The House of Lords won’t have any powers left to curtail, if they keep on exercising them. 
1 Like
Originally posted by @pap
More academic trouble.
Unless government officials make a major U-turn in the next few days, many British scientists will soon be blocked from speaking out on key issues affecting the UK – from climate change to embryo research and from animal experiments to flood defences. This startling, and highly controversial, state of affairs follows a Cabinet Office decision, revealed by the_Observer_ in February, that researchers who receive government grants will be banned, as of 1 May, from using the results of their work to lobby for changes in laws or regulations.
The aim of the Cabinet Office edict was to stop NGOs from lobbying politicians and Whitehall departments using the government’s own funds. The effect, say senior scientists, campaigners and research groups, will be to muzzle scientists from speaking out on important issues. The government move is a straightforward assault on academic freedom, they argue.
One has to wonder. Are they secretly on a mission to fuck everything up?
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/apr/17/britains-scientists-must-not-be-gagged
It’s not that secret is it?
2 Likes
They’ll be upgraded from “useless” to “mostly useless” at this rate.
I was actually a Lord once. Unfortunately, I was not a peer of this sceptred realm. My best mate (sorry Fatso) thought that a Lord title from the self-proclaimed country of Sealand would be an appropriate birthday present for a jumped up twat like meself. He was quite correct, of course.
I let the news slip in the Irish office, and they thought it amusing too. Got called Lord Taylor for some time. Was never quite comfy with the raucous giggling accompanying that address. It simply wasn’t appropriate for these commoners to address a man of my then-station in that way.
Unfortunately, my title was not a life peerage. Sealand are more interested in 40 quid a year renewals than establishing statespeople of experience and the continuity that would bring their nascent kingdom the respect it surely craves.
Some people pay the renewal fee and actually trade on it. I was never arsed enough to retain mine, so I let the Lordship lapse, and rejoined you lot in the forum gutters. I think it’s for the best.
3 Likes
Ah yes. The plucky Principality of Sealand. Lucky you Pap. Your Lordship must’ve been the cause of great personal pride. 
Mind you, one cannot be too judgmental of Sealand, when considering how many of our own Peerages have been proffered.
Speaking of Sealand, have you ever seen No Man’s Fort in the Solent?
Pretty cool what they’ve done with the place.
Mail article / Solent Forts Gallery
Only drawback is – it’s even closer to P*rtsmouth than we are.
2 Likes
This crop of Tories should prove pretty easy to dislike. They’re Pompey Tories.
60% in English and a massive 25% in Maths. I did a Spanish and Italian degree, then a Social Work masters (that had bloody statistics in) and re-took my Maths GCSE (although once came first in end of year tests). Although I had a test at 11 that showed I had the aptitude for being bilingual I don’t get all those prepostitions and subjunctives etc. That kind of talk loses me. Let me spend months listening to people speaking other languages and I pick it up (which is how children learn to speak!) so I’ll stick to that thanks. I see no relevance to children aged 11 needing to know this. May explain my poor performance in English Language A -Level. Though I loved doing stuff about acquisition of language and how language evolved.
Not a big fan of this guy and it’s an oldish article but think he has a point re the exams
/2015/dec/17/we-need-fewer-exams-and-more-wilderness-in-education
But as others have said here, it’s about learning to pass exams and not learning much else, get on the work wheel and don’t ask questions.
5 Likes
Originally posted by @Intiniki
But as others have said here, it’s about learning to pass exams and not learning much else, get on the work wheel and don’t ask questions.
Yep. “Train you in the ways of the Work Force we will, yesss, yesss.”
“Thank you Master”.
1 Like
Cultural immersion is the way to go, particularly if you’re dovetailing that with some background study.
I’ve probably mentioned this before, but my preference would have been to do an English degree. Just thought it was too much of a punt compared to the computing option, so they got me, kinda. I am an instrument of industry. That said, the career has given me financial leeway and the words per minute to write as much bollocks as I like. Swings and roundabouts.
More seriously, I do worry about the number of kids that make that choice, perhaps striking lucky like I did, but still lost to the arts. There have been a few pieces about the gentrification of the arts, the comparatively high number of British actors from wealthy backgrounds and the relative lack of representation from the working class. It’s a good job music still has such a low barrier to entry, financially speaking, or we’d have the musical equivalent of Sacha Baron Cohen rapping about life on the streets in Grimsby.
Still, I reckon more needs to be done to restore the arts as a first class citizen, and create pathways to make it less of a punt and a more viable and stable way to make a living. We’re really bloody good at it for a start, and even if you’re a money-driven capitalist bastard, you should have some interest in promoting infinitely copyable and saleable intellectual property.
The danger is that the only people that can afford to do it will be those that can financially take the punt.
4 Likes
Originally posted by @pap
It’s a good job music still has such a low barrier to entry, financially speaking, or we’d have the musical equivalent of Sacha Baron Cohen rapping about life on the streets in Grimsby.
God no. Anything but that.
Originally posted by pap
The danger is that the only people that can afford to do it will be those that can financially take the punt.
Part of the very fabric of our thoroughly overthrown ‘education system’, sadly.
By the time you get out of studying for your chosen path in life – you’re already £30k plus up to your eyeballs in debt.
“Welcome to the big wide world boys ‘n’ girls – you owe us!”
Should never be that way. It is truly scandalous, that if you don’t have the money (likely through inheritence/family wealth) – that you’re either priced out of following your passion, or bound in the chains of extravagant usury from the moment you take your first steps out on your own in the world.
Like virtually all modern systems, goods and services nowadays, tragically, they are designed to fail us.
5 Likes
The deal, as span back in the 80s, was that we should pay less tax and that we knew how to spend our money better than the government did. The reality is that for most of us, the money the taxman has given us back is now going into the pockets of private industry, often operating cartels, often operating monopolies and homing in on the rail industry in particular, completely free of bearing the operational burden of that industry.
It was a con. A trick to get the public to pay a large price for stuff they were already getting for free (e.g. it wasn’t coming out of their takehome) or at a much lower price, such as housing or other public services subsided by taxation.
You can’t even lay this all on the Tories. Tuition fees are another example of a government charging for what used to be given for free. Introduced by New Labour, and despite what their fucking placards said, voted for by the power-struck Lib Dems.
As you say, it’s by design, and works in tandem with other parts of the machine, mostly leaving people in the position where they need to loan money to do anything significant.
6 Likes
We live in a consumer debt society now - we pay for things on credit cards and with loans, not with our taxes. Sad state of affairs given that taxes has given us things like the NHS but the dosh we spend on private financing just goes to pad Panamanian bank accounts.
3 Likes
Originally posted by @pap
As you say, it’s by design, and works in tandem with other parts of the machine, mostly leaving people in the position where they need to loan money to do anything significant.
Precisely. Another of those parts of the machine, being house prices. As you say, it all works nicely in tandem, to extract our wealth, and place us in ‘their’ debt.
When I was first born, my parents rented a flat at Copenhagen Towers on Weston Shore. They ‘bought’ their first place of their ‘own’, a semi detached in Woolston a few years later, for £17K (or thereabouts). This was only the early eighties, not light years ago. We moved from there in the late eighties, to a detached on the other side of the city. It cost roughly £37K.
From there we moved to a large three bedroom bungalow near the forest, for the princely sum of around £59K. That was in the nineties.
What the holy fuck has happened since then with the price of such a basic necessity as housing, is truly despicable. Outrageously gluttonous, and heinously contemptuous, it is nothing but a brazen assault on humanity.
“So, you would like a roof over your head, would you citizen? Ok then, well you can arrange an extortionate rental agreement to live in one of ours, or, we can magically create the money out of thin air and purchase one for you. You will then spend the rest of your life paying us off for it, plus our lovely little usurous fees and interest of course. Either way, unless daddy pays for it, and you fuck pigs in the mouth to get through school, if you want a place to live, you’ll need to be lining our pockets. So sir, madame – what’ll it be?”
5 Likes
Unemployment up 21K to reach 1.7 million. These figures would of course, exclude all the slaves working for their benefits, so it’s probably more.
but 20,000 more people are in work. must be the migrants. bastards.
Maybe people in zero contract hours.
1 Like
Or people driven to be self-employed because they can’t get work i.e. window cleaners, cleaners, handymen / women. Not that there’s anything wrong with that work but it does take them off the unemployment figures
2 Likes
Seems like Jeremy Hunt has slightly bigger problems than getting handed the wrong consonant at the start of his surname.
Jeremy Hunt can’t impose his new contract on 60% of junior doctors, it can be revealed.
Yesterday he was dragged to the Commons to admit his ‘imposition’ of new contracts on junior doctors wouldn’t automatically apply to NHS Foundation Trusts.
The arms-length bodies that run many hospitals across the country have the freedom to set their own pay and conditions.
The Health and Social Care Information Centre today revealed that of the 52,396 junior doctors in the NHS , some 31,910 of them are employed by Foundation Trusts.
1 Like
He’s clueless.
If you are trying to close the NHS at least get someone decent on the job.
As for Alan Duncan suggesting that the commons is full of high achievers - that is laughable!
More of a rag bag collection of perverts, fraudsters, chancers, the unemployable - and a small band of people trying to change the rest of them.
6 Likes
Cameron is picking up loads of shite today for his attack on Sadiq Khan, using Suliman Gani.
He has already been blasted by sections of Parliament (some shouted “racist” at him) for the attack itself.
I wonder how he’ll feel when this does the rounds. It’s an interview, with Suliman Gani, who fell out with Sadiq Khan over his views on gay marriage, then campaigned for the Conservatives in the last election.
More fucking own goals than Jos Hooiveld.
3 Likes