Cumbria flooded with water but not money

In the last week 900 residents of Cockermouth have been flooded out of their homes or businesses. All the bridges are closed due to structural fears and several have been washed away - one with a police officer (Pc Bill Barker) on it at the time.

Gordon Brown flew in, toured the area, and pledged £1 million of government money as a contribution towards the estimated £100 million costs.

In the same time period the government has given £1 million to Sri Lanka for displaced persons camps, £2 million to South Waziristan for food and water, £1.5 million for road safety to the World Bank, £34 million for expectant mothers in Sierra Leone, and so on, amounting to £239 million in the last week alone.

Surely the people of Cumbria should have first call on our national largess at this time.

BNP

The many councils of Europe

There's the Council of Europe, the European Council and the Council of the European Union.

One of them has a new President and a new High Representative for Foreign and Security Affairs. Can you guess which one?

BBC

Organised child abuse in the UK

The subject of the sexual abuse of children in the UK by organised networks has reared its ugly head again. This time the children's charity Barnardos has raised the issue.

From the Times...

A secret network of organised child sex traffickers is operating within Britain according to the charity Barnardo’s.

Approximately one in six of the sexually exploited children currently being helped by the organisation say they have been moved between cities and passed around between paedophiles.

Martin Narey, chief executive of Barnardo’s, warned of a “hidden” problem in which vulnerable youngsters, many of whom have run away from home, are shunted around the country to increase their isolation.

“Through our work with children abused through prostitution, it became apparent that some young people were being moved around the UK, or from town to town, by abusing adults who would use the children for the purpose of sexual exploitation,” he said.

The charity said it was currently working with 609 sexually exploited children and young people, 90 of whom appeared to have been trafficked within the UK.

One of the victims of this trade, Imogen, ran away from her care home at the age of 12 with an older man she thought was her boyfriend.

She was groomed by a man who treated her well – giving her a mobile phone and the keys to a flat to use – before he began to abuse her.

“He was much older, he was protective – I felt looked after, wanted, loved even. He gave me everything I wanted,” she said, but soon she was being driven to “parties” around Britain where she was told to have sex with his friends.

“I didn’t have any choice – I felt so guilty. Eventually, he’d take me all over the country: Leeds, Bradford, Manchester, London. He’d take me to hotels, some nights two or three.

“I never saw any money change hands. Some men asked ‘How old is she?’ Some asked ‘Have you got any younger?’ They were really sick.”

The bit they never tell you, which you might just glean from the references to Leeds and Bradford, is that the abusers are usually Asian men following their Prophet's example - Mohammed married a seven year old girl, Aisha, and enjoyed sexual relations with her when she was nine.

The victims are white girls "absconded" from care homes.

No mainstream media organisation is prepared to report the ethnic aspect of this crime. They are muzzled by our draconian "anti-hate" laws.

Yesterday (some of) the voters of Glasgow North-East went to the polls to replace their MP, the former Speaker "Gorbals" Mike, who has gone to another place. Here's how they voted...


Labour won easily, with three times anyone else's number, the SNP are Labour's main rival in Scotland and the BNP and Tories slugged it out for 3rd place - the Cons eventually pipped the BNP at the post.

No-one else was anywhere. It's interesting to note that the two Labour "spin off" parties, Socialist Labour and Solidarity have no traction at all.

BBC

Some early thoughts on 2010

See that debt clock on the right-hand-side? Watch it for a minute or two and try to work out when it will reach one trillion pounds.

I reckon Spring next year. Maybe even May 6th, expected date of the next general election. Perhaps before.

A few other treats are in store for us early next year.

• The money for the car scrappage scheme will run out. (February probably)


• Quantitative easing will stop. Next year's GDP won't have that £200bn stimulus.


• VAT will rise from 15% to at least 17.5%, and some leaked documents indicated that the government is thinking of 18.5% or more. (Early hours of Jan 1st. They were going to make it on the stroke of midnight but with all the pubs and restaurants likely to be open at the time they eventually realised this would be a bad idea.)


• Inflation will rise; if the BoE is doing its job interest rates will rise as well.


• Gilt yields will rise. Ten year bonds are nudging 4% already.

Put it all together and what have you got? A rather gloomy Q1-Q2, I'd say.

It's day 20 in Somalia

Doesn't time just fly by? Already it's Day 20 of the kidnapping of Paul and Rachel Chandler by Somali pirates. I wonder how they are faring; if they are getting enough food etc.

Meanwhile the media has moved on and isn't reporting the story anymore.

There's one last plaintive message on their yachting blog, dated October 23rd.

Remembrance

On this day of this, at this time, 91 years ago, the French Marshal Foch, allied Commander-in-Chief and the German anti-war politician Matthias Erzberger met in a forest in Picardy, Northern France, and signed the armistice agreement which ended WWI. They were in such a hurry they never noticed that one of the pages of the document was pinned in upside-down.

What they were fighting about no-one can quite remember, but it was the Great War, the war to end all wars; that we all know.

Every year on this day we wear red plastic poppies to remember our “glorious dead” from that and subsequent wars. Some people start wearing them in late October, but frankly that’s just ostentatious. The correct form is: remembrance week only.

This year particularly, remembrance of our war dead is no great effort of recall. Every few days another funeral cortege passes through the Wiltshire market town of Wootton Bassett carrying soldiers fallen in Afghanistan on their last journey from RAF Lyneham to the John Radcliffe hospital in Oxford where they come into the care of the coroner. The residents of Wootton Bassett have taken to congregating in the High Street to pay their respects as the coffins go by. At first the military authorities tried to downplay this, but now they’ve adapted to the new custom and put on a decent show with crawling black hearses led by a tall man in top hat walking at the head of the procession.

Notable by their absence at these occasions are all the politicians who sent the soldiers to war in the first place. In fact the only party leader to attend has been Nick Griffin, chairman of the BNP, who arrived unannounced, without the massive security team he needed at the BBC, and when asked by journalists for his opinion refused to comment on the grounds that it was neither the time nor the place for politics. In this, he shows a sensitivity and sureness of touch to which none of our actual leaders could ever hope to aspire.