It explains a great deal that our ex-Prime Minister thinks faith, just hoping for the best, should play a greater role in our society.

I wonder, when exactly did Tony Blair start considering “God knows” to be an acceptable response to important questions of government?

£5.52 x 40 x 52 = £11,481.60

£11,481.60 x 3 = £ 34,444.80

Which should be the starting price for one bed flats.

A 100% mortgage at 8.5% interest would cost £280 a month.

Leaving about £150.00 a week to get by on, after tax.

Which isn’t much but it wouldn’t need subsidising

And would make sense of the minimum wage.

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47,000 Euros is plenty to buy

A reasonable roof for over

A hardworking head

In France or in

Germany.

There is no evidence that 25,000,000 people’s personal and bank details are in the hands of criminals, our Prime Minister assures us. He omits to mention that neither is there any evidence that they are not in the hands of criminals.

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Do MPs really believe that to select particular records from a database and to save them to another file is too difficult a thing for Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs to do in-house and requires to be contracted out to a specialist company, rendering the operation prohibitively expensive?

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Contracting out any business function that used to be carried out in-house, often achieved by separating a whole department from a parent organisation, creates increased turnover for the Economy by turning overhead costs into external transactions.

It is another example of how, as if by magic, Gordon Brown’s figures can indicate growth in the economy for no change in output, even when the same work gets carried out by the same people, just from a separate address and with a new name.

I saw news footage of patients in a mental hospital in Serbia. It wasn’t fun to watch. The Serbian Government Minister responsible was reported as saying that things were not as bad as they used to be.

I noticed the wards were clean. I noticed the bedlinen was not soiled. I noticed the cots were in good repair. I noticed there must be many people who have kept the place so pristine, all of whom have managed to ignore that human beings were, and still are, tied to the beds by their wrists.

There were a couple of young adults shown, of fifteen or sixteen years of age, whose entire lives have been spent tied to their childhood cot.

Don’t let them stay that way.

In Saudi Arabia a young woman was gang raped. That is to say, she was victim of 14 consecutive rapes. The maximum penalty for rape in Saudi Arabia is death. Seven men were convicted of raping her and were sentenced to between one and five years in prison.

On her appeal the rapists’ sentences were doubled and if the story were to stop there the Saudi way would seem unextraordinary to the outsider.

The peculiar part, to those of us not convinced that a 7th century desert warlord was a conduit through which a god spoke, is that her appeal resulted in her own sentence being increased, the one she had been given just for being in a car alone with an unrelated male.

Ninety lashes was to be her punishment for being in a car alone with an unrelated male. It was more than doubled on appeal, to 200 lashes and six months of imprisonment.

Taken on its own the law against a woman being alone in a car with an unrelated male could be considered harmless, or even a safety precaution. But when one remembers that women themselves are not allowed to drive it becomes far more sinister. Women cannot travel by road unless accompanied by a male family member.

_____

Dear Gordon Brown,

Can we, the UK, not trade with Saudi Arabia, please? Not even arms at a discreet discount. May I, at least, be given the opportunity to buy my petrol from a non Saudi Arabian source? I am prepared to pay more if I have to.

The USA has Disney and Disneyland. Saudi Arabia has Islam and Mecca. In the UK we have a Church with diminishing popularity, discreetly worth 4 billion pounds, that won’t employ practising homosexuals but will gladly take their money and we have The Seaside, where everyone should go at least once in their lives and for which there is no charge

If the strength of our Economy is reliant upon funding the Saudi Arabian government I would rather have a weak economy. I think most of us would. Most being the majority.

Po.

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The markets waver when it dawns on the gamblers, the stockholders, that their own worth is no more than the continuing pretence of those from whom they acquired it.

So much comes down to light.

How we look. How we feel.

How we behave and

How we perceive

The world

Around

Us.

Sub-Prime mortgages are expensive. As always, it costs a poor person more than it does a rich person to put the same simple roof over their head.

The reason is that the lender has to assume some losses from the “higher risk” market share and factors these losses accordingly into the interest rates charged to each risk group in their customer base. 

When everything is happily balanced the borrower only suffers inflated rates for a couple of years, until they have paid enough of the loan off to sell up and to realise their investment as a downpayment on somewhere else.

Having a downpayment renders borrowers lower risk and entitles them to less punishing interest rates. Less punishing interest rates and a proven track record of repayment enable the borrowers to borrow more.

Thus, for no increase in income and without any more proof of future reliability than they ever had, existing borrowers can soon outbid any one of their fiscal equals coming later to the housing market.

Eventually, to enable anyone to become a new customer of theirs a lender has to relax their own rules and lend more against more recent but equivalent risk.

To adjust for the increase in projected losses, lenders hike their interest rates to new borrowers and the proportion of a new borrower’s income going to putting the same simple roof over their head increases year on year at a faster rate than the price paid for the house does.

For every borrower who achieves a better deal over time a lender must secure another borrower with a worse deal to make up for the loss of profit. The lender needs profit because it has to prove the reliability of its own ability to repay the money it borrowed to lend in the first place.

To be able to lend more, a lender must borrow more so must demonstrate ever increasing profits. These it achieves by charging ever more to the very newest of borrowers for the same simple roof over their head.

After a while the sums just don’t add up, when the bottom of the market can no longer be made to realise the rising profit projections of the low-end lenders.

No one likes to give up their home. It isn’t something people do lightly, however humble their home. It is just that the real cost of everyday, without being extravagant, sometimes doesn’t  leave people enough to pay what they agreed to to buy a roof for over their head.

Here, where the cold reality of real people working their bodyparts off doing real work for real money they spend in real shops for stuff they really need and not being able to afford mortgages on top of that impacts on the digital world of banking, the pace hots up.

As the number of a lender’s defaulting borrowers increases the likelihood of their own profit projections being achieved decreases. The lender’s own credit rating falls and they cannot increase their borrowing as they would wish to, their profit projections fall further and they go into meltdown.

Yah Boo! You might think. But the collapse of a Sub-Prime lender means that loans from lower risk lenders to that Sub-Prime lender will not be repaid. Which means loans to the low risk lenders from higher up the chain will not be repaid.

Just to replace the contribution the highest risk groups in the USA, the poorest, had been expected to make in order for the sums to work in the global economy as a whole, central banks almost everywhere except the UK injected billions of dollars into the lenders at the very top to secure the loans that enable trade and industry.

Trade and Industry flourish by paying minimum wage to the very people who are the Sub-Prime market, without whose investment in simple roofs over their heads the whole caboodle falls apart.

In the simplest of terms, If an employer doesn’t pay a decent wage, enough for their employees to save from, their bank may not have enough to lend the employer to enable their business. In the real world there are many institutions and transactions between the lowest employee and the company overdraft but, if you view “banking” as one great amorphous entity, the principle is clear.

Everywhere a river or stream flows down a valley or through a gorge considerably bigger than itself we can see evidence that climate change has been a feature of our planet for much longer than we have.

It just so happens that this particular phase of our planet’s evolution suits us. Many of us do have a requirement for clothes and temperature controlled accommodation to survive as non-migratory creatures and many live in a fashion unsustainable without a mechanised food-chain but, for the moment at least, we’re doing pretty well.

It is sad, therefore, that so many are now afeared of climate change that they pay more to their governments having been sold the lie that to do so will protect future generations, in a predictably non specific way.

Just as a worship club teases cash from its members on the promise of a better afterlife for their continued support, governments have found a way of guilt-tripping extra cash out of folk. 

Worship clubs say, Pay up or you will have a crap afterlife. Governments now seem to be saying, Pay up or your descendents will have a crap time in this life, the implication being that climate change is all your fault and if you mend your ways and persuade everyone else to mend theirs everything will be okay.

Governments have clearly now joined worship clubs in pretending authority they don’t have in pursuit of money and power.

The head of MI5 tells us of people 15 years of age being recruited for active service with famous terrorist organisations proclaiming religious ideals. He tells us also of 2000 people amongst us planning the downfall of our society and the restriction of the freedoms it permits us in order that they accord with their religious beliefs .

That’s 2000 people who need to get a life away from their religion - and a calculator. There are 60,585,000 others of us here in the UK who are more or less happy with the way things are. Each of the disgruntled would, on average, have to terminate, convert or subjugate to their religion 30,292.5 of the others.

Unfortunately, for the famous terrorist organisation, the apparently preferred termination tactic of religiously disgruntled persons is the suicide attack. The most effective of these to date was in New York City where, in round figures, 19 terrorists terminated 3000 others. Even at that rate, just over 157 each, there would still be 60,271,000 others left after the 2000 had killed themselves.

Put simply, suicide bombing is not a viable strategy to achieve the stated aim of the overthrow of society.  And, of course, we have well known laws in the UK to deal with murder, murderous intent and related incitements.

It appears the aforementioned 2000 are still at large because of the difficulty the policing authorities have with lawyers citing the much publicised Paragraph 1 of Article 9 of the Human Rights Act 1998 which states:

“Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief, in worship, teaching, practice and observance.”

I don’t know why the 2nd paragraph of the same article is not a widely publicised as it qualifies the first thus:

“Freedom to manifest one’s religion or beliefs shall be subject only to such limitations as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society in the interests of public safety, for the protection of public order, health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others. ”

So it is clear, from a single article in a single act, that under English Law a person loses their right to religious freedom as described if by so doing they act with intent to deny others theirs.

By permitting any persons to evangelize, to advocate a cause with the object of making converts, our policing authorities are failing to protect the human rights of everybody else.

[The suggestion that failure to convert will result in something bad happening breaks other laws. The suggestion being made that something bad will happen if you do not make monetary contribution to a fund (collection) from which the evangelizer derives income or expenses, by however convoluted a route, breaks yet more laws.]

Note the Article is entitled ”Freedom of  Thought, Conscience and Religion” and thus cannot be deemed to have a get-out clause for worship clubs in the way so many other laws relating to equality appear to.

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For the full text of the Human Rights Act 1998 - 1998 Chapter 42, excerpted here without permission but not for profit and confident the government or their publishers will not sue me for quoting law accurately, go to:

http://www.opsi.gov.uk/acts/acts1998/ukpga_19980042_en_1