Both Dan Hodges and Guido report that a slither of “Red Princes” are following in their fathers footsteps and offering themselves as Labour candidates for 2015

Dave Prescott is a member of quite an exclusive club, the so called “red princes and princesses”, whose parents are MPs or former MPs, and who will be contesting seats in 2015. Others include Will Straw, recently selected for Rossendale and Darwin; Euan Blair, who is said to be interested in one of the Coventry seats; and Joe Dromey, who was showing an interest in Lewisham.

Joe Dromey’s  mummy, of course, is Harriet Harman.

Have these young men no shame? Each of them has a parent who was at the very centre of the Labour regime that did everything in it’s power to destroy the very fabric of our country.

It burdened us with a mountain of debt and brought us into the longest lasting recession of modern times.

It allowed a foreign court made up of a motley collection of European academics to overrule the very fabric of our ancient common law

It willingly saddled us with an inefficient and expensive energy policy without any serious attempt to question the voodoo “science” upon which it was based

It deliberately allowed a massive influx of immigrants from every corner of the globe by reducing our border controls to a mere token

It led us into wars for the flimsiest of reasons without any notion of strategic overview and with an underfunded army leading to the killing and maiming of hundreds, maybe thousands, of our brave servicemen and women.

Rather than seek to place themselves in power over us once again perhaps these young men should atone for their parents’ shame by devoting themselves to the humility of good works by working as minimum wage care assistants or cleaners in homes for the elderly.

For a second my heart was sinking. Was Caitlin Moran, that courageous campaigner against Twitter abuse, herself guilty of a Twitter hate crime?

But all’s well – her tweet wasn’t a vicious attack on Muslims, only against Catholics and, as we know, in the rarified atmosphere of the metropolitan media chattering class, Catholics and other Christians don’t count….

The Catholic Church – they hate women and fuck kids. On a day-to-day level, that's a tough sell.

— Caitlin Moran (@caitlinmoran) July 15, 2010

Mind you there’s always one unenlightened cynic ready to drip poison…

That is a revolting slur on hundreds of millions of members of the Church, including the overwhelming majority of Catholic clergy. 

There’s also another religious grouping she could’ve applied those tasteful “comments” to with equal lack of foundation. But then she wouldn’t have had the balls.

Oh Morningcloak….when I read your comment at this article I just knew you had a heart of stone….or maybe not…

At last – a measure of reality coming into the NHS debate from doctors who, for decades, have colluded with other health professionals to perpetuate the myth that “free at the point of entry” is a divine right set in Bevanite stone.

Payment for GP consultation is regarded as quite normal in almost every other health system based on the social insurance model (as is payment for board & lodging for hospital in-patients). It helps to cover costs and filters out those who would abuse the system.

With an increasingly elderly population we could never hope to operate a service which is both caring and efficient.

However, in return for payment, we should demand a more balanced consumer/provider relationship:

• Customer friendly hours for appointments – evenings, Saturdays etc
• Initial appointments within hours rather than two weeks
• Competition between practices to win customers by offering wider services
• Reception geared to interests of consumers rather than providers

After all this is already happening…….

There is no doubt that Christine Blower, General Secretary of the National Union of Teachers is a hard left old school apparatchik, a humourless Fred Kite figure in the mould of Bob Crowe and Len McCluskey. That such prehistoric dinosaurs, still mouthing the empty platitudes and slogans of a long discredited messianic Marxist cult, should be the standard bearers of the shrivelled rump of a once mighty British trade union movement should come as no surprise….wasn’t it Marx himself who said that history eventually repeats itself as farce?

What does raise a few eyebrows, however, is that hundreds of thousands of teachers within the NUT, supposedly intelligent, educated folk, should be willing to see a relic like Blower as a figurehead for their profession.

Anyone familiar both with teacher unions and teachers, of course, would not be surprised at all. People like Blower dominate the infrastructure of the NUT because they throw themselves one hundred percent into the mind numbing routine of committees, minutes, agenda and motions that characterise the everyday business of union administration. Most teachers are happy to let them do it because they have better things to do with their lives…preparing lessons, marking work, shopping, kids, drinking, sex, gardening etc. They very rarely attend branch meetings or conferences – it’s far easier to leave it to the Blowers. So the Blowers drift to the top as a result of ….apathy.

But how come the apathetic majority of NUT members put up with being led by Blower and an executive dominated by fossils like herself?

It’s partly because quite a few teachers regard themselves as vaguely “left wing” …I say regard themselves because, of course, though they might talk the talk they never walk the walk. They are what Lenin called radish socialists…red outside, lilywhite inside.  They lead middle class lifestyles. They like to pretend the revolution..join the odd one day strike, maybe a work to rule but that would be as far as they would go.

This hasn’t always been the case. In previous decades there was always a solid core of professionals who would never ever dance to the Blower tune. But remember that many of today’s teachers are lower level graduates from second or third tier universities where a lack of academic rigour is matched with a shallow sub marxist pedagogy.

State school teaching today is a nice little number. No covering for absent teachers, generous salaries, lower contact hours, plenty of support, no compulsory dinner duties, long holidays and automatic pay increases. No performance payments and almost impossible to sack – no wonder they, like the police, resent any idea of change

That’s why Blower’s class warfare rhetoric strikes a chord. But it’s not a Marxist uprising– it’s a Luddite resistance against anything that threatens their cosy cartel

They’re marching up to the top of the hill again…

About 20 of the UK’s leading scientists and meteorologists are due to meet at the Met Office to discuss Britain’s “unusual” weather patterns.

Stand by for a new raft of taxes….

Now here’s an idea – why hasn’t anyone else thought of this?

“Our patients are our customers”

A private doctor’s surgery run by Poles is attracting thousands of patients who have given up on the NHS.
Open seven days a week, usually until 11pm, the clinic gives half-hour appointments – three times longer than usual.
And, despite charging £70 a visit, it already has almost 6,000 Britons on its books. Customers are welcomed into the spotless and modern centre by friendly receptionists whose motto is to ‘put patients first’.

 

You mean that these “customers” don’t have to approach the receptionist as a supplicant, grovelling for a favour by pleading for an appointment that day? They can actually spend half an hour with the doctor rather than be part of conveyor belt that jerks back into action after ten minutes? If they can’t be bothered to turn up for their appointment because it clashes with daytime TV they’ll still have to pay £70? Is it possible that being ill at weekends is no longer a cardinal sin interfering with a GP’s round of golf?

OMG….the BBC Question time audience would have a collective nervous breakdown and the health professionals cartels (aka “unions”) would be flooding our screens with messages of doom, shock and horror at this Oliver Twist moment…

Equalities Minister Maria Miller continued the Tory Party’s war on mothers with yet another attack on stay-at-home mums, hitting them with a double edged guilt trip

A shortage of successful women is holding Britain’s economy back, Cabinet Minister Maria Miller will warn today.

The equalities minister will warn that it is unacceptable that highly-skilled and talent women continue to languish behind men in the workplace.

More help will be offered to school girls to get ahead in business while employers will be urged to hire women over 50.

The call comes as a government-backed report says stay-at-home mothers should go back into the workforce to boost economic growth.

So,  selfish and bone idle mothers, you are not only being traitors to your country by sabotaging the economy – but you’re also betraying the sisterhood.

Ms Miller could even see into the future…..thanks to those marvellous “experts”

Getting those women back to work would boost economic growth by 0.5 per cent a year or 10 per cent by 2030 – vital if Britain is to emerge from the financial crisis, experts said.

Funny how those experts can be so specific about how women are needed to get us out of the financial crisis when they were unable to predict the crisis in the first place….

In truth the figures are meaningless, conjured up out of thin air like the cost/benefit analysis of HS2. Moreover, in a period when unemployment is still relatively high from where are these jobs expected to come?

It seems strange that at the very moment when the concept of the family is under attack – high divorce rates, more and more children being born out of wedlock,  the heterosexual nature of marriage being undermined – Tory politicians like Miller should be devaluing the nature of motherhood. Perhaps that’s one reason why the party is losing it’s core support.

The tragedy is that Maria Miller, unlike most of her Cabinet colleagues attended a comprehensive school  and  has considerable business experience. She should have been a bonus to the government – instead she is a damp squib.

This report is just busywork to give the impression of “something being done” – so just file it under PP….Permanent Pending because nothing will ever come of it…..apart from the fact it will make a few more stay-at-home mums (or dads) feel even more worthless…

Can’t help agreeing with the old windbag here. Syria ia a hornets nest and the last thing we need to do is poke a stick into it. Indeed “a pox on all your houses” should be our watchword here. Hezbollah and Iranian Revolutionary Guard proxies duking it out with AQ leaning Jihadist fanatics from all over the world should not be unwelcome news. Remember the split between Mao and the late unlamented Soviet Union?  It was very good  for us in the west because it meant the Russians were always looking over their shoulder.

The Foreign Office and elements of the North London dinner party circuit are itching to pimp their consciences here with dreams of intervention but, as sure as eggs is eggs it would all end in tears.

When thieves fall out it’s honest folk who benefit….

You know, Dan Hannan makes an excellent point here

When we call a man a terrorist, we bestow a certain status on him. He ceases to be a common criminal, a violent narcissist, a drop-out. He becomes, instead, a man with a cause.

Bellicose young men, in all ages and nations, look for ideologies that justify their aggression. Sometimes, they latch on to an organisation that already exists – the Baader-Meinhof Gang, the IRA, al-Qaeda. Sometimes, as with Anders Behring Breivik or Seung-Hui Cho, they develop their own Weltanschauung – often in language so conceited and hackneyed that, in other
circumstances, it would be laughable.

 

Absolutely right. In the 1980s several  IRA prisoners in Northern Ireland, serving sentences for crimes of murder or aiding and abetting murder, went on hunger strike because they wanted to be granted the status of being called political prisoners. Maggie Thatcher faced them down – she knew that giving  them that status would immediately transform  them into enemy combatants, warriors to be treated with respect outside the battlefield because they were fighting for what they believed was a just cause. So she instructed that they were to be treated as criminals, men and women who  murdered, tortured, kidnapped and robbed law abiding citizens.

Equally do not inflate these murderers egos by describing their victims as being “executed” – that portrays the murder  as a killing sanctioned by higher law and acts as a useful psychological justification tool for those with murder on their mind.

Calling a “terrorist” a criminal  buttresses his own self belief that his gruesome deeds have some sort of moral dimension that takes him far above the child killers, wife beaters and gang enforcers who inhabit the other cells. Calling him a criminal would demean his actions .

The killers of Drummer Rigby in Woolwich were murderers not religious/political activists. The more often we spell that out the less likely shall we hear those weasel words

“Of course I cannot condone these killings BUT……..”

Rest in peace Drummer Lee Rigby of the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers.

Amidst all the pontificating , posturing and political point scoring let us not forget that the British soldier murdered by jihadist terrorists this week had family and friends who will be shedding tears of grief. Above all his wife and son have lost a husband and father.

We the public will honour him as a one of the soldiers who guard us as we sleep – and who paid the ultimate price for that duty. But two other people have also paid a price – his wife Rebecca and his son Jack.

Surely the time has come for every service man and woman to be secure in the knowledge that whatever fate befalls them at the hands of our enemies their spouses and children will be supported generously for the rest of their lives at the expense of those who they protect – we the taxpayers.

Of course the various service charities do a magnificent job via the generosity of those who donate. But it should not just be finance by choice. Every one of us, whatever our politics or religion or philosophy, should pay the charge through our taxes. Far better that our taxes are used for our guardians than be sent to corrupt third world politicians or feckless benefit scroungers

Drummer Lee Rigby or ‘Riggers’ to his friends was born in July 1987 in Crumpsall, Manchester. He joined the Army in 2006 and on successful completion of his infantry training course at Infantry Training Centre Catterick was selected to be a member of the Corps of Drums and posted to 2nd Battalion The Royal Regiment of Fusiliers (also known as the ‘Second Fusiliers’ or ‘2 RRF’).
His first posting was as a machine gunner in Cyprus where the battalion was serving as the resident infantry battalion in Dhekelia. Having performed a plethora of tasks while in Cyprus, he returned to the UK in the early part of 2008 to Hounslow, West London. Here, Drummer Rigby stood proudly outside the royal palaces as part of the battalion’s public duties commitment. He was an integral member of the Corps of Drums throughout the battalion’s time on public duties, the highlight of which was being a part of the Household Division’s Beating Retreat – a real honour for a line infantry Corps of Drums.
In April 2009, Drummer Rigby deployed on operations for the first time to Helmand province, Afghanistan, where he served as a member of the Fire Support Group at Patrol Base Woqab. On returning to the UK he completed a second tour of public duties and then moved with the battalion to Celle, Germany, to be held at a state of high readiness for contingency operations as part of the Small Scale Contingency Battle Group.
In 2011, Drummer Rigby took up a recruiting post in London where he also assisted with duties at the regimental headquarters in the Tower of London.
An extremely popular and witty soldier, Drummer Rigby was a larger than life personality within the Corps of Drums and was well known, liked and respected across the Second Fusiliers. He was a passionate and lifelong Manchester United fan.
A loving father to his son Jack, aged 2 years, he will be sorely missed by all who knew him. The regiment’s thoughts and prayers are with his family during this extremely difficult time.

‘Once a Fusilier, always a Fusilier’