Labour ditches social care reforms to save money. Pensioners to pay more for care!

 

Labour's honey moon period with the British electorate is now over. It looks like the elderly in Britain and those in receipt of state benefits, are going to get shafted under Labour and Sir Keir Starmer-oid.

Most of my mother's life savings were spent on her residential care costs in just under three years. She was a 'self-funder' and paid for her own care costs and the care of others. It's generally acknowledged that self-funders pay higher care fees to subsidise those residents funded by the local authority. After a life time of working, saving and paying her taxes, she was penalised for being prudent and thrifty because of 'means-testing' and received no help with her care costs from the local authority or the NHS. She would only have been entitled to financial help with her care costs if she had qualified for NHS continuous health care funding or had savings of less than £23,250.

Under social care reforms introduced by the previous Conservative government, next October 2025, the £23,250 threshold for getting council support to pay for care cost, was going to be raised to £100,000 and after spending £86,000 on their care, people would've had their care costs paid by the local authority. Both these measures have now been scrapped by Labour's austerity Chancellor Rachel Reeves, who says that scrapping the reform will save £1bn by the end of next year. Reeves has already announced that many old age pensioners are going to lose their winter fuel allowance. Only older people on Pension Credit and means tested benefits will now get help with paying for their fuel bills.

I wouldn't be surprised if the email Inbox of Angela Rayner, the Deputy Prime Minister and MP for Ashton-under-Lyne, isn't already full with complaints from irate pensioners who have had their pockets pinched. Like Fagin, in the musical ‘Oliver’, Reeves believes that ‘You’ve Got to Pick a Pocket or Two.”

All three Tameside MPs, are now on the front bench. Many older people were hoping for some relief from sky high care bills but ditching the cap, could now lead to people paying extremely high social care costs, running into hundreds of thousands of pounds. Some will lose their homes and life savings. In opposition, Labour's manifesto did not commit to a date for introducing the cap, but Labour's shadow health secretary, Wes Streeting, said his party would introduce the spending cap if it won the general election. Labour has now reneged on that promise but as we know, there's no pledge or promise that Starmer-oid won't ditch as and when it suits him.

In previous interviews, Reeves has said that Labour is not the party of people on state benefits. When she was shadow work and pensions secretary, Reeves vowed to be tougher than the Tories when it came to slashing the benefits bill and she said the unemployed would not be able to "linger on benefits."

If Labour is serious about filling a financial black hole left by the Tories, they could start by taking measures to close tax loopholes that allow corporations like Amazon and Starbucks to pay very little tax on massive European profits. Amazon had sales income of €44bn in 2020, but paid no corporation tax. And what about increasing taxes on the wealthy? Similarly, some people do wonder why the British taxpayer is subsiding the food and drink bill in the House of Commons and the rent, food and energy bills of MPs, who receive an annual salary of £91,346 plus expenses. 

Millions of pensioners to lose winter fuel allowance under Labour!

 

Labour Chancellor - Rachel Reeves

Britain's state pensioners are likely to become far worse off under Sir Keir Starmer's Labour Party. In opposition, Labour said that it would protect pensioners from the cost-of-living crisis and ensure that older people had security in retirement.

Earlier this month, Angela Rayner, the Deputy Prime Minister, responsible for levelling up, said that Labour would "extend protections against damp, mould and cold." However, Labour's Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, has just announced that from this year onwards, state pensioners will no longer automatically get the winter fuel allowance to help with paying their fuel bills. She said that only people on Pension Credit and other means tested benefits will now qualify. More than one in three pensioners who are entitled to pension credit, don't receive it.

In the long-run, is the 'triple-lock' safe under Labour? I doubt it. Winter Fuel Payments were introduced by Chancellor Gordon Brown in 1997, to help older people meet the costs of heating their homes in winter and to end fuel poverty.

The End Fuel Poverty Coalition (EFPC), have claimed that over 1,000 people died in England in December 2022, as a result of living in cold damp homes. According to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), an estimated 43,500 excess winter deaths (EWDs) (defined as the number of deaths that occurred in the winter period minus the expected number of deaths for that period based on non-winter months), occurred in England and Wales 2014/15 and these deaths were concentrated among older people.

In removing winter fuel payments for most UK state pensioners, we're going to see more elderly people dying of hypothermia in their homes because they will struggle to pay their fuel bills. Labour's Rachel Reeves may well be engaging in 'gerineglicide'. 

 

Blues legend John Mayall dies at 90.

 John Mayall

It has just been announced that the English blues legend, John Mayall, died at his home in California on 22 July 2024, at the age of 90.  Mayall has often been described as the 'Godfather' or 'Father' of British blues.

I probably first heard of John Mayall in the late 1960s, when a friend let me listen to a Mayall album called 'Bare Wires'. I also saw him at the MEN Arena in Manchester, when his band were the supporting act for the BB King band. A cousin once told me, that he remembered John Mayall playing a gig at Audenshaw Grammar School.

In a moving and very emotional tribute posted on YouTube, Eric Clapton, referred to Mayall as a friend, 'mentor' and 'surrogate father' who had "rescued him from oblivion" when he'd invited him to join his band the Bluesbreakers in 1965. He had just quit the Yardbirds because he was unhappy with their commercial direction and he says he was on the verge of giving up on a musical career.  Clapton was one of many guitarists who became more famous after joining Mayall's Bluesbreakers.

As a band leader, Mayall was a good talent spotter and his band was a school of excellence. He sang, composed songs and played guitar, harmonica and keyboards. Among those guitarists who played with John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, were Peter Green, Jeff Beck, Buddy Whittington, Mick Taylor, Walter Trout, Henry 'Coco' Montoya and the British bassist, John McVie. Walter Trout once said in an interview that John Mayall and Carlos Santana had rescued him from descending into drug and alcohol abuse. Mayall, sacked John McVie and replaced him with Jack Bruce, because of his drink problem.

Mayall was born in Macclesfield on 29 November 1933 but grew up in Cheadle Hulme, a prosperous suburb of Stockport. His father, Murray Mayall, had played the guitar in local pubs. When his parents divorced, Mayall went to live with his mother at his grandfather's house on Acre Lane, Cheadle Hulme. He claimed that he lived in a tree house which was in his grandfather's garden, until he got married. After serving three years of national service, much of it in Korea, Mayall enrolled at Manchester College of Art. After graduation, he worked as an art designer.

It was another blues legend called Alexis Korner, who persuaded Mayall to become a full-time musician and to move to London. He also introduced him to other musicians and helped him to get gigs. In the 1960s, Mayall started to live part-time in the U.S. and in the early 1970s, he bought a house in the Hollywood Hills of Laurel Canyon. The house was destroyed in a bush fire in 1979 and he lost a lot of personal property. He married twice and had six children from both marriages. 

Charles Dickens

 Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens not only walked out on his wife, but he also took the children, which was the law of the day. Charles Dickens junior, was the only one who stayed with his mother Catherine Dickens, who gave birth to ten children.

While Dickens didn't encourage his children to see their mother, he didn't prohibit contact. He purchased a house for Catherine Dickens and sought a legal separation. He blamed his wife for her numerous pregnancies and thought she'd given him far too many children.

There were friends and acquaintances who thought Dickens had treated his wife badly. He accused her of being an unfit mother and we know that he tried to have her committed to a mental asylum, but a doctor found no evidence that she suffered from a mental disorder.

Dickens had become infatuated with a young 18-year-old actress called Ellen Ternan and they later entered into a secret relationship. It seems strange that considering the way in which he treated Catherine Dickens, her sister Georgina Hogarth, continued to live with the family as the housekeeper and remained devoted to Dickens.

Another sister, called Mary Hogarth, who died aged 17-years-old, is probably the sister that Dickens was far more interested in. She'd also lived with the Dickens family and he was badly affected by her death as was Catherine Dickens.

The Deutschland-Ticket - nationwide mobility for just 49 euros a month.

 

D-Ticket

As a bus passenger, I often get on GM buses only to discover that the bus driver, doesn't know his bus route. It's a bit like the way this country is run; by incompetent fools who don't know what they're doing. At times waiting for a Stagecoach bus can be like waiting for Godot. 

The UK rail system is notorious for high ticket prices and its unreliability. A train from Manchester Piccadilly to London Euston can cost up to £185 depending on when you travel and what time you travel. It also depends on whether the train turns up as well as the train driver. Avanti West Coast, is known to offer a woeful and shambolic service and yet it continues to operate. Several newly elected MPs, recently complained that they had been unable to take their seats in Parliament due to train delays and cancellations.

In Germany, the Deutschland Ticket or D-Ticket, cost €49 Euros a month (£41 per month) or €1.63 euros per day. The D-Ticket allows the ticket holder to travel anywhere in Germany on buses, trams and trains.

Compared to countries like France, Germany, Portugal and Italy, the UK public transport system is a joke. The newly elected Labour government of Sir Keir Starmer-oid, have pledged to bring all train services on Britain's railways back into public ownership as and when their contracts run out. 

Remembering Christopher Hitchens.

 Christopher Hitchens

However much I liked reading and listening to Christopher Hitchens, I didn't agree with his zealous support for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He was a good debater and polemicist but he wasn't always accurate. Nevertheless, I always felt as though I had learned something from reading Hitchens or listening to him.

His close friend, Martin Amiss, described Hitchens as a rhetorician of such distinction that "in debate, no matter what the motion, I would back him against Cicero, against Demosthenes." The journalist Lynn Barber, described Hitchens as "one of the greatest conversationalists of our age."   

He was widely read, had a terrific memory, and could also be very witty.  He said of American pastor Jerry Falwell, that if you gave him an enema, you could bury what was left of him in a matchbox. Referring to Mother Teresa's virginity, Hitch said: "The whole problem with missionaries is that one never quite knows their position." Hitchens said that he'd become a dedicated heterosexual because his looks deteriorated to the point where no man would have him.

Probably his two great love affairs were with cigarettes and alcohol. A highly functioning alcoholic, he said he drank enough alcohol on a daily basis to "kill or stun the average mule" but he never missed deadlines or appointments.

In 2007, after living in the U S. for over 25 years, he became an American citizen. Despite leaving Oxford University with a third-class degree, Hitchens became a liberal studies professor at the New School in New York and a visiting professor at Berkeley in California. Christopher Hitchens's last book is called 'Mortality'. In her afterword to the book, his wife Carol Blue, wrote that her husband was an impossible act to follow. I think she's probably right.

Jim Sillars calls on the SNP to 'Repent' and not 'Reflect'!

 

Jim Sillars

The former SNP deputy leader, Jim Sillars, has called Nicola Sturgeon 'Stalin's wee sister' and accused her of running the SNP as a "leadership cult." In a brutal open letter to party members, he called on the SNP to 'repent' and not 'reflect' upon the SNPs drubbing at the 4 July general election.

The SNP returned just nine MPs down from 48 in 2009. In the letter, Sillars accused Sturgeon and Swinney of 'staggering levels of incompetence' and of misleading the movement and having lost its common sense in government. He accused them for promoting marginal issues as national priorities while the real priorities of the people, were education, housing, NHS, and infrastructure.

There's no doubt in my mind that the issue of 'transgenderism' and identity politics in general, led to the demise of SNP and collapse in support for the party. The Scots are noted for being a canny and shrewd lot and I'm sure they weren't impressed when the 31-year-old Scottish serial rapist Isla Bryson, a transgender woman, also known as Adam Graham, was remanded to a women's prison.

As Scotland's First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon had difficulty in saying whether Isla Bryson, who had raped two women, was a man or a woman. Bryson had been charged in 2019 and started transitioning in 2020. 

Is Tony Blair the hidden hand that wanks the skipper?

 

Labour's hidden hand' - Tony Blair

In the British navy, the sailors were often heard to say that the hand that wanks the skipper, is the hand that runs the ship.

It has been reported in the press that Sir Keir Starmer-oid regularly receives texts from Sir Tony Blair giving him advice on what to do in government. Blair, recently had to remind Starmer that men have a penis and females a vagina. It seems that Blair wants Starmer-oid to introduce a digital ID scheme to cut migration. In 2020, Blair said it was "common sense to move in the direction of digital IDs" as part of an effort to fight Covid-19. Sir Jake Berry, a former Conservative Party chairman, branded digital IDs as a "creepy state plan to track you from the cradle to the grave." The 'Tony Blair Institute for Global Change' (TBI), has a track record for trying to push government's into introducing digital identification and digital health records. They also want countries to spend heavily on artificial intelligence.

Critics have accused Blair of using his Institute to advance his own ideological views and its corporate backers. One of the biggest financial backers of the TBI, is Larry Ellison, the co-founder of the technology company called Oracle. Ellison gave the TBI $33.8m in 2021 through his philanthropic foundation and promised another $49.4m in 2022. That was also the year that Oracle bought the healthcare IT company Cerner for $28bn.

While the TBI say that their policy interests are not shaped by its donors' corporate interests, it's known that TBI does put public officials in contact with companies that it believes can deliver changes which it advocates. The TBI employs around 800 staff and its accounts show that it made over £65m in revenue in 2021, a 78% increase on the previous year. Although some have argued that the TBI is bankrolled by billionaires, the Institute says it's not run for profit and that Blair doesn't receive a salary. Blair did tell the Financial Times that he wanted his Institute to be "entrepreneurial, agile and give governments good solid advice..." Staff working for the TBI give advice to countries like Rwanda and Saudi Arabia, two countries that have a track record for violating human rights.

Since becoming the leader of the Labour Party and now Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer-oid has promoted a number of key figures from the Blairite wing of the party. Marianna McFadden, the wife of Pat McFadden, was recruited from the TBI to help plan Labour's election campaign. Last September a Labour source told the Guardian, "If you think the TBI is influential right now, just wait until we get into power and have to recruit half our staff from there."

Many expect that it won't be long before that other New Labour string puller, Mandy Mandelson, is offered a government job by Starmer-oid. 

General George S Patton.

 

General Patton

General George Smith Patton was one of the richest military men in the U.S. army. The Patton family owned what is now downtown Los Angeles. He grew up a spoiled pampered child in privileged circumstances in St Gabriel, California, and enjoyed a life of luxury.

When he became a cadet at West Point, his aunt and mother moved with him for the five years that he was a cadet at the military academy in case he needed their help. Patton also married a wealthy woman, Beatrice Banning Ayer, the daughter of a Boston industrialist. It's thought that Patton may have had learning difficulties in his childhood and struggled to read and write. It's now called dyslexia. When he learned to read, he became an avid reader and poured over books on military history.

Patton proposed invading the Soviet Union at the end of World War II, to drive the Russians out of eastern Europe. He was also highly critical of the Allies denazification program after V.E. Day believing that Europe was going to go Communist. Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery famously said that the first rule of war is "don't march on Moscow." He knew that history showed that those who have tried to invade Russia like Hitler and Napoleon, along with others, generally come to grief.

George S Patton didn't get to lead an army into invading Russia because he was seriously injured in an automobile accident in December 1945 which left him with a broken neck that rendered him paralyzed from the neck down. He died in hospital twelve days later. No one in Patton's vehicle was hurt accept Patton.

Since Patton's death , the conspiracy mongers have tried to deny that this was simply an unfortunate accident and maintain that General Patton, died in suspicious circumstances. They cannot accept that an illustrious American general who survived two world wars, died after sustaining injuries in a car wreck.

 

'Skittles' the Victorian courtesan.

 

Catherine Walters - Skittles

Life for most Victorian prostitutes was pretty dismal and often dangerous, but the courtesans weren't cheap tarts. They were not only known for their good looks and style and sexual abilities, but also their erudition, charm, social skills and artistic abilities.

Esther Lachmann (La Paiva), was known as 'The Queen of the kept women'. Another Parisian courtesan, Marguerite Marie Albert (1890-1971), also known as Maggie Meller, had an affair with the Prince of Wales from 1917 to 1918. He later became Edward VIII. The French President, Felix Faure, was said to have died of a heart attack when he was being given oral sex by the Parisian courtesan Meg Steinheil (later Baroness Abinger). The French nicknamed her 'Deadly Lips', but this could also be because she may have been a police informer. She died in a nursing home in Hove, Sussex, in July 1954.

The English courtesan, Catherine Walters, also known as 'Skittles', had been born in Toxteth in Liverpool and was considered a trendsetter for fashion and style and a fine equestrian who rode with the Leicestershire hunt. She became the mistress of Spencer Cavendish, the Marquess of Hartington and lived in Mayfair. Catherine Walters had also lived in Paris under the patronage of Achille Fould, Finance Minister to Napoleon III.

Another celebrity Parisian courtesan, was the English woman known as Cora Pearl, born Eliza Emma Crouch in Plymouth in December 1836.