How to save a few £100k from the public payroll

Greetings to fellow rantees...apologies for my five-month hiatus. A dear friend recently pointed out that he missed my whimsy and musings, so I've decided to get back into this here blogging lark.

Today's subject of conversation: a suggestion for where to swing the axe when Dave's in No 10.

Children's Commissioners.

First of all, why do we need four of these people (one each for England, Scotland, NI and Wales)? Are the issues affecting children in Scotland that different from those in Wales (viz, lack of access to booze, teachers not letting them play their iPods in class, shops 'stigmatising' them for wanting to buy cans of spray paint...)? Or is this just another one of those pig-headed notions that came out of devolution?

But do we really need anybody doing this job? I mention obviously because of this story but why do we need some unelected public servant (the English one paid £130k pa in 2005; possibly more now) to "speak up" for children? Don't we have government ministers at the Department for Big Hugs and Ice Cream for this?

Causes taken up by the Commisars de Yoof include:

• obviously the one mentioned earlier, that Messrs Venables and Thomson shouldn't have been tried through the criminal system for the brutal and sadistic murder of a toddler;
• ditto, raining the age of criminal responsibility (predictably, as it's higher in goody-goody PC Europe);
• attacking the Government for detaining the children of failed asylum seekers in secure accommodation prior to deportation (both in England and in Scotland);
• lobbying for a smacking ban... and doubtless heaps of other stuff.

What ties all this together? It's an explicitly Left-wing agenda. No notion that children's "rights" should be balanced with responsibilities. No recognition that the authority of adults should take precedence. Nothing. Just the usual "don't blame the kids" PC Guardian group-think in the public sector that seems to be utterly immune to the ballot box.

Well, Dave should think differently. Sack them - all four. Have a Tory Minister for Children at the (hopefully renamed) Department for Education. If people don't like what the Minister proposes re children's "rights", they can vote him or her out.

Simple.

PS - any idea that comes out the UN tends to be a crap one. Just ask Saddam's Swiss bankers how debilitating the UN's "Oil for Food" sanctions were to his bank balance.

UPDATE (15/3/10): The Telegraph's Ed West puts it rather well here.

Madonna gets booed

Oh, this gave me a chuckle.

Apparently, foreign policy academic and plunderer of the Third World's children Madonna was booed at a concert in Romania after saying that the way they treat gypsies out yonder way "made [her] feel very sad".

Perhaps folks just want to listen to her music - not my idea of fun, but some people must like her - rather than listen to her wagging her finger at them for their lack of PC credentials. They'd love Harriet Harman there, wouldn't they?

Reminds me of the story about that preening idiot with the stupid sunglasses and how in one of his concerts, he started clicking his fingers every few seconds, and then said, "Every time I click my fingers, a child in Africa dies". And someone in the audience shouted back, "Well, stop fucking doing it then!". Brilliant.

Double Word Score in PC Guardian Scrabble

What's PC Guardian Scrabble, I hear you ask? It's a little game I've invented re the nature of the articles on CiF and the progressive Left's obsession with the "rainbow coalition" (viz, the idea that there isn't a single problem on the planet that can't be blamed on white, middle-aged, middle-class, heterosexual men). Y'know, like the fact that we have a Minister for Women but no Minister for Men, and there aren't any Straight Pride parades where heterosexual people get to have a march to celebrate their particular preferences in the sack.

These remarks are NOT to be taken as a criticism of gay people at all by me (some of my best friends etc...) - but sexuality isn't the be-all and end-all of who people are. Don't gay people have an interest in safe streets, low taxes, public services in the same way as anybody else? It's similar to our 1980s slogan "Labour say he's black, we say he's British" - let's focus on what we have in common rather tha go down the road of all this tedious, Balkanised identity politics so beloved of the Left.

Anyway, getting back to the topic... have a look at this piece by Ruth Bond, the chair (a talking chair? Very clever. Looks more like a human than a chair to me. I dunno... maybe people sit on her a lot) of the National Federation of Women's Institutes.

In it she whines... whoops, opines, that wonderful though the Green movement is, it's too heavily dominated by men. That gets a double word score in PC Guardian Scrabble as:

1. it's about eco wackery
2. it's a 1970s feminist whinge about "male domination"

Unless Ruth the Talking Chair is perhaps transgendered, in which case it's a triple score.

I do love this quote though:

From Britain's environment ministers, past and present, to prominent campaigners
such as Jonathan Porritt or George Monbiot, global converts such as Al Gore, and the panoply of climate change negotiators from Kyoto to Copenhagen, men are dominating this debate.

Well, lucky, lucky us (PS Right Ranter is a man!) - with company like that, if women have any sense they'll steer well clear!

Seriously though, the Suffragettes fought for what they believed in. Is this where feminism has got to these days? Having a whine in the newspaper? Good luck to you.