September 2009

So that nice Mr. Brown spoke, and spoke, and spoke.

Highlights of the speech were, um, oh yes:

The right of recall of MPs if more than 25% of their constituency voted for it.

This would be more interesting if the idea extended to ministers from the House of Lords given that there are so many in government. I’m sure there are many who would happily recall My Lord Mandy, or even Baroness Scotland. Not that these individuals have a constituency.

We were also promised a referendum on proportional representation. Hmm, that would be like the one we had on Lisbon would it ?

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In his speech to the Labour Party Conference today – just down the road – the Badger of Doom claimed he was going to reign in bankers bonuses.

Goodness! that will help the rest of us.

Of course there’s nothing particularly edifying about a worthless individual being rewarded far beyond any sense of their value to society. Unfortunately, its not actually bankers who spring to mind when I think of worthless individuals rewarded beyond their value.

Sigh.

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Say what you like about Guinness – and I’m usually quite rude about it when promoting our own Black William – but you have to admit that the original Arthur Guinness was a cunning man.

Noting that malt was heavily taxed by the government of the time, he started using roasted but unmalted barley in his beer, giving a delightfully ‘tax free’ flavour to the resulting brew.

He also signed a 9000 year lease on the St. James premises in Dublin. I wonder if he personally guaranteed it ? They’d have to dig him up if the lease was broken….

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…it would seem.

Ofsted is an easy target and if the public spending axe falls heavily here I doubt there will be much weeping. In this case however, I suspect the real villain is the usual poorly thought out and badly drafted legislation behind Ofsted’s actions. It would either have originated with Labour or the EU (and rubber stamped into UK law by Labour).

Unfortunately, thanks to Labour, we haven’t had a chance to vote on the subject of the EU. I am rather looking forward to my chance to give my opinion on Labour however. It’s beginning to look plausible that they will not even make the status of opposition after the election. They’ve managed to anger parents up and down the land twice in as many weeks.

There are quite a lot of parents in Britain.

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(Mad Eye Moody – from the Harry Potter Films)

There’s an excellent beer festival going on in Burgess Hill this weekend, organized by our friends at BeerMatt.

Early reports are that it’s going well.

Merry Andrew will be available today at the farmers market at Worthing Broadwater, and also the Fine Food and Drink Market at Hurstpierpoint.

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The BBC has the story.

H/T Manwiddicombe for this one. It’s an odd thing since reading through his blog he’s drunk our beer and obviously come along to a few of the markets where I’ve been serving – but I don’t have the faintest idea who he is.

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I was busy over the weekend at the Medieval Fair – a huge success btw – so I didn’t see two developing stories until this morning.

The first was the travails of Baroness Scotland who accidentally hired an illegal immigrant. The second is the travails of Peter Coleman, a farmer, who accidentally hired some illegal immigrants (h/t The Devil and The Englishman for the latter story).

As a matter of fact I’m grateful to both of them because I was only dimly aware that I had to check on the immigration status of anyone I hire. Apparently you have to get a copy of their passports with some kind of ‘right to work in the UK’ stamp on file. I’m not at all clear if Baroness Scotland managed this and the fact that she seem ignorant of one of her own laws I find a mite …disturbing…

However Peter Coleman’s story is even more worrying. He claims that he has a list of all passports and proofs of identity. Nevertheless he was handed an on the spot penalty to the tune of £120,000.00. I guess he gets to fight it out in the courts and so on. He says that “We are not experts in forgery.”

Of course not. He’s a farmer.

I’m hoping that the brewery will be in a position to start employing people fairly soon and so I’ll have to check whether or not they have the right to work in the UK. As it happens I’m particularly sympathetic to immigrants because I’ve spent much of my adult life as an immigrant in other countries – Germany, Canada, Belgium, etc. But it seems that the only way to completely avoid the risk of ‘on the spot fines’ is not to hire anyone at all who looks like they might be an immigrant.

After all, I’m not an expert in forgery either.

UPDATE. Baroness Scotland has been fined £5000; I await her resignation with bated breath. In the meanwhile I’ve actually taken a look at some home office guidelines regarding documents. Apparently, in order to avoid discrimination I have to look at and copy everyone’s passports (actually one document from List A or two from List B).

I must say I wouldn’t like a prospective employer to look at and copy my passport, I’m not much going to like looking and copying anyone else’s either.

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I’m working through the weekend at the Hurst Medieval Faire, serving beer to the rude and licentious soldiery. Here’s something to keep everyone occupied while I’m away.

A long term patient at an NHS hospital has started posting pictures of the food he is served every day and inviting the public to guess what it is. Apparently the NHS spends less on patient food than is spent on a prisoner’s daily diet. It goes without saying that a glass of wine or beer to accompany the daily treats are completely verboten.

Enjoy!

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I spent most of yesterday calculating our monthly duty bill, and then with considerable weeping and gnashing of teeth, writing out the cheque for it. In the meanwhile, that nice Mr. Brown was finally facing up to reality.

One of the slightly odd things he said during an otherwise unconvincing speech was that labour would cut ‘low priority projects’. This of course begs the question ‘why am I paying taxes to fund low priority projects’, and also, ‘Are union officials employed by the civil service low priority or not?‘.

This morning my attention was drawn to the following really rather scary chart from Mark Wadsworth:

(H/T Old Holbourn).

Mark mentions that if fake charities and similar government funded bodies are included, about 1 in 4 of us are working for the state, a figure comparable with East Germany. To this I’d like to add the latest news from the Office of National Statistics. 4.8 Million working age people live in households without work. That’s the aggregate figure of the unemployed, sickness benefits, discouraged workers etc.

So the reality is, that something approaching half of all adults in the country depend on the state for their livelihood.

Well sorry guys, the money’s run out, and I don’t think taxing the rest of any more is going to help. You see, we are already rather discouraged about the amount we pay.

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