Mandelson Plans More Shit For Universities

University drop-out rates and graduate earnings to be tagged

University courses are to be tagged with their drop-out rates, graduates' future earnings and the number of contact hours students can expect with tutors. The move, which will be modelled on a food-labelling system, is part of a consumer revolution in higher education to be unveiled this week by Lord Mandelson, the universities secretary.

Students should be treated more as paying customers and given better information about the quality of their courses before they embark on a degree, the new government framework for universities is expected to say on Tuesday.

Yes! Just what we need! More fucking bureaucracy and fake statistics! More PR! More shit! Less learning! It's 1968 all over again, this time without the barricades! Students decide what they want to learn! Yeah! And if they don't get the grades they want they can blame their tutors!

Still, Mandelson's making 15 Year Plans when his government will be out on their arse within a year.

Trouble is, the Tories won't be any bloody better.

Mandelshit's Global Grasp

We Need Greater Global Governance, says Lord Yacht of Mandleboy:

No government in the global economy, and certainly not economies on the scale of the U.S., China, Japan and the European Union, can claim a prerogative over domestic action that entirely ignores the systemic affects of its policies. The only way forward is a totally renovated approach to international coordination of economic policy.

No prerogative over domestic action, eh? I wonder if he's thinking of himself as one of those involved in the coordination of global policy?

I Will Not Eat My Horse

I promise not to eat my horse. On pain of a fine. The EU, of course. As presented by their apparatchiks in DEFRA.

And chipping foals, too - could it be a dry run for humans?

Mandelson destroying Labour for the sake of the EU?

Punch In The Face Digital Progressive Blogging

Back from Australia, where I have managed to avoid UK news and newspapers...however, even in that enlightened country the Righteous are at work trying to snatch people's freedoms away from them under the guise of protecting the kiddies: Filtering (Censoring) the Net. Communications Minister Conroy is obviously a cnut of the most modern, correct kind. May he die from a long painful illness without a pension.

'Progressive' seems to be the new word on the block. It seems to be used a lot by the Lost Righteous - people who realise the New Labour project is a pile of steaming excrement about to go down the crapper but don't have the guts or understanding to reassert Old Labour values. In other words it stinks. If I encounter anyone who speaks this to me directly I shall punch them in the face.

Jackie Smith is still an ugly, stupid and incompetent disgrace squatting like a toad in government.

Pity for the Spawn of the Manse that his bravura performance at the G20 has now dissolved like piss in rain and been swamped by coverage of police (mis)behaviour, including photo footage that the cops somehow managed not to eradicate, despite their new-found laws.

Alice Mahon resigns from the party of the Terminally Righteous, taking a swipe at the EU as she does so:

That same manifesto promised a referendum on the European Constitution, we re-named it the Lisbon Treaty and reneged on that promise also.

If this Treaty is ratified we can say goodbye to any publicly owned services. Article 111-147 is clear, we will be handing over to private corporations, social services, education, transport and postal services. Even the NHS will be up for grabs.

Matthew Taylor finds himself on the panel of an NHS Confederation bash called ‘inequality, nudge and recession: is it time for a new approach to health politics?’ Taking the politics out of health care would be a bloody good start, and as for 'nudge', again I'd have to punch anyone in the face who used that word in front of me. Matthew's post is full of the usual 'progressive' bull: 'Building community resilience and capacity is central to improving public health, which is itself a more important determinant of health outcome and levels of health inequality than the health care system.'

The NHS Confederation bills itself as 'the voice of NHS leadership'. There we have it again, this obsession with leadership. Can't all be members of Common Purpose, can they?

Apparently Mandelshit has been blathering on about 'Digital Britain' (ht Muffled Vociferation). I haven't read the report but I can tell you with complete authority that it is absolute bullshit, the main aims being to promote the image of the government as an up-to-date administration (FAIL) and to act as a smoke screen for extending control over the internet (how's your plan to seize control of Nominet progressing, Your Lordship?). A lot of talk about broadband, no doubt, but I suspect that wireless/mobile access will overtake it within a few years.

Mandelson is also a cnut. May he, too, die of a long and particularly embarrassing disease before he can draw his unearned pension.

And Sunder Katwala sets out 'the ethic which informs the bloggers of the left' in his post: 'Why we blog: our ethic of progressive blogging'. I'm a bit tired and suffering from hallucinations brought on by jet lag, so I'll end with two comments on this: firstly, drawing up a list of 'ethics' for something like blogging just reveals the control-freakery and authoritarian nature of the righteous left (after all, the Spawn himself would create such a list if he knew what blogging was); and secondly, there's that word again, 'progressive'.

Don't fucking come anywhere near me, Sunder, unless you want a punch in the face.

End Game

At last it seems the British media are turning against New Labour. Once the media become openly critical of a government, the end is nigh. The nigher the better as far as I'm concerned.

Like many other people last night I watched Dispatches' programme How They Squander Our Billions:

As the country enters a nasty recession and we feel the need to tighten our financial belts, journalist and broadcaster Jane Moore examines how the government is wasting billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money each year. Jane investigates a variety of controversial public projects that have had millions, if not billions, spent on them and attempts to discover where the money went, who sanctioned the spending and why so little appears to have been done to prevent massive waste and excess. Dispatches also highlights the findings of a report that details the escalation in government public sector spending and sets out what needs to be done to stop the waste. Public spending wastage is reported to have cost every household nearly £50,000 over the past 11 years.

All of which neatly followed a Party Political Broadcast by the Labour Party. Neat.

More, please, especially on the destruction of our freedoms.

I recommend Squandered by David Craig (Constable, 2008) for more spasm-inducing details on this government's wasteful incompetence.

Henry Porter draws our attention to an e-petition launched by David Gilbertson, a former deputy assistant commissioner to the Met, calling for the repeal of Section 110 of the 2005 Serious Organised Crime and Police Act, which gives police officers the power to arrest anybody for absolutely anything at all.

Sign the e-petition (for what it's worth) at: Number 10. This won't make any difference but I believe that we must put the pressure on by as many means as possible as often as possible, just so they know we're onto them.

And Mandy the Slimelord shows his true colours by telling the British people they're a bunch of lazy gits - Mandelson: Britons Don't Want Jobs. Are these the same people who have been working the longest hours in Europe, putting in millions of pounds of unpaid overtime, etc? It's really not a good idea to badmouth the voters in this way, is it?

Mandelson Gets Green Gunk In His Slimy Face

Protester throws green custard at Lord Mandelson

Amazing how she wasn't immediately hustled away and disappeared. Or does that happen later? She waffles a bit but I would take one snippet of her justification and use that by itself: "we cannot have people like Peter Mandelson" - FULL STOP.

Booker Points To EU Postal Elephant

Christopher Booker makes the obvious point about why the Royal Mail is in such a dire condition:

In all the coverage of a possible Labour revolt over Lord Mandelson’s plans to sell off a third of Royal Mail, everyone seems to have forgotten the report from his department last year explaining why our postal service is facing an unprecedented financial crisis. It is no accident that the likely bidders are a Dutch firm, TNT, and a German company, DHL.

The report made clear that the chief cause of Royal Mail’s huge losses was Britain’s keenness to comply with three EU postal services directives, designed to end national postal monopolies by 2010 and to promote “cross-border” integration of the EU’s postal services. As a result Royal Mail had to surrender the most profitable part of its operations, when bulk business mailing was opened up to rival firms. It still has to deliver business mail, for a knock-down price of 14p an item, while the 19 companies that bid successfully for the business of collecting and sorting them cream off all the profits.

This was a major factor turning Royal Mail’s profits into a £179 million annual loss. Driven into desperate cost-cutting exercises, it drastically reduced post-box collections and ended those on Sunday altogether, while making vain attempts to raise revenue, such as its mad “size and weight” pricing scheme. But then EU law kicked in a second time, when our Government was not allowed to make up the resulting deficit under EU state-aid rules.

This was why Nigel Stapleton, head of Postcomm, suggested last year that the only way round the state-aid rules was to part-privatise Royal Mail, thus allowing it to borrow on the open market. No one knows all this better than the great Europhile Lord Mandelson. But it still raises the question as to who would want to invest in a business which EU rules force to run at a loss. The other mystery, of course, is why, in all the coverage given to this vexed issue, no one will explain why it is happening

No chance this info will make its way into the Guardian, the Observer or onto BBC news, is there?

Mandelson Is After Your Internets - Be Afraid

From The Register:

Ministers led by Peter Mandelson are considering a power grab at the independent company at the centre of UK's internet infrastructure, The Register can reveal.

Mandelson's Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR) has asked Nominet, which is in charge of the .co.uk registry, to justify its independence from Whitehall.

There is nothing these bastards don't want to control. The internet is a source of trouble for the politicos because it represents individual freedom (which they don't like). It also allows freedom of expression, freedom of information and provides a platform for ordinary people to find out about and discuss the realities of political life (something not provided by mainstream media). None of which the politicos like.

And it's also a source of revenue.

If the government manages to get away with this (and it will be tantamount to theft) the results will be predictable: an increase in costs, inefficiency on a gargantuan scale, corruption, and, of course, censorship. If they can't price their critics out of the market then they can simply ban them.

Welcome to China-UK.

Is the EU Worried We're On To Them?

Trawling the internet for further information on the EU's hidden part in destroying the British postal system I came across this. Issued in May, presumably as a response to growing awareness that the EU is directly responsible for legislation that is resulting in the closure of British Post Offices, it's described as a 'Fact Sheet' and yet bears the odd instruction 'not to be quoted from'!

It's basically a deceitful attempt to shift blame from itself onto the British government (and, to be fair, the government is guilty - of allowing the EU to get away with this legislation and of implementing measures well before they should). Look here and here for the truth. A combination of 'liberalisation' (ie enforced competition) and restriction of subsidies is at the core of it.

For instance, if you wondered why the Post Office introduced that insane method a couple of years ago of judging the cost of postage by whether an envelope would fit a specific size 'letterbox', then here's your answer.


An article in today's Observer, 'Mandelson urged to halt Post Office Closures' by Toby Helm, talks about Labour MPs calling on Mandelson to block all further closures. Nowhere in the article does Mr Helm acknowledge the part of the EU in this mess. Possibly because he doesn't know? The idea of Mandelson, having just returned from a 4-year jolly at the EU, facing the bureaucrats down and actually doing something useful is laughable. Mr Helm seems unaware of this irony.

However, not all British journalists are as useless as Toby; Henry Porter continues to wage his lonely war against the government's destruction of our freedoms, with an article attacking that pudding-faced cretin of a Home Secretary after the 'scrapping' of the 42 days bill.