Author: Mike

With Air Passenger Duty (APD) being increased next year (there is already to be a rise in APD this November)  by our every people-friendly Labour Government to £85 per person for a long distance trip to say Sydney. UK air travellers would seem to be at the forefront of being penalised for wanting to travel.

Based on a sliding scale similar to income tax against earnings – now there’s a simile – it racks up the costs, the further you travel.

How will this affect the already hard pressed fare payer? Well if you’re a family of four on that trip of a lifetime, it will cost you some £340 in APD to fly to Australia or New Zealand, and just to add salt into the wound, if you want a bit more leg room on that trip and travel Premium Economy (or above), then look out for a whopping £680 APD charge!

Perhaps there will be a rise in travel by train to Paris before you make the long hop – but beware, HMRC have thought about that and if you have bought a connecting ticket via say Paris from a UK seller, you’ll still get stung for APD. You’ll have to get a completely separate ticket for the long hop from a French ticket agency to completely get around it.

I can understand that there is a need to look after the environment, what ever the real reasons (just plain tax raising I think)  for these increases, it will certainly make people think about long haul travel.

As the hunt for the Black Boxes of the recent Air France Airbus crash continues, here is a very good summary of what is known so far and it looks like it’s pointing towards a catastrophic high-altitude break-up.

With engineering discussions focusing on the Pitot Tubes somehow in this case not sending the correct speed information to the on-board computers, it now appears that there have been a number similar incidents on Air France Airbus place.

“The Times of London reports that a similar “incoherent cocktail of alarms” occurred six times on Air France flights since February 2008. Though pilots eventually regained control in those instances, one situation became so dire that the pilot issued a mayday call. In each case, the emergency appeared to be linked to Pitot tubes that malfunctioned in stormy weather, The Times concludes.”

The Air France that crashed had not had its Pitot Tubes replace, this was to be done in due course!!

With only 20 or less days to go before the pingers on the Black Box run out, it’s looking highly likely that this will be one air crash that may never give up its secrets.

A Harvard University study has recently confirmed that continued drinking of liquids from Plastic bottles that contain Bisphenol A or BPA as it is sometime called will result in a build up of the chemical in people’s bodies.

This interesting article in a recent copy of the Boston Globe, has again raised concerns about the use of this chemical and it’s effects when coming into contact with humans!

Despite the USA FDA and the UK’s FSA having not committed to an outright ban, Chicago looks like it will be the first city to introduce a complete ban on all plastic bottles that contain BPA. It’s unclear as yet if this will be adopted countrywide.  But at least one Canadian Manufacture abandoned the  use of BPA in it plastic bottles in late 2008 which was followed by a government ban on BPA in baby products.

With regards to the UK, although companies have release BPA free plastic products, we still seem to be a bit indifferent on the subject and follow it with stories like this one from the Daily Mail.

I certainly think that our exposure to chemicals like BPA and the many others that we don’t even know about that are used by manufactures may well be adding to the recent huge rise in various allergies and the massive increase in such aliments as Diabetes.

So next time you want a drink, check what’s in the bottle, it could be another dose of BPA.

Two interesting books have just been published discussing the ever increasing use of UK Government surveillance on its citizens.

AC Graylings Liberty in the Age of Terror deals with the way that the public through its own compliancy and  indifference is slowing giving away many of its hard won civil liberties. Although, he recognises that there is a need for tools to solve the current terror threats, he is concerned that too many of our freedoms are being eroded on a daily basis with no real public discussion taking place.

Ground Control: Fear and Happiness in the 21st Century City by Anna Minton is another look at the UK’s CCTV coverage and the impact it is having on us, particularly with regards to what we once thought were our public spaces, but are now fast becoming privatised and under the control of yet more invasive  CCTV. As with the previous book, Minton points out that many of these changes are happening under our noses and it would appear without any kind of informed public debate.

Both books are must reads, highlighting the seemingly unstoppable way in which the UK continues to move towards being one of the most monitored countries in the world with every one of its citizens a number in a database and their images being tracked as they go about their daily business.

Despite being dogged by ongoing technical issues, ContactPoint has finally been switched on to allow childcare professionals access for the first time.

With access to the database eventually being granted to over 350,000 people from both Government and Non-Government Organisations (NGO’s) such as the charity Dr. Bernardos, there are still fears that the security of the system is not as good as it should be.

Other agencies that will have access to the initial 51,000 Children at Risk listings will include social workers, police, schools and health officials. However, the database will eventually contain some 11 million child records, kept from their birth to their 18th birthday.

Whilst there is very much a need to ensure that all venerable children are protected from the seemingly increasing cases of child abuse of one sort or another – in fact ContactPoint was borne out of the Victoria Climbié case –  there are concerns that this database along with the many other government databases is just another add-on to the tracking all UK citizens from the moment of birth to the point of death.

Recent comments from the outgoing Information Commissioner Richard Smith adds extra concerns that too much information is being kept by many government agencies on UK individuals.

It seems that the Labour is still intent on getting us all digitised, be it via CCTV, ID Cards or the many databases that it already has and is continuing to build. Big Brother gets closer by the day.

Some recent resources found:

• The FT – Children’s database launched amid leak concerns.

• Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust Ltd – The Database State: Just how many Government databases are there?

• BBC News – Database of all children launched.

• Nursing Times – Children’s database launched despite access fears.

• The Register – ContactPoint goes live despite security fears.

• CIO – ContactPoint children’s database rolls out.

  Technorati Tags: Surveillance,Databases,Big Brother,Security,Government

It seems that requirements to replace our current Electricity and Gas meters with Smart Meter’s may drive the upgrading of the national broadband network that just straight forward consumer demand.

The current government has allocated £10bn to fund the replacement – maybe some of this is coming from the UK Intelligence budget and this might be another surveillance method that this government can monitor what your doing, or am I being paranoid – which will please the communications giants like BT.

However, I wonder just how much this will actually drive the promised upgrade  – all UK homes to have 2mb broadband – to a faster Internet connection? We constantly hear about Government IT projects running over on both Budget and Delivery, the NHS and the Inland Revenue being just two examples.

It becoming a bit confusing just which project will deliver faster broadband for the UK, there’s BT’s own 21CN project, the UK Governments own Broadband plans and now Smart Meters.

I just hope that with some many people poking away inside the connection cabinets that my own Internet speed – today monitored at 4.85MB from Readings South Exchange – drops as everyone else’s gets better.

Yes, there is rightly a need to give everyone in the UK a better Internet connection, but sometimes things don’t always work out for the better.

Communications Consumers Council Statement

I came across this short article in an recent copy of the Washington Post about an increase in the suicide rates in Japan. Staggeringly over 100 people a day commit suicide!

That’s over 36,000 a year! Which puts Japan at eighth place in this World Health Organisation (WHO) collated league table behind Lithuania, Belarus, Russia, Slovenia, Hungary, Kazakhstan and Latvia  and at three times the level of the UK. The Japanese figure has remained over 30,000 per year for the past 10 years!

Various reasons are quoted for this figure including the continuing world-wide economic downturn of which Japan is being particularly hard hit.

However, one recent case highlighted a different reason. Yukiko Shimizu whose father had died when she was 8, had given up quite a successful acting and singing career to look after her mother who had dementia, it is thought that she was becoming overwhelmed with the stress of this task.

Where does the UK fit in this league table? According to these figures from the Office for National Statistics, UK suicide rates continue to fall, although the latest figures are for the end of 2007. However, we’re all familiar with the reporting of  the cluster of suicides in Wales over the past few years and according to these figures from Defra, the high rates of suicides in the faming communities.

Whatever the cause or reasons for these world-wide figures, it’s sad that so many people are driven to this fatal decision.

Resources:

• Samaritans
• Mind Info Line
• Support Line

While writing the previous post, I made a Google search for some info on Caroline Flint, Browns latest abandonee, when I nearly fell of my seat at seeing that Glenys Kinnock, yes Glenys Kinnock is to replace Flint at the Europe Minister!

I don’t understand how someone unelected by ‘us’ to the UK government gets to be put into such an important position!

Wait a moment, I see a trend appearing, didn’t someone else who was in Europe end up as Business Secretary?

For a party that has spouted on quite a bit about House of Lords reforms, it seems that it’s a handy place to have by your side when you want to fast track another of your friends into high places without any need to ask the electorate.

Perhaps we’re going to end up with a whole cabinet of unelected ministers as Gordon staggers from one crisis to another!

Man, am I sick of this Government!

While Gordon Brown continues to find more of his ministers abandoning the ship! – Now its the turn of Caroline Flint (see this) to up sticks!!

A fellow PM, Berlusconi of Italy is facing much fleshier problems. He has managed to get these pictures banned from Italian newspapers, but EL PAÍS of Spain has published the suppressed images. This on top of charges that he has continued to use government planes to ferry his personal guests around Italy may be the final nail in the coffin for this guy.

Due to the supposed UK indecency laws and my unclear interpretation of them, as this image shows an ‘erect’ penis, I’ve edited the image to blank this out.

However, you can go to the EL PAÍS site and see all the images that Berlusconi has managed to suppress in Italy.

So Gordon, you certainly have your own big problems, but I’m sure that Berlusconi has much bigger ones!

Well it seems to be going from ‘Bad to Worse’, or better depending on your point of view as Hazel Blears jumps the fast sinking ship that is now Labour.

Who will be next?

I have never really understood what she has done in politics over the past few years. She had a number of 2nd division ministerial positions (PPS’s etc.) but currently she is (was) the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, incidentally the person responsible for the Local Government elections tomorrow!

I would think that this has something to do with the impending reshuffle that would probably have seen her pushed out by the PM. But it is more about her MP’s expenses; where, once she had been found out, she flaunted the ‘pay-back’ cheque perhaps a bit too vigorously for the Presbyterian that supposedly is Gordon!

Don’t think that she will be missed for one second! But there again, would any politician?

One rule/law I would be introducing today (if I had the chance)  would be to ban any politician that was involved however remotely or small in an expenses ‘scam’ from benefitting from any reward from the publication of their memoirs.

Of course the mainstream media who at this moment  are in full ‘hanging’ mode, will soon be falling over their own troughs to get the latest and greatest. I can just see the headlines in Murdoch’s Sun, Blears Bears All!!!

Oh well! Lets hope the next batch do a better job, though according to a recent poll they are going have to work very hard to win back our trust.

VOTE TOMORROW – VOTE TOMORROW  – VOTE TOMORROW

Did you vote by post? I did , could not believe how big the voting sheet was this time.

Will you vote tomorrow? It is your right and you must exercise it!

I don’t care who you vote for, just make sure that you go out and put your tick in a box. You won’t know how important it was to have this right, until one day you find that you can’t vote. Then who will you blame?

VOTE TOMORROW – VOTE TOMORROW  – VOTE TOMORROW