A couple of years ago Michael O’Leary got a lot of flak for suggesting that fat passengers on Ryanair should pay more. It didn’t happen of course. Either the human rights lobby swamped it or O’Leary was just getting a bit of free publicity again. Whatever the reason, I am disappointed.
Twice in recent flights I have had a very fat man sitting next to me, or more accurately, on me. Not the same man you understand. The first time, some pig featured giant levered himself into the seat, settled himself down and started the loud snoring that he would continue throughout the flight. Obviously I couldn’t use the arm rest on his side. In fact I couldn’t see the arm rest because of the rolls of fat flopping over it into my space.
The problem is not only with the overflowing gut. Because of his massive thighs, the guy couldn’t keep his legs together. One knee splayed into the aisle and the other was right across where my legs needed to go. He must have been accustomed to this situation because whenever the passing trolley full of exciting scratch cards and over priced perfume clouted his protruding leg the only effect was to raise the volume and pace of his snorts.
Just to add to the fun, my piggy companion poured with sweat the whole time and he stank.
You can imagine my pleasure when on the very next flight I was just settled into my seat when another hippopotamus started to lever his enormous bulk into the next seat and once again my armrest and leg space disappeared. This one didn’t smell or snore. I felt almost grateful.
Getting on the queue for the bag drop on my very next flight I was brought to edge of panic by a vast gutted bloke right in front of me. We had checked in online and already had our seat numbers so the chances of him being next to me can’t be all that high can they? After the fearful trip up the aircraft steps and the mechanical “good evenings” of the cabin staff I broke into a genuine smile to see a skinny kid of about nine already sitting in the seat next to mine.
All of this is very recent, but it was brought back to the forefront of my mind today when I saw a news clip about Bridlingtonchip shops putting up warning notices about seagulls nicking chips.
Chip shop owner Justin Carpenter said he was now losing money because of the number of chip thefts. Mr Carpenter said that the attacks were affecting his profits.
“The seagulls dive-bomb them, just take their food and there is nothing you can do about it,” he said.
“So the customers come back to us and we feel obliged to give them the food to reimburse them, and that’s us losing money.”
I don’t know if he was doing an O’Leary and just trying to get some free publicity, but I would like to tell Justin that he hasn’t thought this through. The only effect of his compassionate business model is that he is going to have a load of greedy guzzlers lining up for free seconds and modest sized transport users will be smothered by chip bloated bellies.
Don’t drive yourself bust Justin. If your customers can’t manage to keep out of the way of the gulls make them pay for their replacements. As for you Michael, have the courage of your convictions and follow through with your threats. If a passenger doesn’t fit into the space of one seat they need to pay for two.
Cameron said it was about “ending the old big-government, top-down way of running public services, releasing the grip of state control and putting power in people’s hands. The old dogma that said Whitehall knows best – it’s gone,” he said. “There will be more freedom, more choice and more local control.” Replacing a “take what you are given” culture in public services with a “get what you choose” ethos was vital to making the UK a fairer and more competitive country.
These are brilliant words Dave. If only you meant it or, probably more accurately, had the balls to go through with it.
The key elements of the plan are:
“Companies, charities and community groups to bid to run everything from local health services to schools, libraries and parks.”
About bloody time. What sort of democracy is it in which you have a choice about what loaf of bread or pair of socks you can buy, but if you need your hip replaced or your child needs educating you must take whatever uncaring, incompetent or dangerous provision there is in your catchment unless you are rich enough to pay twice?
“Citizens to be given new legally-enforceable “right to choose” services.”
Stuff your legal rights Cameron. We don’t need new laws, more bureaucrats and the happy hunting ground that this will produce for all sorts of parasites. What is required is for state monopolies to be ended. Providers of every kind must be able to offer their services in a free market so that those who best meet the needs of individuals and communities will thrive.
“State to have to justify retaining monopoly service in most areas.”
The state exists only to ensure the safety of citizens from crime and external threat. The state has no entitlement to hold a monopoly of services of any kind outside of the military and criminal justice system. In fact there is no reason at all for the government to be taking taxes from people for those things which they could buy or take out insurance.
“Councils to be given new funding streams.”
The main reason that Councils fail so badly to meet the needs of the communities that they are meant to serve is that most of their money comes from central government and almost all of what they do is dictated from Westminster. To be serious about localism, Cameron and his government need to recognise that genuine decision making must be made at a community level. For years, all governments have been in fear of the media accusation of postcode lotteries in relation to health and other services. This absurdity must be confronted. Instead of the one size fits all demand which has resulted in crazy targets, we need the precision with which markets can meet the specific needs of local areas with tailored products.
Instead of new funding streams being extracted from taxpayers and distributed from Westminster, high quality services need local providers who know their consumers and work on a human scale. Cameron is offering ever more control when what is needed is much greater devolution of power and real autonomy for the towns and villages in which we actually live.
“Providers to be able to make profits in some areas like getting people off benefits and into work, but not in others such as health care.”
Why on earth is it OK to make a profit out of getting somebody off benefit, but not to fix their varicose veins? This stupid statement just panders to the belief that has been built over generations that there is something distasteful about running a commercial organisation. The opposite is the truth. When people are motivated by the sensible need to make a living, they really care about providing such a good service that their organisation will grow and they will be secure in their livelihood.
What we get from public sector organisations is a focus on building empires and meeting the demands of out of touch managers and politicians. The ordinary citizen who is forced to use these state operated organisations must put up with whatever is provided. All too often that is remote, uncaring, dirty and even dangerous.
There is a simple message for the Prime Minister. You have uttered all the right words and promised none of the necessary actions. Having been elected on a programme of localism you have a responsibility to deliver it.
Two parents who are both higher rate tax payers can receive up to £2,400 per year of public money towards their child care. Who is paying for these wealthy families to bring up their children while they follow their fulfilling lives? All of the rest of us of course, but the burden falls hardest on people with low incomes who still have to buy clothes, furniture and all the other necessities of life and for whom VAT is a bigger proportion of their commitments than it is for the wealthy.
In a cynical attempt to buy middle class votes the Labour Government introduced this mad scheme and now he has bankrupted the economy Gordon Brown is trying to stop it. His big problem is that he doesn’t command any authority in his own party and the Labour MP’s who are scared of losing their seats are threatening to vote against him.
Face up to it Gordon, you do not have the remotest chance of winning a general election whenever you call it. Having wrecked the economy, crippled business and swamped us with a multitude of idiot laws in your periods as Chancellor and PM you must spend your last months making sure that the debt burden you pass on to our children and grandchildren does not get any worse.
You must scrap the childcare vouchers. It will go through parliament because the Tories will have to support it. You have to ignore Caroline Flint and her mates, the country cannot afford to feather bed the wealthy. If they threaten to throw you out as PM just say thank you. Months of misery from the revolting Sun followed by a humiliating defeat at the polls will do your family and health no good. Better to go down now by doing the right thing.
The Labour Government set an impossible target to reduce child poverty and then it damaged the economy so badly by its excessive spending, enormous debt creation and crippling burden of bureaucracy on business that it made every one of us poorer than we should be.
David Cameron is quite right in saying that there needs to be smaller government and that individuals and voluntary organisations should be encouraged to take more responsibility improving their own life opportunities and assisting people close to them when they face difficult times. Our interfering state has made it increasingly difficult for people to help out with child care, volunteer in a youth group or do any kind of constructive community activity. The bureaucratic systems set up by local government and some of the huge charities have no ability to build genuine relationships with the people they are supposed to serve. Although usually well intentioned to begin with, they become self serving empires for their managers and the staff get reduced to box ticking target hunters rather than genuine carers.
The problem with the Tories is that they have not put forward any concrete proposals to show how they would cut the interfering state and we know that in government they will be hard to distinguish from the appalling Labour government they hope to replace.
The welfare dependency that has been built up over decades, including such deceptions as the incapacity system introduced by Thatcher to try to hide unemployment, cannot be wiped out overnight, but real progress must be made immediately.
Cameron says that people should not be worse off when they go off benefit into work. Of course not. He will not achieve that by fiddling with tax credits. The tax credit system is a costly, over complex, bureaucratic monster that needs to be scrapped. Incapacity benefit must be ended and the benefits for all people without work frozen at their current level.
As wages increase and benefits stay fixed the incentive to find work and not be penalised for taking it increases.
Pervert David Sturgess secretly filmed visitors to his holiday cottage in Ceredigion, Wales. He was rightly gaoled for 30 months. The judge said:
“the offences were a gross intrusion into people’s privacy and they were rightly devastated”
The judge is obviously right.
Poole Borough Council secretly filmed Jenny Paton at her private home. Ms Paton is rightly taking legal action against the Council for this gross intrusion into her privacy from which she is rightly devastated.
Will the snooping officials join Sturgess in gaol? Not a chance. The perversion of government intrusion into the private lives of citizens is completely out of control
We condemned East Germany for employing the Stasi secret police to spy on its own citizens. We denounced the Soviet Union for trying to control the lives of its people. We were right to condemn these disgusting tyrannies and they eventually collapsed because their people demanded freedom.
It is time for us to demand freedom. Kick out the national and local governments that take your money away in taxes and then use it to spy on you and force you to do what they demand.
This week it has been reported that many London boroughs will freeze Council Tax and some will probably reduce it. The leader of Wirral Council has said that he wants a 5.2% increase in April and then around 4% every year for the next four years.
Steve Foulkes and his colleagues have got to wake up. Thousands of people have lost their jobs, public sector workers pay is being frozen and inflation is so low that there will be no increase in pensions in April. No increase in Council Tax is tolerable or acceptable.
Politicians, bankers and others have responsibility for the bankrupt state of our economy, but the guilty ones are not Council Tax payers and certainly not pensioners or low earners with frozen incomes. Instead of punishing the most vulnerable the Council must put an end to its own waste and excess.
Voters should be saying to all our elected representatives that they will not get a vote next May unless they can show that they have worked to keep taxes down and not supported any tax rise.
The National Secular Society has calculated that hospital chaplains cost the National Health Service (NHS) £40 million each year.
About 35 years ago I spent a long time in hospital. It wasn’t a pleasant time and one of the things that made it worse was that each Sunday a christian priest came along with a helper. They handed out prayer books and service sheets then conducted a religious service at the end of a multi-bed ward. Being unwell I was not in the best of spirits and having this sectarian religion forced on me was most unpleasant. The fact that I was an atheist and refused their religion did not inhibit them in any way from forcing it on me and as far as I could see there was absolutely no regards to whether anybody in the ward was a follower of any non-christian religion or would not be happy with their particular brand of christianity. In short it was a completely arrogant imposition without regard for the views of others.
Some people may want religious support when they are in hospital and I certainly would not want to deny it to them, but if they have those religious elements in their lives they will probably be able to arrange to have the support continued while they are in hospital.
What is absolutely certain is that there will never be enough money to meet all of the medical needs of patients and the £40 million being spent on chaplains could, and most definitely should, be spent on the legitimate medical purposes of the NHS. Religion is a private matter. Its followers should practice their beliefs discreetly and above all any costs of so doing should be borne entirely by the religions concerned and their members. It is grossly offensive and immoral that taxes collected to provide health care should be misused on religious facilities.
My concern at this issue was aggravated even further when I discovered that there was a Parliamentary Group of 40 MP’s (members of Parliament) campaigning to make it a legal requirement for all hospitals to have chaplains at public expense.
The National Secular Society says:
“these chaplains are parasites on a service that is there first and foremost to provide medical treatment and health care.”
They are absolutely right. We should find out who these MP’s are and make it absolutely clear to them that we will not support them in any way unless they get out of this group immediately.
There are 20 members of this group shown on the Register of All Party Groups. They are:
The achievements of the G20 summit seem very limited. Little has been done to give confidence that world leaders understand, let alone agree on, what is required to avoid a repeat of the great depression of the 1930′s. An extra trillion dollars for the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank may be of some use to tide over struggling countries, but it will not provide the increase in demand that is necessary to revive economic activity. A great deal of emphasis is being placed on agreement to deal with the problems caused by tax havens. This is really a bit of a ‘so what’ development rather than the revolution that they pretend. It is a good thing that a handful of tiny countries will find it harder to hide away the money of organised criminals and third world tyrants, but it is not going to bring an end to the world economic crisis. Anybody who believes that new controls will be adopted by everybody or that they will work very well is deluding themselves. Following the failure of the banks who had brought about the most ridiculous financial bubble in history through creating new financial instruments that were traded without their purchasers having any knowledge of the underlying value, there is now a need to revive demand in the face of consumer nervousness and insufficient credit. There is a very simple way to do this and deal with tax havens at the same time. Tax havens are only of interest because taxes are far too high in the overblown interfering states of the developed world. The legitimate role of government is to protect its citizens so that they can freely go about organising their lives and providing for their families themselves. Vast welfare systems, and the dependency that they produce, must be dismantled. This will allow radical reductions and simplification of taxation. Raising the threshold at which people start to pay tax on their incomes puts money into the pockets of poorer people. These are the very people who spend rather than hoard their cash because they need to spend to feed, clothe and house their families. This provides the demand necessary for economic recovery. Taxes above the threshold should be at a flat rate so that they are easy to collect and there is no longer any incentive for honest people to look for tax avoidance in havens. Protectionist actions will be named and shamed we are told. Well so they should be, but we need to go much further than that. There are still masses of duties, quotas and anti competitive specifications which restrict international trade and the G20 states which account for more than 80% of world trade are just as guilty of these protections as the countries outside the group. We need complete freedom of international trade. Not only is this the most efficient way for people to obtain the goods they want at the optimum price, but it also allows the poorest people in the world to break free from their tyrant governments and raise themselves by their own efforts. Best of all, freedom of trade is the sure way out of economic depression. In advocating free trade it should be understood that I am not supporting such a completely laissez faire approach as to permit criminal behaviour to flourish. Wherever there is money to be made there will be a temptation for some to try to cheat. Regulation must exist to prevent crime in trade while allowing the most possible freedom to bring goods to market.
I have a big problem with public transport for lots of reasons. Far too many of them for me to spend the time on just now, but I will deal with a few.
All subsidy rewards and consolidates inefficiency. At one end you get the obscenity of highly paid commuters getting an enormously discounted season ticket for their train so that it is economic for them to live in Surrey or the Cotswolds and work in London. The taxpayers financing their wonderful lifestyle are, of course, just as much the poor and housebound as they are other transport users. At the other end you have environmentally filthy buses belching out masses of diesel exhaust, heavy in damaging particulates, driving around the countryside with nobody on them other than the holders of free passes. In terms of passenger miles these are probably the most polluting vehicles, including air transport and the worst gas guzzling 4*4′s. In the case of Merseytravel up here, only about 10% of their income is from fares! All of the rest comes from taxpayers in one form or another and most of those people do not use their trains or buses. That is disgusting beyond words as far as I am concerned.
A lot of the people who are not car owners and drivers have limited mobility from various causes. For many of these people they cannot make their way to where the ‘public’ transport is and they cannot make use of it. To an enormous extent, they make use of the cars of relatives, friends and associates either for the whole of the journeys they require or for getting them to the public transport. Let me quote a personal example. A relative does not drive and claims deep green credentials. In fact it is total hypocrisy. They contribute towards the cost of their daughter’s car who, in return, drives them wherever they want to go. When their daughter is unavailable through work they actually pay a friend to drive them. In fact I suspect that their costs of using private cars by proxy rather than ownership are greater than if they simply used taxis. They use trains for longer journeys. As they are pensioners, their fares are deeply discounted and accordingly subsidised by the general taxpayers who are often much poorer than them.
We have one, efficient, modern car which has very low emissions. I would argue strongly that our carbon footprint is smaller than a great many people who do not own cars and we do not draw on public funds to finance our travel. Incidentally, I walk or cycle locally so I don’t drive much at all.
What non car users need for their transport, when they are unable to walk or cycle, is for a vehicle to go to,and return to, their door together with their shopping, luggage, etc. It is absolutely impossible for ‘public’ transport to provide such a service and it always will be. What we should do is scrap all transport subsidies and make taxis more cost effective for those who need them. Incidentally, modern taxis are more disablement friendly than most other forms of transport.
So called integrated transport plans are utter rubbish and a complete waste of money at best. There is no more possibility of planning transport than there is of having a command economy as a whole. If the savage tyranny of the Soviet Union could not make a command economy work, our bumbling liberal democracy most certainly will not. People make their needs clear by where they voluntarily place their money. If a service is not used it should disappear, not be dragged around at public expense in order to justify some ideology or claim moral value.
Posted by malpoet 
