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11th September 2013: The world's gone mad and I'm the only one who knows
13th August 2013: Black is white. Fact. End of.
11th August 2013: Electric cars, not as green as they're painted?
18th June 2013: Wrinklies unite, you have nothing to lose but your walking frames!
17th May 2013: Some actual FACTS about climate change (for a change) from actual scientists ...
10th May 2013: An article about that poison gas, carbon dioxide, and other scientific facts (not) ...
10th May 2013: We need to see past the sex and look at the crimes: is justice being served?
8th May 2013: So, who would you trust to treat your haemorrhoids, Theresa May?
8th May 2013: Why should citizens in the 21st Century fear the law so much?
30th April 2013: What the GOS says today, the rest of the world realises tomorrow ...
30th April 2013: You couldn't make it up, could you? Luckily you don't need to ...
29th April 2013: a vote for NONE OF THE ABOVE, because THE ABOVE are crap ...
28th April 2013: what goes around, comes around?
19th April 2013: everyone's a victim these days ...
10th April 2013: Thatcher is dead; long live Thatcher!
8th April 2013: Poor people are such a nuisance. Just give them loads of money and they'll go away ...
26th March 2013: Censorship is alive and well and coming for you ...
25th March 2013: Just do your job properly, is that too much to ask?
25th March 2013: So, what do you think caused your heterosexuality?
20th March 2013: Feminists - puritans, hypocrites or just plain stupid?
18th March 2013: How Nazi Germany paved the way for modern governance?
13th March 2013: Time we all grew up and lived in the real world ...
12th March 2013: Hindenburg crash mystery solved? - don't you believe it!
6th March 2013: Is this the real GOS?
5th March 2013: All that's wrong with taxes
25th February 2013: The self-seeking MP who is trying to bring Britain down ...
24th February 2013: Why can't newspapers just tell the truth?
22nd February 2013: Trial by jury - a radical proposal
13th February 2013: A little verse for two very old people ...
6th February 2013: It's not us after all, it's worms
6th February 2013: Now here's a powerful argument FOR gay marriage ...
4th February 2013: There's no such thing as equality because we're not all the same ...
28th January 2013: Global Warming isn't over - IT'S HIDING!
25th January 2013: Global Warmers: mad, bad and dangerous to know ...
25th January 2013: Bullying ego-trippers, not animal lovers ...
19th January 2013: We STILL haven't got our heads straight about gays ...
16th January 2013: Bullying ego-trippers, not animal lovers ...
11th January 2013: What it's like being English ...
7th January 2013: Bleat, bleat, if it saves the life of just one child ...
7th January 2013: How best to put it? 'Up yours, Argentina'?
7th January 2013: Chucking even more of other people's money around ...
6th January 2013: Chucking other people's money around ...
30th December 2012: The BBC is just crap, basically ...
30th December 2012: We mourn the passing of a genuine Grumpy Old Sod ...
30th December 2012: How an official body sets out to ruin Christmas ...
16th December 2012: Why should we pardon Alan Turing when he did nothing wrong?
15th December 2012: When will social workers face up to their REAL responsibility?
15th December 2012: Unfair trading by a firm in Bognor Regis ...
14th December 2012: Now the company that sells your data is pretending to act as watchdog ...
7th December 2012: There's a war between cars and bikes, apparently, and  most of us never noticed!
26th November 2012: The bottom line - social workers are just plain stupid ...
20th November 2012: So, David Eyke was right all along, then?
15th November 2012: MPs don't mind dishing it out, but when it's them in the firing line ...
14th November 2012: The BBC has a policy, it seems, about which truths it wants to tell ...
12th November 2012: Big Brother, coming to a school near you ...
9th November 2012: Yet another celebrity who thinks, like Jimmy Saville, that he can behave just as he likes because he's famous ...
5th November 2012: Whose roads are they, anyway? After all, we paid for them ...
7th May 2012: How politicians could end droughts at a stroke if they chose ...
6th May 2012: The BBC, still determined to keep us in a fog of ignorance ...
2nd May 2012: A sense of proportion lacking?
24th April 2012: Told you so, told you so, told you so ...
15th April 2012: Aah, sweet ickle polar bears in danger, aah ...
15th April 2012: An open letter to Anglian Water ...
30th March 2012: Now they want to cure us if we don't believe their lies ...
28th February 2012: Just how useful is a degree? Not very.
27th February 2012: ... so many ways to die ...
15th February 2012: DO go to Jamaica because you definitely WON'T get murdered with a machete. Ms Fox says so ...
31st January 2012: We don't make anything any more
27th January 2012: There's always a word for it, they say, and if there isn't we'll invent one
26th January 2012: Literary criticism on GOS? How posh!
12th December 2011: Plain speaking by a scientist about the global warming fraud
9th December 2011: Who trusts scientists? Apart from the BBC, of course?
7th December 2011: All in all, not a good week for British justice ...
9th November 2011: Well what d'you know, the law really IS a bit of an ass ...

 

 
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What to do about your Census form

 
We realise that many thousands (if not millions) of people up and down the country are desperately looking to us for a lead, and had thought to write our own page about the forthcoming Census. However, we find that Janet Street Porter has already done it just as eloquently as we could, so why bother?
 
Here's the redoubtable and toothsome lady's take on it ...

 

 
Ever feel you’re being bullied? That Big Brother is watching, even though the front door is firmly shut? The moment a fat envelope plopped through my letterbox, I felt aggrieved.
 
The 2011 Census had arrived, with page after page of mind-numbing questions and boxes to tick. I was about to lob it straight in the bin before I suffered a Grumpy Old Woman tantrum (excuse me, Ms Porter, I think you may have infringed our copyright there. Oh, all right then, we'll overlook it this time - GOS), until I read this ominous message on page one: ‘Taking part is compulsory. You may face a fine if you don’t participate or if you supply false information.’
 
It was from Jil (why not two Ls?) Matheson, National Statistician, who adds: ‘Help tomorrow take shape.’
 
I don’t mind filling in a simple form confirming who I am and who lives in my house.
 
But this census goes way beyond that. Apart from needing to know my qualifications, where I was last week, what kind of central heating I have and what religion I am, it also needs to know the exact status of my sexual partnership and who has been visiting lately and whether they stayed the night. I’m surprised we’re not asked about our bowel movements, flossing régime and whether we prefer Waitrose to Tesco.
 
How can the simple job of gathering information about the population once every ten years, which started out in 1801 as a single sheet of paper, have morphed into this costly (£480?million and rising) exercise during a period of national financial hardship? If we can’t afford help for carers, child day-care centres, meals on wheels and libraries, how can we bloody well afford this grandiose census? We are told it’s justified because the information allows the Government to plan grants to local authorities and to decide how much money to allocate for future health care.
 
The stuff about our homes helps to formulate future strategy for housing. If we tell them how we get to work, apparently it will help with the planning of transport systems and new roads. And pigs can fly. Every time a new road, bus or rail route is planned, what happens? There’s a fresh consultation exercise. Ditto when it comes to new housing and hospitals — there’s always a need for up-to-date information and research. More questionnaires, more information, more money spent.
 
I shall put my name on the census form and sign it — that information is already on the Electoral Roll. But no more. Jil Matheson can plan our future together without knowing what kind of heating I have.
 
I might not be quite so angry if I hadn’t discovered the government chose to award the £150million contract to manage the census to the UK subsidiary of U.S. arms manufacturer Lockheed Martin. This giant aerospace company makes cluster bombs, Trident nuclear missiles, F-35 fighter aircraft as well as the Next Generation ID system used by the FBI, which allows fingerprints and biometric data to be rapidly distributed to 18,000 law-enforcement agencies. This company makes huge profits out of different ways of killing people.
 
And it gets worse. Lockheed Martin has subcontracted the handling of the information we provide to a company called UK Data Capture. Its two main shareholders are Edexcel and Vangent. Edexcel has a poor record of handling data to do with exam results and was criticised by Tony Blair. Vangent is the U.S. company whose employees illegally accessed President Obama’s student loan details.
 
Add to this the long list of data disasters which have plagued government departments, including HM Revenue, Pensions and the NHS, and you can see why handing over personal details could make us feel anxious. Hardly a month passes without information being lost by civil servants — so even though census information is kept confidential for 100 years, you can expect to discover some has turned up on a memory stick on a train in the Home Counties.
 
I cheered when ID cards got the chop. I refused to hand over my personal details to the NHS for its dubious Summary Care Records, and now I plan to tell Jil Matheson where she can stick her Census.
 

 
The GOS says: Well, I don't know what all the fuss is about. If you've done nothing wrong, you've nothing to fear ... erm ... surely that must be right?
 
The real trouble with the Census is that only nice law-abiding, middle-class people will do it. You don't seriously think they're going to get a whole host of meaningful responses from housing estates in Dagenham and traveller sites in Basildon, do you? And so far as the Census goes we fully expect 90% of Bradford to suddenly disappear off the face of the earth, because there's no way many Muslim households will want anyone to know just how many illegals they're cramming into each bedroom, and besides, it's white man's magic, isn't it?
 
We'd just like to add one or two other thoughts ...
 
As head of the household I can, if I wish, complete the Census form on behalf of other members of my household. I think I'm going to make my wife a Hindu, my son a Rastafarian, my daughter a Muslim and my lodger a Jedi Knight. Myself I intend to describe as a follower of Fairy Lore. Let's face it, all religion is just fairy stories. Why the hell does any of it find a place in an official government census? They might as well ask us whether we prefer Batman or Spiderman.
 
We note (well, actually it was pointed out by Suzanne Moore; we've decided not to think for ourselves this week) that there is no category for Humanism or Atheism. OK, an atheist really has no religion at all, and there's a box to tick for that. But Humanism involves a set of beliefs, doesn't it, so doesn't that make it a religion?
 
Another problem is the muddling between ethnicity and religion: thus to be Jewish or a Sikh is a religious category, whereas some Sikhs and most Jews would define themselves as ethnically Sikh or Jewish.
 
The section on Ethnicity is absolute nonsense. We have no idea what our ethnicity is - the English are a mongrel race at best, and how can we tell whether there's a touch of the tarbrush or a little yellow streak a few generations back? Any answers we give about ethnicity will be guesswork. And the jibe about white man's magic turns out to be rather close to the mark. Different wording on the census forms for Wales and Scotland allows different identities, so one may be “Black Scottish” but not “Black English”. This is what happens when you try to neatly parcel up the unparcelable and officiously categorise the uncategorisable. It's important, too: it means that many thousands of English people who happen to have black skin are denied the opportunity of being English, as though they must forever be branded as interlopers. I thought this was exactly what we didn't want to happen?
 
The BNP must be delighted to have it confirmed officially that you can only be English if you're white. Don't forget, you read it here first.
 

 
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