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Your Tax Money At Work

She’s sorta right

Homeless people in tents have made a ‘lifestyle choice’, says Braverman
Home Secretary proposes new law in bid to prevent aggressive begging, drug-taking and littering in urban areas

On any one night some 3,000 people sleep rough in the country. Near all of which have at least one, usually multiple, mental health, booze or drugs problems.

There are usually two seaprate groups here. One is teenage runaways and the like. Whu usually do get picked up pretty quickly and provided with a hostel space etc. And the core – who have those multiple problems. For euither group it’s not actually housing that is the problem. For the second it’s keeping housing once got that is.

This is hugely more a problem of having closed the asylums for care in hte community than it is anything else.

Sure, making housing cheaper would be great for all sorts of reasons – but it’ll not solve this problem.

BBC pensions

My, they do seem generous, no ?

The old final salary scheme guaranteed a retirement income until death, came with an inflation link and a retirement age of 60.

Started in the 1940s of course.

Last year the BBC paid an effective contribution rate of 42.3pc of staff salary into the old scheme,

You can see why they were so keen for supposed staff to be working through personal service companies, no?

#For that’s what they were really saving – the NI contributions be damned – by doing so. Somewhere in there is a canny actuary.

The surprise here is what?

The company in charge of constructing the HS2 railway has been accused of deliberately covering up its escalating costs to ensure politicians would keep spending billions of pounds of public money on the project.

Whistleblowers from HS2 Ltd have described how senior managers instructed staff to keep cost estimates artificially low. Each was sacked after trying to raise concerns.

That’s what happens with political projects. There’s no proper budgeting nor control of costs – because there’s no true limit to hte amount of money that can be sucked into it. Sure Britishvolt failed – but at a much, much, earlier stage of the moneywaste. Which is why we use the private sector, not public, to do these things.

Isn’t nationalisation so much better?

Rail passengers in the north have been warned of fewer services and potentially more crowded trains after TransPennine Express said it would cut its timetable further in December.

About 20 services a day between Leeds and Manchester will be taken out of the schedule as the firm seeks to “reset” its struggling operations.

Passengers will now have three trains an hour instead of four across its core intercity line at off-peak times, reducing overall seat numbers by 5%.

TransPennine Express (TPE) was taken into public ownership in May, when FirstGroup was stripped of the contract because of poor performance, although the government said the move was unlikely to improve services overnight.

So, so much better.

This is why we don’t allow government to do the counting

Thousands of NHS patients in Wales who have faced long waits in A&E are missing from official statistics, it has emerged.

Senior emergency medicine doctors told the BBC it was impossible to get a true picture of “how bad things are” because of the missing data.

An investigation by the Royal College of Emergency Medicine (RCEM) using freedom of information laws revealed that Welsh hospitals had routinely left lengthy waits out of their reports for more than a decade.

Easy solution

Some NHS hospital trusts are calling in exterminators on a near daily basis amid a plague of rats and mice at many ageing sites.

Data obtained by The Telegraph reveal that Barts Health NHS Trust, which has four sites in London, had 277 call-outs for rodent-related issues in 2022.

Barts is one of the capital’s largest trusts and is home to St Bartholomew’s Hospital in the City of London, the oldest hospital in England and founded 900 years ago.

However, the NHS trust’s “eclectic and often aged historical buildings” are leading to ongoing issues with rats and mice, it has emerged.

Fire all the power skirts running seminars on gender equity and hire some rat catchers instead. Hell, offer the power skirts the more useful jobs.

That bureaucratic mind

A bus lane trap has written off cars whose wheels are getting stuck and damaged, drivers have said.

Dozens of motorists have found their cars stuck in the bus lane in St Ives, Cambs, despite signs warning them not to enter it.

The trap is designed to prevent vehicles driving onto the busway.

The pit in the road is wide enough that small vehicles fall into it but small enough that larger-diameter-wheeled vehicles, such as buses, may pass.

So, a trench across the road to stop people going into the busway. About which the councillor says:

Cllr Kevin Reynolds from Cambridgeshire County Council has admitted he has little sympathy for the drivers who get stuck.

He said: “If people driving along that road cannot see a big hole in the ground in front of them then I would argue they wouldn’t be able to see a small child.

“I would question whether they should be behind the wheel at all…”

But that’s not the right thought to have, is it?

The aim is to keep the busway clear. Which you’re doing by having those in error jammed across the entrance to the busway. Which isn’t a clever way of keeping the busway clear now, is it?

Just the person I’m going to believe on the subject of corruption

Africa holds the future workforce for the ageing economies of the west, according to one of the continent’s leading financial figures, who also said it was time to ditch the myths around corruption and risk.

In an exclusive interview before this weekend’s World Bank meetings in Morocco, Akinwumi Adesina said there was a resurgence of belief in Africa’s economic prospects and attacked negative stereotyping, adding that there was “every reason to be optimistic”.

Now midway through his second five-year term as president of the African Development Bank (AfDB), the Nigerian former agriculture minister said the continent’s demographic advantage, expanding middle class, and vast investment opportunities meant a shift was under way.

A Nigerian government minister, Ho Yus.

Time to shoot Natural England

Or, possibly more appropriately, gas them:

However, there is still no end in sight to the congestion. Badgers are protected by law and their setts can only be moved between the beginning of July and end of October, and only once Natural England grants permission.

As Suffolk Highways only applied for a licence to move the badgers in June and has still not been granted authorisation, if the licence is not granted before the end of the month the road restrictions will remain in place for a further eight months.

What the fuck do you mean 4 months isn’t long enough to get a licence?

Actually, why don’t we just garotte Tony Juniper as an example to the others? Live, on TV.

That’s basic civilisational collapse

Zimbabwe bans large gatherings as threat of cholera outbreak grows
Cases are rising in many parts of the country and critics are blaming chronic water shortages and poor sanitation systems

Aren’t things lovely when a government really takes power, eh?

Water supply and sanitation in Zimbabwe is managed by a number of different governmental ministries and departments. The overarching organizations that control all water resources are the National Action Committee or NAC, and the Ministry of Water Resources Development and Management (MoWRDM).[2] These groups directly oversee the WASH coalition, a combination of NGOs (Non-Governmental Organizations), UNICEF, and other private groups, that is chaired by the Ministry of Health and Child Welfare, and which finances and builds sanitation and water supply systems in the hope of fulfilling the UN Millennium Development Goal.[13] In addition, the NAC and MoWRDM also oversee the Zimbabwe National Water Authority (ZINWA) which chiefly deals with water supply and distribution to the industrial, agriculture, and private sectors. ZINWA is subdivided into different areas of water catchment. Additionally, ZINWA oversees the 250 major dams in Zimbabwe.[5] As well as this, the NAC is divided into two subcommittees, the Rural Water Supply and Sanitation Committee and the Urban Water Supply and Sanitation Committee, which are composed of many different governmental agencies and are responsible for the planning and infrastructure of water supply and sanitation in rural and urban areas respectively.[2] Local water distribution is overseen by local village or regional governments and sometimes by ZINWA itself.

Lots and lots of lovely government, eh?

Yer Wha?

More than two million motorists could be wrongly identified for fines by Ulez or speed cameras every day, a Government commissioner has warned ministers.

Professor Fraser Sampson, the surveillance camera commissioner, said the ANPR (Automatic Number Plate Recognition) camera network’s three per cent error rate for reading car number plates meant there were “significant risks” of penalty notices being wrongly issued to innocent motorists.

3% error rate? That’s appalling. How did anyone roll out a tech that shite?

Your tax money at work

An ambulance service is permitting staff to take a year of paid leave for the “male menopause” even though the condition is not clinically recognised.

East Midlands Ambulance Service will take into account the experiences of male members of staff who are suffering from menopause-like symptoms such as mood swings and irritability, a lack of enthusiasm or energy, and finding it hard to sleep. Measures will also include providing extra uniforms and changing shift patterns.

Lolly gagging, that’s what I call it, lolly gagging……

Well, yes, obviously

Lockdown harm to children was preventable, Government told
Report by leading campaigners argues worst impacts could have been avoided if ministers had considered rights of the young

Like, you know, don’t have lockdown. Do what Sweden did – which was follow the British plan for what to do in the face of a pandemic. Appropriate precautions and leave the rest of the world be.

I’m agin’ inheritance tax anyway

Labour is planning a “devastating” multi-billion pound inheritance tax raid which could affect farmers and family business.

The party is considering scrapping two exemptions – agricultural and business property relief – that currently allow farms and businesses to be passed down at death without their families paying the divisive 40pc charge.

It is part of a plan to scrap a number of tax reliefs in a “loophole” closing exercise which the party believes could raise as much as £4bn, according to the Times.

On the grounds that I think a bourgeois society is a good society. Let that wealth tumble down the generations. An increasing portion of the population – those who make it themselves and those whi inherit – not reliant upon politics, politicians and the State is a good thing.

If only

Gender-critical civil servants were compared to “Nazis” and the “far-Right” by fellow officials in a meeting discussing diversity, The Telegraph can disclose.

Members of the civil service group Sex Equality and Equity Network (SEEN) were targeted for their views on women’s rights, with one civil servant accusing the group of wanting to “destroy” the LGBT+ community.

SEEN believes “that biological sex is binary and immutable… and that biological sex must not be conflated with, or replaced by, the concepts of gender or gender identity”. It is the first Whitehall group set up to represent gender-critical staff.

If only we could get them to spend all their time arguing with each other….

So it is true then

Rishi Sunak set to scrap second leg of HS2 to Manchester

£100 billion to knock 10 minutes off the London to Birmingham time.

And once we include getting to Old Oak Common and into central Brum it will probalby be slower than the current link.

And all because the European Union thought that high speed rail links from one end of Europe to the other would be a nice idea.

And what about slavery, planning, the environment and equalidee?

The Cabinet Secretary has been warned by senior civil servants of a “woke takeover of Whitehall” that risks “improperly” influencing Government policy.

Simon Case was told in a letter signed by 42 staff from 16 departments that ideology on gender promoted by trans activists has become embedded in the Civil Service in a “significant breach of impartiality”.

Presumably this is the one thing too stupid even for them. But what about all those other upper middle class virtue signalling nonsenses?