That Queen's Speech in Full.

My Government will:

1. Through the provision of a Happy Families Bill enshrine the right of all citizens of this country to be nice to each other; to make sure that the cap is always replaced on the toothpaste and that if you're making a cup of tea to ensure that everyone else in the house at that time is also offered the opportunity of a hot beverage.
2. Through the passing of the Flood and Water Management Bill make it a statutory duty for all Councils in this country to make sure that there are no puddles exceeding 3 square metres in surface area and to make it an offence punishable by the full force of the law for the land within the council area to exceed the average rainfall expected for that area.
3. Through the enactment of the Financial and Finances Act make it illegal to refer to the budget deficit as having "started in Fife" and to ensure that any reference to the recession is preceded by the words "Due to the global nature of this crisis..."
4. Through the provision of the Social Care Bill make it an illegal act not to provide 24 hour care for anyone who wants it. 
5. Through the Vacation and Holidays Bill enshrine in law the right of every British citizen to experience sunny weather on their days off. A new Positive Experience Meteorological Enforcement Agency will oversee this basic right and prosecute, with the full force of the Law, any deviation from it.
6. Through the Education Rights Bill make it impossible for any child to be corrected whether by verbal, written or electronic communication; for every child to be offered a raft of qualifications by application and for every child to have the opportunity to make a terrific job of their lives. The teachers, parents and siblings of any child who doesn't become really happy, wealthy and successful in later life will be subject to the full force of the law.
7. Through the Planning Enforcement Law make it a criminal offence to object to any housing, utility or industrial development within 100 miles of the complainants residence. Not that there'll be any industrial development - but plenty of windmills and new council estates. Nice places probably. 

My Government has also made provision for another Queen's speech next week once we've cleared this little lot up on Friday morning.

Ed Balls - the consummate career politician

Just how low can you go?

Ed Balls. There is no lower. A snake's belly is stratospheric in comparison.

Having threatened the teaching profession with massive redundancies in September he now announces he wants another 2.6 billion for his department. Note that fact - for the department; not schools. Will he get it? Of course not. So what's it all about? Asking for money he knows he's not going to get. Embarrassing his Chancellor in such a weird way...Well of course it's about the career prospects of one Ed Balls. The first salvoes in the post-election battle to be the Labour party leader. No intention whatsoever of doing anything worthwhile for schools, teachers or children. Intent only in improving his own prospects.

He is without doubt a self-serving, over-promoted geek without the first inkling of real people in the real world; has no experience of schools bar the one he attended as a child, and his only contact with Whitehall should be painting the outside of it. With someone as useless as Balls is in charge, the educational establishment - the consultants and advisors and paper pushers and various hangers-on, can lap up the sweet, sweet cream of "investment", slap in their first class expenses developing all those insane and useless initiatives in the full knowledge that Blinky Balls will wipe up their mess and shower them with even more money; money that should be being spent in schools and isn't.

Odious, self-serving and the greatest impediment to achievement and social mobility since slavery.

Whilst Nero Brown fiddles and over promotes his horse (Ed), the teaching profession wait like detainees behind a barbed wire fence waiting, longing for liberation from these fucking idiots and their insane schemes.

And what if the Tories really do take on the Educational Mafia? Well believe me you're going to need a truckload of axes for the DCFS, and that's the bare minimum needed to tackle just the filing cabinets on the first floor.

It'll take a full term of Parliament to hack your way through the inter-twined shitheap they've created over the last 12 years.

A bonfire of the initiatives? The smoke could fill Whitehall for a decade.

10 ways to stop climate change

1. Get rid of cows. They produce methane. If we got rid of the earth's 6 billion cattle then that would be a massive step forward. It may annoy meat eaters, some African tribesmen and the entire Hindu religion but I'm sure they'd see the global view. 
2. Ban cars. That would shut Clarkson up and free up the roads for more bicycles. In a blink this would stop the oil companies raping the planet.
3. Ban world trade. That apple you just ate came all the way from Chile by ship. If we stopped importing stuff then there'd be no need for ships, warmongering navies or pirates. The CO2 savings would be enormous.
4. Stop weeding. Every plant you destroy increases the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. Anyone found destroying a plant will be prosecuted.
5. Close every power station that uses coal, gas or oil. It may get a little dark in the evenings and a little cold in the winter but we have to make sacrifices to maintain our quality of life.
6. Ban planes. Massive polluters and emitters of CO2, planes serve no function - there is no need for 99% of flights; why should you visit your dying mother in Florida when Mother Earth is dying? 
7. Ban the cooking of food. Have you any idea how much polluting energy is required to heat up your meals? Once we get rid of meat eating there won't be any need to cook food for safety reasons anyway. Eating raw vegetables and grains will cut obesity too.
8. Stop the mechanisation of agriculture. The amount of energy used in oil in farming is the same as the amount of energy produced in the food. Effectively, we are eating oil. Accordingly everyone will be given an allotment to grow their own food. Farms will be abolished.
9. Non-believers and deniers will be jailed and their tongues ripped out. I know this is a bit extreme but they are killing the planet and must be stopped. The science is unequivocal.
10. Humans produce CO2 by breathing in and out. This is clearly a denier inspired plot. Everyone must have a respiration holiday at least once a month. During this enforced one hour period everyone must stop breathing until given permission to continue by the Inspector.

With these measures in place we can ensure that climatic stability is achieved, leaving us to tun our attention to the tides. They are a great inconvenience and must be similarly controlled.

This has been a public information post written entirely on recycled organic pixels. Mum, you can stop peddling now.

Message ends.

Wise words from a former Minster.

I can't add anything to this so I won't even begin to try. Lord Digby Jones, ex-Trade Minister, speaking today, to a group of Birmingham 

“I do not see leadership in any walk of society. We are creating this feeling of victim-hood – there, there, there, it’s all right, take a cheque.

“I wish we would stop the Harriet Harman economics – have a cheque, have some money, have some more.

“The trouble with socialism is that you run out of spending other people’s money. Let’s let people take responsibility for themselves.

“The civil service runs the country. Ministers are completely disposal and dispensable. The tribalism of politics in this country is destroying it.

“Jacqui Smith was a failed schoolteacher from Hagley who moved to Redditch and became an MP. She said she was not trained for it, she was not equipped for it, she was put in a job that she didn’t know how to do. We need to connect the governed and the governing.”

“It’s a big, big six months ahead of us, we have a General Election and it cannot come too quickly.

“We must make sure that people feel connected again with the governing classes. I think today we have a tired, stale Government.

The IMP - the death knell for freedom and privacy.

The purpose of the Internet Modernisation Bill is to record each and every email, phone call and internet search made by every UK person, in line with EU directives; and record every poke, twitter, profile update and IM conversation on social networking sites. It is clear that the powers-that-be care nothing whatsoever for individuality, privacy or the right of the individual to privacy. 653 public bodies will be given access to the information, including police, local councils and the Financial Services Authority. They will not require the permission of a judge or a magistrate to obtain the information, but simply the authorisation of a senior police officer or the equivalent of a deputy head of department at a local authority.

Can this be the same Great Britain that fought the Nazis in the second World War? Is it the same country that stood up against the Soviet threat? That rejoiced in the collapse of the eastern Bloc? That sends under-equipped armies half-way around the world to fight dictators who suppress free-speech? 

You either believe in the freedom of the individual or you don't. You either believe in the right to privacy or you don't. There are no half-measures.

A Government of a free country allows its citizens to think freely, associate freely and have unfettered and unthreatened privacy. The incipient IMP is an outrage and a blatant expression of a Government that does not trust its citizens and seeks to control them.

This is enough to start building the barricades...

Bad handwriting

Gordon Brown today said he was "mortified" after spelling the name of a fallen soldier incorrectly in a letter of condolence but pledged to continue writing the messages himself.

Jacqui Janes, whose son Jamie, 20, of the 1st Battalion Grenadier Guards, was killed by an explosion on October 5, said that she felt the Prime Minister had disrespected her son's memory by beginning his hand-written note with the words: "Dear Mrs James".

The fact he writes them is commendable. Anything less would be a disgrace.

But…these letters are profoundly important. Think about it.

These are personal missives from the Prime Minister of Great Britain to those recently bereaved of sons and husbands who’ve died for their country. Just how important can you get? These are not letters to be dashed off when you’re tired or busy. How would you feel if you were the recipient of such a message that was messy, illegible and incoherent? What would that say to you? What level of respect would that confer?

Surely, in the name of all that is holy, that is enough for someone to make sure they are coherent and proofed?

I understand his disability but surely he should understand the importance of these letters to the recipients? I mean I still have the letter sent to my Great-Grandmother informing her of the death of her husband in 1917. The writer of that letter was a bit stressed, busy and writing in imperfect conditions - he still found time to make sure it was perfect though…

The pointy hats; here comes Uncle Jimmy's army

News today that David Cameron finds himself with little racing room for THAT referendum. Fair play to the lad, you can't retrospectively run a race that's already been run and lost. What will come next is to be a measure of the man, but let's face it the person who should be in the cross hairs over all this is one Gordon Brown. Promised a referendum. Bottled it. Shamefully crept into a darkened room to sign it and hoped no-one would notice. The traitor who betrayed democracy.

However the news today that the Tories cannot offer a referendum to ratify something already ratified has truly let the pointy-hat brigade out from their cages. They are all over the blog and comment sites, calling for the Queen to swing into action, for the army to stage a coup, for a thousand independent militias to take to the streets, to capture the TV Stations and to man the barricades.

Cameron is the death of Conservatism they're shouting, a coward, a charlatan, damn it somewhere one of them is probably saying he puts lime in his gin and tonic not lemon. The unutterable cad!

They're screaming about the death of England, about betrayal of the fallen and hanging traitors in Parliament Square. They're shouting for a UKIP Government.

I'm afraid at this point I was laughing so hard it began to hurt and I thought I felt my bladder send a 10 second warning of trouble in the offing, so, reluctantly I had to shut down t'interweb and lie in a darkened room for a bit.

A UKIP Government! That'd do her!

Oh, damn, there I go again!

The Lottery of Life

I have a good friend who lives directly opposite the gates of an excellent local Comprehensive. Currently his kids go to the local Primary School which is about 10 minutes walk away. On Planet Reasonable we'd expect his children to enjoy their secondary education at the school over the road - it is, let's remind ourselves, a local school for local children.  

Today's news that the Government is keen to utilise the lottery system of school place allocation could see his eldest have to travel to the other side of town (a matter of two bus journeys). Two years later his youngest may have to travel to yet another school, in another part of town, not on any bus route from the suburb where they live - it's 4 miles, so let's say a one hour walk. 

And yet just over the road there lies their local school.

Now multiply all those cross city journeys by 5000 (roughly the combined roll of all 3 schools)...

The illogical stupidity of the Government sometimes stretches reason to such limits that you begin to wonder if they are actually having an internal competition to see who can come up with the most ludicrous, incompetent fuck-up of an idea.