BoJo and the Three Cs

"I can hardly condemn UKIP as a bunch of boss-eyed, foam-flecked Euro hysterics, when I have been sometimes not far short of boss-eyed, foam-flecked hysteria myself."

I went along to the People's Question Time this week in Hammersmith Town Hall, mostly to see what Boris Johnson had to say for himself. I genuinely went with an open mind. I am not one to stick up for toffs but I do not begrudge someone because they have had a privileged upbringing. In fact, in a way it is good that we have so many upper class mummy's boys in government because unlike other countries, specifically in the developing world, they did not vie for a government post in order to get rich because obviously they are already stinking rich.

Bo Jo started with quoting dubious statistics about crime falling 25% and crime on transport falling 33%; oh clearly Boris if those figures are true there must be a direct correlation between an astounding fall in crime to your mayoralty! The first question that was posed to Boris was 'Would you feel safe walking in any street of London?' The non-Londoner replied 'yes' to which there was a burst of laughter amongst the audience.

My blood began boiling the more and more as I thought about all the robberies that occur in East Acton alone every day. A place which is mostly populated with pensioners. The lovely guys who took my phone http://musingsfromaneet.blogspot.com/2012/02/where-for-art-thou-i-phone.html (amongst the hundreds of women they have probably robbed,) took a woman's handbag outside the station and when she would not let go, smacked her around the face with their moped helmet. Pregnant women have had their phones alongside clumps of hair ripped out of their heads outside Hammersmith Hospital. The 60+ owner of my local laundrette got robbed on Du Cane Road whilst fetching something from her car. Boys as young as 12 tried to snatch the handbag of my friend's mum; a 4'11" Chinese lady. A gaggle of teens including a girl not too subtly asked my dad for 'the time'. Some years ago my mum was pushed to the floor and her bag taken, which had her late mother's diamond earrings in them. Basically there is almost no resident of East Acton that I know that has not been robbed in the area where they have grown up. Lest I forget that the police did not even turn up when I called them because understandably a Monday afternoon is way too busy a time for them to attend to a woman newly robbed, I thought these were third world problems...

If robberies occur in this tiny area every single day, you would think that there would be police ready to catch the thieves, and if not for the pure reasoning of catching everyday muggers and protecting the people who pay their wages, some inevitably must have links to bigger criminals they wish to catch. But no, what they actually do is a put a minuscule sign on the lamp post outside East Acton station (ironically I took a picture of the sign a week before my phone was snatched.) saying something like 'Beware of muggers' with a picture of a boy on a bike with a Scream mask on. Why not put a scarecrow there? A teddy? A banana maybe? They would all have been equally effective at deterring these criminals who have been cowering in their high tops since Boris Johnson became mayor.

Other gems Bo Jo dropped were 'Ken Livingstone spent thousands of pounds going to see FIDEL CASTRO (said slowly for effect)' and scoffed. When the election campaign was going on I agreed that too much money was wasted in Whitehall but Bo Jo has managed to spend MORE than Ken Livingstone. He attacked Ken's intentions to get subsidised 'but not even that subsidised' oil from Venezuela 'one of the poorest countries in Latin America'. Yes I'm sure your heart bleeds for the developing countries whose oil this country plunders, especially when the subsidy is only so-so.

A woman who was a business owner in Shepherds Bush, alongside other business owners asked Bo Jo to stop its 'redevelopment' aka letting investors run amok so Shepherds Bush can look like a generic piece of city crap. His response was 'I can't talk about it as the councillors are here'. The three 'C' words cahoots, capitalism and corruption springs to mind. After being given some more chances to speak on this issue, he did not and many people walked out. His reaction was unconcerned at best.

The blonde haired buffoon perfectly demonstrated not only that class doesn't mean you have class by scoffing and interrupting everyone he disagreed with, he did that politician pretend slick thing and answered questions with vague statements instead of his actual policies. 'Of course I don't agree with corporations not paying their taxes...' Yeah Boris keeps it real, describing his £250,000 he is paid by the Telegraph annually as 'chicken feed'. London please...

No1 Rule of Life (and Law Students)

Just wanted to say a few things about capitalism, based on Anro's blog http://anbarrockny.blogspot.com/2011/12/stupid-american-capitalists.html

Many Americans seem worryingly brainwashed by their media, it's difficult to get a balanced picture there. The powerful right-wing own most of the media so of course they would peddle rampant capitalism because they are the ones that have benefited in the first place. The same goes for the all-powerful lobby groups, who buy and financially blackmail their way to government influence. Then because these same groups dominate the media, they propagate the madness of the capitalist system and everyone believes it.

No1 Rule of Life - check your sources people!! Journalists and news corporations are not the word of God!! They have agendas and opinions just like everyone else, what would most people do if they became powerful enough? Influence people to think their way of life is right, right? It's just common sense, how can the public still have faith in capitalism when it's proven to be disastrous to families all over the world?

And then politicians there want LESS regulation and smaller government?? So greedy and careless investments can take priority over THE PEOPLE yet again? This is insanity. I read an article that in a majority of a poll, the question posed was 'Should a sick 17-year-old die because they have no medical insurance?' The resounding answer was YES. What has the world come to when people would choose capitalism over the life of a child? The fact that the US is the only developed country to not provide universal healthcare is something they should be ashamed of, not revel in.

Aside from the media propaganda, other reasons that I can fathom as to why they hold capitalism so dear is that less government means less taxes, especially for healthcare. So private companies stepping in where government agencies would have been means more competition and therefore higher efficiency and less cost. Is this what happened with oil companies? Well the prices at your local filling station will tell you otherwise. The price of oil can just keep on going up as the oil barons please, where is the competitiveness and efficiency in that? The price of oil then affects everything, the price of food, the sick and disabled who need to use their car to get around, EVERYTHING. The US government contracts out their war machines to private contractors too, thus ensuring the safety of nations in the hands of people who profit from war. How can this kind of privatisation be right?

Just because Americans  lost many soldiers in fighting communism it doesn't mean the polar opposite; unfettered capitalism, is the solution!!!

FYI ever-worshipping free marketeers, I am not a socialist, I just do not believe in an ever increasing and destructive divide between rich and poor...

See also http://anbarrockny.blogspot.com/

CHAV - Council House and Violent - Do They Deserve All The Derision?

 *Inspired by http://anbarrockny.blogspot.com/2011/11/rent-goes-up-again.html & the attack on the poor*

There are not many societies which deride the poor i.e. the working class as much as we do (see Pippa Middleton dressed at a fancy dress party as a chav). I'm going to join on this for a minute but just bear with me for a minute... I have known so many people throughout my life who have pretended to be homeless, with their parents' encouragement, in order to get themselves in a hostel. Thus ensuring a coveted London council flat in the future, heavily subsidised by the taxpayer. Many council workers are in on this scam and actively tell their friends to get on the housing list, I have been offered this myself. I turned it down and although my morals are intact I cannot help kicking myself as property prices continue to soar and rents becoming more expensive than mortgages. As a child of a parent with those horrific endowment mortgages (after 25 years of an interest based mortgage we will still owe more than a third of the cost of the house, thanks Conservative government and an unregulated mortgage market!) I find myself getting annoyed that council and housing association tenants are paying about 10% of what private renters pay and less if they are on housing benefits.

But this is what the government wants us to do!! To feel angry at the poorer members of society who are just trying to secure their own lives, rather than redirecting anger at the state and how they have let things get to the stage where a studio flat i.e. a box, can cost £300 a week excluding bills and council tax. Instead of facing down greed and forcing landlords to downsize their rent demands or tax them according to how many properties they have etc. they would rather, yep you guessed it bow down to the FREE MARKET system. Nooo don't tax the bankers too much, they will leave the country, Nooo don't sort out the housing prices, that will mess up the free market system. So they are wilfully ignoring the unaffordability (yes I made up a word) of a basic human need and even more absurdly, they would rather stump up the cash in the form of housing benefit.

Many estate agencies do not accept housing benefit tenants anyway for security reasons. Furthermore, housing benefit has been cut in an attempt to move the poor where they should be, in cheap, crap housing just like the good old tower block days. Instead of being unwilling to pay for poor people's sky high rent, why not make sure the rent is not that high in the 1st place? Radical idea I know! If they were forced down, what would really happen? Will the landlords themselves become poor? Err no, obviously not. If tenants had a little more shopping change, would that also not better this flawed economy? Err, obviously YES.

See also http://raraproductions.blogspot.com/ & http://anbarrockny.blogspot.com/

Let's just start from zero

The economy schonomy is all over the news and I don't know if it's just me but it's sooo boring, plus it's terribly depressing. We've been hearing about financial doom and gloom for years now, everything is all 'recession' this and 'slow growth' that. Governments are meant to be controlling/providing for us but the real control over all nations is the economy.

Aaaah the economy, all our lives and livelihoods rely on this thing getting better, oooh don't hurt the poor economy, it has to be fed anything it wants because it has to grow, it can't be restricted by government but yet it must be fed by government money. Well it sounds to me like this economy thing is the emperor in the emperor's new clothes. It's an idea which is enamoured and revered more than God yet it is non-existent and just totally crap.

Everything to do with bail-outs is coated with billions of dosh, where are these billions and now trillions coming from? Greece may get a trillion euros to save them from bankruptcy, America is in trillions of debt and no, all the debt is not owed to China as they are also in trillions of debt apparently. The International Monetary Fund lends out billions on a regular basis, especially to 'developing' countries like Somalia who owe 90% of the entire country's debt to them. How come the Bank of England can just pump billions to provide quantitave easing? Whatever the hell that means. Where did they get all this money from and more importantly, why don't they give it to me?!!

My point is if everyone is in debt, with little to no hope of paying it back this century, yet these random organisations which are meaningless to the ordinary person seem to have an abundance of cash, why don't we just either rob all this money they have or better yet just start from scratch. No-one's listening to the 99% as they allegedly have no resolution except to be anti-capitalist. Rampant capitalism obviously is not full proof or they wouldn't have to keep being rescued by taxpayer's money in a socialist fashion. The power of the West is slowly but surely dying out with the emergence of the Bric countries and nobody can estimate or underestimate the direction of the Arab Spring, so let's just forget AD and call this era PR- post recession and start from zero.

See also http://raraproductions.blogspot.com/ & http://anbarrockny.blogspot.com/

My 1st try at this blogging thing

I don't know who will end up reading this, if anyone at all, so I guess I will just speak my mind on this October morning...
Who am I? As part of a nation obsessed with categories and (unsubstantiated) statistics what particular box do I fit into? Seeing as I did not get the 3rd job I have interviewed for yesterday in just as many weeks, I've decided that today my not so unique selling point is that I am a N,E,E,T, the lovingly coined phrase for those of us who are a burden to society, the state and our parents - not in employment education or training. I am the one in ten in London who is unemployed, the one in five 'young' people who are not employed etc.

We are the future!! Yes the majority of the UK rioters are the future yay! We are the ones that are going to be paying for the baby boomers' decreasing pensions. But how will we pay for them in taxes if we cannot find jobs and to make matters worse they will be in the jobs that we need until they're 67!

As a nation of moaners it is difficult for all of our concerns to be taken seriously, so what's a fresh out of carefree childhood Briton to do? When you're in your teens you inevitably think you're invincible and that you will be forever young. Wrong! Perhaps that's part of the reason we are seemingly in a state of chaos? The sense of entitlement that led to the plethora of graduates with a piece of paper but no life and/or work skills to the rioters that did not give it a second thought to joining the looting frenzy as soon as the opportunity presented itself.

Since we seem to be a slave to this enigmatic thing called the free market maybe we should just accept a number of things; that the market is down and we just need to wait it out until things improve? Even more depressingly, some even think that the good times will never return as the era of credit with no questions asked and 100% mortgages were always a fallacy waiting to be exposed. Should we camp at St Pauls to protest against capitalism et al? Try innovative ways to get a job e.g. advertising yourself on youtube or walk with a board in the City etc? Live with our parents forever, who are also struggling with redundancies, pay cuts, lower pensions and increasing utility bills? Start a business in a climate where people have no money to spare and the European tourists are surely to fall sharply as they're suffering even more than us? Use our shiny EU passports to up sticks to another Member State? Or languish where one of my teachers at school said I would be - on the dole? Well at the moment I've chosen the last option, but only until March - as that's when my government I did not vote for will cut the apron strings.

C'est la vie - should we accept it or try to find answers? Til my next rant, an unproud NEET

See also http://raraproductions.blogspot.com/ & http://anbarrockny.blogspot.com/