Have You Tried England?

Because I disagree with many of Gordon Brown’s decision (most of them actually), I have been labeled a Brown Hater. This divides the world into two camps, those who agree with me and see me on their side, and those who disagree with me and see me as the oppositions.

Sorry to disappoint you guys. I am on no-one side, because as soon as you move to my side I move away. The world is not a football game in which you need to support a team or another

As for Mr. Brown, I don’t hate him at all. I don’t know him, and from all I can see he seems a pretty decent guy. But his mind is not clear, he has not got a vision, stomach for problems, or anything at all which can qualify him to be a CEO, let alone a PM. He is just an average grey man.

I can easily see him as a middle manager in some corporate, and can even imagine having a drink with him every now and then. But this is not enough. England needs (though, can't say deserve) much better.
Do us all a favour mr. Brown, and go home.

Today, Musa, who was found guilty for Speed camera scam, in which he charged speeding motorists up to £200 for taking the blame was sentenced to 16 months in prison.

Today, if the four House of Lords members are found to have accepted £120,000 to help secure amendments to a Government bill on behalf of a business client, they could be required to apologise on the floor of the Lords, but cannot be expelled from Parliament or stripped of their titles, not to mention serving a jail sentence.

I think that our Lords should learn something from the American constitutions, but more so from the French revolution. I think it’s high time for an English revolution.

The anti-Israel campaigners have disappeared from my town. This is natural now that the fighting has stopped. But where are the donation collectors? Where have they gone now that the Palestinians need them the most?

While there was no reason for the donation during the war, now that the fire has stopped you can transfer medicine and food to Gaza. It is now that the people in Gaza need help rebuilding their lives, their homes, hospitals and schools. Now they need our financial aid. But nobody seems to collect for them any more. Not in my town, at least.

We now know that a great deal of the donations for the Tsunami victims never reached the suffering Indonesians. So while I have no doubt about the good intention of the donations collectors in the street, is it possible at all that the donation operation was merely a cynical exploitation of the emotions in the street to make some people rich?

How do we know how much went to those suffering in Gaza and not to enrich people here? If it really went to Gaza why have they stopped now?

Yesterday I arrived at London Bridge station to catch the 21:15 train, which got cancelled at 21:17. The 21:30 got cancelled at 21:34 and the 21:45, which at 21:40 was still running according to the platform officer, was never cancelled but simply vanished from the board at 21:50, annihilating with it any following Thamslink train. No train stuff could be seen, and policemen were strolling the station, probably in preparation for riots, which disappointingly never started.

Eventually we were told to take a subway to St Pancreas and get our train from there. A planned 45 minutes trip took me over two hours to finish.

Why did I have to wait nearly an hour to be informed? Did the trains just disappear, or maybe they were cancelled so they didn’t impact Thamslink’s 90% performance statistics?

For me this is England.

It’s a place where paperwork is mistaken for reality, where train statistics, rather than client satisfaction, defines the quality of the service. It’s a place where ticks in the right boxes were used to prove that a dead baby had been treated well, and that it was just a communication problem that caused a man to starve to death in a hospital, after he hadn’t been fed for over three weeks.

England is also the place that soft crime is dealt with much more harshly than hard crime to help manipulate government statistics. It’s a place that you do not want to be issued a death certificate by mistake, as if this happened you would never be able to prove you were alive.

The credit crisis is merely a wake up call to tell us that reality is something different altogether. But will we wake up, or just add a few more pages to our paper work and feel that our job is done?

Isn’t it chauvinism, not to allow a couple to adopt a child because the man is too fat, but with no behavioral or any other health problems? I was surprised to discover that such discrimination was legal at all. After all, it wouldn’t be in many other civilized countries, and in the US.

On the other hand, isn’t the department dealing with adoption the same as that dealing with child safety, the same department that followed the correct procedures to the letter, only to end up with a dead of Baby P and a few others?

It’s a wonderful economic environment now to find replacement for some of these long term government paper pushers. After all, so many good people are looking for work these days

The government has announced that 30,000 jobs will be created by Olympics projects.

Isn’t it high time to bail out and pass the honour of hosting the Olympics to someone else (Say Beijing again)? If we don’t, in this economic environment, there are only two scenarios:

Either we make a joke of ourselves during the games, as we will not have had the money to build things properly. Or we will build them properly and put London and the entire UK in a much bigger financial mess than it already is.

It took Montreal nearly 30 years to pay their Olympics debt, lead Greece to a near bankruptcy. That was when times were good. These days it will have much more dire consequences.

It’s not too late to bail out. But soon it will be.

I was wondering if it's too late this year to watch the starlings in Brighton. It's truly spectacular, and I hoped to go an see them. Does anyone know?