The looters' looter - by Richard... Friday, August 26, 2011

The looters' looter - by Richard... Friday, August 26, 2011

Brazen in its contempt for public sentiment, the Local Government Group (formerly the Local Government Association) is seeking to appoint a new chief executive, and is ready to pay £190,000 a year. Funded from subscriptions from local government, which it represents, the LG Group is thus far from setting a good example in moderating its salary offers. Instead, it is joining the ranks of the looters with great gusto.

Officially the group, which changed its name from the Local Government Association this summer, has advertised the job for £150,000, with more available for an "exceptional candidate". However its choice, which is likely to be announced in the next few weeks, is certain to be judged exceptional and its salary will be set to come just beneath the £200,000 mark.

Outgoing chief executive John Ransford was paid at the rate of under £100,000 a year in his final months in the job, which means that the new chief executive will be enjoying what amounts to a doubling in salary for a job that has remained unchanged.

And, to add insult to injury, the LG Group brought in a recruitment consultancy to help with the appointment and has put the cost of this at £16,000 – more than many local authority employees earn in a year. 

The contempt of the Group, however, is hardly surprising. Its political leader is Tory Sir Merrick Cockell, former leader of Kensington and Chelsea council. Cockell is one of the local councillors estimated to have made more than £100,000 in a single year in allowances paid by various local government bodies of which he has been a member.

But we must not talk of killing these people ... to do so could be construed as an arrestable offence - and it upsets some of our more sensitive readers. We, the little people, should instead smile and be grateful that we have such towering figures looking after our interests, for such a pittance. You know it makes sense.

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We need a revolution - by Richard...

I don't have much time for Pat Condell. He strikes me as the classic "man-in-pub", reinforcing prejudices which make him almost a parody of himself. This clip is typical of the genre, even if the underlying theme is sound. We do need a revolution – more a counter-revolution, as the "colleagues" got their first to steal our rights. 

But Condell, like so many, confuses elections with democracy. We need to understand here that electing officials does not a democracy make, and nor is the election of our officials a necessary condition for democracy - as Klein Verzet also notes. Until it was so perverted, there was more democracy in the unelected House of Lords than there was in the Commons.

Democracy, therefore, is not about choosing officials, but of controlling them once they are in office. With election comes the threat that, should they not behave, we will remove them ... but since those officials all work to the same agenda now, that threat has lost its force.

Nor can we really talk about restoring democracy. In this country, we have never really had it, except around the margins. The history of the British people has been the journey towards a destination, at which we have never arrived. We need, actually, to create a democracy, to which effect we need to give the means some considerable thought.

For the moment, though, Condell will have to suffice, with his call for a revolution – not an uprising. His is not a call to violence, and neither will you get one here. But to fight the current order and to seek its overthrow by peaceful means are legitimate aspirations of the British people. 

And, as I keep saying, there are more of us than there are of them. We just need to realise our own power.

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Tory splits? - by Richard...

Do you remember when the mantra of "Tory splits" seemed to be the most dominant force in politics, with Labour in full cry at the very hint of them, and the Tory grandees pulling out all the stops to maintain a façade of unity?

And now we have the "coalition", with the Cleggerons totally at odds over a supposedly flagship policy. They are split right down the middle, yet somehow this is not supposed to matter.

Actually, this makes a total nonsense of any idea of coherent government, when the man pretending to be prime minister is being held to ransom by his own deputy who is actively briefing against him.

Meanwhile, while the idiot Boy prattled about clawing back powers from Brussels, he is being undermined by his Business Secretary, Vince Cable, who has "agreed" to a controversial EU directive on agency workers, a measure which is set to cost employers more than £1.8 billion a year.

With that, the very concept of a unified government descends into low farce – a hollow joke. But the tragedy is that the joke is on us, the British people, forced as we are to suffer these posturing buffoons.

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The "excellent blog" - by Richard... Thursday, August 25, 2011

That is from American Thinker. To this day, in volume terms, we get more hits from US blogs linking to us, than we do British blogs – although we do have a few good friends here as well.

The British public, though, is still slow to take to blogs – preferring the safety of the MSM sites and the nanny BBC. And as long as they – and the rest of the clogs - cream off the traffic, our impact is going to be limited. Too many of our countrymen, it seems, prefer their intellectual chains.

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Please leave the sector - by Richard...

Confronted with evidence of their peculation, you would think that local authority chief executives would be hanging their heads in shame. That, though, would be to misunderstand the beast. Lining your pockets with public funds means never having to say you're sorry. Thus, we get "much anger amongst many in local government" at the inclusion of "all payments to chief executives covering items such as expenses, pension payments and returning officer fees".

In particular, the officials are very cross about this story, identifying one of their number, Phil Dolan, as a council fat cat, "earning" £570,000. We've got him all wrong, it seems. When he left his lucrative post, his authority, South Somerset, was "obliged" to pay Mr Dolan his £133,878 salary and £6,000 benefits in kind for the year, £23,122 for his notice period, £239,000 to the Local Government Pension Scheme under rules set by DCLG and £10,700 in statutory redundancy compensation. The only part decided by the council was a £156,676 discretionary redundancy payment.

Therefore, ministers – to say nothing of the rest of us – are making "malicious and vindictive" personal attacks on these innocent local government officials. And as people lap these stories up, we are told, "they come to view local government officers as 'fat cat bureaucrats' intent on bleeding the state dry for their own advantage when, really, they'd be far better off if they left the sector".

Well, there is a real easy answer to that. If these poor, misunderstood little darlinks think they would be better off elsewhere ... please leave the sector. We won't mind at all.

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Actions speak louder than words - by Richard...

Less than two weeks ago we saw this after judge Farook Ahmed had cut the sentence of Vincent Miller, illegal immigrant and drug dealer, to help him escape deportation (above). He deliberately shortened the sentence Miller would have received from a year to eleven months. Criminals given twelve months face automatic deportation proceedings.

And now, we see this: a looter who took just one lick of an ice cream he stole during rioting before he gave it away has been jailed for sixteen months. Anderson Fernandes, 21, wandered into an upmarket store in central Manchester after the door was left open and helped himself to a cone and two scoops. 

But despite giving it to a passer-by because he didn't like the coffee flavour he was still given a lengthy prison term.

And this occurs on the day we see reported that net immigration soared by 20 percent last year. This, says the Daily Mail "is making a mockery of Government pledge to bring it down".

One could venture that what is really behind this is the weak attitiude of government to immigration. When The Man feels threatened, as with the riots and looting, no sentence is too draconian. What a contrast this makes with the laid-back attitude to people who should not even be here.

Sometimes, you know, actions speak louder than words.

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Telling it like it is - by Richard...

After a flat summer, Dellers has delivered a stonker, effectively calling for The Boy to go for an immediate general election. He (The Boy) won't, of course - he's far too wedded to the fruits of office to put those at risk.

With reference to this blog, some of our readers have taken exception to the belicose tone, only just stopping short of promoting physical violence against our rulers. But here, we have Dellers in a spoof letter from Cameron to Britain, telling us that, "if you realised just how totally stuffed we are you wouldn’t waste time getting to the end of this letter. You’d already be outside Number 10 with pitchforks demanding my head on a spike ... ".

We are where we are, writes "Cameron", through the pen of Dellers – and where we are is about as dire a place as Britain has ever found itself in in its entire existence. That includes ... even the darkest days of the Second World War. 

Back then says Delleron, "however bad things might get, we were cushioned by an empire, by America, by a sense of unity and purpose, by a national character defined by resilience, self-reliance, patriotism, decency and an absolute determination – even unto death – never to surrender to tyranny in any form".

I think Dellers overstates that "sense of unity and purpose", but there was at least a common external enemy. Now, the enemy is within, the parasite classes indulging in the systematic looting of the public purse, while handing the legislative and governing powers of Parliament to the EU, unelected quagoes and a corrupt, dysfunctional local government.

And while that is all going on, we have a media besotted with the "bread and circuses" soap opera of Libya, one of those foreign adventures in which we should never have got involved and which now serves to divert attention from the real and pressing crises at home.

Thus, despite the fond wish of the Dellers, the general election – even if it was to happen – is not going to be the solution. Things have gone too far. We are on the edge of the precipice, but there does not seem to be anything capable of dragging us back. 

Undesirable though it might be, it looks very much as if those "pitchforks" will have to be used ... it is just a matter of time. And getting po-faced and "precious" about this blog's strident tone isn't going to make it any different. As for me, I'd sooner be down to one reader and right, rather than play to the masses and join the ranks of the deluded and the ostriches.