Curly's Corner Shop, the blog!

11 year old multiple killer

Somebody wants the Guinness Book of Records to honour the achievements of 11 year old Michelito Lagravere having killed six bulls in a corrida.

I’m sorry, but the only bull fight worth honouring (in my opinion) is the rare one in which the bull wins, and I wouldn’t like to see that event involving an eleven year old child!

The corrida is one of the world’s worst examples of killing for fun.

Don’t they sell the X Box 360 in his home town then?

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Obeya family

A life full of stories

Way back at the end of March I posted this piece about an exhibition at Gateshead’s Baltic Centre featuring photography and a short piece by film maker Tina Gharavi about the history of Yemeni and Arabic families in South Shields and the tales they had to tell.

Tina’s film and Youssef Nabil’s photographs have been a hit and the exhibition is now showing in the Yemen in a major artistic outing entitled Last of the Dictionary Men at the National Museum in Sana’a.

A piece in the Yemen Times features Abdu Ahmad Obeya from Ibb who sailed to South Shields in 1956 and made his life here, it is a story of our multi-cultural success indeed the exhibition includes many stories from 13 other Yemeni sailors who settled in South Shields.

“My life is like the 1,001 Nights,It’s full of stories,” said Obeya

Since 1890, Yemenis have traveled to the port town of South Shields in the north-east of England to work on the merchant ships there. These hard workers were popular with ship masters –notably because they had the good reputation of being reliable and sober- and their work took them all over the world on merchant navy ships.

Tina Gharavi, affectionately called “Princess Tina” by Obeya, worked with the remaining first-generation Yemenis of South Shields over the course of three years to produce both the exhibition and documentary of the same name. It all started when she moved to the small Tyneside coastal town a few years ago and heard that her childhood hero, boxing legend Muhammad Ali, was married in its mosque. As she set out to produce a documentary to commemorate the event, she met some of the elderly Yemenis living in town and learnt of their stories.

“It started a huge sense of responsibility, huge guilt,” she says. “I couldn’t turn my back on it. Here was a story of contribution to British colonial history, a story of integration of Muslims in Britain that was really successful.”

“Historically, integration has happened,” she adds, “Recent hysteria about Islam is unjustified.”

Tina’s filmed interviews with the last remaining Yemeni sailors in South Shields reveal an incredibly interesting story, one of contribution to their new community, of full integration and of sacrifice, particularly during the second world war, a staggering number lost their lives in the service of Britain and her allies.

I hope Tina is successful in her efforts to get a plaque erected at the Al-Azhar mosque to commemorate Mohammad Ali’s visit there in 1977, she hopes to have it in place by July, it would also be nice if her exhibition could be shown once more in the region, even better if it was in South Shields, as it is illustrative of many of the positive aspects of multi-cultural integration and the benefits that can be shared by the whole community. A wider audience for Last of the Dictionary Men would increase understanding and local unity as we all look forward to a slightly more positive international future with Barack Obama’s new attitude towards Islam in the White House.

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Economy overdependent on government spending.

Gordon Brown’ s Labour government is crowding out the private sector and in parts of the UK dependence on government spending  has now surged to more than 60% in some areas of England and over 70% elsewhere. As I tried to explain in this post the size of the government is far too large, we need smaller government and a much smaller public sector if we are to have any real chance of delivering the sort of output which will help us climb out of recession.

James Forsythe at Coffee House says:

State spending at this level crowds out the private sector and places a tax burden on the wealth-creating sector that makes it uncompetitive in a global economy. If Britain is to get itself back on its feet after this recession, it will have to do so with a far smaller public sector.

Here in the North-East as jobs are lost at Nissan, Findus, Northern Rock, it seems that the empire is growing in Newcastle, Washington, and Durham, has anyone seen the size of HMRC in Newcastle? It’s bigger than H-Block!

When Secretary Prime Minister Brown and his Labour government have completed the Sovietisation of the UK’s economy, when we are all employed by the government in one form or another (including some of the biggest charities) just who, exactly, will be producung the wealth that produces the taxes which pays for the gigantic public sector?

It’s not as if I’m alone in thinking this way, I’ve just been reading an interview with Lord Healey, the 92 year old former Labour Chancellor in which he has one or two critical and straight words to say to the man currently wrecking the UK.

We’ve got far too many people working in the public sector. I had a lot of trouble over that. You had the union barons then. Now, the mass of the unions reflects the opinion in the mass of the country. So it would be much easier to cut the public sector these days: but Gordon would have to watch carefully the areas he made them in. I agree with what Digby Jones [the former business minister] said. There’s probably twice as many people working in the public sector as is necessary. And the number has grown for institutional reasons, because institutions like to be as big as possible.

He also has a go at Labour’s current spouting on taxing the rich, thus driving the wealth creators out of the country:

When Lord Healey was chancellor the top rate of tax was 83 per cent, and the rate on unearned income was 98 per cent. Before becoming chancellor he had promised the Labour Party that taxes would rise and that there would be “howls of anguish from those rich enough to suffer”. Did he support Gordon Brown’s decision to raise taxes on the higher paid now?

“I have great respect for Gordon’s judgment, and I think he’ll do it OK.” But was this largely a gesture aimed at cheering up Labour’s core vote in difficult times? Lord Healey is disarmingly honest. “I think probably so. Because what I learned as chancellor was that the rich can nearly always find ways of avoiding tax that are legal, and in any case the amount raised is very small. And it does encourage people to leave the country.”

So did he regret the regime of penal taxation over which he presided? “I think so, yes. The main effect was to get people to invest abroad rather than in the UK, which was bad.”

So that’s it then, with Brown we are all screwed, the rich will leave taking their investment abroad, jobs will be created in other countries, the North-East and other regions will be left with the simple choice, work for the state or don’t work at all. Somehow we’ll keep borrowing the cash we need to keep us all afloat and pay out the wages and benefits! I suppose there will be some ready to scream that Healey is a geriatric pensioner who screwed up the economy and went cap in hand to the IMF to bail out the UK, and they would be right about that. But at least it looks as though he learned something from the experience, he also learned that there was little they could do to prevent a Thatcher victory at the election.

Thatcher had as one of her prime aims the rolling back of the state, unfortunately it was never a total success, the machine kept growing: never in our long history has it been more imperative to halt and reverse this grotesque growth. Without a real swingeing cut in the size of government we will all be well and truly stuffed, the private sector will be choked to death and Britain will drown in the Brown created debts.

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Work and Pensions Commisar James Castro Purnell

I suppose if it was good enough for Brezhnev it’ll be good enough for Purnell

What sort of bloody country are we trying to create for ourselves here, as Timmy points out moves such as these are nothing short of evil and insane!

New powers will be unveiled for the Child Maintenance and Enforcement Agency, allowing it to take passports and driving licences directly from parents who refuse to pay money to their children, without having to go through the courts first.

What? Restriction of movement without even a discussion about it? Without even a chance to defend yourself in court against one of the state’s worst administrators?

It’s bad enough threatening to take away the car licence, which could effectively mean some parents may then not be in a position to earn a wage to pay the maintenance – how bloody insane. Then they want to take away the passport too, so we end up like Brezhnev’s Babes imprisoned on an island with no hope of release. Are we trying to establish the Soviet Socialist Republic of Purnellian Paradise here?

As Timmy points out:

One of the bits and pieces that goes to make up a free society is that you are able to up and **** off….as long as you are not constrained by a court order. An order issued after a hearing in such a court, of course. In fact, I’m pretty sure that there’s something in one or other of those international human rights treaties that we’re so fond of signing, that no one not under such a court order should be prevented from leaving the country.

Certainly, we used to argue that one of the great evils of the Soviet (and their satellites) system was that they wouldn’t allow people to leave freely. That who could and who could not was based upon the unappealable permission or not of a bureaucrat.

Having actually won the Cold War why are we imposing the worst parts of that evil system upon ourselves?

Here I was thinking that our western liberal democracy worked on a system of checks and balances and that we had the Rule of Law and the courts to protect and defend us from the executive, I’m obviously wrong and Purnell obviously thinks that we’d prefer the Brezhnev approach.

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Dedicated to all those chimps and councillors in South Tyneside who just love a cup of tea!

[YouTube=http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=i1zp4OceBhE&fmt]

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Row over BBC impartiality and DEC advertising.

We’ve had two recent demonstrations in South Shields aimed at highlighting some of the issues raised and the suffering caused by the conflict between Israel and the Hamas terrorists in Gaza. Today the row has escalated into a battle of wills between the Labour government and the BBC over the broadcaster’s refusal to air an “advertisement” on behalf of the Disaster Emergency Committee.

I have to say that the BBC’s argument about impartiality has quite a hollow ring to it, yet (for now) I’m happy that they appear to be unflinching in the presence of government pressure. Neither ITV nor Sky are coming in for such measures as Ben Bradshaw knows exactly where he’d be told to go.

Cranmer has a lengthy post on this today in which he alludes to the BBC’s recent pro-Palestinian stance yet urges it’s directors to continue to resist Bradshaw, however, as far as South Shields readers are concerned I’d recommend Man in a Shed for this post in which he reminds us that many charities fail to have an impact on the ground, but we ought  to give something:

But what of the victims of Hamas‘ human shield policy in Gaza ?

My advice is to chose your charity carefully. I sent money during the fighting to one that works with the diminishing band of Christians in Gaza ( estimated to be about 3000 ) who are persecuted at the best of times.

There will be other good charities, just do your home work and avoid those like the UN who are compromised – and do give something. Because the one significant truth of all of this is that a lot of people are suffering.

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Taxpayer to shell out compensation to  victims of “the troubles”

I’m rather in agreement with my Greek friend on this troubled matter.

Despite the fact that thousands of innocent victims have been able to claim compensation through other schemes, I find it all rather ludicrous and troublesome that I should have to pay some sort of compensation to the families of the murderous torturing knuckle dragging thugs who thought they could rule the place when they were representing the IRA, the Provos, the UDF, the UVF, or whatever other paramilitary group they may have favoured. They were responsible for dragging out a conflict and causing hurt and misery to thousands.

The fact that compensation may be deemed suitable is a symbolic gesture which suggests that we on mainland Great Britain were primarily responsible, along with Eire, it would suggest that the paramilitaries were just as much innocent victims as their… err…. innocent victims. It’s a rewrite of history by the looks of it.

If they’ve got £600m to throw about then why don’t they sink it into regenerating the province’s economy?

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The Indy, Monkey, Unbirthday, Mad Hatter’s Tea Party

I dedicate this weekend’s entertainment to those councillors in South Tyneside who cannot see the wood for the trees, for those who do not know that it’s time to set budgets, it’s time to consider next year’s council tax, it’s time to decide which services to prioritise on. For those Indy councillors who would rather join in the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party this is just for you.

[YouTube=http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=z0q-9aFzIbU&fmt=]

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"Are you two enjoying that?"

Gazette fails to carry the full impact

Just been reading the Shields Gazette’s account of Thursday’s meeting of South Tyneside Council in South Shields Town Hall and I was left feeling as though the drama and impact had simply drained away. Either that or there was simply too much going on for the reporter to keep up with.

One or two members must have allowed themselves one huge sigh of relief when they read PMK’s report!

This online report fails to mention the basis upon which the amendment was defeated (that all budgets are reviewed every year and councillors have a duty to partake in those reviews), nor did it mention that the movers of the motion accepted that it was an unworkable plan and were prepared to support the (just as daft) amendment.

Worse still, unless it is to be reported in a later piece, was the failure to trumpet the furore and debacle that erupted when Cllrs. Khan attacked Cllr. Potts for attempting raise the issue of children missing school to go on a demonstration. In my view and opinion this was a very threatening situation when one councillor moves towards another and invites him to come outside and discuss the matter! It resulted in another trying to join in the fun, it took the presence of the Mayor to remind them that they need to respect each other as well as the office and authority of the Chair. It was another disgraceful scene.

One hopes the Shields Gazette will inform it’s readers that the mover of the motion was happily feeding away at the buffet the very next morning, being blissfully unaware of the anger caused the previous afternoon or the unprincipled hypocrisy that was on show.

It just seems to me that the full story will not be known by thousands of readers.

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Protest at college

Well seeing as I am now a bigoted racist and a sexist to boot (according to Commissioner Gordon in the Monkey’s cage), can I just say that some of the Socialist Workers types are not bad at all, not bearded, no smelly armpits and no Jesus sandals either! Affluence seems to have bestowed itself upon them.

A crowd of around 75 members of the Stop the War Coalition gathered outside of the entrance of South Shields Marine College to voice their opinions about the Israel-Hamas conflict in Gaza as the Foreign Secretary and South Shields MP David Miliband arrived with the Defence Secretary John Hutton, to attend the annual South Shields Labour Party dinner.

The protest was noisy, well policed, and otherwise good humoured, some of the people there had travelled from as far away as London to take part (pity the war had already ended,  but they didn’t want to call the event off.)

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