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I do love it when politicians are shown up for what they are.  In my local council area, controlled by the Tories, though I didn't vote for em, there has been a lot of talk recently about the need to reduce the number of schools in order to save costs.  This has been subject to a long and somewhat painful consultation process over the past few months.  Well today the council finally gave its verdict and a number of schools are now to close.

But the schools are fighting back.  At least one of them is promising to use the national government's Academy Schools legislation to wrestle itself away from local authority control in order to save itself.  Where will the money come from to fund this new academy?  Well, I'm not entirely sure, but I wouldn't mind betting that money will be removed from the local council's education budget in order to fund it, even though it now has no control over it and indeed had planned to close it because it couldn't afford to keep it open.

Well that's that then isn't it?  We had the chance to vote for a change, for a more representative form of election to our legislature and we blew it completely.  I don't think that I will ever bother voting again, certainly not in a UK General Election.  My vote is meaningless.  Like I have said before, a dustbin with a blue rosette would be elected as MP in our constituency.  I don't want a Tory MP, I would never vote for one, yet living where I live, I will always get one.  Similarly, if I lived in a constituency in Liverpool or Manchester there would be the same chance of not having a Labour MP.  Nothing that I could do in voting for somebody else would make the blindest bit of difference.

Forget the House of Commons expenses nonsense, this was the biggest scandal in British political history over the last few years.  We had a chance to change things, to make parliament better reflect the will of the people and we fouled up.

I read this description of the grate* man the other day.  I think it's very apt.  Now, I'm not a big fan of cars for their own sake, although I will concede that they are a perfectly good way of getting your shopping home, or taking you out somewhere.  However, as for drooling over their sleek lines or smooth acceleration upto 60mph in less than 3 minutes forget it, I'm not interested.  The other two, I quite like.  James May and Richard Hammond could and indeed do present other programmes that I quite happily watch.

The other day, I was wondering why this should be the case.  It's really quite a difficult thing to put your finger on.  I mean there are other undesirables on TV, Lord knows.  But Jeremy Clarkson just seems to ooze something - you can't see it, or smell it and you certainly can't touch it - it's intangible.  The biggest part of it is his casual xenophobia, always delivered with a smug, if unspoken, "we're British you know."  Unparalleled wanker.

* Yes, I know - it's deliberate.  I spelled it like that because he really grates on me, I mean really grates on me.

I find this more than a little bit cheeky.  In the UK we now have a two-part driving licence - the paper-y bit and a photo-card.  Now I don't know if this is all that cutting edge in terms of what other countries have (it may not be cutting edge at all!), but it seems to be a sensible way of doing things - perhaps one day the move will be towards doing away with the paper-y bit.  But hey, that's not the point of this particular rant...

No Sir.  I'm jibbing about the fact that I have just been asked to renew my photo-card.  This is not unreasonable - our facial appearance does change over time.  But then I read further into the form and see that they want a whopping £20 fee to cover costs!  What bloody costs?  I've taken the picture, all they have to do is scan it, produce the new card and stick in the post to me.  And I'll bet it comes back 2nd class... grr!

They are bloody hopeless aren't they?  I mean, you wash your hands and rinse off the soap so that they're properly wet.  You sashay over to the dryer and hold out your hands, hoping to have them dried.  What you actually get is 2 minutes of a weak, wheezy attempt by the asthmatic motor which merely redistributes the water droplets on your hand, rather than driving them off into the atmosphere.  So you attempt to start the infernal machine again, but of course it's tired itself out with all that heavy breathing, so something inside it says, 'no, I'm afraid you'll have to wait.'  So you give your hands another shake and put them back underneath the vent.  Again, nothing happens, so you quit the scene, muttering grumpily to yourself.  (The fact that the next thing you touch with your clean, if wet, hands is the door handle that countless dirty gets who didn't bother to wash their hands have also touched is the subject of another blog post...)

They are so bad, that I remember one colleague of mine who after washing his hands would shake them vigorously for the odd second, virtually run up to the drier, flap his hands underneath it, thus forcing it to switch itself on for the briefest of brief moments and then quit the washroom, running maniacally back to his desk to complete the job on the latest carefully crafted piece of work that one of his minions had probably spent hours over.

Our good friend Sir James Dyson has obviously been so miffed by his experiences at trying to have his hands dried for him that he has come up with his blade drier and this actually works a lot better.  You can actually see the skin on your hands moving as the much better targeted jet of warm air does the job that it's designed for.  Of course, one thing that Sir James cannot compete with is the address of one of the other providers of sanitary hot air driers.  I won't mention the name, I'd only embarrass them, but they are (or at least were) located at Honeypot Lane in North London.  Great business address, shockingly bad hand driers.

I've just been listening to Jeremy Vine's show on Radio 2.  One of the topics was surrounding the issue of flashing fellow motorists when you see a mobile speed trap - some guy had apparently been successfully prosecuted for doing same.  The gist of the argument of quite a number of callers was that they would always flash in such an event.  I find this quite incredible, and their justifications of it even more so.

The motor car is a great liberator but it can also perform the opposite role.  We become enslaved to the bloody thing.  I'd call it the Clarkson effect.  It makes people want to drive their cars with little regard for the legal speed limit and then get very hot under the collar about the police actually attempting to enforce such limits - spouting all manner of nonsense about 'proper crime'; the same people park their cars all over the place at primary schools, never mind that they're blocking the road / pavement / roundabout / someone's drive.

I reckon it's all gone mad since the 80's when personal choice was handed over to us to do with what we want and basically, bugger the consequences... just a thought.

Hmm... scratches head and strokes chin a la Reeves and Mortimer's Ponderers.  Can't quite think what they're doing here.  The maths are not difficult for the individual.  A three year degree could very well cost £9,000 per annum, making a total of £27,000.  That's twenty-seven-thousand-pounds.  A big hole in anyone's budgeting.  Even if you manage to keep your living expenses down to something manageable like £5,000 a year that's a total debt of £42,000 before you even start work.  That is a whole field of beans, never mind a pile.

Why have they done this? I suppose that there are many different answers and I'm not going to attempt to discuss them now.  Save to say, it's short sighted in my opinion.  I feel that there's a real case of understanding the cost of everything and the value of nothing.  We need graduates if we are going to enable our economy to grow.  I have no figures to back this up, but it's pretty obvious I'd say.  Yes we also need entrepreneurial types who perhaps wouldn't go to University anyway, but even in their companies, they will need graduates.  And so it goes on.  I think that £42,000 worth of debt before your reach the age of 23 wouldn't faze many of today's youth.  However when pressure or advice from parents and other concerned parties is brought to bear, we may well see a rapid reduction in the number of sixth form students progressing on to University life.  Who knows?

It's December, it's Britain, it's freezing and we are still plagued by house flies.  What is the world coming to?  It's a strange, twisted paradox.  One possible answer is global warming, you know the science bête noire that just won't go away (except in Britain, in December when it's freezing).  We had them for a long time last year, well into November, but this year they've really taken the biscuit.  It's currently 8th December and they're still here, despite our having been gripped in the coldest of cold snaaaaaaaps - almost 3 weeks already, it's going to be a long long winter.  They're sluggish mind, oh yes.  I sprayed one with some underarm deodorant in the bathroom this afternoon.  It made no attempt to fly away and just took the full force of the blast from the aerosol.  That'll teach the little blighters...

I don't usually comment on Mark Lawrenson's predictions on the BBC - he is usually so boringly safe (and wrong) with his predictions - but this week they've only gone an invited the PM to make his suggestions as to the scores. He's a big Villa fan by all accounts. Why is it that Toffs go for Villa? I mean, that Nigel Kennedy is a Villan too. Anyway, I digress (and based on such a small sample too), Dave has suggested that Villa will win 6-0 at Anfield on Monday night. Stick that one in yer pipe Lawro...

Anyway, enjoy the PM's predictions in full here.