UK Election 2015 – Let’s ask them nicely to change

For years now we have been told by politicians from the major parties that the trickle down economy is the only way forward and all that has happened is that a large part of the population has no work, relies on food banks or has insecure employment through zero hour contracts and the like. Meanwhile the rich get richer and the wealth divide greater and all the time the same line gets rolled out that this is the only way otherwise big business will get eaten by the bogey man and then we will really be in trouble. And like a childrens’ story this is simply not the truth. So let’s make sure that the next lot of governing politicians govern for all those people who are suffering the indignity of being poor and stop pandering to the wishes of big business and the one percent.

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THE POORER YOU ARE, THE LESS LIKELY YOU ARE TO VOTE -Think about this UK and US

This is an interesting report produced by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation on how poor people are less likely to vote in an election. It is a report about the UK but applies to the US or any other demmocracy. I think I heard on the news the other day that Hillary Clinton will raise a billion US dollars for her campaign and I wondered how much of that would be spent on trying to persuade the poorest 20% of American citizens to vote, the ones that own only 0.3% of US wealth. If you truly believe in a real democracy and not a sham read this. http://www.jrf.org.uk/blog/2015/04/vote?utm_content=bufferb3ab8&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

The Rise of the Machines – Henn-na Hotel Nagasaki

I read today an article about a new hotel in Japan that is due to open this year. At first I thought that it was an April Fool’s joke but having carried out a search on the web it appears to be true. So whether I’m a Luddite or not depends on your point of view. I’m all for technology making our working conditions easier and for making the current working week shorter but replacing human labour completely for me is a moral outrage and if that is the case then yes let’s smash the machines. We have a surplus of labour that will only grow as the human population heads up from its 7.n billion people through 8 billion and beyond. Replacing human labour completely just enriches wealthy corporations, widens the gap between the majority of the world’s human population and the rich elite and creates a society that has even more exclusion something that can only lead to less social cohesion and more crime. The hotel will be part of a theme park and they are expecting them to be able to carry out 90% of the hotel’s functions.

Election UK – what chance democracy

If everybody in the UK had a duty to vote in national elections and there was a box on the ballot paper that said none of the above I’m fairly certain as to what “party” would win the election on May the 7th. And of course our dear leader saying that he wouldn’t stand for a third term, well why would he when so many fat cat pay checks await in corporate land, the same organisations that he helped while being PM. I mean how can he possibly on a politician’s salary. And he is hardly likely to become one of the people and stack shelves in a supermarket or drive a taxi is he?

We don’t have a choice. The majority of the tiny turnout on May the 7th will vote Tory or Labour and we really don’t have a choice as both of them will spend £50 billion of our hard earned UK pounds on the HS2 without even asking us. That’s just so democratic isn’t it?

In Switzerland there would have been a vote but not here as we can’t afford it but somehow we can afford £50 billion. Probably the real reason is that if Britain had a democracy then most of our players and that is what they are wouldn’t be in the job anyway.

Oh well back to the hypocrisy rather than a democracy.

Writing to the papers – have your say part 1

Today I was incensed to write to my local paper again over the ever increasing rail fares that ordinary workers have to pay to get to the great metropolis. The fares go up each year and this year is no different. The most pathetic utterance of our local Tory MP is that they are not going up as much as before. GREAT. And he probably doesn’t pay for the increase anyway, we pay for him as well. What a joke our democracy is. The Labour and Conservative parties blame each other for their collective failures and meanwhile the people can’t even be bothered to vote. Still, we know where the increased fares are going to end up, in the grubby little hands of tricky Dickie and the two capitalist Christians. I’m tired of paying for tricky Dickie’s island in the sun and what happened to the “meek shall inherit the Earth”, certainly not with these two Christian billionaires running the transport systems. If they have any conscience they would realise that Jesus would have kicked them out of the congregation a long time ago. At least we have a little bit of media freedom. USE IT or LOSE IT.

HS2 – The UK government’s plan to squander all the country’s hard earned money down south again

As much as I love London the current plan to build the HS2 infrastructure is a disgrace to all those living and working in the north of the UK. And anyway it will have little if any benefit for London unlike CrossRail. Whilst CrossRail is a great project for London and similar schemes for many other wonderful UK cities would ease congestion and maybe take cars off the road, our Tory/Labour/Lib political elite continue on with this ill thought out scheme. Much of the planning must be to prove that they can match the French and the Germans with their high speed trains but they can’t. An annual ticket from Milton Keynes to London on Virgin on the ridiculous red trains costs about £5000 per year. You would certainly have to earn a lot more than that to pay for the ticket once you have the 20% tax and national insurance contributions taken away. So who will be able to afford the HS2 tickets? Certainly not the workers on the bastard zero hour contracts that our rich, in the pocket of the corporations, political elite will do nothing about. Our political elite love exclusion, all of them, from all three main parties, they dislike people getting on in life. So instead of investing in public transport systems for lowly paid workers to travel on into other cities they will squander and borrow money so that they can look good in front of the other elites.