Sailors Selling Stories

It was not enough for our armed forces to be embarrassed by being caught unawares by the Iranians, we had to suffer the Iranian Government out-thinking the UK Government and dominating the public stage. This was, of course, followed by the farcical handling of the situation at home when the MInisters could not decide whether the members of the armed forces should or should not publish their stories, public apolgies in the House in the Commons etc.

Surely this is simple.

All ranks in the forces should not be able to publish their stories for ten years. This will prevent any future prisoners being able to tout their stories around the media like recently-evicted Big Brother housemates.

MPs, of whatever flavour, should resign if guilty of a serious misjudgement.

What are MP's employed for anyway? Most do not seem to actually do anything and generally have very limited knowledge of what they are supposed to be managing: most of the real knowledge (and, hence, the real power) is wielded by the unelected masses in the civil service. If an MP has poor judgement and poor management skills then all the political speak does not change the fact that they are unfit for the post and only disaster will follow.

Immigration

Business leaders and MPs have been claiming for a while now that immigration has affected the UK job market by driving down the wages of the lowest-paid elements of our society by adding an influx of people willing to work for less pay. While the Government has always dismissed these claims, Lord Turner (one of Blair's personal advisors) recently told Tony exactly the same thing during a private seminar.

Lord Turner's assertions are more difficult for the government to brush aside as he was previously the head of the Low Pay Commission.

Just as worrying is the added pressure that migrants are placing on schools, housing and the NHS -- the country is ill-equiped to cope with our own, natural poulation growth, let alone the sudden arrival of hundreds of thousands of migrants (both leal and illegal) every year.

And Blair's response?

"To counter the growing concerns, Mr Blair is planning a PR offensive on behalf of migrants" (Daily Mail, 31st March 2007: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=445778&in_page_id=1770

I fail to see how a PR offensive is going to make people happier about having to accept lower wages, the inability to get on the housing ladder, the over crowding of schools or the growing lack of resources available from the NHS.

Fake Passports

The Guardian reported, in March 2007, that: "An estimated 10,000 British passports were issued after fraudulent applications in the space of a year - and al-Qaida terrorists have successfully faked applications, the Home Office admitted" (see: http://www.guardian.co.uk/terrorism/story/0,,2038442,00.html)

With the Government's own resources unable to cope with the threat of identity fraud (especially as seen lately with the DWP sending thousands of pensioners' personal and bank details to the wrong people) can we really trust that the identity card scheme isn't going to get corrupted?

What safeguards are there that the identity card scheme will be any more successful in catching and preventing fraudulant applications? And, if these safeguards exist, why are they not currently being used in checking passport applications? If there aren't any safeguards, and the whole point of identity cards in the first place is to help in the war on terror by allowing our security forces to identify threats, why should we bother to continue with this costly exercise and the systematic tracking of honest, law-abiding citizens?

Identity Cards -- A Pointless Exercise?

How do you stop terrorists? Easily - just treat everyone like terrorists and sooner or later you're bound to stumble across one.

The electronic storage of personal details is an increasingly risky business. After the Department of Work and Pensions accidentally sent out thousands of people's personal and bank details to the wrong people, this Government's record in electronic security is questionable, and its strategy of progressively increasing the use of information technology has resulted in bloated, over-funded, under-achieving projects.

The issue of identity cards has been on the political agenda for a few eyars now, and proponants espouse the same view each time the need for them is brought into question. ID cards will help us in our war on terror, help reduce benefit fraud and enable the police to identify criminals. It has also been mooted that they will enable the NHS to determine who is, and isn't, eligible for treatment -- if you don't have one, you don't go on the waiting list because you may be an illegal immigrant over here on a hospital holiday.

Identity cards will be available, voluntarily, from 2008 and mandatory from 2014. Which begs the questions: in the intervening 6 years, just how many terrorists do they expect to sign up for biometric ID cards? How many benefit cheats are going to spend the money to get one, especially if the cost alone would eb enough to make the DSS wonder how you could possibly afford one? How many criminals are willingly going to enable the police catch them more easily? How many pensioners are going to be refused hospital beds because they thought paying for winter fuel was more important than an ID card in the last years of their lives?

I would imagine that the answer to all (except, possibly, the last one depending on how close the NHS was to bankruptcy at the time) would be: none. Which, in turn, forces us to ask what, exactly, the point of the scheme is? The only people who will sign up for this are going to be ordinary, law-abiding citizens with nothing to hide. It's not going to reduce crime, prevent terrorism or reduce fraud, it's just going to make the average person easier to track as they go about their day-to-day business.

A Third of People to Refuse ID Checks?

As the BBC website revealed, at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6526225.stm a third of people will refuse to submit to ID checks which, again, makes you wonder what powers the police will be given to deal with these refusals, and if this will lead to another spate of laws introduced to make more and more of us criminals.

Falling Number of Home Owners

The number of people owning their own homes fell in 2006 and it is the first time since before the second world war that the number of homeowners has declined.

Figures in the Survey of English Housing by the Department for Communities and Local Government have revealed that rising house prices are pricing first-time buyers out of the market. Instead, there is an increasing number of properties being bought specifically to be rented out to people who can not get onto the property ladder with 2.5million people now living in private rented accomodation, the highest figure since Labour came to power in 1997.

See the Daily Mail's article at: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=444799&in_page_id=1770

Planning

Travellers are now permitted to build on greenbelt land without Planning Permission, at a time of housing crisis when most people are unable to get permission to build on brownfields land. One of the results of this is the largest illegal campsite in Europe firmly established in the South East.

Is it about time someone asked 'What are the rights of the populace born in the areas which Travellers decide to target?' or, 'Why, when local people cannot obtain planning permission, can complete strangers have preference in spite of the protest of the local populace and Local Authorities?' or 'Why do the Travellers not have the same powers to ignore the laws in their country of origin?'