The News In Shorts

How the news would look if everyone stopped waffling and told the truth.

Thursday 31 March 2016

Only The Wealthy Can Have Socialism Now.

The wealthy pride themselves on knowing a good thing when they see it and they absolutely love socialism - at least for themselves. Which is why a bunch of wealthy scroungers have given themselves public sector jobs in Parliament and hiked up the wages (not to mention expense accounts) to levels that other public sector workers can only dream of. When a banker gets into trouble his bank is taken into public ownership, the debts he has run up are paid off using tax payers money, his bonuses are guaranteed and, when his bank has been made solvent again, he gets it back at a knock-down, bargain-basement price paid for by the money he's stolen from the rest of us. The whole of the Royal family has been nationalised, their incomes subsidised by the tax payer despite the fact that they own outright most of the damned country already. Yet, the amount of taxpayers money wasted on saving the banks from their own criminality would support the British steel industry, even at £1 million per day, for 200 years. Of course the Tories have no intention of doing anything so last century as saving the steel industry by nationalising it. Socialism for ordinary people? Margaret Thatcher would spin in her grave. Socialism, it would seem, is no longer for the hoi polloi. Like every good thing it has been appropriated by the wealthy and turned into a parody of itself while, at the same time, it is vilified in the right-wing press when there is any suggestion that ordinary people might benefit from it. While the biggest scroungers in the country have now been re-labeled as "wealth creators" the disadvantaged, the poor and the disabled have all been re-labeled as "scroungers". The Tories have turned the world on its head.

Saturday 26 March 2016

What Price Education?

This photograph of Nicky Morgan, the education secretary, actually tells you all you need to know about her. The same wide-eyed manic stare of Jeremy Hunt, the same vacant facial expression of Iain Duncan Smith masking a dim mind, the same furtive look of George Osborne as she internally adds up the money she can steal from taxpayers. This, God help us, is the face of British education for the foreseeable future. A future in which all schools, that's right all schools, will become academies. So what's so good about acadamies? Are they regularly out-performing state run schools? Hardly. Are they more efficient in terms of spending tax payers money? Far from it. So why do the Tories want to effectively privatise education? There are two main reasons. First and foremost is their desire to see a return of Grammar schools, though the model they are thinking of is far from the Grammar schools of the past. Rather than an escape route for clever working-class kids the Tory version is a means to entrench privilege amongst the better-off middle-class and, therefore, more deserving members of our society. Second, but by no means least, their model is one in which tax payers money will be channeled into the greedy hands of already wealthy Tory supporters. Only yesterday it was revealed that a Birmingham Academy Trust has been siphoning off tax payers money to the tune of over £1 million and then handing it to one of their head teachers, Liam Nolan, who just so happens to also be the Trusts Accounting Officer and Chief Executive. It has also been revealed that the Department of Education has failed to monitor the money that has been siphoned off by other so-called Trusts and then paid to private companies as "consultancy fees". Much of this money, surprise surprise, has ended up in the hands of friends and relatives of the trustees. In other words tax payers money is being diverted out of education and into the grasping hands of those who support and bankroll the Tory party. Fraud on a huge scale with more than a side-order of political corruption. Despite this the mad-eyed Nicky Morgan has told the National Union of Teachers today that the course she has outlined is irreversible and there is nothing they can do or say that will persuade her otherwise. Nor should the public think that some sort of control can be exerted on these Trusts by parent trustees. Only today Nicky Morgan has made it abundantly clear that parent trustees will not be welcome and that trustees should be "business people". In other words cronies of the Tory party who will be willing to divert at least part of the money they steal into Tory party funds. After the debacle over Iain Duncan Smith's resignation it is time that the people who did not vote for this criminal government, the 63% majority, to take the gloves off. This is not politics as most people would understand it. This is organised crime and those responsible for it over the last six years should be impeached, tried for conspiracy and fraud and given lengthy jail sentences.

Saturday 19 March 2016

Iain Duncan Smith - The Heinrich Himmler Of Our Time.

Iain Duncan Smith, the UK's most evil and now most cynical politician, has resigned over the Tory plans to wreck the lives of as many disabled people as possible. The latest round of spiteful not to say down right evil cuts to disabled benefits is, according to IDS, "a compromise too far". Compromise? What on earth does IDS mean? Is he suggesting that he only reluctantly agreed to the cuts in order to save the fragile and largely fictional economic "recovery" that George Osborne has engineered over the last six years but now finds that his conscience has intervened to protect the most vulnerable in our society? Hardly. If that was the case then he should have resigned six years ago. IDS has shown little concern for the voodoo economics that Osborne has been pedaling since 2010 and has shown scant regard for the welfare of others. He has seemed quite happy to continue his career as Britain' most successful serial liar and unrepentant scrounger. Suddenly, however, the idea of cabinet collective responsibility, that fig leaf used by UK politicians to avoid criminal prosecution, has lost its allure. "It wasn't me Guv. It was that Cameron and Osborne what done it. I was only following orders." So what is going on? Is IDS merely trying to distance himself before he and the rest of his criminal gang are hauled before the Court of Human Rights for crimes against humanity? That seems most unlikely since his fellow politicians in Europe and the wider world will make absolutely sure that no such prosecution ever takes place. "Blimey," they are probably saying. "If the whole Tory party is dragged through the courts where will that leave me?" Has he had a change of heart? That too seems unlikely since he doesn't have one. So what's left? Ah, of course, the EU referendum and the imminent demise of Cameron as leader of the Tories. What better way for IDS to stake out his future claim to influence in the Tory party while, at the same time, holing George Osborne below the waterline? IDS, like Heinrich Himmler in 1945, is hoping he can negotiate his way out of the mess that the EU referendum will undoubtedly cause, while Cameron, like Hitler, continues to cower in his equivalent of the Berlin bunker before he finally shoots himself in the foot. IDS is probably hoping that Osborne, like Martin Bormann, will simply disappear, that Eric Pickles, like Herman Goering before him, will mount a spirited defence of the indefensible and that Boris Johnson will do an Albert Speer and emerge as "the good Tory".