School Dinners, James Bond style

A school in the London Borough of Camden has announced that it will be using fingerprint technology to buy school dinners. Acland Burghley Academy inTufnell Park will be using the new bio-metric system which will record everything the pupil orders and their account can be seen by the school staff and the pupil’s parents.

Personally I feel this is the“Big Brother” syndrome at its worst. It is brainwashing young people to learn to accept that it is normal to have everything you do to be recorded, scrutinised and studied by the authorities and the establishment. I can imagine it being a bit of fun to an eleven/twelve/thirteen year old to walk up and press a finger or palm to a screen and order your lunch from a screen selection especially if it shows a view of the fingerprint.

What I find alarming is the that The Information Commissioner’s Office, an august body supposedly there to enforce an individual’s information rights, has come out in favour of this by stating “ the use of the system in schools taught pupils that giving personal information to those in authority was perfectly mundane and routine”.

“perfectly mundane and routine”?

I find it anything but“perfectly mundane and routine” as an adult to have my fingerprints taken never mind as a teenager. Can you imagine the scene as an officer of the establishment such as a policeman or an official of the council or government walks up and says to that pupil five or ten years later and says; “It is alright you had this at school for your dinners I have to take your ‘prints. You know it is harmless, you know it makes sense.”

MPs ask for an alcohol price reduction...for themselves

I thought I had gone back a couple of months and it is April Fool’s day.

M.P.s. are calling for the price of alcohol to be reduced in the Palace of Westminster bars. The current price for a pint of Becks Lager is £3.20 and a pint of John Smiths bitter £2.60. At the moment the bar prices are linked to a Wetherspoons pub in Victoria, London. Wetherspoons are renowned for their cheap beer prices compared to other pubs in the local area.   Most prices for a pint of Becks lager in the Westminster area would be close to £4 a pint if not a wee bit more.

The M.P.s are suggesting that the bar prices should be linked to pubs outside central London to make them cheaper.  Do they not realise that anyone who works in Westminster and wants a pint in the area has to pay the going rate. Very few, if any, people have access to subsidies canteen never mind a reduced bar.

Happy New Year? It was until the Tory-led coalition once again began its attack on the poorly paid

It was until the Tory-led coalition once again began its attack on the poorly paid.

In fact the attack on the low wage earner and the people on benefits began just after Christmas with the right wing Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne demanding that the National State Welfare budget be cut by £10 billion. Where did that figure come from? Was it just plucked out of the air as a good “sound bite” figure to ensure the headlines would follow in the Daily Express and the Daily Mail?

I have not seen any figures to justify this claim that it is £10 billion that needs to be cut from the Welfare budget. It appears to tally with the Tory led coalition aim to cut the loan deficit.

I am also astonished, as far as I have seen/heard at the way the media such as the BBC television and radio channels, Channel 4 or the ITV news have never crossed examined the Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne on how he came to this conclusion.  Just a thought, I find it a wee bit strange that you never see George Osborne give interviews. Is that due to his past performances in live interviews and gaffe blown comments?

On Tuesday 8^th January 2013 the House of Commons voted to restrict any rise of benefits of working age to 1% over the next 3 years. This included Working Tax Credits, a payment by the taxpayer to boost the pay of low-paid workers rather than have the worker being paid a living wage by the large companies who make billion of pounds profit to pay their shareholders a large dividend at the tax payer’s expense.

When I say shareholders I am not talking about the person in the street who may have a few shares in a company but the very large global companies listed on the London, New York and the Tokyo stock exchange which make billions of pounds/dollars profit every year.

--McTaggart

Standing room only at Westminster

I stood for Parliament last year along with around a dozen other SHP candidates and, remarkably, we all got in, albeit via an extremely impressive state of the art electronic screening system under the supervision of some of London’s largest policemen.

Mind you, once in, there was no lolling around on the comfy green benches of the House of Commons, baying at the rabble opposite, or relaxing on the even more sumptuous red benches reserved for those of noble birth (or more recently anybody whom the Head Prefect of the day deems worthy of ennoblement and, perhaps more to the point, who might be able to do them a favour in return sometime in the future).

In fact we didn’t take our seats anywhere – not for the whole two and a half hours we were there. You see sitting is not for the likes of us ordinary, decent, taxpaying, non-expense fiddling honest souls. Rather, it is for those chosen by a trusting electorate and who are seen as up to the Herculean task of dragging this great nation of ours from one self-made crisis to another, without ever loosing their nerve or giving a straight answer to anything.

However, whilst we may not have been permitted to sit in either Chamber at any time, neither MPs nor Lords are permitted to stand in their respective Houses without the permission of the Speaker.

Not that we saw any members of either house, except for one Lord who was showing another group around Parliament, presumably to earn a bit on the side since members of the upper house don’t get paid. No, the usual incumbents were off at the annual jamborees boasting about their achievements and making inevitably soon to be broken promises about our future governance.

But putting cynicism aside, it is a privilege to have strolled through this beautiful and immensely impressive place, where from time to time for over the past 1000 years decisions have been taken that have quite literally, shaped the course of world history.

All of us are grateful to the Camden MP and socialist stalwart Frank Dobson for sponsoring the SHP visit, and to our personal guide, Roger King, whose many delightful anecdotes put flesh on the dry bones of our colourful and sometimes violent constitutional history.


R.A.E.