I have been vacillating for some considerable time about whether to name and shame Electricity North West for the appalling way they treated me, aided and abetted by the courts, the police, the planning dept. and others. On the one hand I don’t see why they should get away with it, on the other I am very apprehensive about taking them on again; last time the stress killed my wife and soulmate and gave me diabetes. However, after languishing for quite a while I am now coming out of it, see title.
See also my recent post Mr Bates versus the Post Office. The resounding victory of the postmasters and mistresses has inspired me to expose ENW, which was also flagged up when they recently left the substation gates wide open, again, see picture. Hopefully, this will be my last word on the subject, other than to let you know the outcome. I was going to do it this week, but I have been collating all the evidence, very depressing. I am out for lunch tomorrow, so it will probably be early next week.
I may well give up trying to save the world and fighting “The Man”, we’re all doomed anyway but hopefully not in my lifetime. I have a new love in my life and we both have a yen to find a renovation project in a sunny place, Portugal, Greece, Cyprus? with the sea /ocean in front and the mountains behind.
Possibly, in future this blog will be about our new adventures; with a bit of propaganda thrown in; the leopard doesn’t change its spots.
“One Johnny Marra, there’s only one Johnny Marra”, so sang my shipmates whenever I said anything controversial or profound which was quite often, or even a “big word.” They would conspire to provoke me into it, I could always see it coming but it was done in good humour, and I like to think that we all benefited from it. That was back in the late 1970’s when I worked two summer seasons as crew on the Windermere steamers after I came up to live in the Lakes from London. I got the job because I used to drink in the pub with one of the captains. I was the “middle-class fucker” and although I got on well with nearly all of them, it was obvious that I was different, but then I am also different from most other middle-class fuckers. Just thought I would explain where the name came from. (“JOHNNY MARRA. JUST SAYING”, is to be the title of my next book but initially I will be sharing it on this blog, so you can read it for free.)
More than four decades on there is so much more wrong with our society now that it depresses me just thinking about it. If you set out to deliberately do everything wrong, it would be the same as we have now. Who is to blame? All of us, of course, but in the last few years most of it is down to the corruption and incompetence of the Tories. God knows why we keep electing them, not me I hasten to add. I have heard them described as the cream of this country, ‘thick, rich and full of clots.’ Quite frankly the other mainstream parties are not much better so I’m starting my own. But unless I can get others on board more dynamic, it will not come to anything, I don’t want to run it. I’m an ideas person not an action person and getting on a bit to boot. I’m not even convinced that most of the Great British public are worthy of my attention. But I would like to help those who are unable to help themselves and provide a focus for those who WOULD like to do something. If we can start by getting this country on the right course, it will help the rest of the world. But I am not going to waste a lot of whatever time I have left on building it up. At least I have tried and cannot be held responsible for the problems caused by the others or be accused of apathy. One of the main things we need to change is our first past the post electoral system. Proportional representation would make politicians represent the wishes of all the electorate far better, attract into politics more people with right attitude and would help to prevent hi-jacking by vested interests, lobbyists.
I am pessimistic about the future of our world. Those more learned than I tell me that the planet will continue to orbit the sun for another several billion years until the sun runs out of fuel and becomes a red giant, it is extremely unlikely that we will still be on it. Will we even be around in another thousand years or even a hundred years? we just don’t know. Will life be worth living when we have destroyed most of the environment? Our world causes nearly all the environmental problems but for the moment it is the undeveloped world that suffers most from them. That is changing quite fast, and our actions are now coming back to bite us on the arse. Now it’s starting to affect us, most of us can SEE that we need to do something, that’s a start.
However, I am not going to start quoting a load of figures, they don’t matter they just document what is happening and has happened, not what needs to happen. There are far too many talking shops, “experts” and excuses when what we need is radical action. What matters is how things affect us, other humans, animals and the wider environment. Statistics and figures are bandied about by all sides, but nobody with the power to do something about it does anything, or not enough. Obviously, the brave activists of Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil are doing something but is anybody thanking them for it? They just get arrested and given punitive prison sentences. They are not fucking criminals for God’s sake, and now the government is trying to remove our rights to even protest. Money doesn’t just talk it swears. Activists are castigated for causing disruption when the true criminals, those who are destroying the environment for gain are just given profits, even bigger bonuses and honours. We have been in denial for a long time, but it is rapidly becoming obvious to nearly everyone that the time has come to act fast for the sake of our very survival, unfortunately, the vast majority are apathetic. “Well, it’s not happening to me,” increasingly it is happening and will happen to you, as it has been in other parts of the world for some time.
Of course, this is all leading up to a plug for the Alternative Party, where there will be no sleaze, no corruption or representing the interests of big companies. Everything we do will be open, transparent and in the interests of the majority and we will try to repair all the damage that has been done to the environment, our society and infrastructure.
As a world issue the most immediate problem is overpopulation, there are just too many of us. The world population has doubled since I was a young guy and I thought there were far too many then. It is increasing by about 200,000 EVERY DAY. Google the world population graph, after a gradual slope over the millennia it is now vertical. There isn’t a single problem that wouldn’t be much easier solve if there were far fewer of us. But what to do about it? It has gone too far now for an acceptable solution, fiddling around the edges won’t work, we need the population to be rapidly reduced from its present 8 billion to a sustainable 1 billion. That would require genocide on an industrial scale that even the Nazis couldn’t have imagined. My answer is to do nothing and abdicate the responsibility to nature. Let it run, people will fry, drown, starve and die of disease, it will be unimaginably horrendous, but our hands will be clean. Those of us with insight can see it happening but what can we do when most people are in denial that there is even a problem. Eating less meat and driving an electric car will not cut it.
Climate refugees will try to come to the liveable parts of the world in a flood that will make the present migrant crisis seem like a trickle. Eventually, Royal Navy destroyers will be blowing boats full of illegal migrants out of the water, and we will have a sort of “dads army” guarding the coastline. As history has shown, it is good to be an island, the rest of Europe will not be so lucky. It will be your children and grandchildren that are most affected and obviously it will be much worse in the developing world. It’s a depressing thought, but there is nothing we can do about it, not even The Alternative Party. Surely it would be better to have 1 billion people living sustainably, in harmony with the environment and preferably each other than to continue breeding ourselves into extinction. Do you really want to see us all living in megacities shoulder to shoulder living on factory farmed food and warring over territory? As with. most things it’s always somebody else’s fault, I as on a date with a woman and she said yes there is a problem, she had six kids.
As far as the UK is concerned, we need to urgently reduce or even better remove the influence of big companies, especially those that are running our privatised infrastructure and essential services. Privatisation was the biggest mistake and the biggest con of all time. The Thatcher government persuaded us that these organisations would be better and more efficiently run by private companies. Surely if they weren’t being run properly, we only needed to change/retrain the management not the whole structure. Another excuse was that it gave the public a chance to own shares in these organisations, excuse me Mrs Thatcher but didn’t we already own them collectively? Of course, that was not what happened; instead of individual members of the public owning shares in the infrastructure and services of their country they rapidly became owned by big companies even foreign countries. They are not run any more efficiently in many cases they had the same management and staff that they had when they were in public ownership. The only difference is that the senior managers are paid more and the workers less than before. The privatised companies exist only to be milked for obscene salaries and bonuses for senior management and dividends to the owners. German state railways make so much profit for their investment in our railways that they have been able to reduce rail fares in Germany. That is the operative word STATE railways, any profit our railways make goes in dividends to the shareholders and bonuses to senior management, they must laugh at us all the way to the bank. It means that everything in this country costs a lot more than it should and all profits go in salaries, bonuses and dividends rather than improving the network or service, big companies are allowed, even encouraged to pollute and destroy the environment in the pursuit of profits, which is the first commandment of Tory philosophy.
The next big con in Tory policy was the “right to buy” aka selling off council houses dirt cheap to create more Tory voters. That has been a major factor in the cost of owning or renting a house escalating out of all proportion. Ordinary houses rapidly became investments rather than a place to live, nice houses in nice areas always been both. Nothing wrong with that but everyone should be able to buy a house or rent a decent property i.e. a council house. Most of the cheaply bought council houses ended up being passed on to property companies or private landlords. So, the ideal of a property and share owning public bit the dust, it was always obvious that it would. The governments of both persuasions were either spectacularly incompetent, or they cynically planned the whole thing.
Some of the other things that need to addressed urgently: overuse of antibiotics, bee killing pesticides, genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, fossil fuel use, NHS, social care. All the answers to our problems and what we need to do are obvious, we just need to get more people on board and overcome their complacency, I will be dealing with all that in due course.
My intention for the Alternative Party is to make everyone better informed, more engaged, ethical and insightful, I am probably in cloud cuckoo land there, but any political system can only be as good as those it represents. People just can’t see that they are paying much more tax than they need to, and everything is much more expensive that it needs to be. All to further enrich a small minority of already wealthy or incredibly wealthy people. It’s a sort of reverse Robin Hood, robbing the poor to pay the rich.
Just one more thing before I go, it has recently come to my attention that China intends to introduce a gold backed currency and has been busy buying gold by the ton. They obviously think that there would be a demand for such a currency. As J P Morgan stated before the US Congress in 1912, “gold is money everything else is credit”, I am no economist, but it makes sense to me. The US came off the gold standard in the 1970’s and the UK under Tony Blair in the 1990’s Gordon Brown subsequently sold off all our gold when the gold price was low. The price of gold relative to dollars and the pound has subsequently risen considerably. If a currency is backed by gold, it has a value and governments, central banks etc. can’t just print money above the value of the gold. China’s intention is for this currency to replace the dollar for world trading and if successful it would devastate the US economy and as we are so tied up with the US probably our economy also.
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You may have seen the recent TV drama and subsequent furore, how could you miss it? a true story about the appalling behaviour of the Post Office towards its sub-postmasters and mistresses? It particularly resonates with me because it mirrors my own experience of being persecuted by a large organisation, in my case Electricity North West. The stress of dealing with them led to the death of Carol, my wife and soulmate and gave me diabetes. The tactics were similar in both cases although the sub-postmasters and mistresses being employees were locked out of their post offices and denied access to documents that could have proved their innocence. Each of the 800 of them was told that they were the only ones affected, in my case I really was the only one, it was MR MARROW versus ELECTRICITY NORTH WEST initially in the High Court.
The vast majority of people will fortunately never have to face this sort of thing, it caught me by surprise, but you never know, so I am going to offer some advice based on my personal experience. Their tactics will involve using the Courts and legal system to threaten you with huge costs it is NOT an idle threat but a very real one and they have almost unlimited resources you will be playing with your own money. In my case they started a claim in the High Court that my new build was encroaching on their land. It was a pure invention and I had three items of very good evidence they had nothing. They didn’t need to have a good case because they knew they would be able to bludgeon me into settling out of court so it would never get to a judgement.
The Court initially asked if I wanted to defend the claim. Without even thinking I said yes bearing in mind my solid evidence and their lack of evidence. However, in a very short space of time ENW informed me that they had already run up legal costs of £50,000 which I would have been liable to pay by default if I had abandoned my defence. Bearing in mind that in all cases where the amount involved is less than £100,000 it should be decided by the Small Claims Procedure where the maximum costs allowed are £1500. In this case the value they put on the strip of land they claimed I was encroaching on was £1, the amount I eventually paid to buy the land, even though it was my own land, in the settlement along with a seventeen-pages of bollox settlement deed. I pointed this out to the judge in a pre-trial telephone hearing and was completely ignored. There is also something called the Overriding Objective which is supposed to put both sides on a more equal footing and the costs should be commensurate with the value of the claim. So, the courts are corrupt and biased against the individual in favour of the large company or institution, they don’t even follow the legal guidelines. I have also found that institutions that should protect the public don’t, they are also corrupt and or incompetent. In this case it includes the courts, the police, the planning department, OFGEM, the local press and the press complaints authority.
If the matter had gone on to a court hearing ENW’s projected costs, filed with the Court, were £130,000 and I had no confidence that I would even have had a fair hearing. One old hippie anarchist against a battalion of solicitors, barristers, surveyors etc. and a biased judge. So much for British justice, I always used to naively think that there was such a thing. ENW’s solicitors tried very hard to pressure me into getting my own solicitor; I didn’t and please don’t even think about it unless you are very rich; legal costs mount up at an alarming rate especially when the lawyers start firing letters at each other. I wrote my own letters, several hundred of them and derived considerable schadenfreude from knowing that each one would probably have cost them at least £250 to be read by their own solicitors. If I had had my own legal team, it would have eventually cost me £tens of thousands rather than a £1.
Fortunately, most senior managers of big companies and institutions are incompetent, and I include judges in this. They are also unethical, unprofessional, vindictive and completely ruthless in their persecution of people who they know have done nothing wrong, but merely tried to stand up to them.
You will see that I am writing this in general terms; the seventeen-page settlement document included a gagging clause, sorry disclosure agreement. This is a contradiction in terms, it can hardly be called an “agreement” when it has been imposed on one. It is a cover up of behaviour that someone knows to be wrong, I won’t say they are ashamed, these people don’t even understand the concept, but they realise it will reflect badly on them and or their organisation. It shouldn’t be allowed it is just another cover up of the truth. However, I am not allowed to publish any derogatory statements about ENW’s management past or present, neither am I allowed to say that they have devalued my property, so I won’t; I will just leave it to you to come to your own conclusions about that.
I have been fighting injustice all my life, before this and against all the odds I nearly always won and was even in the fortunate position of being able to cost the MOD £millions when they privatised my job and many others, except senior management of course. The full story is in my book, details at the end of this post. However, I had never been involved in the Courts other than The Small Claims Procedure twice; I lost both times but I was in the wrong anyway, so I hadn’t had any previous experience of just how corrupt Is the British legal system. Once the courts and legal system are invoked you will not win unless you are very rich. Like the postmasters I had done absolutely nothing wrong and ENW’s claim against me was a complete fabrication; I just didn’t have the wherewithal to fund the costs to fight it in Court.
However, senior managers, judges and all the expensive lawyers; the old hippie anarchist was able to run rings round them all. I just had to make the pragmatic decision to buy my own land for £1. They won, with the benefit of hindsight it was inevitable, but it was a pyrrhic victory. It cost them well over £100,000 and the position on the ground remained the same except I now had a formal agreement to access the rear of the property which I didn’t have before. I think it is just possible that I made them change their long-term plans. I am not sure about that, but they did sack the Operations Director when I informed them that what they were doing, which was due to be repeated at every primary sub-station in the Northwest, was unlawful. If I am right, it would have cost them £millions if not £tens of millions. I was then dealing directly with the CEO and his lawyers; I was hoping to get the CEO sacked as well but he retired before I got the chance. Again, I am not allowed to say they were incompetent so I will have to let you come to your own conclusions about that also.
It is not my intention to hijack the wonderful victory of the postmasters and mistresses. Even though there are many of them it took 20 years and a TV drama to bring it about. I just want to point out that these miscarriages of justice must be going on all the time with individuals like me and we need to bring about sweeping changes to the legal system that allows it to happen; and the influence of big companies and the Establishment who can ride roughshod over all the laws that they use to keep the rest of us in line. They were not able to get me criminally convicted but they tried, and I had several run ins with the police, see the main post, date at the end. You can win but it will take a lot of time and effort and cost if you allow them to coerce you into getting your own lawyers; it just moves the battlefield into territory that is advantageous to them.
So far there has been no prosecution of Post Office management or Fujitsu who should pay at least some of the cost of compensation. They certainly shouldn’t be given any more government contracts!!!!!
Their tactics will not work as well if at all on people who have nothing to lose. In my case the house they claimed was encroaching was worth about £450,000 and if they had won in Court they told me they would put a. charge on it, so I couldn’t plead poverty when it came to their costs. If you have nothing you can’t be threatened. The house where I live across the lane is in a family trust I can live there for my lifetime, and it can’t be touched. Once I have sold the surplus house, there is a sale going through as we speak and salted the money away, I will be much less vulnerable.
ENW do you still watch this blog site? Probably not you probably think it’s all over. So, you will either be forewarned, or you will get a rude awakening either way you are not going to get away with it. By the time I have finished with you, you will be about as popular as the Post Office and you should remember that revenge is a dish best taken cold. This country is as corrupt as any tinpot African state, and I am going to do my best to change that. I am even starting a political party to be called The Alternative Party, what else? None of the main existing parties Conservatives, Labour and Lib Dems come out of this very well and my giant killing days are not over yet.
Full story of my struggle with ENW in my post of 23rd July 2022.
Alternative Party draft manifesto 11th. December 2019.
My book: MY GENERATION: Revelations and Revolutions: Revelry and Reverie. Only available on Kindle at the moment but you can get the Kindle app free on your phone, it is almost as good as the device. Go onto Kindle books and put my name and or the name of the book in the search box it will come up, ignore the diet book it was just a try out for publishing the main book.
Further to my previous comments about HS2 I have unearthed more pertinent facts about the debacle which continues to illustrate just how inept and corrupt are the present government and their pals. Whistleblowers concerns were ignored, and they were sacked. A personal assistant was asked to shred copies of reports showing that costs had risen to an unacceptable level putting the project and all those salaries and bonuses at risk. Following a lunch with one of the whistleblowers she was very aggressively interviewed several times, her mobile and laptop were confiscated, she was shaken and drained by these encounters which related to an innocent lunch with a friend and had to go on sick leave. She was later made “redundant”. HS2 claimed that she was interviewed as part of a whistleblower investigation and the redundancy was unrelated. 47 senior staff who objected to the way HS2 had been allowed to cover up cost overruns by the Treasury and the Department for Transport were subsequently sacked or paid off with non-disclosure agreements. Its correctly called gagging and I have been subjected to that myself.
It seems likely that even with the cancellation of the Birmingham to Manchester leg of the project it will still cost well over £100 billion at a time when millions of people are struggling to pay for basic needs like housing, food and energy. The NHS and social care are grossly underfunded, transport is already inefficient, and most people would rather see normal trains running efficiently. So, what would £100 billion pounds buy if used properly? 200 new hospitals, 10,000 new schools, 1 million new council houses or it would pay for 270,000 nurses for ten years. Who in their right minds would choose to spend it on a railway that will get a few wealthy people from London to Birmingham 20 minutes quicker?
Why does it cost us so much to build these projects when the rest of Europe can do it for a fraction of the cost? HS2 will cost £396 million per mile, it will make it the most expensive railway project in the world. It is 8 times the cost per mile of the new French high-speed line from Tours to Bordeaux. The only other country with similar costs to us is the US!! Obviously, part of the reason is corruption and backhanders to all concerned and overpaid management jobs for the boys, it is all part of the mire of corruption and patronage that we must wade through to get anything done. As a result, not only do we have to pay vastly more to get anything built but it means that we get less built than we otherwise could. Crossrail 2 in London has been put on hold, it would have cost at least £30 billion. If we were working at Scandinavian costs it would be possible to build 4 Crossrail equivalents for less than a quarter of that cost.
Another factor here is planning permission and I have come up against that myself; the whole process is grossly inefficient, labyrinthine, and again involves jobs for the boys especially expensive lawyers. Infrastructure projects in Europe ensure that planning criteria have been set out in advance. Once the planning authorities have identified that a project meets the rules it is accepted with no possibility of later revisions. Our system does not consider adverse effects in advance, they are dealt with as the plan evolves by lawyers so it gets expensive very fast. The sheer number of legal points that have to be considered slow the whole planning process down especially as the rules are often not very clear or the government guidance is out of date. This leaves the whole process open to judicial challenge from disgruntled residents. Our electoral system doesn’t help, with local MP’s fearing a backlash from local residents in their consistency, the rest of Europe has proportional representation so does not have this problem.
There is also a lack of people with the necessary skills to oversee a project. There has been a tendency to scrap the engineering capacity in the civil service and rely on outside consultants. Other European countries have civil servants with engineering backgrounds. Then there is the technical nature of the train itself, HS2 is 20mph faster than the HGV. Getting that extra 20mph raises the costs out of all proportion to the benefits of the extra speed which in our relatively short distances is negligible. One can’t help but wonder if it was all down to someone’s ego that our fast train had to be a bit faster than the French fast train?
We are warned that when in the wild and dealing with potentially dangerous wild animals not to corner them. If they don’t have an escape route they will probably attack. You will see from the above picture with the cheetah I was told by the game warden to approach from the rear. Like all cats even the big ones spend a lot of time sleeping and if suddenly woken up, which I did by scratching its neck, all cats like that, it wouldn’t feel trapped. This was not a fully wild animal and being partly domesticated could not have been returned to the wild. It was in a game park attached to a winery in South Africa that did a lot of conservation work. By having people pay to stroke it they said it was raising money to help its wild cousins in the bush. I mention all this because I hate it when animals are abused for the amusement of tourists, the donkeys forced to carry fat people up steep hills, swimming with dolphins in captivity, drugged monkeys to be photographed with, etc.
Exactly the same applies to people, we are animals ourselves after all; if constantly badly treated people will quite rightly attack their oppressors, we could actually do with a bit more of that. While I don’t for one minute excuse the Hamas attacks on Israel, civilians should never be targeted, one can’t help but wonder if it would have happened if the Israelis had not treated the Palestinians so appallingly and for so long. I have experience myself of being up against a ruthless and powerful enemy aided and abetted by all the institutions who should be there to help individuals against them, see my post of 23rd. July 2022, so I know what it feels like. The actions of powerful utilities company caused stress that killed my wife and soul mate and gave me diabetes, I will never forgive them for that, they are the only ones on my list for retribution and should remember that revenge is a dish best taken cold. Taking me on has already cost them well over £100,000 and given their almost unlimited resources and the bias of the courts, they were always going to win. Despite bringing about a miscarriage of justice, it was a pyrrhic victory, the position on the ground is just the same as it was before they the action in the high court and I now have a formal agreement to access the back of my property which I didn’t have before. I have been gagged by the settlement so I am not allowed to comment on their competence, suffice to say that the old hippie anarchist has run rings around them, the courts and their expensive lawyers.
Why can’t people see that we all have to rub along together? and life would be much more pleasant for all of us if we treated everyone decently and ethically. Race, religion and money all separate people, in Gaza all three apply. If we are to get along with each other we have to be pragmatic and prepared to compromise. The rich and or powerful have a responsibility to those less well off, apart from any moral considerations surely it would be of benefit to them if there weren’t a lot of people wanting to rob them kidnap them or rise up against them. On the whole most people will tolerate those better off if they can see that they themselves are being treated at least fairly and equitably.
The problem at the moment is that we have a society where many people are grindingly poor yet still having to pay to make a small minority incredibly rich and a lot of others very well off. It’s called Toryism; they blatantly enrich themselves and their pals while blaming those less well off for their own poverty. There is some truth in that, the people have voted them into power time and again and despite all their other faults they are also incompetent. Hopefully people are finally coming to their senses and it will be reflected in the ballot box come the next election.
Once in a blue moon the Tories get it right. Cancelling stage two of HS2 is one of those moments. Now they are making a virtue of quite rightly saying that the money could be better used. It’s just a pity that they didn’t think of that before they wasted £billions, dug up precious countryside and blighted hundreds if not thousands of people’s lives with stage one. I and many others said that at the time. It is basically a vanity project but I can understand that as one of the richest countries in the world our infrastructure compares so badly with other countries, many of them develoiping countries. This is mostly down to privatisation. Vanity projects are all very well but first we have a lot of less glamourous problems to see to. Social care, the underfunded NHS, government borrowing and pollution to name but a few. I will be at home, indoors for a while now recuperating from my hernia repair operation yesterday. Must take it easy for a week or two, no logging or moving stones so I will have more time for blogging and starting the Alternative Party.
Is life getting better? As with most things yes and no.
Undoubtedly, in terms of standard of living things have improved, I can just about remember my mother washing clothes and bedding in the wash house in a big, galvanised tub and agitating it with a wooden three-pronged plunger. Bear in mind that we were quite well off, we had a bathroom and an inside loo; at that time there were still many houses that didn’t have a bathroom, whole families would have a bath in a tin bath and using the same water which had to be heated on the stove and poured in manually then you had to go outside and freeze your arse off to use the loo. God help you if you were constipated. I can remember when my mother got her first washing machine it had a big electric mangle on top which she was terrified of getting her arm caught in, there would be no such thing as safety cut out in those days, there was no such thing as safety full stop, how ever did we survive? For the few who had a television they had a ten-inch screen black and white of course. Most houses didn’t have a phone but there were lots of red telephone boxes in those days, mostly smelling of urine because they were handy if you needed a piss on the way home from the pub.
We would never in our wildest dreams have imagined then that most people now would have a 65-inch-high definition tv, a mobile phone and would fly abroad for their holiday every year. Cars also have improved out of all proportion and more people have them now. The downside of course is that there is now more pollution from all this and the incredible increase in the population. Also, we must listen to everyone’s banal conversations in public and fight our way through all the people taking selfies at world heritage sites.
Medicine has improved out of all recognition but access to it, unless you can afford to go private often has not. Being able to afford to buy your own house or have a good standard of reasonably priced rental accommodation has got much worse and back the old days everyone who had a proper job, nearly everyone then, could get a mortgage and buy their own house. Undoubtedly, the staggering increase in property prices is what has made my generation rich and incidentally funds the bank of mum and dad for those lucky enough to have a mum and dad who have profited from it. Please don’t blame the Boomers we were just lucky enough to have been born at the right time and would you have done any different. Many more go university now but most of them come out with a huge debt and a Micky Mouse degree so no improvement there.
We are a more tolerant society now, diverse and ethnically mixed; homosexuality is no longer illegal, and we have single parent families where there used to be unmarried mothers and their children were called bastards and likely to be taken from them.
Then we come to governments and society, of which Margaret Thatcher said there is no such thing. Starting with the introduction of state pensions, the NHS and the welfare state all of which are more or less the same age as me, things got steadily better for decades. Then they began to get steadily worse, I don’t think it would be unfair to lay the blame at Thatcher’s door. The rot began with privatisation and the right to buy when Tories became rabidly right wing and gave up all pretence of having a fair and just society. Why can’t the voters see that? Subsequently, they became more and more polarised in that position. Now we are in an incredible mess and the government owe so much that it will have to be paid off by your grandchildren. The present government have been in power for 13 years so they can’t blame it on anyone else. They are completely shambolic and incompetent, probably the opposition are not much better, but they can’t be any worse. Please, please do not vote the Tories in again, you got it wrong with Brexit and we are in steep decline now if they get in next time, it will be terminal.
I have had a good life and still have and I am trying to do my bit to help others to have the same by starting the Alternative Party, I am old and have never been very dynamic I don’t want to run it, I am an ideas man not an action man, but I would like to start it and then leave it to others younger and stronger than I to take over. I doubt I will ever see any benefit from it. As I have said before, watch this space. In the First World War the soldiers were described as “lions led by donkeys”, now we are no longer lions and led by monkeys.
Here it is, my first car and I really loved that car, this was what set me off on a lifetime path as a petrol head about 70 years ago. If you look closely you will see my little dog in there with me. I wonder how many cars I have had and how many miles I have driven in that time. I must have put many tons of carbon into the atmosphere, sorry about that but at least my carbon footprint will end when I pop my clogs. I have a self-charging hybrid now, range anxiety prevents me from going all electric; but my car does anywhere between 50 and 75 to the gallon depending on how you drive it, mostly fairly sedately now. I must confess to owning some fire breathing gas guzzlers in the past including a rally prepared Mini Cooper S that did less than 20 to the gallon and more recently a rotary engined Mazda RX8 similar consumption. When I go to the great racetrack in the sky I can be glad I lived through probably the greatest period in history.
So, another enquiry (Stephen Lawrence) and the Met police are criticised yet again. They are incompetent and institutionally racist to boot. One wonders just what they are there for. They only clear up 2% of all crime and as for deterrence? criminals know that they are almost certain to get away with what they do. If those criminals are big companies not even 2% will get what is coming to them. The police are massively biased in their favour as I have found from personal experience. Thames Water are the latest and what they have done amounts to fraud; they borrow billions and use the money to pay the senior management obscene salaries and the shareholders obscene dividends. Their performance is poor to put it mildly as all sewage pumped into our rivers and the sea testifies. Much of this is down to the government and regulators however and the government are another bunch of self-serving incompetents. We are surrounded and even governed by piggies, these include senior management of big companies, especially our privatised essential services, Courts, government local and national, regulators, planners etc. All aided and abetted by an ignorant complacent general public. To get back to the police, why does anyone join? it is about the only way for someone without qualifications to get into a position of power where they can push people about. My own history with them goes right back to my school days, when I was unfortunate enough to be subjected to the fascist regime of a minor public school. One of the aspects of that regime was that prefects were allowed to beat anyone who infringed, or they thought had infringed, any of the of the many petty rules, or they just had it in for you. So, the regime was not only fascist it was Kafkaesque also. These “punishments” were carried out in a ritualised way in the cricket pavilion where all the prefects would file in and sit around the benches to witness one of them beating a small boy senseless. One of my fellow subversives complained to the headmaster that he had been beaten for something he hadn’t done, the headmaster said how dare you complain about one of my prefects boy and beat him again. The point I am getting to is that some of the worst bullies, who were often thick as well would join the police, there was a big headquarters near the school, when they failed their “A levels”. As a long-haired hippy type I was constantly persecuted by them and this included being stopped in my car, stopped and searched on foot, they actually had them on the street in those days and I knew for a fact that they planted evidence although not on me. It was also a fact that they had a nice little earner selling confiscated drugs that were supposed to have been destroyed. My dealer who used to buy several pounds of hash at a time once found fingerprint powder on the packets. One of my friends was in Kensington market and felt something being slipped into his pocket he immediately threw it away and seconds later was stopped by plain clothed officers who went straight to that pocket and were quite surprised to find no dope. The undercover drug squad were a joke, they dressed like hippies but always wore their shiny black FBI shoes as we used to call them. We would take the piss by humming the Z cars theme tune or grunting like a pig. It was much easier and safer for them to persecute people for smoking flowers than to tackle real crime and criminals. I was once arrested for dissing an officer when on a demo; I knocked his helmet off and legged it into the crowd which closed behind me. I was nearly arrested for streaking, one of my friends was I pushed them out of the way and ran into the house expecting them to follow but they didn’t. Some of us went to the local nick to support him or bail him out. One of the coppers who arrested him came up to my brother and from six inches said you were very lucky to get away with it. At the time I had long hair and was clean shaven my brother had shortish dark hair and a beard. So, not even very observant but they would have automatically been believed and afforded more credibility as a witness than a menber of the public, especially a hippie type. Somone else I knew, not a hippie type, was driving and had had a few, he was going round a roundabout and missed his turning. Instead of going round again he reversed right into another car, a police car was on the scene very shortly after and told him to sit in his vehicle while they spoke to the other driver. He sat waiting to be breathalysed but the officer came up and said you might as well go home mate this guy is so pissed he is trying to say you reversed into him. I won’t bore you any further with my tales about those days, I made quite a pile of money became respectable, in appearance anyway, and moved back up North where I had much less contact with “the filth”. That was to change when I got on the wrong side of Electricity Northwest. I objected to them putting an unlawful mast 60cm from the wall of the house I was building, and they weren’t going to stand for that. These companies are unethical, unprofessional and completely ruthless. Fortunately, they are also incompetent. During the process of building the mast I broke into their compound several times, they couldn’t prove it was me, so they put up a surveillance camera to catch me. I responded by putting up my own camera to watch them. The cops were round the next day and told me it was illegal to put up a camera in a public place. I said if they can do it so can I, theirs is a security camera, so is mine. They said if it’s still there tomorrow you will be prosecuted. I knew my argument although logical wouldn’t cut any ice with the judge, given that there is an automatic bias in favour of “the man”, so I moved it. Subsequently, I told one of ENW’s men to piss off. They reported me for threatening and abusive behaviour and the next day the coppers were up again, just one this time. It was so pathetic, but he had obviously been ordered to interview me, I almost felt sorry for him. The guy who I told to piss off felt threatened, o diddums. It’s nice to think that as one old guy I can still make 4 strapping building workers feel threatened. Obviously, it was so pathetic it would have been laughed out of Court if ever it had got that far. I was hoping he would ask if I would accept a caution, but he didn’t, and I wouldn’t have in any case. Let it go to Court and we can all have a good laugh. If it had gone to Court, then the local press would have had to report on it and then the whole story could have been published. I had already after several attempts got them to run the story, but they were biased as well probably not wanting to lose advertising revenue from Electricity Northwest. They did a complete hatchet job on me more or less saying that I was a property developer bleating about losing a few grand because of an unsightly development and it was my fault for building near to a substation. The press complaints council were also not inclined to take any action and I have a letter from them saying that a quote does not have to be anything I actually said, What?? So, a big company can persecute an old man for standing up to them and use their more or less unlimited financial resources to bring about a miscarriage of justice. The stress of which killed my wife and damaged my health is that not a good story? Then and this was before they made their claim against me in the High Court, they trespassed on my land and caused criminal damage by putting up a rudimentary fence. I trashed it of course and put my scaffolding tower on the land to stop them coming on again. Next day two big police vans one with dogs came up, what no armed response unit? They said I could be prosecuted for damaging ENW’s fence, again What?? and am I not allowed to put up a scaffolding tower on my own land? You are the one who is being awkward Mr Marrow these guys are just trying to do their job. It is hardly the job of the police to take sides and tell me to remove a structure on my own land so that ENW can trespass on my land and cause criminal damage. I argued with them for well over an hour, one of them actually said he was very important and had better things to do. Well why don’t you fuck off and do it then? I was careful not to swear but I was very tempted. They said we were very close to the cuffs going on and a trip to the station, I held out my hands and said go on arrest me then, But they didn’t and I didn’t remove the tower. Now we come to the bigger piggies in their starched white shirts aka the Courts and the justice system which is a contradiction in terms if ever there was one. ENW started a claim against me in the High Court which of course I was going to defend. They very quickly ran up legal costs of £50,000 which I would have been liable to pay by default even if I dropped my defence. They falsely claimed that my new build encroached on their land. They had no case, and I had a very strong case with strong evidence to support it but I would have had to risk £130,000 costs and the destruction of my house wall to have it heard. I eventually had to make a pragmatic decision to buy my own land for £1 and accept a thirteen page “agreement”, it was a settlement not agreement as far as I was concerned and purely to remove the threat of losing all that money. I certainly had no confidence that I would have had a fair hearing. There is supposed to be an Overriding Objective that is supposed to put both parties on an equal footing and the costs should be commensurate with the value of the claim. I mentioned this to the judge in a pre-case telephone hearing but was ignored. All cases where the amount of the claim is less than £100,000 should be heard using the small claims procedure where the maximum costs are limited to £1500. So, the Courts and judges are the biggest piggies of all. I had to settle out of Court and buy my own land for £1. There is a 13 page “agreement” which is all bollox. The position on the ground is exactly the same as it was before they started the claim except, I now have a formal agreement to access the back of my property which I didn’t have before. It cost them well over £100,000 and they have brought about a miscarriage of justice, they have won but it is a pyrrhic victory. Sorry to have been so long winded but there may be people reading this who aren’t aware of what has gone on before. I have gone off piste as usual but this is a prelude to naming and shaming ENW for the sake of my health I had decided not to do that. I have changed my mind again, why should all these piggies be allowed to get away with it?
whaleoilbeefoct 