Sunday, April 19

Ed Balls' 'Balls-Up'

BALLS is back in the news for the wrong reasons!
And it just so happens I am supposed to be meeting the Schools Secretary already under fire for the Sats exams and expenses this week. Tweet me @betterpolitics www.twitter.com/betterpolitics with your questions.
Now it seems he has been slagging off his colleagues behind their backs as part of a bid to become party leader. For more see here: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1171892/Schools-Secretary-Ed-Balls-used-Damian-McBride-undermine-ministerial-rivals.html And poor Mandy might have been in the firing line.
He, of course, denies it and Tessa Jowell has been wheeled out to back him up. But surely this is just another balls-up for a hapless minister.
Maybe it's time for him to say goodbye.
*By the way, what the hell is Richard Branson doing?

Thursday, April 9

The Dawn Bin Raiders - What a Waste of Resources

IMAGINE being woken up at half-five in the morning by strange men sifting through your wheelie bin before gathering all of your rubbish and pouring it into a white van.
You are likely to feel slightly afraid wondering what the hell is going on! You might even call the police for fear you are being robbed!
But this scenario is being played out in Lancashire where the county council is sending out agency workers in the early hours of the morning to look through people's bins! It recently happened in a surburban part of Chorley where one woman said she was about to call the police and another man approached them to ask why they were snooping at such a ridiculous time.
Why? Apparently, to find out what we are throwing away as it helps them launch campaigns to minimise the wrong things going to landfill! And the county council say they are justified in doing this.
An article is set to go into a local newspaper about this scandalous activity which one councillor thought was a wind-up! And so did I when I first heard of it.
Not only that, it costs £30,000 of taxpayers' money per "waste audit" and a team of up to nine people are needed for this. They sign confidentiality agreements apparently so we can all be safe they won't be nicking our identities any time soon with the information they find!!! I'm not convinced.
In this era of constant privacy breaches, this really takes the biscuit and I urge anyone who reads this to write to the county council to vent their frustrations!
I will post the news article here when it finally goes up online.