Beasley's Place

Something smells funny about this story. For a political Party that bangs on about not wanting to be controlled by European rules and regulations, it seems funny that the current Conservative led coalition are now saying that we must be controlled by them when we are awarding major UK investment contracts to non-UK companies!

The head of the Train division in Derby made an interesting comment this morning stating that since the DTI (Department of Trade & Industry) has taken over responsibility for procurement of these types of contracts, Bombardier have not won any of the last three contracts, with one being cancelled and the other two going overseas.

Is there someone in the DTI sabotaging the process in favour of non-UK firms?

Although Siemens, the German based company that won the contract says that some 2,000 peripheral jobs will be created in the UK, the actual building of the trains will happen in Germany.

What does this say about UK successive governments and their inabilities to protect and retain manufacturing jobs here in the UK. It appears that they cannot be bothered to ensure that such major contracts stay in this country. Surely at this time of recession, every job is important to the UK.

I cannot imagine for one moment that Germany or France would let similar internal contracts go outside of their own countries.

This is a terrible mistake.

After a report on the BBC Breakfast Show today about a series of domestic house fires in London, links have now been made to faulty defrost controls in a number of Beko Fridge-Freezer products.

What amazes me is that that the London Fire Brigade bosses alerted Beko to the danger in June 2010 and the company apparently had issued a recall notices to all of its customers. As a Beko customer I have not had one. Have you?

The BBC Breakfast Programme issued a telephone number (0800 009 4837) this morning, which of course has been inundated with calls. They also directed readers of the news story on the BBC website to the Beko website, which crashed almost immediately.

Perhaps as part of the BBC’s commitment to UK Public Services Broadcasting they could also have pointed concerned users to this page of the Trading Standards Institute website where full details have been for sometime about the Beko Product Recall.

Maybe the BBC Watch Dog website might like to have this link on their page, after all are they not supposed to be champions of the consumer?

Whilst looking on the Wokingham Borough Councils website today to see if the Public Sector strikes were going to affect rubbish collection in my area, I came across some information about changes to local rubbish collections/ recycling that will be introduced from April 2012. I don’t remember seeing any leaflets about this or reports in local newspapers, but there are some interesting changes.

Basically these will be:-

• Items for recycling (using existing black boxes) will now be collected on a weekly basis.

• Other household rubbish will continue to be collected weekly, but each householder will now be issued with 80 free rubbish bags/sacks. These will be specifically marked; use any other bags/containers and they will not be collected. Wheelie bin are not to introduced.

• Free collection of Green Waste (Green Bags) will now end as of the end of March 2012. However, if you still want a home collection of Green Waste, you will now have to to pay for this service. You will then be given a brown wheelie bin at an annual charge of £60 per annum or you can buy a number of 75 litre compostable sacks for a price commensurate with the annual charge. Both the wheelie bin/ compostable sacks will be collected every fortnight. However, we are all being encouraged to now take our own Green Waste to local recycling  sites.

It’s good to see that Wokingham is not going the way of other councils and cutting back on frequency of collections, but I suspect that the cutting of free Green Waste will cause some issues for many residents plus some might feel that the extra charge is on top of what we already pay in local council taxes.

More information about the changes and a list of questions & answers (FAQ’s) is available from the Wokingham Borough Council website.

Happy recycling.

With the furore about the terrible treatment of the Dowler family during the recent trial of Levi Bellfield still in the headlines. I wonder why the UK still seems to be having such an problem in delivering fair justice to victims, the ‘system’ seems to be on its head at the moment and favours the criminals.

Leaving alone the Dowler case alone, here are two more recent examples of justice favouring the criminal…

Don’t Film the Yobs, you’ll be breaching ‘their’ privacy! – Yes that is what a community campaigner was told when she wanted to film yobs who were causing issues on her estate. However, it appears that the yobs have higher rights than the ordinary citizen! More back ground here.

Shopkeeper takes teenage thief home to parent and now faces prosecution for ‘false imprisonment’! – It seems that a good intention of taking a thief home to face their parents after stealing some grapes turned into  a nightmare for the shopkeeper who was later arrested by the police for holding the thief against their will. Perhaps the shopkeeper should have called the police, but then the thief (a 15 year old) might not have got off so lightly.

More background here.

I am sure that there are many more cases like this, I’ll have to keep an eye out and post some more.

Still getting some good figures on the BT Infinity broadband line.

Did have a few blips on the upload but overall consistent  download speed continues.

BT still offering some good deals for upgrading (no I don’t work for BT) that would be worth looking at.

Watching internet content such as BBC iPlayer is so much better.

Sometimes things happen in the past and they just get forgotten. However sometimes, events happen that change a nation and a way of live and should never be forgotten for the impact that after 25 years, is still very much felt today.

As part of today’s BBC Radio 2 ‘2Day’ special programming, the BBC repeated (albeit at 5 past midnight – was that an conscious decision?) the Ballad of the Miners Strike.

It had been originally broadcast sometime ago, but was referred to a number of time on today’s Jeremy Vine/Dermot O’leary ‘Top of the Docs’ program about radio documentaries as being available to listen to again on the BBC iPlayer.

As I had not been able to stay up till 1am t0 listen to the whole program (am I now getting too old for ‘all-nighters’?) I also wanted to listen to it again. Imagine my annoyance when I found that the program was blanked out from being accessed on the BBC iPlayer website – interesting that it was the only program not available!

Anyway, after five tweets (two to the live chat of the ‘2Day’ program), two emails and four phone calls around the BBC Phone Labyrinth, the BBC ‘unblocked’ the link to the program and it is now available for listening again.

The Ballad of the Miners’ Strike is a musical exploration of how lives were forever changed by the year-long miners’ strike. With specially commissioned songs and interviews with people involved in the strike both then and reflectively now. However, a friend intimately involved in the strike at the time, says that the BBC did not collect as many views for the original documentary as they perhaps could have.

It’s a powerful piece of Radio broadcasting and another demonstration that despite the ever increasing ‘Digital’ world that we live in, Radio still remains an amazing medium for conveying passion and the importance of verbal recollection.

Listen to it, understand what happened and reflect to some degree on a slice of UK life that has forever disappeared.

The Radio Ballads: Ballad of the Miners’ Strike

Just received this letter from Wokingham Planning office, they have refused permission for the erection of the proposed new Communications Mast and associated equipment.

I am sure that is not the end of the matter as there will probably be an appeal.

Also I have not seen anything about the planning permission for the actual development itself as yet. That must be coming up in a later planning meeting

More to follow I am sure.

The running of Wokingham controlled libraries being put out to tender for private management and could be in line for a massive review if plans to outsource their management to a private company are approve

Comments and further discussions can be found here.

We all know that the UK is behind many other places in the world when it comes to Broadband connection speed. However in a new new index created by Ericsson, London has come in at forth after Seoul, Stockholm and Singapore.

The index is not just about raw speed of Internet access, but about how a City uses technology to connect the many diverse areas, services and its citizens to each other.

This article also looks at a number of other cities around the globe and how they are fairing. The graph also shows where the various cities are in the Index.

It appears that there is a scam being carried out when ‘you’ need to renew your EHIC. Some companies are claiming that they need to charge a £9.00 processing fee during renewal. This is not true as the card can be renewed Free of Charge.

When you need to renew your EHIC make sure that you only use the following website www.nhs.uk/heathcareabroad/. When you arrive at this website, use the telephone number 0845 606 2030 to renew your EHIC. Do not visit any other website.