Dear Prime Minister

Boris' semi-retarded, rubbish-talk over the weekend? The USA are 50 nations who have agreed to surrender portions of sovereignty to a federal overlord, just like the EU...if Eaton teaches people to the standard of the incumbent Mayor of London, it's no wonder you're such an inadequate cockwomble.

Hillsborough? A state-sponsored, Tory-press enabled, 20-year outrage against the common citizenry...par for the course in your world. No...I want to talk about British Home Stores today.

I don't know whether to laugh or cry at the news regarding BHS this week, Mr. Philip Green (and his Monaco-based wife!) have done very well out of the deal so far haven't they! I seem to remember BHS were struggling back in the mid-1990's, dropping the full title in favour of the abbreviated moniker, a change of direction and revamped stores...and a vast flow of money into Mr. Greens bank accounts!

Of course everything he's done has been totally above board and completely legal, it's just unfortunate that all the pension money had apparently evaporated in the process? None of it has been used to buy that aircraft-carrier yacht of his (number three in Phil's fleet I believe) I'm sure.

Poly Peck, Maxwell, Fayrepak (Christmas hampers), JJB (sports goods), City Link (owner-driver couriers)...Banks! It's a never ending litany of what boils down to theft, even if the law (or HMRC) often decide it err...isn't. Pension schemes should not be usable as capital, ever.

A few years ago a chap (known to you as part of the establishment) would fly into Farnborough Airport from abroad in his own jet, where his chauffeur - waved through the gate - would meet him on the apron or taxiway or whatever they call it. No customs, not for the rich, they don't want to have to walk across tarmac when they can be driven!

He also needed the car next to the plane because while he and his family settled themselves into the comparative luxury of a highly-polished, jet-black, 7-seat, conference-layout, Mercedes V-Class, people-carrier (actually built in a Spanish bus factory, but it looked 'the part'), the driver was required to help the co-pilot and flight-attendant carry a large, leather hold-all to the vehicle, which was so heavy the car lifted half-an-inch at the front when the bag was put in the boot.

I shall call him Farnborough cheese-man, as, were I to name him, he would probably sue me for slander or defamation or whatever? It's another thing you people do, is use the law or the threat of the law to protect yourselves from accountability, and 'The Law' goes along with it, because it's run by people like you.

While you have probably been round his place supping on the illegally imported food, as it was driven straight to the familial residence in Kensington-Chelsea where more staff were waiting at the door ready to carry it in!

It may well be that it wasn't cheese and/or cooked-meats, it was heavy enough to be a body; a couple of thousand rounds of metal-linked machine-gun ammunition; a box of grenades or a few bars of gold? I have no evidence that it was cheese and ham, just the co-pilot and steward's word for it!

When the 'Great and the [not so] Good' swan into St. Tropez, or Southampton with their floating gin-palace, customs don't go over the vessel with more than a cursory check of a few passports, and a "Is your driver here? Oh yes, there he is, nice to see you again Mr. Rich, have a good stay".

You lot all cried Mea culpa over the expenses scandal, well some of you did, the guilty cried something unprintable, yet here you are 5 years later, claiming more than ever...while forcing austerity on the rest of us. You just changed the rules to make it legal to claim what you were caught claiming illegally! By a data leak.

But - as we saw with the Panama papers - things are changing Prime Minister, we the people are waking-up, finding digital voice-recorders that fit in breast pockets, 'smart phones' which record silently, data sticks...it's only a matter of time before a disgruntled chauffeur, personal assistant or 'poor' relative uses such a device to record such an event as Farnborough cheese-man's arrival - and maybe make a few bob selling the data to a Tabloid paper...capitalism in action eh, Prime Minister?

The Mr. Green's, and Whites, and Browns, the Maxwell's and Farnborough cheese-man's of this world, and you Prime Minister, are going to lose that ability to hide, to exploit, to enrich yourselves at our expense, to rob your people, companies or whole countries, to gamble with other people's money and lose it all, yet come out of it smiling at the state of your own bank-balances. You will also, eventually, all, lose the ability to misuse the law to protect yourselves from your own poor behaviour.

You wanted us all to buy PC's, we did. You wanted us to 'go digital' and get the Internet, we did.  Then we had to buy Laptops, Blackberry devices, tablets and then Smartphone's...we did - now we're all wired-up to end your way of doing things! They say revenge is a dish best served cold, well there are a hundred billion cold scraps out there, to be collected-up and served to you, and you've given us the tools to collect them, it's only a matter of time now.

Dear Prime Minister

This is the full panoply of Hart District Council's celebratory efforts for the Queen's 90th Birthday celebrations...

...you may struggle to see them, here let me help you...

...is that better? It's pathetic isn't it? I'm not sure Aldershot bothered at all and I didn't see anything in Farnborough at the weekend.

In the golden, olden days, there would have been bunting strewn across the road like red, white and blue snow, there would have been flags as big as horses from every beribboned lamp post and the - now absent - telegraph poles, shops would have decked themselves out in colour-coordinated decorations and prepared shop window displays that had more to do with royalty, nation and empire than they had to do with the goods the shops actually sold.

It would have been in every town, village and hamlet in the land. We would have had a public holiday, schools would have had a day off, and parishes would have had a day of events with a church service and a hog-roast.

I don't blame the local councils, we all know they've had their budgets cut and cut again by the inadequate cockwombles in Westminster - that's you, as if you didn't know, and under the capitalist system that's been replacing democracy since 1979, they are supposed to expect help from the 'private sector' on these occasions, 'private enterprise' is supposed to step-up to the plate.

The Estate Agents had a go, those are paper discs being shredded in the light-breeze of the last few days, and a couple of reels of transparent plastic mesh (taffeta?), while another shop did have a bucket outside with balloons on sticks to which they had attached a dozen or so cardboard masks of her Majesty and the Duke of Edinburgh! Very fetching.

You see Prime Minister, the private sector is all about the bottom line, and while they might pay for some gardening work in exchange for disfiguring hoardings on roundabouts, they won't shell out for a bunch of decorations with no 'guaranteed return in the investment'.

That's why we used to have a general taxation system in which the rich (who benefit from the efforts of the poor, or the inherited-wealth born of the efforts of slavery, land clearance, enclosures...) paid enough for local authorities to be given enough to do enough in situations like this.

This was at one end of town; it probably represents a week's child-protection budget!
Or a penny on the council-tax?

Compared to the Silver Jubilee celebrations (two years before the rot set-in at Westminster), both the Golden and Diamond jubilee celebrations have been muted, damp squibs.

It is a sign of the end of 'Empire', the end of 'great' Britain; even Margret Thatcher (the architect of all you stand for) started to distance herself from some of her core policies in her final post-retirement speeches. She hated what you were doing with housing.

Yet you keep banging on about privatisation, forcing schools to convert to academies, out-sourcing, making-do and mending with Chinese money and French technical expertise (which half the company's own board thinks they don't have!), breaking-up the Health Service...

...what are you going to do with all the money you're taking out of the economy Prime Minister? Run off to China and build a nice house in the hills a long way from pollution centres and rising oceans? Their leader is becoming more dictatorial every day, kidnapping publishers from Hong Kong, taking overall control of the armed forces...he's not going to tolerate a bunch of Western toffs buying-up land there, he's too busy making sure his mates buy-up London...and Toronto and New York...!

Although, republicans would probably argue that celebrating the birthday of a highly privileged woman who wants for nothing and gets the best of everything is anathema in itself! If she fails to make it to a hundred will the Household Division take the Royal physicians outside and shoot them? But that's another post for another day.

You command a dying world Prime Minister...badly.

Dear Prime Minister

Got your leaflet the other day, in fact we've had several....there's nothing in them! Large print sloganeering and text 'sound bites', vast generalisations, seemingly designed to scare rather than educate. It's almost as if you secretly want to lose? Or - at least - aren't too bothered if we do get out of Europe.

I also listened to that Mr. Grayling supping at the temple of arselikens this weekend, that was amusing; he clearly thinks we are likely to stay in now and is desperate to curry favour with you in the event that he and his mob are left out in the cold, his description of you as the man for the job left me wondering if the child of God had returned, unannounced, and was quietly leading the Tory party!

To paraphrase (the Outie): 'In or Out, my mate Dave, my very best mate Dave that wot I love like a brother and respect like Mother Teresa is the only man to lead any negotiations; evv'errr!'

Well...if we get out, France will shit on us from a great height, they never wanted us to join  in the first place and secondly: Germany won't be minded to stop them. Using Norway's figures as an example we would pay more as 'Outies' to remain within the EU trading frameworks than we pay as 'Innies'.

While if we stay in, you can kiss goodbye to whatever - un-ratified - 'changes' you think you obtained the other day! Writ in stone? They're writ in wet sand, you really are an inadequate cockwomble!

Dear Prime Minister

Bit of a departure from the Euro-vote or your general level of inadequate cockwomblery today Prime Minister, but it contains within it several pointers as to why the 'Establishment' lacks the trust, respect or support of the people (even 'its' people) these days.

Hart District Council Offices - Fleet, Hampshire

I saw these from the local library, parked outside the offices of Hart District Council (Tory) the other day and - being unable to read the writing in front of them - took a shot to enlarge it at home. Imagine my surprise when I read the notice to be 'Police Only'. My surprise being based on two facts I happened to have at my fingertips.

One: That there is a perfectly good (or reasonably saveable...I must confess I don't know the condition of the interior) police station not 300 meters from the location of these vehicles, with parking out the front for a dozen or so vehicles and a vehicle pound attached at the side/back of the building with garaging and outdoor parking for another 20+ vehicles of all sizes, and that two: There is a shortage of parking spaces in the town in question - Fleet in Hampshire.

Indeed, when the council recently 'renovated' the car parks and high street, an exercise which suggests a return to former splendor, they managed to reduce the total  number of spaces available and then increase the number of spaces still available as wholly dedicated to unloading or disabled drivers. The overall change wasn't great, about 14, 18 mabe 20 spaces...something like that, but any reduction would seem to be daft as car-ownership continues to rise, and when also you consider that the reduction in parking spaces was accompanied by an announcement of more ticket-issuing traffic patrols!

Now, Prime Minister...we 'the people' have paid for that police station and the land it sits on, we have paid for the library and council offices, that land and the land the car parks sit on, we - technically - own the spaces down the high-street, yet the people we pay to administer our lives and meet our needs as citizens, whilst keeping us safe, have clearly conspired to punitively tax us, by deceit, through manipulation of the available parking, the regulations around that parking and their enforcement?

Tired old 1970's two-tiered, ramped, concrete lump

If you think I'm being silly, let me take you next door to Rushmoor Borough Council (Tory), where many years ago (mid-1990's), someone thought it would be a good idea to hold a car-boot sale on an underused car-park in the centre of a roundabout in Farnborough town centre on Sunday afternoons. Yes- the very same Farnborough as the one with the invisible, inaccessible high-rise, no-entry, or exit car park.

This proved quite popular; Rushmoor has a lot of poverty among the dormitory'd city-types, due to the old GLC-overspill housing projects, so a little Sunday outing to buy or gossip over other people's stuff - they don't really need - is as close to an outing as you can get with a fiver, on an overcast Sunday.

As a result there was a short period of about 20 minutes just after mid-day when some...how shall I put it...'undisciplined' vehicle-parking would occur the other side of the road in the Council Offices car park. I mean, literally; 20 minutes. Once the eBay bottom-feeders had been and gone, it all calmed-down to the leisurely pace of an odd coming and a steady going.

Enjoy your free parking at our expense! Rushmore BC

Yet instead of turning a blind-eye to what was no real problem at all, the council (whose staff enjoy free parking there, all week), panicked, got over-exited, threw all their toys out of the pram and decided to introduce Sunday parking charges, in all car parks, all day, on a Sunday! As far as I am aware, that car-boot sale and those parking charges are both still extant.

Again, we the people own the land that the offices and car parks are located on, we allow council staff to enjoy free parking as a 'perk' on top of their salaries (everyone else has to pay Monday-Sunday), and again bear in mind that Rushmoor were advertising an evening seminar the other week with wine and canapés (for budding Landlords and people trying to beat the buy-to-let mortgage changes) with...you guessed it...Free Parking!

Left - Of course 'Permit Holders A' work for us, but we have to pay to park on our land!

 

Right - Nanny State, Police State, Fascist State...call it what you will; Orwell would recognise it. They'll be printing the Highway Code on curb-stones next!

I said at the start that there were several pointers to the breakdown in the relationship between citizen and state (or 'authority') in this, and while it does read like one of those 'old git' celebs on BBC2, whinging about nothing, there is substance here as well.

The fact that you can see clearly see the 'one law for them (you) and another law for everyone else (us)' rule in action with both these situations.

The fact that you blame 'Austerity' for needing to cut taxes for the rich (despite the fact that it was rich Bankers who got us in the current mess), yet then accept the raising of those missing tax-pounds by further attacking the poor, even the not so poor, with underhand tactics such as the above are both bloody good reasons for the citizenry ceasing to trust or respect you; you who would rule over us.

Fleet Police Station - day-time only service for years, now shut-up and padlocked

Thirdly, the reason the police feel the need for those parking spaces to be reserved for them at the council offices is because the police station is actually all locked-up and derelict, and despite dedicated parking spaces, often Fleet (a largish dormitory with an existing night-life behavioral problem and a plethora of hot-hatched, wide-boys, with exhausts worth more than the rest of their cars) is without a proper police presence.

Indeed the recent spate of day-time burglaries blamed on career criminals dropping off the M3 or having a day-away round the M25, is probably in no small part due to the fact that the town is all but undefended.

In the 'States this is the sort of stuff that might lead a bunch of 'Rednecks' to arm themselves and take over a hunting-lodge claiming 'federal conspiracy' and muttering about lizard-aliens, over here you just get me verbally pissing in the wind, but I'll keep pissing 'till you get a face full, Prime Minister.

Dear Prime Minister

Last Tuesday, I missed an opportunity to be one step ahead of the National Press when I lazily posted my MHS bits instead of pointing out that while 'A Downing Street spokesman' was saying you and your family weren’t benefiting from any off-shore accounting (present tense), it was almost inevitable that you had, through the death of your father;  as beneficiaries of the will, which would have included funds generated by his dealings with the delightful Mossack Fonseca.

Well, it seems I would have been right...actually I think I hinted at it in  a reply to a comment on another post so I can feel smug enough...but not as smug as you probably feel having - so far - got away with what was a dogs breakfast of a week's press briefings!

The thing is, it's not that you did anything wrong, it's that A) you felt you had to lie, deceive and obfuscate (through anonymous spokesmen to begin with) about something which apparently wasn't wrong, B) that the rules which allow something like this to be 'right' are themselves a stinking pile of protectionist crap for the already rich and privileged and C) that your financial bedfellows for centuries have been crooks, criminals, Mafioso, despots, dictators, arms dealers, drug-runners, money-grubbing ex's hiding their assets from their spouses, the not-so-great-and-good of FIFA and the IOC, the UN, the senior civil service, the banking sector, royalty, celebs...yada, yada, ad infinitum, ad nauseam, &etc...The bent bastards of the Establishment - for wont of a single, all-encompassing title.

To recap: After the present tense statement on Tuesday, we had the [future tense] statement on Thursday morning also from your 'No.10 spokesman', stating that you weren't going to benefit from off-shore accounting going forward either, only for you to admit later the same day that, err...actually you had, of course, benefitted from them in the past...and not simply through the will as I suspected, no, it was all a bit more complicated than that, you'd had actual shares and converted them to actual cash!

But as the weekend has slid by, it's got steadily worse, with larger amounts, you mother and 7-year inheritance-avoidance shenanigans thrown out there with the constant refrains of "I [he/we/they] have done nothing wrong [against the rules]".

The rules - clearly - need to be changed. People 'in the street', people 'down the pub', people like me, think it stinks and we've thought so for decades, even centuries, look at how the Church has ended-up with the prime chunks of every village, every hamlet in the land for their buildings of worship and/or - more tellingly - the lovely [usually famous] architect-designed Tudor'esque and Arts & Craft Rectories and Vicarages!

This is not about some petty envy, Prime Minister, it's about fair-play, a level playing field, accountability, transparency, yeah; even 'Democracy'...and whether you understand it or not, a revolution is already in the air; the Mossack Fonseca leak, is not the first, while you (the Western 'democratic' establishment) have driven Mr. Snowden into exile in Moscow, driven Mr. Asange into exile in an embassies spare room and jailed little what's-her-face, apparently forever, they were the vanguard of a movement that included your own expense scandal.

A scandal for which your reply has been to change 'the rules' so that you can all claim more now than you were six years ago, just...not for moats or duck-houses.

But even that scandal could have been avoided, you may remember that the House of Commons (some time ago) appointed an expenses 'Tzar' Liz Philkin (?) to oversee a cleaning-up, she was so good at her job, you sacked her (disgracefully) and disbanded her office...a few years later and you were all swimming in your own shit live on the telly! The same thing happened in the European Parliament, with not one but TWO whistle-blowers.

So, now it's all done anonymously and very effectively, using modern technology.

How long before someone blows the whistle on Vodafone and their relationships with money, tax, loans-to-self, an office above a chip-shop in Luxembourg, HMRC, the useless OfCom, Newbury Borough Council...and their customers?

How long before someone blows the whistle on the water companies and their meter schemes? Or a council bins contract? PPI's? A4E/PeoplPlus and DWP? Immigration centers, prison-service outsourcing, airline ticketing costs....there will be no secrets while you're all so crooked.

Select Folders - Copy - Paste - Eject Disc - "Media safe to remove", clock-out, go home...it's so easy!

The International media (104 outlets world-wide) and the Consortium of Investigative Journalists have been secretly looking at the Mossack Fonseca stuff for over a year - while the whistle-blower regularly updated the stash! What are they already looking at 'next', Prime Minister? What's the next big scandal waiting in the wings or already in the bag?

When the ICIJ put the 'Panama Papers' online with a search tool, I'll be checking it for the name of a certain Knight of the Realm I believe is paid in the Bahamas', in $US, for work he does on the 'phone in his kitchen in the UK. As a bent Judge - in forcing an out of court settlement ['compromise agreement'] on me, without representation - has stated I can never mention the Knight again, except to a law maker, I'll have to find something I can take to a lawmaker, huh? HMRC know all about it!

Watch your back Prime Minister, and understand, no one in this revolution is saying you can't be a millionaire, no one in this revolution wants anyone to die, but they want everyone to earn what they do honestly and openly. They want African kids to stop dying of hunger; they want an end to war and war-mongering. They want steel-workers to face unemployment with dignity, secure in the knowledge there's enough to go round, a safety-net for all and that it (the hidden trillions) is not all mouldering in the British Virgin Islands.

They want to be ruled administered by honest democrats, not rotten, buggins-turn, one-in-five of the electorate voted-for, arrogant but inadequate, cockwombles.

And - of course - the really annoying thing about the last eight days, is you have almost certainly damaged the 'Stay in Europe' campaign, not a lot, but nevertheless: needlessly so.

Dear Prime Minister

Apropos my previous missive...

 

I knocked these up this morning, perhaps you could pass them on to the relevant authorities for me, or are you too busy re-visiting your fathers financial dealings?

Dear Prime Minister

"If all the rich people in the world divided up their money among themselves there wouldn't be enough to go around" - Christina Stead

What to choose to write to you about today?

The steel crisis? Well...that's just the Tory chickens coming home to roost isn't it? 37 years of running down Britain because you have unbridled prejudice of the working classes, a hatred of anyone having a 'life' other that your own privileged sitting on a pile of slave-wealth, grinning at the plebs - I see that Chancellor of yours was in a hi-viz jacket again yesterday, he's barely out of it these days, is it some kind of grubby fetish? "Oh look, I can impersonate someone with employment"

Donald Trump? He's digging his own grave "...quicker than larger turns to piss"*. Build a wall round them until you need to marry one, or get one to mow the lawn...then punish them if they get unemployed, or ill, or pregnant...no punish the doctor..no punish the Mexicans, the Syrians? Kill 'em all (with legally held firearms) and let God sort it out!

The academy-schools programme? I think even the middle-classes are starting to have doubts about that one, I'll leave it to popular opinion and any forthcoming industrial action for now, we can always come back to it here! But when Radio4's More or Less is ripping all your Education Minister's claims and figures to pieces, I think the ice is getting a bit thin on that one, don't you?

 

 

No prime Minister, I think - as it was All Fools day yesterday - we should look at the news Manchester took over responsibility for its local NHS budgets and facilities yesterday. The April Fools being the people of the UK who don't seem to have understood that the NHS started to become a fragmented, semi-privatised collection of individual 'Health Services' yesterday.

Presumably the bit hived-off yesterday should now be referred to as the MHS...geddit; Manchester? It's not part of the NHS if it's under a new authority is it? That great bugbear of Tory dogma, going back to the fat drunk's hatred of it before it was formed, finally dealt a death-blow.

You've always despised the fact that we chose to reward the citizenry, after two World Wars and all the associated privations, with a humanist safety net. Decided to look after our poor, our weak, our needy, and provide for everyone, no matter their means. It really eats you up.

There are those, on the left and in the liberal centre, who have warned for some time that the agenda is to destroy the jewel in our otherwise rather tawdry and tarnished crown, but sadly not enough of tthe electorate were listening. That one thing we - the British - had that was envied by the rest of the world is to be ground down by your petty, right-wing, hatred of the common people.

There are so many things to write to you about, 40 years of telling us Thacherite-Raganomic, free-market, top-run, bottom-line, trickle-down, capital-lead, private-financed, outsourcing is the way forward, the best way, the only way and yet, we are all worse off than we were in 1979. Well, I say 'all', a few of you at the top have done very well indeed...how many of your party have interests in private health companies? Half? Three-quarters of the back bench?

While the rest of us have more debt than ever - personally and nationally, we can't afford housing; bought or rented, our defence forces couldn't hold-on to a cake without asking America to help, hospital waiting-lists are on the up, prisons are overcrowded, you're giving the entire schools estate to a few of your bent mates (with the NHS to follow), you've flogged everything in the cupboard but not reduced taxation, tripled your earnings while reducing everyone else's, multiplied your expenses ten-fold in thirty years, destroyed work-security AND the safety-nets, our kids leave collage with massive debts, apprenticeships have been reduced to underpaid work-programmes with few guarantees and lower qualifications (when you can get one)...

...I can go on, page after page after page...science, technology, the Police, ports and shipbuilding, mines and mining, power generation, flood-protection and flood-prevention, house-building and empty-homes, railways, local authority parking regimes (another tax), local planners and dying high-streets, courts, tribunals and the judiciary, access to legal aid, the right to even bring cases, civil rights, monetising the unemployed, even democracy is under threat...you really are execrable.

 

* Quote taken from Beasley Street  by John Cooper Clarke