I have a lifelong condition, and require 3 x Perscriptions per month. Fortunately for me I get the yearly certificate which costs £108 instead of £336 a year for single Perscriptions’s.
I am really pissed off with this government saying it is easy to be wise in hindsight. I would like them just once to demonstrate some foresight.
I have always admired Hilary Mantel but found a great deal of respect for her after reading this. I share her sentiment exactly and wish I had an Irish grandparent. Hilary Mantel: I am ashamed to live in nation that elected this government (msn.com)
Just reading about the US prison-industrial complex ... (Note: In the realm of psychology a complex is an overreaction to some perceived threat) "Three decades after the war on crime began, the United States has developed a prison-industrial complex—a set of bureaucratic, political, and economic interests that encourage increased spending on imprisonment, regardless of the actual need. The prison-industrial complex is not a conspiracy, guiding the nation's criminal-justice policy behind closed doors. It is a confluence of special interests that has given prison construction in the United States a seemingly unstoppable momentum. It is composed of politicians, both liberal and conservative, who have used the fear of crime to gain votes; impoverished rural areas where prisons have become a cornerstone of economic development; private companies that regard the roughly $35 billion spent each year on corrections not as a burden on American taxpayers but as a lucrative market; and government officials whose fiefdoms have expanded along with the inmate population" "California now has the biggest prison system in the Western industrialized world, a system 40 percent bigger than the Federal Bureau of Prisons. The state holds more inmates in its jails and prisons than do France, Great Britain, Germany, Japan, Singapore, and the Netherlands combined" (Note: That's for a population of under 40m) "Among those arrested for violent crimes, the proportion who are African-American men has changed little over the past twenty years. Among those arrested for drug crimes, the proportion who are African-American men has tripled. Although the prevalence of illegal drug use among white men is approximately the same as that among black men, black men are five times as likely to be arrested for a drug offense. As a result, about half the inmates in the United States are African-American. One out of every fourteen black men is now in prison or jail. One out of every four black men is likely to be imprisoned at some point during his lifetime" The last two sentences are truly shocking
There's also a political element, beyond looking tough on crime. In the aftermath of the abolition of slavery, there was a massive shortfall of labour in some parts of the south, because those industries were accustomed to running off the free labour of the enslaved. But there was a clever workaround: the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery, had a caveat allowing forced penal labour. The obvious result? Convict huge numbers of Black people of petty crimes, and then force them to work: https://slate.com/news-and-politics...very-shane-bauer-american-prison-excerpt.html Now you have slavery but with the sheen of moral rectitude, because you're putting these ne'er-do-wells (who generally did nothing wrong) to productive service. And then again, when Jim Crow laws finally died off after the passage of civil rights legislation in the 1960s, states had to find a new way to deny rights to Black people. And again, there was a caveat in the 14th Amendment (which guaranteed political rights to all citizens but had been trampled on for a century) that could be read to deny the right to vote to those who have committed a felony. Naturally, this meant getting 'tough on crime', where you hang felonies on as many Black people as possible to deny them political agency. These laws are still on the books in a lot of states...in Florida, a referendum actually restored voting rights to ex-felons, but the government has successfully dragged their feet by making it nearly impossible to complete the process of restoring their voting rights: https://www.propublica.org/article/...landmark-law-leaves-few-felons-likely-to-vote
I have an Irish Grandparent, and a French one. I'm English though, and certainly not ashamed of it. I won't let my Englishness be defined by the worst of my fellow countrymen and women, but rather by the best of us. This is still the country of Shakespeare and Shelley and Emeline Pankhurst, George Orwell, Paul Dirac and Tim Berners-Lee. Though we are governed by liars, fools and Old Etonian spivs, I refuse to submit to that or let them think that they represent the true spirit of my country.
I cannot find it in myself to forgive the racists who stupidly voted for Brexit and then put Johnson in power.
I can forgive stupidity. Not all stupid people are racist, nor was racism the only reason people voted for Brexit. Even though every stupid racist probably did vote for Brexit, that wouldn't have been enough to swing it.
Evidence suggests that the strongest support for the Leave vote came from marginalised post industrial communities in places like North East England, South Wales, Cornwall etc. Communities that had been left to rot since the 1980s, and who perceived - even if this was a false perception - that the brave new, outward looking modern world had left them behind. People working in the low wage, insecure, undervalued sector of the economy - a sector which has been growing for decades - appear to have felt (rightly or wrongly, but not without reason) that the glut of cheap labour from Eastern Europe enabled bad employers to drive down wages and treat their workers as disposable assets. That fed a degree of anti European sentiment bordering on racism, but recognising the impact on wages of cheap labour from abroad is not in itself racist. Strong Trade Unions, better labour laws, and a decent minimum wage could have solved this problem for everybody including the exploited migrant workers, but these were not forthcoming. If you have always been on the privileged side of the ever widening wealth gap in this country, you may have missed that deepening resentment which the unscrupulous chancers behind the Leave campaign were able to exploit.
Wait until the inbreds in the comments find out that most of these refugees were effectively British service personnel, it’ll blow their ****ing minds.
https://www.theplayerstribune.com/posts/tim-sparv-finland-world-cup-2022-qatar-soccer Interesting blog from Tim Sparv on the World Cup in Qatar - nothing we probably didn’t know already, but shows that some players are aware of the issues.
**** me! I’ve never seen this but I think it’s VITALLY important that this is shared far and wide across all media streams (of course, the government controlled ones like the BBC won’t show it) to show everyone just HOW they were duped ….. and before anyone answers “but …. Covid ….” the ****show in farming and fishing haven’t been so badly affected by this …. It’s breathtaking …..
