Single Parent’s Treadmill

Persecuted by Bureaucrats

 

 

At present, I am not making ends meet at all. I am completely tied up in knots which prevent me from finding enough time to work. Obviously, I hope to change that. But so far I have been fighting a losing battle.

 

So much so that I have just received notice from the mortgage lender’s solicitor telling me they are starting repossession proceedings.

 

For example; today is a typical example of not being able to find time to work.

 

It is 1400 (2pm.) , office workers have just returned from lunch to do slightly more than 50% of their normal daily work load before going home for the weekend. I have already been busy since 8.a.m, by the way.

 

I, on the other hand, cannot do one solitary item of income generating work right now.  The ordinary workers mentioned above will do 50% of their days work, I will do zero percent. Why ?

 

Because I have just one and a half hours before my nine year old son returns from School. After which time he will require feeding and watering, and when feeding and watering is dealt with he will be wittering non-stop at me about something or other.

 

I cannot stop him – ever. All attempts have proved fruitless. Only by being seriously unpleasant with him can I shut him up and that means ruining what is a reasonably good relationship. It would be pointless to do that. It would mean becoming one of those disinterested and distant parents who couldn’t really give a hoot about the existence of their children, viewing them as nothing more than a severe inconvenience to get rid of at every  opportunity. Anyway, previous experience tells me even being unpleasant only shuts him up for a few moments.

 

Meanwhile, the immediate priorities for me are to attend a brief hospital appointment at 3.30, and deal with a monstrous  mountain of garbage paperwork all generated by insane bureaucrats. I would barely make a dent in it if I spent a full forty hour working week at it, so fitting it all into the hour and a half before 3.30 is slightly difficult.

 

We have lunatic claims for ten years of council tax (over ten thousand pounds worth – a joke, isn’t it ?) for the house I moved out of seven years ago, combined with bailiffs threats to seize everything I possess to pay for it, we have the mysteries of tax credits to occupy a few hours with, we have the State milking me for speed camera fines, where I have to fight the case in court, taking many hours, and many, many other things, all with screaming deadlines and all wanting to take priority and all to be done right now, before the end of today. It is impossible. And there is no possibility of doing what I really want to do which is proper income generating work.

 

Instead I have to devote all my time to fending off the persecution by bureaucrats. If I don’t, they will take their revenge and impose nastinesses on me. The speeding fine will cost money and I will be arrested for not paying as well as having my license taken away. All because  drove at 38 miles per hour on a completely empty main road in the middle of the night, actually obeying all speed limits. Like about three million other people, I have been well and truly conned by a thieving Government which is milking thousands of motorists every day.

 

And, although I will persevere at my desk after dealing with the nine year old and persuading him to go out and play cricket with the local cricket club, past experience tells me I will get very little done at all. Even when I put off preparing the evening meal for him and me until the last minute, its still doesn’t buy much time. It also means we usually eat at 11 pm which is far too later for both of us and drives me completely bonkers.

 

This is just a little cameo of everyday life as a single parent. Variations of the same theme occur every single day. Each day I think tomorrow will be different. But it never is. All my time is taken up by the combination of mad bureaucrats poisoning my life and looking after the nine year old Ninja Destroyer.

BUREAUCRACY OF OPPRESSION

 

Social Services Abuse Children – frequently ! No, Perhaps most of the time !

 

A local family I have known for some time told told me an amazing story recently. It’s about the sheer nastiness of Social Services and the bureaucracy of oppression this Labour Government inflicts on us all.

The story is one of those awful tales of Social Services tearing children away from their families without the slightest moral justification whatsoever.

This family are at the bottom of the social heap. The fifty year old husband used to be in the army. Now he is a full time carer to his wife who suddenly descended without warning into mental illness – schizophrenia – a few years ago.

It could have been because of the awful traumas the family experienced. With a son and daughter with learning disability under the age of ten, the family discovered their third child, a son without any medical problems until then, acquired bone cancer and ended up having one leg amputated at the very top of the thigh.

The family remained close and supportive of each other with the husband loyally caring for a wife constantly causing problems making life really difficult for everyone with her muddled and mentally ill mind.

I have heard a mental health nurse working in the NHS say to another husband looking after a schizophrenic partner “Why bother staying with her. It’s a waste of time looking after them. It doesn’t do any good in the end and it just destroys your own life eventually, so why bother ?”

It made me really angry to hear that. It seemed typical of so many of the lazy, self centred bureaucratic employees in the NHS, only concerned with getting paid and with no intention of ever bothering to do their jobs properly. Instead, hiding their incompetent lazyness behind a blizzard of rules and bureaucratic justifications.

The daughter went to a special school for people with learning disabilities and emerged a reasonably competent young woman, perfectly able to look after herself in her small single person flat supplied to her by the local council. The learning disabilities had been quite minor really.

Then she became pregnant. So far, unremarkable. Everyone is getting on with their lives normally and nothing particularly unusual is happening .

Then, let’s call the young girl Julie, instead of her real name, in case some bureaucratic moron working for the government tries to imprison someone for talking about this matter; because it is, apparently, against the law to openly talk about these things and people are often sent to prison for doing so.

Most people won’t know about that and you don’t really hear about the people imprisoned for protesting against the appalling and vicious incompetence of Social Services and the Family Courts.

The reason being, the Government gags everyone with oppressive laws forbidding any exposure of the dreadful activities Social Services and the Family Courts get up to.

Of course these laws completely protect Social Services from being exposed for the destructive, useless, idle and incompetent idiots they often are. The law also conveniently protects the complacent and pompous little Judges sitting in the family courts, happily collecting their large pay packets, secure in the knowledge they are answerable to no one.

I once heard of a family court Judge who billowed in thoroughly late for the Friday afternoon hearing that was supposed to have started at 2 p.m. It was nearly three O’clock when she finally arrived in the court. She must have had a really good lunch.

Apologising brusquely for being late, she announced she hoped everyone in the court would get a move on and conclude the case before four p.m. as she really had to get off on the dot of four O’clock to do her weekend shopping. She couldn’t possibly stay a minute longer that four p.m., she said.

As a direct result of what she had menacing told the roomful of subservient and groveling lawyers, ritually awed by the sheer majesty of the almost unlimited power the Judge held over everyone in the court, a two year old child was deliberately and intentionally placed in great danger by Social Services.

The poor father who had brought the case to ask the court to uphold the law and return his two year old son the court had previously ordered be looked after by him because the Mother was dangerously mad with schizophrenia, was forced to agree to Social Services being given an instant care order so the case could be finished quickly. Then the fat little Judge could cheerfully go off and do her weekend shopping without a care in the World.

Never mind the child had been illegally abducted by the insane and dangerously psychotic Mother and the Judge herself had told the Social Services she was unhappy with the obvious dangers of expecting this Mother to look after the child when clearly she was seriously mentally ill.

But, no, Social Services insisted they thought it would be too ‘disruptive’ to return the child to his Father, even though everyone in the court agreed the Father was an excellent and competent parent, always having been the principal carer anyway. The Judge specifically told Social Services she was unhappy with the idea of the Mother looking after the child as she was clearly a danger and the Father wasn’t. But, no, Social Services must have their way.

So, the Judge said she would reluctantly agree to the Social Services recommendation that the child stay with the dangerous Mother on condition Social Services visited the Mother every day to make sure she was actually looking after the child and not neglecting it. The very real risk of the child’s death at the hands of a psychotic mentally ill schizophrenic was ignored.

Eventually, as it turned out, Social Services were forced to admit the Mother was dangerously psychotic and completely incapable of looking after the child, so they put the child into a foster home rather than return him to his Father.

In the foster home the child was thoroughly abused by the foster parents. When the child left the foster home he had twenty eight identical little round bruises all over his ribcage where he had been poked hard with the end of a walking stick wielded by the foster parents.

This was to keep the two year old child from coming too close to them.

They didn’t like the idea of the child approaching them to seek the affection it craved, having been arbitrarily ripped from both his Father and Mother by the wickedness of utterly incompetent Social Services people so obsessed with political correctness that they would do everything in their power to prevent a Father looking after his own child.

Social Services even went so far as to threaten the Father in that case with taking his son away and forcibly adopting him if the Father ‘didn’t cooperate’ with them, whatever that meant.

So, back to ‘Julie’s ‘ story. Twenty year old heavily pregnant ‘Julie’ sensibly applies to the Council for slightly larger accommodation – a two bedroomed flat instead of the laughingly described ‘studio flat’ she currently occupies. Actually it is just a glorified bedsitter really, but that’s the property market for you. All exaggeration and hype.

Immediately, the bureaucrats of the ever watchful Big Brother State Surveillance, Interference and Oppression Machine swing into action.

Because Julie has had to fill out endless forms describing her entire life history just to get her Council Accommodation in the first place, the nosy officials noted she once had ‘learning disabilities’.

Straightaway the busybody and prurient Council Housing Official handling an application for larger accommodation notified Social Services that a young girl in Council accommodation was about to give birth and as she was recorded as once having ‘learning disabilities’, perhaps Social Services might want to use this as an excuse to interfere in her life, possibly even destroy it.

You bet they do.

Social Services set about causing the maximum amount of destruction and heartache they can contrive. Standard procedure really. All in a day’s work. They are used to doing this sort of thing all the time.

Within a short time after the child is born, Social Services have grasped control of it through the complacent family courts, and they can now do what they want with the child.

That often means ripping the child away from the Mother and family and putting the baby up for adoption to meet the insane ‘adoption targets’ set by an Orwellian government obsessed with controlling every aspect of everybody’s life with ‘targets’.

‘Targets’ for everything. ‘Targeted Services’, meaning things like non-existent health treatment for vast swathes of the population because services are not ‘targeted’ in their direction. Rather all the money seems more ‘targeted’ in the directions of the government bureaucrat’s pockets and fat index linked pensions.

So, particularly bad luck on all of you lot who want dental treatment. Unfortunately all the NHS dental treatment seems to have been ‘targeted’ somewhere else, because you are certainly unlikely to get any of it. You will be forced to pay for your own dental treatment yourself. Just one example of the clever dexterity of our Government’s ‘targeting’ culture.

Soon the baby is placed in a foster home by Social Services, but the young Mother is still ‘allowed’ to look after her own baby as she too, is forced into the same foster home at the age of twenty years old.

Social Services are not satisfied with torturing the Mother by telling her they have decided to bring a case before the Family Court for the forcible adoption of the child.

So, for no other reason that some knowing official employed by Social Services has decided they know best and can decide on who can have the privilege of keeping the child they have given birth to and who can be arbitrarily deprived of keeping their own child, Social Services also use the Family Court to forbid the Mother and child to visit the Grandparents, or for the Grandparents to offer their daughter any help in looking after their own Grand-daughter.

Apparently all this is based on the grounds Grandmother has been mentally ill, although she is doing absolutely fine now as her husband and children are helping her so much and looking after her.

Social Services also hint darkly to the Family Court that as the Grandparents have an untidily gaudy front garden with lots of flower pots full of flowers, this somehow constitutes a serious hazard to the well being of the baby should she visit the house.

This is the sort of thing Social Services think they ought to protect the child from and even make sure it is adopted to take it away from such a dangerous environment where it might be over-exposed to the dangers of too many plant pots in the front garden. Tsk Tsk.

So the Court bans the child from visiting the Grandparents house, having given weighty consideration to the question of too many flower pots in the garden and other things of such similar great importance.

So there we have it. Another good day’s work done by Social Services. I expect they managed to keep their expenditure of public money to a modest hundred thousand pounds or so to interfere in private family life and tear a child away from it’s parents entirely unnecessarily

Never mind the hordes of dismally deprived children who really need the intervention of Social Services to prevent things like their parents starving or beating them to death. Cases like that are much too much of a bother for Social Services to deal with. There is always an excuse for not dealing with them.

Rather just let those children get on with it and suffer the most awful privations, because the laws of obsessive State secrecy will protect Social Services and the Family courts from the public ever finding out about the true extent their breathtakingly corrupt incompetences.

It’s all just a gravy train really, a nice secure position being paid for by the taxpayer, and there is no real accountability at all. ‘Who Cares. We don’t. We’re just Social Services. We couldn’t care less about anyone except ourselves thank you very much.’

To hell with the children.

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Repossessed, Repossessed, Repossessed !

Instead of Location, Location, Location !

 

The mortgage lending industry are mostly liars and thieves. I can speak from personal experience. Read on and you will see what I mean.

 

The Council of Mortgage Lenders are certainly liars. I have lost count of the times I have seen spokespeople from the Council of Mortgage Lenders telling all us mortgage holders that our lenders will bend over backwards to help us if we fall into arrears with our mortgages when we experience financial hardship.

 

It is, quite simply, a lie.

 

Another falsehood being peddled is that courts are sympathetic towards householders being repossessed.

 

The truth is, once you have become three months or more in arrears, you are likely to be repossessed in the most astonishingly nasty, brutish manner – and very quickly too.

 

The whole industry is rotten to the core. It is intrinsically fraudulent. 

 

For example; I had a mortgage with Birmingham Midshires. They actually told me I didn’t have to pay the mortgage for a while as I was in severe financial difficulties.

 

They immediately ignored what they had told me and sent me repetitive penalty charge notices. Eventually they built up thousands of pounds of mythical expenses they added on to my mortgage. They were all artful works of fiction – a complete fairy tale. 

But the small print of their mortgage contract said this is what they could do. Of course it did !

 

They proceeded to repossess my house and throw me out with an eviction notice that just gave me about three weeks notice to quit.

 

Is that civilised behaviour or what ?

 

To be continued.

A Nationwide Protection Racket To Fleece Us All

Organised crime used to be the occupation of highly unattractive individuals from deprived neighbourhoods full of dysfunctional poverty ridden families. 

One of the most lucrative schemes these criminals dreamed up was the ‘protection racket’. This entailed a bunch of thugs wandering into other people’s premises – a pub, or restaurant for example – and simply demanding money in return for not smashing the place up or beating the owner up and putting him in hospital.

Most people soon learnt it was better just to pay the regular demands for cash because it was the only way they could stay in business. 

Persistent resistance to the menacing extortion often led to murder as the thugs sought to terrorise everyone else into compliance with their demands.

Modern times have opened up exciting new possibilities for slightly more sophisticated methods, rather than just brute violence.

Big business has learnt a few lessons from the old fashioned protection racket scam and crafted a more modern version which has the huge advantage of carrying absolutely no risk whatever of going to prison for being a criminal. 

There are many examples of this form of legalised theft, but consider this particular one. It is very common.

My Potterton gas boiler was ill. It had been ill ever since I bought this house five years ago – despite the fact it was virtually new. Apparently, Potterton were knowingly supplying brand new gas boilers to people all over the country which were faulty from the very moment they were installed. 

The problem was the circuit board. That little bundle of inscrutable electronics that controlled the turning on and off of the boiler when the water was at the right temperature. It would either fail to turn the boiler on at all, or, once on, be unable to turn it off. 

This meant the hot water tank rapidly overheated, reached boiling point and boiling water and red hot steam would zoom into the roof, overflow out of the header tank and down through all the ceilings in the house one after another, wrecking plasterwork, decor and carpets and any other valuable possessions that might be inconsiderately lying around in your house at the time.

When the damned thing gave up the ghost completely and refused to fire up at all, just as winter became a fair simulation of the frozen arctic, leaving us with freezing cold water and a house like a hovel in Siberia, I finally tried to get the thing repaired.

That was when I learned about the new, modernised form of protection racket gleefully seized upon by the likes of Potterton and British Gas.

Big organisations like British Gas and Potterton have a virtual stranglehold over the entire market, just like all the other large companies that either take over every local enterprise or simply drive them out of business. They are basically the only people you can turn to for repairs.

So when I failed to find a local heating engineer who wasn’t a complete cowboy, I was reluctantly forced to turn to Potterton, being the makers of the boiler, as a hopeful source of reasonably reliable repair. 

Bingo ! “No problem sir. Our first available appointment for an engineer is for tomorrow. Would that be suitable ?” 

Would it be suitable ? I was in a state of pathetic gratefulness for the amazing speed with which my inanimate boiler could be repaired and warmth restored to the household once more. My nine year old son would no longer be in danger of dying from hypothermia or pneumonia as he dragged his grey, pinched and frozen body wearily through the cold and wintry house , clutching a duvet around him wherever he went.

But, there was a catch. There would be a fixed price of £349. There would be no other options. So, even if the repair took five minutes and a part costing only a few pence it would still cost £349. As the entire boiler cost only about £1000 brand new, it would be quite impossible to imagine any ordinary repair that was likely to cost as much £349.

So, being a single parent existing on a below the poverty threshold income, I thought this was ludicrous. This repair was going to cost me the equivalent of three weeks entire income !

I turned to British Gas. They couldn’t send an engineer tomorrow but they could manage the next day. That looked promising. I wouldn’t hold the extra day’s delay against them. It was still pretty prompt. Prompt enough, anyway.

Then came the crunch. The cost ? £444 fixed price only, the same as Potterton, but just another hundred pounds more, nearly.

Both of these extortion artistes wrapped these huge repair fees in gobbledygook language which seemed to use the word ‘protection’ quite a lot – just like the old fashioned criminals selling ‘protection’ from them smashing the place up as long as you coughed up the regular weekly payments they demanded with menaces.

Except the genius of British Gas and Potterton is that all they have to do if you don’t pay their extortionate demands is, well, err…. nothing. Yes, all they have to do is absolutely nothing. That means you and your family will simply freeze to death because it will be impossible to get anyone else to repair your boiler, because that is the way the manufacturers arrange it. They are the sole source of specialised parts, for instance.

So, I was forced to return to Potterton, being nearly a hundred pounds cheaper than British Gas at £349 instead of some £444.

When the repairman called he took just ten minutes and cheerfully described it as a complete rip off. The actual cost of the circuit board he simply replaced was just £100 before VAT. Charging the repairman out at £50 an hour would make the bill no more than £150 instead of £349 or British Gas’ incredible £444.

A forty hour working week charged at £50 per hour is two thousand pounds a week or £104000 per year. Enough to pay the repair man his salary of less than thirty thousand pounds a year and still leave the company with a whopping profit.

However. the repairman told me he did an average of five repairs like this a day. At £349 each that is a daily total of £1745 or a staggering total of £453 700 per year. Yes, that’s nearly half a million pounds !

Good money for those that get it ! Shame about the single parents on poverty levels of income shivering with cold as they no longer have any money left at all to pay for fuel to use in their now repaired and working central heating boilers.

Consumers need protection from this sort of extortion which is a creeping menace today as big business becomes increasingly bigger and bigger and more and more out of control as it rampages through our wallets with dishonest and evil impunity.

SAINSBURY’S THUG LIKE BEHAVIOUR

 

I recently visited Sainsbury’s in a Sussex market town on a Sunday to return some boys shorts bought the previous day which had been incorrectly labeled and were, therefore, the wrong size.

 

I had done a major shop the previous day and didn’t need to purchase anything else other than about £5 of milk etc.

 

When I paid the cashier I asked her to ‘swipe’ my car park entry card in order to allow me out of the car park because I had probably been in the store for very slightly more than the half hour allowed for ‘free’ parking.  

 

Without swiping the card I would have incurred a parking fee of £10 for the privilege of being forced to return a faulty product and make a minor purchase.

 

The cashier made the assumption that because I had bought such a small number of items I must have been in the store less than  half an hour. When I told her I had also spend a considerable time dealing with my exchange of shorts she held on to her mindset of me being within the half hour. 

 

She refused to swipe the card, saying she ‘couldn’t’ swipe it if I had been less than half an hour and ‘couldn’t’ swipe it if I had been more than half an hour because I had only spent about £5 and not the minimum of ten pounds.

 

Never the less, I asked her to swipe the card because should I have been in the store for just slightly more than half an hour I would be refused exit without paying a ten pound fee, and I would have blocked the exit to the car park for all the other exiting shoppers while I either paid the fee or had the unpleasant experience of arguing the matter with the intransigent Sainsbury’s staff.

 

Although this discussion was ludicrous, there was no personal difficulty or rancour in the discussion other than the cashier explaining to me her wish to obey her management instructions not to swipe cards in my sort of circumstances.

 

The cashier then hailed a passing ‘supervisor’ and asked her to take the card to the customer service point to have it swiped. An amicably reasonable solution to the utter lack of initiative the Sainsbury’s management deprive cashiers of using.

 

I would stress that despite my slightly acid description of events, there had been no unpleasant exchanges between the cashier and me. I recognised she was following the management instructions to her and our exchange was perfectly polite and civilised in every way.

 

I merely told her I insisted the card must be swiped as I did not want to block the car park exit. And It seemed complete lunacy to gamble on whether I had been in the store 29 minutes and would be freed, or 31 minutes and would be trapped causing every other exiting shopper to also be trapped behind my blocked car.

 

There had been no disruption or ‘argument’. It was a perfectly normal exchange, with a perfectly amicable solution as the cashier instructed the supervisor who gaily tripped off to swipe the card  without further ado.

 

Unfortunately, just as the supervisor walked off with the card, a hatchet faced woman with a Sainsbury’s uniform and  with a filthy expression of intense anger on her face shrieked at the top of her voice to me ‘You’ve been barred from the store.’ 

 

At the same time she slammed her hand on a ‘panic’ button to set off a loud alarm and shouted for security staff to forcibly remove me from the store.

 

Amazed and utterly nonplussed, I replied to her that I had not been banned. The supervisor taking my card to be swiped turned around and handed the card back to the cashier who then handed it to me, unswiped. I handed it back to the supervisor in a dazed state as the screaming harpy was continuing to shriek loudly at me that I was banned and shouldn’t be shopping at the store at all.

 

This was news to me as I have been shopping at the store every few days for five years uninterrupted by any ‘banning orders’ imposed by screaming harpies shouting abuse at me at the top of their voices.

 

The supervisor with my card walked with me to the customer service point where the card was swiped by her without comment. 

 

Meanwhile, a burly security guard appeared who told me I couldn’t leave the store. He kept shuffling up to within a very few inches of my face every time I tried to keep a reasonably normal distance from him, breathing his foetid breath straight into my nostrils as he followed his training instructions to intimidate people by ‘invading their personal space’ in an overtly threatening manner by standing abnormally close to them.

 

 

I was a prisoner of Sainsbury’s, not allowed to leave the premises by this threatening security guard.

 

I was completely stunned at being screamed at for absolutely no reason at all by this maniac of a hatchet faced harpy woman employed by Sainsbury’s, and then kept prisoner and prevented from leaving by a threatening ’security guard’ who clearly implied he would use violence to prevent me going about my lawful business.

Meanwhile, my nine year old son appeared to be in a state of increasing terror at what was happening to his Father.

A  duty manager, then appeared and asked the security guard what was going on. The guard replied he had no idea other than the shrieking Sainsbury employee has said I was banned from the store and had asked him to throw me out. 

 

A slightly unnecessary procedure as, armed with my now swiped card, and having paid for my shopping, I was more than anxious to remove myself from  this screaming madhouse where the Sainsbury employee’s continued shrieking had attracted a wide audience of at least a hundred people looking to see what the fracas was all about.

 

The manager did not speak to me, indeed refused to do so as he asked the security guard what the fuss was about. I was insolently and rudely told to be quiet by the manager when I greeted him as a possible saviour from this growing insanity and attempted to start explaining to him what had taken place. I imagined that, naturally, the manager would wish to speak to the polite and diffident customer being kept prisoner and prevented from leaving the store by a security guard. 

Not so. When the security guard had finished telling the Duty Manager he had no idea what was going on, the manager simply refused to speak to me and told me brusquely to leave. I replied that was what I was being prevented from doing.

 

The manager’s response was to behave in an extremely confrontational and aggressive way, and also following his training on how to deal with violence, proceeded to do the same as the security guard and shoved his face within inches of mine. Together the manager and the security guard ‘herded‘ me out of the store in a brutally uncivilised and unnecessary manner, not allowing me to leave  normally and willingly as I was entirely intent on doing.

 

It occurred to me the pair of them must have been watching too many American Los Angeles Cop and Car chase type TV films and were completely confused about what was American television fantasy and what was real life in a quiet Sussex market town as a sixty year old, inoffensive,  middle class resident went about the daily business of domestic shopping with his nine year old son.

 

I was followed into the car park by the security guard at a distance who waited to see which car I approached. He then wrote my car number in biro on his hand in a thoroughly dramatic manner, no doubt still living the fantasy and taking his cue from all those America Cop movies he watched when not harassing innocent shoppers in the local supermarket for a living.

MILKING THE MOTORIST SPEEDING CAMERA SCAMS

Like many others, I have a problem with speeding tickets , my first ever in forty years of driving !

Of course it was a camera – and a con trick to gather money.

The road was a minor A road completely empty except for me. It was 9.30 p.m. ish on a dark winter night and it was raining cats and dogs, relentlessly.

 Because of atrocious weather conditions  and a very bendy road it was impossible for me to drive particularly fast. Driving at all in those conditions took all my concentration. If I had driven fast, I would simply have skidded off the road. I also had my nine year old son in the car.

 Suddenly, going around a sharp bend I saw a 30 mph sign. It was obscured from being seen at any maximum sort of distance by virtue of being partially around a bend.

 The very second I saw the 30 mph sign I braked as hard as the wet, greasy skid encouraging road surface allowed.

 While my foot was still firmly on the brake holding the car on the edge of a slight skid  – around a corner – in a semi emergency stop sort of way, the camera flashed.

 It was so close to the 30MPH sign it was impossible to slow any faster from what had been a reasonable speed prior to the sign.

 The record showed me doing 38 mph.

 The case has yet to go to court where I wish to fight it.

 I am even considering refusing to pay any fine etc if found guilty and would be prepared to go to prison.

 If everyone was prepared to do this, refuse to pay and willing go to prison, the law would change pretty damn quick, I should think.

 I now always make a point of never paying for parking, and just throw all the tickets away, as I have had some breathtaking experiences of being robbed blind with parking tickets. I even lost a newish car illegally taken by bailiffs.

 Two recent tickets have instantly expanded to over a thousand pounds each because I didn’t pay them. The utterly disproportionate way in which an already extortionate penalty charge of £40 instantly escalates to this sort of figure is a national scandal.  

 

WHY do we all put up with it ?

 

This Totalitarian Government under Gordon Brown is simply a thief.

Motorists are being deliberately milked of gigantic amounts of money to prop up an incompetent, repressive  and failing Government of inadequate control freaks.

 How did they ever get into power ?

Any advice would be very welcome. And might I suggest giving consideration to organising a national campaign against extorting money through the excuse of ludicrously high parking fees.

 If everyone just threw their parking tickets away and refused to pay for parking, the whole rotten system would grind to a full stop.

 Just to point out a little truth that few people seem be aware of. Most council parking parking fees add up the cost of a parking space being more than enough each month to pay for a substantial mortgage.

 Yes, that’s right. Each parking space milks the motorist of a monthly sum sufficient to pay a large mortgage. Some spaces wrack up to being worth thousands of pounds per month to the council in extortion money.

 When criminals specialise in extortion it is a crime. How come it isn’t a crime when councils and the government do it ?

 Can someone tell me ?

 

http://ticketappeal.co.uk/

Knife Crime – Knives Not Needed To Kill

That Twit Gordon Brown announced today that teenagers caught carrying knives will automatically be taken to court and prosecuted.

Somehow he is so thick he imagines this will stop teenagers harming each other and occasionally stabbing each other to death.

When I was growing up and was a boy scout, we all carried large sheath knives or Bowie knives as part and parcel of being a scout. When I was a sailor in the Royal Navy we Seamen were issued with official Royal Navy Seaman’s knives as part of the uniform. We wore them tied on a white lanyard around our waists.

Just about every schoolboy in those days carried some sort of penknife. It was what boys did. Everyone expected it. But we didn’t use these knives to stab other people with. It would never have occurred to us.

No one else worried these knives would ever be used as an offensive weapon because there wasn’t the culture of violence that we are surrounded with today. So we were a great deal less violent than today’s teenagers.

The big difference between then and now is we were not brought up being force fed a diet of extreme violence day in and day out. Violence and aggression were not rammed in our faces everywhere we looked. We did not spend all our spare time playing silly computer games revolving exclusively around the idea of destroying other people with the maximum amount of aggression and violence.

Society as a whole seems to be so dim as to be unable to realise that human brains are influenced only by what is put into them. Feed them a nihilistic diet of violent aggression all the time to the virtual exclusion of anything else, and that will determine their own behaviour.

Simple really.

As you don’t need knives to maim and kill other people, the teenage violence will simply continue without knives being needed at all.

What we need is to change our extremely unpleasant culture – completely !

Can You Believe It ?

My boy – the nine year old Ninja Wrecker – came home from school today and told me there is a new rule at his school that all the kids in year six are forbidden to play with any kids younger than them – that is to say all the other kids at the school in years 5,4 and 3. 

My son is in year 6. All the other kids are also not allowed to play with kids in the previous year groups as them. So year 5 kids cannot play with 4 and year 4 cannot play with year 3. Is this mad, or is it just me that has gone mad suddenly ?

Can you believe it ?

Has our Government become completely insane under that idiot Gordon Brown ? Talk about being control freaks. This takes the biscuit !

It is another example of that vast army of nerdy little pea brained, narrow minded, politically correct morons that Gordon Brown spends our taxes employing to interfere in every part of our lives.

Every State employee, no matter how junior,  has learned that under Gordon Brown, there is no rule of law. All the government bureaucratic minions have been made to think they can make up any rule or infringement of liberty they like as they go along.

It is a pity this useless State school doesn’t spend more time doing what it is supposed to do and give our kids a good education instead of imposing endless petty, pointless and moronic rules.

This same school wrote me a terse letter recently telling me I was obliged to ask their permission to allow my son to cycle the half a mile from our house to the school. I was told I had to fill in a form asking for permission. 

Ah, yes, a form. How can modern Britain function without us all spending our entire lives filling in forms at the expense of actually doing anything useful ?

Is this an infringement of civil liberties, or is it my imagination ?

I was unaware I had to seek anyone’s permission for either my Son or I to cycle where we pleased on the public roads.

Will the school soon be issuing edicts telling me to fill in another  form asking for their permission for my son to, play in the local park ?

This reminds me something worse has already happened. The school reported me to social services some time ago because I happened to tell a teacher that I allowed my son out to play by himself, that is without any adult supervision. I’d forgotten about that. 

I’ll tell you about it another time.

Machiavellian Cunning of Nine Year Old Boys

My nine year old son starts extra tuition with a private tutor after school today to improve his shoddy maths. This is to make him acceptable for the standards required in the entrance exams he takes this November and then again in January for his move into secondary school. 

 

His current local State school is utterly useless, and I was shocked at his lack of maths when I went into it with him. It isn’t his fault at all, and when I started teaching him some of the basics he was lacking in he picked it all up immediately. State schools seem to be mostly rubbish. This one certainly is.

 

When my son went for an assessment  to the Kip McGrath ‘school’ (private tutors) on Saturday, they said he was very bright and his maths abilities far exceeded the pedestrian level of teaching at his present school. They said they were confident he could easily pass the maths part of the entrance exam, but not if we relied on his State school to teach him anything, because it famously can’t really be bothered to.

 

The weekly tuition is costing me £22 a week, and as my income currently fails to even pay the ordinary weekly bills, it is a statement of optimism that I will be able to continue to pay for the tuition for long enough. I told my son I expect him to contribute  his pocket money towards the cost of the tuition. His response was sheer amazement that I was actually paying for it at all. He thought it was free !

 

I have to pay for the tuition, rather than doing it myself for several reasons. The first is I have been completely unable to find the necessary time to do it in the several months I have tried to. The second reason is that I am utterly ignorant of how to go about it properly and what things he is actually supposed to know at his age. The third is the usual problem of parents finding it much more difficult than other people to teach anything at all  to their kids.

 

So far, every effort I have made to apply pressure on my son to voluntarily sit down and actually do some maths without me chaining him to the desk and standing over him snarling constant threats of dire consequences if he doesn’t get on with it, have come to nothing.

 

He agrees with the abstract idea of ‘wanting to do the extra maths’ to be able to get into a good school but, unfortunately, it remains entirely abstract unless I physically sit down and do it with him. This has certain limitations.

 

To give you an idea of how it works, let me explain what happened yesterday.

 

I wanted him to tidy up his lego. Vast amounts of it are scattered over every square inch of the lounge floor, and have been for a very, very long time. At least a a year probably.

 

I have asked him in a variety of ways to put it away, many, many times. I have been endlessly patient and even calm about it. I have been diplomatic; ranging from diffidently polite, through the huge range of diplomacy options as practiced by superpower diplomats politely explaining to Middle Eastern Dictatorships that no one will attend their embassy parties or even play with them  anymore and their country will be bombed out of existence unless they start behaving themselves.

 

Nothing has worked. Certainly not my threats of extreme violence or hints that pocket money might become a thing of the past or he might be confined to the house and not allowed out to play with his friends in the woods anymore.

 

So, yesterday, I tried a new tactic. Rather that give way to my inclination to fly into paroxysms of uncontrollable rage and beat the living daylights out of the little blighter, I thought I would call his bluff and just be calmly and quietly insistent that he goes nowhere and does nothing until all that ruddy lego is back in it’s boxes. 

 

All the flaming lego ‘Bionicle’ alien thugs with their fierce features and violent interstellar death ray weaponry which are perched on every surface must go. All the debris from their battles overseen by the Warlord Ninja Wrecker (my son) which litters the lounge floor making it impossible to walk the short distance to the the telly to switch it on without crunching bits of lego underfoot and breaking them. This causes subsequent accusations from him of me doing it on purpose, followed by copious tears from the Ninja Wrecker as he accusingly  holds up a cracked and broken alien’s face or favourite missile launcher for me to see.

 

It simply must all be packed away so I can actually get round to hoovering up the two year layer of dust on the floor.

 

I naively thought that if I didn’t get cross and just quietly insisted he stay put until it is all done, eventually he would just have to get on with it. Bingo ! he would get bored, stop making excuses, and it would be done.

 

Foolish me. I had reckoned without the Machiavellian cunning nine year old boys can display. Bitterly complaining it wasn’t fair, he disconsolately picked up bits of lego one by one, slowly, pausing each time to sigh as if he was the victim of terrible child abuse.

 

After a while he  simply curled up on the sofa and went to sleep for several hours. It was only late morning. Seeing as how I had to go out of the house and do things later in the day and had to take him with me, my cunning plan had failed. The lego still remains virtually untouched. All I can do is repeat the performance, with massive inconvenience to myself and no guarantee he will ever pick up his lego at all.

 

He wins – yet again !

 

Child Abuse

As a single parent it has become abundantly clear to me the whole idea of both parents having full time jobs and still somehow managing to bring up their children is a complete joke.

 

I have brought up two children who are now adults. We were a two parent family and there was always one of us at home and not working. Now I have been bringing up my nine year old boy alone as a single parent since he was three.

 

What a different experience.

 

It is a full time job; and if I was to have a nine to five job, even locally, around the corner from my house, no matter how I arranged things, it is clear my boy would suffer immense emotional neglect as well as a considerably impoverished way of life.

 

I am finding it seriously difficult just trying to find enough time to work at home from my computer. There just never seems to be enough time to either get on with a decent amount of work,  or to spend adequate time with my boy.

 

How on earth does this ignorant bunch of morons who comprise our government think any single parent is going to be able to bring up children and somehow magically fit in a full time job as well ?

 

Of course,  it is possible to have that full time job and farm out the children to some dipsy child minder. But even if the child minding situation is as brilliant as it can ever get, it will still impose enormous problems on the child and parent.

 

It is hardly surprising the whole country is complaining about the dysfunctional youth of today; a vast and increasing proportion of who are becoming addicted to drugs, alcohol and crime.

 

It is the inevitable consequence of  the Government structuring an economy which forces both parents out to work, effectively ensuring virtually the entire nation simply abandons all it’s children.

 

 

The culture of fecklessness and disinterest in getting a good job and getting on in life is encouraged and nurtured by  children been left with childminders for most of their childhood while their exhausted parents go out to full time jobs, only to come home to a mountain of domestic chores for which there is not enough time to deal with.

 

The nation’s children are simply being abandoned – left to their own devices while their parents slog it out on the treadmill of Gordon Brown’s poisonous economy. 

Taxed to the hilt, working for half the year for absolutely no pay whatever to feed the insatiable coffers of Gordon Brown’s greedily officious  taxman. 

 

And where does all this money go ? Why, to an army of nasty little bureaucrats employed in ever increasing numbers by the government to interfere in every part of our lives and spy on every citizen so they can be controlled in the minutest way.

 

You can’t even leave your dustbin lid slightly raised without the Government spies noting it down in minute  detail and prosecuting you to brand you with a ‘criminal’ record. I mean, what a surreal joke to describe someone whose dustbin lid is slightly ajar as a ‘criminal‘ ! What kind of obscene Orwellian  nightmare has this Government brought to this country?

HIGH STREET THIEVES POSING AS BANKS

 

 

I really got my knickers in a twist recently because my bank, which was Lloyds Bank, sent me solicitors letters threatening court action for an overdraft of about £600.

They also closed my account and I was left with no means of using money other than cash. This made life impossible. I also could not open another bank account because of the blacklisting of me as having a bad credit record .

The situation seemed dire and really got to me.

The reason for the £600 overdraft ? Every penny of it consisted of Lloyds bank’s penalty fees for an unauthorised overdraft which was originally only £5. But even that £5 was part of a sum of about £160 which had been filched from my Lloyds bank account by an insurance company misusing my debit card details for a household insurance policy that was never authorised by me at all.

It was all the result of a completely dishonest mortgage broker trying to ram a dubious mortgage down my throat which I eventually declined to take up. The other part of the total sum filched from me was when I made a one off internet payment of £17 using my debit card and it continued to be debited dishonestly from my account every month for over a year. It was a deliberate theft, common on the internet.

My pleas to Lloyds bank in many letters, and personal visits to counter staff asking my bank to cease these unauthorised payments from my account fell on deaf ears. Lloyds bank told me they couldn’t stop the payments. They point blank refused to stop allowing fraudsters to take money from my bank account. How bizarre can you get?

Then I learnt about the bank charges scam and all the legal actions going on throughout the country. I discovered the banks have stolen tens of millions of pounds from thousands of people under the pretence of them being legitimate charges for unauthorised overdrafts. The whole country is up in arms about it.

Recently I learned all the banks have managed to stuff the entire World economy by virtue of extremely bad behaviour and sheer greed in manipulating money. Governments are even complaining about it. The whole World is wondering if the banks have led everyone into complete financial meltdown.

Then for three months recently I failed to pay any monthly payment to my Capital One credit card account due to an oversight on my part. I didn’t use the card and the only outstanding balance on the card was just £13. They charged me penalties amounting to £39. This works out at an interest rate of about an incredible 1200 per cent. That is pure theft.

With experiences like this and feedback from many other people suffering similar problems, I began to realise the entire financial industry had become utterly different from years ago when it had a reputation for honesty and straight dealing. Now it seemed to rely on deviousness, mis-representation and downright fraud to make money.

More and more people are openly complaining about an ever increasing tidal wave of greed as well as obvious deviousness and dishonesty coming from all sectors of the financial industry, and particularly from banks.

When I saw how many people were beginning to fight back I realised the banks had conned vast swathes of the population.

I think the banks are thoroughly dishonest, outrageously expensive to use for any purpose, and extremely damaging to the entire country. It is about time something was done about it.

Any constructive suggestions anyone ?