Union leaders predict that up to 400,000 workers will be involved in a wave of demonstrations, fuelled by ministers making clear in yesterday’s Queen’s Speech that they are pressing ahead with their controversial reforms.

Y’know, it was the day marked out to celebrate labour n’everything?

If you want to live by the precautionary principle, then crawl up in a ball and live in a cave.

Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson.

BBC programme makers agreed to pay the air fare of one of Britain’s most controversial far-Right campaigners, so that he could appear in a panel show on Sunday morning.

Err, the BBC always pays your travel to get to a studio.

They’ve paid me a tank of petrol to get to a studio in Faro, they’ve paid for a car to pick me up and drop me off in London, they pay train fares for the panellists when Question Time is in Lesser Wallop…..this is just what the BBC do, pay travel to a studio for an appearance.

One would hope that no one who has ever been in receipt of such payments will make anything of this although one can never be quite sure about the hypocrisy of some in the media.

A social geographer is a geographer too stupid or politically biased to be able to teach sports.

Albert Hall debentures are a capital investment. The yield from them is the tickets. So what’s the problem?

So here’s my advice: apply to be a trainee butler for the Queen. The starting salary of £15,000 a year for 45 hours’ work a week might not be much, but think of the perks. Board, food and bills are all gratis, you receive on-the-job training and, thanks to last week’s Budget, from next April precisely £9,205 of your salary will go untaxed.

Some £250 a week disposable income after rent, bills, tax and food?

Gross that up and you’re looking at £30 k or more (that’s using one room in a shared flat in London as a comparator) which really isn’t bad at all for a trainee.

And as is pointed out, with a reference from the Palace and say 6 or 7 year’s experience you’d be able to write your own contract with any number of social arrivistes or Americans (to the extent to which the two differ). £100 k and up is not unheard of for top butlers.

And 45 hours a week for a servant? Recall that the commute is going to be 3 minutes max: it’s actually a blindingly good job offer.

Wonder how many applications they’ll have?

Animal sanctuaries closing under pressure from the RSPCA
A growing number of animal sanctuaries are closing due to an inability to cope with an increase in abandoned pets and growing bureaucratic pressure from the RSPCA.

It’s a classic problem.

The RSPCA run a lot of animal centres/sanctuaries.

The RSPCA inspect all the others too (I think they’ve even got legal rights of entry etc now?).

You’ve got to be pretty naive to believe that the second won’t get a little warped (to put it mildly) in favour of the first.

The way around this little conflict is simply to split the organisation. As it is a private organisation there’s no power to do that: so take away its legal privileges instead. Place them somewhere else if it’s felt that someone does need to have them.

Marriage is best for raising children, Government says
It is better for children to be raised by two parents than one, and better still when those parents are married, the Government will declare today.

We have a logical problem here.

Is it that the sort of people who get married either when they have children or in order to have children are better at raising children? Or is it that marriage itself is better at raising children?

And can anyone think of any method at all of checking that?

The Jubilee is this year.

So, err, they should have been thinking about buying a yacht some 3 or 4 years ago, shouldn’t they?

They do take a certain amount of time to make after all…..

Sting: Knighthoods are for the old
Sting, the musician, says that only older people are awarded knighthoods.

Yes, because you’ve got to show a bit of staying power and also reach the top of your profession.

Things that, amazingly, tend to take a few decades.

Supermarket thieves caught when getaway car has no fuel
Two supermarket thieves were caught when they forgot to put petrol in their getaway car.

Giggle worthy, isn’t it? But that’s not quite what happened.

The hapless pair ran out of luck, and fuel, when they could not get their blue Citroen to start and had to push the vehicle to the supermarket’s petrol station.

Their clueless antics were captured on CCTV in June…..

So our Scallys were nicked then, were they? No, actually, they weren’t.

……and the duo were caught in the act by police four months later when they targeted another Asda store in Hulme in a similar way when one of them distracted a security guard while the other pushed the trolley out of the store.

So the actual story is that even though thieves were sufficiently dim to have a getaway car with no fuel, even though they pushed it around to the petrol station and were on CCTV, they still were not in fact nicked.

Which is rather funny, isn’t it?

In these dark days of financial apocalypse and global unrest, here’s a cheering thought: red trousers are staging a comeback. Until recently, there was a danger that brightly coloured men’s trousering might go the way of the bowler hat: a once-great British institution killed off by the scorn of the young and hip. Only the very poshest old duffers wore colours: defiant in mustard-yellow or crushed raspberry, they stood out like birds of paradise among the dun-coloured masses.

But now the hipsters are channelling the duffers. Young folk in Hoxton and Shoreditch can even be found teaming red trousers with deck shoes. I suppose it’s like the über-geeky look: so uncool it must be cool.

More specifically:

But now the hipsters are channelling the duffers.

That’s how the whole hipster thing works and always has.

John Lennon wore 20s style granny glasses not thick frames like 50s hep cats such as Dave Brubeck. Teddy Boys were channelling Edwardian swells.

It’s never what Mum and Dad did was cool, but always that Gramps had a thing about him, didn’t he?

Our children will never claim that second summer of love tie dye is hip and our grandchildren most certainly will.

The only thing more conservative than hipsters is the modern British left.

That’s the biggest threat to the survival of the species in the wild.

No, the biggest threat to the survival of the species as a whole is actually American wild animal regulations:

Bears, lions, tigers, wolves and monkeys ran amok when owner Terry Thompson, 62, flung open the enclosures at his Muskingum County animal farm near the town of Zanesville on Tuesday evening and then shot himself.

Police following shoot-to-kill orders, some of them armed only with handguns, said they had no choice but to exterminate the animals to protect local residents – and in some cases, themselves – as darkness fell.

There had been at least three dozen complaints since 2004 about Thompson’s exotic menagerie – including a giraffe grazing by a highway and a monkey in a tree – and he had faced more serious charges of animal mistreatment.

Conservationists have for years demanded strict US wildlife ownership laws, especially in Alabama, Idaho, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, South Carolina, West Virginia and Wisconsin, where no such laws exist.

There are more tigers in captivity (some say as many as 25,000) in the United States than there are in the wild. The biggest risk to the continued survival is regulation of keeping such wild animals: take the regulations too far and no one will do it any more, will they?

It’s quiote possible that more regulation is needed, even that more regulation would be a good idea: but don’t ever forget that regulation always also has costs.

An unnamed actress is suing Amazon.com for more than $1 million (£630,000) for disclosing her age on its internet Movie Database website and refusing to remove the reference when asked.

Sigh.

Property developers are sitting on more than 300,000 plots with planning permission for new homes, undermining the case for controversial government planning reforms.

Campaigners say that the “land banks” are enough for more than two years of house building, meaning there is no need to water down current planning laws.

This really is cretinism.

1) How long does it take to gain planning permission? A couple of years, yes? Thus the builders are being entirely rational in having a couple of year’s landbank. You’d expect any business to have a supply of its most important stock, a stock which would cover the time it will take it to gain more of said stock.

2) Prices dimwits. Planning permission is still worth over £100,000 per house in the South. If we want to reduce the price of housing then that’s the price we’ve got to reduce. We’ll do this by issuing more planning permission.

Thereport by Unicef, the UN children’s agency, warns that materialism has come to dominate family life in Britain as parents “pointlessly” amass goods for their children to compensate for their long working hours.

While parents said they felt compelled into buying more, the children themselves said spending time with their families made them happier.

Unicef UK said the obsession was one of the underlying causes of the riots and widespread looting which gripped the UK last month, as teenagers targeted shops for the designer clothes and goods.

My word. So, who wrote this report?

The report, authored by Dr Agnes Nairn, an academic and marketing expert, said: “Parents in the UK almost seemed to be locked into a system of consumption which they knew was pointless but they found hard to resist.”

That would be this Agnes Nairn would it?

Agnes is currently working with organisations who want to operate ethically in the fields of marketing and market research – particularly when working with children. She provides:

• Consultancy
• Ethics Awareness Programmes
• Ethics Training
• Guidance on implementing marketing and advertising codes and practices

The Agnes Nairn who is of course entirely impartial on the subject of the commercialisation, consumerisation, of childhood and the Agnes Nairn who would have no financial interest at all in an increase in concern about such matters?

That Dr. Agnes Nairn?

Oh, rightie ho then.

Man and kids see dead fish in working fishing harbour.

Man complains to harbourmaster.

Sigh.

Entirely a mystery.

Home ownership in the UK will slump to its lowest level since the mid-1980s over the next decade, leading to an “unprecedented crisis” in the housing market, the National Housing Federation (NHF) has warned.

Now leave aside the fact that this report comes from the builders who are looking for handouts.

The actual result is quite probably desirable. It is possible for home ownership rates to be too high.

It’s long been known that a level of home ownership which is “too high” (defining “too high” is a bit tougher) increases the general unemployment rate.

This is because jobs tend not to pop up just where people already live. So some people need to move to where the jobs are. It isn’t the easiest thing in the world to sell up, buy again and move. It’s certainly more difficult to do that than it is to move out of one rental and into another.

So, labour force mobility is constrained by having too high a level of house ownership. Constraints on labour mobility lead to higher unemployment rates. More of the population living in rentals should, ceteris paribus, lead to greater potential (at least) labour mobility and thus a lower unemployment rate.

At this point we get the inevitable comment that sure, so we should build more social housing, right? And in a pure world, perhaps. Except, moving within one local housing catchment area is pretty tough, certainly more difficult than buying and selling. Moving across such boundaries is near impossible: takes years at the very least.

So whatever problems social housing fixes this isn’t one of them.

Council workers could be forced to take a week’s unpaid leave each year as part of radical plans to minimise job losses, it emerged yesterday.

They’ll whine about it at the same time as they praise Germany’s reaction to the recession: making lots of people work part time for less money.

It’s exactly the same basic situation: instead of 5% of the people losing 100% of their income, have 100% of the people lose 5% of their income. Share the pain, you know?

OK, so I don’t know that they’ll whine, I just think they will. But if they do we’ll learn something interesting about the UK labour market. Which is that we can’t have the sort of consensual German system where unions and management plan together how best to deal with hard times: for the UK unions won’t plan together like the German ones.