Curly's Corner Shop, the blog!

When you were a kid, were you any good at Monopoly?

Thing is, there is only one of them in South Shields, does our card have a brown top or something?

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It’s a ruddy good thing for MEPs

Ever wondered why some those politicians who return from Brussels look so fit and healthy? Ever wondered why so many of them have their own businesses or consultancies, or find their way into directorships?

Makes you wonder just how much leverage Gordon Brown had to apply to Lord Mandy of Hartlemonkey to get him away from this stinking rotten pile of cash!

But….shush…it’s a big secret.

Just remember, there are elections coming up this year.

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NO! So they tell us not to try and teach it to our children

This woman is dangerous, almost, but not quite, as dangerous as this woman. This is Children’s minister Beverley Hughes and if you’ve ever wondered why this Labour government is a useless gang of malingering money wasters who have attempted to drown us in the deepest debt seen for decades, then Ms. Hughes is as good an example as you’ll find.

Knowing that the UK has the highest teen pregnancy rates in the EU and that sackless, feckless, and witless parents of some little children will sell their souls stories to the highest bidders, this idiotic woman deigns to say to us “don’t teach your children right from wrong”. She embodies everything which is morally inept about this government. It’s pamphlet Talking to Your Teenager About Sex and Relationships will be distributed in pharmacies from next month as part of an initiative led by Beverley Hughes, the children’s minister.

She wants us to go “light” on morals and allow our kids to form their own judgements, she must know something that the rest of us don’t, has Gordon Brown borrowed another £1trillion to pay for the moral morasse that Hughes’ leaflet is going to create? That whole generation of teenage parents living off state benefits, uneducated, inexperienced in anything other than drink, drugs, and sex, and unable to pass on any moral principles to the next generation because the don’t even understand the words?

Simon Calvert, deputy director of the Christian Institute, attacked the leaflet, saying:

“The idea that the government is telling families not to pass on their values is outrageous.
“Preserving children’s innocence is a worthy goal. We would like to see more of that kind of language rather than this amoral approach where parents are encouraged to present their children with a smorgasbord of sexual activities and leave them to make up their own minds.”

Message to Ms. Hughes – Go away, quickly, and try and take some of your mates with you on the way out!

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Blears attacks political correctness

This is all rather funny, as the Telegraph writers seem determined that Hazel “Chipmunk” Blears is spoking Harridan Harman’s wheels and that the bitches have their claws out. So does that mean the rest of us don’t have to take a blind bit of notice?

No not at all, we just need to remind others in this top down Big Brother styled government that at least one of their number knows that they have all gone too far, but for now her shots are not too carefully aimed. She appears to be attacking the actions of small time council functionaries instead of going for the big guns who run ministries and make the big decisions. There is little point in starting to cvatalogue the PC disasters of the last few years here, I’d end up writing page after page after page, suffice to say that there are many. The ordinary folks of this country are now either totally fed up of being told what they can and cannot do, or totally disillusioned with their politicians who appear to be often remote crocodiles (big mouths and tiny ears) hence the BNP picks up a council seat in Kent of all places – a classic tale of people being neglected by mainstream parties.

If chipmunk Blears had been that concerned over our ability to think what we like or say what we like (within the law) she would have opposed all of those measures which Labour has passed over the preceding eleven years which have eroded our freedoms and liberties, she would have fought tooth and nail to prevent the building of the database state and to stop the council snoopers who pry into every facet of family life – but she didn’t.

Hazel Blears is fearful of one thing, and one thing only, and it isn’t how PC we have become in Britain but is the diminishing size of her less than 8000 majority in Salford!

Pathetic little pixie!

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….hello, anybody at home?

Can you all remember this post from March of last year? It was all about the problems faced by some tenants of South Tyneside Homes who live in Monastery Court and Ellen Wilkinson Court in Jarrow, and the problems they face in getting tickets from a machine which then allows them to get some heat in winter. A full year later and those who make the short trip to Jarrow town hall face exactly the same problem, nothing has been addressed, nothing fixed, still no tickets if you go to work and cannot get back before the town hall people knock off for the weekend.

Now the lifts are malfunctioning, they don’t stop flush with floor level, so South Tyneside Homes put a warning notice inside the lift, ABOUT THREE MONTHS AGO! How would you fancy getting in and out of the lift if you had walking aids or used a wheelchair?

Some residents have made a number of complaints about these issues yet nothinig but nothing has been done, no doubt those Labour ward councillors in Jarrow are fully aware of the situation, are they no longer able to oil the cogs of this machine and get something happening!

“Red” Ellen would be turning in her grave at these award winners!

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We overstretched the economy, now it’s time for the payback

Via Iain Dale

I’m glad that Iain bumped into this and flagged it up, in honesty there are often some very good posts on Liberal Conspiracy, it’s just that their content and sentiment don’t percolate through to the mainstream politicos.

The fact that from time to time politicians make some horrendously bad decisions is without question, and rationality tends to obfuscated and forgotten about when they react to events rather than when planning ahead and being proactive. The Brown government is more difficult to understand in this respect, Labour has been much the architect of it’s own misfortune, Gordon Brown spent eleven years with his hand on the tiller of SS Great Britain, yet somehow he started reacting when the ship had hit the rocks, rather than seeing where the ship was going. Of course what might have been better was to recognise that we were in a massive storm and immediately steer the ship on to the beach, save what could be saved and start planning how to build a new ship!

Aaron is perfectly right of course, the recession is not in fact the disease, it is in fact the cure for all the ails that beset our economies, and the faster that we accept that point, the better it will be for all. Rather than prologuing the ailments, discomforts, and pain, we ought to be trying to get to the bottom as fast as we can swallowing some nasty medicine along the way, so that a healthy recovery can begin sooner.

Bank bail outs, and industrial support, along with “quantitative easing” (printing money) and huge budget deficits built on even more borrowing are not remedies or good medicine at all, in fact they are illusory.

Little more than quack treatment from a quack doctor!

The unpalatable medicine which will cure our economy includes massive reductions in public spending (which will result in an acceleration for unemployment) and massive reductions in personal and corporate taxation (which will provide the economic stimulus.) Real liberals have known this for a long time.

We should stop thinking of the recession as something we can spend our way out of, and just swallow our medicine. Governments, rather than trying to perpetuate a bankrupt economic status quo (see the reduction in V.A.T.), should be using funds to provide basic safety nets for those who fall through the cracks.

We should stop lying to ourselves. We need to be honest. We can’t afford to continue spending money we don’t have. Continuous growth is an illusion. Markets will fluctuate. That’s the way it is.

We spent more than we had. We borrowed beyond our means. And now we have to suck it up.

Sorry. But we need to grow up. And our politicians need to stop bullshitting, and tell us what we don’t want to hear.

The recession is the cure. Now let’s stop making matters worse, and deal with it.

You are perfectly right Aaron.

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Ron Thornton project to be his swansong

I’m pleased to see that South Shields premier watercolour artist and former Stanhope Road teacher Ron Thornton is getting along well in Riding Mill as he completes a book illustrated with his own work about the north east coastline from St. Abbs Head down to Filey. There are many examples of Ron’s quite superb brushwork dotted around South Shields including one or two pubs which I frequent.

I used a web graphic of one of Ron’s watercolours made at Readhead’s Landing during the campaign to keep it open and added to the Map of Public Rights of Way, it was seen as an important piece of evidence that the landing had enjoyed public use for many years. For anyone who is not familiar with Ron’s work, here’s a copy of one of the 73 year old’s pieces.

His new, and as yet untitled book, will be published by the Hexham based Wagtail Press and Ron describes it as his swansong.

South Shields coastline by Ron Thornton

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More erosions of press freedoms, this time it’s corporate blame

Watch this video and worry a bit more.

[YouTube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdOFRaDXd2g&fmt=]

Hat tip – Matt Wardman

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National debt will soon be 147% of national income

• £33,000 for every man, woman and child in the country.
• The worst figure since 1954
• One of the highest in the developed world.
• £67.2billion borrowed between last April and January.
• City experts said bringing the public finances back into order would mean cutting public spending by at least £60billion - around ten per cent - in 2014, and by £100billion by 2020, as well as big tax rises.
• We are beginning to go off the Richter scale in terms of the British experience.

That’s the price of over eleven years of Brown’s stewardship of the economy, doesn’t make happy reading does it?

I’m in agreement with Ken Clarke, public spending will need to be reduced drastically to bring the budget back into balance, but one of the hardest lessons to learn about recessions is that we need to get to the bottom point as quickly as possible, there is little point in dragging out the pain and having prolongued periods of economic inactivity and massive unemployment lasting many years. A smaller state sector and massively reduced taxes are what are required to provide the stimulus that Brown and his pals are so painfully unable to produce.  Brown and Mandelson keep banging on about how much worse things might be if they had “done nothing” whilst the rest of us complain “haven’t they done enough already?”

They know that every time they announce further measures to “help”, or another “bail out”, they are actually heaping more misery onto the next Conservative government – miserable cynical charlatans that they are!

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Gordon Brown raised false hopes – Tories

Unfortunately a number of people in South Shields may have been taken in by the PM’s promise to help out if they were in difficulties with their mortgage. The announcement was trumpeted in advance of the Queen’s Speech and was meant to bring a little cheer to those recently tossed into the jobless queue as a result of Labour’s mismanagement of the economy. However, like many other announcements made on the hoof by Brown, Darling, and Lord Mandy of Fondlepool it has rapidly turned to dust. The mechanics and the details just haven’t worked out, something else uncannily affected by the “curse of Jonah”.

Grant Schapps, Shadow Housing Minister said:

“It looks to me like an attempt to grab the headlines by the prime minister rather than actually deal with the problems.”

He said it was “completely wrong for the government to announce a scheme where the details haven’t been worked out and where months later people’s expectations will have been dashed because actually they are still losing their homes rather than the scheme being in place.”

Best advice to those in trouble and facing difficulties in meeting the mortgage payments is to go talk to your building society or mortgage provider – quickly, before your home gets added to the growing number of repossessions, they will probably be of much more immediate assistance than the bunch of economic illiterates running the bunker in 10 Downing Street.

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