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It’s the World Wildlife Fund’s Earth Hour this coming Saturday…

On Saturday 28 March 2009 at 8.30pm, people, businesses and iconic buildings around the world will switch off their lights for an hour – WWF’s Earth Hour.

We want a billion people around the world to sign up and join in.

[...]

Every single person who signs up to WWF’s Earth Hour sends the message that they want action to tackle climate change!

Sign up here. Get your groovy blog widget – like the one up on the top right – here.

The cynics and climate change deniers will no doubt call it an empty gesture when really those of them of a romantic bent should be enjoying the amazing spectacle and the rest can copper up the money they’re saving sitting in the actual as well as rhetorical darkness.

People of all persuasions, I beseech you, it’s a moment we can all come together and savour.

I’ve written before – and at length – about my experiences when I lost my job and fell into the clutches of a monolithic, uncaring and incompetent government system. I haven’t mentioned it lately because I thought, at a distance of five years or more, things must have changed and my experience was no longer relevant.

And then I watched Dispatches on Channel 4 last night – ‘Digby Jones examines how the government is tackling the unemployment crisis’ – and the old feelings of cloying panic and despair crawled back for a visit.

Things don’t look much improved to me – it was all chillingly familiar. The late benefits, the uncaring, undertrained or absent staff, the impenetrable systems, the empty promises. And with unemployment racing away, things can only get worse. The government has closed dozen of Job Centres since I was frequenting them, getting rid of 30,000 staff.

Will things, can things, change? I think it’ll all come down to how it all impacts on the white, middle classes. Five years ago, I was something of a freak on the unemployment scene and treated as such. The staff in the Job Centre and New Deal office genuinely didn’t have a clue what to do with me.

Now we can expect more like me to be beating their fists in futility on the door of the Job Centre. Traditionally and through little fault of their own, the unemployed have not had a voice in the media or mainstream, which is why the government has been allowed to get away with treating them as the have and do.

Unfortunately, it’s going to take the subjecting of a more articulate, educated, resourceful – and above all voting – demographic to bitter, protracted hardship in order to introduce a little humanity into how we deal with the unemployed. Middle England, I’m sorry to say, must suffer.

'We'll be there in a second, Mr Vice President'

They said he was in a wheelchair as he’d hurt his back moving stuff out of his house.

Yeah, right. We all know he has a legion of winged monkeys in waistcoats and fezes to do all the menial stuff. Dick Cheney carrying boxes? And George Bush is retiring to write a new translation of À la recherche du temps perdu.

The real reason is Cheney’s finally, inexorably, curling up into a ball of pure evil that will eventually become super-dense. The world will then collapse in on the infinitely dense centre of his black heart. You read it here first.

Philip on Gordon Brown’s relentless optimism…

“Today, the issues may be different, more complex, more global” than the Second World War, an altogether simpler and more local affair; yet nevertheless, “the qualities we need to meet them the British people have demonstrated in abundance before”. After all, we survived the First and Second World Wars by mortgaging ourselves to the Americans (who could afford us at the time); we survived the industrial revolution by stealing from brown people and subjecting our own people to vile factory conditions, draconian poor laws and the workhouse; we kept smiling through the Black Death by blaming it on Jews and witches: whitewashed with a minimal twenty-first-century gloss, these are all good, sound New Labour coping strategies.

Read the rest…

With the global economy in the toilet and the environment not far behind it, might it be worth someone checking to see if the world’s richest bastards are building a fleet of rockets in the Australian desert?

Finding Nemo? You better hurry…

One-fifth of the world’s corals have died and many remaining reefs may be lost by 2050 as carbon dioxide from cars and pollution-spewing industries make ocean water warmer and more acidic, the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network said.

Me? I’m off down Sainsburys. They’re practically giving Stella Artois away at the minute. It’s cheaper and easier than building a rocket to get off this turd.

So anyway, this one goes out to all those nice gentlemen who are about to shaft us all at the Poznan climate conference.

Let me see if I’ve got this right. If we get the 2.5 per cent VAT cut – from 17.5 to 15 – in the pre-budget speech today as massively and widely leaked by the headline-desperate government, that means on a £100 trolley of VAT-liable shopping (food is exempt from VAT so don’t expect the food bill to fall), you’ll be a whopping £2.50 better off.

That means, if I spend £200 on stuff other than for feeding my family, I’ll have saved enough for a sixpack of Stellas, yes?

How’s this for a we’re all going to die tearing each other to pieces over the last hunk of mouldy bread mash-up?

Overlay this:

Over a third of China’s land is being scoured by serious erosion that is putting its crops and water supply a risk, a three-year nationwide survey has found. [...] If the loss continues at this rate, harvests in China’s northeastern breadbasket could fall 40 percent in 50 years, adding to erosion costs estimated at 200 billion yuan ($29 billion) in this decade alone.

With this:

Rich governments and corporations are triggering alarm for the poor as they buy up the rights to millions of hectares of agricultural land in developing countries in an effort to secure their own long-term food supplies.

Is it too early to start drinking?

The last words I had with my other half this morning as she left for work were cross ones. It’s raining, the school run beckons, and I don’t have the car today. The youngest has a stomach pain and I don’t think she’s faking it. The new puppy keeps crapping in the most inappropriate places. I’ve blocked the toilet with puppy crap and kitchen paper.

And the galaxy is hurtling – being dragged – towards an unknown dark structure beyond the edge of the visible universe at a rate of two million miles an hour.

Cheers.

…what the BLOODY HELL is wrong with this country?

This week we discover that Tony Blair, one of the instigators of a war that has killed hundreds of thousands of men, women and children is poncing around the world without a care and earned £12 million in the last year.

Meanwhile, Lesley Douglas, controller of Radio 2 and 6 Music (home to the jewel in the crown of British radio, The Adam and Joe Show), has lost her livelihood because a couple of dickheads left sweary messages on a man’s answerphone insulting his granddaughter (a granddaughter who, I notice, is currently selling intimate details of her sex life to The Sun, invasion of privacy be buggered).

Do you know what I mean? Ever get the feeling that our system of doing things is massively and comprehensively demented?

Quite frankly, a country that allows the Daily Mail and attendant morally retarded bandwagon jumpers to dictate its social mores and sense of justice is a country in the shitter.

Anybody else loving the BBC giving the recession a little corporate identity? You’ve got to love the little downward arrow on the logo:

It’s good to see at least literal-minded graphic designers doing well during Econogeddon.

Simon Carr makes a fair point about us all now owning big slices of the banks:

[W]ho are the Government directors on these bank boards looking after? Legally they’re supposed to be looking after the company’s shareholders. So, shouldn’t they be insisting the bank uses every offshore method of avoiding tax? Or denouncing the Office of Fair Trading for attempting to extract refunds for £2bn worth of “unfair charges”? And demanding fast repossessions and overdraft cancellation and higher fees and high dividends to attract investors?

I’m the kind of financial wizard who’s paid probably thousands in bank charges over the years. If I continue to pursue my claim to get them back, am I only punishing myself? Shouldn’t I be demanding I pay back my overdraft? If we don’t make sure our company maximises its profits we’re actually breaking the law. We’re legally obliged to impoverish, evict, and tax-avoid.

So…

I’m gonna sit write down and write myself a letter [1].
And make believe it came from you [2].
I’m gonna write words oh so sweet [3].
They’re gonna knock me off my feet [4].
A lotta kisses on the bottom [5].
I’ll be glad I got ‘em [6].

(And then I’ll charge myself a few quid for the administration.)

[1] On headed notepaper, demanding immediate repayment of my overdraft.
[2] My fellow shareholders.
[3] You know that malevolent reasonableness?
[4] Particularly when I see the charges being levied.
[5] Oh yes, I’m going to have to smooch some serious arse. Pucker up, buttercup.
[6] Who doesn’t like being sucked up to?

Anyway, there’s a jolly good reason why this process of bailing out the hopeless nitwits who’ve thrown our pensions down the shitter can be safely called Socialism. It’s so that when we’re suffering in a couple of years’ time and things have really gone tits-up, people can shake their heads and say: “Well, of course things are bad – that’s socialism for you. If only we could let the banks and financial institutions do every single tiny thing they wanted without any restriction or regulation in the slightest, then everything would be all right again. Sure, it was necessary at the time in order to prop things up and restore confidence, but this just goes to show that socialism is a failed ideology that can’t work at any stage and will only make people miserable.”

Read the rest

As a new banking shareholder Owen Barder lays it on the line with a few excellent instructions for the banks’ managers. All the instructions are perfectly sane, reasonable and humane. Therefore, of course, they don’t have a hope in hell of being implemented.

I’m sorry to harp on about this but when Gordon Brown says something like this:

“For savers, for small businesses, and for homeowners, we must in an uncertain and unstable world be the rock of stability on which the British people can depend.”

…my instant reaction is to ask about those people who aren’t savers, small businesspeople or homeowners. It seems to have escaped the Prime Minister’s attention that for a huge swathe of the country this makes absolutely no sense. It doesn’t distract or detract from the slump they’re already in.

Seeing a bunch of suits down to their last Ferraris and having government money thrown at them must read to many like an incredibly dull, complicated and yet in extremely poor-taste novel. Where’s their rocks of stability on which they can depend?

You know where? It’s the neo-Thatcherite government ministers following the lead of the petty prejudices of the gutter press and telling the low-waged and disabled and unemployed that they’re feckless and lazy and parasitic. That’s the one thing the lower classes can depend on. Uncertainty, vilification and threats. If only they’d had the sense and foresight to be parasites of an altogether different magnitude.

Forget about bailouts and economic war cabinets for them. The government has already surrendered. There are, after all, such things as acceptable losses.

“In case you hadn’t already worked it out – the entire global financial system is predicated on the assumption that you’re an idiot.”

So, I see the undeserving poor are getting more hard-working taxpayers’ money . If that’s what you want to call them and it. I think we can take it that these people at the top with their hands out haven’t been and won’t be treated with the same level of high-handed contempt as those much further down the ladder also needing help.

Of course, the way the small time benefits scrounger is treated – the patronising, the vilification, the incompetence and the depressing – has the dual function of giving petty bureaucrats a frisson of sadistic power and, also, to teach said scrounger not to do anything as stupid and as careless as hit hard times through no fault of their own ever again.

So, here’s another idea for helping solve the global economic crisis. Let’s treat the leading banks just like unwashed dole scroungers. Don’t invite them to Downing Street for high-level talks. Make them walk a mile in the rain to a grubby office where they will be met by the distressingly surly indifference of a claims officer (if that claims officer isn’t off ’sick’). Make the bankers do this at the same time every two weeks. Don’t offer them any advice when they’re there or, if you do, make it ambiguous or just plain incorrect.

Hand the banks’ finances over to undertrained and demotivated staff in a government call centre. Make sure the system is as half-arsed as possible. Delay the payments to the banks for a day or two. When they phone up panicky and asking what’s happened to their much needed money treat them off-handedly. Make sure they know their place. If they can be reduced to tears so much the better. Stoke the crushing uncertainty of it all. Promise to phone back when you have more information but don’t. Send them a payment but make it smaller than promised. Make two payments just to unsettle them further. Insist they can keep the money and then write to them a week later demanding it back. Do it just before Christmas.

If after 18 months this situation isn’t sorted the banks should be handed over to a private sector agency charged with getting the banks working again by all means necessary. They will be paid by results and will receive their money when the banks are working again – whether the agency had a direct hand in helping or not. Again, make sure the staff are undertrained, bored and lacking in any empathy whatsoever. Leave it hanging over the bankers that they could lose their money at any minute.

Start a widespread campaign to plant in the public consciousness that banks and bankers are scum. Find out if any of them are foreign. Shame, shame and shame again. Sodding bankers sitting around leeching off the tax-payer. Add to their already towering misery as much as possible. Apply pressure from which they can’t escape. Make things ten times harder, more long-winded and as frustrating than they need to be. Break these scroungers, in other words. Compensate them by allowing them to get their anti-depressants for free.

The bastards won’t do it again.

Is anyone else noticing an upsurge in spam email purporting to be from your high street bank and asking you to verify your account details and PIN number? I suspect that these emails aren’t from third-party chancers at all but actually from the banks themselves hoping to trap the gullible into ponying up some much needed liquidity.

I see a delegation has been to see the Chancellor of the Exchequer overnight to ask for more cash. I seem to remember that the last large delegation to visit him asking him for a raise – representing teachers, nurses, and other key workers and public sector workers – were told to sod off in no uncertain terms.

Would the banks strike, do you think, if Alistair Darling fails to give in to their demands? Can we look forward to a Winter of Content as smug and patronising banking workers huddle around their braziers on picket lines outside your local branch?

(more…)

Anyway, I think I have the answer. Today at noon, the Prime Minister should announce that this morning he sent teams of mobile car crushers into London’s Square Mile. Simultaneously, he should say, he dispatched Army artillery teams into the Home Counties broker belt.

If the FTSE share index is not up by 200 points at 1pm, he will promise, five upmarket cars will be chosen at random from underground car parks in the City and fed into the mobile car crushers. At the same time, the artillery teams will reduce five randomly chosen houses in the broker belt to rubble.

If the FTSE is not up by another 200 points by 2pm the process will begin again. And so forth. Across the world, presidents and prime ministers will make the same announcement to their own people. The townships of The Hamptons will ring to the sound of cannon fire. Cubed Lexuses will be stacked in the streets of Singapore.

The car crushers will continue to visibly prowl financial districts across the world, and the artillery flank the gated communities, for the foreseeable future as a continuing incentive for market optimism.

Anybody see a down side?

The next move, presumably, will be to nationalise the country’s gambling debts. To revive confidence amongst blokes in betting offices, the Government will hand over £300bn to cover the money they’ve lost. Then a leading gambler will be quoted as saying: “This package goes some way towards restoring calm. The last week has been horrendous. One of my friends lost a ton on an 8-1 shot he’d been assured was a banker by a minicab driver.”

Read the rest

Dreams turn to so much slurry.

Anybody care to have a punt on how many extra deaths the British Gas price rise will cause this winter?

I’ll start with 10,000.

Here’s Business Secretary John Hutton on the push for nuclear energy:

Mr Hutton said: “Nuclear power is an essential part of our future energy mix. And, alongside a 10-fold increase in renewables and investment in clean coal technology, it will help wean us off our dependency on oil and protect us against the politicisation of energy supplies.

It doesn’t matter where you stand on the issue of nuclear power – for or against – the assertion that increasing our number of nuclear power stations will ‘protect us against the politicisation of energy supplies’ is manifest bollocks.

Is the UK self sufficient in uranium? No. We’ll have to get it from somewhere else then. That makes notions of so-called ‘energy security’ shakey from the outset. Canada and Australia are the biggest producers. They also happen to be democratic, white and friendly to us (which is nice).

You don’t have to get very far down the list to find that some of the other uranium producers are proper bastards. Kazakstan, Uzbekistan, increasingly tonto Russia, Namibia, and Niger, for example.

(Although to be fair, it’s France, which generates 80 per cent of its electricity from nuclear, that has the big stake in Niger’s uranium. Not that Niger’s people slumped, as they are, at 177 in the United Nations Human Development Index, have seen much benefit.)

So, do we swap one set of oil-supplying bastards – the Saudis, and all – for a different set of uranium-supplying bastards? We might have the decision taken out of our hands if American proposals to form a new uranium cartel are realised. A US State Department advisory body (chaired by no less a figure than Iraq war architect Paul Wolfowitz) has suggested the US and six other producer nations get together to form a ‘uranium bank’ to control supply. Goodbye Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, hello Organization of the Uranium Exporting Countries.

We’re on the verge of a ‘nuclear renaissance’ we’re told. (The use of ‘renaissance’ is spin, by the way – it evokes a golden age of exploration and enlightenment rather than, in the instance of the nuclear industry, a retreat to ignorance and cover-up). The world and his dog wants a nuclear reactor for some unknown reasons (if someone’s worked out how to keep a 100 per cent safety record and found a safe way of getting rid of the waste they’re keeping bloody quiet about it).

Are we to expect that this cartel’s decisions won’t be politicised in the face of growing competition for uranium whose supply, we might add, is expected to run out before the end of the century at current rates of consumption? The mere suggestion of creating such a body means the ‘politicisation of energy supplies’ as Hutton puts it.

The Great Global Warming Swindle is part of a long-standing pattern. Channel 4 upsets all sorts of people, and it has every right to do so. On all other issues it appears to do so in a random fashion, sometimes attacking people on one side of the debate, sometimes on the other. But one polemical position has kept recurring over the past 18 years: a fierce antagonism towards environmentalism. Some of these programmes have used misrepresentation, distortion or fabrication to sustain claims that environmental concerns are the fantasies of self-serving scientists. It is arguable that no organisation in the United Kingdom has done more to damage the effort to protect the environment.

read the rest.