A Fox-Hunting Supporter In The Labour Party

A Record Number Of Billionaires In Britain.

The latest Rich List shows there are a record 134 billionaires in Britain and the wealthiest 1,000 people have seen their fortunes go up 14% since last year, rising by £83billion to £658billion.
Meanwhile, ordinary British people are suffering the worst pay squeeze since Victorian times.
Yet when Jeremy Corbyn says the main plank of Labour’s manifesto will be to put right “a rigged economy” that works for “the few not the many” he is lambasted as an out-of-touch dinosaur.
Do you think those lambasting the loudest might just have something to lose?
( Brian Reade, 13.05.2017 )

The UK Is Ranked A Shocking 40th In The World For Freedom Of Press.
Because of new laws brought in by the Conservative Government, the UK is now ranked 40th in the world for freedom of press.
The 2017 World Press Freedom Index ranks the UK behind countries such as Costa Rica, Jamaica, Estonia, Slovakia, Samoa, Czech Republic, Namibia, Uruguay, Ghana, Latvia, South Africa, Liechtenstein, Chile, Trinidad and Tobago, Andorra, Lithuania, and Slovenia.
( Wilfred Soon )

He Doesn’t Need To Con Voters Any More.

Nigel Farage’s unashamed support for Marine Le Pen smacks of an extreme right-wing politician who has deliberately kept his dangerous views hidden from the public view.
And now he doesn’t need to con voters any more he’s letting it all hang out.
Just as he did as a public schoolboy in Dulwich where one of his teachers claimed he held “neo-fascist views” and had “marched through a quiet Sussex village shouting Hitler Youth songs”.
I don’t know why we still give this odious reptile the time of day.
( Brian Reade, 13.05.2017 )

Our Kids Deserve To Dare To Dream Of A Better Future.

Why is Theresa may about to splash nearly £1billion on her pet grammar schools project when the NHS is on its knees?
Why are schools, once nurturers of active, inquisitive minds, now factories featuring a production line full of students who have been trained to pass tests and exams rather than to listen, learn, bloom and go forth with the absorption of new knowledge?
Why, with adolescent mental health problems exponentially on the rise, is there next to no funding for pastoral care in schools?

Why, with local health authority child and adolescent mental health services’ waiting lists a mile long and on the increase, is mental health funding not a priority?
Why is PE almost non-existent in some state schools when exercise is vital to physical and mental health?
These are all glaring, goading omissions and injustices that are not only allowed, but endorsed.

Our kids face uncertain futures.
This week, our teenage girls were named among the least happy and most stressed pupils of the world’s developed nations, with the report’s authors citing the stress of tests as partly to blame.
Our kids deserve to dare to dream of a better future.
One where they, rather than the establishment and big business, have the biggest stake in society’s future.
( Fiona Phillips, 22.04.2017 )

Big Beasts Were Skewered On A Red Spike.

Twenty years ago the No 1 single across Britain was R Kelly’s I Believe I Can Fly.
Which was apt, as, thanks to the events of May 1, many of us felt the wind beneath our wings.
It was General Election night and we were treated to the most entertaining bloodbath since The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Big beasts like David Mellor, Michael Portillo and Malcolm Rifkind were skewered on a red spike, as a Labour landslide ended 18 years of Tory rule.
Large parts of this country had been deliberately allowed to fall off the map during that time.

In 1997, unemployment was twice what it had been under Labour in 1979, the number living in poverty had trebled and the richest 10% had became 60% richer while the poorest 10% were 17% poorer.
One-in-five NHS hospitals had been shut, waiting lists were at a record high, there was a chronic shortage of nurses and doctors, and the crime rate had doubled.

State schools had outstanding repair bills of £3.5billion and nearly half of all 11 year-olds were failing national curriculum tests in maths and English.
So witnessing Labour win a Commons majority of 179 was, for me, and I’m guessing many of you who were around then, one of the most intoxicating nights of our lives.
( Brian Reade, 29.04.2017 )

What’s Not To Like About A 70s Revival?

A brief modern history lesson: The phrase “dragging us back to the 1970s” is used to inflict maximum damage because Tory spinmeisters have managed to portray that decade as even grimmer than the 1340s when the Black Death was all the rage.
The Satanic 70s, they say, was when rats roamed streets feasting on unburied corpses, inflation was on a par with 1920s Germany, all houses were lit by candles because the miners were always on strike, and it took you so long to get a phone most people invested in a homing pigeon instead.

That’s not how many like me remember a glorious decade.
There was Bowie and The Clash, Rigsby and Fawlty, cheap football, and tens of thousands of kids becoming the first in their family to go to university (for free).
But mostly there were still proud, content, working-class communities which had yet to be destroyed at the expense of a Thatcherite economic model based on individual greed.
Which was why, in the 70s, inequality in Britain reached its lowest-ever point.

If Labour are offering to undo some of that damage by re-nationalising key industries, bringing in a £10 minimum wage, forcing salary caps on bloated executives and properly funding our schools and hospitals, then what’s not to like about a 70s revival?
( Brian Reade, 13.05.2017 )

Bogus Food Poisoning Claims.

Spanish hotels are threatening to ban British tourists after our ambulance-chasing solicitors spiked a 700% rise in bogus food poisoning claims.
I don’t have a problem with their stand.
Indeed I wish we could ban all ambulance chasers from our hospitals, where compo claims cost our already-battered NHS £1.4billion a year, £418million of which goes to blood-sucking “no win no fee” legal firms.
That’s money that could hire 19,000 nurses or pay for 25,000 kidney transplants.
And that’s a realisation that makes me throw up far more than a plate of dodgy paella.
( Brian Reade, 06.05.2017 )

Andrew Will Be Promoted To Arrogant-Insulter-In-Chief.

I was saddened to hear that Prince Philip is retiring from all of his royal “work” at the age of 95.
Mainly because it reminds us that in 20 years’ time that’s the age everyone will be made to work to before they get a state pension.
I just hope Phil will be able to get by on the £122.30 a-week pension (that’s if he doesn’t get sanctioned by the DSS for leaving the job of his own accord) especially with those big heating bills.
But I’m sure the firm will cope without him.
No doubt Andrew will be promoted to Arrogant-insulter-in-Chief (he’s already put in the hard yards) and Edward will help hold the gun of the President Emeritus of the World Wildlife Fund when he shoots wild birds out of the sky in his grounds.
( Brian Reade, 06.05.2017 )

The Living, Breathing, Bumbling Human Embodiment Of A Blooper Reel.

Think your kid’s smart for knowing how to play a Peppa Pig video on the iPad all by themselves?
Sorry, they’re practically sub-normal compared to a certain eight-year-old in the States, who learned to drive using YouTube tutorials.
He then half-inched his parents’ keys and got behind the wheel to rock up at a McDonald’s drive-thru with his baby sister.

And he probably did a much better job than most of the Uber drivers I’ve been taken home by recently.
His initiative certainly puts us Brits to shame, a study this week claims one in five of us can’t change a light bulb and a third of us can’t read a map.
But is it any surprise we’re so clueless when you look at our role models?

There’s Theresa, the wicked witch of Westminster, who I wouldn’t trust to run a bath let alone the country, and Boris, the living, breathing, bumbling human embodiment of a blooper reel.
Come to think of it, maybe we should just put that eight-year-old in charge, actually?
( Adam Kay, 15.04.2017 )

A Fox-Hunting Supporter In The Labour Party.

I don’t have much time for tactical voting, but if I lived in London’s Vauxhall I’d find it easy to vote for anyone but Labour candidate Kate Hoey.
Mainly because I can’t see which part of her is supposed to be Labour.
Months before the 2010 General Election, when asked if she would be upset if the Tories kicked out Gordon Brown, she answered: “No. Absolutely not.”
And recently she described her party as “extremely unpatriotic”.
She was an advisor to Boris Johnson when he was London Mayor, she floated down the Thames on a boat supporting Nigel Farage and she said she was “proud” that Theresa May was her Prime Minister.
Maybe because Hoey knew May would promote her two biggest political passions: a hard Brexit and fox-hunting.
( Brian Reade, 13.05.2017 )

I’ve voted Labour all my life and, ironically, the only time I’ve held my nose as I did so was in 2005, after Blair invaded Iraq with his tongue embedded in George Bush’s backside.
( Brian Reade, 29.04.2017 )