Tag: future Britain

Future Britain – Adur Rights

I will try to ensure that you will have these rights:

 

  1. Right to Freedom of Speech
  2. Right to earn and to have savings and property
  3. Right to the sanctity of your homes
  4. Right to trial by jury for major crimes and to speedy justice
  5. Right to a safe community
  6. Right to honest local parliamentary representation,
  7. Right to privacy
  8. Right to minimal government and minimal taxation
  9. Right to make your own decisions

1)   Right to Freedom of Speech. This means:
–     the right to constructively criticise or find humour in any aspect of your lives, politicians, central and local government, schools, churches, business organisations, the media, institutions, using whatever media is available TV, Radio, videos, blogs, videocasts, films, newspapers, cartoons, etc

2) Right to earn and to have savings and property. This means:
–     a commitment to protect your savings for example from the ravages of inflation, from tax raids, from predatory interest rates, from retrospective legislation,
–          revising the wasteful approach to burning fossil fuels as this degrades the value of your currency

3) Right to the sanctity of your homes. This means canceling the recent laws for hundreds /  thousands of government and local government employees and / or their agents to have the right to enter your home without a court order

4) Right to trial by jury for major crimes and to speedy justice. This means:
–     re-instating trial by jury and to reducing the maximum time anyone can be held incommunicado by the police from 28 days to 14 days

5) Right to a safe community. This means:

–          amending agreements so that our citizens can only be extradited to a foreign country after prima facie evidence has been produced in court;
–          releasing police for more effective work by reducing their paperwork and simplifying the laws of evidence-          decriminalising the use of drugs in exchange for course of treatment,
–          freezing the 1036 new imprisonable offences, 3600 recent laws and the 88,000 recent statutory instruments–          reinforcing our border controls and reviewing our immigration laws–          reinforcing our military services

6) Right to honest local parliamentary representation, This means you having a member of parliament who:
–          listens to what you say and tries to represent you even if their personal views are different;
–          has the authority to change every area of law, rather than having the laws laid down by unelected dictocrats based in Brussels
–          only claims expense which are wholly, necessarily and exclusively incurred in the performance of their duties
–          rejects payments towards the costs of a London home
–          votes on every subject according to his conscience and his constituents’ wishes rather than taking instruction from their paymaster whether a political party, a foreign entity, a trades union, a religious group, a business corporation and also has signed the revised Oath of Allegiance

7) Right to privacy. This means:

–          Information provided by a voter to one government department stays independent and is not shared nor sold to anyone else who wants to use it

–          Each patient owns their own medical history and can maintain a copy of it

–          Three or more photographers at a private house is a breach of the peace

–          Removing all the speed cameras and all the CCTV cameras

–          Removing the need to give notice of intention to travel

8) Right to minimal government and minimal taxation. This means that:

–          the whole ethos of our society is based on to self-responsibility, self-reliance, self-discipline, self-control. Each person has to take responsibility for your own actions and inactions, for every part of your life and it is the responsibility of parents and society to help achieve this, rather than providing an excuse mechanism or doing it for them

–          We no longer need the assistance of the dictocrats in Brussels to detail how we are to run our lives

–          Income Tax and National Insurance is abolished and Corporation Tax is brought down to 10% of net profits

–          Police, Fire, Planning, come under the locally elected Actionate, under the control of a senior spending panel, they will receive the take from a local Sales Tax (replacing VAT)

9) Right to make our own decisions. This means that:

–          You can chose which school, college and university you want yourr child to attend because you will be given education vouchers towards the costs, similarly you can chose at what age the children finish school after the minimum age of 14, and you can claim on-going value vouchers for education  for your whole life

–          The NHS Primary Care Trusts will be replaced with a network of locally elected Health and Education Actionates to choose and control what health and education facilities their local community needs

–          Quangos are disbanded, the work being re-absorbed as and if necessary

–          You have the right to die when you want and the right to assistance in doing so providing you have created and signed a living will at least two years earlier

 

Originally published 160409

FUTURE BRITAIN – Roll up, roll up, Chose your own offence

FUTURE BRITAIN – Roll up, roll up, Chose your own offence

The EU has decided that we are all criminals now and the following will put British Citizens on the EU subversives list.

This EU Council 19th January 2009 ruled on the establishment of ECRIS, a pan-EU ‘criminal’ database and system includes the following ‘offences’:
* Offences related to waste* Unintentional environmental offences* Insult of the State, Nation or State symbols (Non-specified, could be any state or nation.)* Insult or resistance to a representative of public authority (What happens to demonstrators?)* Public order offences, breach of the public peace* Revealing a secret or breaching an obligation of secrecy (There goes ‘whistle-blowers’)* Unintentional damage or destruction of property* Offences against migration law—an “Open category” (offences undefined thus all encompassing)* Offences against military obligations—an “Open category” (offences undefined thus all encompassing)* Unauthorised entry or residence

* Other offences—an “Open category” (offences undefined thus all encompassing)* Other unintentional offences

I particularly like the last two!

 

Future Britain – Council procurement procedures

Future Britain – Council procurement procedures

 

Altogether it’s a very poor deal for the council tax payers AND for our local businesses.

I finally understand where it all goes wrong in procurement.

There’s a professional procurement team who are disciplined to follow the guidelines……. Precisely and totally. They are disliked by their ‘client’ departments in the council for ‘interfering.’

They negotiate contracts and their job is to get Best Value. So what’s the problem?

The core problems are:

– they are over-worked so to minimise the amount of work the procurement team want contracts, specifically contracts for supplies or maintenance, that last for a long time say 3 years. As a result the calculation of the value of a contract for £1,000 per month is £36,000. The contract can be cancelled at three months notice, so calculated on that basis the contract risk is only for £3,000.

If the contract was cancellable at one months notice then the risk is only £1,000.

Certainly the annual value is only £12,000.

This ‘value’ is critical as the procurement team have specific ways of working dependent of whether the contract is for less than £5000; upto £20,000; upto £40,000; upto £135,000 and over £135,000.

If the contract value is calculated on the minimum risk basis then in the example chosen the requirements for bidding change dramatically and are much less onerous because the contract is for £1,000 rather than £36,000.

– In preparing to bid companies are required to complete a Pre-Qualification Questionnaire. The procurement team are only interested in bids where the bid represents less than 25% of the company turnover, subject to a minimum turnover of £50,000.

On the contract value calculation above of £36,000 then the turnover needs to be £144,000 whereas on the lesser risk value of one month’s notice the turnover needs to be only £4,000.

AND why have a minimum turnover of £50,000.

– In completing the Pre-Qualification Questionnaire the procurement team specify that the bidding company provide ‘audited accounts’. By law small companies with a turnover of less than £5,600,000 do not need to have their accounts audited, so the procurement team automatically exclude most small companies or worse still the small companies automatically exclude themselves.

(The procurement team started by saying this was the only document required, though later they changed to say “There’s a briefing letter which requires the relevant documents to be attached to the PQQ.” These documents include the accounts together with the ‘Policy Documents’. I know one organisation where there are three hundred and twenty Policies!)

– The procurement team also said they would give preference to companies providing one invoice per week for all their services. I don’t see how this would reduce or simplify their work as there will still the same no. of item lines to be checked and approved. In fact it’ll be more likely that the invoice will contain an item to be challenged and therefore more likely for payment to be deferred. I think they should be giving preference to companies providing their invoices electronically.

– Because the procurement exercise is divorced from the ‘client’ department and because the contract is “in force” for say 36 months, the operation and control of the contract is outside the client department’s remit, whereas on a ‘one month notice’ contract calculation the contract could be handled by themselves and the supplier terminated almost immediately if the service, quality or price is poor.

In total because the contract is awarded for 36 months the supplier has no pressure to deliver quality goods and service to a good price every month, worse still there is no easy control by the client department to ensure that they do; and small local companies are automatically excluded from the business opportunities with their own council for services in their area.

Altogether it’s a very poor deal for the council tax payers AND for our local businesses.

Future Britain

Cliff Jenkins – Prospective parliamentary candidate,

Honest, truthful, hard-working,

living in your constituency,

a non-politician,

a new type of independent.

I want to improve your life so I will work for:

–        Replacing Council Tax and also Value Added Tax with a straightforward local sales tax payable direct to your council

–        Eliminating Income Tax and reducing corporation tax

–        Better education for your children, with transferable vouchers

–        Free prescriptions, free disposal of sharps, free dentistry

–        Better public transport, saving you time and money

–        Pavements for pedestrians, making life easier for you

–        More Police in view, with relevant laws, safer for you

–        Local control and better quality local services for you

–        Service rather than government – .srv.uk for you

–        Healthier life because of better education and activities

–        Higher personal aspirations, excellence for each person, respect for each person’s capability,

–         ‘Risk areas and risk activities’ for physical activities

Proud to be British, just 60 million of us in a world of 6 billion people, just 1%, so I will support decisions to:

1.     Celebrate being British with new national days the 23rd April Shakespeare Day to celebrate bringing the English language to the world, 21st October ‘Pax Britannica’ Day to celebrate our peacekeeping & defence success, the morning of 11th Nov Remembrance Day and also a TaxFree Day (date to be decided every year)

2.     Protect each British citizen from all enemies

3.     Equip our soldiers, sailors, airmen, police and intelligence forces with the best equipment money can buy –  whatever is needed for us to be the best in the world

4.     Side-step the problems of global businesses by creating ‘British’ mutual banks, ‘British’ Auditors, ‘British’ Businesses

5.     Create a ‘Britain PLC’ infrastructure to help businesses to provide the top-class services the world needs

6.     Re-instate “British Passports” and also “British citizens only” channels at airports and sea ports

7.     Amend immigration controls such that, as people want to live here, they need to be able to speak and write English, to adopt  our traditions and culture, and to abide by the law of our land

Nationally I want to see

  • Better value for our taxes; less law; less red tape for businesses; elimination of Quangos; and reducing the school leaving age
  • The British as the fittest people and the best educated people in the world
  • A system of expertise recognition which can be earned and awarded at any point in your career or life
  • People living long active lives and in a way that doesn’t require so much petrol, diesel, gas etc
  • Free Trade with every country in the world

 

 

“And I do declare that no foreign prince, person, prelate, state or potentate hath ……. any jurisdiction, power, superiority, pre-eminence or authority, ecclesiastical or spiritual, within this realm. So help me God.”

from the Oath of Allegiance in the English Bill of Rights, 1689

Future Britain – Digital Britain, Broadband problems

Future Britain – Digital Britain, Broadband problems

 

Everybody, the politicians, the TV companies and the telecoms companies, seem to have clubbed together on a ‘never mind the quality, feel the width’ basis. They are trying to sell us spoof.

Both the main parties think 2mb download is wonderful. It’s patently obvious that they don’t use broadband to run the country. If they did they would know that the key constraint is going to be ‘upload’ speeds.

It doesn’t really matter if you can download at 30mbs if you can only upload at 256k (less than one-hundredth of the download speed.) If you are working on a shared file or word document or whatever, then the speed needs to be similar both up and down.

We use 3.5mb download and when we are using VoIP telephone there can be constraints. If therefore we want to add video / camera so that we can see our correspondent, whether customer or supplier, we need even more bandwidth. Adding this facility is going to be critical if we are going to have any chance of reducing travelling between offices or to reduce travelling into work.

The TV companies, I think, just want to save the costs of their next transmitters. (The images they are putting over the Internet are very poor, very small pictures, poor sound and slow (because there’s not enough bandwidth, even at 3.5mbs, let alone 2mbs.) The telecoms companies want to maximise their current income potential without any extra investment or they want to get a government subsidy for what they should be doing ANYWAY, or BOTH.

And as for the politicians, well, they just want to get a good sound-bite.

The reality is that the business of Britain PLC needs good quality broadband at a low cost. We need to get upto the quality levels that other countries have now and improve on them.

So to solve the problem and to achieve an objective of (say) 30mb upload and download speeds (SDSL) for business:

–         nationalise the current hardwired twin core cable, still allocated to BT

–         nationalise the current so-called glass-fibre network from Virgin Media and replace all the twin core cable connections

–         get proposals and submissions for supplying SDSL synchronous networks

–         review the costs benefits of having buried cables rather than overhead cables

–         charge the TV companies several billion per year each for changing to a new medium.

Living Concept for Brighton West Beach, incl Portslade and Shoreham harbour

Living Concept for Brighton West Beach, incl Portslade and Shoreham harbour
by Cliff on Fri 16 Jun 2006 04:23 PM BST

Shoreham Port Authority have published their proposals for doing something at Shoreham Harbour. Regretably they can’t get agreement between Brighton and Hove City Council and Adur District Council and West Sussex County Council and SEEDA. So we need to help them.

Personally I’d like to see something like this:

[singlepic id=13 w=320 h=240 float=]

1. A mass transit system running on a bridge over the Harbour entrance and linking Shoreham Airport with the centre of Brighton

2. A pedestrian-only mini town on Brighton West Beach, with housing, hotels, offices, school(s), medical centre, university, entertainment facilities, restaurants and cafes, Olympic size swimming pool.

The finance for all this is centred on the capability of the Shoreham Port Authority to recover land from the sea to the south of the harbour. Their Phase 3 is just this. It creates a new piece of land approximately 1200 metres long by 400-800 metres wide. The mass transit system is necessary as there’s no other way to get the volume of people into and out of West Beach Town. So the land sales or leases need to cover the cost of this bridge and the links to the airport and to Brighton City.

We don’t want any height restrictions, we want exciting architecture, maybe including a floating pier as suggested in place of the West Pier. Then it’s upto the individual developers to fund their projects.

The benefits of this project will be:
– a huge jolt in the arm for the housing market
– a solution to part of the transport problem in Brighton
– a visitor attraction in its own right bringing more people into Brighton
– a boost to the success of the airport
– a huge raft of new jobs for all sectors of the community

Scroll to top