Anti-Tesco Protestors

Fed up with this now - they're at it again. This time protesting against a Tesco application in Hanham.

Do you think they would protest if it was a development application from Sainsburys or Waitrose?

Would they fuck. The hypocrisy is staggering.

Essentially, the people protesting against Tesco are the handwringing chattering classes who find Tesco opening stores at odds with their anti-globalist agenda, but won't admit it. It has nothing to do with "saving the shops on the local high street", or "increased congestion and pollution", but they don't have the gonads to say so, mainly because they realise it's not really a valid complaint.

This was demonstrated aptly with the recent BERATE campaign in Bedminster, who had no problems with Sainsburys building a store there - because somehow that wouldn't harm local shops or increase congestion like a Tesco would. They seemed strangely unable to justify why this was.

People moaned when Tesco built a store on Golden Hill - now even the snottiest of Westbury-On-Trym residents use it.

Julraj in the comments section of the above article sums it up perfectly:

Don't worry, the usual thing will happen...
1. Tesco want to build a new store.
2. Local NIMBYs get together and attempt to block building it for reasons like 'it will ruin our highstreet' and 'think of the environmental impact!'
3. Tesco run out of patience
4. NIMBYs announce victory and disband
5. Sainsburys/Waitrose strike a deal to build there instead
6. NIMBYs like the idea of Sainsburys/Waitrose (hypocritical prats) and instead talk nostalgically about how the will enjoy their new supermarket.
7. Everyone with any brain confused that their original points on why not to have a Tesco dont seem to apply to either a Sainsburys or a Waitrose.
...in the future...
8. Local highstreet dies?

As I've said before, if the opening of a Tesco "threatens" the highstreet shops, then the shops aren't fucking good enough. If they were, they'd stay open and retain their trade regardless of a supermarket close by. Especially in the case of North Street, where there was an overpriced and understocked Spar clone, a couple of run-down hardware and charity shops, and not much else.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Or for those of us who speak a relevant language, Who watches the watchers?

A second member of the MPs' standards body is defending his expenses claims after reports he "flipped" two homes.

Labour's Andrew Dismore, who represents a north London seat about 10 miles from Parliament, claimed £34,000 on a second home in west London between 2001-2003.

The Daily Telegraph said he then made second home claims on his Hendon flat, amounting to £31,000 from 2003-2009.

What a fucking surprise. No, really.

The Daily Telegraph says he owned the Notting Hill flat with his partner, who ran her homeopathy surgery from the property, and designated it with the Commons fees office as his second home, on which he was allowed to claim expenses.

This really says it all. How can homeopathy, which has been proven as pseudoscience and quackery on occasions far too many to mention, have a "surgery"? By using this term the BBC are just giving it credibility.

He said: "It was the right thing to do to designate the Hendon property as the second home and the London property as the main home."

You can tell he's a Labour MP can't you - telling us what we should be thinking is the right thing. You're not allowed your own opinion under a Labour government, proles.

He added: "The Hendon property was cheaper to run, which was also an important consideration to me, and my claims progressively and rapidly reduced year on year since then.

"Although I could have claimed more I did not do so."

How very noble of you Andrew. You grasping cunt.

He looks like a cunt too:



You can almost smell the arrogance.

MASSIVE development on Climate Change - CRU emails & data hacked & leaked

See here. Initial analysis confirms this is legit.

It seems the Climate Science cat is out the bag. The scientists have been fiddling with data and models to attempt hide the Global Warming decline as well as all sorts of other shit.

Grab the .zip file while you still can here, read it, and weep.

There's simply too much here for it to be a forgery in my opinion.

Update: The BBC has reported the hack, but is not reporting the content of the emails. Typical.

Update 2: The excellent Bishop's Hill blog has provided summaries of the mails to save many of us wading through them. (Thanks to Banned in the comments)

Fake Jan Ormondroyd Twitter feed

Saw it on a few people's twitter things on their blogs (I can't be arsed with Twitter) here.

Great idea, but a shame that they let the cat out of the bag so quickly with an admittedly amusing post:

Daydreaming & getting a little bit moist in the knickers at the thought of the next visit from all the fellas at the FA

Not an image anyone would wish to savour, I'm sure. I can't help thinking if they'd carried on the earlier tweets about Strategy and Leadership for a while they would have reeled quite a few people in on that one!

A seriously misguided gift

At a rather misguided hippyish online shop called the Good Gift Shop. It revolves around the principle that instead of buying someone a present like a nice bottle of wine, you buy them the "gift" of giving money to some shoeless Indian street kid.

All very noble, although the gift-giving is a bit imbalanced, with the person giving the gift left with a warm and fuzzy feeling, and the reciever getting....fuck all.

Still, whilst there are very worthy sounding causes like Supporting an Afghan Girl for £20 or A year's schooling for a pupil for £25, there's one that really takes the fucking biscuit.

For ordinary folk - reduce the National Debt.

In purchasing this, essentially you are just giving money, money intended to buy a friend or relative a present, straight to the government. The spiel is even worse:

Why lumber your descendants with a staggering debt burden? Now is the time to start reducing the National Debt in their names (and their interest). A wonderful present for children and grandchildren. If you think it´s futile, be more effective and increase your contribution. We even have a bonus for bankers.

Delivery through the Charities Advisory Trust to HM treasury

So this company of fucking clueless hippy hairshirt-wearers are advocating just giving the government money. They are advocating, as if enough isn't taken from us already, the people of the country bailing out the government from it's financial incompetence and mis-managment - which of course is what will happen, but these people are helping it along!

Even worse, this "gift" is placed in all seriousness on the same page as paying for a water pump in an African village or a bike for an Indian midwife.

But yet they think that an equally worthy cause is fucking giving money to the Treasury, because Gordon Brown has borrowed too much and spent it on nothing.

"Well Johnny, we were going to buy you a Playstation 3, but then we thought a far better use of the money was just to pay more tax".

Words fucking fail me. However, if they don't fail you, feel free to contact The Good Gift Shop to tell them what you think about this particular gift.

A brilliant letter

Over at Liberal Conspiracy a brilliant letter has been written to Baroness Buscombe in response to the PCC's idea of extending its remit to cover blogs as well:

Baroness Buscombe
Chair
Press Complaints Commission
Halton House
20/23 Holborn
London EC1N 2JD

Cc. Rt. Hon. Ben Bradshaw MP, Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport
Cc. John Whittingdale MP, Culture, Media and Sport Committee

17 November 2009

Dear Lady Buscombe

Re: Extension of PCC regulation to UK Blogs/Blogging

We write in regards to your apparent proposal that the PCC should consider extending its remit to the ‘blogosphere’ as reported by Ian Burrell of the Independent on 16 November 2009 (1).

While we are grateful for your interest in our activities we must regretfully decline your kind offer of future PCC regulation. Frankly, we do not feel that the further development of blogging as an interactive medium that facilitates the free exchange of ideas and opinions will benefit from regulation by a body representing an industry with, in the main, substantially lower ethical standards and practices than those already practiced by the vast majority of established British bloggers.

Although we would not wish you believe that this criticism relates to all your members – The Guardian, in particular, has adopted a number of practices, not least the appointment of a Readers’ Editor to deal with complaints, which we consider to be the current gold standard in ethical journalistic practice amongst national newspapers – It is nevertheless the case that the vast majority of national newspaper titles routinely fall well short of both those, and our own, standards and that our direct experience of dealing with the Press Complaints Commission shows the organisation to be, in the main, complicit in those failings.

To give but one recent example of bad practice, of the many that bloggers have documented in over the last few years, an article published by the Tabloid Watch blog in October, covered documented, in some considerable detail, the tortuous process that one of its readers had to go through in order to get the News of the World to retract a manifestly untrue and inflammatory statement by one of its regular columnists, Carole Malone. In this particular column, published in July 2009, Malone made use of an all-too-common and utterly racist myth that ‘immigrants’ (meaning asylum seekers) receive free cars on arriving in the UK (2), a myth that is most closely associated with the propaganda output of the British National Party.

All you have to do to get everything Britain has to offer is to turn up illegally with some sob story of how your own country is too dangerous or that you’re a lesbian who’ll be shot if you stay there and Hey Presto, it’s like you’ve won the lottery! And, in effect, they HAVE.

Free houses, free cars, free healthcare and free money. Hell, they don’t even have to work or speak the language. Even the suggestion they should is seen as racist in Brown’s Britain.

They can just live as they did before, only with a whole heap more money and zero responsibility to the country providing it. (3)

What we find most striking about the process documented by Tabloid Watch is the extent to which the PCC actively sought to facilitate the News of the World’s efforts to avoid undertaking practices that we, as bloggers, take for granted as being standard practice in our corner of the Internet; i.e. the prominent publication of an honest and open correction of a factual error on the original article in which the error, itself, was made. Instead, as we invariably find to be standard practice amongst, particularly, tabloid newspapers; the correction and cursory apology (4)– when it was grudgingly issued after what Tabloid Watch described as ‘two months of wrangling’ – appeared in a location other than that of Malone’s column in the newspaper’s print edition and on its website on a page utterly divorced the article to which it relates, which was removed its entirely, and in such a way that only someone searching specifically for the retraction would ever be likely to find it. (5)

To all intents and purposes, the retraction might as well not have been issued, for all that it would apparent to visitors to the News of World’s website that it had ever been made.

This is but one clear example of a practice that would be unacceptable amongst established bloggers and one of many that bloggers who specialise in monitoring the national press for accuracy have documented in recent years. For a blogger to engage in such practices, which include ‘stealth editing’ of articles, after publication, to avoid owning up to factual errors and removing and/or refusing to publish critical comments from readers, especially those that highlight and correct factual errors.

For an established blogger to adopt such practices would do incalculable damage to their public reputation; this being, after all, all that we have to trade on.

To the vast majority of national newspapers such conduct is no more than standard operating practice.

Consequently we would suggest that before your even consider turning your attention to our activities, you should direct your energies towards putting your own house in proper order. Should you succeed in raising the ethical standards and practices of the majority of the national press, particularly the tabloids, to our level then we may be inclined to reconsider our position. Until that happens, any attempt by the Press Complaints Commission to regulate the activities of bloggers will be strenuously resisted at every possible turn.

Regards,

Unity – Ministry of Truth (6) and Liberal Conspiracy (7)

I suggest everyone signs it!

Private Parking Companies - Parking Eye, MET Parking Services, etc - the lowdown

Reading this story on the Evening Post Website reminded me of a post I've been meaning to do for a while on these fucking shysters.

A Bristol motorist has been fined after being accused of leaving her car in a McDonald's car park for 41 days.

Teresa Tremlett was stunned when she opened a letter to find a £100 fine from MET Parking Services claiming she had overstayed her welcome in the car park in Bedminster by 60,160 minutes.

The parking company enclosed CCTV images of Mrs Tremlett's Mercedes entering the car park in Sheene Road on September 24 and another one of her leaving the car park on November 5.

But Mrs Tremlett, 34, from Headley, says she had simply gone into McDonald's to buy food using the drive-through on both dates and had not parked her car in the car park on either occasion.

When she explained to MET Parking Services, she was told her fine would be waived.

OK, let's get a few things straight here.

1) The "fines" are not fines. They are (unenforceable) invoices for a civil contract they allege you have entered into. These companies are for all intents and purposes, fucking con-artists. They put up signs in car parks of selected companies such as B&Q, McDonalds, Pizza Hut etc which are sometimes easy to see, sometimes not, and then post you a letter demanding money if you overstay in the car park. They rely on two things: a) You not knowing the law and b) You being duped by their attempts to make their demand look official such as a chequered border round the edge of the letter, and using terms in the letter such as "Penalty Charge Notice" or "PCN" (it's not one), as well as attaching a tear-off cheque.

2) These companies are operating with the permission of the car park's owners (be that B&Q, McD's or whatever) but often the owner has no idea of what kind of shady business practices the companies get up to, with threatening letters, abusive phonecalls, etc.

3) These companies are private parking companies. They have no legal authority whatsoever to issue parking tickets. The only people that can are the Police and the Council, and only then on the public highway or publically owned land.

4) The "contract" that parking company claim exists between you and them (i.e. by parking in the car park you agree to their terms and conditions) only exists if you are aware of it. In order for you to be aware of it you need to have seen the sign. These signs need to be clearly placed and be reasonably visible from where you parked.

5) The "debt collectors" and "CCJs" threatened by the letters will not materialise. You may well be sent letters from a credit collection company, but miraculously they will have the same address and bank account details as the parking company. It's a front. Furthermore, they haven't yet taken anyone to court. Why do you suppose this might be? Because these invoices are unenforceable in law. They are in a clear breach of the Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts Regulations 1999 by charging a "fine" which is completely disproportionate to the loss incurred by the company (i.e. charging you £100 for overstaying in a free car park). These are the very same regulations used succesfully by many people fighting bank overdraft charges. As with overdraft charges, it doesn't even matter if you're made aware of these fine amounts and agree to them when you park (on the sign) - it's not relevant as far as the law is concerned. The only thing they are legally allowed to do is claim actual damages for breach of contract. (And even then they have to prove who was driving, and you have no obligation whatsoever to tell them as a private company). And since no damages have occurred (you have parked a bit too long in a free car park), there's nothing really they can claim for.

What should you do if you get a letter

My advice, based on extensive research, is just to ignore it. They will send another, maybe 2. You may then get (but not always) a letter from a "credit collection company". This is normally the same company as the private parking one, under a different guise. Ignore this like you have done the previous letters. Nothing will happen. If it does go to court (which it won't), you will win anyway. If you respond, you'll go onto a "potential fuckwit" list and they'll just pester you even more. Fuck them.

An interesting aside is that this also applies to paid car parks, e.g. NCP. They may try to charge you a similar amount for overstaying your paid-for parking ticket, but they can't, due to the same reasons as detailed above. All they can claim for in court is the loss that they have incurred, which would be how much it would have cost you to buy a ticket to cover the overstayed time.