The price (continued)

I gave up trying to make ends meet in rented accommodation, it just wasn't possible. My total out goings (rent/food) was greater than my total incoming by nearly £200/month. Once all my savings were used up, I gave the landlord a months notice and had to move back with my family.
I can only imagine what would have happened if I had no family I could have done this with :(
I was lucky, many are now homeless as a direct result of UK tory party policies. Many are dead as a result.
Many people are now in working poverty, barely earning enough to live on while working several jobs.
We need to bring down this government (general election ASAP!) for the good of the UK.

The horror of the Trumpocalypse will soon be upon us. Combined with the Brexitshambles (brexit means wrexit) and the advances the far right fascists are making in Europe, Vladimir Putin must be crying with laughter (thats if he even has tear ducts). All his christmas wishes come at once! Next step, recreate the old soviet union and expand it even further.

Just a quick shout out to all those in Canada who voted out the extremist right Harper government.
It must feel like waking from a long nightmare!
I hope that Canada can return to being a beacon for all those who feel that one form of extremism cannot be used to combat another.
Well done all those who voted.

Another wizard wheeze!

I have just been informed of the boys from Eton's latest wizard wheeze.
Now, if you go to sign on, once you are finished with the signing, you will be directed to a job coach and you will be expected to leave the dole offices with an actual job!
Of course, it won't actually matter if you are suited to the job or even fit enough to do it, as long as the unemployment figures look good the evil shits in this govt couldn't give a fuck.
This week, my signing officer mentioned to me that other dole offices that have started using this scheme have had a huge increase in "rapid reclaims", people who have been put into unsuitable jobs and have very quickly found themselves back signing on.
Any pretense at humanity has gone from our government, they only give a shit if you are fabulously rich or own a newspaper that is aligned with their evil.
Viva la revolución!

The price

On money management.
Every month I am just barely scraping by.
During my previous term of unemployment, it was possible to make ends meet fairly easily, I simply stopped having a life of any sort. No going out, no meals with friends etc.  This time, that simply isn't enough. Rent has increased hugely (up by £40/month since then) but housing benefit and dole has pretty much remained static.
This has made budgeting next to impossible. Of course, as soon as I lost my previous job, I took my car off the road as you just can't run a car on benefits. Even if you could afford the fuel, the yearly tax, mot and insurance hit will put a stop to it.
But even basic things like food are unaffordable. And as I am receiving JSA, I can't apply for food banks so there is no relief there.
Oh, and the lie that the unemployed don't pay council tax? Most unemployed people who don't live with relatives are in shared accommodation and as such, pay the full amount of council tax.
So, yeah, life could be better.

Mind numbing

The days just fly by.
Except of course, they don't.
I recently read an article about a long distance swimmer who swam from Land's end to John O'groats. The bit that caught my attention was when he described how he managed the boredom. He would segment the time into chunks, that way he wouldn't have to think about the distance he had left to swim.
And I recognised that as how I deal with the days here. It's not as if you can spend the whole day on Jobsearch. Once you have exhausted the websites that cover the kinds of jobs you are looking for, how do you fill the rest of the day?
The answer is epic clockwatching.
Oh look, it's 10am, only 6 more hours til home time. Then 5 then 4 etc. Of course there is always other websites to look at, but the huge majority of these are blocked at the servers (as are the proxies).
I suppose I could run up massive bills on my phone (from which I type this, by the way), but one of the major problems with being unemployed/slave is the lack of money.
So yes, I guess one skill I could now add to my cv is boredom management, tho I very much doubt many employers would be pleased to see that there...

They pile it on...

the pressure that is. The nightmare that is Seetec continues.
Today I was told that rather than allowing me a brief respite (not having to attend on Thursday mornings), I am now here 9 til 4, 5 days a week. They don't count lunch breaks (unlike pretty much every real job I have ever had) so this only adds up to 30 hours/week.
For me, those few hours on Thursday mornings allowed me to decompress a little, it took the edge off what was almost unbearable.
There is a strange feeling of being trapped at the same time as feeling pushed into doing something that would allow them to sanction me.
I can only pray that I get the job I interviewed for last week, because the alternative is too horrendous to contemplate.

A waking nightmare

I'm getting a lot of reading done, however I can't really think of this as a good thing.
In May this year, I found myself back among the ranks of the unemployed.
A few months later and I was transferred onto the so-called Workfare scheme. In case you don't know about it, this is the privately run scheme that exists, ostensibly, to get people back to work.
Let me get things straight, it exists to get people off benefits, and if you think these are one and the same, you may be in for a shock.
The main tool used to reduce the number of people on this scheme is called "sanctioning" which doesn't sound so bad. Until you know what it entails. Sanctioning means that you loose your benefits for a specific period of time (both housing and unemployment benefits). Essentially, you have no means of support for however long they decide is appropriate. Need to pay rent or buy food? Hard luck. So, you either jump as high as the government sanctioned private company says, or become homeless. And what do they say you have to do? Full time work (usually at a compliant charity, that way you can't complain that you are taking up a real job). I have heard rumours that the charities are paid for every placement they provide, tho I have no proof of this. I wouldn't be at all surprised.
Boiling it right down, we are looking at state funded slavery, only missing the physical torture.
Also of interest is the fact that this scheme costs the taxpayers considerably more than simply paying benefits. The scheme has to pay for travel (I was sent from Cambridge to Kings Lynn four days per week for a month for my placement until the place was shut down due to health and safety concerns that had been brushed under the carpet for months).
So, when David Cameron complains about the cost of benefits to the UK economy, keep in mind, he is actively jacking up those costs.
And the reading? As I am still on placement but they haven't actually found me anywhere to go, I have to sit in an airless office all day doing "jobsearch" which even the employees here admit will only take up a couple of hours a day, so the rest of the time I read.

Time for a little reaming, bend over Cameron and your banker and press friends...
This government is despicable at best.
While unemployment rises, they have the nerve to blame their very victims for the state of the country.
Meanwhile, the newspaper owners get to decide the very law that governs the garbage they push.
The government's policies are based entirely on their ethos of blame the poor for the economy and a spreadsheet that was so full of bugs and inaccuracies they had to pick and choose which bits they made public.
And so, the press (in exchange for the neutering of Leverson) become the puppets of the government, faithfully parroting every lie about the poor being the ones to blame for this countries woes instead of holding the true culprits, the government, hand in hand with the big banks, to account.
There is no happy ending here, just tissue after tissue of lies.

What a bunch of total bankers!

You have to wonder what the press are doing when they yet again, jump all over the banks when they announce massive bonuses.

Are the press in on the scam? The banks announce "massive" bonuses for a very good reason, it keeps the public irritated about piffling small change (and to the banks, a few million, maybe even the odd billion is small change).

They do it so that they can look good when they can then change their minds later.

Meanwhile they continue to owe the UK public hundreds of billions.

The death of ID cards

OK, score one for sanity, the coalition government take a step back from the stupidity that was ID cards (but lets be honest here, their reason isn't the right one, they only want to save money).

Oil and petrol

It seems that the price of oil has less and less to do with the price of petrol in the UK.
Recent falls in the price of oil have not only failed to be reflected in the price of petrol, but in fact seem to have pushed it higher!
And I am not talking about the ridiculous increases in "fuel duty" (read - tax), but the price charged by the petrol companies. Both before and after the recent fuel tax increase, it was noticeable that the base cost of petrol (before tax, fuel duty, what-have-you) increased despite falls in the price of oil.
I would really like to know how the big oil companies can justify this increase, as it seems to bear no relationship to a, the cost of oil and b, reality!

HELP!

I can't help but wonder at what point (if at all) the UK and US governments realised that they no longer had any real control over their economies.

It seems amazing to me that any government would think it a good idea to hand over control of something quite so important to people who are only interested in one thing, the bottom line, how much they can make for them selves and their clients (probably in that order too).

And now we all need help, but who else is there to ask for it?

Ah, of course, increase taxation to cover massive bailout plans that so far have done nothing other than to underline the fact that they can do nothing. Oh, and show to the stock markets around the world that they are panicking. Which of course, only induces further panic.

Would someone please stop the planet, I want to get off now.

42 is not the answer!

Desperate Brown scrapes through
Frankly I am appalled that anyone in their right mind would oversell the threat posed by terrorists to such an extent that they feel that one of the mainstays of the British legal system should be done away with totally.
The only people that feel that they need a whole 42 days to question people are the police themselves, and quite frankly they are wrong!
Personally I am disgusted by those politicians who allowed themselves to be swayed by the "sweetening" of the deal. You are morally bankrupt, and you should step down from your positions, you have no mandate to rule any more!

UK ID cards possibly put back two years.

The BBC are reporting that National ID cards could well be put back two years.
While this may seem like the government are finally listening to the public and taking our criticism in, I have another take on this.
Should they decide to out them back by two years as reported, I am sure that the only reason they are doing this is to give the UK public time to forget their appalling record on data security (see the "Nothing to fear?" article below). I am sure that by 2012, most people will have forgotten how useless the British government are at not loosing vital information.
Perhaps I am being cynical, but until I hear that they have given up on this pointless waste of taxpayers money, I won't rest easy.

Duplicated.

My fears about our data based society have hit home hard as at the end of 2007, someone was able to duplicate my debit card, and use it to buy goods totalling nearly £700 ($1400). I have determined to be even more careful about where and how I use my debit card from now on, but really it is just too easy to copy this kind of information.
With the encryption that will be used in the UK I.D. cards already cracked, how can the government even think of introducing a technology that will make I.D. theft even easier?!

Nothing to fear?

Just a quick heads up for all those who are happy to give away personal freedoms and then say "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear!". Well, whether I have anything to hide or not, I still have plenty to fear, for instance, the UK government losing 25 million (and thats British millions, not the more paltry US millions) personal details of people who have had contact with the UK Child protection agency. So thats, names, addresses, bank details (tho, fortunately not the actual logins) etc. Nothing to fear now?

Judge suggests that UK become one massive DNA database!

Quite astounding! I really can't believe that anyone in their right minds would think that this is a good idea. So instead of actually doing something about the (potential) human rights problem here, he is suggesting that we make it worse!
Were my DNA kept on record for simply being at the same place where a crime had been committed, I would be livid!
It is quite possible to have your DNA sample taken and kept on record indefinitely even though no-one has suggested that you have committed a crime yourself ,in this country.
Were we all to be forced to submit to DNA sampling "in case" we should ever commit a crime in future, I for one would be very worried about the government's use of such information, particularly as it has already shown that it is perfectly willing to sell such information to the highest bidder.
I would like to see this idiot judge made to stand down immediately for such a suggestion!

Speed or cash?

The avalanche of newsworthy stories continues unabated, but it is getting difficult to pick out the ones worthy of attention. I keep looking at items and thinking, is this yet another assault on personal freedoms or just a random hiccup. I recently noticed that a new form of speed cam has been introduced , this one they reliably inform us is vandal proof (so, vandals have stopped using paint now have they?) and can monitor several lanes at once with up to four cameras. It's base is also buried into the ground and made of thick steel, so no more cutting them down, however, quite a few UK Gatso style cameras have been burned down.
I also have to question the thinking behind this kind of camera. If as suggested, they can now be painted to blend into the surroundings, they are not a deterrent to speeding in of themselves (how can they be, you don't know they are there if you are not from that area, and you just slow down in the area if you know it is there, then speed back up again afterwards). So they are not to make people slow down, then they must be there for revenue purposes, exactly what the government have always insisted they are not for. I notice that these cameras are significanly cheaper to install then the Gatso type, and can cover several lanes, so revenues are going to increase significantly with these machines.
Strike one more against the little guy who accidentally steps over the limit.

At last!

The return of Harbour waves, sorry about this, I know all you thousands of people have been waiting patiently for this (right...) but for some reason my Google account hasn't been letting my into my blog of late.
Anyway, we are back and posting and there has been a lot to post about of late!
In fact too much to cover with the little time I have available to me :(
I will be updating again soon with further ponderings on the state (and it is in a hell of a state) of personal privacy in the UK and other things that take my fancy.

Tsunami