A few of the many sets of buzz-words or –phrases popular within Party-political circles is “Are we message-good? Are we on track? Are we reaching our base; our core?” The Party faithful, or ‘the core’, are known to respond to command phrases which fit their belief profiles; but what happens when the Party changes, or alters, and the core doesn’t?

My son, a micro-electronics engineer, works in the automotive industry in the North-East, and a great many of his mainly male work-colleagues give their loyalty to the Labour Party; the “Party of the working Man”. My late eldest brother, my late father, were also life-long Labour supporters, On the map of voting intentions, where I live, County Durham is part of a Labour red block which goes against the vast spaces of Tory blue throughout the rest of England, We are, in reality, a rural area with the vast open moors of Northumberland and of Durham; with the inherited memories of an industrial heritage; of shipbuilding, armaments, coal-mining and steel: but with the emphasis on the ‘heritage’; because the ship-slips and cranes have all fallen silent, the Chieftain & Challenger tank factory is shuttered, the mines have disappeared, and the steel is hanging on by it’s veritable fingertips. But the Labour Party counts its support up here by the bucket-full; the ‘red’ seats are safe from Blyth to Newcastle, from Sunderland south to Durham.

But I do wonder why this ‘tribal loyalty’ still exists, when the Party which engenders and hopes for, and to a certain degree depends on the support of that ‘working man’ seems to have morphed into a metrosexual, femininised, elitist-run Party which laughs at the St. George’s flags on a house, or sneers at the ‘white vans’ of their male voting base, whilst promoting a ‘pink van’ for the Labour ‘wimmin’ who, incidentally, wouldn’t be seen dead in that pink monstrosity, or anything near it. When much younger than today, Read the rest of this entry »

Here is Harriet Harman showing all the substance one expects from Socialists….

One of the many areas in which we, as a nation, are failing is in our legacy to our children. We fail them in the huge debts, piled up by a profligate Labour spendthrift Government intent on one thing, and one thing only, getting re-elected. We fail them with the ludicrous education policies, imposed on an electorate bemused by politicians promises, which result in young adults having to accept remedial education before doing any job which requires either reading, writing, or the ability to add up without access to a calculator.

I take particular note of the absence of reading ability in our young people, because that is obviously the only way in which so many people have become confused when given due notice of their lawful debts. I refer to the recent failure by the Office of Fair Trading in their lawsuit against the banks’ ability to levy whatever charges they deem necessary upon account holders who go into an overdraft without agreement from the lending bank.

As ATW readers may have informed themselves, the banks’ ability to charge their customers a penalty, after the customer has withdrawn more than their account holds in credit, and thus gone into an overdraft without any agreement from their bank; has been long argued to be unjust, unfair, and probably fattening into the bargain. The OFT took on the banking industry after many account holders bleated that the imposition of such charges, and afer winning in the Appeal Court, lost the final battle in our brand-new Supreme Court.

The problem was, is, and will be be that any account holder should know what he or she signs up to when they open a current bank account. If they don’t read the small print, or even the large print, it is purely their own fault. Banks make money by accepting deposits, and paying out a small rate of interest upon those deposits; while placing a greater rate of interest upon cash borrowed. The difference between the loan interest and the borrowed interest is where the banks profit, and it is not unreasonable that they also expect to profit if their account holders withdraw money on an overdraft basis without any agreement from their bank manager! It is not unfair for a bank to charge a customer for going into the ‘red’, and it is also not unfair that the banks do this on a regular basis! If they didn’t place a charge for use of the banks’ money, authorised or otherwise, they would rapidly go out of business.

My advice to the so-called ‘hard-done-by’ customers who have now to realise that they aren’t going to get away with it is simple; pay up, find a more accommodating bank or building society, or shut up!