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Monday 28 July 2008

“Now just high-tail it on out of here, you pesky critter” said the Mail Marshal at Seiko Watches

One of my readers who works at Seiko often fails to get his normal helping of perceptive social comment from me because the Mail Marshal there stops it dead.

Something about unacceptable language, apparently. Amazing.

So I thought I might for once, raise the tone of this emission (that’s not rude is it?) with wise words from The Economist.

They commented recently the U.S. economy is based on private profit and social debt. When the money is made all the capitalist pigs have their snouts in the trough. When it is lost, taxpayers have to bail them out.

What adds insult to injury is that the rogues responsible all waltz away with massive pay-offs.

This is true here too, only in the U.S. everything is bigger and better. They have trillions of debt where we have billions; their crooks walk away with millions, ours with hundreds of thousands.

Nevertheless, should the creep at Northern Rock have been allowed to walk away with a fortune when people lost their jobs and we bailed out the firm? And should that ex-adman be so richly rewarded for not sorting out the Royal Mail.

For that matter, should the useless head of Network Rail, a man called Coucher, have a year end pay of £1.2 million when the organisation has done such an appalling job?

Well the answer is, he met the targets set by the “Regulator”. What kind of regulator is that? The only possible answer can be a stupid, inept useless regulator. One who is blithely unaware of the concept of competence, let alone profit and loss. One who did not rise through merit but was appointed by politicians whose only skill is in trotting out tripe and getting freebies.

But then the whole show is run in a very odd way. Take the chairman, Sir Ian McAllister. At Christmas, when thousands of passengers endured day after day of misery, that little porker was enjoying an extra long Christmas break with his family at his £1.5million home saying he'd "only get in the way" if he went into work.

Amazingly, this smug, podgy twit gets £250,000 a year for a three-day week. He said his presence in the office was unnecessary. If so, why not get rid of him? He also said: "Sometimes you have to know when to stand back and just let the experts get on with it."

What did the experts get on with? Network Rail failed to finish £415 million of engineering works by December 30 as planned. And Ian was knighted for "services to transport" on the very day they got a record £14million fine for making passengers' lives a misery over New Year. How come Hitler never got a Nobel Peace Prize?

But you can always rely on one factor: Wee Gordie Broon, the mastermind behind the stupid public-private lash-up that is Network Rail, which has neither social nor private responsibility.

And today I noticed another brilliant decision.

This country is in serious financial trouble so we’re going to give £30 million to the Palestinian Government. I wonder how much will reach the poor, betrayed masses there. One thing is for sure: it will all come from the betrayed masses here.

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