Barristers have announced that they're going to strike over low pay and legal aid rates on 5th September. It is expected that the majority of Crown Court cases across the country will be adjourned.
Criminal defence barrister, Rosalind Burgin, 28 (pictured left), said that she earned £7,000 more per year working as a coffee shop barista. She says that the legal work is insecure and is still waiting for payment for work that she did last September.
The junior barrister from Manchester, says that while working as a criminal barrister is noble work, "you still need to be able to live."
Hippolyte Taine, the French historian, critic, and philosopher, famously said: "When it comes to revolution, forget the poor and worry about the poor lawyers."
In Britain, we already have the cameras; the next step is to use this technology to control social behaviour by linking it to a social credit system, like they've done in China. The more loyalty you show to the Chinese Communist Party, the better your social credit rating.
Rishi Sunak wants Britain to have closer links with China, and the Chinese have supported his bid to become the next UK Prime Minister. His wife, Akshata Murthy, is a shareholder in a technology company called Infosys, which was co-founded by her father, N.r. Narayana Murthy. Infosys are established in China and it's believed the company have been pushing for digital ID's and a social credit score system.
It was recently reported that the Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had issued emergency orders cutting off funds to protestors. If an organization is on the government list, the banks must freeze their accounts.
A 40-year old man from Warrington, who was unable to get a face-to-face appointment with his GP, was told to go to the hospital for blood tests. After he started to suffer from chest pains, he rang 111 and was taken to Warrington Hospital.
After a 20-hour wait at the hospital, Gareth Dixon, was told that there was nothing wrong with him and that he should make an appointment to see his GP. He told the hospital that he would not leave until they had taken blood tests. After blood tests were undertaken, Gareth Dixon was told that he was terminally ill with leukemia.
Many GP's are refusing to see patients face-to-face and have stopped walk-in surgeries. This is putting patients lives at risk and placing an intolerable burden on the emergency services and NHS hospitals, who are having to deal with patients who should have been dealt with by their GP's.
We shouldn't automatically assume that it's necessarily the state that's imposing a curtailment on freedoms and free speech. Far too many people, nowadays, are quite happy to ban, cancel, and to no platform people, simply because they don't like what they have to say. They have a totalitarian mindset that hankers for more laws, bans, and proscriptions.
Already, some universities are removing books that are deemed to have 'challenging content' and are putting 'trigger warnings' into books so as not to offend the emotional sensibilities of their students. This is hardly what I would call preparing someone for the vicissitudes of adult life. They say they are not opposed to free speech but are "intolerant to intolerance." But as the writer and journalist George Orwell said, "If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not what to hear."
The French have a saying - "Moutons de Panurge', 'Panurge's Sheep'. This describes an individual that will blindly follow others regardless of the consequences. It refers to people who do the same thing as others and follow the fashion.
In the story by Francois Rabelais, 'Gargantua and Pantagruel', Panurge ('knave' or 'rogue'), buys a sheep and then as a revenge for being overcharged, he throws the sheep into the sea and the rest of the sheep in the herd, follow the first over the side of the boat, in spite of the best efforts of the Shepherd. That's what we're dealing with; it's not the people but the 'Sheeple'.
It seems quite astonishing that the Conservative government minister who's responsible for deciding whether the people in England can gain access to nature, and to land to walk on, is a huge landowner who owns 12,000 acres of West Berkshire.
Richard Benyon, who owns the 12,000 acre Englefield estate, which is the largest estate in West Berkshire, is the government minister who has been put in charge of deciding whether to broaden access to the English countryside.
Just 8% of England's land has free access, including coastal paths and moorlands, and campaigners want this to change. Those who campaign for the "Right to Roam", point out that Benyon, was involved in the Agnew review, which looked into broadening access to the English countryside and which was shelved with little explanation. The Agnew review had promised a "quantum shift in the public's relationship with nature."
Although in bygone days, a lot of land was held in common ownership, this land was enclosed and often stolen by landowners. Over a third of the land in England, remains in the hands of the aristocracy, mostly in private estates like Englefield. The Englefield estate which has been owned by the Benyon family for hundreds of years, contains land that was once a common and which was absorbed into the private estate.
According to the Ramblers, the estate contains lost footpaths and was once farmed by commoners who held rights to farm the land. They say the process of enclosing the land was started in 1802, by Richard Benyon, an ancestor of the current minister, who moved an entire village out of sight of Englefield house, to make way for a deer park. The Ramblers say that in 1854, Benyon was granted a stopping order by his friends in parliament to close the public road that ran in front of his house.
On Sunday, a 150 campaigners visited the Englefield estate to call on the minister to open up his land for people to walk on and to have picnics, and to extend access to the green spaces of England to the general public. Amongst the trespassers, were morris dancers and musicians. Campaigners who have previously met the access to nature minister, say that he told them that their proposals made him feel "warm and fuzzy inside."
What
has become known as Potato famine of 1845 or the ‘Great Hunger’, was not the
first time that people in Ireland had had faced starvation. Famine was a
frequent visitor to Ireland. The famine of 1741, was reckoned to have killed an
eighth of the Irish population and there were outbreaks of localized famine in
1800, 1817, 1822, 1831, 1835, 1842. It's
said that The 'Great Hunger' of 1845 onwards, killed around 1 million people
and drove a further 1.5 million into emigration. Many of these died of disease
in what became known as the coffin ships.
Some
people refuse to call it a 'famine' because there was no shortage of food in
Ireland at the time, which is true, and the country was exporting food while
people starved to death. What the poor cottier was short of, was the money to buy
the food. Cormac O' Grada, Professor of Economics at University College Dublin,
says that exported food only amounted to one-seventh of the value of the potato
crop that failed. He writes:
"Thus the 430,000 tons of grain exported in
1846/47, must be set against the shortfall of about 20 million tons of potatoes
in those same years."
Although
Irish food production would not have replaced the potato, had the food been
retained in Ireland, for the use of starving people, and not exported, it would have greatly alleviated the suffering. The British government made Irish
landlords responsible for poverty in Ireland, in spite of the fact that Ireland
had been part of the Union since 1801. Making landlords liable for rates on
land valued at less than £4 a year, led to clearances and evictions. Under the
Gregory clause, the starving peasantry had to surrender any holding greater
than a quarter of an acre in order to get relief. Under the Encumbered Estates
Act of 1849, it was compulsory for land to be sold on the petition of either
owner or creditor. This allowed speculators and Gombeen men to buy land for a
fraction of its worth, when a tenant was in arrears with rent or a debt. But
many tenant's were evicted at will.
Despite
the fact that the British government did introduce relief measures by importing
food and other relief measures - Peel
without consulting colleagues or seeking approval from the Treasury, made
£100,000 available for the secret purchase of Indian corn maize in America
- they are accused of genocide. Yet, the government official Sir Edward
Pine-Coffin, commandeered a warship, filled it with food and sent it around
distressed areas of Ireland.
Many historians who have studied this subject, including Irish one's, dismiss the genocide theory. Indeed, at a time when Irish people were starving, many Irish farmers continued to export food to get the best prices for their products. However, the civil servant, Charles Trevelyan, who had considerable influence over Irish policy, believed that the way to counter the looming disaster in Ireland was to end relief and not to interfere in exports. He reversed Peel's policy on grain shipments and stopped the supply of food to Ireland. A devout Protestant, Trevelyan couldn't have cared less how many Irish people died. He wrote:
"The judgement of God sent
the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson, that calamity must not be too much
mitigated...' It was the Irish nationalist Protestant, John Mitchell,
who said "God sent the blight, but the English created the Famine."
The deregulation of buses in 1986 didn't work. Public transport in London was never deregulated. Outside of London, bus passenger numbers have fallen, bus fares have rocketed, and there are fewer bus routes.
In Greater Manchester, Stagecoach and First, dominate the bus system. Andy Burnham says he wants a London style bus system for Greater Manchester and he's capping bus fares at £2 in September. In London, a standard single bus fare is £1.65 and under the 'Hopper' scheme, you can transfer to other buses and trains for free for an unlimited number of times within one hour, of touching in for your first journey. A one-day bus only travel ticket costs £4.95. If you're 60 and live in Greater London, you qualify for a free bus pass, where you can travel free on buses, tubes, and other transport within Greater London.
In Greater Manchester you now have to be 66 to qualify for a free bus pass when it used to be 60. On a Stagecoach bus in Greater Manchester, you can travel three stops at a distance of half a mile, and it can cost you £2.50. Late night buses, including the last one, or the one before, might not even turn up, and you either walk home or it's a taxi. Stagecoach mounted legal challenges to Andy Burnham's bus reforms, yet they can't even run an efficient and reliable bus service for passengers.
When most of us were growing up, there were only two gender identities - male or female. The vast majority of people still see it this way and identity as male and female, which is now called 'Cisgender', which corresponds with their birth sex.
If you want to accept it, and I don't, some sources now say that there are 72 gender identities and 78 gender pronouns. Some of the gender identities include: Androgyne, Gender Expansive, Genderfluid, Genderqueer, Non-binary, Omnigender, 'Two Spirit, Pangender, etc.
Ostensibly, 'Drag Queen Story Hour' (DQSH), another import from America, like bubblegum, is supposed to be about "inspiring a love of reading" among children and to encourage them to read. So why do some people feel it's necessary to use a Drag Queen to teach children to read?
Jonathan Hamilt, who co-founded the New York chapter of DQSH, says that the program strives to "instill the imagination and play of gender fluidity of childhood and gives kids glamorous, positive, and unabashedly queer role models "
This social engineering project which seeks to challenge gender stereotypes, respect for diversity, and which promotes an LGBT agenda, might sound like harmless fun, but isn't there a danger that we're going finish up with some highly confused children who are not quite sure what they are, or where they're likely to fit into anything?
I like diversity and eccentricity, but should children of three and four years of age, really be used as guinea pigs in a social engineering laboratory experiment by those who want to promote "queer role models" and proselytise LGBT politics? Some parents are objecting to this kind of propaganda and have started to protest against events of this kind.
Albert Woodfox, spent 43 years in solitary confinement in a U.S. prison after being wrongly convicted of the murder of a Louisiana prison guard in 1972. He was a member of the 'Angola Three' who were all wrongly convicted of the murder of the prison guard, Brent Millar.
Before the murder, Woodfox, and his fellow Angola Three member Hermann Wallace, had set up a chapter of the Black Panther party inside the prison. They used it to campaign against the segregation of prisoners and the unpaid cotton picking that black prisoners were forced to do in chain gangs in the outlying fields.
Woodfox, who died aged 75, is thought to have spent more time in solitary confinement than any other individual in U.S. history. He survived 43 years living in a cell that measured 6ft x 9ft and was only released in 2016.
Although atrocities and inhumane treatment of this kind are being meted out to some prisoner's in the U.S. prison system, the Home Secretary, Priti Patel, has approved the extradition of the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, to America to face charges relating to the disclosure of classified information. Assange has been charged with 17 counts of espionage and if convicted, faces up to 170 years in a U S. prison. Assange who is an investigative journalist, has already spent over three years in Belmarsh Prison without being convicted of anything.
An independent review found no evidence that Oldham had experienced above average instances of child sexual abuse, nor that the police and council had orchestrated a cover-up of such crimes. Yet last week, on GB News, the presenter Mark Steyn, referred to Oldham as "another child sex hellhole.'
For the last three years, a Bengali blogger called Raja Miah, from Oldham, who also blogs under the nom de guerre of 'Recusant Nine', has been spreading the now-debunked conspiracy theory that Pakistani grooming gangs had been operating in Oldham to sexually abuse young children and that the Labour Council in Oldham, had conspired to cover this up so as to not alienate the Asian Labour vote.
Despite the findings of the independent review, and the debunking of this conspiracy theory, Mark Steyn, said on GB News that the authorities in Oldham had allowed "highly organised Pakistani rape gangs" to operate and described the council as "a jurisdiction so depraved it will willingly sacrifice its most vulnerable members on the altar of so-called diversity.'
For further background information on this story, try reading, "What happened when Raja Miah's prophecy failed" in The Manchester Mill, an online Manchester newspaper.
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