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March 30, 2010: Service will be sporadic!

Many apologies to those who have missed seeing my daily blogs recently. The new, vastly improved Website is on its way, and I hope to launch it soon. Please bear with me.

March 25, 2010: Something’s gone wrong

I am looking into whatever has bedevilled this site over the past few days. Please bear with me while it is fixed. (A new-look site was being planned – perhaps the old one found out and got the ‘ump?)

March 24, 2010: Stimulating the economy

With Alastair Darling’s Budget announcement looming today, my mind returns to thoughts of what’s really wrong with the economy. Labour, driven by an overarching need to keep their party in power will want to paper over the cracks and make things look better than they are, while the Tories will be snarling and snapping, eager to do whatever they can to bring down the Labour vote.

Papering over the cracks includes things like the ‘park and cream’ idea, which addresses the problem of unemployment by ‘parking’ job applicants with no qualifications, experience or skills so that they don’t appear in the unemployment statistics and creaming-off those with better prospects and placing them in jobs which may not be ideal but which gets them off the jobless total.

It’s smoke and mirrors! But we all have to live with the realities that follow and whatever mirages are conjured up today, those realities will come home to us all after the forthcoming election is done and dusted. Personally, as I have said before, my vote would go to any party that proposed ways of creating jobs, encouraging enterprise and helping us to re-establish Britain on the world map.

No Mickey-Mouse schemes, just real measures. No cuts that will impact the training of young people: instead, solid plans to encourage apprenticeships. No palliatives to deal with redundancy and the collapse of industries: just promises to invest in rebuilding businesses and deterring the import or goods and services. No shilly-shallying over the closure of our heavy industries: just clear plans to ensure that we regain our place in those vital businesses.

And of course, as you’d expect from me, no ignoring of the truth about our desperate need to build nuclear power stations but instead, statements that the Government will be acting to make sure that the next generation of plants will be British-engineered and British-built.