WESTMINSTER SIDE STORY

Our Guest Blogger Juliette writes


(If you don't know the songs of West Side Story, this post will make absolutely no sense to you whatsoever. If you do, however, allow me to present...)

WESTMINSTER SIDE STORY

A Recession Era Musical

By Bernstein, Sondheim and Juliette

Scene 1
(Tough-looking ministers pirouette down Downing Street, and launch into the first big song-and-dance number - to the tune of When You're A Jet.)

When you're in debt,
You're in debt all the way
From your first cigarette
To your last dyin' day

When you're in debt,
And the worst comes to pass,
You got bailiffs around,
You're chucked out on your arse!

You're never alone,
You're never undetected!
The bank is on the phone
The bailiffs are expected
Your leccy's disconnected!

Then you are screwed
With a capital S,
And you'll never forget
It's a right fucking mess.

When you're in debt,
You stay in debt!

Scene 2
(Tony and Cherie Blair are lying on a sunny beach, surrounded by hundred dollar bills and bottles of Cristal. The couple launch into a perky duet, to the tune of I Like To Be In America...)

I like to be in America
More cash for me in America
Scrounging's okay in America
Ten grand a day in America

I'm glad we went into that war
Or we might still be a bit poor
Everyone there's scared they'll get shot
Everyone there can suck my cock

I like to be in America
Everything free in America
Not called a bitch in America
We're fucking rich in America...


Scene 3
(Alone in Ten Downing Street, Gordon Brown gazes out of the window thoughtfully. Begins to sing a moving solo, to the tune of Maria...)

Oh Dear!
I've just seen the figures, Oh Dear!
And suddenly my name
will never be the same

Oh Dear
We're right in the brown stuff, Oh Dear!
And suddenly I've found
How frightening a sound
Can be!

Say it loud and I hear angry scousers,
Say it soft and I just shit my trousers

Oh Dear

I'll never stop saying Oh Dear!




Scene 3
(Policeman sits at his desk in front of a mountain of paperwork. Suddenly, a group of people burst in and launch into big song-and-dance number, to the tune of 'Officer Krupke')

Dear kindly Sergeant Krupke
You gotta understand
It's just that we've been burgled
and the cunts took twenty grand
It's not that hard to find them
Unless you're fucking thick
Golly Moses, chuck 'em in the nick

Gee, Officer Krupke
We hate to be pests
A bit less PC bullshit and a few more arrests
Hugging a hoodie's
a right waste of time
Just go and solve some fucking crimes

Right! Officer Krupke
We know you're not Morse
And we know you've got to get to your diversity course
It's just that some scumbags
Broke into my flat
And now they've gone and nicked my cat

Oh, Officer Krupke
We know that you're stuck
It's not your fault you're managed by some useless old fuck
Your sergeant is a tosser
His chief of staff's a twit
Goodness me, of course you can't do shit

Dear Officer Krupke
What are we to do?
Gee, Officer Krupke, Krup you!

Scene 4
(Middle aged man pirouettes round room lined with final demands, and full of blank spaces where bits of furniture used to be. Admiring his stanley knife wielding reflection in the mirror, he sings to the tune of I Feel Pretty...)

I feel shitty
Oh, so shitty,
I feel shitty and just want to fight!
And I pity
Any fucker in a suit tonight

See the shitty flat in that mirror there
Whose can that depressing flat be?
Such a shitty mess,
Telly repossessed,
Family looking stressed
Such a shitty me!

My mood's crashing
I hate bankers
Feel like smashing some wankers with bricks
For I'm fucked
By a pretty detestable clique!


Scene 5
(Grand finale. Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling dance off into the sunset hand in hand, and launch into a stirring duet, to the tune of Somewhere....)

There's a place for us,
You'll find it on the bus
Lose your job and we'll take you there
Where you'll wait for hours on a wonky chair

There's a place for us
Called the Job Centre Plus
Get your cards and we'll take you there
It all started with Tony Blair

Somehow
We'll make a shitload of money
And wriggle out of this scot-free

Somehow
Somewhere
Somewhere.....

J x
Posted by juliette at 21.14

Beeching rail cut reversed 46 years later

The train to Ebbw vale left from Cardiff this morning for the first time in 46 years

So that means the last one was in 1962

Beeching was an MP much like today's MPs with his snout in a trough, he was associated with the road building industry who were desperate to build roads for the government to get the juicy contracts.

The public transport system that Beeching destroyed has led to a wholly crap dependence on the car but of course they didnt bother about global warming back then.

My head hurts...

I shall blog after Monday.. right now I have a headache. There is so much that is flying around with the full moon just gone and other stuff that comes with this time of this particular month including the clocks going back on Sunday morning (if you didn't remember then this is your chance to get an extra hour of time for sleeping and the rest...)

For me personally it means that there are now five months of dark evenings but I don't care.. I have a lightbox so summer is always present if I need it.

Apologies to regular readers.. there are some... but Henry is catching up with some decent quality time and trying to catch up with friends, listen to music and generally heal so there isn't going to be some sharp witty comment here for a bit because well Sunday signals the herald of it getting dark before you go home in the evening from work.

I try to think of it as governmental induced jetlag twice a year to put it into a different perspective so I guess this does have a political slant in some respects.

Anyway there is always Musings my other blog for you to read and digest if you feel the need to probe further...

Blogging on a Saturday night

Oh dear its got to this has it? Everyone else in the universe is watching the rugby on tv ( I assume they are) but I'm firmly square eyed on the laptop.

Lots of political intrigue and machinations this week , the Eu treaty in Lisbon, than you very much Gordon ....Not.., 2 suicide bombers in Pakistan almost getting rid of Benazir Bhutto who survived even though she was just two feet away and Dumbledore has been outed by JK Rowling.

What a week.

Blogging likely to be infrequent over next week

I say likely but you never can tell.

Im going to be busy with certain things and this may prevent me from just sitting down and spewing blog content with witty repartee and political comment.

Two By-Elections

Tony Blair resigned as an MP last week and the Labour candidate for Ealing Southall died suddenly also at the ripe age of 82.

This means there are by-elections taking place on the 19th of July in both Constituencies namely Sedgefield and Ealing Southall

Remedy UK are planning to field two candidates.

I would urge you if you read this blog ( I hope someone somewhere reads it) to urge your friends and mates and whoever else you know in those constituencies to vote for their Remedy UK candidates so that the junior doctors can have a voice in Parliament.
After all if 10000 junior doctors lives have been blighted by this governments' disastrous management then its about time we fought back.

Use your vote wisely!

Tony to push through new stop and search laws

It seems that shiny Tony is going to leave us all with a bad taste in our mouths
Not content with leaving Brown with a poisoned chalice he's going to add alkali and a few other chasers to the cup.


"
Prime Minister Tony Blair plans to push through a new anti-terrorism law before he steps down next month giving "war-time" powers to police to stop and question people, a newspaper reported on Sunday. Blair, who is due to resign on June 27 after a decade in office, wrote in an article in The Sunday Times that his government planned to publish new anti-terrorism proposals "within the next few weeks". An interior ministry spokeswoman confirmed the government was looking at including a "stop and question" power in the new legislation. "We are considering a range of powers for the bill and 'stop and question' is one of them," she said. The "stop and question" power would enable police to interrogate people about who they are, where they have been and where they were going, The Sunday Times said. Police would not need to suspect a crime had taken place. If suspects failed to stop or refused to answer questions, they could be charged with a crime and fined, The Sunday Times said. Police already have the power to stop and search people but have no right to ask them their identity and movements. The Sunday Times said the powers already existed in Northern Ireland. Civil rights groups viewed the plan to extend them to the rest of Britain as an attack on civil liberties, it said. Such powers had only existed before in other parts of Britain in war time, it said. Interior minister John Reid is proposing other measures to combat Islamist militants, the report said. These would give police the power to take documents away for examination even if their value as evidence was not immediately obvious and the power to remove vehicles to examine them. Blair's government passed tough anti-terrorism measures after the September 2001 attacks on U.S. cities and again after four British Muslim suicide bombers killed 52 people on London's transport network in July 2005. However, some of Blair's proposed measures -- such as a plan to hold terrorism suspects for up to 90 days without charge -- have been blocked by parliament or the courts. Britain's anti-terrorism strategy has faced criticism in the last few days after the disclosure that three men suspected of planning attacks on British or U.S. troops abroad had absconded. Authorities had attempted to keep tabs on the three men through "control orders". In his article, Blair said it was not the government's fault the three had absconded. Instead, he blamed parliament and the courts for quashing the tougher measures he had wanted. "We have chosen as a society to put the civil liberties of the suspect, even if a foreign national, first. I happen to believe this is misguided and wrong," he wrote. Britons had decided that, except in very limited ways, the threat to public safety from extremism did not justify radical changes to the law, he said. "Their right to traditional civil liberties comes first. I believe this is a dangerous misjudgment," he added."


The above post is from Reuters via Msn

Is nothing safe from Tony?

I should be happy but Im not

Ever get those days when you wake up and realise that you hate your life? That your therapist makes you feel shit and that the alarm clock waking you up with its little beep and the full sunrise bulb is a portent of doom, such that you throw the covers over your self and hunker down for as long a sleep-in that you can manage, because you cant be bothered to make it to the sitting room to switch your SAD lightbox on and to bask in its 10000 lux glow?

This is one of those days and with all good ironic days its sunny outside rather than the bleak grey of winter but you carry the bleak grey inside you and expand it to cover your personal space.

On the face of it Im blessed, I have money in the bank, a holiday booked, a dog that loves me and a dishwasher and an allotment in London. Do I feel blessed Not one bit!

I guess this is part of the depression and the perfectionism I set for myself that good days are fabulous and bad days are terrible.
Where have I gone wrong in the last 36 years? Working in the NHS is possibly one of those wrong moves. Protocols, Policies designed to make you feel like a tiny cog in a massive operation that can be replaced at a moments notice MMC seeks to do this even more and so that is why the last blogpost is entitled murdering medical careers.

The government are corrupt, we know they are and so do the police but has anyone thought about asking for a general election, No... of course not because all politicians are corruptible and most of them already are corrupted. Lets face facts if they weren't conniving and devious how could they ever have made it to MP in the first place.

The vitriol flows today even though I havent even thought about this blog and am just letting my imagination run and run and to cap it all off I need to get my greenhouse up this weekend and I also need to get my sodding computer to a data recovery specialist because the mother board over heated a couple of Sundays ago and left me without internet access at home.

Am I upset yes, am I angry yes so I'm off to the violence initiative tonight aswell so that when I explode at idiots on the road in this current state, I may be able to just calmly take it as a sign that the country is literally going to the dogs in future.

Murdering Medical Careers

Right time to throw a good broad side and up the political stakes. The government are as we speak butchering the hopes and ideals of 18000 young doctors a vast proportion of whom will leave these shores never to return in order to get a job abroad in New Zealand, Australia and anywhere else they can find one. Hell I'm even thinking of leaving myself as the NHS will be a shadow of its former self once these awful plans get entrenched, but because I'm a slightly older version of a junior doctor and am rather attached to these shores I wont be going farther than the EU. Sweden for all its high taxation looks to be the best place because at least they plough the money back into social systems rather than spend it on unnecessary wars and because if you learn Swedish you are basically ahead of the game there.

I would urge all of you who read this blog ( if there is anyone) to march with RemedyUk on 17th March to protest about this.http://www.remedyuk.org/page13/page13.php