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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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I used to own a railway, you know.
 
As such organisations go, it wasn't bad. It was formed in 1948 and inherited a motley collection of old steam engines and rolling stock in an appalling state of disrepair after years of wartime drudgery, and an infrastructure that, apart from patching up the bomb damage, had received little or no maintenance in the last nine years. As "British Railways" it soldiered on, building new and rather fine steam engines and then some indifferent diesels, replacing much of the stock and managing to make a go of things even in the face of government-sponsored competition from road haulage.
 
After a while it re-invented itself as "British Rail", painted all the engines blue and closed a lot of minor lines. For this it is hated to this day by railway enthusiasts, but the fact is that there's still a hell of a lot of railway left in this country (I know, I just got my first Senior Rail card!), and though British Rail were quite unable to supply an edible sandwich, the trains did run, they mostly didn't crash, and they sometimes arrived on time.
 
And all this was mine - and yours, of course. It was a national industry, owned by the state for the benefit of the citizens of the state.
 
Then the Tory government gave it away. Without so much as a by-your-leave they gave away my railway so that their friends could all buy shares in it and make a huge profit. It wasn't a very bright thing to do, as almost no railway has made much of a profit for the last hundred years, but these were the days of Thatcherite enthusiasm when the idiots believed that everything and anything could be used to turn a fast buck. I only wish we'd grown out of it, but sadly we haven't.
 
The way it was done was pretty ludicrous, too. They formed one company, Railtrack, to own and manage the track itself. Then other companies could bid for the right to run trains on it, using engines and carriages hired from still more companies. This was to ensure that there were lots of companies so that the government and their friends could own lots of shares and make lots of money. The only ones who lost were the poor bloody passengers.
 
Well, now the wheel has come full circle. Railtrack was underfunded (as railways have always been in this country) and poorly run (which by-and-large they haven't been), and it got into massive trouble. In 2001 Tony Blair's government, in the person of that execrable little s**t Stephen Byers, decided to scrap it and put in its place another company called Network Rail. Trouble is, he didn't pay the Railtrack shareholders anything like its true worth - in 1998 shares had been valued at £17, but in 2002 he paid them only £2.50 and got the whole shooting match at a knock-down price of £500 million when it should have cost him £4 billion.
 
The shareholders were furious. Nor were they deterred by Byers' threats of vast legal costs, and but for the London bombings the big news this week would have been the court case where they are suing the government for "malfeasance" ("misuse of power"). It looks as if they might win, too.
 
So I feel quite pleased, really - hardly grumpy at all. It looks as if one nasty little politician is getting his arse kicked, the government is going to be revealed for the bunch of scheming cheats we've always known them to be … and the shareholders? Well, if you remember, they were the ones who pinched my railway in the first place, because they thought they could make a nice little profit. I don't remember them paying me any compensation, either, so the whole thing served them bloody well right.
 
From my point of view it's all turned out rather well, I think. Now, Mr.Blair, about that National Health service I used to have ...
 

 

 
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