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How about covering the recent demonstrations in Manchester about student fees, another new labour mess up.
Police failed to stop a peaceful demonstration despite the use of riot gear and students are holding a sit in.

wall mart has begun to ration rice?


the same people [fund managers] who brought us credit crisis now bring us commodity bull run. They have taken the billions out the stock market and put into energy and agriculture. So the public are paying for both credit crisis and commodity bull run.


commodity bull runs like this are usually associated with majors wars like ww1 and ww2. Now we see rationing and hoarding. So where is the war and who is the enemy?


is it the fund managers?

bookindano has raised some points that have been exercising my thoughts. I cannot get over the feeling, no the certainty, that "big business" and the get rich quick merchants are milking the world crisis? (of their own making) as an excuse to rip us off further.

Oil! Lets keep jacking up the price to see how long we can get Governments/people to pay for it. OPEC has the solution, considered by Saudi then think otherwise (see today's Times) to raise the barrelage to 15m per day, then no we will keep it at 12.5m. We can blame the Chinese and India. Meanwhile our Governmnet rakes it in with increased VAT revenues and has the audacity to be still hiking it by another 2p in Autumn.

Food. Lets blame bio fuels and shortages, (of our own making) and throw in some failed harvests, a strange phenomina, only occuring now. I wonder why? Supermarkets are now jumping on this bandwagon.

The "spud" shortage of the 70's is forever etched on my mind when farmers were deliberatly inflating the price of spuds and spraying purple barnloads hidden away. The price of a bag of chips never came down. We oldies remember and never forget.

The Banks and City. Well enough said. Big bonuses, pay-offs for failures and still making the public pay for their mistakes. They write of £billions of debt of their own mismanagement but would never consider wiping out my few pounds of an overdraft. A Law for the Rich and another for the poor.

Its about time Newsnight investigated these people. Never mind we can always blame Brown as I blogged last year whenever Blair gave up. It was all his fault then and soon to be Camerons when he gets elected in two years time. There will be a lot of people for a rude awakening but still "It's Buggins turn" as the Bristish electorate always default to whenever a Government has outstayed its welcome.

Dear Mr Morgan

Watching the show last night I wondered which characters might they play in a shakespearean drama.......

mmm, any thoughts from other bloggers?

and as the European Space Agency launch a recruitment drive for new astronauts perhaps the playout might be something along the lines of Star Trek or 'Reach me for the moon' sort of stuff,

best wishes
Bob

The once formidable ex-chancellor (now waffling PM) appears to be handing out money hand over fist these days.

But wait, why is it so difficult to come up with £2.5-3.5bn (administrative overhead excluded) for the lowest paid individuals in our society, working hard for their meagre livings, while bankers on 6-figure bonuses and 7-figure golden parachutes receive £50-100bn of our collected taxes to clean up their messes!

And while I'm on sums, did anyone notice that those house prices our PM seems so desperate to prop up represent 10 to 15 times the salaries of the same low-paid individuals hit by abolishing the 10p rate, i.e. unaffordable?

So here we have it. New Labour is arrogantly squeezing the very bedrock of their constituency at every turn, perhaps hoping their anger at and distrust of Thatcher's Tories is still strong enough to withstand any minor backlash.

Brown (and Darling): Keep it simple. Do a mea culpa (far more honourable than all this spin and empty back-dating/credits promise nonsense). Bring back the 10p rate or raise the tax exemption limit, both of which do not require tax accountants to calculate or additional public sector staff to administer.

AND THERE'S MORE

How it works. Lowly back-bench MPs get hammered by their constituents, so have to be rebellious to appease the voters. Their ministerial masters come up with vague assertions such that the MPs can say they are reassured enough to wait and see. Why should they not? It is dishonourable to disbelieve honourable assurances (as they did when Tony went to war in our name).
This saves the blushes, and hides, of constituency MPs and in the fullness of time, the lie matures but it's then all old hat, and politics moves on (as they have with Tony's lies). Yet another example of LIVING WITHIN THE LIE.

Yvette Cooper scarcely inspired confidence
on last night's programme, did she? Quite
incredible that the Chief Secretary to The
Treasury clearly had not been briefed by
Mr Balls on what this U-turn might cost?!
But perhaps Ed was busy riling teachers.

In Scotland we are going about our normal business and not rushing to the pumps .....
despite being held to ransome it seems by
a little-known company called INEOS which
seems to have become the third largest chemical company in the world - despite
being even younger than a New Labour
Government ...... but smells a bit like ICI.

Apparently BP sold off the Grangemouth
refinery to this company in 2005 and the
new owners - INEOS - are now trying to
unpick pension arrangements for future
employees. This is Gordon B's backyard:
he can probably see the flares going out
over Grangemouth - from his bathroom
windae as he works on Cabinet papers.

COVENANTS AND COVES

Since the start of Tony’s War, there has been much made of the covenant presumed to exist between state and the armed service-person. But what of the implied covenant between successful parliamentary candidate and their constituency?
Charisma-cove Blair just upped and left Sedgefield when the call came to save the Middle East. Now catastrophe-cove Boris will, I am led to believe, dump Henley should he become London Mayor. Where is the honour in seducing voters through kissed babies and be-crouched wheelchairs, by inference to serve a full term rather than ‘till whim us do part’, if these instant-honourables then shove off without permission from the voters?

I watched the film on the new opera and have to admit perplexity at the idea that opera will be given greater appeal if "more daring" (which I interpret to mean more nudity which does not necessarily mean more erotic) and more adventuroous, meaning (according to the examples given) that the music is closer to the avant garde than, say, Bernstein's West Side Story or Rossini's La Gazzetta.

We were treated to a few chunks of Birtwistle's Punch and Judy and Minataur which, fine, have their place in the avant garde milieu but I can't think these works are likely to bring opera to a larger public. To most people, the music will be a noisy mishmash of sound making little sense.

I'm a great fan of contemporary music, have heard and seen a few operas by modern composers but can't see how this strategy is likely to work and might deal a double blow to both contemporary music and opera.

These stagings might stand a better chance if shown on TV maybe late in the evening on one of the interactive channels. Opera has been brought to vastly more people since its appearance on DVD.

Operation Orchard

Is it not time that the ´óÏó´«Ã½ ran a full programme on this bombing raid against Syria?

The ME press has run masses of stories on this act of provocation while the Levant is on standy by for the next US Israeli war yet the beeb only runs a piece when the CIA has got some pictures to show to support its propaganda roll out.

Does anybody really think that having been shown dodgy photos of innocent agricultural
trailers stuck in the Iraq desert which we were told were for producing lethal chemicals that the Bush executive will ever be taken seriously?