Larry’s Diary – Week Two Hundred And Forty-Six

Monday

Good morning happy readers from a very warm London. I hear that it is not so warm everywhere in the country and up North and it the West of England it is rather wet and chilly. The Home Secretary says the public have lost respect for the police. Well, I’m not sure she understands what is happening. From what I see it is the two-tier policing that is causing the problems and it is being totally ignored by the Government and the senior police who pretend there is no such thing happening when even a cat can see it is.

Did you catch the closing ceremony of the Olympics on TV last night? I thought it was an absolute pile of poo. What was all this stuff about a ‘golden alien’ coming to Earth? I bet little kids were hiding behind the sofa. And having a karaoke break and trying to get people to sing in French is typical froggy thinking. I bet that the common language amongst the competitors was English, and they would have been better getting people to sing in English. At least the next one is in the US, but with the time difference it’s not going to be easy.

The word in Westminster is that the junior doctors think they have the Government over a barrel. Now they have got a big two-year offer the word is that the offer will be accepted but they will be back next year for even more money. The problem is the BMA has been taken over by a far-left faction and at the moment they want to prove just how powerful they are. They aren’t in quite so strong a position with the current GPs dispute, as so many GPs have left the union. Many of them are reasonably happy with the current contract as they get paid quite well and they are free to work part-time in private medicine.

I hear that Argentina was thinking about gifting Ukraine five French made second-hand Super Etendard Modernise aircraft it bought cheaply in 2019 when they were decommissioned by France and has never been able to use. Apparently, their ejector seats never worked and the newer version of the model of aircraft Argentina used to attack the British fleet in the Falklands were deemed unsafe to use. So are they still planning to palm them off on Ukraine? Well, not really, the reason the ejector seats didn’t work is that they were made, like most others in the Western world, by British company Martin Baker and Britain has a ban on military exports to Argentina, but not to Ukraine. So as soon as the aircraft leave Argentina the seats could be made to work. Anyway, I now hear the Argentinian Navy has had second thoughts and now think they can make the seats work and will be retaining the planes.

The largest Indian airline, Indigo, has decided to issue each of its ATR72 pilots with an iPad pre-loaded with all the paperwork including maps, NOTAMS and manuals. The pilots of the 45 ATRs in the Indigo fleet will now no longer have to carry 15kg of paper around with them. Instead, they will each have a 9th Generation iPad (not the current 10th Generation, the old ones are now cheap) preloaded with what Indigo are calling an Electronic Flight Bag. I expect that if this move is successful it will be expanded to the rest of the 390 aircraft fleet.

Last year Transport for London spent £22 million on mounting a crackdown on fare dodging across the Tube, buses, Overground, DLR and trams. So how effective was this crack down? TfL say that they issued 200,000 penalty fares bringing in £1.3 million, but I wonder how much was people voluntarily paying at the end of their journey because they couldn’t buy a ticket before commencing a journey. In addition, TfL say that they identified 414 people who habitually avoided paying for all or part of their journeys last year, adding up to more than £363,000 of avoided fares. So, if it cost £22 million to recover £1.3 million wouldn’t it save money if they didn’t bother?

We are now five weeks into the Liebore Government, and I see that their ‘Smash the Gangs’ policy is going absolutely nowhere. At the beginning of last week, I told you that over 4,000 illegal boat people crossed the channel, now I haven’t seen the numbers for all of last week but yesterday, Sunday, there were another 703 plus two died. So, it looks like we are seeing at least 1,000 a week coming in under Liebore, despite their promises. If my memory serves me correctly this is even more than were crossing the Channel under the Tory government. Are they going to let them all claim asylum?

Tuesday

Hello everyone, it’s another lovely morning in London. The sky is cloudless, and it is nothing like as humid today. In fact, it is a beautiful morning. Some of the numbers out this morning are interesting, Unemployment fell to 4.2% and there are 884,000 job vacancies. Mind you those are the vacancies registered with the Job Centre Plus, but lots of employers don’t bother to register job vacancies. It’s inflation data tomorrow so that might be interesting.

I have been reading that I shouldn’t say ‘good morning’ to you all as it is racist! According to what some people say, it is what the slave owners said every morning to their slaves, so if I say it to you I am good as calling you a slave. Well, I think of humans as my slaves anyway, and your only purpose on this planet is to look after every need of us cats. So, I will be continuing to say ‘good morning’ to you all.

Did you see the French pole vaulter who failed to clear five metres in the heats when he knocked the bar off with his penis? I must admit it did look rather large in his skintight suit. Well, I now hear that he has been offered €50,000 to appear on a porn site. No word on if he has accepted. Mind you whether he is that well-built or not we will have to wait and see.

It was the opening of the Football League season this weekend and one or two sides suffered a poor start. Among them was Plymouth who had a poor season last year and appointed Wayne Rooney as their new manager. They went down 4-0 at Sheffield Wednesday but it was the fact that one of their team had his name spelt wrongly on the back of his shirt. Somehow the name Forshaw had an additional ‘e’ added to it so it became Foreshaw. But to make matters worse they brought on a substitute called Issaka and the letter ‘I’ fell off his name, so he became ssaka. Quite an embarrassing afternoon for Rooney.

With the end of the Paris Olympics, I see that the British Olympic Committee is once again trying to get a Great Britain football team to enter the 2028 Olympics in the US. It is not very easy because unlike ever other footballing country we have separate football governing bodies in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. They fear that if they came together under the Team GB banner EUFA and FIFA would use it as an excuse to make such an association permanent and only allow one national entry into things like the World Cup and the European Cup of Nations. When we hosted the Olympics back in 2012 the international regulators agreed to not press us on such things if we entered a combined team but said it was a one-off. I really can’t see the four football associations wanting to chance upsetting the status quo without extraction a similar promise from EUFA and FIFA.

An employment tribunal judge has just found in favour of three white inspectors who claimed discrimination when an Indian sergeant was promoted to detective inspector leading the prestigious Thames Valley Police “priority crime team”. The tribunal heard that in August 23 it became known that TVP were looking for a detective inspector to lead the team. Despite the three white officers expressing an interest in applying for the job it was never advertised and a competition didn’t take place. The tribunal was told that the deputy chief constable told a female superintendent in charge of filling the position to “make it happen” and despite warnings that not following procedures was likely to attract a legal challenge, Sergeant Sindhi was appointed and promoted. The superintendent claimed in court that the appointment came under a “BAME progression programme” which the judge said “clearly did not exist at the time.” The judge ruled that the three inspectors were discriminated against because they were “white British” which is a protected characteristic of race.

The Premier League season starts this weekend with matches being shown on Sky and TNT. But the Champions League has already started for qualifiers, and this includes Glasgow Rangers who play the second leg of their qualifying round with Kyiv at Hampden Park tonight. I understand that it will be shown live on BBC Scotland. But there is a bit of a change with TV coverage of the Champions League this year. A match will be shown on Amazon Prime who have first pick and TNT will then show the rest. Finally, on a Wednesday night, the BBC will be showing highlights of all that week’s games starting at 10 pm on iPlayer and 10:40 pm on BBC1.

Wednesday

Good morning happy readers from a not-so-happy cat. All that lovely sunny weather has disappeared, and it is cooler and raining first thing in London. According to the forecast it should be warmer and dryer later, I hope they get it right. I see that inflation has gone up a tad this morning and is now 2.2%, which was not unexpected. It seems the reason was that the price of gas and electricity didn’t drop by as much as last year which seems an odd way to calculate things as they actually went down.

I hear that a road sweeper in Beckenham has been denied his dream holiday in Portugal because his employers’ contract with the local council says that employees cannot receive money or gifts in kind. Paul Spiers has worked the same area for years and always plays Elvis songs on his speaker to pass the time while working. A local befriended him because she also had a love of Elvis and learned it is his 63rd birthday this month and that he had hoped to celebrate by going on holiday to Portugal but being a lowly paid worker he hadn’t been able to save enough. Apparently, he had only ever been abroad once, and that was to Portugal, which he enjoyed so much he wanted to go again. So, the friend set up a ‘Go Fund Me’ page to raise £2,000 to pay for the holiday, but when his employer heard they said he couldn’t accept the money. But quite extraordinarily ‘On The Beach’ say he has won a competition for a £3,000 luxury holiday to Portugal!

The Army has acquired a new rifle from the Israeli company Smash, that is designed to take down a drone with standard NATO ammunition. The chance of hitting a fast-moving drone with an ordinary rifle is said to be next to nothing, but this rifle comes with a computer-assisted sight that focuses on the rapid movement of the drone’s propeller and makes all the calculations as to where the drone will be when the bullet arrives. It will not let the operator fire until it has a firing solution and is said to kill drones 80% of the time with a single bullet. I wonder if this rifle has made its way to the Russia-Ukraine conflict yet?

Yesterday there were lots of complaints on the internet from people who had to wait for hours for their bags at Gatwick Airport. I understand the problem mainly effected British Airways flights who said that it was all caused by the late arrival of an unusual number of flights all arriving at the same time. At Gatwick airlines are responsible for unloading and transporting their own baggage from planes and taking it to the airport’s delivery system. Apparently, the BA system was swamped with arrivals.

The Ealing Beaver Project says that baby beavers (kits) have been born in London for the first time in 400 years. In October last year they released a family of Eurasian beavers into the Paradise Fields site in Greenford. Now there are reports that the beavers have created two lodges and six dams which the project says means they are happy in their environment. Now automated nocturnal cameras have revealed the presence of at least two kits. I’m not sure why beavers became extinct in the U.K., were they hunted for the meat or their pelts? But they were first reintroduced in Scottishland and are now being reintroduced in England.

In his latest campaign advert the Donald talks about the Camel being a failed border czar who has not stopped millions of immigrants crossing the border from Mexico. Her supporters say she wasn’t a border czar, at least not in the normally accepted meaning of the phrase. This is strange, as I definitely remember it being announced that she was in charge of the border. Still, ‘her people’ say she wasn’t actually given that task, what she was really asked to do was stop immigration at source. Well, whichever one was her job; she seems to have failed. The highest number of immigrants entering the States was 150,000 in one month under the Donald but was around 80,000 when he left office. Under Biden it has been over 300,000 a month but is currently running at around a steady 200,000.

Today the numbers behind the basic unemployment figures are available and they show that there are 9.4 million ‘economically inactive’ people in the U.K. That is calculated as people of working age who are not looking for employment. So, it includes students but does not include those over retirement age. That is one hell of a lot of people and means that they are in some way being supported by the taxpayer. According to the Office of National Statistics, 2.8 million are off sick, and 1.8 million are caring for someone. But that still leaves an awful lot who chose not to work.

Thursday

Hi peeps, well yesterday morning it was forecast it was going to be wet this morning but before I went to bed they had changed the forecast to dry and warm. So Liebore have decided to have an amnesty on zombie knives, you just need to hand it in at a police station, if you can find one, and they will give you £10. Fat chance of that stopping knife crime.

Not content with caving into the junior doctors the government has now caved in to the train drivers Union ASLEF and rewarded them with 14%. The previous government had said they would offer a big increase if the union would look at many of the practices that kill productivity. Well of course all those conditions have been dropped and the unions have got their backdated wage increase and given nothing in exchange. I wonder which union will be next to demand a big increase.

Well, the latest numbers are out this morning for GDP and the economy grew by 0.6% in the second quarter of the year, April to June. This is a tad less than the first quarter, January to March, which went up 0.7%. One thing to remember is that this growth came under the Tories, the current lot didn’t take over until early July so they can’t claim it as anything to do with them. Of course, this growth came at a time when the doctors and train drivers were regularly striking. Now the Liebore lot have started caving in to the unions with huge wage increases which we the public will have to find the money for, I bet this has a huge detrimental effect on the good growth numbers of the first half of the year.

I read of a couple who last January were woken at 5 am by their front door being smashed in followed by heavy footsteps coming upstairs and two men bursting into their bedroom. The men shouted they were police and demanded the couple got up and dressed, while others started turning the house upside down. It was only when they were dressed and downstairs in their living room and handcuffed that the police showed them a search warrant looking for drugs. There was just one problem, the warrant wasn’t for that house, it was for one with the same number but in a similarly named street several miles away in a different postcode. The police apologised, boarded up the shattered front door and left. To date the couple have had £100 for ‘inconvenience’, but not a written apology, any compensation for the damages done or half scaring them to death for thinking violent burglars were raiding them.

Today a new independent company has taken over running the top tiers of women’s football. The company called Women’s Professional Leagues Limited (WPLL) now controls the Women’s Super League and Women’s Championship. WPLL is owned by the 11 teams in WSL and the 12 in the Championship. It will be starting off with a £20 million interest-free loan from the Premier League, who will also be advising on broadcasting, commercial operations and other things. The FA will have a special share which will entitle them to take a share of profits over a threshold that hasn’t been disclosed. I don’t expect it will make the on-field play any better.

I read that one of the effects of first London’s Congestion Charge and now its ULEZ zone has been a massive jump in the number of cloned number plates being used in cars in London to avoid fines. Normally the first anyone knows about having their number plate cloned is receiving a fine through the post for something like not paying to enter the Congestion Charge Zone or illegal parking in London. Often the car owner was at work in Birmingham or Bristol and thinks it has been a mistake by the system that automatically reads number plates. But when more tickets start arriving they fall in they have been cloned. In 2021, 22,450 tickets were cancelled for cloning in London alone, in 2022 it went up to 30,846 and last year it jumped to 36,794. That’s a hell of a lot of cloned numbers diving around London.

Yesterday Reform kicked off the idea that we should have a referendum on immigration. Personally, I think it is an excellent idea in principle and that the majority in this nation would vote to stop accepting any more coming into the country. But I foresee a problem, all the namby pamby bedwetters in parliament would do their utmost to not to implement the referendum result, just like they did with Brexit. Mind you I can’t see the current government accepting having a referendum as they know what the result would be. Another reason why we need a Reform government.

Friday

Well, it’s another lovely morning although the forecast for the weekend is not so wonderful. Of course there is another bank holiday Monday coming soon, so any decent weather will definitely be disappearing. I see the WHO has declared another ‘global health emergency’ over the latest outbreak of monkeypox in Africa. I see this is a different variant to the last outbreak and is said to be more infectious and killing more people. Still, it seems to be limited to Africa at the moment where health services are far worse than in more developed countries. Strangely Africa suffered far less than the rest of the world from COVID, so is this just their turn?

Yesterday a judge quashed the conviction of six people who had been found guilty of fare evasion on the services of four different railway companies. The judge ruled that the railway companies had used the controversial Single Justice Procedure to prosecute them. Judge Paul Goldspring said “They should never have been brought through” the SJP as the train companies did not legally have access to this method of prosecution. The judge said that at least 74,000 people had been wrongly pushed through this system and are now expected to be contacted by the rail companies to tell them they are not guilty. The four companies were not named but I understand they include Greater Anglia and Northern Rail who both say they will be refunding people wrongly prosecuted.

I hear that there is an odd deal-swap on the cards between Spain and Turkey. Spain requires an up-to-date jet trainer and Turkey needs large jet transport aircraft. The Spanish airforce operates a fleet of 27 A400Ms and has placed an order for 26 more. Turkey has 10 A400Ms and would like more but there is quite a long wait if they were to place an order today. However, Turkey has developed a jet trainer that can also be used as a light attack aircraft. The Hürjet is due to join the Turkish Air Force early next year. So the countries have come up with the idea that Turkey swap 24 x Hürjet trainers for six Spanish A400M transports. I hear talks are in progress.

Since Liebore became the Government five weeks ago we have had 5,000 people arriving across the Channel in small boats. If you were the 5,000th customer of a restaurant, or the 5,000th person to visit a museum, you might get a free meal or a small prize. Do we offer the small sort of thing to the 5,000 persons crossing the Channel illegally? I wonder what they should get, maybe an upgraded hotel room, or a quick route to citizenship?

Yesterday I mentioned the new policy of rewarding people who hand in a zombie knife at a police station with a £10 reward. I have been having a bit of a think about it. What happens when you are walking to the cop shop to hand in a knife, are you breaking the law? If you are not, then surely if you are stopped for carrying a knife all you have to say is “I am taking it to the police station.”

What is going on at Chelsea FC? In this and last year they have so far spent £1.2 billion on new players and are trying to sell players to raise £200 million to avoid breaching Financial Fair Play rules, also known as sustainability rules. Of course, other teams know they need to sell players and are consequently only willing to offer below Chelsea’s valuation. Chelsea also have far more players on their first team books, over 50, than any other team and far more than the maximum of 17 foreign and eight homegrown players allowed in a Premier League club squad. This means they will have to either sell players, send them out on loan or disappoint them by only playing them in lower-level teams and competitions. But by far the biggest problem is FFP, as the FA have deducted points from teams who fail to comply with the rules and Chelsea are already under investigation for doing so in previous seasons.

Robber Reeves has a bit of a problem. She has put it out the Tories left the economy in a terrible state with a £20 billion black hole, which will mean increases in tax and the cutting of the senior citizen’s Winter Fuel Payment. However, events this week have shown this black hole is of Liebore’s own making. Firstly, the economic numbers out this week have shown the economy to be robust with good unemployment, GDP and inflation numbers being published. So what is causing a black hole, could it be the huge settlements that have been announced with the junior doctors and the train drivers? I hear GPs will be the next to be offered a settlement. Then Red Ed is planning to give £11.4 billion away in overseas climate aid. I wonder how long it will be before the senior doctors, consultants, and nurses are back for loss of differential increases. Not to mention firemen, ambulance workers, Border Farce, Civil Serpents, HRMC and every other state employee threatening strike action if they don’t get equivalent increases. I think we are in for a tough time.

Saturday

Morning all, another lovely morning here in Westminster with not a cloud in the sky. This morning, I hear that in Gaza the Palestinians have been thinking of digging up the bodies of British soldiers buried in war cemeteries and holding them to ransom. How disgusting, it just goes to show how little respect they have for non-Muslims.

Yesterday ASLEF announced new industrial action on the East Coast Mainline the day after it agreed to put the latest offer on drivers’ salaries to a vote. However, ASLEF say that this dispute is between its drivers and the train operator LNER and has nothing to do with wages. They say it is over the total breakdown of relations with the employer and they are going to strike every weekend starting on 1st September and running until early November. What is intriguing is that LNER is not a private company and is owned by the Government, through the Operator of Last Resort.

I have been looking at the national opinion polls since the election and it tells an interesting story. The Tories are down a couple of percent now in popularity, the Liebore went up in the first poll after the election but are now down 3%. But where have the voters gone, well according to the latest poll it’s Reform and they are now polling higher than the Tories and Liebore have a 12% lead over Reform. The next lot of local elections and by-elections are going to be special.

The Housing Ombudsman has just ruled on 13 cases against housing associations and councils housing. One of the Associations involved was Clarion Housing, Britain’s biggest housing association who had first had a broken window reported to them four years ago and despite constant reminders from the resident had only boarded up the window and not bothered to repair it. In another case a resident had complained of a leaking window and had been told that it would be fixed in 2036 when all the windows were due for replacement. Most of the complaints seemed to revolve around windows and the councils ignoring the need to repair or replace them. The councils were told to fix the problems and pay the tenants compensation.

I hear that Jeremy Clarkson’s new £1,000,000 pub is due to open next Thursday, and before it is in business the local council is complaining about parking. The pub is beside a fairly busy road and the council thinks that when the pub’s car park is full people will park on the road’s grass verge. Clarkson has offered to turn a field into an overflow car park, but the council is reluctant to give permission. Apparently, there was a similar problem at Diddley Squat Farm and Clarkson was eventually allowed to use a field as an overflow car park there but apparently the council hasn’t learnt.

What is called a new type of ice cream van has started up in Fife. The difference is that the van will run on fixed routes on different days of the week, and you can track it on the internet so you can tell exactly when it will get to you. In addition you can preorder and prepay on the internet. I wonder if they are cat friendly and sell the feline equivalent of what I understand is known in the doggy world as Pup Cups? I could just do with a 99.

When the Formula 1 season restarts later this month after its summer break there is going to be a change to the regulations. As from the next Grand Prix what is called asymmetric breaking systems are banned although it is not clear if any of the teams had deployed such a thing or even planned to do so. The idea is that rather like viable brake bias where the way a car’s brakes are applied more to the front or the back axle this would allow the brakes on the left or the right to be applied first or harder. I have no idea if this was being considered by a team, but I do wonder if it would make a car go round a track any faster.

That’s me done for the day and as it is a cracking day I’m off to sit on the windowsill in the sun. It’s lovely and warm in the sun, and I am looking forward to a nap. Chat to you next week.
 

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