What Do You Think Today?

[Avatar]

Probably to a large extent. But we should not be insensible to the benefits in both conservation and economic terms, because they do not depend on the nature of the people doing it.

--A

[peter]

Fair enough Av - your sagacity trumps my outrage, and rightly so!

[Avatar]

Would that more people took such a practical view.

--A

[peter]

The Telegraph's new columnist William Hague had a front page promotion quote yesterday saying "The Labour Party has lost it's direction in the dessert and has no star to guide it out". A man clearly with his finger on the pulse given that they have had 400,000 new members sign up in the last month for no other reason than the emergent 'star' of the leadership race Jeremy Corbyn!

[Avatar]

I'm quite looking forward to that actually. When's the election?

--A

[ussusimiel]

I think peter meant this post to go here, instead of where he put it:

Voting closes on 10 September with the result being announced on Saturday 12th. Corbyns success is by no means assured - there are powerful forces arrayed against him, and even if he does it doesn't automatically follow that it will be a good thing for the party, but the one thing it *will* do is show that there is another way that at least should be thought about. Not everything pre-Thatcher was bad.


Yesterday nearly every paper showed the harrowing image on its front page of a Turkish soldier carrying the body of a dead migrant child washed up on a beach. Of course the toddlers death was a tragedy but did it have to be used as a weapon to heap guilt upon our (the UK's) shoulders, blaming us for the escalating immigrant crisis occurring at Europe's boarders as tens of thousands of political refugees, assylom seekers and economic migrants seek ever more dangerous means of gaining egress to Western countries. Wrong, wrong, wrong! We are not to blame for the turmoil that drives people from Africa nor the war and savagery that forces then to flee the Middle-East. These regional failings and uphevals must be addressed internationally, but in their own areas. All countries, the UK included are happy to provide refuge to a few tens of thousands of desperate people fleeing war and persecution etc - but when the number rises to hundreds of thousands or even millions it becomes a threat to the very nations who would offer succour. This is not our fault and the media were absolutely wrong to lay the guilt and blame on our shoulders!

[Avatar]

I suspect you're correct, thanks.

--A

[peter]

Thanks U. - don't know how that happened.

[Avatar]

Do you type elsewhere and then copy/paste?

--A

[sgt.null]

I read copy/paste as copy/pasta - I think the meds are kicking in.

[peter]

No Av - I expect it was just clumsy use of the small screen on my notepad.

(Keep taking the tabs Sarge - and if my rotten backache doesn't ease up soon I'll be joining you! )

[Avatar]

Ah, give me a desktop any day.

--A

[sgt.null]

Ah, give me a desktop any day.

--A

I have a beautiful older wood desk that we bought used for 9 bucks. it cost more to ship it to the house ($20.00). I've had it around fourteen years.

[peter]

My school desk top I remember with fondness. Etched into its surface by previous years of ink stained oiks, could be found knowledge of all the profanities an eight year old boy could desire, crude representations of parts of the female anatomy that would not be fully encountered for years to come and the secret names of 'beaks' by which they could be tormented and ridiculed in a manner as they so richly deserved.........

Ahhh, my old desktop!

[Avatar]

How times have changed.

--A

[peter]

The Guardian last week proclaimed that we should "tear up the green-field sites, convert the stately homes and reclaim the investment skyscrapers of London" in order to provide housing for the refugee families camped on the boarders of Europe. Fine sentiments, but I never heard them deployed in respect of the thousands of our own homeless families screaming out for housing!

[Avatar]

Don't mess with the green fields.

How bad is the UK homelessness problem? And to what extent is it self-imposed? I thought you could get a council flat in the UK if you were homeless?

--A

[peter]

We have many of thousands of families crammed in with their parents due to housing shortfalls, which are estimated to run into the hundreds of thousands nationwide. We have a fraction of the houses needed to bridge the gap between need and supply being built. Your realistic chances of securing a council flat or house run between zero and none - unless you are in an extreme situation eg actually on the street or about to be with a fistfull of young todlers. Our minnimum wage does not come even close to the level at which a mortgage can be secured and the rent on a two-bedroom house in Cornwall is around £170 per week against an income of say £220 for forty hours. Yes - we have a problem.

[Avatar]

Well, I was talking in terms of people who are actually on the street there.

--A

[peter]

Yes - it's an odd situation that one AV. Government statistics estimate that the number of people who actually sleep on the streets in the UK is between two and three thousand [bad enough surely], but given the number in my town alone I can only think this has to be a gross underestimation. There may be those amongst them that 'choose' this way of life, but my bet would be that mental illness, drug and alcohol dependancy and family/financial breakdown account for the bulk of them.