Public Transport? Fuck public transport.

Proof, if it were needed, of how increasingly ridiculous public transport is.

The senior executive decided on coach travel after it was found that taking 200 of the company's staff from Reading to Coventry by rail could cost as much as £27,000.

Last week, the first £1,000 fare in the history of Britain's railways was revealed by a survey showing how long-distance prices have soared since privatisation in the mid-1990s.

The trip from Newquay, Cornwall, costs £1,002 if the ticket is bought on the day of travel, and has met with fierce criticism.

Why the fucking fuck would anyone spend a thousand pounds to travel by TRAIN, for gods sake - you can fly to Los Angeles for around £400. And that's for one person. Imagine if there are 4 of you.

How can the environmentalists expect us to give up car travel when it's better in every way compared to public transport? It hasn't even got the price going for it! If I am held up, I'd much rather sit in a traffic jam (which I'd point out to the environmentalists isn't anywhere near as prolific as they try to make out!) in a plush comfortable car than on a freezing cold platform at Birmingham New Street.

So, let's weigh it up:

Going by car:
* Is cheaper than public transport, especially if there's more than one of you
* It's often quicker
* You can travel whenever you want, at no notice
* You can go wherever you want
* You don't need to wait for your car to be ready
* You can listen to any music you want, or choose to travel in complete silence - not listening to someone else's stupid mobile phone conversation
* You can be cool on a hot day, and warm on a cold one
* You don't have to tolerate other passengers, especially smelly, noisy, or fat ones
* Delays can be avoided with re-routing
* You can stop when you want for food or drink, for the kind of food or drink YOU want

Remind me why I should take the train or the bus?

Why is it always the munters?

A woman who was banned from making loud noises during sex has lost an appeal against her conviction.

They both must just be desperate to advertise to their neighbours the fact that they're getting it.

*Shudder*

Jeremy Clarkson on Mandelson [Censored]

Lifted from Old Holborn, a brilliant article on Mandy by Jeremy Clarkson in the times, which has since been pulled. Staggering. Who pulled it?

I’ve given the matter a great deal of thought all week, and I’m afraid I’ve decided that it’s no good putting Peter Mandelson in a prison. I’m afraid he will have to be tied to the front of a van and driven round the country until he isn’t alive any more.
He announced last week that middle-class children will simply not be allowed into the country’s top universities even if they have 4,000 A-levels, because all the places will be taken by Albanians and guillemots and whatever other stupid bandwagon the conniving idiot has leapt

I hate Peter Mandelson. I hate his fondness for extremely pale blue jeans and I hate that preposterous moustache he used to sport in the days when he didn’t bother trying to cover up his left-wing fanaticism. I hate the way he quite literally lords it over us even though he’s resigned in disgrace twice, and now holds an important decision-making job for which he was not elected. Mostly, though, I hate him because his one-man war on the bright and the witty and the successful means that half my friends now seem to be taking leave of their senses.

There’s talk of emigration in the air. It’s everywhere I go. Parties. Work. In the supermarket. My daughter is working herself half to death to get good grades at GSCE and can’t see the point because she won’t be going to university, because she doesn’t have a beak or flippers or a qualification in washing windscreens at the lights. She wonders, often, why we don’t live in America.

Then you have the chaps and chapesses who can’t stand the constant raids on their wallets and their privacy. They can’t understand why they are taxed at 50% on their income and then taxed again for driving into the nation’s capital. They can’t understand what happened to the hunt for the weapons of mass destruction. They can’t understand anything. They see the Highway Wombles in those brand new 4x4s that they paid for, and they see the M4 bus lane and they see the speed cameras and the community support officers and they see the Albanians stealing their wheelbarrows and nothing can be done because it’s racist.

And they see Alistair Darling handing over £4,350 of their money to not sort out the banking crisis that he doesn’t understand because he’s a small-town solicitor, and they see the stupid war on drugs and the war on drink and the war on smoking and the war on hunting and the war on fun and the war on scientists and the obsession with the climate and the price of train fares soaring past £1,000 and the Guardian power-brokers getting uppity about one shot baboon and not uppity at all about all the dead soldiers in Afghanistan, and how they got rid of Blair only to find the lying twerp is now going to come back even more powerful than ever, and they think, “I’ve had enough of this. I’m off.”

It’s a lovely idea, to get out of this stupid, Fairtrade, Brown-stained, Mandelson-skewed, equal-opportunities, multicultural, carbon-neutral, trendily left, regionally assembled, big-government, trilingual, mosque-drenched, all-the-pigs-are-equal, property-is-theft hellhole and set up shop somewhere else. But where?

You can’t go to France because you need to complete 17 forms in triplicate every time you want to build a greenhouse, and you can’t go to Switzerland because you will be reported to your neighbours by the police and subsequently shot in the head if you don’t sweep your lawn properly, and you can’t go to Italy because you’ll soon tire of waking up in the morning to find a horse’s head in your bed because you forgot to give a man called Don a bundle of used notes for “organising” a plumber.

You can’t go to Australia because it’s full of things that will eat you, you can’t go to New Zealand because they don’t accept anyone who is more than 40 and you can’t go to Monte Carlo because they don’t accept anyone who has less than 40 mill. And you can’t go to Spain because you’re not called Del and you weren’t involved in the Walthamstow blag. And you can’t go to Germany ... because you just can’t.

The Caribbean sounds tempting, but there is no work, which means that one day, whether you like it or not, you’ll end up like all the other expats, with a nose like a burst beetroot, wondering if it’s okay to have a small sharpener at 10 in the morning. And, as I keep explaining to my daughter, we can’t go to America because if you catch a cold over there, the health system is designed in such a way that you end up without a house. Or dead.

Canada’s full of people pretending to be French, South Africa’s too risky, Russia’s worse and everywhere else is too full of snow, too full of flies or too full of people who want to cut your head off on the internet. So you can dream all you like about upping sticks and moving to a country that doesn’t help itself to half of everything you earn and then spend the money it gets on bus lanes and advertisements about the dangers of salt. But wherever you go you’ll wind up an alcoholic or dead or bored or in a cellar, in an orange jumpsuit, gently wetting yourself on the web. All of these things are worse than being persecuted for eating a sandwich at the wheel.

I see no reason to be miserable. Yes, Britain now is worse than it’s been for decades, but the lunatics who’ve made it so ghastly are on their way out. Soon, they will be back in Hackney with their South African nuclear-free peace polenta. And instead the show will be run by a bloke whose dad has a wallpaper shop and possibly, terrifyingly, a twerp in Belgium whose fruitless game of hunt-the-WMD has netted him £15m on the lecture circuit.

So actually I do see a reason to be miserable. Which is why I think it’s a good idea to tie Peter Mandelson to a van. Such an act would be cruel and barbaric and inhuman. But it would at least cheer everyone up a bit. onto in the meantime.

UPDATE: Just in case anyone didn't believe it was there, it's still on Google (but not in Google Cache) if you search for the URL:



It's also still on the Times Website if you search for "rope" and "mandelson", though the link is dead.



UPDATE 2: Someone's put a screengrab of the article before they pulled it online.

UPDATE 3: It's back. Maybe a "technical" problem, but I'm inclined to think not.

Government responds to "Please Go" petition

Remember the petition calling for Gordon Brown to resign?

Glory be, the government have responded:

The Prime Minister is completely focussed on restoring the economy, getting people back to work and improving standards in public services. As the Prime Minister has consistently said, he is determined to build a stronger, fairer, better Britain for all.

Well, that's just fine then, isn't it. Over 72,000 people signed that petition (and since it was spread around the blogosphere but not much further, I expect many more would have) and that's the best response they can come up with.

Fuck me, it's like PMQs, isn't it?

Their arrogance knows no bounds

Yes, it's MP's expenses again.

The BBC are still reporting that MPs have got the utter cheek, the outright fucking mendacity to be absolutely furious they are losing the trough their snout is bolted to.

Some MPs have already made clear how concerned they were about the proposals from Sir Christopher Kelly's independent committee, leaked last week.

Tory MP Roger Gale suggested Sir Christopher was "not living in the real world" and said reports that MPs with constituency homes an hour from London would not be allowed to claim for a second home were "absolutely ludicrous".

So you find it unacceptable that you might have to commute an hour to work? Who do you think really is not living in the real world, you dispicable cunt? How fucking dare you show such arrogance and such disdain to the people who put you there? How dare you so personally insult the constituents that voted for you? Fuck you, Roger.

Labour's Sir Stuart Bell told the BBC existing mortgage arrangements "cannot be disturbed" and that he did not think MPs would "accept any enforced redundancies of present staff".

Why can't they be disturbed? Are they too much of a good thing to let go? And who the fuck are you to decide what MPs will and won't accept? You are our servants, not the other way around. Fuck you, Stuart.

Still they've got a plan to "fix" the problem:

Commons leader Harriet Harman has said MPs will not get a vote on the matter and it will go to the new Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (IPSA).

Independent eh? That sounds good. Oh, wait a minute...

The IPSA's chairman and board members will be approved by a new committee of MPs, headed by Speaker John Bercow, which includes three Labour MPs Sir Stuart Bell, Don Touhig and Liz Blackman, Conservative Sir George Young and Lib Dem Nick Harvey.

Independent my fucking arse. It's the same old shit with you cunts, isn't it?

Sir George said the IPSA would be independent and the MPs' committee would only oversee appointments but accepted that it would have to consult the committee, along with other bodies, when "preparing or revising" an expenses scheme.

Yeah yeah, usual shit. After all, turkeys don't vote for Christmas.

But even if the IPSA decides to take on board all Sir Christopher's recommendations, it is not clear when that might happen.

Never, if the MPs can help it. You can guarantee they'll just find another way to get the cash.

That prompted Lib Dem frontbencher David Heath to tell MPs last week: "I have my doubts whether the timetable will be such as to see real and effective change before the expiry of this Parliament.

Well, we won't see any "real and effective change". That bit's simple.

Brown "opens up" to Men's Magazine

Ignoring the disgusting "Goatse" image that the title of this post brings to mind, if this is all his advisors think he needs to do to get voters "on side" then he may as well throw in the fucking towel now.

In it Mr Brown insisted Labour can win the next election

I rest my case.

but when Morgan asked how he would make himself "sexy", Mr Brown said: "I can't change in the way you're asking me to."

Replace "sexy" with "competent" and you're closer to the truth.

After Morgan claimed the public perceived him as miserable and dour, Mr Brown said: "I accept I have to do better in the presentation area. I've got my strengths and I've got my weaknesses."

Actually, nobody gives a fuck about his presentation, and the fact that we perceive him as miserable and dour should frankly be far less of concern than the fact we find him excruciating to tolerate as a woefully incompetent prime minister, leading a woefully incompetent party.

Mr Brown went on to say he had "very little money", adding: "It's very expensive being prime minister. I gave up my prime ministerial pension that would be worth around £2 million, but on my first day in office I gave it up.

No, Gordon. Factory workers on minimum wage who struggle to feed their family and loose sleep wondering how the next bill is going to be paid have "very little money". You're never going to have to worry about how the next bill is going to be paid, are you, you despicable revolting champagne socialist. You gave up your prime ministerial pension? How fucking noble of you. But you still have your MP's gold-plated index-linked pension, I guess?

When asked how he wanted history to judge him, Mr Brown said: "That he stood up for fairness, and tried to ensure that people got a fair deal."

Errrr-errrr!

On the subject of entertainment the PM talked of his preference for ITV's X Factor over the BBC's Strictly Come Dancing.

He said: "[Simon] Cowell accused me of wavering in my support for The X Factor, but I haven't. I'm an X Factor fan, and Peter Mandelson looks after Strictly Come Dancing."

Ooh, mince! Chase me Peter, chase me!

Mandlesnake "leaking" Blair's EU President Intentions

...to the BBC.

But who gives a flying fuck whether Blair wants to be EU President or not? As far as the UK public and the rest of the EU is concerned, he's not fucking getting it.

How the fuck can he even contemplate it whilst families are still arriving at RAF Lineham to collect their dead sons?

And even worse, that fucking McDoom still thinks he has any clout at all, in the UK or abroad:

Gordon Brown is lobbying for Mr Blair but a lack of support from EU socialist leaders could scupper his chances.

I think Bliar has done a pretty fucking good job of scuppering his own chances.

Seriously, if Blair is installed as EU President, we're fucked.