BRITISH INDUSTRY, IMMINENT MELT-DOWN
- Corus, the company that took over (or amalgamated with?) British Steel, is expected to report a loss
of £400 million today and probably the closure of another of this country's
steel plants. It's share price has fallen to 4p. Perhaps now would be a good
time for the British Government to quickly organise the purchase of this company
while this can be done for a knock down price. A Dutch steel plant could then be
closed instead of another one of ours (Corus is Anglo/Dutch but the Dutch seem
to have control at the top). The Government could show a little of the
entrepreneurship they admire so much and arrange a Public/ Private Partnership
to do this but they won't, they know they can't benefit from such a deal in the
way that a poisonous, greedy entrepreneur would so they won't bother. They will
probably leave it to their Indian billionaire friend who lives in Hampstead to
carve up our steel industry even more comprehensively than the Dutch (it is
probably partly his companies that are destroying it, see below).
- Alternatively, the Government could just buy the steel plant that is to be
closed down, for a song, or seize it in the national interest to prevent it
being destroyed. The Government allows foreign firms to take over our assets and
then destroy them to reduce the competition with their own. We already import
60% of our steel, the way things are going the figure will soon be 100%, Soon
there will be no way of reviving or saving any of our manufacturing industry, we
will be dependent on foreign sources for all our goods. The only choice of work
for most of the population will be selling, clerking and cleaning. Our balance
of payments position will soon become horrendous and we will quickly sink to
Third World status. I don't believe any other European country has thrown in the
sponge and sold out to other countries like we have; France, Germany and Italy
have all managed to protect their industry to a much larger extent than we have
ours. We practise Free Trade but nobody else does, our industry is being wiped
out, nobody else's is. We even boast about the amount of foreign investment we
get by bribing foreign companies to come here to save us from the failures of
our own.
- Japan has never practised Free Trade. I spent a week there ten to fifteen
years ago and don't think I saw a single foreign car on the Japanese streets, I
expect the situation is much the same today. I don't think I saw a single black
person in Japan either, they don't burden themselves with immigrants or asylum
seekers, I don't think they take any. They have been in recession for over ten
years but their industries are still wiping the floor with ours.
- Actually, judging by a report I have just heard on today’s one o’clock
news (14/3/03), our steel industry is as much a dead duck as nearly all of our
other industries. Surprise, surprise, it is principally the Chinese again. They
and, in this case, the South Americans too, can produce steel for a fraction of
the price we can. It looks as though it is as futile to try to compete in this
industry as in most others. Capitalism and the market are now threatening to
collapse everything except, perhaps, our kitchen furniture and conservatory
industries. It is almost time to turn this country into a theme park for the
entertainment of the populations of the dynamic, advanced, South East Asian
countries, or has somebody got a better idea?
- The dozy, ignorant half-wits who govern us don't care if all of our
industries go down the tubes, it won’t be their jobs, careers and chances of
making a decent living that disappear. They are doing alright, they will get a
cosy sinecure in the City, the House of Lords or Europe if they get turfed out
of office. Even John Major seems to have found himself a nice little number and
the Kinnocks are doing very nicely indeed out of our membership of the EU.
Hurrah for them. Some say.
THE LEGAL PROFESSION SCANDAL
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The Who Wants To Be A Millionaire Trial
- Why does this trial have to take up so much expensive court and lawyer time?
Who pays for it and do they pay all the expense or is some of it born by the
tax-payer? These programmes that offer prizes of large amounts of money for
doing very little should be against the law, they are corrupt.
- There is no need for these big prizes, they don't make the programmes any
more entertaining, they make them more ridiculous. They are designed to make the
programmes appeal to the mentally challenged section of the population.
- Mastermind, University Challenge, Brain of Britain (Radio 4) and Round
Britain Quiz (R4) hardly give prizes at all do they and they don’t have triple
choice questions that can be guessed with a 33% chance of getting the right
answer. The programme is only fit for
morons who want to believe that one day they will be lucky, a completely
unmerited fortune will fall out of the sky into their laps and they will be able
to indulge all their greedy, extravagant, self-indulgent fantasies with no
thought or concern for anybody else's problems. Or, another sort of moron who
enjoys seeing the goony grins of the above sort of morons when they win. Or, yet
another sort of moron who enjoys the synthetic "happy, clappy isn't this
fun" way in which this type of programme is presented.
The Catherine Zeta Jones Trial
- What a tragedy, Mrs Douglas has caught the Hollywood variant of celebrity
disease. A magazine has published smudgy photographs of her wedding that were
taken by a gate crashing photographer, how terribly distressing, surely a
million pounds in damages can't be enough compensation for such an enormous
injury? I expect her wedding was a sordid, disgusting display of extravagance,
self-indulgence and narcissism anyway. I expect there are as many people begging
on the streets of New York in order to survive as there are on the streets of London,
they have no chance of a £54 million contract for being the puppet of film
directors for three years like the one she has been given but why should she
give a damn about that. Getting another million for the small glitch in her
wedding arrangements is far more important, it might refill the coffers to their
level before the bash. In any case, she will probably be getting married again
in two years time and several more times after that so she needn't be short of
opportunities to get everything absolutely to her satisfaction on at least one
occasion. She and her husband should go back to cesspit Hollywood and stay there
living the American Deluded Nightmare (as far as most of us are concerned)
until, hopefully, their disease subsides. Until then, they will be despised by
most people with more than two functioning brain cells.
- Our courts shouldn’t be bunged up for weeks for trivial nonsense cases like
this one, it doesn’t seem to merit even half a day of court time. It should be
sufficient to bring the opposing parties together face to face in a locked room
together with an arbitrator and not let them out or have any refreshment until
they have come to the most mutually satisfactory agreement they can. If they can’t
come to any agreement in two hours the arbitrator should impose a stiff fine on
both parties, slap their wrists and dismiss the case.
The Omagh Bombing Legal Process
- According to a newspaper report (Sun.Tel. 9/3/03) nearly all of £1.2 million
pounds raised to finance a private prosecution of five suspects thought to be
responsible for the Omagh Bombing has now been spent. It is estimated that a
further £840,000 needs to be raised to take the case to court. Nearly all this
money is going on legal fees, 50% or more on preparation of the case. The
solicitor in charge is paid £4 per minute for his services; nice work if you
can get it. What on earth does he do that merits this sort of income? Most or
all of the material this individual is working with, a police report, police
interviews, witness statements, hundreds of logs of telephone calls made by the
Real IRA bomb team and secretly recorded film used in the identification of the
suspects, was collected for a BBC Panorama programme presented two and a half
years ago. It was all handed over, the solicitor hasn’t had to find it for
himself. I don’t believe he is much more than a clerk. This looks like a case
of vultures gorging on the corpses of victims of an atrocity; what do you think?
How does this solicitor defend himself? Apparently he has chosen Matrix, the
London chambers specialising in human rights, to provide the barristers who will
be needed. Matrix was set up with the Prime Minister’s wife, Cherie Booth QC,
as a founding partner and she was reputed to "earn" £500k pa several
years ago. Maybe she too will get some tasty carrion from this case. Workers in manufacturing
industry are trying to compete against Malaysian workers who are paid £1.5/hr
(by the Dyson vacuum cleaner company) and Chinese workers who are probably paid
less, yet lawyers, whose abilities don’t extend much further than the almost
universal ones of reading, writing and speaking, think they are worth £4 a
minute (this is a 20% discounted rate by the way). We should all be able to
enrol on law courses straight away so that we can all enjoy the bonanza, why
have we been duped into taking up other careers?
- If manufacturing industry must face competition from South East Asia then so
should the legal profession. A lot of accountancy, software and call centre work
is being exported to India, it seems that about the only thing that will educate
lawyers to their real worth will be competition from either there or, even
better, China. What a delicious spectacle squealing lawyers would make for those
of us who worked in manufacturing (and most other non-lawyers), it would almost
compensate us for our own pain. The legal profession, like the medical
profession, is probably as sordid and corrupt as the criminal fraternity and a
bigger burden on society. They both pose as saintly defenders and protectors of
those in trouble while, in fact, they greedily exploit their vulnerability.
- The suspects in this case all live in the Irish Republic and, apparently,
compelling defendants to cross the border to attend civil trials is unheard of.
Also, if a "default" judgement was given against them it would be
difficult to enforce south of the border, it therefore appears that all this
expenditure is likely to achieve virtually nothing. It would seem to be
desirable for Tony Blair to have words with Bertie Aherne on the subject of
giving sanctuary to terrorist atrocity suspects.
THE EDUCATION SCANDAL
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The argument about positive discrimination to help students from
disadvantaged backgrounds to get university places.
- A French journalist on the panel of the Any Questions programme (BBC Radio 4)
a week or two ago said that there are no private schools in France nor in
Germany, Holland or Sweden; I get the impression there are few if any in the
United States either. All of these countries are more successful and prosperous
than ours, their citizens have a higher standard of living (on average) than we
enjoy. Our education system cannot possibly be just when some children get
vastly superior education facilities to others.
- There are still millions of people in work who were brought up in the hard
times just after the Second World War and who never had the slightest chance of
going to university. Many have been stuck in low wage, no hope jobs all their
lives with minimal chance of ever escaping. They are now expected to endure,
without complaint, the sight of young people leaving university and immediately
being paid twice as much as they have ever been able to earn. If they lose their
job when they are getting on in years they have to beg and grovel to get another
one, even a menial serf position. It is sick, Sick, SICK.
- How many times have we been told that jobs aren’t for life any more, that
we may have to change our occupation several times during our working lives?
What provision has been made to make this feasible without severe financial and
other difficulties? Virtually none.
- The emphasis now must be on access to worthwhile, affordable, relevant
education throughout life for all, not on feeding the egos of the spoilt brats
of the prosperous classes and giving them an enjoyable scive/ romantic interlude
before they belatedly start doing some real work.
- What do we need graduates for? There is little point studying most technical
subjects, they are a passport to poverty because our industries are being wiped
out by the Far Eastern economies. People who work in engineering and technology
cannot be paid ridiculous salaries like lawyers because they are trying to
compete against their counterparts in low wage economies (with little chance of
success; some very able people may survive a bit longer but few others are
likely to.)
- Most non-technical subjects are a sham, there is no need to go to university
to study them, success in them signifies virtually nothing.
- Most of the jobs provided by a service economy can be handled very
satisfactorily by eleven year old primary school leavers.
- Most education is an almost complete waste of time, it is never used
productively. Nearly everything I was taught at grammar school and then in the
first year of an engineering degree course has been of no use to me since and
was forgotten long ago. Learning Latin was a complete waste of time, it has
never been of any use to me and I forgot 99% of it years ago. French has been
almost equally useless to me so far and is likely to continue to be so, I can’t
afford the time to try to revive or maintain my slight remaining knowledge of
it. I don’t think the history I was taught at school has ever been of any
practical use to me, it now seems to have been mostly kid’s stuff and more or
less irrelevant to life in the present day, I don’t recall being taught
anything much later than the French Revolution for example. All that most people
need is one or two good history books for reference and access to a library and
book shops, in fact, most people’s history needs are met by television.
Geography is much the same, I have a large atlas and that meets most of my
needs. I have never made any use of the chemistry I learned to 'A’ Level or
much of the physics and maths either. The first year of the engineering degree
course was common to civil, electrical and mechanical engineering students and
mostly consisted of subjects like mechanics of machines, strength of materials,
thermodynamics and hydraulics which I have never used and am not very likely to
now since electronics and computing have been my main interests. At the end of that year I was so depressed I was a hospital case and
for that and other reasons I dropped out of the course and found that after
three years higher education I still hadn’t even started to study the subject that
most interested me. A few years later I managed to get a job with an engineering
company and day release to study for an HNC in electrical and electronic
engineering. Only a small part of that course was relevant to the work I have
done subsequently.
- Education, education, education, humbug, humbug, humbug, corruption,
corruption, corruption. The purpose of the ridiculously extended, full-time,
education process is to make sure that children from poor families cannot
complete it so can never qualify for the highly paid jobs the prosperous classes
want to make sure their children get.
- According to a recent newspaper report, plumbers and other tradesmen can now
get a higher income than professors and the same is probably true of
near-illiterate double-glazing, kitchen, conservatory and most other sorts of
salesmen. Some graduates, accountants and the like are now training to be
plumbers, apparently, and could earn up to £60k or even £100k pa. Of course, to really hit the jackpot one has to be a footballer,
pornographer, drug dealer, vice trader, wheeler-dealer or businessman.
- The main purpose of the education industry is to keep a substantial section
of the middle class in comfortable employment, whether this education serves any
useful purpose is largely irrelevant. People are encouraged to stuff themselves
with knowledge regardless of whether it is going to be of any use to them or
whether there is going to be any demand for their services when they have
obtained a qualification. Knowledge is also thought to be good in itself as well
as in it’s function of keeping people busy. Nobody really knows what the
demand for the various skills is now, or will be in the future, it is all left
to chance and the market. Eventually it becomes obvious that there is a glut
or a famine, ie. when it is too late to correct the situation without pain to
the individuals affected. In nearly every facet of life this is a sordid,
lottery society.
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