AIRSTRIP ONE

Oh dear. I like Newsnight but I’m having to give this week’s show a miss.

I made a vow to switch off or turn over whenever I see George Galoway on the telly. I refuse to listen to that arsehole.

New Labour citizen Jacqui Smith has updated the Newspeak Dictionary again. “Islamic Terrorism” will now be known as “Anti-Islamic Activity“.

Ms. Smith said that making any link between Islam and terrorism was unfounded and could be “inflammatory”. She said that there was “no evidence” that following the religion of Islam meant that one was any more or less likely to become interested in the murder of innocent people for political gain.

Coffee in hand, I switched on BBC News 24 today and was dismayed to see yet another cog in the NHS spin-job in motion.

According to the BBC News, the country is losing 175m working days each year due to sickness and our Health Secretary Alan Johnson (AKA Obersturmbannführer) is now setting out plans for changing what he calls “the sick-note culture” and plans to urge GPs to issue “well notes” setting out what tasks a worker can perform instead of certificates automatically signing them off.

According to the CIA’s World Fact Book, the UK has a total population of 60.7 million and a labour force of 30.7 million. The maths isn’t difficult and from these figures we can deduce that on average each working person takes off six working days each year as a result of sickness. Is this really so much?

It is about six years since I last worked in an office job and when I was doing that I was in constant fear of getting sick. When I got a cold or flu I’d try at all costs to be at work. I’d take my sickness into work and spread it around. Other people the office where I worked would get sick and they too would come into work sick. This was the norm and I suspect that it still is amongst office workers in the UK. If I did need to take days off sick I would usually take them as holidays as my boss simply didn’t tolerate sickness. I am self-employed now and have never looked back.

Once I got laryngitis and as my job involved being on the phone all day I was forced to take time off work to let my non-existent voice repair itself. After a few days, I was able to speak, allbeit in a whisper, so I returned to work and promptly lost my voice again answering the phones. I suggested that I be given other tasks but my greedy little shit of a boss didn’t care. He just let me loose my voice again and I had to take more days off as part of my holiday allowance. To add insult to injury when I had finally made a full recovery I was hauled into his office for a lecture about the inconvenience of taking holidays at short notice.

I suspect that my boss was not a special case and that this is the normal attitude of many businesses.

Alan Johnson has recently been trying to persuade GPs to open-up their surgeries in the evenings and at weekends to accommodate working people but GPs are having none of it and why should they? GPs and reception staff are people too. Why should they be forced to work out-of-hours if they don’t want to?

This attempt to shift blame onto the shoulders of those who are sick and those who work very hard in the NHS service curing the sick is frankly pathetic. Why isn’t Mr Johnson having a go at employers for their intolerance? Why isn’t he re-enforcing the idea of a “duty of care” that employers have for their employees? The rot starts here. Surely the idea that an employee can be treated as a social leper just for being sick should be unacceptable in any civilised society.

Workers in the UK get fewer bank holidays than their European counterparts and according to the BBC’s news website:-

Europe averages 11 bank holidays each year, compared to eight in England and Wales and 10 in Northern Ireland. Only the Netherlands has fewer public holidays than the UK, but Dutch workers have more annual leave.

In March 2005, Tony Blair pledged to ensure workers get bank holidays on top of paid leave if Labour wins the next general election. Does anyone believe that this will really be the case?

New Labour is quietly rolling out a “master-plan” to force genuinely sick people back to work by paying US companies like ATOS loads of money to “re-assess” disability claims. They are forcing doctors to break their Hippocratic oath of “doing no harm” by making them police their patients and effectively turning them into Agents of The State.
The fact is that UK workers have longer hours than other European workers for a lower standard of living. They are punished for being sick and have fewer holidays. Alan Johnson is just another New Labour toadie spouting crap. New Labour = Brave New Bullshit.

I logged on to the TFL website this morning and saw that I had 3 quid pay-as-you-go on my Oyster Card. I thought, right, enough for my bus fares today, put on my coat and perhaps somewhat foolishly left my visa card and wallet behind; it was a simple journey and I didn’t think I’d need any money so I didn’t take any with me.

Three miles from home and three buses later I feel like a lepper.

It turns out that information from each bus has to be downloaded via hard-wire and this can take time. When I logged on to the website this morning at six o’clock, seventy pence had yet to be deducted from the information from a bus that I took yesterday evening. You’d have thought that by that time they would have added this information. You’d have thought that they’d use wi-fi. No - I’m guessing that the Oyster machines are powered by newts running around tread-mills.

The upshot is that I’ve just had to walk two miles home with my back in great pain (I have spondylolisthesis).

So to anybody who doesn’t presently hold the office of the Mayor of London, I apologise for my bad language in advance.

Fuck you Livingstone! I’m waiting with champagne and flute glass in hand, ready for the day you go.

My new Lenovo laptop arrived a day early with no dead pixles and fighting fit. The extra 2 Gigs of ram was easy to fit and I’d uninstalled all the rubbish in about fifteen minutes.

I can highly recommend laptopsdirect.co.uk to anyone who wants to buy a laptop. The rep was friendly and informative when I called and the laptop arrived earlier than expected. The price was lower than at other outlets and the “no dead pixels guarantee” was well worth the extra £25 I paid.

Both Sony and DABS mucked me about and I’ve now added them to my list of companies that I neither use nor recommend to clients.

Justice Secretary Jack Straw has ordered an inquiry into claims police bugged an Islamic Terrorist when  he was visited in jail by a friend who happened to be an MP.

Suspected Islamic terrorist Babar Ahmad and Tooting MP Sadiq Khan were recorded twice in Milton Keynes’s Woodhill Prison, the Sunday Times says.

In a statement on Sunday, Mr Straw said “It is a terrorists right to fraternise with MPs should he wish to do so”.

He went on to say that it was not yet clear who the target of the bugging had been and that although bugging an MP would be completely acceptable, if any investigation finds that the main target was Mr Ahmed there would be grave consequences concerning the human rights of terrorists in British custody.

Since the release of “Groundhog Day” (The Film) the BBC News has been reporting the event live from Pensylvania, USA.

It amazes me that the BBC feel that this event is worth reporting as “news”. Why should a manufactured “tradition” from a country with a little over 200 years of history be news?

Compare the BBC’s extensive reporting of Groundhog Day with their total disregard for St George’s Day.

Pathetic.