Five years ago I shot to number 1 in Google for Carol Kirkwood naked with one of my shortest posts and this continues to attract weather girl fetishists from all over the UK.
Carol appears to have blown her entire wardrobe budget on perhaps as many as half-a-dozen flasher macs in a range of pastel colours.
I reproduce a couple here for the benefit of Kirkwood fans, but feel a need to point out that she remains far too mumsy for my tastes and I find her rambling weather forecasts virtually indecipherable.
I imagine it’s just me, but the Muzak-style noise made by Sky boxes while you’re desperately searching the programme guide for something to watch is on the verge of driving me mad, or at least reaching for the mute button.
It’s trying so hard to be inoffensive, it can’t help but be totally offensive.
Worse, it reminds me of the worst restaurant meal I ever had. This was taken, not surprisingly, in Wales. The starter was a prawn cocktail, the sauce of which might have been made by mixing tomato ketchup and mayonnaise, it came with a modest, fresh-ish side salad; the main was a piece of salmon that had most likely been frozen a decade before, it came with a modest, not-so-fresh side salad; then there was cheese and biscuits, doorstops of near-frozen coloured cheddars, which came with a modest, wilted side salad.
But what topped the meal, was not so much the recurring side-salad but the inoffensive music they played; Chris De Burgh on bloody pan pipes… over and over again.
Nevertheless, we should spare a thought for the poor session musicians who churn out this crap. Nobody grows up with dreams of making inoffensive Muzak for set-top boxes. The chances are that these people once had dreams of stadium gigs, world tours, groupies and drug fuelled orgies. Instead, they are zombie musicians.
I’m not one for boring people with tales of woe around boring IT stuff, but I have found myself contacting technical support lines a fair bit lately. And going through all that restarting, reinstalling, waiting in online chat rooms, waiting on the phone… it really take it out of you.
And the thing is, there’s no real satisfaction at the end of it.
The best part of a day spent setting up a wireless printer is a day wasted, especially when it turns out that Dell reckon the only to get it working is to not bother securing the network; ‘people will be able to use your internet, but probably not see your files.’
There comes a point where you have to give up and send it back.
Yet there can be no real job satisfaction for the techie either. Days spent in an internet chat room telling people to click start, then control panel… must really take it out of you. And at the end, somebody’s printer might do what it’s supposed to do.
I can’t understand why they don’t all just top themselves.
With the MPs’ expenses scandal so dominant, its seems odd not say something. But the affair is unrelentingly depressing and the speaker’s resignation will have little effect.
Like so many people, MPs feel they should be paid more than they are, but they instinctively know 75 per cent of voters are against them. So rather than pay themselves what they think they’re worth, they like to pretend to be getting by on what they imagine to be a relatively modest wage for the job.
Topping up their salaries with expenses isn’t fiddling in the usual sense, but a long term deliberate strategy to fool the public that they’re getting real value for money.
Too slowly, MPs are coming to realise that the public are not happy and should never be. Parliament should be transparent and that means MPs’ remuneration should be easy to understand.
Yet even those who think they understand the public’s anger are out of touch. Hazel Blears seemed to think waving a cheque about on TV made things all right. Few people who had wrongly claimed £13,332 could make things all right simply by paying the money back after they’d been caught. Most would be prosecuted as well. Many of Blears’ Salford constituents will be earning the minimum wage and won’t make £13k in a year. They won’t be impressed that writing big cheques is so easy for Blears.
Today Gordon Brown emailed Labour Party members to report that the party’s National Executive Committee has established a panel to scrutinise expenses claims made over the last four years. It will have the power to deselect MPs. This will take time and many, including Stuart Bruce, appear to believe every Labour MP should be put up for reselection.
Unfortunately, Luton South has already shown that local parties cannot be relied upon to do the right thing. Here one of the worst offenders may now be challenged by Esther Rantzen. Putting everyone up for reselection would not deliver the result required: heads must roll.
Given that heads must roll individual MPs must receive a fair hearing. Provided those MPs who have most wantonly abused the system are stood down, the NEC will be seen to have taken the right approach, even though it offers little relief in the short term.
Anyway. Watching this video, which Alan Duncan reckons is an unacceptable stunt may cheer you up. The funniest moment comes when the real gardener asks if Duncan knows what’s happening and seems to accept that he does…
I was never enthused by the congestion charge. I don’t think pricing poorer people off the roads is the way to go, but I voted yes because it was to unlock Transport Innovation Fund money and it was hard to imagine the city securing a similar level of investment any other way. And having voted yes, I was very disappointed to be on the losing side.
But this plan, drawn up after the city so forcefully rejected TIF, appears to deliver the key benefits for less than half the price. It really is difficult to see what extra – apart from a congestion charge – TIF would have delivered.
That leaves me feeling very silly, especially given that Communique, the No Campaign’s PR agency, invited me to help them out and I turned them down. Now they’re up for a major award.
Manchester will finally get a decent public transport system, but the city will not be grateful. The investment clearly could and should have been signed off years ago, dragging the government kicking and screaming has been a costly exercise.
‘It is ironic that the only people without the freedom to take a pay cut are those on or just above the minimum wage. How can that be fair?’ – Tory MP, Christopher Chope
It appears that the Conservatives are so confident of victory at the next general election they are already introducing legislation to take us back to the 1980s, with a mischievously named Employment Opportunities Bill.
The main opportunity it offers is to work for less than the minimum wage. It is simply unfair, claims Christopher Chope MP, that people earning no more than £5.73 an hour have had to sit by as their higher earning colleagues have taken pay cuts. Chope reckons that many of these people would like to show solidarity with their fellow workers by taking a pay cut of their own. But the draconian Labour government won’t let them.
The other opportunity is for asylum seekers, who would be given the right to work. It will be interesting to see how this provision, which is worth supporting (although it would be far better to speed up the system so asylum applications are dealt with before would-be refugees have a chance to settle), plays with Tory supporters.
Labour really needs to get its act together and give Chope every opportunity to promote his Employment Opportunities Bill. Voters deserve to know a lot more about the opportunities a Tory government would open up for them.
Chope and his colleagues may be beyond parody, but they are both serious and dangerous: visit Wage Concern and sign the petition.
My recent post on Manchester’s ID card trial has prompted my local Lib Dem MP, John Leech, to email pointing out that he is the only Manchester MP to consistently oppose ID cards and vote against them. He also points out that Mike Joslin, who so naively argued for them in a student newspaper is a very active campaigner in support of Lucy Powell, John’s Labour opponent, who John reckons is an ID card supporter.
John then complains that I treat him most unfairly on this blog. And that hurts.
So to be fair, John is not all bad. I’ve asked to sign a number of Early Day Motions since he was elected on all sorts of issues and most of the time he’s obliged me.
Elections are like wars and so it’s often forgotten that Liberal Democrat and Labour Party members often agree on a great many individual issues. In Manchester the lack of a significant Conservative presence further exaggerates the differences between us and as a result it can all get a bit personal and petty at times, which is unfortunate and reflects badly on us all.
Nevertheless, while we may agree on many issues I see no evidence of any underlying philosophy or set of principles behind Liberal Democrat policy. There is nothing to suggest the Lib Dems have a vision for the country and they certainly do not have a vision for Manchester.
Recently, John’s used his communications allowance to write to me about his work on animal welfare and on this issue he pushes the right buttons. He’s also written to me about pubs on which I’m sceptical, fearing his u-turn is a bit late. And he’s written to me about health, on which I think he’s taking the piss.
John leads on polyclinics, on which we had a lengthy private correspondence but on which I didn’t blog because, as Johh knows, the NHS was a client at the time. Rebranded as GP led health centres, it’s a great shame that none were ever proposed for John’s Manchester Withington constituency.
Very few people realise – many are surprised, even shocked to learn – that the NHS does not generally employ GPs and that the preservation of the right to private practice is a key object of the BMA. GPs are private sector contractors who receive a package of support to rival that of MPs. They tend to be directly employed by the NHS only in situations where a practice would not be economically viable, in rural areas say.
John surveyed his constituents and, while he doesn’t say exactly what he asked them, he does reveal that nine out of ten rejected private sector GP practices. And yet there is no hint of a proposal to nationalise existing GP surgeries.
Had John asked if constituents would like the option to see a GP on the weekend or late into the evening, I am confident he would have received a very different answer. Had John asked if constituents would prefer the additional £250m made available for polyclinics and GP led health centres be used to fund tax cuts, the results would have been more interesting.
This sloppy approach to the NHS in particular has earned John Leech a reputation for scaremongering, most notably on world leading cancer hospital Christie’s. Stories like this provoke genuine anxiety among some of the most vulnerable people.
Nevertheless, I don’t believe that John deliberately sets out to stir up NHS scare stories. I reckon that health professionals, whose political agenda he has not taken the trouble to understand, have exploited his hunger for cheap votes.
Providing parents with better opportunities to get involved in their children’s education is probably a good thing, but is unlikely to help those at the bottom. This kind of initiative assumes and requires all parents have bought into the idea that education is the route to self-improvement. Sadly, that’s not the case.
I’m reminded of a not untypical incident from my inner-city London secondary school (now thankfully closed and re-opened as some kind of college). We had quite a trendy music teacher, quite out of keeping with the rest of the school, who made the mistake of attempting a whole class detention. Being scheduled at the end of the day he thought he’d have us and even gave a week’s notice. A friend of mine didn’t bother telling his father who was in the habit of driving him home. Within ten minutes the teacher was being threatened in front of the class by an angry parent. He never regained control of the class.
It is the children of parents like this who are mostly likely to fail.
Children with parents who take an active interest in their education, support schools and understand the system don’t really need any more from the state. At my predominantly middle class school in Wales, almost everyone was expected to go to university and almost everybody did.
Government cannot change subcultures overnight, but it can and should intervene and should concentrate on those without a pushy parent behind them.
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Five years ago I shot to number 1 in Google for Carol Kirkwood naked with one of my shortest posts and this continues to attract weather girl fetishists from all over the UK.