C.J. Stone's Blog, page 24

Residents shocked at vote to cut their care services

So what’s going on at Lang Court?

On the one hand they’ve just had new windows, new front doors and new kitchens fitted in every flat, at the cost of several hundred thousand pounds at least. On the other, the residents are being asked to vote on downgrading their services.

That’s right: just to show what a wonderfully democratic society it is we live in, some of the most vulnerable people in our community are being asked to choose which of two possible reductions in their care services they prefer: an almost total downgrading, or a lesser downgrading in which services will be reduced, but only withdrawn completely at the weekend and overnight.

What a choice! The option to keep things as they are is not on the ballot paper.

You may know Lang Court. It’s a lovely place: on the seafront, not far from the shops, with a great community spirit. Beautiful flats. Tranquil gardens. A safe and secure environment for vulnerable people to live, with lots of services on offer. It’s a model of what a decent caring community should look like. We should be building more of these, not getting rid of them.

The residents are naturally very worried. Many of them are in their eighties, some with serious infirmities. A few of them sold properties to move into Lang Court, on the understanding that the current level of support was part of the deal. It’s come as a complete shock to find out that it is not.

It is what is known as enhanced sheltered housing, one of four such schemes in the Canterbury area. All are being balloted on the prospective changes. It’s still not clear how the votes will be counted: on a scheme-by-scheme basis, or all together.

Eventually the schemes are to be decommissioned, when new builds have been completed.

As to what will happen to Lang Court then, who knows? One of the residents I spoke to said she thought it was on the list to go private. Given property values in the area, I wouldn’t be at all surprised.

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It’s like voting on who gets to kill your granny

I’m starting to think this whole referendum debate is based upon a false dichotomy.

A vote for Leave is a vote for Boris Johnson and Michael Gove to rewrite the British constitution in favour of their rich friends.

Anyone who thinks that the majority of the Leave campaign are for the NHS are simply deluded.

These are free-market capitalists, Atlanticists, who want to reduce public services and sell off even more of our public assets than they have already.

According to John Major, Gove wants to privatise the NHS, Johnson wants to charge people for its services and Ian Duncan Smith favours an American style private insurance system.

If you you think they are really against an an unaccountable, bureaucratic, undemocratic organisation imposing itself upon our sovereignty, then ask them why they aren’t interested in pulling out of NATO?

But equally, those on the Remain side who talk about reforming Europe are talking codswallop. The EU has neoliberalism written into its constitution, and is profoundly anti-democratic. You only have to remember what they did to Greece to know that.

As Tony Benn said: “the Treaty of Rome… entrenches laissez faire as its philosophy and chooses bureaucracy as its administrative method.”

So a vote for Leave is a vote for less democracy, while a vote for Remain is a vote for less democracy. Either way there is a democracy deficit and the democratic process turns on which undemocratic outcome we are going to have to live with after.

The constant trumpeting of individual campaigners shows up even more how false the choice is. Nigel Farage on the same side as George Galloway. Jeremy Corbyn on the same side as Jeremy Clarkson.

Personally I found the sight of Sadiq Khan sharing a platform with David Cameron—who had been denouncing him as an extremist only days before—wholly unedifying, and it inclined me to trust Khan less, rather than Cameron more.

It’s like a vote about involuntary euthanasia turning on who gets to kill your granny, and by what means: strangulation or a pillow over her face?

The only choice is no choice. How depressing.

The Gateway Between the Worlds

This poem was written at the behest of Helene Williams for the performance at the end of the pebble formation known as The Street in Tankerton, Whitstable.

Photograph by Sue Carfrae: http://www.carfraephotography.com/

On the threshold of the horizon
In the betwixt and the between of this liminal landscape
Where these two ancient rivers meet and merge into the sea;
Where the land invades the sea and the sea invites the sky
At the gateway between the worlds;
What ghosts may linger, what ancestors may wander
And mingle with the memories
Of those who are still alive?

This wide Estuary,
The rivermouth that breathes the wind
Along the North Downs to Bromley South
To Bermondsey and Southwark;
The river of air that enriches the brain,
That fills the lungs and rings the blood
And keeps the City alive:
What history does it carry,
What dreams does it remember,
What hopes and thoughts and incantations are carried on the breeze?

Does the English Channel channel the English
Like a psychic at a séance?
Was the English language planted here
Amongst the rocks and trouble here
To put down roots and send out shoots,
To delve down deep
And crawl and creep
To make this land its own?

And those of us who are gathered here
At this opening in Time
In the ever changing present
At the gateway between the worlds,
Are we not also mystery,
Part liturgy, part history,
Of untraceable ethnicity,
Elemental, elegiac, poetic, prosaic,
Earthbound and roaring,
Secretive and soaring,
On our own and holding hands
With one as lonesome as we?

For this is an interdimensional portal
At the crossroads of the Evening,
Where elemental creatures meet
And quest secrets from the deep.
And when we are born we are born from Earth,
And when we die we return to Earth
And as we live we give thanks to Earth
For the blessings of the day.
And the breath of life it is from this Earth,
And the joy of life it is from this Earth,
And the springs of life are in the Earth,
Which we can never trade away.

And the Earth it never ponders, never questions, never reasons,
Never adds up or takes away, never scorns and never treasons,
Never gives up, never gets sad, never gets lonely, never grows old,
Never tires of its duty, never gives up on its soul,
Never wakes up in the morning not wanting to get out of bed,
Never falls asleep late at night off its box and off its head,
Never mourns for the loss of things it held onto for too long,
Never lies about its feelings, is never false and never wrong.
It's never early for an appointment, never late for a date,
Doesn't murder, doesn't torture, doesn't tell us how to hate,
It never makes a promise it knows that it can't keep,
Doesn't put down, nor turn its back, nor sell itself too cheap,
Doesn't have self-pity, never makes a fuss
Because these things it knows we bring
And it can trust it all to us.

Nought out of 10 for sneaky Windows raid

So after months of rejecting Windows 10 on an almost daily basis – Microsoft having loaded their advert on to my computer without asking permission – the company have now imposed the new operating system on me anyway.

The way they did this was by redefining Windows 10 as a recommended update which, without having altered the default settings (which I never knew existed) meant that it was downloaded automatically.

I went to London with Windows 8 on my computer, and came back to find Windows 10 already installed. Certain features which existed on my old set-up have been disabled, and my computer no longer works as it should. Will I be compensated for this, I wonder?

There are a number of issues. Firstly it’s the fact that they can access my computer and do what they like to it, apparently without seeking my consent.

Shouldn’t there be a law against this? I find the idea of an unaccountable corporation having access to the inner workings of my computer very disturbing to say the least.

Then there is the fact that Windows 10 has a secret back door which allows Microsoft to spy upon my every move.

This is what it says in the terms and conditions:

“Microsoft collects information about you, your devices, applications and networks…. Examples…. include your name, email address, preferences and interests; browsing, search and file history; phone call and SMS data; device configuration and sensor data; and application usage.”

The point is, I didn’t consent to those terms and conditions did I? I was in London. Microsoft have taken it upon themselves to force this upon me by subterfuge.

Finally there are well-founded rumours that the company allows government agencies access to people’s computers for other, even more, nefarious ends.

Domestic terrorism is a catch all term which has already been applied to various groups in the United States, including animal rights activists and environmentalists, as well as to radical Muslims.

How long before the list includes socialists, trade unionists, human rights activists and dissident reporters, as it did in National Security States in South America during the Cold War?

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The Whitstable Gazette.
The editor welcomes letters on any topical subject, but reserves the right to edit them. Letters must include your name and address even when emailed and a daytime telephone number.
Send letters to:
The Editor, 5-8 Boorman Way, Estuary View Business Park, Whitstable, Kent CT5 3SE,
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Stonehenge Byway

Mad Alan and Bubba of the Loyal Arthurian Warband

I parked my camper between two thorn trees on the Drove, just passed the crossing where the old A344 used to run, and spent the night there.

In the morning there was a frost, despite the lateness of the season, with a thin mist rising in the hollows as the sun began to warm the landscape.

It was May the 1st: Beltane.

The Drove—full title “the Netheravon Cattle Drove”, also known as Byway 12—is an ancient right of way cutting across Salisbury Plain. Historically it was probably used to drive cattle from the village of Netheravon to Salisbury Cattle Market: hence its name.

It is a wholly unremarkable stretch of unmade road, pot holed and rutted, with a few scattered thorns along the verge. What gives this road its special significance is where it passes on one part of its journey: along the stretch from Lark Hill to the A303 it skirts Stonehenge on its Western side, close enough to get a good view of the monument without having to pay English Heritage for the privilege.

The current cost of entry to Stonehenge is £15.50 for adults, £9.30 for children, or £13.90 for students and senior citizens.

Tickets have to be booked in advance.

Park up on the Drove and you can get almost as close for free, without booking, and without the annoyance of having to pass through English Heritage’s new £27 million Disneyfied visitor centre.

Not that I was there to see the monument today, enigmatic and mysterious though it is. I had other purposes in mind….

Continue reading: http://internationaltimes.it/stonehenge-byway/

What did I used to do before Facebook?

OK, I have a confession to make: I’m a Facebook addict.

It’s true. I just can’t keep away from it.

The trouble with Facebook is that it feels like you are doing something, even though you’re not.

You’re always busy: checking your updates, sticking up posts, answering messages, replying to other people’s comments, engaging in debate, friending people, unfriending people.

Sometimes it makes me wonder what I used to do before there was Facebook. I’m sure I filled my time up with other things, I just can’t remember what those things were. I spent the first forty years of my life without a computer.

Even when I did get a computer, I was still able to do without Facebook for another ten years or more.

I can’t remember when I first signed up to it. Probably around eight years ago. Facebook will know. It knows everything about me. I do remember when it evolved into a tool for my writing. This was during the riots in 2011. I collected a lot of material in the space of a week, and, at the end of it, turned it into a story.

It felt really good, and I was pleased with the results. How modern I was: a sixty year old man using Facebook to write stories. Since then, unfortunately, it’s been deliberately sabotaged.

Facebook was floated on the stock market in 2012. That’s when it stopped being a social network site and became a way of making money for its shareholders.

Your posts no longer have the same reach they used to. You are probably only being connected to about 5% of your contacts at any one time. You have to pay Facebook to get your posts “promoted”.

It’s like they’ve sold you a car and then put a hole in the petrol tank. The idea is that you’ll buy more fuel. Only you don’t. You just don’t go anywhere any more.

The Arab Spring was organised through Facebook. That couldn’t happen these days.

Which is probably another good reason why Facebook was hobbled.

What wise ruler would allow the people a tool by which they can organise his overthrow?

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Opposing Israel policies is not anti-Semitism

So there’s been this brouhaha in the media about whether Labour have an anti-Semitism problem or not.

Meanwhile, as if by magic, a number of other important issues seem to have disappeared from the news.

Take this as an example: on Monday the 25th of April, 4 days before Ken Livingstone’s clumsy intervention in the debate about Naz Shah’s Facebook posts, Tory MPs voted down an amendment to the Immigration Bill calling on the government to take in 3,000 unaccompanied refugee children from Europe.

Let’s repeat those words so we can be clear exactly what they mean.

“Unaccompanied”: they are on their own with no adults to protect them.

“Refugee”: they are seeking refuge from a dangerous situation.

“Children”: they are below an age when they can be expected to take care of themselves.

The amendment was tabled by Alf Dubs, a Labour Lord with Jewish blood who, at the age of six, had escaped the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia by coming to Britain.

Alf Dubs, in other words, knows exactly what it is like be a child fleeing danger.

The two stories are thematically linked. Alf Dubs knows the consequence of real anti-Semitism, and responds to it with a magnanimous amendment to a nasty piece of legislation.

Our own MP, on the other hand, apparently unable to grasp the plight of these vulnerable minors, voted against the amendment.

Neither Ken Livingstone nor Naz Shah are actually anti-Semitic. They are anti-Zionist, which is a different thing altogether.

Not every Zionist is a Jew. Not every Jew is a Zionist. Opposing the policies of the State of Israel is not anti-Semitism, although it serves the State of Israel to pretend it is.

Ken Livingstone was certainly incautious in his use of words, but his main assertion, that the Nazis held talks with German Zionists in 1933, is true.

As for Naz Shah, the Facebook posts which caused such a furore were put there long before she became an MP, which makes you wonder who is trawling through other people’s social media pages to dig out quotes in order to be offended by them later?

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The Whitstable Gazette.
The editor welcomes letters on any topical subject, but reserves the right to edit them. Letters must include your name and address even when emailed and a daytime telephone number.
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Corporations the worst offshore tax offenders

There was something dishonest about the way news of the Panama papers was presented to us by the mainstream media.

The first thing we were treated to were insights into the financial arrangements of Valdimir Putin and some top officials of the Chinese Communist Party.

It was only later that we began the hear about David Cameron’s dad’s offshore dealings and the possibility that our Prime Minister may have been involved in tax avoidance in the past.

After that leaders of all the major political parties were forced to publish their tax returns.

So what is it about the words “tax” and “avoidance” that people don’t get? By definition, tax avoidance won’t show up on your tax returns, making the whole process an exercise in gesture politics of the most useless kind

But there was one glaring omission which the news was unable to bring to light. What about the corporations? Don’t they too keep their vast wealth in offshore accounts?

And the answer to this is: “yes, of course they do.”

What the Panama papers show are the activities of a single law firm dealing with the tax affairs of a number of wealthy individuals. Multinational companies don’t need to consult law firms as they have their own legal departments to work out the arrangements for themselves.

According to Oxfam, the fifty largest companies in the United States may have hidden as much as $1.3 trillion in offshore accounts.

This is only what they have avoided paying tax on in America. It doesn’t tell us what they have plundered from the other nations of the world, including our own.

“Poor countries are particularly hard hit, losing an estimated $100bn a year to corporate tax dodgers,” said Robbie Silverman, Senior Tax Advisor at Oxfam. “This is enough to provide safe water and sanitation to more than 2.2 billion people.”

So while us onshore citizens are being taxed at source, and watching as our public services are being wrecked beyond repair and the most vulnerable amongst us are targeted for cuts, the very richest are basking in their sunny tax havens, with almost unimaginable wealth at their disposal.

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The Whitstable Gazette.
The editor welcomes letters on any topical subject, but reserves the right to edit them. Letters must include your name and address even when emailed and a daytime telephone number.
Send letters to:
The Editor, 5-8 Boorman Way, Estuary View Business Park, Whitstable, Kent CT5 3SE,
fax  01227 762415
email kentishgazette@thekmgroup.co.uk

Corporations the worst off shore tax offenders

There was something dishonest about the way news of the Panama papers was presented to us by the mainstream media.

The first thing we were treated to were insights into the financial arrangements of Valdimir Putin and some top officials of the Chinese Communist Party.

It was only later that we began the hear about David Cameron’s dad’s offshore dealings and the possibility that our Prime Minister may have been involved in tax avoidance in the past.

After that leaders of all the major political parties were forced to publish their tax returns.

So what is it about the words “tax” and “avoidance” that people don’t get? By definition, tax avoidance won’t show up on your tax returns, making the whole process an exercise in gesture politics of the most useless kind

But there was one glaring omission which the news was unable to bring to light. What about the corporations? Don’t they too keep their vast wealth in offshore accounts?

And the answer to this is: “yes, of course they do.”

What the Panama papers show are the activities of a single law firm dealing with the tax affairs of a number of wealthy individuals. Multinational companies don’t need to consult law firms as they have their own legal departments to work out the arrangements for themselves.

According to Oxfam, the fifty largest companies in the United States may have hidden as much as $1.3 trillion in offshore accounts.

This is only what they have avoided paying tax on in America. It doesn’t tell us what they have plundered from the other nations of the world, including our own.

“Poor countries are particularly hard hit, losing an estimated $100bn a year to corporate tax dodgers,” said Robbie Silverman, Senior Tax Advisor at Oxfam. “This is enough to provide safe water and sanitation to more than 2.2 billion people.”

So while us onshore citizens are being taxed at source, and watching as our public services are being wrecked beyond repair and the most vulnerable amongst us being targeted for cuts, the very richest are basking in their sunny tax havens, with almost unimaginable wealth at their disposal.

****************

The Whitstable Gazette.
The editor welcomes letters on any topical subject, but reserves the right to edit them. Letters must include your name and address even when emailed and a daytime telephone number.
Send letters to:
The Editor, 5-8 Boorman Way, Estuary View Business Park, Whitstable, Kent CT5 3SE,
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email kentishgazette@thekmgroup.co.uk

Austerity: a fancy word for class war

The business secretary, Sajid Javid, has ruled out nationalisation for Britain’s ailing steel industry.

On the other hand, when the banks were in trouble in 2007, state aid was lavished upon them in mind-boggling quantities.

In the period from 2007 to 2010, the British taxpayer directly subsidised the banks to the tune of £1,162 billion.

Try thinking about that for a second. That’s one thousand, one hundred and sixty two thousand million; or one thousand, one hundred and sixty two followed by nine noughts.

It’s a huge number. So huge, in fact, that it’s almost impossible to imagine it. But let’s try.

If one pound equalled one second, it would take 36,821 years to reach that number.

That’s how much money was transferred from the public to the private sector in that period, and which we are currently paying for in the form of austerity

No such commitment is being offered to the steel industry, of course

Port Talbot is losing around £1 million a day. That’s a lot of money. To put it into perspective: at that rate we could continue to subsidise steel for over 3,181 years for what we spent in just three years to bail out the banks.

RBS is about to be re-privatised, at a loss to the taxpayer of £22 billion. That would keep the steel industry afloat for 60 years.

You have to ask why there is such a discrepancy in the government’s attitude to one set of people, as opposed to the other? The answer is fairly obvious if you stop and think about it.

Sajid Javid is a merchant banker. George Osborne’s family own a lucrative wallpaper business which has not paid corporation tax for seven years. David Cameron’s father founded a multi-million pound investment fund in a number of off-shore accounts.

In other words, these people are rich: they have more in common with bankers in the City of London than they do with steelworkers in Port Talbot.

There’s an old fashioned word to describe what this is really all about. That word is “class”.

So when Noam Chomsky says that “austerity is just a fancy word for class war” we know what he’s talking about.

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The Whitstable Gazette.
The editor welcomes letters on any topical subject, but reserves the right to edit them. Letters must include your name and address even when emailed and a daytime telephone number.
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