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Let’s all become Swiss

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I’m going to shamelessly reproduce this from The Devil’s Kitchen, because it’s just so damned good:

I propose a Swiss style Cantonal, federal Government for the UK.

Britain doesn’t have a mountain of cash like Switzerland because we are not neutral and insist on having wars to keep the taxes flowing.

Britain doesn’t have a mountain of cash like Switzerland because we pour it into the EU to keep Slovakians and Bulgarians in Mercedes and farming subsidies.

Britain doesn’t have a mountain of cash like Switzerland because every politician who ever obtains power instantly spends it on whatever they feel will keep them in power.

Britain doesn’t have a mountain of cash like Switzerland because we encourage the feckless to breed, third world beggars to plunder our housing/benefits stock and politicians are in charge of education.

Britain doesn’t have a mountain of cash like Switzerland because the British are criminals by nature and anything that ins’t nailed down is nicked, sold off cheap and the proceeds invested in Stella Artois or Skunk.

Britain doesn’t have a mountain of cash like Switzerland because we make FUCK all. Our education system doesn’t support engineering or manufacturing, it supports morons who can tell you Wayne Rooney’s star sign and nothing else.

Britain doesn’t have a mountain of cash like Switzerland because anyone can become British. Unlike the Swiss where even if you are BORN there, you have no automatic right to Swiss Citizenship and your local community will decide if you have added enough value to the community to become Swiss. No mumbling in Gujurati that you understand what housing benefit is and can you bring all your relatives too please. In the back of a lorry from Kurdistan.

Foreign youth commiting crime in Switzerland is an interesting one. If you cannot control your Kurdish son because he is “out of control”, the whole family gets booted back to Shitistan. I LIKE that approach. We cannot even send Africans back to Africa or Terrorists back to Jordon—thanks to the EU.

Swiss jails are not full. Ours are, to overflowing.

The Swiss pay £100 Million a year to get the good bits of the EU. The UK pays £30 BILLION a year to be ruled over by shaved Belgian Baboons.

Rant over. The EU is shit, we’ve tried it, it is too expensive and I don’t like taking orders from people who live abroad and have never voted for.

Bastards.

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Cameron hails ‘end of New Labour’

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BBC NEWS | Politics | Cameron hails ‘end of New Labour’ – it was no secret that the worst local election results in 40 years and the election of a Conservative Mayor of London would be quickly followed by the first by-election loss of a Labour seat to the Conservatives in 26 years, a seat that was previously held by a single Labour MP since its creation 25 years ago at that. It doesn’t get more humiliating than that and I think that the only clearer sign that New Labour could possibly be given that their time is up would be a defeat at a general election. I just don’t know what else could possibly happen to let them know how the electorate feel about them in the meantime, everything has surely been done.

Tamsin Dunwoody lead a repulsive campaign against Edward Timpson, claiming that he was a “toff” with a £53m fortune and implied that somehow these things made him unsuitable to be the Member for Crewe and Nantwich, and that somehow an unemployed mother of five would be perfect for the job. Regardless of the fact that it’s Dunwoody that appears in Burke’s Peerage and not Timpson, Dunwoody was the daughter of the previous Member, Gwynneth Dunwoody, who held the seat for 25 years before she died. I’m sorry, but with contacts like that you’re only unemployed if you want to be and if it suits you, and it obviously did in order that she could wage her pathetic class-war against Timpson, whose family built their business from nothing, a business that provides essential services to the public up and down the country, employing local, skilled people in every branch. Why on earth should that be considered by anyone to be a bad thing? It’s nothing more than Labour’s familiar old sour grapes about anyone who’s not happy just being another brick in the wall and has dared to make something of themselves.

New Labour deserved to lose this by-election in every way conceivable, and the Conservatives deserved to win it based on the dirty-tricks campaign alone, although obviously this is not the only reason why they will have won. Good for you, Edward Timpson, and screw you, Tamsin Dunwoody, you sadly typical New Labour hypocrite. You must’ve though that you were just going to inherit that seat off your mother in some kind of grotesque New Labour ascension, not unlike that of Gordon Brown’s last year. How wrong you were.

Of course, Gordon Brown and his sound bite scripted cronies are claiming that the loss of the seat is due to the global economic climate, that people are feeling the pinch and want to send a message to him to steer us through it. It has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that he’s the worst Prime Minister that this country has had for 40 years and that everyone is sick to the back-teeth of New Labour’s endless incompetence, taxation and bullshit. No, perish the fucking thought.

2010 suddenly doesn’t seem that far away. There’s light at the end of the tunnel, and not before time.

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British Airways replace knackered suitcase

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So on my way out to Gran Canaria (full blog on that coming soon, promise), British Airways knackered the retractable handle on my suitcase, presumably in Terminal 5’s infamous baggage handling system. I was left carrying it for the rest of the journey (a further two flights) to Gran Canaria, and obviously all the way back too (another two flights).

When we returned to Terminal 1 on Monday I went up to the customer service desk, fully prepared for the mother of all fights with a jobsworth hiding behind the company’s terms and conditions and stating categorically that British Airways couldn’t possibly be held responsible for damage to personal property caused by uncaring staff and/or malfunctioning machinery and that it’s left at the owner’s risk, yadda yadda yadda. But it never came, and I was all geared up for it too!

Instead, a very nice gentleman took the details of the suitcase, produced a catalogue of luggage from under his desk and asked us to identify the suitcase in it, filled in a form in front of us and then without even looking at (much less actually examining) the suitcase, stated (without any sort of fanfare) that he was very sorry for the damage and that a replacement suitcase would be delivered to me in three to four days.

Well, you could have knocked me over with a feather. The same was true on Wednesday, when, sure enough, the replacement suitcase was delivered to my apartment. Not some cheap knockoff, the real Samsonite deal, a direct replacement.

Everyone loves to slag off British Airways but on this occasion I really can’t fault them. Good for them. Bigup.

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Manchester gets Glaswegian makeover

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Scottish shiteThe whole of Manchester city centre is in a terrible state this morning. Every street is covered in empty cans, beer bottles, plastic glasses, discarded fast food, newspapers and other miscellaneous detritus. It’s absolutely fucking revolting and I am nothing short of appalled at the way that these 150,000 people, who clearly had absolutely no respect for their hosts, have behaved. Frankly, they deserved to lose the game. The debris is everywhere, even the station concourse this morning was covered in beer, puke, chips and what have you, with some still drunken fans wandering around shouting about how “shite” Manchester is, despite treating our police force like hunted prey, wrecking residents’ property and complaining when their expectations weren’t met to their standards.

Tell you what, I’ve got an idea that will keep us all happy. Why don’t you all fuck off back to fucking Glasgow, or wherever it is your crawled out from, where it’s apparently completely acceptable to treat your city like a sub-human pigsty, fucking stay there, and never fucking come back? I’d be game for that, and since you consider Manchester to be so fucking awful, you should be too. I, nor anyone else who lives or works in Manchester I expect, ever want to see the likes of you here ever again and I’d be surprised if any other city felt differently.

Furthermore, whichever organisation made all the profit out of yesterday, be it UEFA, City stadium or Rangers FC, I don’t fucking care, should be made to foot the bill for the cleanup. Why on earth should I have to put up with this when someone else has made a killing out of it? Glasgow should be made to make an official and public apology to Manchester for the way in which its residents have behaved; certainly if 150,000 Mancuncians descended upon Glasgow and left it in that sort of state there would be an outcry, swiftly followed by yet another handout from English taxpayers to clean it up.

I hate football at the best of times, and yesterday has done absolutely nothing to improve my opinion on it. The “beautiful game” and all its “supporters” can fuck right off and fucking stay there.

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Brown ‘listening and learning’ as PM

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BBC NEWS | Politics | Brown admits ‘mistakes’ over tax – this is totally enraging, our unelected Prime Minister is apparently a trainee:

Prime Minister Gordon Brown has admitted making “mistakes” in abolishing the 10p rate of income tax.

But Mr Brown said he was “listening” and “learning” as prime minister and that problems were “being dealt with”.

No, I’m sorry, I don’t accept this. Gordon Brown is the Prime Fucking Minister of this country, he is supposed to be an expert on these things, he’s supposed to have learnt, not still be learning. Who will take responsibility for his mistakes? There is nobody to supervise him, there is nobody who is supposed to know more than him. When and how is this ongoing, unstoppable incompetence going to end?

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No-one thinks Mugabe won says Brown

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BBC NEWS | Politics | No-one thinks Mugabe won – Brown – I’m quite frankly astonished at the sheer bare-faced cheek of this, and New Labour has to try really fucking hard to astonish me these days:

“No one thinks, having seen the result at the polling stations, that President Mugabe has won this election.

“A stolen election would not be an election at all. The credibility of the democratic process depends on there being a legitimate government.

Gordon Brown

I’m sorry, but aren’t you an un-elected Prime Minister who ascended to the position without an election or electoral mandate and without any opposition from within your own party? I’m pretty fucking sure that you are. Mugabe is a horrible, horrible man, I’ll not dispute that, but you, Great Leader Brown, are the last fucking person on this planet to pass judgement on his election credentials.

You can fuck right off with your holier-than-thou speeches on democracy, frankly. What a load of old horseshit.

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It must be great living in Railway World

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What is it with train companies? Like banks, they seem to live on a completely different planet to the rest of us. Last night Chris and I were booking transport from Heathrow to Manchester for when we return from Gran Canaria and, on failing to book a domestic flight because we get into Heathrow too late in the evening, we were left with no alternative other than a train. This is fine, trains from London to Manchester are fast and frequent and usually very well priced, not to mention the fact that they’re way more environmentally friendly than domestic flights.

So I went onto thetrainline.com, which is apparently the only national rail booking service (so it’s not like they have any competition to be price-conscious with), and searched for trains from Heathrow terminal 1 to Manchester on the evening of Monday 12th May. I specified standard class and two adults. The minimum price quoted was £159. First class tickets were in excess of £400.

This, as you will agree, is quite ridiculous. I know that trains to Manchester, off peak, in standard class and booked far enough in advance can be booked for as little as £13.00 per person. I also know that the Heathrow Express and the tube, which the quoted price included, cost £15.50 and £3.50 per person respectively. So I did another search, this time for the last train from London Euston to Manchester, and sure enough it came up as £26.00 for both of us (£13.00 each). This means that the previously quoted price included £133 for 2 adults to travel from Heathrow T1 to London Euston, when I know that the actual price will be £38, buying walk-up tickets.

Where the hell are they getting this extra £95.00 from? For the privilege of not having to buy separate tickets for the various legs of the journey? We could buy the walk-up tickets, throw them in the bin and take a cab to Euston and still have a decent number of notes in our pocket out of that £133 that they wanted me to pay to get 20 miles from the airport to Euston. What the fuck?

Incidentally, were we able to take a carbon-belching domestic flight from Heathrow to Manchester it would have been £88 for the two of us, including all the taxes. Go figure.

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Liverpool, a city crying out for a purpose

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Spotted in Liverpool

Spotted in Liverpool

What a total shithole Liverpool is. I went there on the train today to fix something that had gone wrong at Chris’ Dad’s as yet unused new office there and the place hasn’t changed at all since I last went, which has to be three months at least.

There’s still a sky full of cranes from any number of building sites, each one of which has imposed some sort of temporary road closure in its environs, which would normally be acceptable except all the different construction companies don’t appear to communicate with each other regarding their road closures and temporary one way systems and so it’s actually possible to get trapped in a one way system from which there is no escape, if you’re in a car. Even pedestrians come up against sealed off streets with no alternative route presented, and I know the particular area of the city in which this office is reasonably well; heaven help a visitor to the city. The roads and pavements that are open are all wet and filthy with building site muck.

Yes, I know that all these building sites will eventually make Liverpool a better place and that it’s in the middle of a transition period at the moment, but I do have ask to ask to what end? Liverpool, far from being the globally important shipping hub that it used to be, is just another boring British city, trying desperately to catch up with its trailblazing Mancunian neighbour, but it’s just too late to the party if you ask me. Birmingham, Leeds and Sheffield are the same, they’re all building sites too at the moment, keen to compete with Manchester, but it’s all a little trite now. Manchester’s done it; it’s rebuilt, revitalised and it’s fabulous. Why bother with anywhere else? I love it here. Were it not for the fact that I have family in Surrey I probably wouldn’t ever leave the city, holidays notwithstanding.

The Liverpool locals haven’t changed either, but then I didn’t expect anything else. They still seem to actually go out of their way to get in mine. I don’t know what it is about Liverpudlians, they just seem to have this knack of getting in my way more than locals in any other city in the country.

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