Gurkha Issue

I am so glad that the Lib Dems and Conservatives could come together on this issue and vote this bill down. Hopefully the Government won't have the moral cowardice to ride rough shod over this as they have other things.

It seems the more you give to this country the less you are though of. I am not particularly military specialist or fan but these people have committed themselves to this country we need to commit ourselves to them. We seem to let any other random in to this country to leach off it but the Government are not willing to pay for patriots.

I've found the money needed for these people to stay in our country. (like alot of other people)

Number 1 - Scrap the Nuclear Arms Replacement program. (Loads of money)

Number 2 - Scrap the ID card system (Loads of Money)

Number 3 - Get Jackie Smith's husband to claim the money on her expenses as Porn. She doesn't check them receipts.

None of the bravery medal nonsense. They are all brave if they commit themselves to armed combat.

Robert Shaw School Clean Up.

A lovely day for a clean up today. All the pupils from the year 4 class came out to help out with the litter pick, assisted by local residents, some parents, a member of the Local Area team and the local Lib Dem Councillors.

A great effort by all with about 20 bags of litter and garden rubbish with a large quantity of brambles and broken twigs/branches being put in a skip. The efforts of the children and parents has almost cleared the edge of the school of the litter that has built up over the years. A few interesting items were found including an old childs bike, an angle grinder blade and an old axe.

The efforts of the Residents Association cleared old twigs and branches with a couple of the Association managing to clear a good portion including brambles. I have a few cuts from this but not as painful as the paper cut on my little finger.

The pictures show a portion of the hard work carried out by the volunteers. The subway which provides access to the school was also given a good spruce with a wheel barrow full of leaves and litter collected.

Support in the way of equipment and rubbish bags was organised by Susan Ward-Rice, one of the Neighbourhood Officers for the area and the collected rubbish was taken away by Streetscene.

During this time the Local Councillors Foster and Long put themselves to work collecting litter for the street Robert Shaw is located on and with ferreting around in hedges managed to collect a big bag full of litter.

A big thank you to everyone involved.

Big Spring Clean - Robert Shaw School

As part of Nottinghams Big Spring Clean as few of the Residents Association, Year 4 pupils and a couple of others are getting together tomorrow to give the school a bit of a spruce.

Thankfully it looks as though the weather is going to be nice for us. Hopefully we'll all get the place spic and span.

Finally a break in the rain.

At least one of these Bank Holiday days has turned out to be relatively rain free day, although everything is still damp so no playground for the children unfortunately.

The wife is trying to get profile done for her yearly assessment so a little peace time is required. A little walk was in order to burn off the whole Easter egg that the children have just ate. A whole egg in one go, how they were not ill I'll never know. Glad to see Nestle have removed the plastic packing and replaced with cardboard and reduced the size of the box. I had read this was a plan of theirs. Good on them.

There was a bit of land near a subway that seemed to be a litter trap so a couple of black bags later the years of litter have been significantly reduced as well as a whole carrier bag of can recycling which went in the appropriate bin.

A couple a miles later back to home a few calories burnt off and a bit less muck on the street.

Ikea Nottingham on a Saturday Afternoon

We need some of Ikea's storage units for the "Toys R Us" volume of toys that the children have. Ikea have a couple of good storage ideas and since I have removed the old useless fitted wardrobes from their bedroom we now have the space.

The suggestion was put, "Why don't you go this afternoon?"

I thought about this and decided that the volume of traffic on a Saturday afternoon is comparable to the entire D-Day landing force.

I decided to put it off to a late evening one day in the week.

Nottingham Industrial Museum

Being a reasonably damp day we decided to take a little walk to Wollaton Hall Natural History Museum and the attached Nottingham Industrial Museum. Both of these excellent facilities are thankfully inside are free to everyone as the Nottingham Industrial Museum always has been. It has been compiled, repaired and maintained by volunteers all these years.

Nottingham City Council has given these people money to maintain this facility to his point. Now because of a shortfall in the council budget of £20 million pounds they plan on removing this funding. A paltry £44,000 in the grand scheme of things.

Isn't it strange that they can find the unreal amount of money for the Nottingham Contempary Art Gallery from a VAT refund, what a lucky refund that was to get them out of a pickle.

http://www.thisisnottingham.co.uk/news/Petition-save-Nottingham-s-heritage/article-756538-detail/article.html

As someone in a letter of response to the article about says, there are plenty of art gallerys in available in Nottingham already but there is only one Industrial Museum and these machines are not something you can switch off and then in 2 years time just switch back off again.

The article from this Evening Post above also quotes Councillor David Trimble regarding the gallery, "It is this sort of thing that put Newcastle/Gateshead on the map". Do we have a case of City envy Mr Trimble. There is also the fact the just a gallery doesn't make a city Mr Trimble.

OH by the way, Newcastle Council is a Liberal Democrat run council, take some tips Mr Trimble and your LABOUR colleagues. I know one thing, I'm envious of the Newcastle citizenry for this fact.

Thanks for choosing an easy, non-fashionable target Labour Councillors.

About time for a change.

Recently, although I am quite comfortable in my life and have actually quite prospered even in this downturn, I have become despondent with the inadequate way we are being governed and the complete disregard for the common person with which this government acts.

From the actions that took us in to the Iraq war after such a significant protest against this course to the complete mismanagement of our economy based on the premise we have got some money lets spend it (during the boom times) instead of what was being preached to us about saving and our own financial responsibility. Normally I wouldn't be against an ID card scheme, one did exist just after World War II for several years, but it is the insidious amount of data they wish to hold about you that fills me with fear and sickness. If this government were to have their way my and my children's DNA profiles as well as all manner of biometric data would be collected with as little thought as someone collect coupons from a supermarket. They can not be trusted to hold this data secure. This is my mind just classifies everyone from BIRTH as a future criminal to be monitored, catalogued, suppressed and feared. How long before we cross further over the line and criminalise more aspects of our lives. It all seems to be creeping in the back door through these times with civil liberties being eroded in the times of so called emergencies but these liberties never being returned once the emergency is over.

We are constantly informed of the threat of terrorism which I am sure our secret services are doing a enormous job to keep us safe. I remember the IRA attacks on the British mainland happening on a regular basis but no DNA database, biometric ID card or such like that would have been available at the time being proposed. A database of every law-abiding individual is not needed. Use the money being wasted on other resources for the correct people to be investigated, infiltrated and imprisoned when they wish us serious harm.

It brings me to the point of this rant, thoughts or feelings whatever it is to say that we need a change in our lives and my conversion half way through my life (hopefully less) to take a deeper interest in the main parties in our politic system and my position of blissful and comfortableness in my old position of doing the same old thing.

I now believe that our 2 parties that are at the head of the game just take it in turns making an absolute mess of country after a certain period in office without the will to change anything that might overly offend their paymasters for fear of reducing their own personal income. They are bought parties doing what they think is best and listening to no one else because we do not matter.

I took an online test recently that asked a series of questions and was surprised to find that i was definitely holding out the wrong political position. This took me to look more in-depth at the Liberal Democrat party, what the stand for and what changes the could make.

We have had Liberal Democrat councillors in my ward for a number of years and have always been impressed by their attentiveness to local issues that actually matter to people but when it came to a General Election I am guilty, like maybe a lot of people, of being steered to vote for the usual gruesome twosome.

We have the vote to change that, use it and DON'T listen to the nay-sayers that "oh, the Liberal Democrats will never get enough votes."

We need to vote for a party that is instilled with the values of Freedom, Fairness and Trust to change our lives for the better.

http://www.libdems.org.uk/policies

Delicious Proof

On Friday I had the unfortunate gift of having the abominable "Loose Women" on the communal television screen at work. These Macbeth-styled witches were giving their unwanted opinions and brewing up uninformed words on the nature of politeness in Britain and the supposed North/South divide that seems to exist in politeness and open friendliness to strangers.

A conservation started in our communal area regarding the attributes of Nottingham in this respect which started off quite positively but the area was frequented by a work (i was going to say colleague but that would denote some form of positive association so I'll say "a person I work near") who has such a negative orientation on life that this conversation degenerated in to her usual sardonic comments about everything about the place she hates.

Boy did she generalise and club everyone in the city in to the same basket. For some reason she mentioned she has fallen down a lot in the past in the city (God only knows why, if he exists) and no one has ever come to her aid. Vehemently denying that this makes everyone rude and unhelpful and pointing out that someone of her age would be perfectly capable of extracting themselves from the floor. My response was that I was positive if a child or a pensioner had fallen over (obviously a child with no one to be seen in attendance) that the good people of Nottingham would come to their aid.

To my utter satisfaction we were in the City Centre this Sunday morning and an incident occurred in the corner of my eye. I turned to see a lady had slipped to the floor (uninjured, thankfully) and no fewer that 4 people at her attendance. Thank you to the good Nottingham people for proving me right.