’s forbidden to execute virgins. And we shouldn’t forget the possible problem of a little lack of brotherly love felt between Shias and Sunnis. Plus there’s the stoning of blasphemers, adulterers and any woman who is judged to have behaved immodestly. But apart from all this, I think it’s fair to say that Islam is progressive and tolerant.
So, there you have it. Final proof that Islam is a religion of peace and tolerance. Now who could argue with that? (I hope I don’t get killed for writing this)
By David Craig, on October 26th, 2012 The Tory press has been having several orgasms about the latest GDP figures. But before you break out the champagne and then head for the shops to buy more crap from China, there are a few things to remember.
1. Most Brits (and many journalists?) don’t seem to understand the difference between “deficit” and “debt”. Our “deficit” may be stabilising, but our debt is completely out of control – £320bn in 2000: £700bn in 2010: £1trn today: £1.6trn by 2015/6
2. Our interest payments on our debt are heading to over £60bn a year – about what we pay for Defence and Education
3. This is an optimistic view based on the ludicrously unrealistic growth figures projected by the £2m a year waste of space called the Office of Budget Responsibility. If the economy only grows by a more likely 1% a year, then we’re well and truly up s–t creek
4. The Government is planning a massive increase in our taxes to pay for the fact that it is not making any serious attempt to cut public spending. Hidden away in the middle of Osborne’s last budget report are the Government’s projected increases in tax (see figure below). So it’s time to save what you can, because your useless government needs an awful lot more of your money.
By David Craig, on October 25th, 2012 Just before my latest book GREED UNLIMITED was published, the serialisation rights were sold to the Daily Mail features. The plan was that the Daily Mail would do a big article based on my book. But then there was a problem. As far as I understand the situation, it was as follows:
GREED UNLIMITED came out at the same time as the Tory party conference. It seems that the Daily Mail decided to take the editorial line that David Cameron was a hero, that his conference speech was pure genius and that he was going fight back from the dreadful bungling of the last few months, win the next election and save the country from the ghastly Miliband and Balls. Given this decision to back Cameron, an article based on GREED UNLIMITED which criticised Cameron wasn’t too welcome. Result – the article based on GREED UNLIMITED got spiked and will now never appear. But by that time it was too late to go to another newspaper with the story.
Unfortunately for me (and my finances), this means nobody knows about the book and I’m unlikely to sell any copies. To me it seems a waste as I did a lot of work to find material for the book, GREED UNLIMITED is not a bad book and it would be better if the copies were read, rather than chucked into the rubbish skip.
So, if there’s anything you can do to help – buy some copies for yourselves and friends, tell people about the book, email contacts with the link to the book on Amazon suggesting they consider buying it and so on, that would be much appreciated.
Here’s the link to GREED UNLIMITED on Amazon https://www.amazon.co.uk/Greed-Unlimited-Cameron-Protect-Squeezing/dp/1872188095/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1351141988&sr=1-1
By David Craig, on October 24th, 2012 Once again a committee of self-important, grandstanding, intellectually-challenged MPs calls in the TV cameras so it can be filmed supposedly giving someone a grilling. In this case it was the BBC’s Director General, George Entwistle, and one of his grey sidekicks whose name I can’t be bothered to remember. Yet again it was lights, camera but no action. A bumbling Entwistle ran rings around our useless MPs. Either he couldn’t remember anything or else he claimed he couldn’t say anything until the supposedly independent BBC enquiries had reported their findings. But, of course, these supposedly independent enquiries would be reporting to BBC bosses, not to us taxpayers who pay for BBC bosses’ lavish lifestyles.
Let’s just remember how much BBC bosses pay themselves. The £816,000+ a year Mark Thompson and the £513,000+ a year Mark Byford may have thankfully gone. But there are plenty of highly-paid, highly-pensioned paedophile-protecting BBC bosses still in place. About 310 managers at the BBC earn over £100,000 a year with 135 of these pocketing more than the Prime Minister. And these are not big stars. They are mostly pointless, self-serving, greedy, sycophantic bureaucrats who contribute little to nothing to the service the BBC should be providing.
It’s time to cut the BBC down to size. Its budget should be reduced by 5% a year for the next five years (as should the licence fee). And the BBC should cut its output by a quarter and focus on providing public-service broadcasting leaving churning out trash to the many and increasing number of commercial channels. It’s time for Auntie to go on a serious crash diet.
Moreover, perhaps all managerial salaries at the BBC should be cut by a quarter and the money saved put into a fund to pay damages to all the people abused by Savile and the other BBC-based paedophiles? After all, why should licence-payers get fleeced yet again to pay for the largest paedophile ring cover-up in British history? What do you think, Mr Entwistle?
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