General Election – Will You Vote For Gordon Brown?

Voters, who were unavailable to vote on polling day in Tameside, were jamming the phone lines at Ashton-Under-Lyne town hall demanding not to be deprived of their vote. Staff told them their only option was to vote “by proxy” in the election. That is, to nominate another person to vote on their behalf.

The inept town hall staff at Tameside then did not rush to post out the proxy forms. The postal delivery service in Hyde is spasmodic at best, and mail tends to arrive typically every few days in mid afternoon rather than daily in the morning.

By the time the forms arrived (without a prepaid envelope), there was only two days before the deadline for proxy forms to be received back at Tameside Council. Your author duly posted a proxy form first class – from the sorting office in Hamnett Street. It only had to travel a few miles across town, so one would hope it might have made that journey in two days.

The building’s address is, some might say sinisterly, called Status Park 4.

But the intrusiveness of the system at the heart of Government’s so-called ‘e-Borders’ scheme has provoked such fury among civil liberties campaigners that some consider it akin to a modern-day Stasi headquarters.

All the information passengers give to travel agents, including home addresses, telephone numbers, email addresses, passport details and the names of family members, is shared with an unknown number of Government agencies for ‘analysis’ and stored for up to ten years.

The best way, I think, of understanding how the special relationship works is to answer this question. When a visiting American actor comes here and makes nice noises about Britain, do you feel all warm, gooey and proud? I bet you do. Now think how it works the other way round. When a British actor goes over there and makes nice noises about America, do you think they even notice?

Honestly? I believe it’s time we stopped deluding ourselves about our relationship with America, which since the late 1940s has produced virtually nothing. And tried to make friends with the French. Because the last time we did that, the world got Concorde.

Knock, knock: it’s the council bin snoops! Householders are facing “re-education” home visits for producing too much rubbish after figures released under freedom of information laws revealed that councils have quietly microchipped 2m bins.

The chips can be used to record the amount of rubbish families are throwing away. Those recycling too little will be sent warning leaflets, then visited by council officials…..

Your taxes are paying for this; your taxes are paying Labour to monitor every facet of your life. 1984 anyone?

Commenting, Sir Andrew Green, Chairman of Migrationwatch UK said, “Yet again the government have tried to bury the true picture in the middle of a 17 page statistical release but they cannot conceal the fact that immigration will have a massive impact on housing demand and therefore on our whole quality of life and our environment. It is time that the government faced up to the facts and brought immigration under control instead of seeking to camouflage the true position”.

The European Parliament has prohibited the use of the terms ”Miss” and ”Mrs” in case they upset female MEPs. According to a new ”Gender-Neutral Language” guidance, the politicians are required to address female members by their full name only.

It has also revealed that ‘’sportsmen” should be called ”athletes”, statesmen should be referred to as ”political leaders”, and terms like ‘’synthetic” or ”artificial” should be used in place of ”man-made”.

The guidance lists has also banned terms for describing professions, including fireman, airhostess, headmaster, policeman, salesman, manageress, cinema usherette and male nurse.

The move aims to close a loophole in plans being drawn up by GCHQ, the government’s eavesdropping centre in Cheltenham, to create a huge database to monitor and store the internet browsing habits, e-mail and telephone records of everyone in Britain.

The “Big Brother” database would have limited value to police and MI5 if it did not store details of the ownership of more than half the mobile phones in the country.

Sir Victor Blank and Gordon Brown have made a bad banking crisis worse by fatally contaminating one of Britain’s few good banks. Mr Brown was the foster parent. People should remember this the next time either of them claims to have acted competently during this crisis. Sir Victor should go now; the electorate can decide on Mr Brown’s fate when he deigns to call an election.

The survey of over 250 authorities shows that county councils, facing elections this year, have kept their rises below 4 per cent, while London authorities, following Boris Johnson’s example, have limited their increases to as little as 1.2 per cent.

A handful of police authorities have however defied the Government and confirmed increases of well over 5 per cent for their share of council tax. The highest hikes have been set by Derbyshire Police, 8.7 per cent and Greater Manchester Police at 7.5 per cent.

MINISTERS have spent £900m paying off 15,000 civil servants only to recruit an extra 42,020 in new permanent jobs, according to figures released by parliament.

In the past four years government departments have paid £882m in severance packages, worth an average of £60,000, to staff on voluntary and involuntary redundancy programmes.

Over the same period, however, they have recruited nearly three times as many civil servants, with annual salaries totalling £1 billion, despite government commitments to cutting government waste.