The UK spends £20bn a year on these sickness and disability benefits - £5bn less than the 'loan' fund it donated to the banking sector in just one day. Meanwhile new cash injected into the Social Fund – a source of interest-free loans for people on low incomes, including grants to help the mentally ill return to the community and emergency loans to re-house families who've lost their homes due to fire or flood – stood at just £81m for the whole year.

Whilst there has been a little talk about more regulation, nobody has stood up in parliament and called for a major rethink about the way we run our economy. And no wonder – all their pensions are linked to the value of shares in the very businesses the government is propping up!

But the hypocrisy doesn't stop there. For years we heard the same old story about how there's never any money for a liveable benefits system or a decent minimum wage, but somehow UK plc finds billions of spare cash to support corrupt businesses that are in a mess only because of a greed that has benefited no one but their shareholders. For years we've heard the mantra that the free market must be allowed to run unfettered – yet the most 'capitalist' governments are nationalising huge companies left, right and centre. It just goes to show that capitalism is a myth and the sooner we stop wasting money propping up a failed system that will never work - the better.

http://www.schnews.org.uk/archive/news647.htm

Just how much more are we going to take of this crap? 

Trouble is we are not going to end up with capitalism failing to bring in any form of improvment, what we are seeign in action is captalism failing to bring in totalitarian absoloutism, we are seeing the beggining of police juntas, yet the media is so blinkered it won't even ask the questions that need asking let alone propose any conclusion that is not pre-approved. 

So if one is a banker or more accuratly a money changer, one can scrounge of the state as much as one wish, yet if one is starving and dying of hyperthermia one has to stop being a burden on the state .... well apparently banks are 5bn more of a burden in one day than anyone on welfare is in a year ..... so who should we be attacking and villifying in the popular media? 

As we approach a winter with quickly rising fuel bills, so those on state benefits are worse off than ever, as those on the poverty line struggle to survive, we see those who have created these false emergancies, getting bailed out, energy chiefs boasting that a harsh winter will mean record profits ..... the people who suffer from these bansk failing are the average workers, the employees who now face a winter potentially dependent on state benefits, as recipients of said benefits now cross class divisions in ways unprecedented before, we now see just how real the division between bourgoisie and proletariat is. 

Maybe if poverty striken folks all die from cold, starvation, suicide and the like we will generate enough money to bail out any bank and corporation that fails .... the image of capital surviving on the bodies of the working folks has never been more vivid.

Maybe one day these diseased cancers on society will learn money is not the reason for living and can not be taken with you. Perhaps they will ask themselves who it was according to Christian Theology (a religion most claim lip service to) that Jesus threw out of the temple. 

Times article ~ Frances Gibb Legal Editor ~ Legal Aid falling apart

According to the propaganda about the legal and justice system every man & woman guilty or innocent gets a fair trail in a court judged by their peers with competent legal representation. 

Increasingly those of us with a minimal of a passing interest in our prosecution system have seen this to be a comforting lie, designed to induce complacency. 

The case Frances Gibb addresses invovles yes a very horrible crime and if guilty the accused deserves the appropriate sentance ~ however we are talking about a 17yr old who has been left without legal representation because of the beaurocracy in our legal aid system. 

You can bet your bottom dollar that the prosecution will use the best person/people they feel they need for the job yet the defence is having trouble getting anyone even vaguly qualified for a murder trail of this complexity. 

In a year where unsafe convictions have been high profile (barry george) in the media and public awareness, it seems incongruous that nobody really cares, still, about preventing unsafe convictions now and in the future.

One of the many things miscarriages of justice cases often have in common is poor legal representation at the original trail, what often leads to the unsafe conviction being overturned, is through friends, family, charity, a decent legal team being engaged on behalf of the defendant. 

Curtailing legal aid funding in the manner illuminated by the times article can only lead to trouble, guilty or innocent everyone has a right to fair trail, this is not occuring and it is past time the voting public gave a dam. 

"I hear much of people's calling out to punish the guilty, but few are concerned to clear the innocent - Daniel Defoe, writer 1661-1731

http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,437087,00.html

http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,401899,00.html

http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2008/03/murat-kurnaz.html

Read the book "Five Years of my life; An Innocent Man in Guantanamo" you will and should be disturbed, a feeling of impotence will hit as the realisation hits this is being done in the name of so called 'freedom' and 'justice' ...

We tell ourselves slavery ended in the 1800's but it didn't, this mans life cost $3000, and it became clear very quickly to authorities in the US and Germany he was innocent yet he still spent five years in conditions no-one should ever be in.

In it's way this is far more disturbing than individual miscarriage of justice cases, because what occurred to Murat Kurnaz is courtesy of 'Allied' forces transpiring across the board, a sort of mass miscarriage of justice being perpetrated in our names.

We might not be able directly halt what is befalling many but by goodness we can open our minds and see what is really happening and alter our own perception of the current world situation.

Maybe be less inclined to believe everyone who looks potentially Moslim is a terrorist, question what the media and politicians tell us.

When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist. 

When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.

When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.

When they came for the Jews,
I remained silent;
I wasn't a Jew.

When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out.
Martin Niemöller 

 If someone who was at one stage a supporter of Hitler (till 1934 I believe) then all of us can question and review our view of what is done in the world.

Or perhaps not:: - 

 At least part of the bees dying out problem or 'colony collapse disorder' seems to be (according to shcnews sources) the wonderful cuddly multi-national pharmacutical company 'Bayer Pharmacuticals' and by extention the allegedly corrupt elements of the US enviromental protection agency.

""In recent years they've been peddling a new pest-controlling chemical concoction containing a nerve toxin called Clothianidin. The always-slack and amenable-for-a-backhander US Environmental 'Protection' Agency duly passed it fit for use in 2003, despite cheerfully acknowledging the lack of necessary safety research data, merely asking Bayer if they'd think about submitting it at some time later. With the US market at it's mercy, the profits of doom could begin to be exploited by Bayer, despite the French having banned an older relative of the chemical in 1999 and subsequently declining approval for Clothianidin. French researchers found that bees were a lot more sensitive to the pesticides than Bayer claimed.But sales rocketed, although not under the name Clothianidin, as it's not really safe-sounding and snappy. It was rebranded as Poncho and now sprayed all over corn, sugar beet and sorghum crops. The nerve toxin gets into all parts of the plant that grows from the coated seeds. Within two years, bees started disappearing in large numbers.""

for the full article see - http://www.schnews.org.uk/archive/news644.htm 

Mail 'article' Ramsey slams vegetarians - again-

""In another tirade, he said: 'My biggest nightmare would be if the kids ever came up to me and said "Dad, I'm a vegetarian". Then I would sit them on the fence and electrocute them.'""

We all know Ramsey is a foul mouthed pratt, but this is just showing an ignorant lack of imagination. 

Is any parents real worst nightmare their kids being a veggie i wonder?

Well asking a few of my friends who are not veggie but are blessed with children i am relaibly informed that much of their worst nightmares are by degree more exotic and more mundane .... worries about how their children will make it in todays society, which in a society where media and politicians deny there are class divisions yet in any statistic worth exploring class divisions in terms of health care, job and education oppotunities becoming startlingly apparent, is hardly suprising. To more extreme concerns about paedophilies, muggings and so on.  

Oddly enough their kids going veggie or vegan was not in the top ten of "worst nightmares". And for balance i asked some of my veggie friends if one of their worst 'nightmares' was their kids going to eating meat; although it was a concern for most their actual "nightmares" where much as above. 

Fair enough this is hardly a bone fide academic study however there is little doubt that these opinions are more rooted in reality than Ramsey's hatefilled ignorance. 

One can only conclude Ramsey feels so threatened by vegetarianism that this fear has robbed him of his reason.