Yet another new blog

I found this item online:  https://theconversation.com/food-poverty-agony-of-hunger-the-norm-for-many-children-in-the-uk-116216?fbclid=IwAR1VclzXXoOp4WUMDo5sph1562i9V-K0OceYDqEM5A3ua7s3jW6cTSSad0w It's by an academic at the university of Kent (yes, it has poverty too) and it's worth a read. Some of us know what poverty is. I'm told my family was part of the 'urban poor' 60 years ago, except we didn't know it. We thought we were just like everybody else. We had crap houses but we had jobs and we certainly had enough to eat. Later, as a teacher, I worked in the area of Glasgow I used to live in. That was in the 1970s. Again, the parents of my pupils were part of the 'urban poor'. Jobs were scarcer but no one went hungry. We had the welfare state - never referred to then as 'welfare' or as 'benefits.' So what has happened? How have we reached the point where 4.1 million children are living in poverty in the UK, with kids stealing le...

I don't know Father Martin Magill, any more than I knew Lyra McKee. But I'm glad Fr Magill was there to conduct Lyra's funeral and I'm grateful to him for what he said. And just as grateful to the congregation that they reacted by applauding Fr Magill's comments, even if it took the politicians a minute to realise that their lack of reaction had been noted by everyone in the cathedral and watching on the telly. And I don't just mean UK politicians or Protestant politicians or Catholic politicians. The lack of human response by all of these people tells us a lot about what's been going wrong in the UK for the last few years. Northern Ireland isn't another wee quiet area of the United Kingdom. We're dealing with 40 years of  suffering for people in Northern Ireland. Its border issue is even now right in the middle of brexit. What did politicians like Theresa May and Arlene Foster think would come of just giving up on Stormont? What do p...

It started with brexit. Every old duffer with a history in politics - not to mention a seat in the House of Lords - has been trotted out to tell us how important Britain (England) is in the world and how life  will be so-o-o-o much better once the UK has shaken off the shackles of the EU.  So we've had Nigel Lawson. Nigel wanted the UK to leave the EU but he wanted to live in France. Sadly (for us, though not for the French) his application to remain (irony alert!) in France was rejected and he's back in Blighty.  Now we've got Ann Widdecombe deserting the sinking ship of Torydom to join Farage's Brexit Party.  And George Galloway...well, the less said about him the better. You'd need slo-mo eyesight to keep up with the number of party changes George has made in his time. So what have these styumers (Glasgow word - speaks for itself, I think) got in common?  They are old .  Farage is 55. Galloway is 64. Widdecombe is 71. Lawson ...

It was good to hear your view on the UK government's reaction to the extension to their negotiations to leave the EU: 'First thing they do is go on holiday.'  You may as well know that they plan to spend most of the next six months nipping off on holiday. After all, that second home in the Algarve isn't going to take care of itself.  This is called the British work ethic. You and I may think leaving the EU is a crisis that merits at least turning up for work, but that's not how the Conservative Party works. Some of them have got into the habit of telling off the voters for not working hard enough, ignoring the people who run the business world and acting as if  they have all the time in the world - and every right to take as long as they want to reach a decision.  You must have noticed how they work: they sit around a lot in the chamber, baying at each other, arguing with the Speaker, following their Henry the Eighth rules. They tend to forget that ...

Now how did that happen? There was a fire. The Paris Sapeurs-Pompiers turned up. They and a whole lot of volunteers removed as many of the art works and holy relics as they could and took them to safety. They started storing them in the Louvre straight away. The fire brigade tackled the fire and stopped it spreading beyond the wooden spire and the roof. The President of the Republic came along with the mayor of Paris, both looking shaken, and promised to help. Several individuals and companies had promised 360 million Euros to repair and restore the church (and let's not forget that's what Notre-Dame is) even as night fell. And you know, astonishingly, nobody tried to apportion blame. There will, of course, be an investigation, but meanwhile no one is blaming anyone. Except in the UK, where this fire has already been compared by the media to fires at York Minster, Windsor Castle and Glasgow School of Art. Just trying to equate Notre-Dame with any or all of these b...

If you want to know what a farrago is, try these synonyms: hotchpotch , mishmash , ragbag , pot-pourri, jumble , mess , confusion , patchwork , melange , hash , random collection, motley collection, chaos , assortment , miscellany , mixture , conglomeration , medley. I think this is a perfect description of Nigel Farage. This is a man who has sat as an MEP for 20 years but has apparently done nothing for his constituents in south-east England in that time. He's on the EU fisheries commission but has only attended 3 meetings out of 32. He wants the UK out of the EU but has taken care to ensure his children have German passports (their mother is German) before we go. It seems the electorate don't mind, however, since they keep on sending him back to Brussels. Or are they just trying to get rid of him? Has Farage ever turned down his salary on the grounds that he doesn't believe in the organisation? Not once. He's one of the few politicians who can provoke the normally ...

The telly's rubbish because it's Sunday. I've done two washings, dried and folded one and hung the other up and that's me knackered. I could watch some of the stuff I've recorded on my Skybox but my concentration is mince. So I've been surfing the net, dipping into bits and pieces here and there. First, I found a clip of BBC street interviews in Ripon in Yorkshire: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-politics-47847340/may-and-corbyn-brexit-talks-what-do-voters-think The woman who described Westminster politics as 'like the playground' got it exactly right. So did the people who wanted some kind of 'national' unity, although, poor souls, they seem to have missed the point: Brexit isn't about 'national' anything. It's about the Conservative Party. And then came the well-fed elderly man who started (well, in this clip this is how he started but I know how editing works) by saying: 'I'm a Conservative voter.' And I knew ...

Well, I don't know who she was. Some Tory MSP - no doubt labelled rent-a-mouth by her opponents. She, it seems, said in the Scottish Parliament this week that she would be happy if the state had no role in the NHS. In other words, she'd be happy to see the NHS privatised. Either she's too ignorant or too young or too well-off - or all of these - to have any idea exactly why the state came to play a role in healthcare in the UK in the first place. There are lots of stories from two world wars of the shock recruiting officers got as they discovered the poor health of a lot of  soldiers. TB and rickets were rife. Malnutrition was normal among recruits from industrial areas, where there were regular outbreaks of highly contagious and debilitating diseases like diphtheria, measles and scarlet fever. Medical conditions went untreated because treatment had to be paid for and poor people couldn't pay. The NHS wasn't some treat for the poor. Having a healthy workforc...