If I was in charge …
Although the meaning was cryptic, the previous ‘If I was in charge …’ post was not a comment on immigration.
Blind old cnut Blunkett all of a sudden – many years too late – says that interception was too much
Blind old cnut Blunkett all of a sudden says “Human nature is you get carried away, so we have to protect ourselves from ourselves,” he said. “In government you are pressed by the security agencies. They come to you with very good information and they say ‘you need to do something’. So you do need the breath of scepticism, not cynicism, breathing on them. You need to be able to take a step back. If you don’t have this, you can find yourself being propelled in a particular direction.”
I suspect that this is about spying on mobile phone users: In fact I suspect that it’s about governments demanding the ability to spy on mobile phone users is designed into the systems. This was on big C cnut Blunkett’s watch after all …
COUNCIL RESOLUTION of 17 January 1995 on the lawful interception of telecommunications
(96/C 329/01)
Official Journal C 329 , 04/11/1996 p. 0001 – 0006
[These demands from ‘law enforcement agencies’ are for every signal including location. Mobile phones signal their location continuously. Isn’t that a bug? … Blunkett, what do you have to say? You were home secretary after all … ]
[Later edit: Blunkett became Home Secretary in 2001. It should be recognised that mobile phones announce their location and much more.
[Later: It appears that there was no opposition by Blunkett to these demands from ‘law enforcement agencies’. Wasn’t there a scandal about this time about New Labour databases? – Escalibur was associated with Mandy and Labour coming into power but it was more than that – have to research this.]
Don’t look at this Mobile phones are designed to be mobile bugs
The women who sparked the Labour movement
http://www.theguardian.com/women-in-leadership/2013/nov/04/women-who-sparked-labour-movement
The Match Women of Bryant and May formed Britain’s first women’s trade union and won the right to better conditions. So why do so few know about their achievement?
by Lyn Brown, Labour MP for West Ham.
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Hearing of the grim conditions, Annie Besant investigated and published an article in her weekly newspaper, The Link, headlined: “White Slavery in London,” prompting Bryant and May to threaten libel action. The company put pressure on the women to discover who had spoken to Besant.
Bryant and May identified and dismissed “ringleaders,” provoking around 1,400 women to walk out on strike. The workers put a picket line in place. The factory was at a standstill.
The striking women marched daily through the streets, collecting money to sustain their families. They marched on parliament where they lobbied and impressed MPs. Bryant and May was forced, through public, social and political pressure, to accede to the women’s demands for safer working conditions and the cessation of arbitrary fines.
Crucially, the company allowed them to form a trades union, so that “future disputes, if any, may be laid officially in front of the firm.” The Union of Women Matchworkers, the greatest union of women and girls in the country, was formed.
The Star newspaper congratulated the workers on their “magnificent victory, a turning point in the history of our industrial development.” Truly, it was.
Given Bryant and May’s political and economic power, the strike by these impoverished women was particularly audacious and by no means predestined to succeed. The struggle of these women, played out in the glare of publicity, had repercussions far beyond the betterment of their own conditions.
The Match Women’s Strike was a vital catalyst for ‘new unionism’. It was openly acknowledged by the dock strike leaders a year later in 1889 when the call went out from John Burns to a meeting of tens of thousands of strikers to: “Stand shoulder-to-shoulder. Remember the match women, who won their fight and formed a union.”
The Match Women demonstrated to working people that it is possible for marginalised, unskilled workers to bind together in solidarity in trade unions and succeed in their demands for reasonable pay and conditions.
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I would prefer a transition to a revolution …
Please …
think about it …
Let’s go for the transition
Hopefully it’s like a revolution without the blood and guts
We make it
We do it
I’m trying to do it
[ reflect please ]
[ … and how would you do it? and then what? how would you do … ?
what would you do?
… (you’re not really doing it, are you?)
I think that it’s time for a transition of wealth from all the fantastically filthy rich scum to people who need some of that money to exist and feed their kids.
See it’s easy
I don’t see why filthy rich scum who have done nothing but inherit their wealth should <having a bit of trouble finding the word here – it’s like kill and subject them to torture> poor kids.
HS2 … the high-speed train route with the same old staggering fares
http://www.theguardian.com/money/blog/2013/nov/02/hs2-train-fares-commuter
With commuter tickets already costing thousands of pounds, will anyone be able to afford to travel on it?
The government says its proposals for High Speed 2 “assume a fares structure in line with that of the existing railway”. So we can probably expect to fork out an absurd sum for a ticket unless we trawl through websites three months in advance, can be absolutely certain we are going to travel on the 3.42pm on a Tuesday afternoon, and we craftily split the journey half way to Manchester. Get any stage wrong and the inspector will haul you off the train and land you with a huge fine.
It is remarkable that in the debate on HS2 so little has been said about fares. Will taxpayers be expected to pump billions upon billions into a Mitterrand-style Grand Projet then find it’s out of the reach of anybody other than swish executives on expense accounts? The omens, despite the government’s reassurances, aren’t good.
Take the prices for travelling on our only existing high-speed track, HS1, that whizzes through the Kent countryside. If you live in Ashford, the opening of the line promised a huge improvement in train times into the capital. Sure enough, it now takes just 35 minutes into London St Pancras compared to the 61 minutes it takes on the former route into London Victoria.
But at what cost? A season ticket for commuters from Ashford to a London terminal using the old route, plus an onward journey on the tube, costs £4,996 a year. That’s a pretty staggering sum for a 54-mile journey (about the same as London to Brighton). But if you want to take the HS1 trains, and save half an hour, the cost rises to £6,360. A commuter paying 40% tax has to earn £10,600 a year just to pay to get into work (oh, and there’s a £700 to £900 a year bill to park at the station).
The Ashford example suggests that using HS1 costs 27% more than the fare structure of the existing railway, which I think we can rely on as a better indicator of what fares will be like on HS2 than what the politicians are telling us. The – so far – lacklustre economic gains that HS1 has brought to north Kent should also deflate some of the more ambitious claims about the impact of HS2 on northern cities. An analysis in the Economist this week suggests HS1 has brought benefits for London, but little elsewhere.
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