Prisoners – get pregnant and go home?

Did you read the news today that prisoners are to get a pay increase?   If you did, you may have noticed that will include an increase in maternity leave as well.

Maternity leave, really!   It’s bad enough out in the big, wide world where the poor suckers of men and non-childbearing women have to pick up all the work of those engrossed in nursery decoration, cots, new buggies and disposable nappies.   But in prison?

Of course, they really mean prisoners’ maternity pay, which is set to increase.   But the mind does just wonder whether “maternity leave” could mean more than a few weeks not working and could mean leaving the gaol’s confines for a spell at home! 

Assumed consent will lead to withdrawal of consent

The trouble with this and any Labour government is that it doesn’t allow for people like Mr Womble on Tour and me.

I see the question of “assumed consent” for organ donation is being raised again  -  this time by the Royal College of Nursing.   And that is despite the very clear statement on Mr WoT’s blog that nobody is to assume his consent.

You see that’s the thing about people like me.   I have carried a donor card and been on the central register since the scheme was first set up.   But as soon as the government sticks its great boot in to try to take control over what I’m doing, then I immediately think oh well, I won’t do it then.   I’ll withdraw my donor registration and refuse consent.  

Governments, particularly Labour ones, want sheep who meekly do what they tell them.   But Sepoy and Mr WoT are not like that.   We like to run our own lives, and any move to compulsion or assumed consent has a negative effect.

What a son to have

I bet there are many elderly gentlemen in the country, and a good few ladies too, who would like to have a son like Mike Hammond.

Mike’s father, 88-year-old Jack Hammond, recently had to move into a residential home.   He found there was only one other male resident, and he had nothing in common with him.   What Mr Hammond liked was to take a friendly drink in the local pub, but he couldn’t go by himself.

So son, Mike, advertised for a drinking companion for his father.   There were many applicants, so Mike drew up a shortlist, and then interviewed them with his Dad.   They’ve ended up with two people who will job share taking Mr Hammond to the pub.   One is a retired doctor and the other a former army man and both seem to get on well with Mr Hammond.

Mike had offered £7 an hour plus expenses.   The two applicants were so keen to be Mr Hammond’s drinking chums that one said he didn’t need the expenses, and the other is doing it for free.

So now Mr Hammond gets convivial evenings at the pub several times a week, because not only are his new companions going to be with him for three evenings each week, but Mike himself takes his Dad out twice a week.

Mike said he was convinced he had found the right gentlemen for the job  -  “Dad’s now going to be going down the pub several times a week  -  three with his new friends and twice with me.   He was an extremely social person before moving into the care home and I want to give him some of his old life back.”

What a son to have.   In no way neglecting his father, taking him out himself twice a week, and prepared to pay someone for several other nights!

Well said, Sarko!

This was part of Nicolas Sarkozy’s interview with French Television this week:-

“Talk to that lot?   Who stone women, stop girls from going to school, destroy ancient Buddhas?   I don’t think so”.

He was talking about the Taliban.   I’d like to think Britain would be just as determined.

I will not be a citizen of the Manche Region or the North Sea Region. I am English, that says it all.

From time to time I look at The Monarchist website, but, although very much a monarchist myself, I usually give up  -  just a bit over the top.   But today, this one’s worth a look.

A new EU map has removed England completely.   It has been divided into three and attached to various bits of west mainland Europe.  “The Manche” region covers parts of southern England and northern France  -  see, they’ve even given it a French name.   Rebel ye Anglo Saxons!!   Western England, Wales, Portugal and Spain are lumped into an “Atlantic” region, and Eastern England, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands and parts of Germany into a “North Sea” region.   Even the English Channel has been renamed the ”Channel Sea”. 

This is the really chilling bit, though, German Ministers claim the plan is about

“underlying the goal of a united Europe” to “permanently overcome old borders” at a time when the “Constitution for Europe needs to regain momentum”.

Old borders?  They are the borders of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.   They are the borders of the four nations of England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.   Nobody has ever asked their inhabitants if they wish the borders to be changed;  if they wish to be part of a silly European region.   And I, for one, don’t.   I, for one, want to remain a subject of Her Britannic Majesty Elizabeth II, Queen of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and a resident of the proud nation of England.

This little plum appeared on St George’s Day, how apt.   It also co-incides with a poll in The Daily Telegraph showing that one third of people want England to have its own parliament and twenty-per-cent want England to be an independent country and for Britain to be broken up.

As well as we who want England and the English properly recognized, those who want a United Kingdom to continue must fight this dastardly plan to impose a completely artificial map on sovereign nations.   It always beats me how people as nationalistic as the French and the Germans seem to go along with these things.   But that doesn’t mean we have to.  

England must remain as a sovereign country, and these rubbish regions must be resisted.

 

 

Food shortages – rationing looming – self-sufficiency – austerity bites again

Yesterday’s headlines, “Era of cheap food ends as prices surge” have escalated today to “Rationing introduced in bid to protect vanishing rice supplies.”  (Both headlines from The Times)

A few thoughts:-

Yesterday’s warning was that the cost of basic foods will rise steeply again because of acute shortages in commodity markets.  One wouldn’t mind so much if one thought that the cost would go down when the supply situation improves.   Cynical maybe, but I wouldn’t put money on it.   In fact, the ground has already been prepared, (oh dear, another pun), by experts saying the days of cheap food have gone and will not return.

Second, amazing that WalMart is introducing rationing of rice in America  -  the first time, apparently, that food has ever been rationed in the USA.  And it was recently suggested that a Cameron government in the UK might bring in food rationing to bring home to people the seriousness of the economic situation.   In Britain rationing, while never welcomed, was tolerated in two world wars because of the national determination to defeat the enemy.   It continued through the Attlee post war government, and then was resented because the war was over and people’s hopes had focussed on a new better life.   In fact, it bit much deeper in those years;   the rationing of coal during one of the most bitterly cold winters being a case in point.   Even with the return of Churchill’s Conservative government in 1951 it took a couple of years before rationing finally disappeared.    (I’m disregarding the temporary later rationing of petrol.)   So, for people who lived through any of that, there is a deep antipathy to any idea of rationing.   Younger people I suspect do not realize what it would mean  -  it would sure come as a shock.

Finally, it seems at last as if the farming policy of the last few decades is coming home to roost.    It was always madness to give up so much of our self-sufficiency.   Back in those war-time and rationing days every possible acre was put over to growing food, sometimes tearing up historic landscapes to do it.   Even individual families were urged to “dig for victory”.   Well, that’s going a bit far, but the recent regime of set aside and subsidies not to grow food have led to our being in a position where we are most certainly not self-sufficient.   To some extent that was brought on by the British palate being tempted by foreign dishes, experienced on package holidays, and leading to vast imports of foreign ingredients.   Apparently now Britain’s favourite dish, almost regarded as traditional, is a curry.   How the old colonial Sahibs and Memsahibs would have relished that.

Whilst welcoming the ingenuity shown by farmers in diversifying, whether that be into soft fruits, venison, or the like, or utilising out-of-use farm buildings for mini commercial workshops and offices, barn conversions, and bed and breakfast, it is surely clear that we must bring more agricultural land back into farming use, and must look to be more self-sufficient.

 

 

Happy St George’s Day

Happy St George’s Day to everyone, and particularly to the Witanagemot Club, and to all blogs and websites promoting England and the English.

Is this where the invasion of our privacy is coming from?

Do read this from Nanny Knows Best.   It just about sums up the frustration so many of us feel today.   In fact, frustration isn’t a strong enough word.   It’s actually fear and loathing at what is happening to our once wonderful country.

I dare say there will be those who say he shouldn’t have used the Hitler quote.   If it brings home to a few people the enormity of what is happening, and the similarity of the softly, softly, drip, drip method of a government imposing its hated restrictions, invasion of privacy, rat on your neighbours, and complete control of individuals, then it’s worth it.