Quake!

Was on my PC around 1am last night and suddenly the house started to wobble a little. It was quite windy outside so figured it may have been a strong gust. Then the wobbling got worse and everything in my room was rocking like crazy. After about 15 seconds it stopped.

Apparently there was an earth movement measuring up to 5.0 on the Richter scale with its epicentre near Hull. Hull was in ruins but there was almost no damage at all...

I'm not a plate tectonics expert, but I do know that the UK is not near the edge of a plate and so the world wasn't about to open up and suck us in.

Still, it's quite unusual for the UK to feel the earth move. I don't think there will be a tsunami but if there is, maybe it will help refloat the Riverdance.

Taxed to death

Our justice system was yet again shown as a complete embarassment when 76 year old Richard Fitzmaurice was locked up for 34 days for refusing to pay his Council Tax. Mr Fitzmaurice owes West Norfolk Council about £1600.

In 2005, 73 year old Sylvia Hardy was jailed for 7 days for refusing to pay Devon County Council the sum of £63.71 which was owed on her Council Tax for the previous year.

First point to be made is that it is unbelievable that these people have been put in prison when extremely dangerous criminals and repeat offenders continue to get pathetic community sentences because "there isn't enough space in prison".

Personally I class violence against a person or against property as quite serious offences, but there are plenty of cases where vicious assaults or robberies are committed and the offender walks away with a week of gardening or scrubbing graffiti off walls as punishment. But for a minor offence like avoiding the Council Tax they can easily find a jail space for an old age pensioner? It's pretty crazy to me.

I guess this isn't really the main point. These two Council Tax crusaders have stated that the reason they wont pay is because it's an unfair tax. I think most people would agree with that but what can you do about it? Most people have a lot to lose and can't think about contesting it, but pensioners can: they are also the ones hit hardest by the Council Tax.

Council Tax is supposed to support local amenities, rubbish collection, transport, Police, and so on. The problem is that it's calculated in a completely unfair way: it's based on the value of your home.

Given huge increases in fuel and electricity bills its easy to see how pensioners are being hammered by this tax, because pensions are not increasing at the rate of Council Tax. If you're a pensioner on a normal state pension but you're living in your family home that has been passed down through the generations you will struggle to pay because your home may be worth a lot. How can councils justify increases of up to 20% per year when the old age pension increases by around 3%?

It's pretty simple to me - they can't justify it at all but they don't need to either. I can't actually think of any improvements our local council has made except to build a leisure centre near my house. The roads are awful, the traffic management is a joke and only assists frustration rather than congestion, there are roadworks everywhere all the time. To park in the town is an absolute rip off and streets are littered with parking meters and little Hitlers to slap tickets on cars.

As an aside, in the centre of Glasgow it costs £1.20 to park your car for 2 hours. In the centre of Wigan it's apparently 50 pence to park for 2 hours. Centre of Blackpool? £2.20. Rip off. You could understand it if it was worth it but it isn't. The buildings of the town are really, really poor and the selection of shops is pathetic. When you can go to the centre of a big city and pay less to park and have a nice modern and clean experience with lots of choices of shop, why would anyone want to come to old and dilapidated Blackpool?

A couple of years ago we had our rubbish bins collected every week and they would take whatever you left out. Now it's every two weeks, you have to have 4 different wheelie bins and seperate your rubbish into them for recycling and they wont collect the bins if they are over a certain weight. Furthermore they only take one bin per week.

This is the case amongst almost every council and must save them an absolute fortune considering they also profit from your waste now that you so kindly seperated it for recycling. Council tax time and boom, 8% increase.

There's more antisocial behaviour than ever before, amenities such as local swimming pools and gardens are being closed down due to "lack of money". Everywhere you look the council are cutting back. So where's all the Council Tax going?

Simple. Like MP's, Councillors are fuelling their space rockets with it and passing the bill on to members of the local area. Our local Council employs some people on £250,000 per year contracts to basically bullshit about nothing. We've had a million white elephants proposed such as "Storm City" which completely failed when it was first brought out in the Midlands, the Super Casino which wont ever happen plus endless Las Vegas style revamps which wont ever happen. Revamps of the bus station that wont happen, Pharaoh's Palace and international hotels along the sea front that wont ever happen. A world class conference centre which wont ever happen.

All these artists impressions to deceive the council tax payer that the council wants to improve. Unfortunately I look at the facts not the propaganda that hits the front page of the local newspaper (the Evening Gazette).

Absolutely loads of money was creamed off by the Councillors and their cronies beneath that Super Casino umbrella. They must have spent about £50,000 on free holidays to Las Vegas under the guise of factfinding. Casino "consultants" were employed on huge contracts to do the best part of nothing.

Money is leaking everywhere within Councils. Fylde council has been slammed for wasting over £600,000 on a waste disposal project because it's causing two local attractions as well as a swimming pool in a nearby suburb to face closure due to lack of money.

How can these muppets come up with this nonsense? Sure you save money by closing swimming pools, leisure centres, lakeside attractions, parks, gardens, and so on. But then you don't have any services. And Council Tax would still go up. Maybe closing the town hall down would work.

Our local town hall planned to waste almost £1million on a Lowry painting "for the people of Blackpool to enjoy". What a load of bollocks. They would stick it in the town hall where they can wank themselves silly over it. Whichever stupid twat came up with that idea should be fired on the spot. If they can afford that painting, they can afford to keep our services going.

They have even closed all the public toilets and a private company called Danfo has been contracted to provide them. You now have to pay to use the toilet because the Council wanted to save some money on staff. It's indirect taxation.

Council tax pays for all the misdemeanours of the local authorites in Britain and is utterly and completely unfair. It should be scrapped immediately. The much hated Poll Tax - a personal tax rather than one based on the value of your house - was far fairer.

I believe they should implement a local income tax for local services. I believe the Police should be paid out of national income tax. I certainly don't think councils should be able to waste all our Council Tax money and slap a bill for more on your doorstep every year. I think better controls and management of council spending is needed. More efficiency is needed to keep council spending down and give value for money.

Their jailing might be a sad reflection on our "justice" system but I don't feel sorry for the two Council Tax evaders, Sylvia and Richard. I believe their cause is just and that sooner or later the camel's back will break on this issue. MPs are starting to get rumbled with their hands in the coffers and it's time to start slamming Councillors for the same and bring shame upon this archaic tax.

These people were all voted in by you and I yet they continue to flaunt our trust by selfishly lining their own pockets or pursuing their own self-benefitting agendas. It doesn't even seem to be about Government or Local Government: you can see this by the crazy schemes they implement which don't benefit anyone whilst letting core services and building rot. Pandering to pressure groups and corporations instead of practising the will of the people.

My town, formerly the UK's premium tourist resort, is in freefall. But all the fat cats in the Council care about is making more money for themselves to waste.

Share the love

There's a device known as the "Mosquito" which has been around for a while here. Essentially it is a high frequency sound emitter that only people under the age of 25 can hear due to hearing degradation as people get older. It's installed outside off licenses and known places where hoodies hang around and is used to disperse them. But now one council that used them has banned them because a hoodie decided to complain that it gave him a headache. How ridiculous.

Unsurprisingly various idiots have come out in the press bleating about human rights, including Shami Chakrabarti who always seems to get her opinion into the media despite being a nobody. They brought racism into it by talking about a device that only emitted high pitch sounds to black people. I don't know why, I guess there was some point there but I couldn't see it. It's always the same in this country, the vandals and hoodies that are antisocial and commit offences get all the support and the shopkeeper gets no protection.

Similarly, drugs-cheat Dwain Chambers today was included in the British World Indoor Athletics team despite UK Athletics saying they didn't want him in. Chambers was rumbled in 2003 for knowingly taking performance enchancing drugs and advocated drug use afterwards saying that you need to take drugs to win. It is frankly unbelievable that he is allowed to come back. However I do believe that a very large majority of athletes are on some kind of drugs.

I was reading some opinions about Chambers and one in particular made me laugh simply because of its complete irrelevance. An athletics follower named "Darren" commented on the Sky News website that those that are slamming Chambers for being a druggie shouldn't buy records from artists that use drugs and if they did they would be a hypocrite.

I don't know what planet "Darren" is on, but knowingly setting out to use banned drugs to cheat in competitive sport like Chambers could not be further apart from taking drugs for whatever pleasure these musicians get out of it.

Those kids that booted Gary Newlove to death got "life" sentences adding up to about 17 years in jail each. This means they will be out when they are 35 if they serve the full sentence (which they wont). Anywhere else they'd have got death.

One-legged former hardcore porn star Heather Mills is still trying to milk McCartney's millions it seems. They're in court again trying to thrash out a divorce settlement. Mills is a gold digging attention seeker. Anyone that saw her pathetic rant on national TV a few months back can see how false and two-faced she is. I read somewhere that she wouldn't accept £50 million but wanted £100 million. How is fifty million not enough?

Go away Galloway

I'm getting a bit tired of George Galloway and his apparently goggled vision of Western life. For example, I'm listening to his radio show at the moment and someone e-mailed in commenting that Muslims should be brought more into British society rather than given reasons to exclude themselves from it. This was obviously in relation to the Sharia thing I have already commented on. I agree pretty much with this. If people want to live seperately I don't see why Britain should have its culture carved up to suit them.

Galloway replied putting down the e-mailer, asking whether Muslims should be forced to go to the pub on Friday nights, get drunk, then go outside and piss on the wall on their way home to beat up their wife.

I know he's spent loads of time in Glasgow but bloody hell is that what George believes is commonplace in British society? Is he really trying to suggest that normal Brits are ALL alcoholic antisocial wife beaters? He always cracks down when someone makes a sweeping comment about Muslims but he's quite happy to dish out the same crap against normal non-Muslim British people.

Another stupid one is the way he bleats that abortion is "the law" in this country and that if he were a Jewish doctor he could say he wouldn't do one because of religious beliefs. This seemed to be about all he could come up with to justify his view that Sharia should be implemented here. Problem is, abortion isn't the law here. Sure it's legal, but its a choice on a case by case basis. I don't see the link between the UK law permitting abortion and implementing Sharia for divorces, marriages and any other family cases. Apples and oranges.

I also don't understand why certain bits of Sharia can be picked and chosen either. Why's Glasgow George not supporting the criminal aspect too?

He is a self confessed anti-capitalist which I find hilarious given that he's profited from the very thing he hates. The show he presents on commercial radio station Talksport nets him £100,000 per year for one night per week. In addition he pockets the standard MP's wage of about £70,000 per year plus a further £100,000+ of expenses.

Hypocrite!

Bashing the Bishop

Archbishop of Canterbury Dr. Rowan Williams came out with yet another load of crap in a lecture the other day. He reckons that Islamic Sharia law should be implemented into UK law.

Is he completely out of his mind? I know it sometimes feels like it but you cannot have one law for one group of people and one law for everyone else.

If every different religion were allowed to implement its own laws, we might as well split Britain up into Little India, Little Pakistan, Little China, Little Saudi, Little Iran and so on. There might be a Little Britain somewhere, but it'd probably be banned.

We already suck up to Islam far more than we ever have for any other culture or belief. I don't mind allowing Muslims to do whatever their religion says provided it never affects me and is never inflicted upon me.

When immigrants from Asia were first encouraged to come to Britain fifty or sixty years ago it was under the condition that they 'acculturise'. Basically they had to accept and embrace British culture.

Didn't happen. In Britain today we have two seperate societies. We have the indigenous population that go about their lives as best they can and we have the Muslim society that aims to turn Britain into an Islamic state. They will never associate or mix with the normal Brits due to the nature of Islam. They do not want to associate with normal non-Muslim Brits. The Koran tells them to destroy us.

Islam is a very very extreme religion based on a core of fear and violence. It has no empathy, sympathy or forgiveness. Consider Gillian Gibbons that was jailed in Sudan because she allowed a pupil in the school she was teaching at to call his teddy bear Mohammed. I was not surprised to see that it took weeks to get her out and the idiot that leads Sudan would only negotiate with Muslims.

Appeasement of any religion makes me sick. At the moment it's Islam but it doesn't really matter which one. Sudan should have had trade embargos immediately and all aid withdrawn immediately. Why can't we have the conviction that Muslims do when they run into a supermarket and blow themselves sky high?

I personally think all religious fanatics should be booted out of Britain, including Rowan Williams and his ilk. Christianity and Islam have the same goal - they want the whole world to be the same religion. The difference is Christianity is far older than Islam and yes 800 years ago Christians were doing all the violent things the Muslims are doing now.

Britain is pretty much secular now. Church of England is dying out and due to all the negativity in the media about religion I believe most people that were born here are not interested in it. I'm not just talking about 'white people'. There are obviously exceptions including those with an Asian parentage that can't let go of Islam.

Im astounded how Williams can throw away all his beliefs, get on his knees and try to appease Muslims with this rubbish. Maybe he's doing it to remind people that he hasn't died yet, because lets face it - what else does this muppet do?

Whats next, I wonder. Will he be advocating honor killings and public stoning in accordance with Sharia?

Now he must resign.