THE MONTHLY MOSQUITO

The House of Commons is, in principle, a workplace. MPs turn up, debate, assemble on committees and propose motions. This isn’t regular work, but it is their work and it is important. It’s for this reason that it’s worth questioning why MPs have access to subsidised alcohol and 8 bars.

These bars differ in character, from the bawdy sports and social club to the more reserved Stranger’s bar. Nevertheless, they are coupled by two elements. They are the cheapest place to booze in Central London and they would be improper in virtually any other workplace.

A pint of Stella Artois will cost you £3.70 in the Stranger’s Bar, across the road it would cost you like £4.60 for a 330ml bottle. If you fancy Ales then you can find one of the guest ales for as little as £2.80, across the road this would be £4.50.

Gin is half the price it is across the road and wine is about a third.

All of this is conceivable because we are financing our MPs food and drink to the tune of about £6 million a year. This was the total for 2014. More current figures imply MPs have decreased their expenditure, spending only £3.7 million of taxpayers’ money.

This is money that is allegedly spent getting drunk at work, something that most of us would get fired over.

It does better describe a bit of the culture inside Westminster. In the dodgy dossier, various MPs who are affirmed to have drink difficulties and the recently discredited Michael Fallon has been associated with a few alcohol-fuelled eruptions.

The unfortunate demise of Charles Kennedy declined to change the commons association with alcohol. The actual measure of the dilemma is further difficult to know given that the Speaker, John Bercow, quashed a report into the dilemma.

This does not imply we should have no compassion for people with drink problems, guidance must be made accessible, but we should be outraged at the culture that’s been permitted to develop and various women journalists have made comparable points.

They have demonstrated that the hard-boozing practice in Westminster is a dilemma and an obstacle that permits the degradation of women.

When you have characters like Michael Fabricant using drink as a reason, and an insignia in one bar emphasizing that “what happens here stays here” it’s difficult not to scrutinise our MPs. They have decided to waste our money licensing their immoral habits.

Whilst Michael Fabricant has been scrutinised and the insignia has been removed, development is achingly sluggish. MPs must acknowledge that the House of Commons has a drinking problem, a dilemma that feeds an astonishingly lethal lad culture.

When a number of MPs are implicated in sexual rape and lurk behind the alcohol when David Davis can supposedly rape Dianne Abbot and laugh it off, and when a much-respected ex-soldier like Kennedy is annihilated by drink, it’s time to ask serious questions.

Would we allow it in our workplace? Would we permit bars in our office? Would we advocate boozing at work?

Of course not and Westminster must change.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The government has been accused of an outrageous broken promise after declaring that thousands of life-long sick and disabled people will no longer face cruel re-tests for their benefits and people with a severe, lifelong disability, illness or health condition who it is doubtful will ever work again will be spared from reassessments for Employment and Support Allowance (ESA).

The move came into power for all assessments, nearly a year to the day after it was agreed by then-Work and Pensions Secretary Damian Green. However, Labour announced the move fell short of what the government had agreed and was too questionable.

Only people thought unfit for the work-related activity in ESA, or its equivalent in Universal Credit can claim the exclusion. Those thought to be fit for the work-related activity will still have to undergo retests and this is an extremely fractured promise.

Sick and disabled people have been anticipating the Government to announce specific conditions that would be exempt from punitory reassessments, ultimately presenting the certainty many have been anticipating.

Instead, they have been given vague statements with no particular guarantees at all, but the Government must publish a complete inventory of the requirements that will automatically be excused from reassessment immediately.

This should have included all disabled people on ESA, including people with learning disabilities in the work-related activity group.

And as normal, the DWP is attempting to claim prestige for doing less than agreed, later than agreed.

These new rules are an important move in the right path, but it is still not apparent on how many people with Parkinson’s disease this will now help.

A dilemma still rests with the assessors’ really jumbled understanding of Parkinson’s disease. About a quarter of people with Parkinson’s disease have been put in the back to workgroup for ESA despite the fact that their situation will not change, which is simply ridiculous.

Until this situation dramatically changes, it is feared that multiple people with Parkinson’s disease still won’t be shielded from the ordeal and insult of unnecessary ESA assessments.

But for countless people, they do not address the heart of the dilemma.

The Work Capability Assessment remains basically flawed and in need of radical overhaul and two-thirds of ESA, settlements are currently overthrown at appeal and this is a long-awaited move towards making the welfare system make sense and people with Multiple Sclerosis should be able to rely on the support without the perpetual anxiety of having it taken away.

This decisive move ensures that the right protections are in position. People with severe health infirmities or disabilities that are not going to change will no longer be required to attend regular assessments.

For anyone who ends up losing their home because of DWP penalties that eliminate their JSA and ESA. We must ensure that anyone we know and who has been sanctioned knows that there is help. If your money is withdrawn you can go to the council and fill in a Nil Income form.

That will reinstate rent and council tax and give access to additional relief like meter credits, foodbank vouchers and emergency cash payments. This information is not readily accessible sadly and it should be.

The authorities will only deal with you if you ask specifically which is a disgrace, therefore if your benefits have been sanctioned then bear in mind assistance is still accessible.

Decision makers are challenging GP’s experience when they should be co-operating with one another in the affairs of that person instead of exercising their authority and control because the decision on that one person could be catastrophic.

People that have health conditions that can’t be reversed, yet have been stuck on the Work Related Activity Group and still, they can’t walk the obligatory 20 yards required for the Support Group without pain and have to stop, yet were regarded by the Decision maker to not be qualified to continue getting Mobility Allowance.

The reason, a Work-related activity could be something such as walking to the garden gate or strolling to the shops, resting on walls to relax.

If the genius at the DWP states you’re okay to go into WRAG then there you shall stay, and those broken government promises will never be of any use to those of us who would benefit from it. The problem is no matter what evidence you have it’s overlooked, if not by ATOS, then the DWP Decision maker.

What is required is a settlement method like that employed by MP’s, when determining whether an MP’s request for his/her £100 pen holder is needed, or their 100-yard travelling expense is deserving of the £40 a day they have claimed.

What are we going to do without ATOS’s wonder cures that doctors and consultants never knew about when examining their patient and here is the ATOS health professional with a couple of months experience in medicine repudiating doctors, and professionals are going to become a thing of the past, are they?

And then are those with Rheumatoid Arthritis and other Autoimmune diseases, are people with these ailments still going to be overlooked by the government?

It seems they’re not doing a damn thing to support people with disabilities.

The difficulty with the WRAG group in ESA is that you are classified as sick or disabled by the DWP but they state you are not ill or disabled enough to go into the support group.

The additional point’s to take into account concerning the applicant being put into this group is it has been done solely on the say-so of a person with medical knowledge, not by someone who has experience of that claimant’s problems.

The last point is you are put in the WRAG group for one year and then all your payment’s end in that year, you have to frequent training at the jobcentre plus and also if asked have to go and get work experience unpaid with a company without no extra benefit’s.

The claimant’s who do not comply with the process defined above stand a good possibility to be sanctioned and have all their benefit’s discontinued entirely.

The DWP do not tell claimant’s about such thing’s as having barely 30 Day’s to lodge a compulsory reconsideration against the award or your appeal cannot begin, also you are allowed to see and cross-reference what you said and what was recorded at the assessment, could this be a tactic to prevent a failed claimant’s appeal and if you appeal you get no benefit’s, deceitful or what?

It definitely doesn’t benefit somebody who is brain damaged and has to go through the pressure of examinations, it’s simply a misuse of time and money.

When Remploy was about, there were countless disabled people that worked, although some could not work there as it was not a safe environment for them particularly if they suffered from seizures.

It’s a bitter pill but not everyone can contribute to society, and to force them to only ever makes them worse.

This dilemma will endure until the government see that subcontracting out ESA/PIP assessments to a third party firm is just not working.

This dilemma is glaringly evident to anyone and to get a really detailed assessment of how a person’s sickness or disability affect’s them on an everyday basis you must have a medical expert with a full understanding of that illness or disability and to carry that out you need to get the actual picture.

The government must by now recognise that there is a dilemma with the number of appeals going to tribunal and the judiciary overthrowing the DWP’s judgment not to grant the benefit to the claimant this is now for both ESA/PIP and over 50 percent for both benefit’s.

The cost’s of these successful appeals is paid for by the taxpayer so you can see that the promise made by the government that these benefit reforms will release money is extremely controversial and the cost to the taxpayer is about 10K for each tribunal, how is this saving money?

Indefinite DLA should have continued as Indefinite DLA and should not have changed over to PIP at all, and should not require an assessment at all. Indefinite DLA should tell the government about the nature of their health, and the reality that it doesn’t should leave us speechless.

Those that are having their money taken from them are presently being left isolated and overlooked, suffering from anxiety while the government appear to be raking it in, brushing any liability under the carpet.

People who have been awarded a lifetime award of DLA, then the Tories got into power and those that have been awarded a lifetime award are now having to have more assessments, so clearly this was not a lifetime award.

Some of these people are suffering from degenerative conditions and unquestionably won’t improve, so why the retesting? Furthermore, some people that are being evaluated, are being evaluated by ex-dentists, therefore when you have a muscular syndrome, it’s upsetting, if it wasn’t so hilarious.

People who specialise in bending the facts and everything you say makes you feel insignificant and this is how the Tories handle people and people are unfairly being put into the Work Related Activity Group (WRAG) on the basis of an evaluation that they’ve never been informed of and never been seen by anybody at a testing centre.

Fortunately, some people are great at retaining accounts of everything, but if you communicate with the DWP they attempt to displace the culpability, essentially stating that you’re lying.

If some of these people were not so clued up and mentally competent they would be in a situation where they would seemingly be sanctioned every other month as their health wouldn’t allow them to do anything that is expected of someone in the WRAG to do and consequently be in a hell of a situation.

But how many people does this happen to who don’t have the strength to dispute it?

All I can answer is, thank goodness able-bodied people have no concept how terrifying the evaluations are, and then to be evaluated by someone who hasn’t a clue about long-term conditions, who essentially accuse you of putting it all on.

Many disabled people have a difficult enough time as it is without the added strain of regular examination, attempting to catch you out and assuming that you are a deceiver.

Of course, there are thousands that try it on and that further is a disgrace when the money could be going to were it truly is required, but if a consultant at a hospital states you are suffering a disability they should welcome that diagnosis.

While thousands may try it on, the figures show that much more don’t claim at all or are unjustly eliminated from a government support system than those who claim fraudulently.

It’s horrifying that people have to be evaluated by someone who doesn’t know their ailment or how it affects them, then manufactures lies about what they have said. The fact that proof has to be sent in from doctors, consultants and specialists and then they entirely dismiss it because they don’t understand that person’s symptoms and how it destroys their life.

Another thing they dismiss is the GP’s evaluation and how they disregard the doctor’s knowledge of health issues that impair a person’s life.

 

 

Keeley Sheppard who is 20, and is 29 weeks pregnant and about to move into a new home has had her Universal Credit payments cut without her knowledge and will presently have to survive on a penny a month.

She expected to get £500 per month but was crushed to discover that her payments had been suspended almost entirely and without notice.

Keeley Sheppard and her partner Dan Pye, 25, are awaiting the delivery of their first child at Christmas and moved to live with her dad and step mum in the Cotswolds in May when they changed to a joint Universal Credit claim.

At the moment Keeley Sheppard doesn’t work and partner Dan is looking for work.

They were both on single universal credit claims before and everything was fine, they went to appointments, and did all the right stuff but they went onto a joint claim because they were moving in together. However, it wasn’t until last month when they logged on to their UC account to find out they were only getting paid a penny.

If a claimant hasn’t done one of the activities in their claimant commitment they could be sanctioned, indicating their UC payments will be briefly reduced. Nevertheless, Keeley Sheppard was given no reason for the penalty and has been forced to take out a £300 Recoverable Hardship Loan from the job centre.

Since then, their UC payment has risen to £40 but is still well under what was expected.

Keeley Sheppard has been told, because she is 29 weeks pregnant, she can only be sanctioned up to 20 percent, if she is sanctioned but she’s been sanctioned a sizeable amount.

Keeley’s step mum Billiejo has got Fibromyalgia so is no longer working, while her 16-year-old sister also lives in the same flat so it’s all five of them on their dad’s salary. Clearly, their UC supports them a tiny bit and their dad can’t support all of them, and he’s trying his hardest, and they’re making it work to a certain point but it is difficult.

The DWP won’t give them an explanation and Keeley has been prescribed anti-depressants due to the magnitude of the situation.

It’s utterly sickening that they are setting them up, a young couple, about to have a baby at Christmas and now going into their first home, into debt and to fail already and the DWP is not giving them any explanations and it’s an outright scandal.

Universal Credit is a monthly payment to assist with living expenses for those who have low income or are out of work and it is currently being launched across the United Kingdom and supersedes Child Tax Credit, Housing Benefit, Income Support, Jobseeker’s Allowance, Working Tax Credit and income-related Employment and Support Allowance.

The Government has come under heightened tension to pause the rollout of UC, which critics maintain puts defenceless families in danger and Work and Pensions Secretary David Gauke announced that the questionable 55p-a-minute charge on the welfare helpline would be abandoned, but denied proposals for a pause in the rollout.

However, Theresa May will not hesitate on the rollout despite Labour gaining a House of Commons majority requesting a pause in the introduction of the flagship benefit reform and the DWP has been approached for an explanation.

 

There are young people out there that have diabetes, coeliacs disease and other illnesses that have missed appointments, or are ten minutes delayed because of public transport and have ended up with precious little to live on a month because they have been sanctioned.

Some of these people have to have a special diet and if they don’t that could be life-threatening to them, this is inhumane and animals are treated better.

There are a number of people out there who will say that this chap must get off his behind and go and look for work however you require money to find work.

You require money to eat food so you can be equipped for a job. You require bus fares or petrol to get to interviews. You require money to write and post letters. You require money to purchase work clothes. Doing this sort of thing to people makes it much harder to obtain work, the notion that the Government are doing this to encourage people into work is sheer propaganda.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Government has endeavoured to elude liability for the contaminated blood scandal that caused the deaths of more than 2,400 people from AIDS and Hepatitis C which has been exposed for the first time by a media outlet.

Previously unseen Cabinet papers reveal senior ministers in the 1987 Conservative Government pursued a judicious policy of not taking any accountability for allowing contaminated blood products to be given to haemophiliacs.

The papers further reveal ministers attempted to restrict the Government’s financial accountability to victims despite personally acknowledging it could not refute convincingly the allegation that it was at fault and in the 1970s and 1980s, more than 4,000 British haemophiliacs were given blood products tainted with HIV and Hepatitis C.

Because the United Kingdom was not self-sufficient in blood products the substance called Factor VIII was sent from the United States, where it had been manufactured with blood drawn from various benefactors.

These comprised prisoners, habitual drug users and sex workers who had been compensated for their blood and campaigners maintain the cabinet papers amount to proof of a cover-up.

Former Labour health secretary Andy Burnham, now metro mayor for Manchester, told the media documents to show attempts to deny victims support, truth and justice went to the very top of Government.

Lord Owen, who as health secretary in the 1970’s suggested Britain should be self-sufficient in blood products, a method which if ensued may have avoided thousands of mortality, told the papers showed the Government had clear responsibility and liability.

The new details are contained in a cabinet memo from 1987, written by the then Conservative Secretary of State for Social Security John Moore. The report was discovered by campaigner Jason Evans, whose father was contaminated with both HIV and Hepatitis C and died in 1993 when his son was four.

The memorandum is a summary of a plan put to the Cabinet Home and Social Affairs Committee sub-committee on AIDS, a body that included some of the most high-profile ministers of the Margaret Thatcher Government including Willie Whitelaw, Norman Fowler, Douglas Hurd, Kenneth Clarke and future Prime Minister John Major.

The meeting was assembled to address the fall-out from the unfolding contaminated blood scandal on November 4, 1987, a day before the Haemophilia society was due to lobby MPs in Parliament and by 1987 it was obvious that thousands of people had been contaminated and were dying, and in the memorandum, Mr Moore admitted the measure of the dilemma.

About 1,200 haemophiliacs were contaminated before 1986 with the HIV virus by Factor VIII and around 40 had already perished of AIDS. The prognosis for the rest was bleak.

Mr Moore, who was in discussions with the Haemophilia Society about a potential financial agreement, confirmed that the Government’s refusal of liability was unlikely to be believed.

The Haemophilia Society has fortunately got across their opinion that the haemophiliac’s difficulties with AIDS are due to Government’s failure to guarantee self-sufficiency in blood products. While wrong, this is difficult to debate convincingly in presentational terms.

Mr Moore went on to examine ways of restricting the financial compensation given to victims while seeking a strategy of not taking responsibility.

Addressing the proposed £10 million once-and-for-all payment to be given by the Haemophilia Society, and this was particularly attractive as it reduced Government interference, and it would be compatible with the policy of not admitting any personal accountability for injury created in this way.

The minister further reported an interest regarding the consequence of any payments on likely anticipated litigation.

And lawyers warned that payments accepted by haemophiliacs in this way might not be as effective judicially as would a personal ex-gratia payment by the Government should a haemophiliac take legal action.

The payment scheme eventually went forward and, in the 1990s, the Government made ex-gratia payments of £60,000 to those contaminated with HIV, who were compelled to relinquish any right to legal action.

The discoveries come with campaigners still awaiting details of how the Government proposed to continue with an inquiry into the scandal promised by Theresa May and three months after the Prime Minister made the promise, a moderator has still not been named and the arrangement, articles of recommendation and timing are still to be established.

In addition, about 500 victims and their relatives have begun a High Court lawsuit upon the Department of Health and Mr Evans, who is the lead complainant in the legal action, states the memorandum is an indication of a cover-up.

For 20 years people have been told that the victims had no proof, and that the Government had no liability, and that the mortality was not the consequence of the failure to ensure self-sufficiency in blood products.

Yet what this reveals is that from the very inception the Government knew their case was flimsy and it was hard to refute because it was true.

This is some of the cover-up proof that points towards a cover-up. Here it is in black and white that has been told for 20 years, but really, the Secretary of State in 1987 was stating totally the opposite and it has never been made public until now and if it’s not a cover-up then what is?

Lord Owen, who beforehand reported that records from his time as health secretary had been destroyed, said: “I think the government has a responsibility, and personally I think there is a strong case they have liability”.

They revealed that in this cabinet paper that it would be really hard to deny, and it has now been proven difficult to dispute and now the Government has decided to do something about its cuts through all this legal debate and comes up with a bountiful settlement.

These discoveries tell us that at the very pinnacle of Government, from the Cabinet downwards, there was an endeavour to refuse assistance to the victims and to refuse them honesty and fairness.

That’s what people have speculated for countless years and now these discoveries start to give the complete portrayal and it actually is a rather dark episode in our country’s history.

The infected blood scandal of the 1970s and 80s is a shocking catastrophe which should really have never have occurred, which is why this Government did a thorough inquiry to ensure that victims and their families eventually got the answers they have spent decades waiting for.

Views put forth in the discussion will presently be weighed up and the essence of the inquiry will be announced in due course.

Mr Moore was made a life peer in 1992. His office at the House of Lord’s did not reply to a call for comment.

This is all pretty repulsive. Nevertheless, not unexpected because they are people with no morals and an honest government would acknowledge their mistakes and blunders rather than covering them up.

Those politicians concerned should face the consequences be that that is a figurative image of Margaret Thatcher in the Houses of Parliament, or that there are some original members of the cabinet and committee still alive and some are still working in party politics and the media.

And attempting to cover up the government’s accountability and answerability for contaminated blood that caused over 2,400 deaths should not be easily disregarded.

It truly is repulsive that around 2,500 people died. These were ordinary people who were being given blood throughout the course of medical procedures.

The blood was shipped from the USA and contained HIV and Hepatitis viruses and we should recognise what a horrifying tragedy this was.

As regards the cover-up which was brought up in the Commons and no doubt the papers will commence digging but the Commons and press might be hiding by the chance of legal action.

 

 

 

 

Sir Robert Devereux will reportedly enjoy a £1.8 million pension pot when he calls time on his career giving him an instant lump sum of £245,000 with an additional £85,000 following every year, a massive sum that pummels the mediocre UK national wage.

Hopefully, he will go on to do some additional work because most people at the age of 61 are pretty healthy.

If only everyone could dream of the sort of pension he has been secured by the taxpayer.

For the common public, pension ages are being raised and people are working longer to get their pension and it’s essential that the Government sets a precedent and Labour MP’s have rallied upon the move by Mr Devereux that will see him demonstrably better off than many of those still in work.

This will not go down well with pensioners whose savings are evaporating. As ever, it is one rule for those at the top and another rule for everybody else and most of the people his department serve cannot afford to retire at the age of 61 because of their low salaries.

His annual pension payment is about double what most constituents earn in a year and Mr Devereux’s pension by claiming it will hit every taxpayer with a sizeable bill.

This is an unusual sum and hard-pressed families will be enraged to see the size of their bill for Sir Robert’s pension and payouts of this dimension are a thing of the past in the private sector because they’re entirely unaffordable, and at a time when the Government needs to make savings, every penny of public money should be used on essential services, not gold-plated pensions.

The state pension age will be extended to 66 in 2020 before being increased again to 67 in 2028 and the foundations of the increases were devised by Mr Devereux.

The Mandarin is no newcomer to enormous amounts of money being flung his way after getting a £20,000 gratuity in 2013 despite being profoundly scrutinised by the public accounts committee following his management of the Universal Credit scheme.

The civil servant was knighted in 2016 for his services to transport and welfare as well as his voluntary work.

Mr Devereux will retire on his forthcoming 61st birthday on January 15.

He is a typical civil servant, they make the rules but do not have to live by them. Where is the fairness? And what was he knighted for? Doing a job he was more than well paid to do, it appears.

The Labour party under Tony Blair used pension funds as a public pocket especially the trillions in miners pensions which they drained with each budget because the fund’s results were reported a surplus rather than being paid to many men whos retirement proved a living hell through multiple ailments directly connected to their former profession.

They unquestionably looted private pension funds which are why so many schemes failed with the result that many who had paid into those schemes lost everything.

The way the scheme is set up is absurd. We pay contributions that are utilized to pay existing pensioners so there is no fund as such. The people currently working are paying for current pensioners.

You pay for your parents’ and grandparents’ pensions and your sons are currently paying for yours.

It always was an ill-thought out scheme and presently its vulnerability is growing quite obvious. The Tories took it. They make the rich wealthier by taking money from the poor. Corporations in the United Kingdom get more in bonuses than they pay in tax.

The last five Governments have been like cancer to the British people and we need new drugs to combat this epidemic.

It would be pretty reasonable for the retirement age to be placed at 55 for men and women, and that would enable millions of honest hard-working people to appreciate a long retirement while they are in good form, but that goes against government strategy of treating the public like they are cattle.

There is no £1.8 million pot. There is, nevertheless, a debt on the taxpayer to fund this fungus, a pension that a £1.8 million pot would give someone who had worked for it.

Yet another Public Servant on a six-figure wage, retiring on a gold
plated pension at 61 years of age, subsidised by the wealth originators of the Private Sector Taxpayers, the preponderance of who don’t have a gold plated pension to rely on, other than the state pension at the age of 65 which rises to 66 in 2020.

The reason being, the country can’t afford to continue to fund the state pension from age 65, but the policymakers can manage to pay themselves enormous floating pensions at the expense of the hardworking taxpayer.

Let the simpletons of this universe join together and stop these freeloaders in their tracks. What’s good for us is good for them and there must be a cap on these corrupt public pensions and we continually appear to have money for all the incorrect stuff.

Nothing changes. Do not permit him to touch his pension until he is 67.

What a stinking robber he is, he lines his own pocket and steals from the poor, and they knighted the pudenda. No wonder they raised the retirement age for the workers, so the rich can retire early and he will get more pension than a lot of people will make in their lifetime.

No wonder he’s grinning or is it a superior stare? One law for the so-called cream, and another for us common people.

The Pension Age was lengthened so Welfare Benefits could be given to more foreign visitors.

They want us dead before reaching Pension Age and 67 increasing to 69/70. However, the Germans retire at 63, France at 62, Hungary 62.5

What happened to EU Harmonisation?

No wonder he looks so superior. Grinning all the way to the bank while holding two fingers up to the people and it’s sickening and it seems about right, us and them, as it was, as it is, and as it will be, for the foreseeable future, the sad part is these robbers get away with it, as this villain has.

What a shock then, so its all new stuff that the UK public sector has been piggybacking on the rest of the workforce.

The economy was hit back by a banking disaster where its now sliding out, refer to Lloyds court case that another large bank should have been closed back then, through ineptitude.

However government couldn’t have that, so we were all screwed a little, then came 10 years of mini interest rates, only to hit us a little more.

Meanwhile millions of pensioners have been screwed by bad performance of the so-called financial specialists but at this time no one in media ever reported the others side, that’s town halls, civil servants, police et ectera, pension shortfalls, that’s because you are still paying them so they don’t exist because they still get their full whack and the public don’t even know they paid for it.

Not too long back the police marched on Whitehall because their pay increases were fractionally adjusted, guess who caved in?

The cost of civil service pensions is sustained by the taxpayer. There is a tiny bit, which used to be described as the Widows and Orphans fund that is funded by the person, but I don’t know if that is still running.

It worked out to a few pounds a month for most people but you got no benefit from it on retirement if you were still married. If you were single on retirement you got back a tiny lump sum to indicate the amounts made, which was taxable.

The pension cited for this man is his civil service pension which has been completely subsidised by those of us who pay income tax.

Nevertheless, many very senior civil servants became self-employed which permits them to pay far less tax on their large wages.

This civil servant has the largest pension pot in Whitehall and is the mandarin guilty of making us all work longer before we can retire? And Sir Robert Devereux is amongst the dozens of top officials sitting on pension packages of more than £1 million.

The report that 30 top civil servants have racked up the enormous pots comes merely weeks following the news that the state pension age will increase from 67 to 68 over two years from 2037.

The league table of the top ten pots comprises just two women, increasing the chance of a sexism row similar to that which hit the BBC following its gender pay gap.

Former pensions minister Baroness Altmann stated it would cost a private sector worker more than £3 million to get the equivalent package as Sir Robert on the annuities market.

Eyebrows might be raised at the fact that the man in charge of the department for pensions comes so high up the public sector list when it comes to his own pension. Taxpayers will be quite interested to see they are financing these bountiful pension schemes.

Most people would never be able to strive to such valuable pensions and women are poor relations in pensions. Everywhere you look, women miss out and the public sector moved to career average pensions five years ago, but those ten years from retirement age including many on the league table were told their final salary schemes would stand.

Details of the enormous pots were exposed by a media review of Whitehall annual reports, but it only involves those working for central government departments and the numbers savouring such tremendous opportunities would be even higher if those working for quangos and the Ministry of Defence were included.

After Sir Robert, the civil servant with the next best deal is Sir Simon McDonald, permanent secretary of the Foreign Office, whose pot is £1.7 million. He will get £85,000 a year plus a £245,000 lump sum. Next, comes Sir Martin Donnelly, permanent secretary at the Department of International Trade, with a £1.2 million pot. He will get £80,000 a year and a £230,000 lump sum.

The highest-placed woman on the top ten list is Sue Owen, permanent secretary of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. She is in sixth position with a pot of around £1.6 million, which will amount to £70,000 a year and a £210,000 lump sum.

The country’s top civil servant, Cabinet Secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood, comes following her with a pot of about £1.5 million, according to the Cabinet Office’s annual report from 2015/16. This is worth £75,000 a year and a lump sum of £225,000.

The Cabinet Office has not, however, announced its 2016/17 report.

If military figures were added, the table would be topped by Gen Sir Nick Houghton, the newly departed chief of the defence staff. His pot is £3.4 million, which will entitle him to around £150,000 a year and a lump sum of £445,000, according to the 2016/17 annual report of the Ministry of Defence.

This is an out-and-out injustice when 1950s women have had their pensions stripped from paying in since 15 years old amount to losses of over £48,000. The DWP and this man created injustice and severe mismanagement in never notifying these women that their pension ages were being moved on by 5 years and then in 2011 sped forth and pushed on another 18 months so that amounted to over 6 years of pensions robbed.

The 1995 Conservative Government’s Pension Act introduced plans to raise women’s SPA (State Pension Age) to 65, the same as men’s and WASPI women promoted the equalisation with men but they were lied to, handled with total irreverence as family women, carers, voluntary workers.

These women underwent prejudice at work, low salaries and could not belong to company pension schemes. Clearly, the entire country must come out in their support. This is a wrongful violation which Theresa May has to sort out quick otherwise the repercussions will be unprecedented.

What happened to WASPI women will fall on the young of today and in the future, so it affects us all.

It’s completely shameful how these 50’s women have and are still being treated and it’s disgusting the way MP’s now rattle on about prejudice and getting women an equitable say but sign up for and allow this pension disaster to occur.

Women have a pretty powerful vote and I really pray that they vote down any government in office that does nothing about this. This abuse has to end.

But the true prejudice is that 450,000 UK pensioners are refused index linking to their State Retirement Pension solely because of where they live. The frozen pensioner has met all the NI contribution requirements when working like everyone else but is refused their retirement, unlike everyone else.

This is another illustration of the two faced-government administrators using the justification of austerity to deceive the working poor whilst at the same time feathering their own nests and it’s outrageous.

Even former Benefits Agency chief Lord Bichard stated that older people must cease being a negative burden on the country and that Pensions should be linked to contributions to the community as an incentive for people to look after the very old.

He said that the elderly should earn their pensions by doing voluntary work in their communities to avoid being a burden on the state.

Lord Bichard, previously head of the Benefits Agency, made the questionable proposal at a House of Lords debate on how to meet the costs of Britain’s ageing people. But his ideas were branded ‘National Service for the over-60s’ by furious pensioner groups.

The cross-bench rival, a retired permanent secretary at the Department of Education, withdrew from the civil service at only 53 and his taxpayer-funded pension is calculated to be £120,000 a year.

Lord Bichard, 65, illustrated a similarity between the workshy claiming unemployment benefits and retirees drawing their pensions.

He said that they are now prepared to say to people who are not looking for work “If you don’t look for work you don’t get benefits”.

Therefore if you are old and you are not participating in some way or another, perhaps there is some punishment appended to that.

And he called for imaginative concepts such as making old people attend to the really old.

Lord Bichard asked if we are using all of the incentives at our disposal to encourage older people not simply to be a negative strain on the country and to actually be a positive member of the community?

He said that it was quite reasonable, for instance, to visualize a society where civil society was making a larger participation to the care of the extremely old, and elderly people who are not really old could be making a valuable contribution to civil society in that regard, if they were given some encouragement or some credit for doing so.

He later promised to examine the concept more as part of his work for the Committee on Public Service and Demographic Change.

Pensioner groups responded with rage at the recommendation that the old should have to earn their pension following a lifetime of working and contributing taxes.

This amounts to little more than National Service for the over-60s and is utterly offensive. Those who have paid their national insurance contributions for 30 or more years are qualified to draw their state pension and there should be no endeavour to put additional restrictions in their way.

We already have one of the lowest state pensions in Europe and one in five elderly people in Britain live below the poverty line.

Lord Bichard’s remarks were very divisive, attempting to pitch younger people against elderly people when the truth is that the real distinction in our society is among the rich and poor and honestly, Lord Bichard should have thought twice before making such ridiculous and ill-informed comments.

Older people are a hugely positive part of the community and over a third of people aged between 65 and 74 volunteers, a portion that only descends slightly for the over-75s.

In addition, approximately a million older people contribute uncompensated care to family or friends, conserving the state millions of pounds and his views were rather an unusual approach.

Those who have retired have already made enormous contributions to our society and are already the biggest group of charity and community volunteers.

Lord Bichard’s idea smacks of social engineering of a deadly kind. He seemed to be implying that if you choose to stop working, even once you reach the age that society concludes it is prudent to stop, civil servants should evaluate you and determine whether you are fit to be selected to do a job that they decide you should do.

Professor James Sefton, of Imperial College, London, a past adviser to the Treasury, seemed to support Lord Bichard and he informed the committee he could not understand why young people were not taking to the streets in a demonstration because they were financing the older generation and he thought that they should be outraged, also that the deal they were getting was poor.

He additionally implied that the current generation was pretty big contributors to the public purse, whereas past generations had profited from the public purse.

These people are super scroungers, and their pension is equivalent to over 20 standard basic pensions and the House of Lords is a retirement home financed by the taxpayer, and if we’re looking to facilitate cuts we should begin there.

Incredible remarks from a person that draws £120,000 per year from the public purse, this is how the wealthy and privileged in society believe all pensioners past retirement age should be assigned to workhouses for their daily bread, seems like he has been time-warped out of Dickens.

Why don’t we just come to an agreement? All old retired people do a voluntary job and people like Bichard and the likes of him in the House of Lords won’t give up their pension funded by the taxpayer.

Getting rid of the House of Lords should save us a bundle of money.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Britain’s first openly gay Member of Parliament has gained a gong for decades of fighting for LGBT fairness. Chris Smith, 66, gained the PinkNews lifetime achievement award at a star-studded bash attended by Prime Minister Theresa May.

In a comment before arriving to give the honour, Jeremy Corbyn attacked Donald Trump of inciting hatred upon gay people and rebuked a surge in hate crime in Britain.

The ceremony was portrayed by Stephen Fry and notable guests were scheduled to include TV host Lorraine Kelly, Corrie star Brooke Vincent, Doctor Who’s Pearl Mackie and fellow actors Simon Callow and Rupert Everett.

Top Labour politicians including Emily Thornberry, Diane Abbott, Ed Miliband and London mayor Sadiq Khan were scheduled to join the bash alongside Tories Nicky Morgan and David Mundell and Commons Speaker John Bercow.

Labour’s leader praised Parliament for having 45 LGBT MPs the greatest of any legislature in the world and called Lord Smith a powerful champion for equality.

Jeremy Corbyn rebuked the terrifying abuse of gay men in Uganda and Chechnya, continuing that in America we have observed a Trump Presidency which rejects gay marriage and has incited hatred and bigotry upon LGBT people.

Here in the United Kingdom, we have observed a spike in the homophobic hate crime, as well as other sorts of hate crime.

Ex-MP Lord Smith famously came out in 1984 by stating: “Good afternoon, my name is Chris Smith. I’m the Labour MP for Islington South and Finsbury, and I’m gay.” And in 2005 he broke the mould again by announcing he had been HIV positive for 17 years.

The ceremony was also attended by Equalities Minister Justine Greening, who came out as gay on the day of a gay pride march in London.

Most people and I say most because that’s not all, but some people exist and flourish on arrogance and for those that do, they exist on the thought that homosexual people should not be permitted to live, net alone mate with each other. The same as there are egotistical people that don’t accept that blacks and whites are the same and choose to treat them negatively.

There is just no room for them, it’s them or us because they are not identified as normal human beings, but then what is normal? Normal is what our culture says or makes us accept as normal.

It is past time that we rethink what we determine by the concepts normal and abnormal as those concepts refer to the mental and emotional states and responses of human beings. Certainly, it is a real topic as to whether those terms can be sensibly used at all, given their enormous baggage and built-in prejudices and the common uncertainty they generate.

This is not an empty topic without real-world outcomes. The treatment of every individual mental disorder that mental health experts diagnose, from depression and attention deficit disorder on through schizophrenia emerges from how culture defines normal and abnormal.

This stuff touches tens of millions of people yearly and concerns everyone because a person’s mental representation of what is normal is largely shaped by how culture and its customs determine normal.

The focus of what is normal can’t be and must not be a mere statistical distinction. It can’t be and must not be normal to be a Christian simply because 95 percent of our population is Christian. It can’t be and must not be normal to be drawn to someone of the opposite sex simply because 90 percent of the overall community is heterosexual.

It can’t be and must not be normal to keep slaves simply because all the landowners in a country own slaves. Normal can’t mean and must not mean what we see all the time or what we see the most of.

It needs to have a distinct meaning from that for it to determine anything of importance to right-thinking people.

Neither can it mean free of discomfort, as if normal were the equivalent of oblivious and you were somehow abnormal when you were conscious, human, and real. This, nevertheless, is precisely the game presented by the mental health industry and it makes this specific, illegal switch.

It announces that when you feel a particular level of discomfort you are abnormal and you have a dysfunction. It associates abnormal with undesired, turning into “I don’t want to feel sad” into “I have the mental disorder of depression.”

In this illustration normal is existing clear of unnecessary distress, abnormal is feeling or appearing significantly distressed. Normal, in this way, is slaying a hamlet in wartime and not feeling anything afterwards.

Abnormal is feeling something, and for a long time thereafter. The consequences of morals, understanding, and knowledge are marked unnatural and robotic loyalty to wearing a pasted-on smiley face is designated normal.

Is that what we actually mean? Is that what we actually need?

Sorrow, guilt, anger, regret, uncertainty, apprehension, stress and other comparable encounters and situations are all expected and normal, given the reality and needs of the world, but, that is, to mental health experts, where those events and experiences become trademarks of abnormality and cash cows, after all, mental health generates a gross income for many…

It is just not right to call the deficiency of significant anxiety normal and the appearance of significant suffering abnormal, that simply isn’t correct.

If normal mustn’t be what we see the most of or the absence of significant distress, how else might it be imagined or defined? Is there maybe a way that the terms healthy and unhealthy capture what we might like normal and abnormal to determine?

Maybe normal could equate healthy and abnormal could match unhealthy? Sadly, that ruler is likewise unprotected.

It is fair to state that if you catch tuberculosis or manifest cancer you have gone from a normal state to an abnormal state. However, it is not fair to assume, for example, that it is healthy for you to endure no harmful outcomes from shooting defenceless noncombatants and unhealthy of you to endure distressing results.

In the last case, you are suffering, but PTSD in this situation is not like cancer. In this case, it may, in fact, amount to the healthy and nonetheless very distressing functioning of your conscience. This PTSD may, in fact, be evidence that you are healthy, evidence, that is, that you are a person with a functioning conscience, sooner than evidence of any unhealthiness.

It will not prove legitimate to declare that a person is healthy because she is not appearing distressed and unhealthy because she is feeling distressed. Being down because you discovered your partner cheating on you doesn’t make you unhealthy.

Becoming concerned because you can’t pay your bills doesn’t make you unhealthy. Becoming jaded and restless because your job underutilises you doesn’t make you unhealthy. If you jump from being distressed to being unhealthy you are jumping into the arms of the medical paradigm, a position you do not want to dive for no good reason.

Whole industries earning billions of dollars are created on the terms normal and abnormal and on the concepts of well and disordered. It is consequently impossible that the correct thing can be done and that the circumstances can change.

Even right-minded and high-minded mental health professionals can’t really conceive of doing away with the current idea of “mental disorder.” If they did away with it, what would they have and where would they be? Given that even the best and the brightest in the field are attached to an illegitimate naming game, there is probably no hope for change.

What does it mean to be normal? And abnormal? Who gets to choose, and what are the consequences? When do we praise variations from the norm, when do we denounce them, and why?

Differentiating between the definition of normal in a statistical sense and in a normative sense. Statistically, normal is the average or middle of a set of data. In a normative sense, norms are the criteria by which our conduct is measured, such as honesty and understanding.

What people generally do becomes what they ought to do, in other words, statistically normal behaviour becomes the social norm for behaviour. Alternatively, the common practices and approaches that successful people use, those on the leading point of the statistical bell curve frequently become social patterns to which others are required to comply.

If we start by ascertaining the elements of the word normal. The ancient Greek origins of normal mean well-known. Normal further used to mean a rule, such as a carpenter’s square. In English, normal was first used to illustrate the conjugation of regular and irregular verbs.

How did normal achieve its present usage? If we investigate the significance of normalcy, especially in religion, mental health, and honesty, why is normal greater than abnormal? The actual value of normalcy is that norms give social integration and regulation.

The negative side of normalcy is the marginalisation of those that don’t fit inside the norm.

It could be pointed out that artists are more imaginative because they work outside of the normal, mainstream culture and that creative force influences culture forward and alterations in social norms happen because of differences from and tensions with actual norms.

Societal transformation happens when opportunities for behaviour are presented that vary from or interrupt the jurisdiction of normal standards. We could further ask whether normalcy is context dependent, indicating the developing treatment of blacks and homosexuals in America. This context-specific meaning of normality shows the relativity and changeability of our thoughts of normal.

Nearly all of us consume some part of our lives questioning if we’re normal. Not a bad question, since the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) concludes that more than 1 in 4 Americans have a mental disorder.

Someone with a mental disorder has reactions, responses and ideas that differ from the norm. In these situations, someone who isn’t normal doesn’t match up to what society and medicine views as the norm.

When we consider what’s normal, it’s frequently in the sense of defining whether the way we evaluate and act is the same as or at least comparable to the preponderance of other people.

In a social situation like a party, for instance, you would probably make friendly discussion with a stranger about the host, the food and weekend plans. However, a person with Asperger’s syndrome might have a 30-minute chat with someone about engineering, not seeing jaded emotions or impatient shifting from foot to foot.

This behaviour is outside established parameters of what’s reflected as acceptable, or normal, social behaviour.

When it comes to assessing our own behaviour, we normally choose how to respond based on our own understanding of what’s normal. If you gamble compulsively and feel it’s an unusual behaviour that you’re one of a very rare people in the world who can’t quit gambling you might feel uncomfortable and cover it up.

However, if you were to discover that millions of people in the United States struggle with a gambling addiction and help and therapy are possible, you might be more inclined to seek to change that behaviour.

At the same time, social norms have a powerful impact on the notion of normal. In a Western society, what a person views as a gambling addict might be viewed as a typical adult in a society that considers unstoppable gambling to be a rational behaviour.

We can look at a society’s laws to see what’s culturally deemed normal, but that doesn’t always give us the best clues. For instance, smoking marijuana recreationally is prohibited in the United States, yet millions of Americans have indulged.

In another sense of the term, normal means average or standard. So while an alcoholic may crave to lead a normal life, a bored high school student may crave to lead anything but. Normal, observed through the eye of the observer, and is purified through the microscope of our civilization.

Therefore, there is no such thing as normal or abnormal, it is how others portray it. However, some people appear to use it to their benefit, shifting how people think, and normal and abnormal are overused.

It is a keyword that is applied to make people think that they are worthless and other people to think that they are beyond everybody else.

Normal and abnormal, healthy and unhealthy are central to our everyday lives and act as a determining factor on who and what we are and it is the liege of our common vocabulary towards an inferior position or a greater one and this seems to be a game strategy.

Gay people might not be seen as normal to some, but to others, they are very normal.

All of us are of course a tad peculiar in one way or another, it would be ridiculous to say that we should all be identical, that would lead to a really monotonous society and oddball some of us might be, but that does not imply that we are normal or abnormal, it simply suggests that we are all individual in our own way.

There is no one stranger than folk!

There are two kinds of male oysters, and one of them can switch sexes at will. And before man slithered out of the muck, perhaps he had the same possibility. Perhaps originally we were supposed to be able to change sexes, and being born with merely one sex is a mutation.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The father of a soldier killed in Iraq wants to join Twitter so he can call Donald Trump a damn liar.

Euvince Brooks states the US President did not contact him after his son’s passing, despite professing to have called every military family who lost a daughter or son.

Mr Brooks’ son, Sgt Roshain E Brooks was killed in August, and the family have not heard from the White House. He told the media that Donald Trump insists to have contacted every bereaved family and that had upset him even more.

He asked his daughter if she could show him to tweet so that he could tweet the President and tell him that he’s a story-teller and when you listen people twisting the truth, you want to challenge that person, and that’s the way he feels, he feels that Donald Trump is a liar.

Mr Brooks is the third family member of a fallen soldier to openly challenge Donald Trump’s claims and it emerged he told a pregnant widow, her spouse knew what he signed up for seconds before she received his coffin.

Donald Trump dismissed making the remark to Myeshia Johnson during a telephone call, calling it a total fabrication but the account first given by Democrat representative for Florida Frederica Wilson was later strengthened by the mother of Sgt. La David Johnson.

Now the media has talked to the families of 13 Americans killed in battle since Donald Trump became President in January. Nearly half had got telephone calls, the remainder had not heard from him and Donald Trump insisted he had called every family of somebody that’s died, and it’s the hardest call to make.

However, it appeared he had agreed to give the dad of a soldier killed in Afghanistan $25,000 but the cheque never came.

Army Sergeant Dillon Baldridge, 22, was shot dead alongside two other American soldiers on June 10 by an Afghan police officer. His father Chris Baldridge stated Donald Trump called him privately and offered the financial donation and stated that his staff would help set up an online fundraiser.

Mr Baldridge, a construction worker, had told him he was struggling and the $100,000 (£75,000) gratuity given out by the military was going solely to his ex-wife. Mr Baldridge stated he has got nothing.

However, Sarah Huckerbee stated in the Whitehouse press briefing that he got in touch with everybody who went through the right channels and that he doesn’t phone everybody randomly.

Chris Baldridge, the father of Army Sgt. Dillon Baldridge stated that Donald Trump called him at his home in Zebulon, N.C., a few weeks after his 22-year-old son and two fellow soldiers were fatally killed by an Afghan police officer on June 10.

Their telephone discussion lasted approximately 15 minutes, Chris Baldridge said and centred for a time on the father’s struggle with the way in which his son was shot, killed by someone he was training.

He stated, that he and his wife would have sooner their son had died in trench warfare, and he felt like he got butchered over there.

Donald Trump’s proposal of $25,000 adds a dimension to his ties with Gold Star families, and the revelation accompanies issues regarding how frequently the president has called or written to the parents or wives of those killed.

The media communicated with the White House about Chris Baldridge’s statement but officials refused to address the issues in detail.

However, in a statement, a White House spokeswoman said the money has been given and that it’s sickening that the media is using something that should be seen as a reasonable and genuine gesture, made personally by the President, using it to develop the media’s biased agenda.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Britain is £490 billion worse off than everyone imagined, as the Office for National Statistics updated its evaluation of the country’s accounts and concluded Britain has exaggerated its international assets.

We now owe considerably more to foreign investors than earlier speculated and overall it amounts a quarter of the UK’s Gross Domestic Product.

It comes merely six weeks before Philip Hammond’s first Autumn budget and Treasury executives are reportedly braced for gloomy predictions.

The Office for National Statistics states the UK’s stock of wealth much of which is in international investments has fallen from a plethora of £469 billion to a net shortage of £22 billion and half a trillion pounds has gone missing.

The mind-boggling decrease of Britain’s capital leaves Britain with no stock of foreign assets to better protect against Brexit and it comes as the Chancellor is under growing demand to prove how the nation would dispense with the increasingly imminent chance of a no-deal Brexit.

It’s believed falling out of the EU without a settlement could create the Gross domestic product to retract by an additional 7.8% and it would be increasingly challenging for the government to protect against a drop on the pound.

This would be astonishingly hilarious if it wasn’t astonishingly scary and sad and which tax haven has it gone to?

It’s astonishing how only the Tories could lose £469 billion, and the mainstream media seem unaware of this, if Labour had lost a £100 it would have been front page news for weeks with them crying out for his head.

The country is a mess and so is the economy but people are wising up to these crooks and the Tories perpetually mess up everything and this is simply clear ineptitude.

It’s pretty poor fiscal administration, and we should question how they succeeded in losing half a trillion. The Conservatives have perpetually had a lousy record on money management but they continually condemn Labour, and some people actually believe them.

But there’s a distinction between losing it and making it disappear.

The pound has fallen, that money is never ever coming to the NHS, and austerity is expected to continue even longer, and presently we’re worth much less than we imagined and there’s no safety net after Brexit.

The United Kingdom is spinning into another slump or probable recession. If Brexit bombs, and it looks like it will, the destruction will not only be long-term but plausibly permanent and seemingly, it turns out the experts were correct all along about the destruction Brexit would do to the country, and our government simply can’t count.

Money doesn’t simply vanish or does it?. Has it just disappeared, or has it seemingly been secreted away in British Overseas Territories, far away from the grasp of the taxman?

And we should check the pockets of the selfish, cheating suits.

All this dependence on banking has got this nation into this mess, they are nothing but players, and they’ve demonstrated themselves to be incompetent players at that.

Margaret Thatcher destroyed most of it. When this country was a genuine substation of production. Nearly all teenagers got apprenticeships but now industrial monsters like Trafford Park are full of minimum wage warehouse jobs.

Margaret Thatcher was the worst thing to happen to this country and Theresa May is carrying it on. She apparently deems herself as another Margaret Thatcher in production and she is apparently shaping herself into a clone of her.

 

 

An army bomb squad was called out to perform a controlled explosion after a suspicious coffee cup device was spotted near a town centre car park and an evacuation was started after the polystyrene cup with microchips taped to it was discovered near a branch of TK Maxx in Stevenage town centre.

Bomb disposal specialists, officers from Hertfordshire Police and firefighters rushed to the scene to deal with the event and blocked off neighbouring roads. Nevertheless, it was later reported the device was not viable with police presently seeking to discover who was accountable for the deception.

A spokeswoman for Hertfordshire Police revealed officers were called to the shopping centre following reports of a suspicious object and specialists from the Explosives Ordnance Disposal unit attended to give a technical assessment which led to a successfully controlled explosion.

The Local Crime Unit has now started an inquiry into this incident and can verify that this was not a viable device, although it gave the impression of being so although the motive behind the placement of the device is still unclear at this stage.

Despite its size, if it had been a viable device it could have had the potential to create severe harm and it’s really distressing that somebody could have thought up such an insidious idea that could have scared so many innocent men, women and children.

Although there could be some sort of comical aspect to all of this and even though we don’t yet know the origins of where this device came from or who even conceived it in the first place, people should, however, be extremely observant when going about their everyday routines.

We can’t wince every time we go out of our front doors or merely look frightened, that would be totally stupid if we froze every time we observed a container or package resting someplace out in the public, or in some supermarket.

It seems like someone was playing a prank, but we can understand why it was taken so seriously and this bomb-scare in Stevenage comes under two weeks following a handmade explosive device was detonated on a tube train in Parsons Green, west London, wounding 30 people.

Police are on high alert following the event, which took place on the District Line service on September 15 and seven people have been detained as part of the inquiry into the assault, but only one person, Ahmed Hassan, 18, has been charged.

Of course, you can never be too cautious, if it had been overlooked and it had been a viable device, then everything could have been a whole lot worse and ultimately, the police will DNA, fingerprint, locate the offender and prosecute for, of course, wasting police time and scaremongering.

Nevertheless, a little common sense is required here, or else every abandoned plastic bag and coffee cup will be reported, however, it’s not stupid to be careful and much better to be alert over things, after all, you can make an explosive out of virtually anything.

We live in a day and age of conflict, it is no longer peace and quiet in our society and this is a threat to us all, and we battle with hostility most of the time and this is our existence, a functioning democracy in a nation of decrepitude.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Theresa May has suggested she may dismiss Boris Johnson after stating she would not hide from a challenge and the attacked Prime Minister has been informed she must hold Boris Johnson to his word of honour after he began speculation he was pushing for the top position.

Helpless Theresa May, who has come under pressure to bring fresh faces to her team, could hold a cabinet reshuffle in an endeavour to improve the damage to her power as Boris Johnson abused social unity after he set out a range of red lines for Brexit in a newspaper interview, some of which went past government policy.

Collaborators rejected proposals that Theresa May would be finished by Christmas and Boris Johnson used a newspaper article to petition for party solidarity but admitted there had been a moment while Members of Parliament sniffed the air before gathering around the embattled Prime Minister.

Former prime minister Sir John Major hit out at the self-absorbed and disloyal way of some Tories who are driven by their own personal agenda, remarks seen as a slapdown to Boris Johnson, while Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson stated that being a politician should never be about private ambition.

Ms Davidson told BBC One’s Andrew Marr Show the Foreign Secretary had supported the Prime Minister’s Florence speech on Brexit and Theresa May should hold him to that.

He is of huge ability, a great person in the party and if the Prime Minister thinks he is the best person to be Foreign Secretary then she has his complete assistance.

Theresa May has frequently endured issues about whether Boris Johnson, a possible leadership opponent, is unsackable due to her vulnerable status following the uncertainty of a general election rebounded, stripping her of a Commons majority.

But when questioned what she might do with the Foreign Secretary, Theresa May said that it has never been her style to hide from a challenge and that she’s not going to start now. She said that as Prime Minister it is part of her responsibility to make sure she always has the best people in her Cabinet, to make the most of the wealth of talent accessible to her in the party.

Theresa May’s ill-starred conference talk was disrupted by a prankster who gave her a false P45, while a persistent cough left her grappling to be heard and a backdrop started to miss words as she made her crucial speech.

The Prime Minister acknowledged the address was an uncomfortable moment but never contemplated quitting the address as she is not someone who gives up.

An endeavoured coup directed by former party chairman Grant Shapps has fizzled out, but the media claimed four Cabinet ministers had argued the necessity to oust the Prime Minister.

One told the media that it felt like that this would be over before Christmas.

Culture Secretary Karen Bradley stated that Theresa May would absolutely still be in place at Christmas and dismissed the measure of the competition to her leadership.

They are talking about fewer than 10 percent of the parliamentary party possibly, perhaps, maybe looking for her to move on. That’s not a particularly high number when you look at another almost 300 set to keep her in position.

Boris Johnson would be reflecting on controversial remarks he made regarding Libya at the Tory gathering, adding that he didn’t believe it was extremely clever or amusing.

However, there were rumours that Theresa May was planning a reshuffle and that they were simply speculation replying that what she stated was she wanted the best people around the Cabinet table. She’s further said before that she maintains she has the best people around the Cabinet table.

Boris Johnson used a media post to examine whether the Tory party would permit itself to be pressured into an election that no-one wants, adding: “What do you think you are doing you nutters?” And he stated that party MPs have sniffed the air and turned sensibly away from the cliff.

Sir John used a media article to urge the Tories to wake up and smell the coffee, telling Theresa May that drastic steps on her social justice agenda was required and calling on the party to unite or risk the neo-Marxist Jeremy Corbyn taking control.

Communicating through the media, International Trade Secretary Liam Fox announced the Prime Minister’s misfortune throughout the talk had been seized on by a handful of malcontents.

Ms Davidson announced she would support Theresa May to lead the party into the next election, telling ITV’s Peston on Sunday that he thought she was the greatest prime minister that we’ve got and she has his complete support.

There’s probably quite a number of women out there that are getting a tad irritated at how many male commentators are discussing male cabinet ministers determining what she should or shouldn’t do as if she has no business in this herself.

After all, she’s the prime minister of a G7 nation, she didn’t get there by chance or by default and she’s unquestionably got pluck, perseverance, character, she believes in service and attention and she definitely has many people’s backing.