Update | 2003/05/21
Romiley on an overcast mid-May morning. The cowboys have sneaked back to paint a couple more lamp posts black -- apart from the stripe of dark grey undercoat which will receive the gold stripe in due course. The lamp post with the fancy top on the right has been painted in this shot and the painters are lurking in their van, parked outside the Stock Dove, gathering their strength before tackling the other fancy-topped lamp.
   At the last weekend, they painted gold stripes on the 3 black lamps posts around the BP petrol station -- and only those 3. From the niggardly way our Trivial Democrat-dominated council doles out the 'gold' paint, you'd think it had real gold in it! As of today, the lamp post at the mini-park at the junction of Compstall Road and Sandy Lane remains obstinately undercoat dark grey. Could be that, lost among the newly leafed oak trees, it has dropped off the road map for Romiley's refurbishment?
The Lamp Post In The Trees has been painted black and the Triv-Dems have sprung for another tin of gold paint and the lamp posts in the heart of the village are now looking very posh.

Here are the results of our email poll on what the French would prefer to be called.

			Singe de capitulation qui mange du fromage (1)
			A bas les rosbifs et l'Albion Perfide!
			Froggy (1)
			Bof! (2)
			Include me out!

Notes : (1) All of these votes were received from genuine French email addresses, but most seem to have come from North African illegals or citizens of other EU countries resident in France.
(2) Most of these votes were received from the Paris area.

We've had Old Labour in power and they made a bog of things. We now have New Labour allegedly running things [in office but not in charge of anything] and they're making a bog of things, too.
   Maybe where we're going wrong is in putting up with any sort of Labour -- New or Old. Maybe what we need is something entirely new in the way of political parties. And that's why the New Party is asking for your support at the May 1st local elections and all subsequent elections.
   The New Party has New Ideas; New Ways of doing things; New Solutions for the same old problems; New Directions for the ratepayers' and taxpayers' money; and New Concepts of administration for the 21st Century.

• The New Party is free of the taints and baggage of the old political parties.
• A vote for your New Party candidate is a positive step toward a better future.
• Our candidates for the Romiley East and Romiley West wards have extensive experience of political activity at a local, national and world level.
• Vote for the New Party and get Romiley's flaky pavements fixed!!!

YOUR NEW PARTY CANDIDATES FOR ROMILEY
DAN SHEIDAMUSS for EAST	ALDEN NABAMOIS for WEST

TAKE A STEP IN A NEW DIRECTION on May 1st and thereafter!
Whotcha got to lose?

What Do You Do
When You Ain't Got A Clue?

Drown your ignorance in 1,500,000 words filling 2,500 pages bound into 18 volumes. And then give your victims 2 days to wade through your garbage -- and not any old 2 days, the Cup Final weekend. That's what the Mugger did with his garbage about membership of the European single currency.
   p.s. United Europe? Is that a rival to United Dairies?
   p.p.s. Never mind the Single Currency, what about a Single Language -- ENGLISH -- to save some trees and cut down on Euro-bumf?

You know you've hit rock bottom when you can't even get yourself arrested! This is reported to be the fate of former Iraqi Communications Minister Mohammed Sahaf. Trying to find something to do before he takes up his new post at Downing Street as a Special Communications Executive, Mr. Sahaf thought he'd surrender to the Americans and wind them up for a while. But they refused to arrest him because he's not featured in the pack of 55 'Most Wanted' cards. Dozy lot, these Yanks.

Saddam Does Things By Threes?

Gulf War Watchers are now wondering what happened to the three Iraqi cargo ships, which were said to be sailing the high seas aimlessly before the war kicked off. They were supposed to be carrying Saddam's Weapons of Mass Destruction but the Americans were said to be reluctant to try to search them in case the captains scuttled the ships and caused a major pollution episode. If the war is over, why have we heard no more about these ships?
   Some Gulf War Watchers are drawing parallels between the three ships and the three trucks containing cash, which are said to have taken Saddam's holiday money to Syria. They now believe that three is a mystical number for Iraq and that any connection between Saddam and three of anything is to be viewed with extreme caution.

Honour Among Politicians?

One of Saddam Hussein's last acts as Boss of Iraq was to destroy his Weapons of Mass Destruction, according to the latest theories of why they haven't been found. So is Vice-Prez Blair about to be Profumo'd for lying to the House of Commons about Iraq's weapons, including the non-existent WoMD? Or does John Profumo belong to a bygone age when there was still honour in politics?
   The conspiracy theorists are saying that Mr. Hussein ditched his WoMD purely to embarrass V-P Blair, which hints at a Blair-centred view of the universe. What seems to be more real is the leak which claims that Downing Street ordered the Intelligence services to 'sex up' the report on Iraq's weapons, which the V-P used to justify a war.
   Where do we go from here? A likely course seems to be another grovelling apology from the Vice-Prez before he moves on -- or tries to. Sack-cloth on and on yer knees, Mr. Vice-Prez!

The latest bright idea to seep out of the O.D.P.M. [Office of the Deputy Prime Minister] is to send out a bloke on a motorbike when someone makes an emergency call and asks for the fire brigade.
   Mr. T.W.O. Jags [pictured left with a minder] would like the bloke on the motorbike to do a recce then get on his mobile to report whether the call is genuine or a hoax.
   The government expects to save lots of money through not sending fire engines to hoax calls. Customers trapped in a fire are expected to be patient for a while longer as the time taken to get a fire engine to a genuine emergency is expected to be doubled under the new system.

Delivering Added Value? Well, Not Exactly ...

Control Plus, the outfit which provides Manchester with traffic wardens, is keen to give added value to the customer. So there was rejoicing when warden Damien Smethurst delivered the 'plus' of booking 101 vehicles in a single day -- double the usual rate.
   Unfortunately, he did it on the May Bank Holiday Monday, and 84 of his tickets went to vehicles on single yellow lines, which don't count on a bank holiday. So instead of raising around £4,000 for the city, he landed it with the expense of cancelling his invalid tickets. Further, the city council decided to award all wrongly ticketed motorists with one day's free parking at extra cost to Manchester's ratepayers. But with a Labour council, they should be used to paying over the odds.

Compensation Culture -- The Next Step?

A 17-year-old drunken yob has been ordered to pay £100 compensation to a copper for calling him 'fat'. A district judge in Barrow, Cumbria, decided that PC Montague, who is 5' 8" tall and weights 14 stones, had suffered mental anguish.
   Is this another compensation floodgate opening?

Saddam To Buy The Dome?

Saddam Hussein is known to have sent Qsay, his youngest son, to pulled off the Mother of All Bank Jobs in Baghdad in the early hours of March 18th. The crew of robbers took two hours to load $1billion in US banknotes (90%) and euro notes into half a dozen trucks and disappeared into the night before US bombs began to fall on the city. Three of the trucks are known to have entered Syria in the early days of the Second Iraqi War. The fate of the others was unknown -- until recently.
   According to information leaking out of the former KGB organization in Russia, the missing vehicles travelled north through Turkey, Georgia, Russia, Poland and the Ukraine into western Europe. They are believed to be 'somewhere in northern France' at the moment. Why? Because the fugitive pro-tem World's Favourite Despot is eager to turn his loot into goods as a first step to laundering it. And the UK has a very attractive item for sale.
   Government insiders have been dropping hints that the Millennium Dome is about to be sold to a 'wealthy customer from an oil-producing nation'. There is also speculation that it could become a diplomatic enclave with full diplomatic immunity for deposed government officials. So if you see a strangely familiar, 65-year-old Arab with a moustache driving a people-carrier around Greenwich, don't be too surprised.
US troops have found most of the missing billion hidden around Baghdad -- in 'barricaded garden sheds', Saddam's palaces and buried in parks. He is now thought to have got away with only $50million, which should be enough to keep him going for a year or two.

He's Behind You, Chaps!

Vice-Prez Blair is "one hundred per cent" behind the UK's bid for the 2012 Olympic Games, is he? Well, now we know for sure that we're heading for a shambles at best and a £4billion Millennium Dome-style white elephant at worst.

Passive Smoking -- No Smoking Gun

A new study published in the British Medical Journal has dared to state that the effects of breathing in other people's cigarette smoke are nowhere near as deadly as the anti-smokists would have us believe. The real story, however, seems to be the anti-smoking lobby's outrage that someone has dared to publish something that they don't like rather than the merits, or otherwise, of the research. How odd.

The Feck's A Stakeknife?

The IRA's chief torturer was a spy for the Brits all along, certain Irish newspapers would have us believe when they 'outed' him. But he's turned round and said it's all a mistake, he was never an informer and he's never even heard of the IRA and what the feck's a 'stakeknife' anyway? And that's probably the best plan for him. After all, the IRA can't kill him because that would be an admission that the dreaded Brits fooled them. And if he's not working for the British 'intelligence' services, they don't have to pay him his eighty grand a year any more. Great solution to a knotty problem.

The place, Riga. The occasion, the 48th Eurovision Song Contest. The achievement, our contribution scored nul point -- i.e. we were the most crap of the crap.
   Allegedly, 150 million TV viewers watched Turkey win the contest, even if it's in Asia Minor, not Europe, and our useless duo achieve their landmark. The lack of points was believed to be a post-Iraq backlash, although what a war in Iraq has to do with the ESC is something known only to Surrender Monkeys and similar fair-weather friends.

Patriotism is the last refuge of -- the Vice-Prez

The place, Warsaw. Vice-Prez Blair is desperate to become Prez of a eurostate after the next regime change in the UK and he's shown that he is prepared to surrender control of anything at all to the mob in Brussels to buy his way into the job. But he reckons that if someone opposes him, that makes them 'unpatriotic'.
   Quel scoundrel!
The Vice-Prez really does have proof that Saddam's WoMD really did exist before he dashed off to war with Mr. Prez Bush -- but the details are all top secret. But he has got it. Trust him.

John D'Amato was taken out in 1992 by Anthony Capo and Victor DiChiara, two of his torpedoes, on credibility grounds. His 'family' feared ridicule in organized crime circles if their leader was exposed as a homosexualist, something which is strictly against Mafia rules.
   The deceased was only rumoured to be a potential source of embarrassment, but he had to go, a witness told a court in Manhatten, New York. So desperate was the situation that his 'family' broke Mafia rules by not talking to the bosses of other crime families before getting the job done.

He was a crap prime minister at 49.
He'll be a crap prime minister at 50.
And he'll still be crap at 51!
So reaching the 'Big Five-Oh' isn't going to make a whole hell of a lot of difference.

p.s. No birthday party for the Vice-Prez to avoid offending those who weren't invited? You couldn't make it up, could you!
What did the Vice-Prez get from his missus in the way of a birthday present? Not forgetting that Mrs. Vice-Prez cops for around £250K per annum for whatever it is she does. 2 bottles of wine -- out of a case which someone gave her on a freebie holiday in Australia! How appropriate.

The EU plans to ban bacon-flavoured crisps because the flavour-giving agent is carcinogenic. They're also planning to ban all smoked foods on the same grounds. We're now waiting, with barely contained anticipation, to find out how many thousands bags of crisps per day one has to eat to achieve a measurable increase in the risk level. Next on the hit list is shoving VAT on postage stamps, allegedly in the name of increased competition. But we all know the real reason -- it's to increase the amount of VAT tribute flowing into the EU's coffers. Why? Because the bigger the pot, the more you can steal without anyone noticing.
   If the budget is hundreds, you can steal tens of euros;
   if the budget is millions, tens of thousands can disappear;
   and when billions are sloshing around, then it's dead easy for the usual suspects to make millions leak away via their 'accounting devices'.
   Pity the dozy sods in Brussels don't have something better to do with their time than mess with things that aren't broken; pity there's no one watching what happens to the cash; and pity that anyone who does try to protect the cash gets dumped upon from a great height by the usual suspects [yes, we're talking about you again, Neil Kinnock].

Why is Vice-Prez Blair cool with giving the people of Iraq a referendum on their constitution and not cool with doing the same for his customers in the UK over the EU constitution?

It's all very simple, really.
   He has no ambitions to be Prez of Iraq but he does want to be Prez of Europe. And his only chance of achieving that particular ambition is to grab his ankles and let the EU park its constitutional bike with no adverse input from New Labour's customers, especially when he has a whole heap of apologizing to do over the war in Iraq.
   When you're looking for a politician's motive, always suss out for the personal interest angle.

Jointly to the Parole Board, Mr. Justice Kay, Home Secretary Blunk and Lord Irvine
for not letting Tony Martin out of gaol 2 months early 'because he's a danger to burglars'.

Jointly, to Culture-Vulture Secretary Praticia Hewitt, who doesn't watch 'reality TV' but who thinks the government should regulate it to prevent New Labour's customers from watching too much of it.

Jointly, to the jobsworth in Lincolnshire police who charged an ambulance service driver with speeding when he was on a transplant job, especially after the Cambridgeshire police dropped their charge from the same job.

Jointly to the politicians at the Ministry of Defence who sent a war crimes tribunal to investigate the conduct of Lt.-col. Collins in Iraq.

Hospitals -- surprise, surprise! -- diverted resources to A and E departments when the government's inspectors turned up at the end of March to gather data on their efficiency. They also cancelled operations to free up beds so that their customers wouldn't have to lie around on trollies, making the place look untidy. And then it was back to normal when the government had 'proof' that it's doing wonders for the NHS. As a result of the exercise, the hospitals didn't suffer a cut in funding, Vice-Prez Blair and his crew got to tell their customers that all A and E departments are 99% efficient with their hands on their black hearts, and everyone was happy; apart from anyone who needed to use an A and E department at a time other than the last week in March, of course.

Following in the footsteps of Prez-For-Life Niyazov of Turkmenistan (see BFN for August, 2002) and Idi Amin of Uganda, Prez Lukashenko of Belarus has decided that no one else can call himself Mr. Prez. Any heads of companies, unions and other organizations are for the high jump if they dare to call themselves 'president'. Like Zimbabwe, Belarus is now a poverty stricken basket case, where opposition politicians disappear and the secret police are firmly in charge. Sounds like another for Prez Bush's regime change programme.

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