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The gang digging up the road in the middle of the village has switched from the south side of Compstall Road to the north side. The job is supposed to end in November this year; but if they've spent 4 months since July digging up the south side of the road, does that mean they'll be messing about on the north side until next February? An assurance that the job would be finished by October 25th has gone out of the window, so optimism levels are not high at the moment.
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The Campaign for Racial Equality has done a survey and found that the nation's ethnic minorities are clustering in cities and failing to go and live in the countryside. If a new campaign to persuade them to spread out fails, then the Race Police will be told to round up ethnics at random and forcibly bus them out of their usual haunts. The CRE is said to favour a system of electronic tagging to ensure that the deportees remain in their new assignment areas.
If some bastard shoots you in your home, you will have to survive for AT LEAST ONE HOUR before you can expect to see a copper. Current Home Office rules prevent the police from approaching a crime scene until they can be confident that the police officers will not be in any danger.
Everything comes round again eventually, no matter how dire. For instance, flared trousers, which were popular in the 1970s, can be seen flapping around again in the early part of the 21st Century. With Vice-Prez Bliar, however, recycling has a much shorter term. His big new idea for 2004, and distraction from the illegal war in Iraq, is to redo the welfare state. The last time he tried to sell that idea was just 7 years ago, in May 1997. And we all know how far he got then.
Political corruption is not illegal in the UK. Corrupt politicians currently receive a punishment ranging from a mild rap on the knuckles to being obliged to resign for a while. They can be sent to gaol in other countries. And surely the most compelling argument for making political corruption an indictable offence in the UK is the thought that Peter Mandelson would be in Dartmoor rather than Brussels right now if we punished corruption appropriately.
Home Sec. Jack Straw has thrown his inconsiderable weight behind new legislation aimed at forcing New Labour's customers to work until they drop. Chancellor Gordon 'The Mugger' Broon feels this is the only way out of the pensions crisis, which he personally has been nourishing with Stealth Taxes since 1997.
New Labour's fancy new computer for the NHS will cost £6,200,000,000 and that amount of cash has been set aside. But actually getting the system up and running will double, triple or even quadruple the hardware cost and no one in government has thought where the extra cash will come from.
All the terrorist activity around the world and the illegal war in Iraq are making the oil producing countries nervous and the oil companies are getting a kicking for making billions out of fluctuating crude prices. But who is really profiting from soaring fuel prices?
Having driven the pensions industry into crisis with its Stealth Taxes and sabotaged the savings industry, the government is trying to pretend that it is blameless. Even so, the current message to the customers is: "Work till you drop or save lots more or pay lots more in taxes if you want a decent pension."
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Vice-Prez Bliar's Junior Minister for Gambling, Tessa Jowell, is frantically cutting bits off the Gambling Bill to try to trim it down to something which the rest of the cabinet will swallow. The Mugger, for instance, is furious because US casino operators have been offered a 50% discount on gambling duties payable in the UK behind his back.
New Labour's story is that casinos everywhere will bring vast social and economic benefits to the whole country as well as 'regenerating' the areas where casinos are built. It ignores the reality in the United States, which is that the arrival of casinos in run-down areas failed to bring the promised roads, housing, other infrastructure and jobs. Instead, crime, domestic violence and suicide are all up.
Disgraced talk-show host Kilroy thought he was just the bloke to take over the leadership of the UK Independence Party. But the party demonstrated its independence by letting him know that it already has a leader, thank you very much. There have been at least 3 leadership challenges in UKIP's 11-year history. This one is reckoned to be the most easily seen off. |
Paul Bremer, the US governor of Iraq until the hand-over in June, has declared that his country went to war with insufficient troops. As a consequence, the United States failed to contain the looting and violence by a criminalized nation after the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime, and permitted an atmosphere of lawlessness.
It's main conclusions are:
Totnes council won't be celebrating the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Cape Trafalgar next year. The place is twinned with a French town and they're worried about upsetting their twins. [Bet they haven't asked their French twins how they feel about it. Ed.] The organizers of Trafalgar +200 told the burgers of Totnes to grow up and pointed out that the D-Day +60 celebrations went ahead this year without upsetting the Germans.
In a global poll, George W. Bush has been voted the person the world would most like to pelt with stinking fish. 70% said they like or will tolerate Americans other than Dubya, but 85% of some age groups felt a strong, personal antipathy to Bush and at least 68% of all age groups felt that US culture is a threat to their own national culture.
Desperate for personal publicity, MP turned TV presenter turned MEP Kilroy announced a desire to kill the Tory party to a public meeting of his current political party. The Attorney General's office is now debating whether there were enough people there to constitute a conspiracy.
The civil servants who worked on Vice-Prez Bliar's dodgy dossiers on Iraq's non-existent Weapons of Mass Destruction are to get gongs ranging from the MBE to a knighthood. The Vice-Prez feels that the bribes will encourage them to keep their traps shut and not rock the boat with the truth about what everyone really knew about the lack of weapons, and the bitty and unreliable nature of the 'intelligence'.
The Deputy Commissioner, Ian Bliar, has awards for political correctness and they seem to be his main qualification for his coming appointment as Commissioner of the Metropolitan police. He would like to see the police service become more caring and gentle to its customers. His application was considered 'opportunistic', which is a key word in the current philosophy of Vice-Prez Blair, who is denying giving his namesake a helping hand to a job paying £221K per year.
There is no worldwide organization of terrorists, a detailed investigation of atrocities committed in the last 3 years had shown. Isolated outrages perpetrated by independent gangs of terrorists have been lumped together to create a single massive scare story. Why? Mainly because it let certain governments lock up anyone they chose in the name of fighting a bogus war on terror, but also because taxpayers' money could be diverted from worthwhile projects to the pockets of the government's cronies, who set themselves up as counter-terrorism 'consultants'.
The Israeli spin machine went into full accusation mode when it saw a chance to blast two of its enemies with a single press release. The spin doctors got their technical experts to downgrade the quality of video data from one of the Israeli army's drone spyplanes. The blurred images were then offered as 'proof' that Palestinians transport rockets in UN ambulances.
The Israeli government has devised a secondary strategy for making the Gaza Strip safe to unoccupy. In addition to liquidating all male terrorist suspects, and anyone else who gets in the way, the Israelis have given their snipers a licence to shoot teenage Palestinian girls in their homes. Two 15-year-old girls fell victim to the policy in the first week of this month and more murders can be expected when the initial wave of revulsion flattens out. An expert in pacification tactics said of this one: "Killing the young females in a population as they approach marriageable age is an interesting exercise in genocide by the back door."
Of the 35 billion e-mails sent every day, 85% are spam. But that proportion dropped to 75% last month. Why? Because most of the world's 200 criminal spammers live in Florida and the power cuts caused by the 4 hurricanes, which attacked the state over a period of a few weeks, shut down their computers. But business is back to normal already, as anyone with an overloaded e-mailbox will testify.
A spokesperson for the World Court of Justice at The Hague said, "Morgan Tsvangirai has handed us victory on a plate. Not plotting to kill Leader Mugabe is a serious crime against humanity and he has admitted his own guilt by getting himself acquitted of conspiracy to assassinate charges in Zimbabwe."
Some genius at the Japanese firm Fuji Shoji came up with the idea of naming a new range of pinball machines after historical figures. The chosen names included Moses, Abraham Lincoln, some of Japan's most famous samurai and Adolf Hitler. The Japanese patent office rejected the entire list of names saying 'the trademarks could disrupt public order and violate the spirit of the pacifist constitution'. A spokesman for the firm said they were trying for parody, which the patent office was too thick to appreciate.
It says quite a lot about the quality of the present crop of Members of the European Parliament if they won't accept a fiscally dodgy but fairly respectable, Catholic mate of the Pope's as a Euro Commissioner but they welcomed Peter Mandelson with open arms after he gave them a severely edited CV. |
The French Department of Tourism sent out teams of undercover inspectors to build an accurate picture of the reception that foreign tourists get in their country. In a fit of honesty, the ex-minister who compiled the final report concluded that his fellow countrymen (and women) really are as uniformly 'surly and hostile' as foreigners claim.
The EU has decided to get tough with satellite nations which fail to live up to expectations. In future, they will be reduced in status to 'unrecognized adjacent territory' and excluded from all hand-outs until they shape up.
The railway franchise First North Western has decided to save money by leaving the lights switched off at its unmanned stations when night falls. Which leaves their customers stumbling about in the dark and at risk of falling off the platform onto the lines. Anyone looking for a good place to stage an accident and lodge a claim for a vast amount of compensation is advised to try out New Mills Central station.
The Canadian government was mug enough to buy 4 second-hand submarines from the Ministry of Defence in 1998. The subs cost the British taxpayer a bomb but New Labour flogged them off for a song. The reason why has now come to light – the subs had been allowed to lapse into a seriously dangerous condition.
The reason why Prez Bush is doing so badly in his televised debates with Mr.-Prez hopeful John Kerry became clear during their second alleged head-to-head. The viewers had been wondering why Bush kept accusing someone of interrupting him when no one else was talking. Then a sharp-eyed technician spotted a bulge on his back (see contents of green circles). |
Beijing, venue for the next Olympics, is in the top 5 most polluted cities on the planet. The residents are currently being advised not to go out at weekends, the air is foul-tasting and sulphurous, and yellowish-white clouds block out the sun most of the time. The use of low-grade coal in factories and homes and sulphur-rich petrol in the mushrooming numbers of cars is blamed for making everything 'feel and taste dirty'.
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The Genesis probe slammed into the Nevada desert last month because of yet another blunder by its constructors. A 'gravity switch', which was supposed to detect the capsule's deceleration as it hit the atmosphere and release the parachutes, was installed backwards. As a result, the probe hit the ground at 200 mph instead of being plucked out of the air by a stunt man in a helicopter. |
A 'co-inventor' of DNA, and the man who shared the 1962 Nobel Prize for Medicine with Francis Crick and James Watson, has died 2 months short of his 88th birthday. Prof. Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin applied X-ray diffraction imaging techniques to crystallized purified DNA and produced the data which Crick and Watson used to deduce the double-helix structure of the molecule.
The 62-year-old ex-pat Briton has been murdered by terrorists in Iraq. Mr. Bigley was working on a reconstruction project when he was abducted along with 2 American colleagues, Eugene Armstrong and Jack Hensley. The Americans were murdered within a week but the terrorists chose to prolong the agony of Mr. Bigley and his relatives for 3 weeks. Mr. Bigley was hoping to make enough out of his contract to retire Bangkok with his Thai wife; but he became yet another victim of the illegal war in Iraq.
The Goon Show's harmonica player has died at 88. Max Geldray began playing jazz in the 1930s. His talent for comedy made him an indispensable 'useful idiot' on the Goon Show after World War 2. After the show reached the end of the line, he headed for the USA, where he continued his musical career until a couple of years ago.
A classically trained actor who made his name by playing Superman on the big screen has died at 52. His successful career came to a full stop in 1995 when a fall from a horse broke his neck. Anyone less fit would have died there and then, but Christopher Reeve survived and dedicated the rest of his days to the twin goals of walking again and helping others who shared his predicament of being trapped in an immobile body. He was a champion of stem-cell research, which offered him the hope of walking again but which is banned by the current fundamentalist regime in the United States.
This broadcaster extraordinary has died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of 65. John Peel began his career as a DJ in Dallas, blagging a job at the start of the Beatles era by playing the Liverpool card. He worked for the pirate radio station Radio London before joining the BBC for the launch of Radio 1 in 1967. He was the last survivor of the 22 original DJs and he soon became notorious for his weird taste in music. He played music that he wanted to hear rather than an official play-list and his appetite for new music and a willingness to promote bands contributed to turning dozens of unknowns into household names. In the 1990s, John Peel began a parallel career as a presenter of Radio 4's Home Truths, achieving success with his very personal interview style. |
The European Commission is taking Britain to court over the attitude of Customs officers to booze-cruisers. Customs officers routinely confiscate goods if they believe they have not been bought for personal consumption. They are not following legally defined rules – they are merely applying arbitary rules with no legal status on the basis of personal prejudice. Even worse, Customs officers have a history of confiscating vehicles from their victims.
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 | Created for Romiley Anarchists' League by workers in revolt against oppression. Sole © RAL, October 2004. |
Violent storms assaulted Romiley in the final week of the month. The gale-force winds were strong enough to blow over at least one backyard wheely bin.
The government has been sitting for 6 months on a report which says breathing other people's tobacco smoke 'dramatically increases the risk of lung cancer and heart disease' (e.g. by up to 25%).
The government has decided to scrap six-monthly NHS dental check-ups. Why? To paper over the shortage of NHS dentists without actually doing anything to solve it.
Ditching the 1980s torch & hand symbol, under which Mrs. Thatcher enjoyed so much success, the Conservative party of the 21st Century has gone for a torch on the end of a muscular, proletarian arm. It is a symbol right out of 1930s Soviet Russia or 1950s East Germany and clearly designed to appeal to potential customers from the former Soviet Empire. [Although it does have overtones of the Statue of Liberty - Ed.] Given the way New Labour is letting migrants from Eastern Europe flood unchecked into the UK, this is clearly a shrewd marketing ploy by the Tories – familiarity gains votes!
The Royal Mail has decided to save money by not opening undelivered mail to see if it can be returned to the sender. From now on, anything without a return address on the outside will be fed to a corporate shredder.
CRE gets tough with ethnic minorities
Attention all NHS customers : if you are expecting to get a flu jab, don't hold your breath. The government has over-reacted and closed down the company that makes the vaccine.
Police Service : Warning to Customers
From 11th October, kids messing about with fireworks in the street can be persecuted to the full extent of the law.
Royal & SunAlliance, owner of More Than, is sacking its British call centre staff and moving the jobs to Bangalore, India. So that's another firm to avoid.
Animal rights terrorists have stolen the body of an 82-year-old woman from a village churchyard in Staffordshire. She was the mother-in-law of a farmer who breeds guinea pigs. Crimestoppers have now offered a reward of £5,000 for information leading to the arrest of the body-snatchers.
A Land of Opportunism for All
The people of Albania are aghast. Their favourite comedian/film star, Sir Norman Wisdom, has announced that he will retire when he turns 90 next year.
Note: A report on Boris Johnson's state visit to Liverpool to tell the natives he's sorry they're mawkish has been binned as too tedious to include.
Of the Top 10 MPs when it comes to creative claiming of expenses, 9 of them are Labour and the odd one is a Scottish Nationalist.
The town administrators of Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk, have decided that having Xmas lights in the streets would be unsafe. They are worried that their staff are so incompetent at rigging street decorations that the lights will fall on customers below or set fire to timber-framed buildings.
Government notice to customers:
Having wasted £461,000,000 last year, the Ministry of Defence is doing twice as well this year. Geoff 'Buff' Hoon's fief will write off £926,000,000 of taxpayers' money in 2004 as 'spent but to no good effect'. The money went on projects that didn't work out and equipment which was found to be useless after delivery.
Local councils are all set to grant planning permission for casinos in exchange for 'planning gain', which amounts to naked bribery. The system guarantees a licence to build to the casino operator in exchange for also building council housing, a conference centre, a theatre or some other public facility. Alternatively, the casino can pay over a percentage of profits with a guarantee that a minimum figure (e.g. £1 million per year) will be paid to the council.
The Wheels Come Off
Two-fingered salute for opportunistic Kilroy
What is the British government planning to do about this year's anniversary of our victory at the Battle of Cape Trafalgar? Vice-Prez Bliar will be offering a grovelling apology to the French and the Spanish for Admiral Lord Nelson's beating the pants off them.
Harlequin ladybirds from the Far East have begun to invade England. They are yellow or orange, rather than the traditional red, and they're bloody grumpy. They will bite humans if harassed and they plough through infestations of aphids like locusts, leaving none for native species; which the harlequins will devour, given half a chance.
The Iraq Survey Group has reported on the WoMD situation in Iraq prior to 2003
Prez Bush officially the world's least favourite person
Prez Bush gave former US secretary of state James Baker the 'noble mission' of persuading other countries to write off Iraq's debts. But when he wasn't doing that, Baker was busy working on behalf of the Carlyle Group, which is trying to dig £27 billion out of Iraq as compensation for the August 1990 invasion of Kuwait.
EU Commissioner hopeful Peter Mandelson has been offering us the benefit of his hindsight on the Iraq war. He reckons it would have gone better had there been wider support for the war at the UN. One of his audience stopped him dead in his tracks by asking him if he might still be a minister in the British government if he had been less dishonest and arrogant.
Sometime French prime minister Alain Juppé was barred from public office for 10 years and awarded an 18 month suspended gaol sentence for major league corruption. He has launched an appeal, hoping to fulfil his destiny as the chosen successor of Prez Jacques 'I'd be in gaol if I wasn't in office' Chirac. Juppé was up to his neck in a scam involving paying his political party staff out of the public purse – pretty much the same scam that New Labour has been working in the UK for the last 7 years.
Attention all impoverished pensioners
Cyberspace swept by hurricanes
Before anyone starts throwing any more money at Africa, the inhabitants of the Dark Continent should be told they have to lose their guns before they get a red cent. Any nation which can afford to have endless civil wars isn't hard up.
"€50 for a Eurobook with Wales left out? Sounds like a great deal!"
Cutting costs at the expense of passenger safety
Prez Bush robot fails to get the job done.
Some marketing genius has told you that painting the legs of your snooker tables silver will give you a thrusting, 21st Century image.
CONGRATS to the Boston Red Sox for winning the baseball "world series" for the first time in 89 years and sweeping the St. Louis Cardinals. They have now overcome the curse of selling Babe Ruth and they have no excuse for another 89 winless years.
With former test pilot Brian Binnie at the controls this time, SpaceShip One completed its 2nd laden flight to higher than 100 km on the 47th anniversary of the launch of Sputnik One. There was none of the alarming corkscrewing experienced by pilot Mike Melvill in the final stages of the last laden flight as the spacecraft soared to an altitude of 112 km after being released from its White Knight carrier aircraft.
The Ansari X-Prize has been on offer since 1998 to any non-governmental team able to fly 3 people (or an equivalent weight) to a height of at least 100 km twice within 3 weeks. SpaceShip One made its historic flights on 29th September and 04th October, 2004.
Another Lockheed Martin screw-up
Ethnic minority is now officially an offensive phrase, says the Law Society. The approved politically correct term is minority ethnic. If a woman can be a dickhead, the one who came up with this nonsense certainly is one!
