It's the taking part that counts

That idiot Dr Tanya Byron has been self publicising again: today she came out with yet more revelations about video game censorship.

She reckons that games should be labelled as films currently are, i.e. Universal, PG, 15, 18 and so on.

Wow. If she had a clue about the subject matter she would realise that most games are rated already, and no matter what age you place on a video game it won't stop kids from playing it just like it doesn't stop kids buying cigarettes under age, buying booze under age or renting/buying 18 rated films under age.

Does she really think kids are copying what they see in video games? Really? Does she really think first person shooter games are the cause of black gun culture, or that games such as Grand Theft Auto are the cause of youths taking vehicles without their owners consent?

Does she really think kids are not exposed to sex or violence before they are 15, or even 18? Most TV programmes after 9pm are packed with both but I don't see Byron bleating about this, probably because hey, she is getting paid by taxpayers to compile a report about the danger of the Internet and of video games to kids. So hey, lets not consider everything else outside the box eh Tanya?

I can't be arsed with bleeding heart do-gooder spongers like Byron that make a name for themselves by inciting hysteria within the ignorant masses. Gary Glitter is a bigger danger to kids than some coloured pixels on a computer monitor. Has she really nothing better to do than regurgitate this crap every other month on TV as though it's some ground-breaking discovery she has made?

England are shit

Here are my scores, out of 10, for the England team tonight after their game against France.

David James: 0. Gave the penalty away, looked slower than Neil Ruddock and had an even more stupid beard than Neil Ruddock.

Ashley Cole: 0. Overrated money grabber, did nothing at all apart from whinge at the referee.

John Terry: 0. Too slow, miles off the pace and allowed Anelka to breeze past him for the penalty.

Rio Ferdinand: 0. Lazy. Didn't seem to care and looks like Bart Simpson. Except not yellow.

Wes Brown: 0. Scored against Liverpool at the weekend. Still looks bizarre.

Joe Cole: 0. Did nothing except look like someone had just smashed him in the face with a grand piano. I think he had one blocked shot from 40 yards.

David Beckham: 0. No pace and not 21 any more. Received the ball in good areas but stood there playing long balls to nobody. After 25 Hollywood passes that were easily intercepted, Capello took him off.

Owen Hargreaves: 0. Looked tired throughout the whole match. Made pointless runs to nowhere and generally did nothing.

Gareth Barry: 1. Seemed to try. Didn't give the ball away as much as the others and dared to trespass in the opposition half.

Wayne Rooney: 0. Had no shots. Gave the ball away a lot.

Steven Gerrard: 0. Had one shot into Row Z and looked like he was about to cry.

Subs:

Michael Owen: 0. Not sure if he got a touch of the ball. Slow off the mark to chase the one ball England managed to put in the box.

Peter Crouch: 1. Won some headers that went to nobody.

Stewart Downing: -300. If being a left winger is cutting inside and kicking the ball to the opposition goalkeeper, I can do it. Not England quality. Can't think of anything he has done to justify his place in the squad.

David Bentley: 5. Fouled Malouda and pushed the diving bastard to the deck.

Joleon Lescott: 0. How did Frankenstein get into the England team?

The Other Defender I Can't Remember: 0. Guilty by association.

Expenses... again

They are at it again. This time the MP's are scrambling to block publication of second home expenditure - and they are spending our money to do it.

A group of MPs led by the Speaker of the House have decided to continue fighting against this publication by taking the issue to the high court. Apparently they were advised by lawyers that they didn't have a leg to stand on and almost everyone thought they would drop it but they haven't.

It seems to me inevitable that they will have to disclose this information. Firstly it's in the public interest and secondly its our bloody money. However the MPs have been bleating that they don't want their addresses published for fears of harassment.

Fine by me, just publish how much they are creaming off to pay for their marble kitchens and plasma televisions. I don't think anyone is bothered where they live.

Of course, we know the real reason they don't want this information in the public domain. The BBC's political editor Nick Robinson (the guy that looks like Judge Jules) summed it up pretty well when he talked about the possibility of several resignations if/when the figures are published.

Whilst MPs operate under a shroud of secrecy with regards to the amount of freebie money they are siphoning off for their own pockets, nobody will trust them.

Secrecy is only needed when there is something to hide.

Ultimate Speed Camera

It's been shown many times that speed (or "safety" as they like to call them) cameras are not effective at reducing accidents and it's common knowledge that these cameras serve only to extract more money from the motorist by enforcing archaic speed limits.

You can understand it: it's free money for them. Sure, a bit of investment in the cameras, support and staffing but from then on it's ding 60 quid here, ding 95 quid here if they decide to take the driving course instead of the 3 penalty points on the licence. Easy.

Apparently they are going to start reducing speed limits on country roads which historically have been national speed limit (I think this is 60 mph on a single carriageway).

The problem I have with these cameras is that they were touted as being placed only in accident black spots - the implication being that they reduced injuries and fatalities caused by speeding motorists. I'm all for that if that is the reason.

The problem is that most of the ones I see are placed in places with no schools, no shops and no houses nearby and in many cases they slyly reduce the speed limit so people don't realise they are speeding and get themselves caught by a camera. For example on wide dual carriageways leading up to motorways.

What defines an accident black spot? This is a question I wrote in a letter to the local newspaper a few years ago in response to an article detailing the placement of a speed camera near my house. The residents of a house outside which the camera was placed understandably did not want the camera outside their home. My letter was published, however no responses were drawn from the moronic do-gooders at the 'Road Safety Partnership'.

I can think of loads of speed cameras nearby but these places are hardly black spots. I do know, though, that it was common to exceed the speed limit in these areas.

Taking another angle on it, if someone gets run over whose fault is it? In almost all cases the motorist ends up getting shafted, but lately almost all of the cyclists I have seen have had no lights on their bike. I have seen gangs of teenagers walking down the middle of the road deliberately to antagonise motorists. They tend to swagger along and move out of the way only at the last minute unless you stop, in which case they make abusive gestures at you.

I quite often see dogs that run out into the road on those extensible dog leads because the owner is on some different planet and doesn't restrict it. I always worry when I see parents walking along with kids that must be about 3 years old and they let the kid walk along the kerb without holding their hand. Are people that fucking stupid?

A motorist can be driving any speed and if someone be it child, or dog, or teenager runs into the road then it's quite likely that when colliding with a 1.5 ton lump of metal there will be injury whether the driver is driving at the speed limit or 3 miles per hour above it. But as always given all of the above examples the motorist ends up drawing the short straw.

There is also the factor of the drunk, uninsured, banned driver. It drives me mad that courts seem to think that banning a driver means they definitely wont be on the roads and there have been loads of cases where someone that is banned has got straight back behind the wheel and run someone over. No speed cameras or speed limits will ever change that.

Pressure groups like the Road Safety Partnership just love to blanket as many incidents as possible speed related because it feeds their own purpose and pays their wages: the reality is that crap drivers will always be crap drivers and idiots will always be idiots no matter the speed cameras, traffic calming measures, or whatever.

The best way to solve accident blackspots are to make them non-blackspots. Change the road design, add more saftey railings or pedestrian crossings. Encourage pedestrians to realise they have a responsibility for safety as well.

The Police must realise that people slow down for cameras and then speed up again provided the flow of traffic permits it. This is why they often position a mobile camera just after the fixed GATSO camera: to catch people speeding up again.

Speed cameras are unhelpful and frustrate motorists. The facts show clearly that they have made no impact on the number of fatalities on the road. In some cases, where they are hidden and may appear suddenly in the viewpoint of the driver causing him or her to slam the brakes on, it could be argued that they are dangerous too.

The ultimate form of speed camera would be one that could detect bad or erratic driving, drunk driving and so on however this probably wont ever be invented. The next best thing is to hit bad drivers hard with some jail time. This wont happen either.

I guess we are stuck with the draconian, unforgiving form of speed enforcement for now. I'm just surprised there aren't any vigilante groups going round spraying the lenses so they don't work!

Robin Banks

Looks like the predictions about the budget were pretty accurate. The Chancellor, Alistair Darling, has rammed up tax on almost everything you could think of.

Petrol is up 2p per litre.
Beer is up 4p per pint.
Wine is up 15p per bottle.
Spirits are up 50p per bottle.

The moronic thing is how this is sold as being the "miracle cure" for binge drinking. Firstly it wont be, and secondly we know that it's not really the reason he's taxed it so hard. To provide some sort of comparison all you have to do is look at what has happened with banning of advertising of cigarettes as well as the enormous tax increases on them. Did it stop people smoking? Not really.

It's a straightforward tax on as many people as they could extract more cash from. The Government know it wont make any difference and that people will continue to drink so they liberally smatter some taxes across the board. If it meant people giving up drinking then the Government starts to lose taxes and everyone is aware how financially broke the UK is at the moment.

Let's face it - Labour already introduced 24 hour licensing, allowing bars, pubs and even supermarkets to sell alcohol at any time they like. So now we are all used to the late opening hours we get slapped with more tax? Am I too cynical?

If you couple into this budget the fact that all farm produce - particularly butter, milk and cheese - as well as loaves of bread have skyrocketed in price recently and so has gas, water and electricity you have to wonder where we are heading.

Yet more taxes were slapped on so-called gas guzzlers in the name of Climate Change (tm), despite the fact that the money goes nowhere except into the greedy MP's expenses pot. We're getting battered on every turn by so-called environment taxes so the climate should - if these Government funded boffins are to be believed - be changing to a perfect one because we are paying loads of money because of it. Isn't the case though.

These taxes might seem small but they soon add up. It annoys me also how the Chancellor defers some taxes so that they occur after a few months or next year, by which time we have forgotten about them. For example, he deferred the petrol increase until October, by which time we will probably be paying around £1.20 per litre anyway. It already costs me about 80 quid to fill up my gas guzzler...

Darling has also looked at forcing supermarkets to charge for plastic bags. I'm sure they would rather the Government forced them to do it rather than make an active decision. Small things like 10p for a plastic bag put customers off if they can go elsewhere and get bags for free, but is it going to save the planet? Absolutely not.

Remember the Chancellor is the same idiot that doled out £40billion to a bank to save it from going bust. I don't really see why I should be hammered for more tax because the Chancellor is clueless. It's a sad state when the Government can hand out such large amounts of public money to private firms affected by their management of the economy to save its own bacon.

I'm getting a bit fucking tired of England right now. I heard the other day that in Wales it's now free to park at a hospital. Arguably it should be free everywhere but it's not in England - its more expensive than parking in a town centre. Profiting from the sick.

Also in Wales if you need a prescription from a doctor, it's free. It's around £8 per item in England.

In Scotland, students pay no tuition fees to go to university. English students have to pay over £3000 per year.

What pisses me off is that the tax I pay goes to give freebies in Wales and Scotland, but what are they doing to give me any freebies? Nothing, I don't get anything.

Get me on an plane to Australia.

Drink on the brink

My idea of binge drinking is going to a pub one or two days a week and drinking 8 or 9 alcoholic drinks. I don't know what the Government's idea of it is but today it's rumoured that in the upcoming budget there will be a tax hike on beer, wine and other common alcoholic drinks.

Of course, it's not a straightforward tax on these drinks. Its a tax that they claim will stop binge drinking which apparently is the root of all evil at the moment.

I entirely disagree with that. According to the Government, I am a binge drinker. So are everybody that I know. Other than being on the PC too much, I'm not antisocial. I don't commit crimes. I don't inflict myself on other people. I'm not a lout.

To be honest I can't think of the reason the Government has a bee in it's bonnet about binge drinking. It makes them a bucket load of tax revenue and increasing tax on alcohol will simply make the Government get more tax. A no-brainer really. Social drinkers like most people will continue to go to the pub on a Friday/Saturday night, and binge drinkers/alcoholics will not be affected.

They might suggest that a lot of crime is caused by alcohol fuelled thugs and they are probably right. But even after the tax increases I will still be able to walk into an off licence and walk out with a 3 litre bottle of strong cider for about £1.50. I don't think thugs are buying their alcohol in pubs, bars or nightclubs: you can get 6 litres of cider for the price of a bottle of beer in a nightclub.

A thug will be antisocial whether drunk or sober. Alcohol may cause the thug to go to extremes, but people don't suddenly become violent thugs because they have a couple of beers on a Friday night. They become violent thugs because they skipped school, probably have a single parent, have no prospects and have nothing to lose. I've said it before, but it's the Jeremy Kyle Generation.

I get the impression that the Government either has no idea what goes on, or they invent scenarios to which they refer to when ramming taxes up on things. Like petrol and other fuel and road taxes are being rammed up in the name of something that doesn't exist (climate change). Guns were banned after a lunatic shot up a school in Dunblane, causing gun clubs to be closed and all legal guns to be handed in. Illegal guns, of course, were not handed in and have become massively more common since and crimes involving guns have increased.

Local taxes have increased hugely to pay for services like the Police who don't seem to be arresting any real criminals any more, and to pay for rubbish collection which has gone from weekly to fortnightly and you now have to sort your own rubbish for recycling.

Taxing booze on the basis that thugs drink is just another farce. It simply means they will be even more angry and frustrated because their booze is more expensive.

So they will have to steal more to pay for it.