Charities Are Big Business With Highly-Paid Bosses And Fancy Offices

Half Of All Youth Centres Shut By Tory Councils.
Half of all youth centres run by Tory councils have been shut down since David Cameron came to power.
Critics say the closures raise the risk of crime and anti-social behaviour.
A survey of 105 local authorities reveals funding was axed for 411 of their 811 youth centres since 2010.
( Jack Blanchard, 05.09.2015 )

Remember When George Osborne Kept Blaming Gordon Brown?
Remember when George Osborne kept blaming Gordon Brown rather than the global economic meltdown for the UK financial crisis?
He promised to eliminate the deficit and bring down public debt.
Well after five years as Chancellor, Osborne has cut the deficit by only a third (as Labour would have) and doubled our debt.
And who does he blame?
Global forces!
Do those forces mean something only when the Chancellor is Osborne, not Gordon?
( John Prescott, 06.09.2015 )

I Understand Tories.
I understand Tories.
I know what they’re about.
They’re wealthy, they’re greedy, and they try to con everybody else into believing that they too can be wealthy and greedy and everything will be well.
I understand that, I know where they’re coming from.
I’ve seen them around for a long time.
We’ve all seen them around for a long time.
I don’t need any lessons from them.
Nobody does.
What we do need is to be strong enough and bold enough to put forward a rational, sensible alternative which is about valuing everybody.
( Jeremy Corbyn )

The Queen Hated Thatcher For What She Was Doing.
I’m a staunch republican but I’ve got nothing against The Queen as a person.
Indeed if we abolished her tomorrow I’d be happy to have her back as our head of state.
So long as the majority of us voted for her and the rest of her family were made to get a job.
In fact I’ve had respect for her since reading how she hated Thatcher for what she was doing to the miners and the poor back in the 1980s.
( Brian Reade, 05.09.2015 )

A Modern Version Of Slave Labour.
The number of workers on zero-hours contracts rose by 47,323 in the last six months, to a total of 744,442, officially.
The real number is much higher.
And I bet only a minority actually asked for so-called “flexible working”.
Millions would work a full week, if only employers let them.
The system is a modern version of slave labour.
( Paul Routledge, 04.09.2015 )

Islamophobia is a word created by fascists and used by cowards to manipulate morons.
( Christopher Hitchens )

Charities Are Big Business With Highly-Paid Bosses And Fancy Offices.

Time was when charitable organisations were modest affairs.
Little old ladies selling flags from cardboard trays on street corners, that sort of thing.
They were often based on churches and other religious groups.
They concentrated on homely issues like the protection of children and animals.
Not any more.

These days, charities are big business, and they ape the worst excesses of big business.
They boast highly-paid bosses, celebrity champions, royal patronage, fancy offices, large staffs and shops on every high street.
They spend millions on emotive TV advertising to rake in the money.
No charity is complete without an American-style chief executive officer, whose exotic six-figure salary is justified by the spacious argument that “we have to recruit and retain the best talent”.

The change from what went before happened because we have more disposable income, and where there is spare cash there is always somebody anxious to get their greedy dabs on it.
Charities are no exception.
I gave money to the British Red Cross and I never heard the end of it.
Letters, phone calls to my home, constant appeals to give more.
And that is low-level stuff by comparison with the high-pressure salesmanship that goes on.

Charity chiefs are going too far.
They set up a lucrative market in information-swapping, selling on our personal details to rival charities and other businesses.
Some of them have a fine disregard for who they sell to, so crooks and scam merchants get access to the life savings of vulnerable givers.
The result is one scandal after another.

One 87-year-old man suffering from dementia lost £35,000 to a tsunami of demands after his details were passed on to more than 200 competing charities and some outright criminals.
The RSPCA has been caught sizing up potential legacies from donors.

This isn’t charity.
It is sharp practise, old-fashioned capitalism, profiteering from the good intentions of people with a conscience.
The charities industry has an annual turnover running into billions of pounds.
( Paul Routledge, 04.09.2015 )

The Most Dangerous Man To Government.
The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out.
Without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos.
Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable.
( H.L. Mencken )

Disabled People’s Rights.
It is both extremely worrying and deeply sad that the UK, for so long regarded as an international leader in protecting and promoting disabled people’s rights – now risks sleepwalking towards the status of a systematic violator of these same rights.
( Baroness Jane Campbell )

The Solutions For Syria By David Cameron.

The solutions suggested for Syria by David Cameron can seem quite confusing, so this is the simplest way to explain.
We should have bombed the dreadful President Assad’s forces a year ago, and supported his opponents, but decided not to.

We have a chance to put that right, but now we need to bomb the dreadful Islamic State’s forces, which are even worse, and support their opponents, especially President Assad.
The force opposing Assad that we would have supported a year ago is Islamic State, so if only we’d done that back then, we could now ask Islamic State if they could give us back the bombs we’d given them, so we could drop them on them instead.

Not only that, but if we’d bombed Assad’s forces a year ago we could help more now, by bombing those who had helped Islamic State, such as us, and bomb ourselves.
And if we really want to help people fleeing Islamic State, don’t let them come here as the last thing they want is somewhere to live in safety.
We should send them back, Islamic State can’t be that bad, surely?
And if we’d done that, it would be over by Monday.
( Mark Steel, 11.09.2015 )

Sir John Major’s Private Chats With The Queen.
Sir John Major says that during private weekly chats, the Queen influenced his 1990s Government on a number of occasions.
“I have no intention of telling you what they are,” he told his radio interviewer.
No? Nice that a Tory premier and the unelected head of state can decide in secret how the lower orders shall live.
How cosy, and how wrong.
( Paul Routledge )

A Miserable Prince Of Wales.
A newly-discovered letter shows that back in the 1920s we had a ‘miserable’ Prince of Wales who whined to his married mistress about the ‘torture’ of being sent on a ‘loathsome’ first-class Caribbean cruise surrounded by ‘revolting’ natives.
Ah, that’s what I love about our monarchy.
In this swiftly-changing world it’s the one thing that always stays the same.
God bless ’em.
( Brian Reade )

David Cameron’s Dismissal Of Refugees As A “Swarm” That Needs To Be Repelled.

It feels only right to thank David Cameron for his brave stance throughout this refugee crisis.
Or, as Theresa May prefers to call hundreds of desperate families fleeing war and hunger, the “events of this summer”.
In Tory circles, “don’t mention the war” has become “don’t mention the Syrians”.
And I want to thank him because he has unintentionally read the last rites on Britain’s century-old feeling of moral superiority over the Germans.
He was shamed into a face-saving U-turn yesterday by the rip-tide of emotion that photo of the dead child on the beach unleashed, but it was too little too late.
A British Prime Minister’s dismissal of refugees as a “swarm” that needs to be repelled when compared to Angela Merkel’s declaration that her people would welcome as many of them as they could take, left us without a goose-stepping leg to stand on when it comes to portraying ourselves as more humane than the brutish Hun.
( Brian Reade, 05.09.2015 )