Garbagegate - What are they up to?

What have the British government and the Eurocrats achieved in the first half of 2007?

June 2007
Education, schmeducation! A-Levels are worth a grade less than in 1997. Someone getting a C in 1997 would be awarded a B under New Labour's debased exam system.

£750,000 of taxpayer's cash That's how much it will cost to pay off Blair's 25 special political advisors, who are just Labour stooges on the public payroll.

DEFRA bog up to blame for Yorkshire floods. The Department of the Environment, Food & Rural Affairs has been making a total hash of paying out EU subsidies to farmer – so much so that Britain was required to pay a stonking fine to the EU's coffers. As a consequence, DEFRA has been obliged to make budget cuts and the softest target available was flood defences.
Not invading Iraq would have made more than enough money available for building up Britain's infrastructure, especially at a time when the government is insisting that thousands of new houses be built on flood plains.

The government has been caught lying with statistics again. The British Crime Survey omits 3 million crimes from its annual guestimate, currently 11 million crimes/year. Violent crime is 82% higher than the Home Office would have us believe and the fiddle explains how this rotten government has made the total amount of crime 'fall' by 35% since 1997.

The Labour party is raising the cost of objecting to all-night opening of pubs & clubs in order further to promote, its policy of 24-hour drinking. Objector will have to pay £400 instead of the present £25.

Convicts will be getting £200 of taxpayers' cash in addition to 'get out of gaol early' cards. The government has decided to let 25,000 of them out early, and it feels obliged to compensate them for the loss of 18 days' board and lodging. The criminals will also be entitled to have their rent paid for those 18 days. New Labour is definitely the party of the criminal.

Labour's alternative to Fat Government seems to be Stupid Government! The Home Office, prop. J. Reid, has decided that there is a shortage of teachers in Scotland, so anyone wanting a work permit to teach in Scotland can have one for the asking.
One small snag, though. There are just about 500 vacant teaching jobs in Scotland and thousands of newly qualified teachers are facing the dole when their courses end. Spit the bones out of that definition of shortage.

Brown's dirty trick backfires. Offering a government job to Liberal peer Paddy Ashdown after party boss Ming the Merciless turned down a change to join the planned Obese Brown Mega-regime has upset his own party as well as the Libs, and exposed him as a hypocrite. Brown was violently opposed to getting the Libs on board when Tony Blair first floated the idea back in 1996.

Brown abandons fat government, goes for obese instead! He seems to be trying to include all other parties in one mega-government, presumably in the hope that he will become another Stalin or Mugabe figure, who rules until he drops.

No one at all is to blame! This is the conclusion of a Ministry of Defence 'investigation' into how 15 naval personnel were hijacked in the Persian Gulf by Iranian pirates.

Labour's decision to abolish grammar schools condemned poor kids to poverty, a study by the Eductation Dept. has found. Harold Wilson's 2 anti-grammar school campaigns in 1965 and 1976 produced an educational disaster in the 1970s and reduced significantly, the ability of children of poor families to better themselves.

£2 billion per year That's how much taxpayers' cash this Labour government is blowing on management consultants (many of them cronies) instead of using the civil service. Value for money is clearly not a New Labour concept.

Health Sec. Strewth Kelly has ordered councils to distribute Labour party propaganda and bogus statistics about migrants, and present it as factual information. All paid for by the taxpayer, of course.

Lying about unemployment? Labour keeps 1.7 million off the books. A survey by Sheffiled Hallam University has found that one million fit-for-work people are being kept off the unemployment register and on incapacity benefit, and the rest are mainly people don't have a job but who haven't paid enough National Insurance contributions to get benefits or have too high a household income, or too much saved, to claim benefits.

One Hundred Million Quid. That's how much New Labour is costing the country to create a Supreme Court by moving the current Law Lords to another building 300 yards away from where they are right now.

Labour MP Frank Field has uncovered the hidden agenda in Brown's tax credit scheme. A 2-parent family on the minimum wage has to work 100 hours more than a single mother to get the same income.

The BMA has passed a landslide vote of no confidence in Health Sec. Praticia Hewitt. But she's not going.

The Bank of England is independent? How can that be if Gordon Brown gets to pick the people on the committee which sets interest rates? So that's independent apart from the stooges, is it, Gordon?

This useless government does it again! After producing thousands of doctors and nurses with no jobs to go to, thousands of newly qualified teachers are finding that all their hard work has been for nothing and they are unemployable.

The government's solution to the flood of migrant labour from the poor parts of Europe is to make employers legally liable to pay for teaching them English so they become unemployable and go somewhere else.

£6.5 Billion – that's what Britain's membership of the EU will cost from 2011 thanks to Blair-Brown sell-outs.

The government has blown £7.4 million on the HIP shambles. Most of it, of course, has gone into the pockets of cronies and usual suspect 'consultants'.

This useless government can't even do a good job of cheating! Despite throwing billions at education, the government has missed the majority of its own, much-fiddled targets.

The government's grand plan to shunt civil servants out of London are in total disarray. Three years on, less than half of the dispersals have been made and top-quality staff are refusing to be shifted out of London to the sticks.

Taxes under G. Brown have gone up by the equivalent of 10p in the pound on income tax since 1997, the accountants Grant Thornton have found.

May 2007
Gordon Brown has received £113,000 to fight a non-existent Labour leadership contest from people to whom he gave jobs paid for out of public money. But as there's no leadership contest, the cash is being spent on Brown's tour of Britain PR campaign aimed at making him look vaguely human. A nice scam for him; not so good for the taxpayer.

Just the odd million pound – that's how much Tony Blair's farewell world tour is costing the taxpayer.

£500 million of the 2006/07 NHS budget wasn't spent. That's the consequence of the cutbacks enacted on the orders of Health Sec. Praticia Hewitt to let her make a false claim that the NHS was in 'profit' when that financial year ended. Just another New Labour scam, in fact.

EU blows raspberry at Blair crime plans. Tony Blair was talking tough about deporting foreign criminals last year. This year, his gas is at a peep because the EU has decided that its passport-holders can't be deported even if they commit a serious crime in Britain. [see EU section below]

The government's plan to build 160,000 new homes in the Thames Gateway is an utter shambles, the National Audit Office has found. Worse, nothing much is being done about the infrastructure; roads, schools, shops, hospitals, etc.

The Treasury is on the verge of writing off £5 BILLION, which has been wrongly paid out, or lost due to fraud, over the last 4 years under Gordon Brown's disastrous 'flagship' tax credits scheme.

Home Information Packs will cost 4 times the official government guestimate (no surprise there). They will lumber the country with a total cost of £5 billion by 2020. The scheme will cost home owners at least £340 million MORE than any savings they encourage.
– source: Open Europe, an independent think tank based in London.

"If you can fake sincerity, you've cracked it as a politician. Gordon, you have a long, long way to go." Gordon Brown's lavish, and clearly insincere, praise for his departing party leader, which was also spoilt by the ham acting, and his laughter-provoking protestations of humility when he heard that he wouldn't have to face an election battle, are cited as recent examples of sincerity disasters.

Labour's policy of spot fines for shoplifting has produced a crime wave. Thieves have realized they won't get a criminal record and even if they bother to pay the £80 fine, they are left well in profit.

John Prescott has awarded himself a £15,000 junket to Barbados as a leaving present. Naturally, the British taxpayer is picking up the bill.

The Office of National Statistics is deliberately underestimating the numbers of migrants arriving in Britain as part of Gordon Brown's Stealth Tax campaign. The scam works like this: if the ONS claims that an area has fewer migrants than its previous guess indicated, then the government can pay out less cash to the local councils for their support. As a consequence, the Council Tax goes up to meet the shortfall and Brown can put his hand on his black heart and boast that he hasn't put income tax up.
black blob Immigration minister Liam Byrne is in trouble for deliberately exaggerating the contribution migrants make to the British economy as part of the government's fall-back position for failing to control Britain's borders and lacking the vaguest notion how many immigrants are in the country.

Who blew £400K of the taxpayers' cash jetting round the world and staying in 5-star hotels, sometimes with his wife, over the last 3 years? Sir J. Bourn, the auditor general and the alleged watchdog of government finances. How do we know this? Because it came out under the Freedom of Information Act, which this rotten government is trying to neuter, with the connivance of a Tory jobsworth, so that this type of information on MPs and civil servants remains secret unless leaked.

This rotten government has broken the law yet again. The Home Office is obliged by law to publish an estimate of the cost of Labour's ID card scheme. The last estimate of 2006 was published in October, the first of this year was due in March but New Labour chose, illegally, to publish after the local elections, and also to try to bury the latest rise under Blair's resignation speech.
The 10-year cost of the scam has gone up by £840 million since last October to a new total of £5.75 billion – which excludes an additional £510 million on the Foreign Office budget to cover the cost of consular services associated with issuing ID cards abroad. The guestimate also excludes the cost of installing ID card readers at social security offices, at GP's surgeries for registering new patients, etc.
With the latest increase, the cost of an ID card rises £12 to £105.

Why is Gordon Brown in hiding? The reason why he's not been seen since the local elections could be something to do with the kicking the Labour party got. Or it could be because a Commons report has just revealed that under his personal, 'flagship' tax credit system, £6 billion has been paid out in error. Worse, allowing claims to be made on the Internet via a badly protected government website has handed a further £1 billion to criminal fraudsters, and the Treasury has written off £2 billion of its blunders as unrecoverable; the equivalent of 1p on income tax.

The government has wasted £1 billion through overspending on IT projects over the last 5 years. The Ministry of Defence, DEFRA, the Transport Dept., the Foreign Office and the Home Office are the major wastrels.

Thanks to New Labour's bungling, every family in the country has to pay an extra £390 in taxes this year to pay for gold-plated pensions for 6 million public sector staff. The Treasury sneaked this information out last month, well buried in an report containing obscure statistics, and it has only just come to light.

April 2007
The government has told so many lies that is it afraid to hold an official inquiry into why MI5 didn't pursue two of the 7/7 suicide bombers, who were seen with Omar Kayam, the leader of the failed fertilizer bomb plot, who was gaoled forever this month.
Blair and his confederates are worried about what else would come out of an independent inquiry, including details of their failure to provide MI5 with enough resources to get the job done, and Downing Street's attempts to pin the blame on retired MI5 DG Dame E. Manningham-Buller.

Labour's flagship druggie rehabilitation programme is sinking. G. Brown has decided to cut the funding.

Work & Pension Sec. John Hutton is waging a smear campaign against Ann Abraham, the parliamentary ombudsman, for daring to expose Labour maladministration, the government's role in the collapse of hundreds of company pension schemes and the worthless guarantees issued to now pensionless employees.

Government meddling is bad for your health. The government's Home Information Pack scheme will lead to misguided modifications in older properties in the name of making them (nominally) use less energy. Over-insulation and sealing will make the properties warmer and damper, producing condensation, mould, decay and human health problems such as asthma and bronchial distress.

The Schools Fruit & Vegetables Scheme has achieved nothing. An independent survey has found that giving children free fruit and vegetables has had no lasting effect on their diet and it is just another New Labour gimmick.

Same Old Labour The Treasury is frantically trying to cover up a decision to hide £1 billion of Olympics costs as far back as September 2004; 2 months before the bid went in and 10 months before the IOC's decision was announced. The original estimate of the cost was £2.4 billion. That had gone up to £4.4 billion by September 2004, including the billion pounds hidden by Gordon Brown and his minions. The current cost estimate is £9.4 billion.

Labour is burying bad news again Ofsted is allowed to publish information about good schools but everything about failing schools has been put on hold until after the local elections on May 3rd.

The wheels have come off Blair's plan to save Africa. Launched 2 years ago, it is slipping into the dustbin of history as all the other people's money that he promised to the African masses just ain't appearing.

Brown blamed for backlog in the courts. The chief executive of HM Courts Service is blaming Brown's cuts in the Dept. of Constitutional Affairs' budget for cuts in staff numbers and services, and a growing waiting list for trial dates.

In 2000, T. Blair pledged to pour £750 million into community sports via Sports Action Zones. 7 years later, just £ 8 million has been spent and Britain tops the European league table for fat kids.

"Expensive, slick and totally useless." That's the verdict on a decade of New Labour anti-drugs propaganda, which has done absolutely nothing to cut drug consumption in Britain.

Despite years of complaints, Labour is still supplying troops with sub-standard equipment. This include boots which drop to bits in a hot climate and inadequate body armour and vehicles. The latest disaster on the supply chain is food. Troops returning from patrols are being told there is no grub available and they should go out and buy a pizza, making sure to get a receipt for an expenses claim – which, more often than not, isn't repaid.

The MRSA threat in New Labour's dirty hospitals is driving 50,000 people/year abroad in search of medical treatment.

Education Secretary's A. Johnson's latest Big Ideas:
1. Praise badly behaved schoolkids and reward them with CDs, iPods, mountain bikes and cinema tickets in the hope it will turn yobs into decent citizens.
2. Encourage pupils to do their homework research on internet sites, e.g. Wikipedia, which offer free information which can be full of spoofs, inaccuracies and downright malicious falsehoods.

Talking Brown or talking Balls? New Labour is cutting back severely on its Private Finance Initiative but 2 NHS trust hospitals have enjoyed huge increases in their PFI funding. One hospital serves the constituence of Health Sec. Praticia Hewitt and the other serves the constituency of Brown crony & speechwriter Eddie Balls.
Even worse, 80% of new hospitals are being built in Labour constituencies. Who says this rotten government isn't playing politics with the NHS. And no wonder 93% of doctors don't trust Labour to run the NHS.

New Labour inquest scam Embarrassing details of how service personnel died, e.g through lack of proper equipment and support, can come out at an inquest. Which is why New Labour is letting them pile up at Oxford coroner's court and creating a backlog of 5 years or more. The law could be changed quickly to allow an inquest to be held at a court other than the one nearest to RAF Brize Norton, where the bodies of service personnel are repatriated. But New Labour's war criminals don't want more embarrassing truths to come out until they are safely out of office and enjoying large and undeserved pensions.

A student of the Robert Maxwell School of Pension Administration, Gordon Brown was warned in 1997 that his abolition of pension fund tax relief would destroy the world's best pension system. He ignored the warnings and slapped on his his stealth tax. As a result, he cost the pensions industry over £100 billion, ended a majority of final salary schemes and pushed savers into less secure schemes paying out less. He stole the pensions of private savers while, hypocrite that he is, he is looking forward to a public sector pension pot which it would be illegal to hold in the private sector.

In February 2007, Tony Blair said; "The UK military presence (in Iraq) will continue into 2008." He implied that the troops would leave them, but he was lying again. The Ministry of Defence has plans for tours of duty in the Persian Gulf stretching into 2012.

Government targets for hospital waiting lists are putting lives at risk. Men with prostate cancer are being given radiation treatment to meet New Labour targets before they are assessed to find out if they need it.

Gordon Brown was warned of the consequence of stealing £5 billion/year from private pensions. Documents released under the Freedom of Information Act show quite clearly that officials at the Treasury spelled out the consequences but he went ahead and did it anyway. His decision to wreck 'the best pension system in the world', and his choosing to bluster about it and send his man Ed Balls out to lie about why the tax-grab was done, say rather a lot about the judgement and competence of a man who thinks he's entitled to be the next prime minister.

March 2007
Margaret Beckett got herself into more trouble by offering a mealy-mouthed apology to Argentina over Britain's decision 25 years ago to retake the Falkland Islands after an invasion ordered by the ruling junta in Argentina as a distraction from problems at home.

Margaret Beckett should have been sacked for making such a total bog of setting up the Single Payments Scheme for handing on EU subsidies to farmers, the all-party Commons Environment, Food & Rural Affairs committee has concluded. Her system was such a flop that 96% of farmers still hadn't been paid 7 months after the scheme was set up, several farmers committed suicide because of Beckett's financial chaos and the EU fined the British taxpayer �305 million last month for New Labour's mess. But instead getting the sack, Mrs. Bucket was rewarded for her incompetence by promotion from Environment Sec. to Foreign Sec.

MPs have voted to give themselves an extra £10,000 per year. The cash is supposed to help them to communicate with their constituents but most of them will use it to provide personal propaganda when elections loom and just pocket any cash left over.

As a final 2-fingered salute to the British people, Blair is signing up to a new European constitution. As he's on the way out, he can afford to ignore the opposition in his own country, not to mention that in 23 of the other 26 members, and endorse a plan to sneak the constitution in without subjecting it to the test of national referenda.

The government is setting up a Data Police Force, which will issue fines of £1,000 to anyone who fails to update their personal details on the government's new data bank. Failing to send in a change of address, failing to correct a mistake on the National Identity Register and failing to hand in a dead relative's identity card will all add to the government's coffers.
The master plan is to create a NIR which is complete enough to provide census information so that doing a dodgy census every 10 years can be dropped.

There are now 7 million people on the public payroll – almost a million more than in 1997. Gordon Brown makes the total 5.8 million by his usual swindle of leaving over a million people out of his calculation.

Another Budget Swindle Gordon Brown failed to mention in his Budget speech that he has chopped 3 months off the deadline for submitting self-assessment tax forms. The deadline for the online version of the 2007/08 tax form remains 2009/01/31 but anyone submitting the paper version of the form has to get it delivered by 2008/10/31. Why? Because Brown is hoping to trick a £100 fine out of anyone who misses the new deadline. Not to mention interest on any tax owed.

Brown's budget scuppers Jowell's plans for a gambling empire. The Culture-Vulture Sec. was gnashing her teeth after Brown slapped a 15% tax onto online gambling operations based in the UK and ensured that any businesses which planned to set up here will go elsewhere in search of lower taxes.
It used to be the Labour party's ambition that "Britain should become a world leader in the field of online gambling". That's not going to happen now. And Brown's 50% tax on casino profits means that the Manchester super-casino ain't likely to happen here, either.

The great New Labour roads disaster By failing to provide local authorities with cash for road mending, while requiring them to waste vast amounts of cash on things like diversity training, New Labour has built up an 11-year road mending backlog after 10 years in office.

The Retain Price Index is now 4.6%, the highest inflation level for 16 years. The Consumer Price Index, which excludes housing cost, which is why the government uses it, went up from 2.7% in January to 2.8% in February due to the Chancellor's doubling of Air Passenger Duty.

Productivity in the NHS is down even though pay is up. Since 2003, £19 billion went on NHS wage increases but, thanks to negligent contract negotiatons, there were no corresponding requirements to increase productivity.

New Labour's latest Big Idea is to waste millions of pounds of taxpayers' cash on creating 'virtual bills' for hospital patients, university students, the parents of schoolkids and anyone else who uses state-provided services. The virtual bills will tell them what they are costing the taxpayer to shame them into using public services prudently (something which the Labour government never does).

Yet more dishonesty from Gordon Brown's Treasury : Labour's plans to build 1,500,000 new homes in the south east of England have failed to include the following costs:
• £18 billion for new sewers and treatment plants
• £3 billion for new flood defences
• £10-15 billion for building new reservoirs in drought-prone areas
• Untold billions for new roads, essential services, shops, etc.

Just 1.7% of police officers on duty are out on the streets. The remaining 98.7% are at the police station, filling in forms and fiddling figures to meet New Labour targets.

Just 1.7% of police officers on duty are out on the streets. The remaining 98.3% are down the nick, filling in forms and fiddling figures to meet New Labour targets.

Olympic costs – more government lies Minister for Gambling T. Jowell told the Commons that the 2013 Olympics, sold at £2.4 billion, will now cost £9.3 billion. But she deliberately left out the £1.1 billion more needed to buy land in East London for the Olympic Park.

The government has cut £100 million off next year's science research budget. The money is going to the DTI to cover the cash wasted on propping up the car-maker Rover and to cover future liabilities of British Nuclear Fuels. Most of the money has already been committed post-graduate research projects by the 8 DTI-funded research councils.

No more Standards In Public Life? Sir Alastair Graham's 3-year job as chairman of the Committee for Standards in Public Life ends in April. Tony Blair has made no effort to reappoint or replace him, which is a clear admission that there are NO standards in public life under New Labour.

Spin and no substance The Financial Assistance Scheme, which is supposed to help people whose company pension scheme went bust, has paid out £3.6 million to victims of New Labour's demolition of private pensions and £7 million on staff and other costs.

The Transport Department has abndoned a speed camera safety survey. The study was intended to find out if speed cameras make the roads safer by reducing accidents but the DfT has anticipated the likely outcome and pulled the plug. The government was afraid that their study would show that speed cameras merely move accidents to other places and all they do is extract cash by stealth from motorists while doing nothing for road safety.

The Treasury is so useless at controlling cost-overruns on road building schemes that the average overrun is 30% on 200 of them, and the taxpayer is having to fork out another £2 billion to cover the government's negligence.

The government is planning to sell access to personal information on its ID card data bank. Banks and businesses will have free access, for an appropriate fee, which raises the spectre of criminals setting up phoney businesses for the purpose of identity theft, knowing that any checks made on them will be totally inadequate.

Old Labour hypocrite Gordon Brown doesn't use an NHS dentist. He goes to a private cosmetic dentistry clinic and issues silly press releases on his pain threshold.

It's Tony Blair who hands out honour, not Lord Levy. So if New Labour is positioning Blair's minion as a scapegoat, the master deserves the majority of the blame. And Gordon Brown has to be included. If he is credited with masterminding the 2005 general election campaign, he must have known how much money there was to spend and where it came from.

The government is missing its own green targets. The Sustainable Development Commission, the government's own green watchdog, has found that New Labour is failing with regard to carbon emissions, water consumption and waste reduction while urging everyone else to be environmentally friendly.

A £15 surcharge from next month. That's how much everyone fined in a court will have to pay under the government's latest scam. The cash is alleged to be going to compensate the victims of crime and provide jobs for a new tier of New Labour dependents.

The government has tried to bury its plans to be even softer on shoplifters. If the thief hasn't been caught before, handing back the goods and saying sorry will be the penalty. And if the thief has been caught before but the goods are worth less than £200, then the penalty will be an £80 fine and no criminal record.

New Labour's Daylight Robbery Bill The Tribunals, Courts & Enforcement Bill, currently going through parliament, will give bailiffs the power to kick someone's door down to seize goods, but there is no provision for regulating the conduct of bailiffs and no protection for their victims against extortionate fees and excessive charges.

MRSA in hospitals is a consequence of New Labour's targets. A study by the Department of Health last year found that hospitals with a bed occupancy rate of more than 85% have an MRSA rate 16% above the average because cleaners are unable to do a thorough job of disinfection between patients. The MRSA rate is 42% above the average when the occupancy rate exceeds 90%. These occupancy rates are a product of Labour party targets for waiting times and the government's failure to spend cash directed to the NHS effectively and wisely.

The value of personal pensions has collapsed since 1997. Someone paying £200/month into a personal pension would have received an annual income of £20,500 in 1997. As a result of 10 years of New Labour, that return is down to £4,600 per annum in 2007.

The government, which is supposed to be trimming its bloated staff, is spending an average of £50 million per year on employing expensive temporary staff from agencies. So much for G. Brown's alleged efficiency review; a.k.a. Gordon's smoke 'n' mirrors scam.

No one is to blame for the Home Office's latest failure. An internal inquiry has cleared everyone from Ministers to tea persons of blame for failing to add to the Police National Computer, details of Britons convicted abroad of serious crimes. The Home Office whitewash budget is 500% overspent at the time of writing.
Even Hom Office minsiter Joan Ryan, who lied about her part in the mess and sat on a warning letter from the police for months, is innocent.

Serious criminals are escaping gaol thanks to New Labour's failure to build prisons, the Sentencing Guidelines Council has admitted. Run by Lord Chief Justice Phillips, who doesn't think criminals should go to gaol anyway, the SGC has found that 33% of burglars go free, compared to 21% in 1999, and twice as many heroin dealers now go free compared to 1999.

Corby in Northamptonshire is losing 80 Prison Service clerical jobs. Why? Because the people are too white and they don't contribute to New Labour's diversity targets. The blatantly racialist decision has caught the attention of the Commission for Racial Equality.

£870, or more, worse off over the last 4 years; that's what way above inflation rises in Council Tax and the prices of water, gas and electricty have done to most households in Britain. The average cost of C-Tax and these utilities has gone up by 50% over a period when pensions went up by only 13%, thanks to Gordon Brown's incompetence.

The shambles of New Labour's NHS training scheme has left 8,000 junior doctors, trained at a cost of £2 BILLION, out of a job.

February 2007
The government's failure to pay EU subsidies to farmers via the Rural Payments Agency has cost the British taxpayer an EU fine of £305 million.

Fortnightly refuse collections are contributing to the spread of disease. A report commissioned by DEFRA this year has confirmed warnings issued last year when the government decided that refuse need not be collected once per week. The policy is encouraging the growth of the populations of vermin and insects in the home environment. The mania for home composting, in particular, has contributed to a 30% growth in the business of rat exterminators.

Half of The NHS hospitals are imposing MINIMUM waiting times for operations. Even though the staff and equipment are available, and the staff are being paid anyway, operations are being posponed to save cash to meet Health Sec. Praticial Hewitt's target of balancing the NHS budget by the end of this financial year.

The Equal Opportunities Commission faces the prospect of shopping itself! From April, the organization will be violating a new Gender Equality Duty, which requires all public bodies to have equal numbers of men and women on the staff. The EOC is overloaded with women, who currently hold 70% of the top jobs.

Another fine New Labour cock-up! As a result of the latest rise in the minimum wage, carers who work 16 hours per week have slipped over the threshold for the carers' allowance by about a pound. Which means that they stand to lose the £40/week carer's allowance. More threshold problems caused by G. Brown not knowing the consequences of his dabblings.

Nine Billion Pounds! That's the latest figure being tossed around by the Treasury and the Dept. of Sport & Culture as the eventual cost of the 2012 Olympics, which the government sold on the basis of a budget of £2.35 billion. G. Brown's meddling is getting the blame for the mess.

The Ministry of Defence has blown £18,000 on psychics. The plan was to find out if they could find Osama bin Laden. They couldn't.

Gordon Brown's flagship Sure Start plan has hit the rocks. It wasted most of its £1 billion start-up budget on jobs for the staff, buildings and equipment. The plan was started in 1998 to bring health care and education to poor children, but an investigation by a team of Department of Education academics concluded in 2006 that the plan had flopped. But their report was buried by the government.

New Labour has wasted £3 billion on messing about with the NHS. All its 'reforms' have managed to do is demoralize the staff, shatter confidence in the NHS, give people MRSA and create something which looks very like the system that was in place in 1997, before they started all the messing about.

Stealth taxes have DOUBLED the effective rate of income tax since 1997. This has come about through Gordon Brown's refusal to change tax thresholds and allowances in line with average earnings, and amounts to robbery on a grand scale.

What the hell for? Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, who doesn't have a job, has had his budget increased by 30% (that's £2.6 million, folks!) to help him carry out his non-existent duties.

The government is going soft on its commitment to deport foreign criminals. Irish criminals are a special case and they are being allowed to stay on and continue their criminal careers in Britain. "An illegal sham," is what a judge called Tony Blair's public consultation process on proposals to build a new generation of nuclear power stations. Following complaints from Greenpeace that Blair & Co. had already made their minds up before the 2005 energy review was published, Mr. Justice Sullivan in the High Court decided that the government's 'consultation process' had been 'misleading', 'seriously flawed' and 'procedurally unfair'. Vital information on the costs of nuclear power stations and the disposal of nuclear waste had been concealed, and the waste disposal details in the consultation document were 'misleading'.
As a result of the challenge, all the money spent on the fake consulation has been wasted and the whole thing will have to be done again. Which means that Tony Blair won't have enough time left in office to present his planned White Paper on nuclear power. Which is what the whole bogus consultation was all about; the legacy thing.

Asleep at the Wheel? Bernard Matthews is being threatened with prosecution, fines and 2 years in gaol over the filthy state of his turkey ranches in East Anglia, but where were the DEFRA inspectors while the buildings were going to hell? And why did DEFRA's inspectors let the turkey ranches stay squalid? Or has New Labour abandoned the concept of public health inspectors on some idiotic human rights ground?

A classic New Labour screw-up! John Reid is busy boasting about his plan to create 8,000 new prison places sometime in the future while grim, grey Gordon Brown is dourly refusing to stump up the cash to fund them.

£30 million down the drain! That's how much the government has encouraged local councils to waste on traning staff to be 'smoking police', whose job it will be to sneak around pubs, clubs and other public places hoping to hand out penalty tickets to smokers.

Another of Gordon Brown's claims has been shot down in flames. He brags that he has turned Britain into a paradise for children. But a Unicef report puts Britain 21, behind Poland, the Czech Republic and Portugal, in a Quality of Life for Children league table. The USA came 20th.

The government is spending £137 million per year on advertising. This is twice what Tesco and Marks & Spencer spend.

The Downing Street website keeps crashing. Why? Because someone was pratt enough to let a voter post a petition against Tony Blair's plans for constant monitoring of motorists and his 'pay as you drive' scheme. Over a million people have registered their opposition to the idea and the government is limiting access to the website, so that it keeps crashing, to avoid getting a protest vote of 2 million.

Another instance of New Labour's collective eye off the ball! The government has neglected to have members of the Territorial Army made exempt from new EU regulations on the working hours for lorry drivers. Which means that part-time soldiers will no longer be able to drive army vehicles at weekends if they have used up their driving quota during the working week.

The government's plans to close hospitals are such a good idea that 13 minister have been involved in protest campaigns against closures on their own doorsteps.

New Labour has given up on education – it's official! Gordon Brown's latest Big Idea is to compel employers to train their staff to the standard of 5 decent GCSE passes as they can no longer expect to get that sort of education in schools run by New Labour.

Don't expect to see an NHS dentist before April. A slight cock-up on the financial front has meant that there is no cash to pay for NHS treatments in lots of areas for the rest of the financial year. Another fine financial mess Gordon Brown has gotten us into!

The National Audit Office has found that Gordon Brown has been lying about the savings from his efficiency drive. He claims that £13.3 billion has been saved but the NAO will let him have only £3 billion as Brown has been up to his usual dodgy accounting practices. But honesty is the last thing anyone expects from the whole New Labour crew now.

The government has abandoned its 2005 election promise to build 50 new community hospitals by 2010. Just 4 schemes are in the pipeline. And at existing hospitals, patients are being shunted out of A&E departments into 'assessment units' as a fiddle for meeting the government target of patients being treated within 4 hours.

10-year biometric passports contain a chip which is guaranteed only for 2 years. So any chips which fail will have to be replaced at the taxpayer's expense. Another fine New Labour mess-up.

Gordon Brown keeps putting off the government's next Comprehensive Spending Review. It is due in April but he has pushed it back to October. He's hoping against hope that he won't be Chancellor when his policy of wasting vast amount of cash on the public sector hits the buffers. Another reason for worry is that his stealth taxes are set to hit £10 BILLION PER YEAR for the next 5 years to buffer his financial recklessness and bungling.

January 2007
Wasted opportunities = recklessness with public safety. The government has had abundant opportunities to build new prisons on sites which already have planning permission and sites which do not need planning permission. But it failed to do so. Part of the problem is Gordon Brown's attempts to sabotage the ambitions of Labour leadership rivals at the Home Office by refusing to release the cash for building prisons and the rest is down to New Labour's endemic ineptness.
Of the 9 prisons built since 1997, 7 were the result of plans by the previous Tory government.

It was all a bit of a laugh, the doctor who negotiated the current contract for GPs reckons. He never thought the government would go for the silly offer that he made. But they did. And now New Labour is planning to pay GPs even more to resume working in the evening and at weekends.

£4.8 billion of taxpayers' cash; that's how much Blair's war in Iraq has wasted.

The Blair Legacy – Soft On Crime Fewer thieves go to gaol under New Labour and their sentences are shorter. The same applies to violent criminals. And the number of police officers is falling.

The root cause of the prison service crisis is widely seen as Gordon Brown's ambition. He refused to make cash available to build enough prisons to sabotage the careers of rivals who took on the job of Home Secretary; any who didn't lose the job through their own incompetence, greed and/or corruption.

The government has approved plans for 145 new casinos in 49 town. And despite all the fuss over the 'super casino', the government also plans to let existing casinos trade up to 'super' status without having to go through an extended licensing process. It will also let casinos and betting shops advertise on TV, in newspapers and on football shirts from September 1st, 2007.

Government U-Turn – 24 hour drinking is a bad idea! After spending years trying to make pubs stay open 24 hours per day to maximize tax revenues, the government is now trying to make it harder for pubs to extend their opening hours to cut down on public drunkenness. A penny must have dropped somewhere.

People who install wind turbines will have to pay more Council Tax. Even though they are trying to save the planet, and give themselves a lower electricity bill, the turbine will count as a home improvement, which will raise the value of their property. And under New Labour's new rules, that means their council can demand more money from them.

New Labour is discriminating against university candidates with educated parents in the name of social engineering. In future, candidates will have to declare on their application form if their parents went through the higher education system so that universities and colleges can meet government targets for 'wider participation benchmarks' by excluding potential students whose parents have degrees.

Another empty promise from Tony Blair – he said he'd deport the 'vast bulk' of foreign criminals but the UK Borders Bill, which was supposed to make that happen, is stuffed full of exceptions; including bogus human rights grounds to not kicking bad guys out of the country.

Waiting lists for prisons is Home Sec. John Reid's latest Big Idea. Which means that burglars, drug dealers, etc. can stay in business for 3-6 months more before they trott off to their local gaol to serve a severely abbreviated sentence.

Thousands of criminals are being freed early, hundreds more aren't going to gaol, where they belong. This is the consequence of Gordon Brown's failure to cough up the cash needed to build more prisons and New Labour's collective blame-shedding match with the judiciary.

Council Tax will have to rise to pay for New Labour's 24-hour drinking culture. The government introduced a system of completely unnecessary, new licences when the Licensing Act came into force in November 2005. But surprise! It didn't cough up the cash to cover the extra costs involved.

Racialism and political correctness is to be built into all areas of the school curriculum. This is New Labour's latest big idea for education.

New Labour is closing police stations in addition to post offices. 582 local cop shops have gone since May 1997; one per week.

The number of people with a company or personal pension has fallen under New Labour. 60% of the working population has such a pension scheme in 1997. Only 39% have one now.

Due to Gordon Brown's failure to increase tax threshold in line with price inflation, 41% of households will be liable for inheritance tax this year compared to 34% last year. Inheritance Tax is particularly pernicious as it is a tax on already taxed savings and investments – i.e. a tax on financial prudence.
The response from the Treasury to this uncomfortable truth was the obvious lie that 94% of people will pay no inheritance tax in 2009.

Burglars have a better than even chance of not going to gaol under New Labour. This is due to softer sentencing policies and the government's failure to build new prisons.

More talk without action from Blair. Despite his promise of October 2006 to give the forces in Afghanistan whatever they need to get the job done, the army is still short of helicopters, mind protected vehicles, night-vision equipment and a host of other vital bits of kit. All requests to the MoD have been turned down and Blair has done nothing to bang some heads together. Probably because he knows that one of the heads in need of banging belongs to Mr. Purse-Strings – Gordon 'The Meany' Broon.

Smoking cannabis is okay for kids under 16, the government thinks. Police officers are no longer allowed to arrest junior pot-smokers as New Labour wants to spare them the humiliation of being dragged off to a police station if they commit a crime.

Firemen are no longer allowed to climb stepladders under the government's current health & safety regulations. As a consequence, they can no longer fit household smoke alarms because being up a stepladder presents an 'unacceptable risk'.

Tony Blair's eagerness to increase the number of votes cast in elections has left the postal voting system wide open to fraud, the Committee on Standards in Public Life has found. Malpractice is a real problem in some areas of the country and the changes to polling methods have had only a marginal effect on voting.

The government is buying votes in Wales by awarding a £16 billion contract to train members of the armed forces to the defence firm Qinetiq, which was privatized last year, at great benefit to usual suspects, with the government retaining a 19% stake. Shifting training to Wales will put money into marginal Labour constituencies, and training establishments in Conservative and Liberal constituencies will have to be closed as surplus to requirements.

Disposable income has stagnated under Labour. Higher prices, higher taxes and huge energy bills thanks to the failure of the Labour government to regulate the industry have meant that incomes are now failing to keep up with prices. The main problem is Gordon Brown's Stealth Taxes, which are used to fund Labour's tax & waste policies. Which explains why Brown is so eager to get out of the Treasury and into 10 Downing Street before the wheels come off completely.

Gordon Brown's attempts to wrap himself in the UK flag foundered on the rock of hypocrisy. He chose not to go to an official function commemorating the 300th anniversary of the Union. He preferred to shoot off to India on a junket instead.

New Labour's Building Schools for the Future programme has flopped. In 2004, they promised that 100 new schools would have been built by the end of 2007. But due to bureaucratic foot-dragging, only 5 contracts have been signed and no more than 14 new schools will have been built by the end of this year.

NHS hospital waiting lists are shorter in Labour constituencies. On average, people have to wait an extra week to get into hospital in a Liberal constituency and it's an extra 10 days in a Tory constituency. This is because hospitals in Labour areas get more money under New Labour's plan to play politics with the Health Service.
UPDATE As well as NHS swindles, New Labour is also throwing lottery cash at its own supporters. On average, Labour areas get TWICE as much lottery cash as Tory areas, and of the 50 constituencies getting the most lottery cash, 34 are Labour ones and just 4 are Tory constituencies.
Worse, this money should be coming from general taxation but the Labour party is plundering the lottery instead.

John Reid breaks another promise. He pledged to get rid of 15 failing senior officials as part of his Home Office restructuring plan. 3 have been moved, 3 demoted and 3 allowed to retire early. The rest are still in place and none of the failures has been required to resign.

New Labour is about to let crime soar. Why? Because Gordon Brown has frozen the Home Office police budget, which means that chief police officers will have to hire cheaper civilian staff, and the number of coppers will drop. And once criminals realize what has happened, they will make hay.

13 government ministers are, or have been, involved in campaigns against the Blair regime's creeping closures at NHS hospitals.

The Home Office has been lying about its failure to get the records of Britons convicted abroad entered on the Police National Computer. Each and every Home Office minister is denying any knowledge of the problem. But the police have proved that a request for funding to get the job done was TURNED DOWN by the Home Office in October 2006.

The Assets Recovery Agency is for the chop. This New Labour Big Idea for hitting criminals in the pocket was launched with the usual spin 4 years ago. It has wasted £100 million of taxpayers' cash and raised a paltry £15 million from confiscating the assets of criminals.

The government is diverting £1 billion of lottery money from 86,000 community projects to the London Olympics, the costs of which are soaring out of control.

Blair peerage nominations illegal. The House of Lords Appointments Committee has announced that nominees must have have made a credible contribution to public service, and giving, or lending, money to the Labour party doesn't count as doing something for the public good.

The government is lying about the cost of living. According to official figures, it has risen by 15% since 1997. But if the things they left our are added in – rises in housing costs, Council Tax, rail fares, energy bills, etc., then the true increase since 1997 comes to 72%. Each British family is paying £9,000 more in tax (including Council Tax), a rise of 81% on 1997.

The British state pension is the worst in Europe, a survey by Help The Aged has found. Comparing the basic state pension with the average salary, even pensioners in Estonia, Latvia & Slovakia are better off than their British counterparts.

The government is down-grading hospitals because it claims that it has made a sustained investment in community services. Health Sec. Praticia Hewitt insists that the chronically sick can now receive proper care at home instead of in hospital. But what she omits is that only 1,200 of the 3,000 'community matrons' promised have been recruited, and training new district nurses is being cut at a time when 25% of them are approaching retirement age.

New Labour is abandoning the justice system. At present, 11% of crimes attract a penalty notice for £50 or £80 – which costs £91 to enforce. Shoplifting, causing criminal damage and being drunk and disorderly have all become 'decriminalized' offences, and if the criminal is an allegedly penniless foreigner, there's a good chance that no action will be 'in the public interest'.

New Labour Values: The government is to spend £2.3 billion on converting the Ministry of Defence HQ in Whitehall into a palace for civil servants but it expects the troops and their families to live in squalid slums. And who's in charge of distributing cash in this government? Some bloke called Brown, isn't it?

More "Cronies In Action" Postwatch, which is supposed to look out for the consumer's interests, is being packed with Labour party members and supporters to ensure that the government's plan to close 2,500 post offices gets no more than cosmetic opposition.

Slum landlord Tony Blair says he thinks about our troops every day 'with admiration and thanks'. Which makes it very difficult to explain why he expects the armed forces and their families to live in rotting, squalid slums, why he sends troops into foreign wars with weapons, clothing and vehicles which are inadequate, and why his government is turning the Royal Navy into a mothballed joke.

Britain is experiencing an explosion in the populations of rats and mice thanks to Recycling Mania. The National Pest Technicians Association blames it on the government policy of cutting the frequency of refuse collection to fortnightly, the use of composting bins, storing refuse in plastic sacks and providing recycling bins which are too small. Local councils charging rip-off rates for pest extermination (e.g. £65 a go instead of a 'free' service which is paid for through the Council Tax) has also contributed to the plague.

The NHS is wasting £25 billion per year through mismanagement. Spending has doubled since 1999 but due to the government's failure to make sure that the money is spent on things that matter, activity, quality and access to treatment have risen by only 20-30%.
Worse, the government has calculated that the NHS will have to sack 37,000 staff due to its cash crisis. The government plans to use the threat of unemployment to reduce pay rates, and there will be no jobs for 3,200 fully trained consultants in 2010, which is why the Labour Party is talking about getting GPs to do some of their work.

Labour's 10-year transport plan has been abandoned. Launched in 2000, it promised to improve capacity on the rain network. But what actually happened is that stations were closed and instead of more track and more trains, what we got was higher prices as a means of reducing congestion by forcing poor people to stop travelling by train.

Better Out Than In Meanwhile, in Europe . . .
where employees of the European Commission's 27 ministries can be sacked only for breaching the code of conduct. If they can't do their job, they are transferred until they end up somewhere where even gross incompetence doesn't matter.

June 2007
EU destroys British thermometer industry. Banning the use of mercury in thermometers and barometers has put British workers out of a job of the sake of eliminating the use of 76 lbs of mercury per year. But when the incandescent lamp is banned in 2 years' time, there will be tons of mercury sloshing around, as it is a vital component of fluorescent lamps. And, surprise! The EU has excluded mercury in fluorescent lamps from its general ban on dumping toxic compounds in landfill sites.

The Merkel Plan A new treaty having the same legal substance as the rejected EU constitution but camouflaged with different terminology and presentational changes to disguise what it really is, and to outflank the referendum lobby as neatly as the Maginot Line was outflanked in 1940.

The EU plan to let livestock breeders feed dead pigs to chickens and dead chickens to pigs has hit the buffers. Supermarkets don't want anything to do with it because they think the public won't buy the meat products.

May 2007
Yet another reason to be thankful for EU membership. The EU has decided that any criminal holding an EU passport should no longer be liable for deportation after committing a crime serious enough to merit a gaol sentence. Which will put some 3,000 such criminals on the streets of Britain and free to pursue their life of crime with the European Commission's blessing.

Who's the bigger carbon criminal? The EU has continuously attacked the US as a carbon criminal country but this month, the official carbon emission figures for 2006 were released. Emissions from the USA were down by 1.6%. Emissions from the EU were up by 1.5%.

Don't expect cheap fluorescent light bulbs while Mandelson is around. The EU is planning to ban the sale of incandescent light bulbs in 2009. At present, anyone making the switch to fluorescent light bulbs early is being hit by a zonking £1.80 a time import tax on bulbs imported from China. The tax should have been abolished in 2006 but Mandelson decided to keep it going. And no doubt his successor will do the same. So it looks like stocking up on incandescent light bulbs while they are still around makes even more sense than it did when the ban was announced.

New Labour & the EC surrender! The European Commission, and its New Labour clients, had abandoned the plan to force British traders to stop using Imperial measurements. Pints, miles, pound & ounces; they are all safe and they can be used beyond 2009 without fear of a £2,000 fine. Why? Because it has taken the EC well over a decade to realize that the United States also uses its own form of Imperial measurements and banning them might damage trade with the US.
p.s. The Imperial measurement system has not been legitimized. It has merely received an 'infinite extension'.

April 2007
The EU's Trek of Shame Moving the EU parliament from Brussels to Strasbourg for the financial benefit of the French, costs £180 million per year and releases into the atmosphere, an unnecessary 20.3 kilotonnes per year of carbon dioxide. This homage to French vanity is higher than the annual carbon dioxide emissions of each of 134 sovereign states, viz.:- Afghanistan, Albania, American Samoa, Angola, Antigua and Barbuda, Armenia, Aruba, Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Benin, Bermuda, Bhutan, Bolivia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Botswana, British Virgin Islands, Brunei, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cambodia, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Cayman Islands, Central African Republic, Chad, Comoros, Cook Islands, Costa Rica, C�te d'Ivoire, Croatia, Cyprus, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Djibouti, Dominica, El Salvador, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Estonia, Ethiopia, Falkland Islands, Faroe Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, Fiji, French Polynesia, French Guiana, Gabon, Georgia, Ghana, Gibraltar, Greenland, Grenada, Guadeloupe, Guam, Guatemala, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, Iceland, Jamaica, Jordan, Kenya, Kiribati, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Latvia, Lebanon, Lesotho, Liberia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Macedonia, Madagascar, Malawi, Maldives, Mali, Malta, Martinique, Mauritania, Mauritius, Moldova, Mongolia, Montserrat, Mozambique, Myanmar, Namibia, Nauru, Nepal, Netherlands Antilles, New Caledonia, Nicaragua, Niger, Niue, Palau, Panama, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay, Puerto Rico, Republic of the Congo, R�union, Rwanda, Saint Helena, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Samoa, S�o Tom� and Pr�ncipe, Senegal, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Slovenia, Solomon Islands, Somalia, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Suriname, Swaziland, Tajikistan, Tanzania, The Gambia, Togo, Tonga, Tuvalu, U.S. Virgin Islands, Uganda, Uruguay, Vanuatu, Western Sahara, Yemen, Zambia and Zimbabwe

The latest EU Lie / Own Goal : The media commissioner, V. Reding, would like us to believe that .eu is the 7th most popular top level domain extension on the planet. But what she's keeping quiet about is that 80% of .eu registrations were filed either (1) as duplicates (which are rarely used) of existing web addresses as a protective measure, or (2) by cyber-squatters hoping to be bought out at a vast profit.
Worse, the EU's own website is based on .int extensions and switching to .eu has broken millions of links which will take 'several years to put right'.

The European Commission is planning to waste € million on setting up a search engine as a European rival to Google, Ixquick, et al.

The corruption gravy train rolls on and on . . . 160 police officers made 40 dawn raids in 4 countries at the beginning of April 2007. Their haul included 3 men of modest stature in the EU heirarchy, who have been swanning around in fancy cars and living it up for 10 years or more. In the EU, where corruption is a way of life, nobody thought twice about their lifestyles. The cash to fund their conspicuous consumerism is thought to have come from the usual source – contract scams and lax management.

Brown handbagged by EU The Treasury has been trying to unpick Tony Blair's 2005 giveaway of a big chunk of the British rebate from the EU budget for the last 2 years. But Brown has been told that there will be no deal on 'absent trader' VAT fraud if he doesn't surrender the cash. So he has caved in. A Treasury spokesman said, "There is no link between the two dossiers," as his nose grew a couple of feet.

March 2007
The EU is planning to waste £747 billion over the next 14 years. The money will be going on cutting emissions of greenhouse gases from the EU nations by 20% by 2020. This will reduce total human emissions of greenhouse gases by 3%. As 99.72% of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere comes from natural sources, and only 0.28% comes from human sources, the EU's planned cut will reduce total greenhouse gases in the atmosphere by a massive 0.0035% – a totally insignificant amount, which will have no effect at all on the Earth's climate.

The EU is just a hollow sham! Luxembourg lawyer Pierre Pescatore has revealed that the "Treaty of Rome", which was signed 50 years ago by the original 6 EEC countries, was just a hollow sham. All that was signed was a thick wodge of blank paper with printed first and last pages. Why? Because the signing ceremony was rushed forward to get it out of the way in case de Gaulle was elected president of France again and scuppered the whole deal. So the French are to blame for the shambles of the European Union because they effectively handed the eurocrats a blank script.

Europe's leaders are banning cheap light bulbs within 3 years. In the name of waste-of-time carbon emission reduction, everyone is going to have to switch to dimmer fluorescent bulbs sold at rip-off prices.

The European Commission has done a dirty deal with US airlines, under which they will have access to London's Heathrow airport but British airlines will get nothing. Only American Airlines and United Airlines can operate services between Heathrow and the USA at present. The deal will allow Delta and Continental Airlines, which have to use Gatwick, to move to Heathrow. But the ban will remain on British airlines transporting passengers within US borders, e.g. by picking up passengers on America's east coast on flights continuing to the west coast.

February 2007
The European parliament has done a U-turn on its blanket smoking ban. Smoking will now be possible in 'designated smoking areas'.

The Germans are trying desperately to revive the rejected European constitution by stealth. Prime Minister Angela Merkel is busy trying to do dirty deals with fellow conspirators.

A culture of lies is so deeply ingrained at the European Commission that it even lies about how many members of staff it has. The EC website admits to having 25,000 staff. But the British think tank Open Europe has found that the real total is over 54,000. The extra staff are hidden away in low-profile agencies, e.g. the Community Plant Variety Office and the European Personnel Selection Agency. The EC is currently recruiting like mad and opening two new subsidiary departments this year. No bloody wonder it costs so much! And no wonder the auditors keep refusing to certify its dodgy accounts.

January 2007

People who lost a pension when their company went bust were failed by New Labour, the European Court of Justice has ruled. The government had a duty to protect these people but it has been ignored them, or swindling them, for years.

The European Commission talks big and doesn't deliver. Again! The EC announced that it would curb carbon emissions from vehicles, in a flood of self-congratulation, at the beginning of the month. But the grand ambition has foundered on the twin rocks of practicality and getting agreement from the member states, especially Germany and the UK, the main paymasters.

The EU's auditors have found that just 7% of the budget has been spent legally and with proper records. Which means that they will refuse to approve the accounts for the £80 billion EU budget for the 12th year in succession.

The EU is planning to put the price of a new car up by €2,500 in the name of saving the planet. The real reason is to enforce an arbitrary emissions limit which will have no effect what so ever on climate change as long as the likes of China and the USA don't bother about the amount of carbon dioxide which they produce.

The EU plans to take control of roads throughout the community. The EU will set 'harmonized' speed limits and blood-alcohol levels, it will decide when drivers have to use headlights and it will make drivers re-apply for a licence every 10 years. Member states will be allowed to change their law voluntarily to bring them into line with new codes, which will be enforced if there if the volunteering is not quick enough.

An EU directive has resulted in the abolition of trained watermen on the Thames. Captains of passenger and freight vessels used to have to go through a 5-year training course before obtaining a licence to work on the Thames. But thanks to the EU, anyone from Europe can obtain an operator's licence for the stretch between Woolwich and Putney after spending just 60 days on the river over a period of 6 months. European skippers need no special training at all for other parts of the Thames. And in Britain, the training period has been reduced from 5 years to just two.
UPDATEThe EU is blaming the above on New Labour's incompetence and their eagerness to enforce their own, twisted, inaccurate interpretations of new legislation.

The pauper nations Bulgaria & Romania were admitted to the EU on January 1st, making the 25 into 27 and creating more work for the translation industry.