Brown's In His Bunker, All's Well With The World

Gordon Brown today insisted he would reject any moves from within his Cabinet to encourage him to stand down as Prime Minister.

Mr Brown said he would refuse to move aside even if senior Labour figures told him it would help the party retain seats at a general election, arguing that his focus was on tackling the recession and pushing through a programme of constitutional reform.

That about says it all, doesn't it? Full article in the Mail.

UK Border Stasi Twats

The UK Border Stasi now want to turn academics into unpaid snoopers, keeping an eye on overseas students to make sure they attend their courses, and to report anyone they think may be involved in terrorism. Comment from Longrider.

The University and College Union has decided to boycott these new rules. Quite right.

The Border Agency can go fuck itself. I'm certainly not acting as an unpaid little stooge for their nasty little racket.

The People Need Modernising - At Great Cost

From Lincolnshire: Dramatic rise in council bosses on more than £50K.

This is the bit that gets me (and I've yet to get the info on the Council's staff list):

The amount of officials at Lincolnshire County Council earning salaries of more than £50,000 has surged since 2004 by more than 250 per cent, while those earning over £100,000 has also jumped.

That is from the website and is just a precis of the article, which came out on Thursday and makes the figures clearer:

Figures released by the county council show that in 2004 nobody earned £100,000 and just 56 people were on more than £50,000.
By 2008, eight people were on salaries of £100,000 and 145 were earning in excess of £50,000.'

Forget about that the argument that these figures are not 'sky-high' (they are, especially in Lincolnshire) and just consider the speed with which this increase has happened.

And dispense, too, with that old argument that you need to pay this kind of money to attract the best people. When I look around at both the private and public sectors what I see is too many people being paid too much for a doing a bad job or being average at best.

And to cap it all, the last para in the article is a quote from the 'assistant director of people and modernisation' - Christ above, what is that? And surely it means there's another chief above her, the proper director? Both of them, no doubt, on excellent salaries. Bags of paperwork, I bet, and targets and meetings and reports, and buggerall to show for it.

The other question is, did the council dream this load of bullshit up by themselves or are they reacting to regulations imposed by the EU? These days that's often the case.

Barroso Bastardo

Barroso and the millionaire. Obviously no conflict of interest.

Barroso the young Maoist. The EU, ultimate paradise for all those failed lefties of the 70s.

The EU is an empire, according to Bastardo; although Wallstrom likes to think of it as a football team, Solutions United. From the delusionally self-aggrandising to the pathetically feebleminded.

Governed By Vermin

On top of the French insult over the D-Day celebrations, Gordon Brown has no plans for a ceremony in London to commemorate the Normandy landings. He'll be too busy in France fighting with Sarkozy about who should insert themselves first into the Fundament of Obama.