I’m beginning to think we’re jinxed when it comes to mobile phones.

Last week I posted about the dilemma I have now that Three have turned off the mast closest to my house.  I left Orange because it was so unreliable so staying on Three when I can only pick up Orange on my Three phone is no good and T-Mobile doesn’t work in my house.

Well now it’s becoming more of a pressing issue because Orange have also just switched off a mast and you’ve guessed it, it’s the mast nearest my house.  Getting an Orange signal isn’t a problem but making and receiving calls and sending and receiving texts is a problem and data connections are a rarity because the already overloaded Orange network is now maxed out all the time.

So in a nutshell, I’ve got a choice between O2 and Vodafone.  I’ve been asking on Twitter and Facebook and so far pretty much everyone has said Vodafone.  O2 are apparently having the same capacity problems as Orange and T-Mobile.  But what about Vodafone?  Everyone can’t be happy with Vodafone otherwise there’d be nobody on the other 4 networks!  Their data allowances are rubbish, as are their upgrades but what about the network?

The coverage checkers for O2 and Vodafone both show reasonable coverage for where I live – not as good as Orange, T-Mobile or Three – but there’s not much difference between the two.  So it’s just down to reliability, customer service and value for money but which one should I choose?  O2 or Vodafone?

Well, isn’t little Georgy Porgey Osborne a clever boy?  He’s decided to means test for family allowance to stop the well off from getting money they don’t need but being the clever boy that he is, he’s dropped a bit of a bollock.

The means testing is being done by taking family allowance off anyone who is in the higher tax bracket.  This means that if either parent earns over £44k they won’t qualify for family allowance.  And rightly so, there’s no need for someone earning £44k to have family allowance.

But here’s the clever bit: if two parents earn £43,999.99 each – a combined household income of £87,999.98 – they will still be paid family allowance.

Genius.

#2 son is due to start secondary school next year and we’ve just put in his application for the same school #1 goes to and his preferences for the LEA-controlled schools.

#1 son goes to an excellent independent school (top performing state secondary in England) and #2 son wants to go there as well but the school is badly over-subscribed – they turn down over 1,000 applicants every year – so the odds are stacked against him getting there.

For his LEA preferences, we haven’t chosen the nearest school to home because it’s rubbish which presents us with a bit of a problem – if he doesn’t get into the same school as #1, how is he going to get there?

I drop #1 son off at school in the morning on my way to work as it’s in vaguely the same direction as the office but the other two schools on #2′s list are in the opposite direction.  What we need is for one of them to be able to go to school by bus but there’s a problem: none of the schools is more than 3 miles from home and a weekly bus pass for a child is £10 – taking off school holidays, that’s about £400 a year!

The 3 mile rule is what the British government says is the maximum distance a child of secondary school age in England can be expected to walk to school.  There are exceptions for children with medical conditions of course and #2 has a heart problem so he fits the criteria for getting a free bus pass … but only if he goes to the local, rubbish school.

You can get a free school bus pass for your children if you meet the usual criteria and it’s this that has annoyed me.  If you’re unemployed your children can have a free school bus pass.  If you’re an asylum seeker your children can have a free school bus pass.  If your household income is below a certain level your children can have a free bus pass.

It may surprise my regular readers to know that it’s not the freebies for the workshy or asylum seekers that irritates me, it’s the latter.  I work, I earn an above average wage but I have 4 children.  Someone on minimum wage with 1 child getting income support, housing benefit, etc., will have as much, if not more, disposable income than me but the household income criteria is an arbitrary threshold, it doesn’t go up if you have more children to pay for.

Ok, so it’s my choice to have 4 children (although I did inherit 2 stepsons) but if the system offers help for parents – which my taxes pay for – then it should do so fairly.  And if the system purports to offer parents the right to choose which school they want (or need) their children to go to, it shouldn’t penalise them for exercising that right.

Harriden Harperson, the fascist man-hating bitch of an Acting Leader, has finished her speech and some scary looking woman (it has to be a woman of course) has announced the winner of the deckchair rearranging competition on the SS New Liebour and the winner, with xx% of the vote, is …

Ed the Millibeast

Right, now the excitement’s all over I’m going to go and find some paint I can watch drying.

A couple of months ago I achieved a small personal victory against Orange who finally admitted that their network is struggling and terminated my contract early.  They’ve since agreed to pay me a quite reasonable amount of compensation for unreasonably keeping me in contract when they knew they couldn’t provide me with the service I was paying for.

So I changed to Three for a number of reasons, foremost of which was the value for money and the superior coverage.  For £32 per month I get a free network unlocked HTC Desire, 500 minutes of any network calls, 1000 minutes of Three to Three calls, 1000 texts, 120 MMS messages and 1gb of data.  On the coverage front, I get Three’s network which provides relatively patchy coverage nationally (but fine in the places I frequent regularly) and roaming access to voice and data on Orange – the largest combined coverage of any UK mobile network.

I have been more than happy with Three right up until last Saturday when my phone would no longer connect to Three and was stuck on roaming.  I assumed it was a local problem and after a few hours called Three to confirm they were aware of the problem.  They said there was no problem, it must be the phone and I should turn it off and take out the sim card, leave it for a few minutes and try again.  I left it overnight to see if the problem went away by itself but it didn’t so I tried what I was advised to do and that failed to fix the problem.

So I called again and was told it must be my phone and that there is a known problem with the HTC Desire that can cause it to latch onto a roaming network and be reluctant to move back to the home network.  I was told to take my phone to a Three or Carphone Warehouse shop and get it flashed to the latest version of the software under warranty.  The phone had updated that morning so I knew it was up-to-date but I reluctantly agreed to do as they said.  But later that day I went to a relative’s house and as soon as I travelled away from home, the phone picked up Three again.  ”Ah-ha”, I thought, “that proves it’s the network”.

So when I got home I checked #2 son’s phone which is also on Three and his had the same problem.  I manually scanned for networks and it would only pick up Three on 2G – scanning with the phone set to 3G wouldn’t pick up Three at all.  So it’s definitely the network, without a doubt and I phoned Three back up again.  The person I spoke to this time told me that the mast by my house had been decommissioned and that they were currently working on the next nearest to upgrade it to take up the slack from the decommissioned mast.  This would take a couple of days, he told me.

Being a naturally suspicious person, I decided to go to the Three shop in town and check it out the following day.  I went, they checked and confirmed that what I was told was correct.  Brilliant, it’s not my phone and I just need to sit tight for a few days and it’ll be sorted.  Except it isn’t sorted because my phone still roams onto Orange as soon as I turn into my street and it’s been a week.  I called Three today to find out if the upgrade had been finished on the other mast – yes it has and there are no problems with any of the masts in my area.  You know what’s coming next don’t you?  I did and I sighed.

The handset faults person asked me for my software versions again and told me that I didn’t have the latest version.  I disagreed.  So did he.  He told me it was my phone and I needed to get it flashed.  I told him it wasn’t my phone and explained all the above again and asked him if he genuinely thought that it was all a co-incidence and that two different models of phone had spontaneously developed the same fault which only manifests itself in my street and started when they turned off the mast near my house?  He said it could be.  Clearly it isn’t.  This is what I do for a job – I diagnose and fix application infrastructure faults for a multinational IT company.

The aforementioned handset faults person got his supervisor to phone me back and we went through it all again.  He didn’t try and blag me the like his colleague did though and agreed that it was Three’s fault.  He offered me a different handset or to terminate my contract without charge.  As I’ve already proven it’s not the handset with #2 son’s phone, the only option is to terminate the contract and go elsewhere.

But here’s the dilemma: my phone works in the house, it just can’t get a Three signal so it roams onto Orange.  If I’m on a call when I turn into the street it invariably cuts me off as it tries to keep the Three signal for as long as possible and ends up cutting me off because it’s too late to switch the call to Orange.  And I came off Orange for a reason – the network is overloaded and unreliable.  But I won’t get the deal I’ve got from Three if I go to another network – I won’t get the data, the free calls or the coverage.

Obviously Orange is out of the question so that leaves me with T-Mobile, O2 or Vodafone.  We’ve dabbled with T-Mobile and it was nothing special and then they built a new mast at the end of the road and the signal nosedived to the extent that it often wouldn’t work indoors.  So that leaves O2 or Vodafone.  Having worked for a mobile phone dealer, I know that Vodafone’s upgrades are shit – you have to spend quite a lot of money with them to get a decent upgrade when your contract is up so that leaves O2.  But O2 have overloaded their network with free data packages to the extent that their network in London was pretty much knocked out earlier this year for weeks.

So now you see my dilemma, what should I do?

Well, not quite but there was a fire a short time ago in a block of flats in the next street to me.

Seven police cars, two fire engines, a paramedic car and two ambulances – the most exciting thing to happen to Brookside since … a fortnight ago when serial arsonists were lighting fires around South Telford every day and the fire brigade was patrolling the estate every night.

Here are some pictures …

No restrictions on using the pictures for personal use, for non-personal use please ask.

A church in Florida plans to hold a “Burn the Quran Day” on September the 11th, despite universal condemnation both at home and abroad.

The church preaches that “Islam is of the devil”.

Back in 2005, the Danish newspaper, Jyllands Posten, published cartoons depicting the muslim prophet, Mohammed.  The newspaper was threatened with bombings and the cartoonist received death threats.

The response from the “international community”?  Calls for moderation and criticism of the newspaper and cartoonist for offending muslims.

And in 2006, three boys were expelled from an Islamic school in Australia after they were caught pissing on bibles and burning bible pages.

The response from the “international community”?  Well I don’t remember seeing it on the news or in any newspapers over here.  There were no spontaneous protests from christians calling for the boys to be beheaded.  The boy’s father blamed the school.

Still in 2006, muslims protesting in London about the newspaper in Denmark publishing Mohammed cartoons waved placards calling the murder of people who insult Islam and other “anti-British slogans”.

The response from the “international community”?  Calls for moderation and criticism of the newspaper and cartoonist for offending muslims.

And a regular sight at any anti-American or anti-west protest by muslims, the burning of the Stars & Stripes:

The response from the “international community”?  I think you know the answer already.  The Stars & Stripes is second only to the bible in the list of revered objects in the USA but the “international community” seems to think it’s ok to desecrate it if you’re a muslim.

People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.

I’ve not long got back from stewarding a community event in Brookside, Telford called “Health & Harmony”.

I’m still none the wiser at where “Harmony” comes into it but the “Health” bit was covered off by the free fruit smoothies that were given out, the healthy eating advice and the demonstrations by Telford Thai Boxing club.

The event was organised by Brookside Improvement Group, which I’m a member of.  As the officially recognised residents group for, it’s important to get feedback from as many residents as possible and this event was used as an opportunity to get some feedback from residents.  There were some excellent suggestions such as a community garden and improving playgrounds.  One of the best suggestions was simply putting a cigarette bin outside the shopping arcade so smokers have no excuse for dropping their cigarette butts on the floor outside – it’s cheap and has an immediate benefit.

Of particular benefit, I think, was getting feedback from the locals that congregate outside the shopping arcade drinking.  They don’t look particularly nice and they discourage some people from using the shops but what most people don’t realise is that they clean up around the shops and see off the younger drinkers that cause trouble.  Most of these people don’t have jobs and want something to do with their time – just like the local kids.  They want organised activities, something to do during the day other than sitting around drinking.

Most people were critical of the estate and for the same reasons – it looks old and tired, there’s too much rubbish around – the same criticisms you’ll hear about any 40 year old housing estate.  But most people also had something positive to say – the sense of community where they live, the greenery and one woman who had moved away for 15 years before coming back said “it felt like coming home”.

One of the main attractions was the Brookside’s Got Talent competition.  Two of my kids (the youngest two) did a dance they learnt at Telford Academy of Performing Arts and came in second place.  There was almost no talent contest after the person who promised to provide a karaoke machine let us down but luckily a local DJ stepped in at the last minute and gave a couple of hours of his time for the event.

Special thanks is also due to Tesco in Madeley and the Co-Op in Stirchley, both of which provided the ingredients for the smoothies and to the supermarket in Brookside that donated bottled water, tea, coffee, milk, sugar, squash and other essential supplies to the event.

Bloody buggering Sky, I swear there’s a conspiracy to piss me off.

Two months ago they buggered up my internet connection and then buggered up my phone fixing my broadband. I spent several days arguing with them over the phone that the problem was at the exchange, not my equipment or my phone, the micro filter or the socket.  Eventually I got through to someone sensible in their higher level support department who did the unthinkable and didn’t follow the step by step instructions that clearly had no relevance at all to the problem I had and eventually got the problem sorted at the exchange.  I managed to figure out the problem despite being in a hotel on a training course but it took several days of phone calls for Sky to catch up with all their gadgetry.

So they fixed my broadband by moving my line from one switch to another and in the process paired my phone up to god knows where, but it wasn’t my phone line!  As compensation fro dicking me around entirely unnecessarily, ballsing things up twice and costing me quite a lot of money in phone calls they knocked a fiver a month off my bill for a year.  Which they also cocked up, resulting in my getting billed for two half price phone lines instead of one.

Anyway, they sorted all that out and everything was fine until yesterday when we got back from a week’s holiday to find that the internet wasn’t working.  There was no heartbeat light on the micro filter (I bought an expensive filter a while ago which tells me when it’s connected to the exchange) and the data light on the router was red which kind of suggests that there was no connection to the exchange.  So I did some tests, including trying a spare router which they sent me when there was nothing wrong with my router two months ago.

Eventually they figured out that there was a problem and phoned me back to tell me they’d fixed it.  So I asked what was wrong and what they’d done to fix it.  There was a pause and a reluctant explanation: they’d done some tests on the line and discovered that it will only support 10mbit/sec so they’d reduced the connection to 10mbit.

Interesting.  So my line has supported a connection at over 20mbit/sec for over a year but suddenly, in the space of a week, my line has mysteriously degenerated to the point where it will now only support half the data rate it did before I went on holiday.  Is there an explanation?  Well, the maximum speed is calculated from the distance from the exchange, the line quality and the quality of the wiring at home.  All of which I know and that’s how I know their maths doesn’t add up.  According to Kitz, at 900m from the exchange with 13dB downstream attenuation, I should be be able to connect to the exchange at 22mbit/sec with a throughput of just over 20mbit.

As the crow flies I am less than 400m from the exchange so the actual length of cable is probably somewhere between the 0.4km distance from the exchange and the 0.9km they estimate.  Regardless, the LLU speeds quoted above are pretty much spot on what I’ve been getting for over a year and nothing has changed.  The router is still plugged into the master socket with no extensions and a high quality micro filter.

Anyway, they said that it will take up to 24 hours to put the speed back to 20mbit (5 minutes to reduce it, a day to increase it … hmmm).  Needless to say, 24 hours later it’s still connected at 8mbit – not even the 10mbit I was told yesterday that my line could support.  Not a happy bunny as you can imagine so I phoned again, went through the same conversations and had another promise to put my connection back to 20mbit.

I pay for 20mbit, my line supports 20mbit, I expect 20mbit!  I suspect another battle may be in the offing, let’s see what happens tomorrow.

The English Defence League (EDL) held a “static protest” in Bradford yesterday which was typically marred by violence.

The original plan was for the EDL to hold a march through Bradford but the Chief Constable of West Yorkshire Police, Sir Norman Bettison, successfully got the Home Secretary, Theresa May, to ban any protest marches in Bradford this weekend so they held a “static protest” instead.

UAF Leader arrested for conspiracy to organise violent disorder in March 2010

But wherever the EDL go, of course, the extreme left wing fascist group, Unite Against Fascism (UAF) follow to wreak havoc.  The order to ban the EDL from marching no doubt came from her boss, David “Cast Iron” Cameron who is a supporter of the UAF fascists (the list of MPs supporting the UAF was removed after it was splashed all over the papers but nothing ever disappears forever on the internet).

Yesterday’s EDL protest was met with opposition from both the UAF fascists and The Muslim Community.  The two factions – the EDL and the UAF/Muslim Community – were supposed to have been kept at a safe distance from each other but the UAF/Muslim Community protesters mysteriously made it to within a few yards of the EDL protesters.  The UAF/Muslim Community gathering place was half a mile away from where the EDL were allowed to protest.

There is a lot about yesterday’s protest that doesn’t add up.  Why were the UAF thugs and Muslim Community allowed to get so close to the fenced in EDL protesters?  If the EDL were the trouble makers, why did the UAF and the Muslim Community have to be stopped from getting at the EDL protest by a physical blockade of police vans and a line of mounted police?  Why have the police told the media that EDL protesters threw a smoke bomb at the UAF/Muslim Community protesters when this video clearly shows the trail of smoke from the smoke bomb being thrown from the UAF/Muslim Community protesters at the EDL protesters?

The media’s coverage of the protests is equally suspect.  Sky News provided live coverage which apparently showed the smoke bomb being thrown at the EDL protesters but they continued to report it as being thrown by the EDL.  And despite there being two separate protests yards away from each other – the EDL and the UAF/Muslim Community – the rotating banner said “English Defence League Demonstration in Bradford”, implying that the EDL were the only ones kicking off when clearly they weren’t.  Another strapline was “Smoke bombs, bottles & stones thrown during English Defence League demonstration” – but who threw what?  It was both sides but the strapline revolving underneath says “English Defence League Demonstration in Bradford”.  Another said “One EDL supporter taken to hospital after injuring his leg” – how did he injure it?  Was it an accident or was he hit by a brick or a bottle?  There’s no interest from Sky, it’s all part of the “English Defence League Demonstration in Bradford”.  What about the EDL supporter with cuts on the back of his head from what looks like a bottle injury?  How was he injured?  Again, no interest, it’s part of the “English Defence League Demonstration in Bradford”.

One of the arguments used by the UAF thugs and The Muslim Community as an excuse to ban the EDL march and whip up anti-EDL hatred in Bradford was that the EDL protest might see a return to the Bradford of 2001 when The Muslim Community and non-muslims rioted after David Blunkett, as Home Secretary, banned a National Front march but allowed a march by the extremist left wing Anti-Nazi League (now merged in the extremist left wing UAF) to go ahead.  Sound familiar?  The Muslim Community dictates the agenda in Bradford because the authorities can no longer control them.

I’m surely not the only person who sees something wrong with this comment?  If The Muslim Community turns to violence – which they did yesterday and have done at every EDL protest – then it’s because they’ve been provoked into violence.  How has this been allowed to happen?  Why have the Brits allowed extremism in The Muslim Community in Bradford to reach such epidemic proportions that a protest march by people opposing Islamic extremism could “provoke” them into violence?

Again, I’m sure I’m not the only person to see something wrong with this comment either.  It is the job of the police to keep the peace and enforce compliance with the law, not to run people out of town like a wild west sheriff.  The EDL have a right to free assembly and peaceful protest.  They also have a right not to be harassed or attacked and the police have an obligation to protect those rights.  But instead, the objective of West Yorkshire Police was evidently to deny them their rights and to remove them from Bradford as soon as they could in case the EDL’s presence in the city provoked The Muslim Community into violence.

So what now for the EDL?  Almost a year ago I wrote about the EDL following their march in Manchester and again in April this year following a protest in Dudley.  At both protests the EDL were portrayed as the trouble makers with little mention of the UAF thugs despite the ratio of arrests to protesters being 1 in 250 for UAF and only 1 in 1,333 for the EDL – 3 arrests from 4,000 EDL protesters and 6 arrests from 1,500 UAF thugs.

I said that I had no interest in ethnic nationalism and I still don’t but I wonder if perhaps I’ve misunderstood the EDL?  Their website says they’re only interested in opposing Islamic extremism and the creeping influence of Sharia and not race so maybe we should give them the benefit of the doubt?  Some of their members are clearly more interested in white supremecism than opposing Islamic extremism but then that’s the same of any organisation that is even vaguely involved in any type of nationalism.  Even the Campaign for an English Parliament – a group that is extremely defensive of its non-partisan civic nationalism – has had problems with members or supporters who have developed an unhealthy obsession with race politics (we’ve rooted them all out to the best of my knowledge) and the English Democrats have some very unsavoury characters in their ranks despite being a primarily civic nationalist party.  The EDL have no control over who chooses to support them and the beliefs those people hold and it’s unreasonable to expect them to filter out the undesirables from the thousands of people that turn up to their protests.

The problem the EDL have is that they are a porous organisation.  They have to be to attract the kind of support they get at their protests.  The downside of this is that they are open to infiltration from all sides.  They have obviously been infiltrated by the likes of the National Front, the BNP and other ethnic nationalists and it is inconceivable that the police and security services haven’t already got people in the EDL chain of command.  The trouble that both lots of infiltrators cause at protests is bringing the day the EDL is proscribed closer.  One of their protests has been banned now, that sets a precedent for suppressing them.  Banning one of their marches establishes them as “wrong”, the next step will be to ban them from having any sort of protest and then to ban the group altogether.  The violence at protests will be cited as justification for banning them and the cost to the taxpayer of policing their protests will be used to convince the general public that banning the EDL is a good thing.  The UAF fascists and The Muslim Community will be exempt from the bans despite them being the cause of most of the trouble at EDL protests because they’re not “wrong”.

The media has already been mobilised against the EDL – a collective blind eye is turned to the UAF fascists and The Muslim Community whilst the violence and thuggery perpetrated by the extreme left is blamed on the EDL.  Despite being apolitical, the EDL are described as “far right” by politicians and the media, following the “right is wrong” mantra that the left have managed to implant into the collective psyche.  The left have managed to convince most of the population that the left wing nationalist socialist BNP are “far right” whilst the forces of anti-fascism are exclusively left wing which of course makes right wing bad and left wing good.  The truth is that the BNP are a left wing party, fascism is a centrist ideology incorporating both left and right wing ideologies and there are as many – if not more – anti-fascists on the right as there are on the left.  Opposing radical Islam and unfettered immigration does not make you a fascist, no matter what the vicious thugs in UAF and failed communists in the Labour Party say.

England is not Britain

Not only are the EDL not “far right” but they are not English nationalists either.  English nationalists know the difference between England and Britain.  Glaswegian muslims are not English nationalists and they don’t ask “Why are they against the United Kingdom?”  England is not Britain and the English Defence League is not English.

So, back to my question a few paragraphs up: should we give the EDL the benefit of the doubt?  I am inclined to believe that the core few people that started the EDL and probably the majority of their supporters are not ethnic nationalists.  I agree that radical Islam has to be dealt with and I agree that Sharia is a cancer that needs to be excised and most people will agree with the EDL’s stated objectives and raison d’être.  What the English people need is a leader – someone in tune with English public feeling and clever enough to take on both the media and the British establishment.  The EDL and its leader, Tommy Robinson, have done a lot in a short amount of time but they aren’t going to lead an English revolution because the EDL is a tainted brand and the danger is that the EDL will end up tainting English nationalism as a whole through guilt by association, just as we are starting to win the war against Englishness.

I certainly won’t be supporting the EDL for the simple fact that they are British nationalists and I am an English nationalist and because I have no desire to get my head caved in by some psycho communist or a member of The Muslim Community for being on the “wrong” side of the police line.  That said, I would still be interested in observing an EDL protest first hand and if anyone from the EDL wants to arrange that, feel free to get in touch.

Recommended reading on the EDL and UAF:
Nourishing Obscurity
The Anger of a Quiet Man

The English Defence League’s … robust … report on yesterday’s protest is here.

Oh dear, looks like the fuck up fairy has visited Google!

The BBC News website has a non-story about speeding statistics at the site of two switched-off speed cameras in Oxfordshire.

Oxfordshire County Council couldn’t afford to keep the speed cameras going after the British government withdrew central funding for speed cameras in England so they turned them off but Thames Valley Safer Road Partnership – one of the many speed camera quangos producing misleading advertising and lobbying national and local government for more business – continued to monitor two sites for 10 weeks and came up with the startling revelation that people were speeding past the speed cameras that had been turned off.

I’ve said this plenty of times before – speeding isn’t dangerous, driving too fast is.  You can break the speed limit and still be safe but you can drive below the speed limit and not be safe.  This is where speed cameras fail in their supposed objective of making the roads safer – they don’t catch dangerous drivers, they don’t catch drunk drivers, they don’t catch people that brake sharply at speed cameras and then race off at breakneck speeds as soon as they’re past the lines painted on the road.

Thames Valley Safer Road Partnership’s shocking statistics – endorsed by Brake, the government-funded fake charity – show an 88% increase in speeding on Watlington Road, Cowley.  That’s an increase from 7 people caught speeding when the speed cameras were on to 62 people not getting caught speeding when the speed cameras are off.  62 people in 10 weeks – that’s less than 1 speeding motorist per day!

But of course the road conditions play a big part in whether it’s safe to exceed the speed limit or not so what’s Warlington Road like?  Is it a winding country lane?  A narrow street through a busy housing estate?  Erm, no.  It’s a wide open road, most of which is through open countryside and the rest is past some industrial units.  Part of the road is dual carriageway and there are traffic lights dotted at short intervals where the road makes its way past the industrial units.

The other speed camera site is the A44 in Woodstock where the number of people breaking the 30mph speed limit went from 90 to 110.  Again, this is over a 10 week period so that’s 2 more speeding motorists per week now the speed cameras are off compared to when they were on.  And again, this is a wide open road and it’s actually a bypass for Woodstock and the only hazard nearby is the entrance to Blenheim Palace which has filter lanes to control the traffic and presumably slows the traffic down when the road is busy by virtue of being a tourist attraction and attracting lots of traffic.

One statistic is conspicuously absent from propaganda from Thames Valley Safer Roads Partnership – the effect on the accident rate from the speed cameras being switched off.  There is no mention whatsoever of the accident rate and that speaks volumes.  If there was one extra accident at either of those sites it would have been used as “evidence” that turning off speed cameras is going to kill and maim hundreds of babies and pensioners.  But there is no mention at all and that means there has been no increase in accidents, no increase in casualties, no increase in deaths and no justification for turning the speed cameras back on.

The statistics from Swindon have shown that speed cameras on average have no tangible effect on road safety.  Inspector Paul Winks from Thames Valley Police said “The consequence is more death and more death is unacceptable”.  This is naked propaganda – there is no evidence at all to back up such a ridiculous statement.  Thames Valley Police wants more speed cameras because they get a cut of the income generated from the fines and because it means they don’t have to put police on the roads catching dangerous drivers.

The whole legal basis for speed cameras is that they should be a deterrent to inappropriate speeding in danger spots.  They are supposed to be brightly coloured and highly visible so that it discourages people from breaking the speed limit, not hidden round corners or behind bushes and road signs to catch people speeding.  All speed camera sites in England need to be reviewed by a commission, headed by a judge, to rule on their legality because a great number of them certainly aren’t being used for road safety, they’re being used as roadside tax collectors.  An unattended camera on the side of the road is no substitute for a trained police officer.

I was just getting dinner out of the oven when #1 son came knocking on the kitchen window and presented a crying 6 year old boy.

After talking to him it turned out that his mum had gone shopping and packed him off to his friend’s house.  He’d changed his mind halfway to his friend’s house and decided to go back home only to find that his mum had already left.  Knowing that his dad didn’t finish work until 8pm he walked to his grandparents’ house which is a few doors away from us but a good 10-15 minutes walk away from where he lives.

His grandparents weren’t in so I got him to take me to his dad and uncle’s house on the off chance but there was nobody in.  So next stop was the friend’s house he was meant to have gone to but there was nobody there either!

Dreading the thought of having to phone the police to come and take him away until his mum or dad could be found, I asked him if there was anyone else he could go to nearby.  Thankfully there was – an auntie.  So he took me to his auntie’s house which co-incidentally happened to be a house I lived in when I was a kid and luckily his cousin was there.

So this lad was returned safely to his family but how different it could have been.  A 6 year old shouldn’t be walking around a housing estate by himself – anything could have happened to him.  Lucky he ended up here rather than being intercepted by a gang of feral youths or a kiddie fiddler.  With all the stories in the news just lately about kids being abused and murdered, what was the lad’s mother thinking leaving a 6 year old to walk to a friend’s house while she went shopping without even checking if the friend was in or that he’d got to where he was meant to be?

The British government have banned adverts for “the sex industry” in Job Centres because they might lead to exploitation of vulnerable unemployed women.

I’m not an expert in “the sex industry” so I’m happy to be corrected but this all seems a bit daft.

For a start, I’d imagine the kind of strip club or lap dancing club that prostitutes their dancers is unlikely to place adverts in the Job Centre.  It therefore follows that if someone was looking for a job as a stripper or a lap dancer that they’d be less likely to be exploited going to a Job Centre than replying to an ad in a free newspaper or a card in a window.

Furthermore, why is lap dancing, stripping or topless waitressing necessarily being exploited?  According to this website, a good looking, talented girl can earn £1,500 after “house fees” and before tax per week in one of the top London clubs like Stringfellows or Spearmint Rhino.  That’s for a 4 hour shift, 5 or 6 days a week.  Four hours a day on minimum wage sitting behind a till in Tesco will earn you £116 per week before tax.

I’m lucky: I have a stress-free job, I work regular hours and I enjoy what I do but I certainly can’t earn 6 grand a month before tax working 37½ hours a week and getting paid for providing round the clock out of hours cover every other week.  I’m starting to feel a little exploited myself, I wonder if that nice Mr Grayling will ban adverts for jobs paying less than £75 per hour?

For the last few months the service I’ve been getting on my Orange mobile phone has been getting progressively worse.

A few months ago I couldn’t make phone calls at all for about half a day and nor could I receive any.  #1 son’s phone was the same, so was Mrs Sane’s and so was the work phone I had – all on Orange.  All the phones had a full signal but they wouldn’t make or receive calls.

I called Orange off my landline (an expensive call) and they couldn’t tell me what the problem was.  The work phone came back on before our personal phones – to be expected, they use QoS on their network.  But this was the first indication that something was going seriously wrong with Orange’s mobile phone network.

Since that time, the service has become increasingly poor.  When trying to make outgoing calls I would often get connection errors, network busy messages or just simply timing out without making the call or displaying any errors.  This could happen with a poor single or with a full 2.5G signal.  I took Orange’s advice to change the phone from 3G to 2G temporarily and this improved the service greatly but I use a lot of data so it wasn’t a proper answer to the problem and when it started happening even with 2G manually selected, I decided enough was enough.

Over the past few months I have spent hours on the phone with Orange trying to get to the bottom of this problem.  Several times I told them that if they couldn’t fix the problem it was fine but that I expected them to end the contract early so I could change to another provider.  That’s pretty much where the sympathy ended and I had some interesting conversations with people at Orange about this.  During one call I was told that there was no real difference between 2G and 3G data connections – in reality it’s between 1.8mbit/sec and 3.6mbit/sec, depending on the state of the network where you are.  On another call I was told that it was impossible for Orange to cancel my contract early and when I pointed out many times that the terms and conditions they continuously quoted at me as an excuse to keep taking my money without providing the service I was paying for said that they could, in fact, cancel my contract whenever they wanted for whatever reason they wanted, the woman hung up on me.

The problems happened mainly in busy built up areas, generally not rural or sparsely populated areas.  It also generally happened during the day, not at night.  I’m not a mobile phone network engineer but I’m a pretty techy person (alright, I’m a geek) and over the last few years I’ve gained quite a lot of knowledge and experience of networks and communications infrastructure.  To me the cause of the problem was pretty obvious – not enough capacity – but trying to get someone at Orange to admit that their network wasn’t able to cope with demand was a seemingly impossible task.

But it wasn’t impossible because, with the help of a couple of nice men from Orange’s off-shore call centre in India, I managed to get a call escalated to Orange’s networks department and on Saturday a very helpful man from Orange called me, discussed my problems and agreed that it was lack of capacity on the network and that it couldn’t be fixed.  He agreed that the iPhone was the trigger that has brought the network to its knees just as it has done with O2 and said that it may get better when they start merging their network with T-Mobile in a year’s time but they just don’t know at the moment.

It was a refreshingly honest admission from Orange and they agreed to end my contract immediately, allowing me to change providers.  Co-incidentally, there was an announcement on our company intranet today that Orange have come clean to my employer about their network problems and staff are even being offered second phones on a different network by the company where problems are particularly bad.  It may just be a co-incidence but could my call on Saturday have been the trigger for an open admission by Orange that their network is basically buggered?

Stoke-on-Trent City Council has produced an 11-page Ramadan guide for schools which advises them to cancel swimming lessons and sex education for all pupils during the month.

The council suggests swimming lessons should be cancelled in case muslim children accidentally swallow water when they’re supposed to be fasting rather than the more reasonable suggestion that muslim children should be given the opportunity of taking part in another sport instead.

They suggest cancelling sex education lessons because muslim boys are forbidden to think about sex during Ramadan after they have reached puberty rather than the more reasonable suggestion that muslim children should have the opportunity to catch up on missed lessons after Ramadan.

The Ramadan guide even suggests that schools reschedule exams in case muslim pupils are tired from getting up early to eat before dawn rather than the more reasonable suggestion that muslim children might like to go back to bed after their early breakfast so they’re not tired for their exams.

The council says “The overriding consideration should be that children do not feel disadvantaged in school activities because of their religious observance” whereas most people, I think, would say that a more reasonable “overriding consideration” should be that a child’s religion doesn’t get in the way of their education or the education of every other child in the school.

Making reasonable adjustments to accommodate the religious desires of a child I have no problem with.  Offering Halal or Kosher meals to those that want them is reasonable, only offering meat from animals that have been killed inhumanely to all pupils isn’t.  Offering pupils the ability to defer their participation in activities or even miss them altogether because of their beliefs is reasonable, forcing an entire school to miss out on activities or reschedule them to accommodate the whims of a medieval religion isn’t.

Despite the best efforts of some, the muslim breeding programme hasn’t yet provided a majority muslim population in England and until it does there is no reason why the lives of so many people should be disrupted to accommodate the religious choices of a minority of the population.

But the nice people at Stoke-on-Trent City Council haven’t pulled all of this out of their own arseholes, they’ve had guidance from the Muslim Council of Britain.  The MCB is an unelected taxpayer-subsidised europhile Islamic group which claims to represent 500 muslim groups, membership of which is restricted entirely to those who profess the muslim faith.  Hardly representative of the majority of English people are they?

Stoke-on-Trent City Council really have gone too far with this booklet.  Not only is it a waste of taxpayers money, it’s also insulting to assume that non-muslims will happily have their lives rescheduled around the Islamic calendar.

The cost of the Pope’s visit to England and Scotland is going up to £12m, not including the as-yet unspecified cost of policing.

Some of the cost is being paid by the Catholic church but the rest is being stumped up by the British government out of English taxes. The country is broke, England is facing billions of pounds of budget cuts yet the British government agrees to spend millions for the head of a paedophile ring to spend a few days here.

I object to my taxes being wasted on the Pope’s visit.  If he wants to come here then let him pay for it himself.  If the Vatican doesn’t have the cash to pay for it then they could always call Ocean Finance and take out a mortgage on one of the Pope’s palaces.

Well, that went will didn’t it?  For the first time ever I got up and walked out before an England game finished.  While England were making a half hearted attempt at trying to claw back a 3 goal deficit I was in the garden getting the BBQ started.

I notice that a couple of the part time patriots in my street have already taken down their flags, including the house behind us that put their flag up just before the game started and had already taken it down before the game finished.  By this time tomorrow the country will be purged of the flags the part time patriots have painstakingly bedecked their houses and cars with.

So, with England out, the question is who to support next and on the basis that I have a Dutch god daughter and they are the only country in Europe not to hate us with a passion, I will be supporting the Netherlands.  But unlike the part time patriots, my England flag will stay up.

… the linesman and referee to be able to bloody see!

England have gone back to the dressing rooms for half time 2-1 to Germany when the actual score is 2-2.

The linesman was a few yards from the corner, he should have been able to see the goal.  The referee was in the right position to see the goal, why didn’t he?  Capello, Beckham and Pearce could see it from the halfway line.  The fans could see it from the stands and were unimpressed judging by the chants of “the referee is a wanker”.

FIFA recently refused to have any kind of technology to adjudicate on goals – that position is surely untenable after the ridiculous decision to disallow England’s second goal.  Tennis has hawk eye which can see if a 2.7″ wide tennis ball travelling at 130mph is over the line, it would have no problems with a 28″ football at 30mph.  Rugby has a video judge and the game stops when there is a dispute so why not in the world cup?

I always knew Sepp Blatter was an arsehole, now he has the opportunity to show that he has some integrity.

I would love England to win the World Cup but if – as seems likely – we don’t make it to the finals, the disappointment will be tempered somewhat as long as we give the Germans a damn good thrashing this afternoon.

The Pope is bitching about Belgian police raiding the home of a retired Catholic archbishop and the graves of two prelates as part of an investigation into child abuse by Catholic clergy.

Well that’s a bit unfortunate your holiness but if the Catholic church dealt with paedophile priests instead of protecting them then the police would probably be happy to rely on the co-operation of the church.  In fact, if the Catholic church told their priests that child abuse is an unforgivable sin there might not be any need for police investigations at all.

Belgium is an overtly Catholic country (with the exception of Brussels which is rapidly turning Islamic) so the decision to raid the home of a retired Catholic archbishop won’t have been taken lightly.  The Pope should get his own house in order before he starts criticising other people.

Without wanting to sound like an armchair manager, what the fuck are you playing at Capello?

Seriously, the team is playing unbelievably badly and I’m afraid I have to lay the blame with Capello.  I normally defend managers when people criticise them because the 11 players on the pitch are supposed to be professionals and if tactics aren’t working they should use their initiative but in this case there are clearly no tactics to change.

The players are milling round the pitch, completely clueless.  They’re getting the ball and haven’t got a clue what to do with it.  The team is obviously suffering from having no time to practice together as a team because they don’t know who they’re going to be playing with until 2 hours before the game starts.

And why is Wayne Rooney still playing?  I really never thought I would say this but he’s a liability right now.  He’s worried about picking up an injury, he’s backing off from tackles and tonight he was limping at one point.  Rest him if that’s what he needs but he shouldn’t be playing if he’s not up to the job.

Here’s a request from Blists Hill Victorian Town, part of the Ironbridge Gorge museums.  We spend quite a lot of time at Blists Hill and we find something new every time.  They rely on donations and volunteers to keep the museums open and the money will come in useful!

Having spent four nights in the world’s most uncomfortable hotel bed in Leicestershire, I woke up tired and grumpy this morning which is not a good way to start the fourth day of a five day training course.

Actually, I was woken up by a phone call from an excitable Mrs Sane rather than my alarm this morning to tell me that the internet was working again in our house.  It stopped working Friday night/Saturday morning and if it wasn’t for repeated phone calls arguing with “higher level technical support” people at Sky about what the problem was, I would still be without internet now.

Anyway, I haven’t put in my expenses and compensation claim for 5 days without internet, hours of phone calls on my mobile and doing their bloody job for them yet so I’ll save the details for another day.  They’ve also messed up my phone line in fixing the broadband because the phone number rings out but the line is dead.  They’re saying someone will call me in 24-48 hours to do some diagnostics, I’ve told them I’ll be phoning Virgin if it’s not working by the time I get home tomorrow.

So, back to this morning.  I’m already feeling a bit crap – tired, aching, homesick – so what I really needed to cheer me up was a phone call at half 11 this morning to tell me my grandad had died.  He’d been ill for a while having had a couple of heart attacks, emphysema, pleurisy, and asthma and had a couple of weeks in hospital a couple of months back but as far as we knew, he was waiting for a chest infection to clear up so he could have a blocked artery sorted out.  He was taken into hospital overnight with a bad chest and died this morning at half 10.  Bit of a shock and pretty gutting, especially as I’m away from home and having to make do with phone calls to family.  Listening to my daughter crying her eyes out when I phoned home telling me “I didn’t want grandad to die, I wanted to go and see him again” was horrible and I couldn’t be there for her.

We weren’t close in the way that some people are with grandparents – in fact, I hadn’t seen him for a few years until he went into hospital a couple of months back – but that’s how it was when we were kids and other than my parents, my sister and my nan, I don’t see most of my family for years at a time even though most of them live within 20 minutes’ drive.  But he was my grandad and I loved him even if he was a cantankerous old bugger (not to mention being Welsh).

I went to see him a few weeks ago and we talked for a long time – probably more that one day than I’ve ever talked to him before.  That was the last time I saw him and that’s what I’ll remember.  He was smiling and joking, I didn’t see much of that side of him as my grumpy grandad when I was a kid.

I didn’t see him as often as I should, especially when he only lived a few miles away but I’m glad we spent a bit of time together this last couple of months.  He told one of my aunties the other day that he was fed up of feeling ill and that he’d had enough.  Yesterday he had pictures of my nan out on the table with her things that he’d kept (she died years ago).  I guess he knew what was coming and I think he wanted it.  He died with his wife and four of his daughters around him.

But I’m not going to write today off just yet.  My mother-in-law is in Shrewsbury tonight for the Pride of Shropshire awards where she’s in the final three for the carers award.  She’ll find out in a couple of hours if she’s got the award.  Hopefully she does and I can end the day on slightly less of a downer.

I’ll be glad when today is over and even more glad to get home tomorrow.  Today has been a thoroughly shitty day.

My mother-in-law is in the final 3 of the Pride of Shropshire Awards in the Carers class.

My father-in-law has an über-rare disease called superficial siderosis.  As of 4 years ago there were only 270 confirmed cases worldwide so as you can imagine, there’s not much known about the disease or what is likely to happen in the future.  He started losing his hearing about 20 years ago, the last thing he heard was a firework about 6 or 7 years ago (it certainly surprised him!).  When I first met Mrs Sane her dad was walking with a stick, driving by himself and going fishing.  Now he needs a wheelchair outside, a big walking frame in the house and he can’t go anywhere on his own.

We won’t know if she’s won until next Thursday but just being in the top 3 is an achievement even if she doesn’t.

John Prescott’s phoney class war has taken another bizarre twist with the announcement that he has accepted a peerage.

Prezza made a BBC documentary recently all about his class war and in 2005 he even slagged off Tony Bliar’s school “reforms” because they weren’t working class enough.  Yet as Deputy Prime Minister he was on a salary of £134k – more than 9 times the current minimum wage of around £14.5k – and had two grace and favour homes paid for by the taxpayer and a flat paid for by a union as well as his taxpayer-funded constituency home.  And then there were his two armoured, chauffeur-driven Jags that he used to do the shopping and drive his wife up the road so her hair didn’t get blown about.

Like all class warriors that have had a stint lording it over the proles (excuse the pun), Prescott is a millionaire with a hefty ministerial pension which will keep him in the manner to which he has become accustomed and as a member of the House of Lords he’ll be paid £335.50 for every day he hauls his sweaty, pampered arse into the House of Lords.

I can’t decide whether the thought of an unelected millionaire Lord Prescott fighting his phoney class war against other unelected millionaire Lords, all appointed under one of the systems he’s supposedly devoted his life to opposing, could be best described as ironic or hypocritical.  I’m thinking probably both.

The Fortean Times merrily pointed out this morning on Twitter that the Olympic mascots “appear to be Cyclops-eyed, pincer-handed aliens“.

He may not be Prime Minister any more but we just can’t get away from El Gordo.

Anyway, what about those mascots, eh?  Very shiny, and bit angry looking and just a little bit phallic (in-keeping with the theme set by the Lisa Simpson blowjob logo).  But I can forgive their inadequacies somewhat because one of them is names after my home town.

I grew up in Much Wenlock and quite frankly the town makes very little of the fact that the modern Olympics probably wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for Dr William Penny Brookes and his Wenlock Olympian Games.  Having the mascot named after the town might just be the kick up the arse they need to start making the effort to capitalise on the Olympic connection.

That said, the town council did ask the International Olympic Committee for permission a few years ago to put the Olympic rings logo on the signs at the entrance to the town but they were turned down.  Now might be an opportune moment to ask again.

The organisers of the London Olympics reckon they can raise £15m peddling Wenlock and Mandeville tat.  I’m not convinced they’re going to make much money out of merchandising although they do bear more than a passing resemblance to Crazy Bones which might earn them a few quid from special editions.

Unsurprisingly, the mascots have already been extensively photoshopped.  The chav one is my favourite.

Well, that’s about all you can expect on the great white Olympic elephant from me.  Waste of money and no English team, what is there to interest me other than the connection with the town I grew up in?  Oh, and if anyone wants a guided tour of Wenlock from a local, I’m available for a small fee.

Facebook fans in Pakistan will no doubt be pleased to learn that a home-grown rival to Facebook has been released following the site being banned in the country …

So one of the first acts of our new EU regional administrators is to introduce fixed term parliaments.

Any alliance whose purpose is not the intention to wage
war is senseless and useless

I support fixed term parliaments – I even have a button for the campaign for fixed term parliaments in the sidebar of this blog – but I can’t bring myself to support the ConDem coalition’s proposal.

There is nothing at all wrong with a 5 year fixed term parliament and I wholeheartedly agree with it.  Stopping the British Prime Minister of the day from calling an election when it is politically expedient rather than when it is good for the country is a fantastic idea.

What is wrong, though, is the requirement for 55% of British MPs to pass a vote of no confidence to bring about a dissolution of parliament and subsequent election.  To be honest, in a fixed term parliament, the current rule of 50% +1 MP to pass a vote of no confidence would no longer be acceptable.  Turkeys don’t vote for Christmas so the party in power should have no say in a vote of no confidence.  If they have the support of parliament then they should be able to survive a vote of no confidence.

I would prefer to see a 5 year fixed term parliament with a requirement for 75% of opposition MPs required to force a dissolution of parliament.  It needs to be a high figure to prevent spurious attempt to depose the party in power but not so high that the opposition has to be virtually unanimous in their opposition of the ruling party making it almost impossible to depose them.

This 55% rule will keep ConDem coalition in power for as long as they want it and certainly most parties that form a government through an outright majority.  The extra 5% is 4 MPs – hardly an insurmountable target.

Cameron’s campaign for absolute power has to be stopped.

Well, it looks like people didn’t use their vote wisely after all.

The expected anti-LibLabCon backlash didn’t materialise with people voting for the LibLabCon coalition.  The Leaders “Debates” shown on Sky, ITV and the BBC successfully deflected attention from the local candidates and onto the party leaders even though only a few thousand of us could vote for them and the anti-hung parliament propaganda in Tory newspapers scared a lot of people into so-called “tactical” voting.

The BBCs partiality in this election needs to be investigated and steps taken to ensure that the privileged and powerful few aren’t given an unfair advantage over the already disadvantaged smaller parties.

And when the Tory media complains about the fact that Gordon Brown is still Prime Minister despite losing by 2m votes and 50-odd seats, they have only themselves to blame for interfering in the election.  If they’d left people to get on with voting for who they wanted instead of peddling propaganda about a hung parliament the result could have been very different.  If they’d stuck to slagging off Liebour and the Limp Dims instead of telling lies about a hung parliament they wouldn’t have motivated the LibLab voters.

It looks like UKIP’s hopes are all pinned on Nigel Farage.  The result has been pretty disappointing nationwide for UKIP but it looks like a lot of deposits have been retained and UKIP have beaten the BNP in almost every seat contested.

In Telford, David Wright managed to cling on to his seat with a reduced majority of about 1k, reduced from 5k.  Denis Allen got almost 2.5k votes, keeping his deposit and effectively depriving the Tories of a victory.  That was certainly the general consensus anyway – the Tories were fuming with us and the Liebour lot were shaking our hands blinking away the tears in their eyes, thanking us for seeing the Tories off!

In the Wrekin constituency, Mark Pritchard increased his 500 majority to 9k.  Malcolm Hurst for UKIP got 2,050 votes and missed the 5% needed to keep his deposit by about 350 votes.

As I type, there are over 2m more votes for the Tories than there are for Liebour and a difference of 47 seats.  There are 1.6m votes between the Limp Dims and Liebour but the difference in seats is 189.  The electoral system is fundamentally wrong and needs changing.  Under proportional representation, based on current vote share with 43 seats left to declare, the seat allocation for the main parties should be something like:

• Con: 235
• Lab: 185
• Lib: 149
• UKIP: 20
• BNP: 12
• SNP: 11
• Green: 6

Tens of millions of votes will be ignored no matter what the outcome is because we still have this medieval first past the post electoral system.