Saturday 4th July 2009  

UK news, politics  
and current affairs  

Poor old Ronnie Biggs. You’ve got to feel sorry for the dopey old crim. He flies back from sunny Brazil hoping that the easy-going Brits will let him off with a slap on the wrist, and he ends up spending his dying days in prison.

His lawyer is doing his nut because Jack Straw failed to let him out in parole. “This is not justice,” said his son. “My father has made been to serve a long sentence because of his name”… kinda forgetting the fact that he only served a solitary year before jumping over the prison wall. And even when you add on the few years he’s done since swapping the naked ladies in Rio for the fat lags in Norwich, he’s still only served less than half what he was originally given. Everyone else in the gang had to serve their time, so why not Biggs? If the dopey old egit had stayed put in the first place then he’d be out by now.

His lawyer seems to be under the impression that all criminal punishments should be rendered null and void the moment a lag falls ill. You have to let him out, he says, because he’s an old man. All he wants to do is have a last game of Bingo and quiet pint in a Margate pub. What’s the harm in that, he says? Well boo-fucking-hoo. That’s his tough luck isn’t it. He should have thought of that before running away.

Biggs should knock the lawyer’s pretty missus on the head with a cosh, and see if he’s still so forgiving.

I got told off today for daring to mention the word “chopsticks”. If anyone is offended by the use of that word then please stop reading now, because I’m going to mention it again.

There was something in the papers about China preventing access to Google’s search engine, because they were fed up with their citizens using it to search for porn. That would naturally affect a lot of China-related businesses, I thought, so I made the light-hearted comment that chopstick sales would plummet.

Not very funny, granted…. but I’m not a very funny guy. But it was enough to land me a ticking-off from a well-known webmaster’s website. I was duly informed that any citizen of the West who dares to mention that the Chinese people eat with chopsticks is considered a racist of the most heinous kind, and my posted slur on their ancient culture must be deleted forthwith. Which is exactly what happened — they censured the comment and wiped it from existence.

What is going on with that? Can we not even talk about the Chinese equivalent of knife and forks now? We’re English, but do we get offended whenever Americans mention bowler hats and cups of tea? Do French people go around erasing every mention of croissants? Do Italians throw a wobbly whenever someone talks about pizzas and pasta?

The ironic thing was that they were censuring me for using a 100% innocent word, but at the same time railing against China for cracking down on their citizens free speech and access to the internet. They were perfectly happy to fight for the Chinese people’s right to access porn and sexual pictures and movies on Google, but thought it okay to ban me from saying “chopsticks”. Where’s the free speech over here?

People think they are doing other people a service when they come out with all this PC bullshit, but they’re just pissing off us normal people who resent getting lectured by these hypocritical pricks.

It’s on the news today that 800 British Airways employees have agreed to work for free for a month, to help the airline cut costs. Now, I don’t know if these were the top bosses who did this, in which case that would be fair enough. But if it’s a load of people lower down the line then they must be the dopiest load of staff in Britain.

Let’s say they are paid £1,500 a month… if that’s the case, then that means they collectively saved BA just one million quid. But BA boss Willie Walsh earns 3/4 of that on his todd. And all he’s done is offered to forgo one month’s wages too.

This guy currently earns 61 grand a month (£735,000), more than double what a BA trolly dolly earns in an entire year. It is also 40 times what these £1,500 people earn. Maybe he could forgo two months wages instead and save his staff some pain.

His last year’s pay rise alone would have been enough to let 23 of these people carry on on full wages. His annual pay rise was nearly 3x the entire amount that a employee would expect to take home between now and Christmas.

BA made nearly 1 billion pounds in profit in 2008 (£875 million) — so the idea that knocking off one million quid now is a vital necessity which prevents everyone ending up on the dole is dumb. And he somehow managed to make himself look great at the same time by donating a few crumbs from his huge hunk of bread!

Iran has kicked out two British diplomats from Tehran, accusing them of “activities incompatible with their status”. The two diplomats concerned, Mike Gambit and James Bond, are believed to have become wedged inside the chimney of the palace of the most excellent leader of the Iranian Republic, Ayatollah Khamenei.

The British Embassy responded — rather lamely — that they were simply two chimney sweeps employed by the British Government to unclog the chimney of the most superb supreme leader of Iran, to prove to him that we are not evil.

“Mr Bond and Mr Michael Gambit were employed by us to unclog the chimney of our embassy but they got lost on the rooftops because of some low clouds and ended up on the roof of the Ayatollah’s palace,” they said. “And then they fell down the chimney and became stuck, and found a camera, which was probably left there previously by some real spies, or maybe some rats stole it and dragged it up there. But it was already there anyway, and nothing to do with us. So it’s actually a good job that they fell in or the Iranians would never have known about it.”