This is Eric your computer welcoming you onboard.

(All site written content is Copyright (C) 2013 by Hugh Hunt) 

Would you fly on a plane with no pilot? As the first passenger jet with no one at the controls travelled 500 miles over Britain, admittedly on a test flight with no passengers on board, passengers on flights in the future could apparently soon face a worrying dilemma, as for reasons best known to themselves,  the air industry believes pilotless flying is the future of air travel. There I was thinking that with all those unemployed disgruntled graduates out there looking for a good job, not to mention even more who are unemployed but not up to their neck in student loans, there should be a large pool of suitable trainee pilots around to see the airlines through until they bring in Star Trek transporters to get us all to Benidorm.

Generally speaking I’m not a scaredy-cat and have never had any problem with flying, even in the rather casual maintenance environment of West Africa, but if anyone thinks they’re going to get me up in a pilotless computer controlled flying machine to anywhere they are completely out of their tiny mind. With the world awash with computer hacking nerds, geeks and cyber nutters on God knows what designer drugs, thinking what a laugh it would be to take over the control of a plane full of expendable computer illiteratie and see if they can land it, not to mention those well-known Muslim terrorists always looking for a new way to kill innocent people, the air industry must be out of their high flying minds.

OK Betty, you can send the 747 from New York into Biggin Hill now. What do you mean,it's not an airfield anymore?

 

Some predict that within ten or 20 years, commercial jets will be flown routinely by remote control over our towns and cities, but I have a feeling that Joe Public along with every Health and Safety Inspector ever hatched out into this dangerous world will have quite a lot to say about it, and will more than likely tell “some” to piss off rather than have their flight flown by faceless controllers on the ground. Mysteriously, supporters of so-called ‘autonomous  aircraft’ justify their developments on safety grounds, claiming that as most air accidents are caused by human error, then surely it makes sense to remove people from the equation. Obviously these staggeringly naïve individuals are forgetting the small detail that only people fly aircraft at the moment, so apart from major mechanical failure, which incidentally human pilots frequently overcome and land safely, human error is about the only other choice. Have these innocent soul’s never heard of computer failure, or do they live in some rarefied world where computers are infallible machines which never let you down, because if they do, have they got room for me there?

Is there a computer engineer on board?

Last month’s test flight over the UK was part of the Astraea project, which is the catchily named, £62 million Autonomous Systems Technology Related Airborne Evaluation and Assessment programme funded by industry and the Government. The craft, with the original nickname of the “Flying Test Bed”, is able to cruise in British airspace with no human involvement, though not yet without any humans on board, presumably in case the computer says “no” at an awkward moment, or the controller on the ground needs to pop to the loo. The high-definition cameras in the cockpit and underneath the craft scan the skies for weather systems and other old fashioned manned flying machines, and feed the information back to the computerised navigation system, allowing the craft to change course automatically to avoid storms and turbulence, other aircraft, weather balloons and even parachutes, parachutists will be glad to hear. The only planes regularly flown pilotless thus far are those much debated “drones”, of which there have been 100 crashes since 2007, including nine since the start of this year, so obviously still work in progress.

God knows where the bloody things gone now. It's probably miles away and about to crash on some silly sod's head.

 

Lambert Dopping-Hepenstal, Astraea Programme Director at BAE Systems, whose name I incidentally can’t bring myself to take seriously, says “Unmanned civil aircraft are an exciting new opportunity. We see these aircraft undertaking dangerous roles in poor conditions”, so possibly they will just be asking for volunteer passengers who are already flirting with the idea of suicide rather than regular fair payers. He also claims that “unlike humans, computers don’t get tired, don’t need lavatory breaks, don’t have unions and don’t need regular rest periods (or get drunk at parties with stewardesses the night before they fly),” ho! ho! More to the point Lambert Dopping-Hepenstal also admits what is surely at the heart of all this; that it will save the aircraft operating industry money, but strangely makes no mention of computers being fallible and breaking down or cyber-attacks and the like. All in all, one of the high tech developments I can quite happily do without seeing in operation before I head off into oblivion.

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Spiritual sex, slimy Scots, a silly singer and civil service scrubbers.

(All site written content is Copyright (C) 2013 by Hugh Hunt) 

Convinced his home had been overrun by supernatural spirits causing thumping noises, a man in Tasmania set up a camcorder in his kitchen, pressed record button and went off to work. Returning later he found a nice recording of his girlfriend having sex with his teenage son instead, so not so much thumping as humping.

You wouldn't think blokes old enough to get into this dump would need us to teach them how to touch up their lippy.

A Nightclub's bosses in Glasgow have installed a two-way mirror in the women's toilets so that groups of very sad men can leer at female clubbers using the sinks from two private booths placed behind the mirrors. The booths cost £800-a-night each to hire and the seedy owners of The Shimmy Club, though surely that should be The Slimy Club, defended the two-way mirror as just being a 'bit of fun', though I would say that at £1600 per evening they put a high price on so called “fun” in Glasgow. In 1988 Glasgow was “City of Culture”, so obviously all downhill since then, and this is surely just the sort of thing which could make people think the Scots will stop at nothing to make money, heaven forebid. If I were you girls I’d pack a lump hammer in your clutch bag next time you decide to slum it in slimeland.

I was just nodding off and asked the others to wake me up before they go go and Wham! there I was on the road.

Singer George Michael is an unconventional sort of chap at times, and has been arrested in the past for having drugs in his car, for soliciting gay sex in a public lavatory, having drugs in a public lavatory and was sent to prison for absent mindedly driving his Range Rover into a house in the middle of the night. Last week he managed to absent mindedly “fall out” of a car travelling at 70 mph on the M1, and survive with reasonably minor injuries. One has to wonder whether he was making a desperate attempt at attracting the attention of a friendly mobile drug dealer, had spotted a speeding mini bus full of transvestites and couldn’t resist the temptation to try and join them or just urgently needed to find a passing public lavatory.

So sorry to wake you up dear but could you just confirm which leg we have to take off? Ah, OK so your right arm is it.

Senior British civil servants in the Department of Health will have to work on the frontline of the NHS if they want to be promoted, the Health Secretary is to announce. From next month, 200 senior officials will have to perform tasks such as mopping floors, emptying bedpans and serving meals to care home residents as the Government responds to the Francis Report into the major problems at the Mid Staffordshire Trust, so it’s reassuring to see that the men from the Ministry will now be able to neglect patients in person before getting promotion. The ambitious public servants will also be expected to fill roles such as GP receptionists and hospital porters for a total of four weeks a year for six years, though it is believed that they will not be asked to help in operating theatres as most are unable to tell their arse from their elbow and could create a bonanza for “No Win, No Fee” low-life ambulance chasing lawyers.

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Tony Blair aims to make millions as Pitkin Mk 2 in Albania.

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Some of you will be aware of the late Sir Norman Wisdom’s enormous popularity during the Communist era in Albania, where cheeky chappie Norman was a cult comedy figure and one of the few Western actors whose films were allowed in the country during the dictatorship of Enver Hoxha. In Hoxha's view, Norman's put-upon little working man struggling against capitalism, personified by employer Mr Grimsdale and the upper classes, where a Communist parable on the class war. Meanwhile ordinary Albanians simply found Norman’s slapstick comedy hilarious, and knew him simply as "Mr Pitkin" after his character in his films, and sod the socialist symbolism. In 1995, he visited the post-Stalinist country where he was greeted by many appreciative fans, including the President Sali Berisha. On a visit in 2001, which coincided with the England football team playing Albania his appearance at the training ground overshadowed that of David Beckham, and Norman was even made an honorary citizen of the Albanian capital Tirana. The day after his death in 2010 Albania declared a day of national mourning.

From down trodden milkman to Communist hero. The wonderful world of Wisdom.

Albania has elections next month which the Socialists are expected to win, and I’m sure you will all be as pleased as I am to hear that their leader Edi Rama, has got off to a flying campaigning start by finding a brand new slap-stick comedian to divert the country’s attention from his no doubt totally legitimate business dealings with the well-known multi-national drug, arms and human trafficking organisation, Albanian Mafia Plc. His new comedic powerhouse is none other than Britain’s very own “Straight sort of Guy” Tony Blair who is now going for an image change and cracking the jokes himself, for a large fee of course. Surely we all remember his hilarious performances when defending his and his comedy side-kick Bush’s invading of Iraq to stop the use of those shadowy “Weapons of Mass Destruction”, which of course turned out to be one of the biggest practical jokes ever plaid on the world community. What a mischievous pair they were, and apparently many Iraqi’s are still trying to see the funny side of it as they do their best to avoid being blown up each day.

Blair has agreed to advise the next government of Albania in a deal which could be worth millions of pounds to him, as Albania is hoping to join the European Union and is understood to be interested in New Labour-style reforms, presumably so that they can end up in due course in the same enviable state the UK is in today. He is being lined up to work as a consultant for the Socialist Party if, as expected, it wins next month’s elections, and in a video released about the discussions Blair said “I will be very happy to help you. I am very interested in your country”, failing to add the obvious, “Since I will be making millions out of you”. The country, ruled by hard-line Communists until the 1990s, became a democracy in 1998, and is one of Europe’s poorest countries, with its GDP 119th in the world, even below war-torn Congo, but obviously wealthy enough to waste millions on Blair’s dubious advice.

A couple of hours in makeup and they'll be ready to hitch up and hit the road, but watch out for the potholes Cherie.

In order to get the publicity ball rolling in Albania I gather that Blair is planning to do a re-make of the famous Wisdom comedy, “The Early Bird”, with Blair reprising the roll of Pitkin, the harassed horse powered milkman struggling against modern motorised delivery methods. His old partner George WumbleU Bush will be playing his employer Mr Grimsdale with the aid of a guide dog and white stick, and wife Cherie will at last find a roll in which she is perfectly cast as the horse.

Mr Blair has also signed deals to “advise” governments in Kuwait, Brazil and Colombia with the Government Advisory Practice he set up after he left Downing Street in 2007. He was criticised recently after it emerged that he will also advise President Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan, whose police force shot and killed 15 striking oil workers in December 2011, and who is well known for being an old fashioned socialist dictator. The deal is said to be worth £16million to Blair, or just over one million pounds per oil worker.

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How do you pick a winner when they are all such obvious loosers?

(All site written content is Copyright (C) 2013 by Hugh Hunt)

British MP’s are hoping to give themselves a £10,000 a year pay rise soon, and anticipating a few gripes from unreasonable members of the un-appreciative public, who may think that raising the lazy sods basic pay from £65,738 to £75,000 per annum is out of order, they have already sited an old saying in their defence. Fearing that they may be accused of having their “snouts in the trough” yet again, they have pre-empted the challenge by claiming that “if you pay peanuts you get monkeys working for you”, a saying which they are presumably living proof of as they seem to think their existing pay comes into the primate class.

Personally I think there probably is a good argument for increasing British MP’s pay, but only if it is combined with moves to increase the quality of the people standing for election and getting rid of the many dead legs and time servers who fill the so called corridors of power at the moment, and that includes most of the “front benchers” as well. What a characterless and shallow bunch they are, with it hard to identify a single one among them who could reasonably claim to have any real character or charisma about them, let alone notable ability and leadership qualities.

At the moment we have Compo Cameron making himself look a total prat, shuffling around trying to placate the unruly members of his party over an EU referendum and Gay Get-togethers instead of giving them really strong inspirational leadership and making them do as they’re told, or to put it another way, doing what a party leader should be doing. Meanwhile, over the Cabinet table Coalition chum Cleggie is heading up shit creek, having just been caught out fiddling a nice little £12 million grant for his wife’s favourite charity, Booktrust last year by getting one of his party mates to lobby for it, enabling it to be given direct rather than having to compete with other charities.

It’s hard to get interested in British politics when you have to choose between three nonentities like these.

 

With this shambolic situation on the Government’s front bench you would think that Labour leader, Foggy Millipede would be bouncing around on his little wooden pallet, brimming with confidence, little face lit up in anticipation of marching into power in 2015. Sadly sloth and despair have overtaken the Labour hierarchy who privately admit that they are staring defeat in the face in two years’ time rather than the resounding victory they had planned on, and are at last realising what a disaster giving Ed rather than Dave the task of making the party look electable again after the thirteen year balls-up masterminded by Blair and Brown. The Labour performance in the local elections was well down on expectations last month, the economy is slowly picking up and the up and coming EU elections for MEP’s is looking equally bleak with UKIP set to make great gains.

What a sad bunch of nonentities they all are, but presumably able to console themselves with the thought that they are pretty much on a par with all the other political no-hopers making such a pig’s ear of running the recession hit European Union at almost every level at the moment. It’s at times like this I wish I believed in some kind of God who could help us, but as religion seems to inevitably lead to even more trouble rather than relieving a situation I think I’ll stick on that one.

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Trouble flying into Top Gear

(All site written content is Copyright (C) 2013 by Hugh Hunt)

I can’t say I watch Top Gear with Jeremy Clarkson and his two chums acting rather like over excited and over indulged children who have been given big boys toys to play with, but there are times when his so called “gaffes”, which are surely quite intentional on his part, do raise a smile, much as those of the wonderful Prince “Phil the Greek” Philip have done over the years. In this politically correct, over protective and safety obsessed world we now live in, someone surely has to try and blow the claustrophobic cobwebs of correctness away occasionally, and Clarkson does a good job of using his public profile to do the job, and hopefully he will continue to do so.

His latest effort was to demand that “babies should be put in the baggage hold on flights until they are old enough to behave” which I can imagine many air travellers who have suffered the pain of a small child screaming in their ear in the confined space of a modern plane will have great sympathy with, if not openly, as I certainly have. He had just flown to Scotland when he tweeted: ‘When will British Airways realise that babies belong in the hold?’ This inevitably drew an immediate response from irate Justine Roberts, of mumsie website Mumsnet, who hit back with ‘There are plenty of Mumsnet users hoping British Airways will realise Jeremy Clarkson belongs in the hold’ which I’m sure there are dear, but hopefully a few of them will also possess, what’s it called now, ah yes, a sense of humour, which you sadly totally lack.  Ever thought of adding a joke’s section to the site Justine? 

You’d think being a mum would be fun but strangely there are very few pictures of Justine Roberts available with a smile on her face. Come on girl, cheer up or I’ll ask Jeremy to pop round and tickle your fancy.

Making Ultra-Orthodox Jews Work, Kill and Pay

(All site written content is Copyright (C) 2013 by Hugh Hunt)

We watched a fascinating documentary the other day in which they looked at the various problems facing Israel both as regards its defences against its Arab neighbours and the country’s economy. Most Israeli men and women are called up for military service for up to three years when they turn 18, and a large proportion of the county’s budget is spent on defence, though exceptions are made for most Arab citizens of Israel, for rather obvious reasons, as well as ultra-Orthodox Jewish men and women for less obvious reasons.

Ultra-Orthodox Jews now make up some 10 percent of Israel's population of 8 million, and most do not work at all, they receive military service exemptions, talk and argue a lot and rely heavily on state subsidies for financing their religious studies and to support their families, and are not so orthodox as to prevent them having three times the average birth rate for the country as a whole. If you are wondering who I’m talking about, they’re the bad hair day weirdoes dressed in black and wearing silly hats who you see beating their heads against the “wailing wall” in press photos depicting religious Israel, and about 60 percent of ultra-Orthodox men engage in full-time Jewish religious studies throughout their lives, sadly making it impossible for them to actually do any work. 

 

These bizarre workshy layabouts are brain washed into believing that they are entitled to be kept by others as they contemplate religion. Not sure what they are doing here but it all looks a little suspect to me and decidedly secular.

When Israel was created fifty odd years ago there were a few hundred of these religious zealots and they were given these special rights to keep them quiet, but there are now 800,000 of them who now regard the abstention from military service and needing to work as their God given right. However, their ability to live at the expense of normal working Jews and avoid military service is now being withdrawn, and some 20.000 of them have summoned up enough physical energy to take part in violent street protests where the crowd heard rabbis warn that army service would irreparably harm their way of life; in other words make them work and fight for their living.

The esteemed Bank of Israel Governor Stanley Fischer agrees that the country can no longer afford the luxury of having 10% of the population being kept in idle religious contemplation by the rest.  Last week he issued a warning aimed at the Haredi, as these parasites are called, saying that “We can’t have an ever-increasing proportion of the population continuing to not go to work. By the time you are up to 10 percent of the population of whom 70 percent of the male part of that population doesn’t work, you have the prospect of huge swathes of economically inactive adults undermining the economy and viability of the state itself.” Arrangements have to be made to force them into work, said Fischer – and fight, your average Israeli tax payer would add.  

The Angel of God appeared in the burning bush but unfortunately no sign of them appearing yet in the burning bin.

  

Military service and paying tax may be duties of citizenship the Haredi have managed to dodge up until now, but they never fail to miss out on voting. As they expand their numbers, they are able to lever growing political power and raise ever greater state subsidies for their communities, and if they don't get their way legally, they will orchestrate religious riots, something that now flares with ever greater frequency. These are now put down with increasing enthusiasm by the Israeli Police as the public irritation with these idle religious zealots grows and their time of living off other people’s labours is thankfully coming to an end. Change will come, said Mr Fischer, but the question is whether it will happen with social conflict, with political conflict, or consensually and constructively; unfortunately the Haredi don't do consensus and are notably useless at anything constructive, so social conflict looks like the odds on favourite if you fancy a punt.

No figures are available for the extreme Orthodox Jewish population in the UK, though they will undoubtedly be making full use of the long suffering British benefits system to enable them to pursue their indolent lifestyle of contemplation and copulation, so if you see one passing thoughtfully by one day tell the lazy sod to get his hair cut, get a job and use contraception.

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Eurovission Waste of Time and Money Contest

(All site written content is Copyright (C) 2013 by Hugh Hunt)

Welsh singer Bonnie Tyler has said she "did the best that I could do" at the Eurovision Song Contest last night after her UK entry came 19th out of 26, and I’m sure you did dear, though why anyone bothers with this annual festival of second rate music anymore is surely a mystery to most people, or possibly just me? It seems to have become a self-perpetuating burden on the finances of the combined broadcasting media of Europe and beyond with so many countries now involved that no one dare suggest that it’s consigned to the great entertainments wheelie bin in the sky once and for all. The results now bear little relevance to the quality of the music, having far more to do with political leanings than poetical lyrics, and cultural ties rather than catchy tunes. Having seen off artists of the calibre of Humperwrinkle last year, and the slightly past her croak by date Tyler this year, and even failing to respond to the writing skills of none other than Sir Andrew Lloyd What’s-his-name, why doesn’t the Beeb just throw a wobbly and withdraw from the annual farce in a huff and be done with it. Unless you love tacky, trivial and tiresome entertainment of course, in which case, get a life.

“I did the best I could do”, well it just wasn’t good enough was it Bony, sorry that would be Bonnie

Whatever happened to people with ethics and accepting responsibility?

(All site written content is Copyright (C) 2013 by Hugh Hunt)

As if it wasn’t bad enough the UK Police hitting the headlines on a daily basis for everything from major cover ups of failings by senior officers too wooden top plods claiming damages for getting a splinter in their finger when scratching their head or falling over their own plodding feet, some of the new Police and Crime Commissioners who only took up their office earlier this year are also already at it. Anthony Stansfeld, the Conservative Police and Crime Commissioner for Thames Valley, could not claim for the cost of the 45-minute drive from his home to the force’s headquarters every morning, so he changed his main office nominally to a single small room in a police station just four miles from his house which he checks into each morning, and he can then drive to the headquarters on expenses. 

Less than 6 months in charge of Thames Valley Police and already fiddling expences. Obviously one of the boys.

In the first few weeks after the move he clocked up over 1,000 miles and was paid more than £450 of public money – a 6,181 per cent rise on the £7 he received the previous month. Adding icing to the expenses cake Stansfeld has now become the first PCC to appoint a chauffeur to ferry him back and forth to work, which means his mileage claims have ceased but it will now cost taxpayers at least £20,000 a year for him to be driven around in an Audi. There was astonishment from the public at the behaviour of Stansfeld, who is paid £85,000 as PCC and £15,000 in allowances as a Tory councillor, and now controls Thames Valley Police who incidentally must make £40 million of cuts in their budget over the next four years, or should that now be £40 million and £20 thousand.

Stansfeld will be in good thick skinned company within the Thames Valley Police who were accused of catastrophic failings a week ago, along with local social services, who between them enabled a sadistic group of 7 Muslim men to drug, rape and traffic girls as young as 11 over the past eight years within their area. Victims repeatedly told police they had been abused and sexually tortured and care-home staff just watched as the men collected the under-age girls at night, but despite this catalogue of appalling blunders and missed opportunities over many years, nobody is prepared to take the blame.

Both Thames Valley Police Chief Constable Sara Thornton and Joanna Simons, head of Oxfordshire County Council, say they will not resign, even as it emerged that only one care worker has been sacked in the aftermath of the scandal, and even though most of the eight-year campaign of abuse by the gang took place after Miss Thornton was appointed head of the Thames Valley force in 2007. She yesterday apologised for not acting sooner, but when asked if she had considered resigning from her £160,000-a-year post, she said: "The focus has got to be moving forward. I think the focus for me is on driving improvements in the future", in other words, “If you think I’m giving up £160,000 a year because a load of young girls got abused while I was in charge you must be mad.”

Both deeply incompetent and without any sense of honour or inclination to take responsibility for their terrible failings.

Mss Simons also said she was not quitting her £182,000-a-year job as chief executive of Oxford Social Services, and has said ‘My gut feeling is that I am not going to resign because my determination is that we need to do all that we can to take action to stamp this out.” Listen dimbo, apart from that being meaningless bollocks, my gut feeling is that your determination is cutting in around eight years too late, during which time you had plenty of opportunity to prove you were up to the job and failed miserably to do so, so on your bike and out of there.  

Some hope needless to say. In the past, when major failings were found in an organisation’s performance and this was a very major failing, both on the part of the Thames Valley Police and Oxfordshire Social Services, those in charge were honour bound to resign and did so immediately and without fuss. Nowadays the tactic is for those who presided over the cock up to completely ignore any suggestion of accepting responsibility for what has happened in the past and come out with platitudes about what needs to be done in the future to ensure the same f**k-ups don’t occur again. Mysteriously they claim that having been in charge while everything went wrong makes them uniquely qualified to ensure it never happens again, when in fact there is absolutely no basis for such a claim and they need to be thrown out in disgrace and a clean pair of hands put in charge.

These two deeply incompetent women presided over equally inept colleagues and between the lot of them desperately failed six young and vulnerable girls who not only deserved far better but were plainly entitled to it. The least these two sad and inadequate individuals, who have obviously been promoted well beyond their very limited capabilities should suffer is being consigned to the dole queue as soon as possible, along with their sidekicks who were equally lacking in their abilities.

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Being homeless in luxury.

(All site written content is Copyright (C) 2013 by Hugh Hunt)

London’s Westminster City Council has spent millions on sending homeless people to exclusive hotels because they cannot find anywhere to house them, it has been claimed with officials allegedly approving four-star accommodation for those without homes because of a loophole in the benefit system. Bills including £248,000 on rooms at Jury’s Inn Hotel in Chelsea, £171,000 on rooms at the Copthorne Tara Hotel near the exclusive Kensington Gardens in West London, and rooms at the Leinster House Hotel near Hyde Park which cost £133,000. People are claiming they are homeless rather than moving to cheaper areas to dodge new laws that cap their housing benefit, and many people are believed to have been staying in hotels for months, despite strict laws saying they should only be in bed and breakfast accommodation for no more than six weeks.

And should the late night movie and companion be billed to Westminster Council or your Parliamentary expenses Sir?

 I have been unable to confirm rumours that most of the individuals concerned are MP’s who have become homeless since the Parliamentary expenses scandal hit the fan. 

Pay-back time is getting near for mega-rich tax “avoiders” and their “advisors”.

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Sorry to talk about rats two days in a row, but at least this time they are the human variety, though even more unpleasant in their way. Apparently at long last, after a joint effort by Britain, the United States and Australia, the net is closing in on the super- rich rodent tax dodgers who have received such a well-deserved bad press over the past year, as international spy agencies no less, have helped to expose how hundreds of Brits, Americans and Australians are hiding billions of pounds in foreign tax havens. More than 100 ultra-wealthy individuals have been identified so far with hundreds of high-profile but low-life individuals still being investigated for major tax evasion as their secret offshore accounts in hideaways like Singapore, the British Virgin Islands and the Caymans Islands are identified, along with the names of their equally appalling “financial advisors”.

These bags of cash are getting heavier every day. Pity we can't trust anyone enough to carry them for us.

The files show how the rich, many of the names on the list being of very well-known people, have hidden billions away and in Britain the first ones to be identified have already been sent letters by HM Revenue & Customs warning them that they face paying the tax they have dodged along with massive fines. Chancellor George Osborne is said to have been shocked by the amount of money involved though I doubt most ordinary tax payers will be that surprised to find that those who seek fame and fortune and crave the admiration of the public who helped make them so rich, are equally determined to avoid paying their fair share into the national pot. Some rich people use their wealth for the good of others and are happy to pay their taxes, whilst many others are only interested in their own selfish ends and will do all that they can to keep as much of their high earnings as possible for themselves in exactly the same way that multi-national companies like Amazon, Google and Starbucks do. Whether individuals or corporations, they are equally devious and certainly not deserving of anyone’s admiration, unless of course you are one of them yourself, though having said that, if the tax laws had been written properly in the first place they wouldn’t be able to do it at all.

The actions of these greedy people costs the UK around £70 billion each year, and the Inland Revenue, who of course wrote the flawed legislation in the first place, said it was continuing to analyse the material, the equivalent of more than 200 lorry-loads of printed A4 sheets. They have urged those who use offshore tax structures to “urgently review their taxation arrangements to ensure they comply with the law” and have “encouraged” those who do so, to ensure "early disclosure of tax irregularities”. Failure to do so may result in a criminal prosecution or significant financial penalties and the possibility of their identities being published, which is obviously the bit which the public will look forward to. 

£70 billion did you say. Grief, that's more than some of my best friends are worth.

Hopefully the miscreants will then be put in the stocks so that the British tax payers can get a bit of payback by pelting them with rotten fruit and veg, bad eggs, bricks and anything else that comes to hand. I’m glad to hear that they are also investigating more than 200 UK accountants, lawyers and other “professional advisers” named in the data as advising the wealthy on setting up the elaborate offshore tax arrangements. About time the entire bunch of greedy, slimy and unbelievably selfish scumbags were brought to heal, and the sooner the better, and with the recent agreement among G7 leaders the momentum will hopefully increase.

 

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Rats gnaw their way into the Chinese food chain.

(All site written content is Copyright (C) 2013 by Hugh Hunt)

If you were one of those picky souls who were put off your bargain basement burgers by the thought they may contain a few ounces of Uncle Tom Copley’s old grey mare in the meat mix you could do well to steer clear of China for a while as it’s in the midst of much murkier meat machinations in the form of hundreds of people being arrested after passing off rat meat as lamb. Admittedly in the hands of a Michelin star chef the loony lunchers would probably be queueing up for a taste of the latest culinary masterpiece, but for some reason the Chinese have taken exception to being served up with rack of rat, and heads may literally role over the rodent dressed up as lamb affair.

This latest food scandal in China has raised yet more questions about food safety in the country which has barely seen a day go by without news of yet another food safety horror story recently, but this latest case is truly gruesome even by Chinese standards. When people eat at cheap restaurants or roadside stalls they are frequently left with that queasy feeling that they may have consumed something they did not order, and when they get home, if they do in fact make it that far, they frequently get their doubts speedily confirmed.

A woman recently had lunch at a restaurant and discovered a stone in her soup and then a piece of scrubbing brush in her main course, and when asked why she had not complained, she said she did not want to spoil the meal for her friends. The irony is that people in China are now eating more than ever before but good quality food is increasingly hard to find after the largest mass migration in human history with tens of millions of rural migrants pouring into the cities to fuel the country's booming economic growth having caused a chaotic and un-manageable demand in the food supply chain.

The food industry in China is frequently unhygienic, un-controlled and dangerously criminal, with farmers smothering vegetables in questionable pesticides, livestock businesses pumping cattle full of steroids and corrupt officials often certifying inedible food as safe having taken their cut of the proceeds in the never ending fight to supply enough food for the mushrooming urban population. Many people are deeply concerned over the poor quality of home produced Chinese food but only the better off middle classes can afford to buy imported produce such as meat from Australia and milk from New Zealand.

The greatest anger in recent year’s involved formula baby milk in 2008 when a scandal of stunning proportions unfolded in homes across the country as hundreds of thousands of babies became sick after drinking contaminated formula milk and several of them died. Not surprisingly the authorities initially suppressed the scandal because they did not want bad news breaking before the Beijing Olympics, but inevitably the problem was so great that the cover-up was exposed. This producing public outrage that the authorities were prepared to put international perceptions of the country ahead of the health of its babies and the trust of the public, but the problem still flairs up and only recently there was a massive run on imported formula milk because local supplies were again suspect. During the aftermath of the baby milk scandal, the authorities promised to take tougher measures to clean up the food supply chain, and even introduced the death penalty in some cases, but inevitably corruption and lax enforcement of regulations means that people are still looking at their plates every mealtime and thinking about the country's terrible record on food safety. 

Apparently your ribbled remark "Let them eat Rat" went down very badly outside.

 

As one would expect in a Communist state, China's leaders are very particular about what they eat themselves, and, allegedly, there are carefully monitored special farms producing vegetables, fish, pork and poultry for the nation's leadership, but such is the public mood, the leaders know they need to deal with the simmering public anger over food safety as a matter of urgency. Very much in the same way that they need to deal with the appalling air and water pollution, out of control greenhouse gas production from old coal fired power stations and mushrooming public health problems. China’s economy continues to grow but with terrible human costs, caused of course by western demand for cheap goods in much the same way the recent Bangladesh disaster was.

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