NEWS AT THE END OF NOVEMBER

One of the most important news items of the week is that around 9 million Britons are in serious debt that they can’t see their way around paying with the population of half a dozen major cities involved such as Hull, Manchester and Nottingham. And what delight this must be to Tory Boy George Osborne and his Treasury who’ve just rushed to assure the British public that they have most definitely not made any kind of deal with the Big Six Energy Supply rascals cartel to lower energy prices now or in any foreseeable future. What music this must sound to the ears of price rise organizer in chief, Lib-Dem Secretary of State for Energy Ed Davey. Now at last hard pressed pensioners and the elderly know what their Lib-Dem protectors against Tory excesses in Coalition Government that they so hurriedly climbed into bed with are doing to help them out! Yes, you’ll know how concerned they are and what they’re doing to help you out when you’re shivering your balls off this coming Winter. Apart from that the news about all those millions of British people in debt must also be music to the rampant industry of loan sharks and usurers squeezing the life out of the payday loan poor. Why, if they’re in debt already they’ll have to come begging for more, especially with Christmas just round the corner.

Millions of people in desperate debt and millions of old people who can’t afford to keep warm in Winter. Sounds like Tory-Lib Dem Coalition Government on a genuine high, but never mind all of that, the Bath Christmas market has opened!

It used to be called a German style market because of all the little wooden chalet type retail outlets but actually they’re more like idealized little Swiss chalets. Maybe one hundred in all at the center of the City of Bath. All lit up and tasty looking for goggle-eyed punters to spend their end of November pay at. This market and these stalls are definitely worth visiting, but not for any sound, sensible  or commercial reasons. Not if you’ve got half a brain and are looking for something really nice, unusual, imaginative or reasonably priced to buy for family or friend. This downright conglomerate rip off will be thronging with people coming from far and wide over the next fortnight, desperate to find something worth giving and keeping that won’t end up in a charity shop early in January. Sorry! You can squeeze your way round with the merry throng of suckers but if you’ve got any real class you’ll end up wasting your time unless you’re desperate, that is, to say that you’ve bought that something in a nice carrier bag from the lovely City of Bath, joke-joke! Or unless just about any bit of unnecessary bit of overpriced crap will do because no-one turns down Christmas Gifts, do they?

Perfectly tasteless wooden ties, fanciful up their own arse little Christmas tree decorations, snowy tinsel and tree bark, loads of little home-made genuine farm-produce cheese outlets with tiny little cheesy-on-a stick liberal-democrat type tasters, chou-chou and roast chess-nut outlets run by seriously Romanian type vendors, the usual exceedingly exclusive olive oil mob, a few seriously diabolical jewelry outlets, others selling a desperate variety of bowls, all howling CRAFT at anyone deeply stupid. And then there are the wretched home-made relish and jam stalls with the usual bit of grease-proof wrapping to make them look so deadly authentic, (here another joke-joke). Many of the stalls this year are new. Traders over the last three or four having been so badly bitten by the swinging rent of Bath’s ever avaricious Council and the plain lack of trade, just not bothering to turn up any more. Not even the two or three Nepalese jewelry men who at least made an effort, or the few who sold amber or excellent sloe gin liquor or vodka, or the couple who sold some interesting tiles. Just not enough money to make it worthwhile coming back.

This year it’s mainly little cheese jobs, silly things made out of oily wood, the usual fabulously priced Christmas decorations crap and of course, the mulled cider, overpriced sausage and burgers and merry mulled wine crew. I’ve already seen people handing out notes for quite frankly Christ knows what and it’s his season after all, isn’t it? Seriously, was all the shit in the Bath Christmas market worth dying for because in all truth you’ve really got to be stupid or silly to buy anything there. There have been odd times in the past when you might have come across something nice, I mean really nice, but not anymore. I mean there are people and lights and burning meat smells and things to look at but a genuine market needs to be selling things that are really worth buying and the Bath Christmas market is endlessly full of plain crap, and none of it’s cheap either

Oh yes. There’s a stall selling homemade type beers with labels on bottles saying Old Man’s Fart, Arse Liquor, Cats Piss or Grumpy Old Sod. Now you’d really need to be wanting to buy that for someone as a gift at three for a tenner but sales were brisk as I watched. Many jolly fat-faced women indeed were dead keen, telling me it was fun and when I wondered whether the recipient might not have thought it insulting I was told I had no sense of humor! It was only then that I realised why so many people are so heavily in debt and walked away wondering for what! Nearby was a stall flogging designer figurine bottle stoppers, nudes and such like. It gives you a sense of the adolescent puerility of it all. No class and not even funny. Tasteless unfunny little gifts that reflect badly on the giver. Or do they? Well look at it this way. Why bother spending money there if your act of generosity might make you look like a jerk? Why indeed? I suggest you give it a miss unless you’re desperate that is. Or you’re the kind of woman who shovels baked beans down her gob by the shovel load or indeed thinks it’s a laugh watching her kids pulling the legs off spiders. To others, I suggest that you buy your cheese somewhere better like Lidl’s, or any pates, relishes and jams from nearby Waitrose. Honestly, they’re a much better deal.

There’s one good thing to be said for the Bath Christmas Market however. It’s only minutes away from the Real Italian Pizza Company where in my opinion they make the best pizza outside Naples and at an excellent price. I know because I’ve eaten pizza in Naples six times and it’s the world’s best! But the stuff in the Real Italian runs it a close second, especially The Four Seasons. And the Chocolate Dream sweet is to die for. The service by the way is superb.

Kindly excuse the digression but back to News of the Week! The Government have just sold off part the Student Loans Debt they held to a private company. That’s for all student loans prior to the nauseating trebling of fees to nine thousand quid. It’s calculated that by the mid 2020’s the loan debt will run to about £46 billion. That’s not millions I’m talking about but billions! Many student debtors have left the UK and gone untraced overseas but most in the UK are known. The problem is that after students lost their grants and were forced to pay fees it was believed that the extra money they’d earn by having such qualification would easily help them pay off the loan. Unfortunately having a degree has never guaranteed a much higher income and worse still, neither has it guaranteed them a job! Many in fact are employed in occupations having little to do with their degree courses and earning a poor wage besides, so the chance of them paying off their loan are minimal.

That said, the annual interest they have to pay on their student loan still keeps on going and their debt to Government is ever increasing.  That’s another feather in the cap for New Labour Government that abandoned free higher education which ultimately led to student loans being sold off to the debt sharks creating a nation of student debtors! Well done Dirty New Labour, friend of financial swindlers and bankers and enemy of students from poor working class backgrounds. Question is, how are all these student debtors ever going to pay back their loans. Worse, how are all the parents supporting the current generation of students paying £9000 a year these days in fees ever going to pay back this kind of debt? The only answer they’ll shortly discover is that they or their kids will be forced to sell off the houses they live in when the next Government flogs off the current student loans portfolio to the next round of sharks.

It explains why the last ten years of Government, whether it was New Labour or Coalition, was so hot to vastly increase student numbers. There are hundreds of thousands more students now than there were in the 1980’s. All lending money from Government. Most unable to pay back such loans in the future without suitable well paid employment! So why print all the money to hand out the loans? The answer’s simple enough. The whole tarted up promise to newly qualified students of easy better paid jobs was just a plain con. Just another big sell going nowhere in the face of endless recession, especially with universities now handing out degrees ten a penny. An undervalued degree in the face of unemployment is quite frankly worthless only somehow the loan must be repaid. And where do you think the money for that will come from?

A piece of international news barely considered but of real importance is the Ukraine refusing to sign a big Trade Treaty much trumpeted by the European Union. Such a ‘deal’ had been widely sought both by the EU along with the Americans only the Ukraine’s last minute refusal put a serious dent in their plans. Russian pressure, even blackmail by President Putin, was blamed and the President of the European Union and others were seriously pissed.

The Russians, unsurprisingly, put pressure on the Ukraine to abandon the deal which the EU intended they sign up to at a summit in Riga. Instead, despite putting pressure on the ex-Soviet Republic, they got the big heave ho. So what were the reasons? Firstly Russia is the Ukraine’s main trading partner. If the deal had gone through a great flood of cheap foreign goods from Asia by way of Europe would have flooded the Ukrainian  markets to the detriment of Russian exports. Seems reasonable enough until you scratch under the surface. Far more important, a Ukrainian Trade Deal with the EU would also have meant a tie up with NATO, in effect with the Americans. Ultimately such a tie up would have resulted in pressure on the Ukraine to station NATO i.e. American warplanes, on its territory just a short hop from Russia, Ukraine’s next door neighbor. The Trade Treaty sounded like a simple fair exchange of goods only it was far more devious than that. America with nuclear weapons on Russia’s doorstep? Sounds a bit like nuclear missiles in Cuba to me!

Just as devious as Obama, David Cameron and other European heads of state assuring the Israelis that the Iranians will definitely behave themselves and won’t go on producing more weapons grade uranium to make nuclear bombs if they give them lots of money. Then they’ll allow them to check how much of the stuff they’re really producing under the deal they worked out in Geneva! Problem is, now that everyone’s gone home with the Iranians laughing their heads off, this murderous gang of fanatics has said that reducing their production of uranium wasn’t part of the deal anyway! And far more important, it’s now clear that the United Nations Weapons Inspectorate won’t have any mechanism in place to check whether their friends in Tehran are keeping ANY PART OF THEIR PROMISE because they won’t be ready and able for another 6 months.    

The result is everything the Iranians along with their friends in the White House and Whitehall ever wanted. They’re not on good terms with Britain and the United States while the Jewish State of Israel is isolated and friendless. That’s quite okay really. Obama, John Kerry and William Hague were never genuine friends of the State of Israel and the Jewish people anyway so it’s good for them to know where they stand. And where is that? Basically exactly where they were in 1933 facing annihilation, only they didn’t quite know it then. The difference now with six million gassed is that they know exactly how it is.

Final item of news. For all England football fans, so it’s more important than anything else. The world famous Itaquerao football stadium in Sao Paulo that was hoped would host many games in the World Cup in Brazil next year has just partly collapsed. Oh dear!