Censorship has done a U-turn

Back in the 60s and 70s the fight was on against censorship. Young people pushed against the old restrictions with publications like Oz doing battle with Mary Whitehouse.

Now young people are fighting on the side of the censors demanding that everything, including children’s books, are rewritten and monuments destroyed.

Censorship has done a U-turn. Must be run by politicians.

Four things a new technology has to achieve

There are four things a new technology has to achieve in order to become mainstream and popular.

First and formost it has to supply a need, whether current or as yet unknown, to the people who will buy it.

It has to be convenient , safe and cost effective. It either has to be something that can’t be provided by other suppliers or it has to be cheaper than anything they can supply.

This is why Green technologies are not popular.

The first hurdle they have to overcome is the fact that their uptake will take people out of their comfort zone. Petrol or diesel cars are known and at least some people can perform their own repairs, something that is becoming less possible as computerised technology becomes more prevalent. Worse, electric vehicles are perceived as being unsafe due to sponaeous fires that are difficult to put out.

Coal fires have been demonised by councils for years with smoke free zones. Wood fires are now under attack. And yet people hanker after the comfort of sitting in front of a real fire. Especially when power cuts and electricity, gas and oil prices have skyrocketed to the extent that people have been unable to afford to heat their homes.

The only reason that the Green technologies are still in the game is government subsidies and taxes on the traditional technologies.

Nicola Sturgeon says that she is going to learn to drive in order to gain some personal freedom The very personal freedom that Green Taxes and subsidies take away from the poorer members of society. Still, about time a politician realised why people choose their own transport over germ laden and uncomfortable highly priced public transport which is now becoming far too dangerous to use as violent attacks and stabbings are becoming commonplace. Incidentally, it is even more highly priced when subsidised by local or central government due to the added costs of the bureaucracy involved.

In every walk of life regulations are heaped onto every business and technology in the name of health and safety. The one exception is anything that carries the label “green”. Anything fitting into that category seems to be free to put everyone at risk.

The tragedy of a tourist bus in Venice breaking through the barriers of a flyover, plunging almost 50 feet and catching fire, leading to deaths and injuries is one example.

The vehicle was powered by electric batteries.. Fire brigade commander Mauro Longo told Il Gazzettino website that the batteries caught fire and made the task of clearing the bus a complex operation.

Witnesses told Rai TV they could hear people screaming but the flames were too high to intervene

There have been a series of fires caused by the batteries of electric vehicles catching fire and burning so intensely that they could not be put out. The London fire brigade expressed its concern that the proposed doubling of the power of electric bikes risked more severe fires and described lithium battery fires as London’s fastest growing fire trend.

The move from plastic straws to virtually useless paper straws has not been as beneficial as originally claimed. Paper straws contain more PFAS (forever chemicals) that can stay in the environment for decades. They can contaminate water courses and are linked to higher cholesterol levels, low birthweight, early puberty and immune system problems, thyroid problems, an increase in the likelihood of kidney, prostate or testicular cancers, and even higher blood pressure among other issues. You can, of course, use a water filter to remove PFAS but not if it is then passing through a contaminated straw.

Fire safety regulations are usually imposed first and foremost with health dangers following a close second. So why the free ride for Green technologies? Why are they being pushed into consumer’s hands before they are ready for marketing? Something that is happening around the world, not just here in the UK.

We need some answers because the deaths and damage to health are not acceptable minor defects of these technologies. They are devastating disasters for the people affected.

Add to this, smart meters, pushed by government, are not working properly. Nearly 4 million of them are malfunctioning, leading to people getting bills for thousands of pounds worth of electricity that they haven’t actually used.

Heat pumps that are unsuitable for many of the UK’s older properties. People who have been pushed into installing them find they have to run them far longer than expected, costing high electricity bills and even then they don’t heat their houses properly. or cost effectively.

Governments need to back off, stop subsidising ideas and technologies that need time to develop and leave the market and the public to decide when they are ready and safe to buy and use.

If Ireland is banned from sending asylum seekers to the UK let’s send every boat load over there.

The Irish High Court has ruled that britain is not a safe place to which their government can return asylum seekers.

This is incredibly helpful. The border between Northern Ireland and the South is, in reality, a land border between the UK and the EU. What would happen if the UK took all of the boat people to NI and tipped them across the border into the South?

Yes there would be howls of outrage from the political left and from the Irish government, but after that? The horrors of the ECtHR pontificating on our callousness? All we have to do is repeal the Human Rights Act and pull out of the ECHR.

The Judgement from the Irish High Court means that they can’t send them back.

What can they do? Only two options.

Leave the EU or relocate the new arrivals back to other EU states.

Either way it would solve lots of problems for the UK.

The WASPI Women are buzzing with fury – Back to 60 got it right

The WASPI women are unhappy with the level of compensation suggested by the Parliamentary and Health Services ombudsman. Although the ombudsman found that they had not been properly informed of the changes or given sufficient time to plan, the level of compensation suggested was derisory, with an upper limit of £2950.

Carole Cooper said that the government had stolen £45,000 from her and that she wanted it back. WASPI had been campaigning for £10,000 or more per woman affected.

Naturally the DWP and government claim that they do not have enough money to cover such payments.

Why not? They can find untold funding for foreign aid and to house and care for asylum seekers and immigrants arriving on small boats. So why did the country run out of money for pensions?

The answer is simple. Successive goverments raided the pension fumd and failed to pay money into it.

From 1986 to 1989 the value of the fund increased from £5.3bn to £10.4bn. As a result the supplement paid into the fund by the Treasury was abolished by the Social Security Act 1989.

The fund nosedived nto the red, now being raided for the full cost of unemployment and sickness benefit. By 1995 the value of the fund had dropped by 50% leading government to reintroduce another supplemet that was far less valuable than the original. New benefits also had to be paid out of the fund.

Instead of reinstating the fund properly, which would have ensured that £billions were available for women’s pensions, successive governments decided to destroy the pension expectations and rights of women.

The Back to 60 movement were not taken in by the platitudes from government and it was clear that the WASPI request for compensation would result in an offer of a pittance. No wonder the WASPI women are buzzing with fury.

Press ganged British slaves fought to free foreign slaves – Who should qualify for reparations?

Everyone seems to be geting aerated over whether Rule Brittania should be played at the last night of the Proms on the grounds that the term “Brittons never shall be slaves” means that everyone else can be.

Others point out that the Royal Navy was actively trying to stop slave ships and slavery.

Problem is that those British ships might well have been manned by men and boys who had been kidnapped by Press Gangs, whipped into compliance with a cat o’9 tails and fed such a poor diet that they succumbed to scurvy.

So who were the slaves? The Britons or the people the Royal Navy was fighting to free from slavery?

Where was the Church of England or the politicians whose duty it was to care for the British people?

Who should get reparations? The descendants of those who were enslaved by the navy or the people they freed?

Derail the government funded charity gravy train and give us our money back

The charity sector is up in arms because, thanks to councils cutting their funding, they have lost £13.2bn since 2010.

Yes, that’s right. Your cash strapped councils have been hiking your council tax while they force you to fund charities whose activities you might even oppose.

While you have been struggling to make ends meet your councils have been squandering your council tax and now some have actually declared themselves bankrupt while others are staring into the financial abyss.

If that wasn’t bad enough, while the chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, ponders how to provide miniscule tax cuts in the budget, the government has been funding charities and think tanks that would fold if they had to depend on donations from the public.

In 2019-20 it was claimed that charities got somewhere between £500m and £35bn from government. Are you surprised that nobody knows the exact figures? Is there a reason for their being obscured?

Large charities have been criticised for covering up how much of their income is from the government. Some charities get so much tax payers’ cash that they might as well be classed as a branch of government.

Wondering why you have to pay such high taxes in order to fund what you thought was the “voluntary” sector? It gets worse.

The government funds what are called “sock puppet” charities so that they can lobby the government on issues such as tobacco and demand bigger government, new legislation, higher taxes and tougher regulation.

Have you wondered why government seems to be in the pockets of such political lobby groups? Why they pass legislation that is either opposed by the public or simply does not register on the radar of most voters? Did you know that the Refugee Council recieved £10million of public money? That we fund organisations that criticise the government for trying to send migrants back?

The 2006 and 2011 Charities Acts removed many of the restrictions that prevented charities from running political campaigns and allowed them to tap into the £42bn market share of the charity sector.

It is time for the charity sector to stand on its own feet and for both local and national government to stop squandering tax payers’ money on lobbying groups whose aims are often in direct conflict with the wishes of the paying public.

If the Chancellor wants to fund tax cuts in the budget he should look no further than the money paid to charities and give it back to the tax payers. If they care about the aims of the charities, who will not doubt squeal loudly as their government gravy train derails, then no doubt the public will fund them.