Curly's Corner Shop, the blog!

Man arrested under the Terrorism Act after venting his frustrations on Twitter!

Was it Tony Blair who suggested that terrorism should not be allowed to alter the fundamental way in which Britain goes about it’s life and work? That was before he enjoined us in T.W.A.T. (The War Against Terror) with George W. Bush.

Now you cannot even make a light hearted joke on your Twitter page without being placed under arrest, thrown into a cell, and having half of your possessions taken away for forensic examination using one of Blair’s laws!

The lead investigator kept asking, ‘Do you understand why this is happening?’ and saying, ‘It is the world we live in’.

Thanks Mr. Blair, but of course you live in an entirely different world to the rest of us, a one that we contribute £600,000 per annum towards as you live the high life in top quality hotels and build a multi million pound property portfolio, and pick up another £5m per year for talking to people who don’t necessarily include the South Shields MP and Foreign Secretary, David Miliband (at least not on a regular basis).

T.W.A.T. of the highest order, it certainly hasn’t altered his way of British life!

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South Tyneside leadership considering options

It will soon be time for the leadership of the Labour Party in South Tyneside to announce the formation/membership of it’s cabinet for the new municipal year, and with Hebburn Cllr. Eddie McAtominey’s suspension from the Labour Party expiring soon it will be interesting to find out if there is a chair at the table waiting for him, as a former cabinet member he has the experience that his colleagues may be missing.

Others who perhaps may be being considered include Cllr. Jim Perry, Cllr. John McCabe, and Cllr. Linda Waggott.

The biggest trouble is with the current cabinet, and the next, not a single one of them has any experience at all in making radical cuts to budgets and no experience at all in reducing council tax rates! Regardless of which party wins the next general election it is now generally accepted that massive cuts in public expenditure will be a fact of life as they grapple with a huge budget deficit, local government will not escape this reality. The Labour leadership on South Tyneside Council should be thinking NOW of how they will manage the expectations of central government and how they can reduce the burdens on local council tax payers rather than continuing offering choices of ever increasing taxation!

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I was having a canny night until someone mentioned they’d get the back lanes fixed.

A singer in a smokey room
A smell of wine and cheap perfume
For a smile they can share the night
It goes on and on and on and on

This could be like having South Tyneside’s own version of Perez Hilton!

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FBI forensic artists have produced a picture (left) of the world’s No. 1 bogeyman Osama bin Laden having digitally altered his features to show the effects of age, and dressed him in western styled clothes to show how he might look now. Of course, it is true that there have been no confirmed sightings of the most wanted man for a long time and rumours abound that he may well in fact be dead following the heavy American bombing of the Tora Bora mountain range, it is also known that he had a serious kidney complaint that required regular dialysis, some people suggest that he may have even expired as a result of renal failure. However, he is still the reason why Britain and the US are engaged in the so called War Against Terror, a war in which those suspected of having taken part are not, have not, and will not be tortured willingly, knowingly, or even unknowingly by British agents or personnel or those friendly partner nations who we work with.

A Foreign and Commonwealth Office spokesman has said (of the case involving the High Court battle between jailed Muslim terror suspect Shaker Aamer and the Government):

‘We do not accept allegations of UK involvement or “complicity” in his mistreatment.  We firmly reject any suggestion that we torture or mistreat people or ask others to do so on our behalf. Mr Aamer and his legal representatives have made a lot of unsubstantiated allegations.’

Yet it has taken months and months and months for David Miliband, the South Shields MP and Foreign Secretary, to come to a decision to finally allow American security cleared lawyers to see papers relating to British Intelligence reports relating to Mr. Aamer’s questioning, the papers  are still not being aired in public. The case so far has dragged on for an inordinate length of time at great expense to the British tax payer, and is the second such case in which the Foreign Office has been found wanting by the High Court.

While Lord Justice Sullivan said the Government’s sudden change of heart was ‘clearly the most sensible solution’, he said: ‘the wasted time and money has just been enormous.’

He went on to condemn the manner in which disclosure had been ‘obstructed’ since last October, and said that the Government had ‘taken the matter up to the wire – only making concessions that were absolutely necessary’.

The picture on the right shows how digital forensic artists believe David Miliband has evaded the attention of the High Court since October and how he may appear next time he eventually travels to his constituency in South Shields. He has no relationship with the man on the left whatsoever.

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Idiotic idea!

When will they understand that the price of alcohol is not the problem, the culture is the problem that needs to be solved!

The crackdown will mark the culmination of a scheme, overseen by Andy Burnham, the Health Secretary, to cut alcohol abuse. Tackling the problem will be a major plank of the party’s manifesto.

Except, of course, this idiotic idea will not solve the problem, price has little or no correlation to the amount of consumption and as Timmy points out minimum price setting would be illegal under EU laws and the use of a tax revenue as an alternative would be legal but only supply a never ending stream of cash to those puritanical bodies in advance of those who are far more deserving of taxpayer help.

No, it’s not just the cretinism of raising alcohol prices (looking across Europe there are countries with lower prices and less drunkenness, places with higher and just as many problems with binge drinking), they’ve also managed to come up with the worst possible method of doing it. Illegal and creating an independent  bureaucracy with no financial oversight.

Edukashun, edukashun, edukashun! (Tony Blair was right there, so where have they gone wrong?)

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Spokesman blames batch of faulty badges

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Funny thing about this motor manufacturing industry, once you’ve had a good look at the list, can you tell me which of those companies do not operate without the support of taxpayer funded subsidies in whichever countries they are producing?

We want a greener cleaner environment, our governments get together and try and cobble deals that would see worldwide action for electric vehicles or non fossil fuel burning alternatives, but in reality they are paying motor manufacturers to carry on producing the same old crap that cannot pass a basic MOT test!

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Chinese to do the job themselves!

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It’s hard to see Google’s move as a brave and principled strike against China’s intolerance of political dissent. The ad broker has said it’s no longer prepared to censor searches in China. So, does that mean it’s simply kicked the problem of policing Chinese Google searches to the Chinese themselves? It’s a sensible bit of outsourcing really – censorship is one of Beijing’s core competencies. And they’ll probably do it more efficiently.

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Quick news round up

Life seems full of busy right now, I hardly have time to get to this keyboard and jot down my thoughts on matters political, libertarian and annoying, both on a national and on a local level. So here’s a quick round up of the things that have bothered me over the past couple of days:

The historic court case without a jury – There you have it, NuLabour has finally allowed “Diplock Courts” to take place in England, your right to a trial by twelve of your peers can be removed, juries protected and revered since Magna Carta are no longer necessary, Fausty warns that tyranny may follow and Marcel Berlins in the Guardian asserts that economy is being served before justice:

I am a little concerned to see money being a factor in a case in which an accused’s liberty is at stake. But that is the way the government thinks now. Why is it so keen to abolish the right to trial by jury for certain fraud trials? Not because it serves justice but because it saves money. Why is it pleased about the Heathrow Four’s trial by judge alone? Because it many take only two or three months instead of six. Think of the ­lawyers’ fees saved.

Elsewhere, fellow Geordie Jack Pickard has an extraordinarily good post about Yasmin Aibhai-Brown who argued in The Independent that our collapse in moral values is pushing British Muslims to the edge of reason and extremism. Live and let live, and if what we do or think causes no harm or offence to other people then leave well alone!

Oh, and the general election will be on May 6th., as revealed by Tory Politico‘s reporting of Europe Minister Chris Bryant, and finally on matters more local South Shields Conservative candidate Karen Allen sounds a little bemused and taken aback that a Labour controlled South Tyneside council should actively want to transfer staff from the public to the private sector, and South Shields MP David Miliband has been described as immature by a fellow Labour MP. I was tempted to do a Photoshop mock up of the Foreign Minister in short pants and with Harry Potter hair but that would have been quite childish (I’ll leave it for another day).

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David Miliband’s announcement raises questions.

Christopher Booker writing in The Daily Telegraph raises some very important human rights issues regarding Britain’s relationships with the beleagered Tibet and communist China:

Last week, I reported on the strange eagerness of our Foreign and Commonwealth Office to appease the murderous regime in Tehran. Another example of the FCO’s willingness to kowtow to nasty regimes has been flagged up in another newspaper, where a columnist researching ahead of a recent visit to China came across a remarkable statement from the Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, slipped out on the FCO website on October 29 2008, just before representatives of the Dalai Lama were due to hold talks in Beijing on the future of Tibet.

Buried in the statement was Britain’s recognition for the first time that, like “all other members of the EU… we regard Tibet as part of the People’s Republic of China”. The historic significance of this change was not lost on Beijing, since until then Britain, with its unique role in Tibet’s history, had for 100 years been very careful not to recognise Chinese sovereignty over Tibet. The group known as Free Tibet noted that Miliband’s concession gravely weakened the position of the Tibetan envoys without getting anything in return – commenting how extraordinary it was that Britain should have “rewarded China in such a way in the very year that China has committed its worst human rights abuses in Tibet in decades, including killing and torture”.

Here is the statement from the South Shields MP and Foreign Secretary made in October 2008:

We have made clear to the Chinese Government, and publicly, that we do not support Tibetan independence. Like every other EU member state, and the United States, we regard Tibet as part of the People’s Republic of China. Our interest is in long term stability, which can only be achieved through respect for human rights and greater autonomy for the Tibetans.

Yet it seems from a reading of Robert Barnett’s report for The New York Times suggests that human rights and human suffering were traded for Chinese cash to help sustain the resources of the International Monetary Fund, at a time when Gordon Brown and Barack Obamma were urging world leaders to go out and spend, spend, spend (or introduce “quantitative easing”). Surely this Labour government has not sunk so low as to ignore the historic demands of downtrodden people for their liberty, and can appease on such a scale at the drop of a large wad of cash, I feel embarrassed and ashamed by the position taken by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and buried away in a statement on it’s web pages.

Barnett finishes by saying:

It may be more than banks and failed mortgages that are sold off cheap in the rush to shore up ailing economies.

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Brown promises free laptop and broadband access – again!

In what aides described as a sign of his commitment to ”aspiration”, the Prime Minister will say he wants every household to have broadband access to the internet.

The aim is to get all families linked up to their children’s schools via the internet and access progress reports on attainment, behaviour and other needs. To make that achievable, he will pledge £300 million of investment to help poorer families.

O.K. I’m feeling pretty down on my luck, poor, but still aspirational – put me down for one!

Of course I ought to realise that anything that sounds too good to be true must be err…..too good to be true.

Both Brown and Balls must be bonkers to be dragging this old chestnut out again, they are either plying us with a cheap joke and having a laugh, or they don’t realise that this governing by initiative lark is a load of old tosh that we’ve heard before. They keep coming back like tired old door to door salesmen peddling the same old rubbish hoping that we’ve forgotten that they rang our bell at least three times over the past year or more with same incredible too good to be true offer.

It started back in September 2008 when Brown made this pledge:

Low income families could get vouchers up to £700 in value to get their household connected up to the Internet.

“To ensure we are prepared for the times to come, the Government will fund one million more households to get online, enabling parents to link with the teachers at their children’s school and helping young people with their homework and coursework”, Brown will tell delegates at the Labour Conference in Manchester.

Just two years earlier the then Chancellor Brown had scrapped the Home Computing Initiative!

He was back at it in January of 2009 when he was endorsing the Carter report’s recommendations that by 2012 would provide minimum download speeds of 2 megabits per second (Mbps) to every household.

“Today’s interim report from Lord Carter sets out the scale of our ambition to compete in the digital economy, a market currently worth over £50 billion a year in Britain alone and expected to grow rapidly in the future. Our digital networks will be the backbone of our economy in the decades ahead. We know that every aspect of our lives – every school, every hospital, every workplace and even every home – will depend on the services the digital network provides.”

Later in June 2009 Brown was again pledging broadband for all, surprisingly:

“We can create the right framework, for example, for the release of wireless spectrum – a national asset – while also liberalising its uses and extending mobile broadband coverage.

“In our fibre optic and cable networks, which will provide the next generation of superfast broadband, the Government must also complement and assist the private sector to move farther and faster.

“The first step must be to make the existing broadband network truly available to all.

“Broadband is at a tipping point. High-speed internet access will soon be essential for everyone.”

That was after the departing communications minister, Lord Carter of Barnes, claimed that large parts of Britain will not receive improved access and his report went on to reveal that Brown’s government had been unable to strike deals with any of the main players in the telecoms industry on how to fund the required infrastructure for fibre-optic connections across the country.

And so here we are standing listening to these snake oil salesmen reading from the prepared script for the fourth time, it’s time to tell them to go away and slam the door in their face. Their record in enabling broadband fibre optic cabling of Great Britain is abominable and they they think they can keep on enticing our votes with gimmicks and initiatives that have been trailed before us numerous times in the past. Brown and Ball once again trying to be seen to be doing something and “getting on with the job”, as once again they deliver another repeat announcement.

Isn’t it time that they realised that the biggest aspiration that the British people have right now is for complete change?

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