23/04/2009 by Steve Tierney.

St. George
Every time the question about a national day for the English comes around it seems to get bound up in rhetoric of whether we should, or should not, be proud to be English.  Whether we (as a people) are given to this sort of celebration or not.  Whether we even have anything to be proud of.  Well, I am certainly proud to be English.  I am indeed given to this sort of celebration.  And I do believe that England has a great deal to be proud of.  Times are hard for many and they’re going to get harder.  One of the things that will help get us through is to remember our long, colourful history.  Another is looking at our communities and the decent, proud, generous people who live in them.  We sell ourselves short sometimes, getting bogged down in arguments about benefits cheats, teenage parents, corrupt bankers and knife crime.  Let’s try to remember our good points too.  A national day to keep that in mind is a good thing. 
Happy St. George’s Day!

Stand And Deliver
Yesterday the Prime Minister put on his mask, strapped guns to his hips and laid in wait on the side of the highway.  The first carriage to come along was carrying the Middle Class.  Gordon leapt out into the road and shouted : “Stand and deliver!  Your Money Or Your Life!”  People might be forgiven for thinking Robin Hood had arrived, stealing from the rich (well, prosperous, anyway) and giving to the poor. 

Until the next wagon to happen by.  “Stick ‘Em Up!  I’ll be taking all your jobs, please.” Gordon ranted, aiming his six guns at a bunch of weary working class travellers.  “I know the prosperous employ everybody else, I just don’t care.  The public sector isn’t big enough yet anyway!”  Leering evilly, Gordon smirked: “Don’t worry, you’ll be looked after.  As long as you meet the criteria.  You need to be a teenager, out of work for six months or more, driving an eleven-year-old car, the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter, born on the Sabbath under a blood red moon.”  Or something like that. 

Having now put the lie both to the Big Idea that the middle classes have nothing to fear from New Labour and to their Manifesto commitment against huge tax increases, Gordon Brown finally openly reverts to type.  It’s back to the Seventies with a hit parade of class warfare, economic ruin and social jealousy.  Since today is also William Shakespeare’s Birthday I think a quote is in order. 

O, beware, my lord, of jealousy;
It is the green-ey’d monster, which doth mock
The meat it feeds on.
- Shakespeare’s Othello

I’m aware that my metaphors are something of a mish-mash.  Much like that disastrous nonsense of a fabricated budget.  Give me strength.

The Small Print
At the end of April ‘09 we move officially into Campaign Season.  The run-up to the County Council and Euro-Elections mean that some rules come into force which I am advised I must adhere to since I am a candidate for the Roman Bank & Peckover county division.   As a consequence of this I will be obliged to include an amount of ‘Small Print’ at the end of every blog post detailing my Conservative affiliation and some other campaign-related details.  My posts will also be slightly delayed as they will need to be ‘approved’ by my local organising secretary.  She’s a good sport and I’m not particularly controversial, so I don’t anticipate any problems.  I’m only making this advance notification in case anybody wonders why small print suddenly starts appearing at the end of my posts.  It doesn’t mean I’ve sold out, or am under the dictatorial thumb of Big Brother.  It just means (like any good Conservative) that I want to stay within the law and do the right thing as a county candidate.  Somehow, I doubt that telling readers I’m a Conservative at the end of each post is going to be a big surprise to anybody.  But if it is I’d have to ask… what Blog have you been reading all this time? 

Three Thousand Readers
My latest ‘hits count’ for the blog website is three-thousand individual readers a week.  TWELVE THOUSAND a month?  Bloody hell!  (Excuse my French.)  Who are you all?  Thank you for reading but please… leave a comment once in a while!  It’s exciting to know my occasional rant encourages some inspection.  It’d just be nice to get some feedback!  Speak now, or forever hold your pieces.  <Ahem>
  

Posted in England, St. Georges Day, Budget, Labour Party, Cambs. County Council, My Campaign, Conservatives | No Comments »

30/03/2009 by Steve Tierney.

Gordon Brown - The Taxman Cometh
Our Prime Minister is truly a master of squeezing every penny he possibly can from anybody who has the temerity to be productive.  It never ceases to amaze me the new and devious ways he invents to get our cash.  All of our cash.  Not just the rich, not just the middle-classes, he taps each and every one of us, siphoning off huge portions of our hard-earned pounds.  It wouldn’t be so bad if he did something decent with it like actually improve our schools or hospitals.  But Labour’s idea of ‘improvement’ is to set up a body of overseers and introduce a stack of tick-box forms.  Even when he hands money to the non-productive section of society he dresses it up as a generous boon from the government.  Notice he never mentions that he has created a benefits trap.  Anybody unlucky enough to have fallen into it has little chance of ever escaping.  Another ‘client’ for the government’s ongoing social experiment.  It got me thinking.  He loves the inheritance tax because as far as Gordon is concerned you shouldn’t even be able to escape his icy grip in death.  He loves borrowing because that lets him tax people who haven’t even been born yet. 

That is our Prime Minister in a nutshell.  Tax the Womb.  Tax the Tomb.  It never ends.

Newton Here I Come!
If you’ve read any of my earlier blog entries you probably know that I am standing as the Conservative Candidate for the Roman Bank and Peckover Ward of Cambridgeshire’s County Council.  The ‘proper’ campaign starts at the end of April.  I’ve been out and about in the area since I was selected last year making sure people get to know me and I have a good understanding of the views and concerns of my neighbours in the ward.  Over the last two weeks I’ve been delivering my “In Touch” newsletter to the people of Leverington.  I’ve finished that now and this week my team and I will be in and around Newton delivering door-to-door there.  If you live in Newton and happen to see me, please do feel free to say “Hello!”  If you’ve got any views or comments, I welcome the communication!  I hope I didn’t miss anybody but if you live in Leverington and for some reason have not received your “In Touch” newsletter, please let me know and I’ll drop one in to you personally.

Posted in Labour Party, My Campaign, Cambs. County Council, Leverington, Newton | No Comments »

25/03/2009 by Steve Tierney.

There She Blows
From some time the sceptics amongst us have believed that Gordon Brown’s economic experiment was shortly due to end in tears.  Many of the things I (and others) predicted months (or in some cases years) ago have come to pass.  Quantitative Easing (Money Printing), spiralling unemployment, plunging sterling and more.  The most significant predictation had notable failed to materialise though.  Until today.  The latest U.K. Gilt Auction failed spectacularly.  What does this mean?  It means that the government’s latest attempt to borrow a huge sum of money from lenders around the world met with a fairly clear and resounding: “No.”  This may have failed to make the headlines of our newspapers but make no mistake, it is a very important development.  It means that unless something dramatic changes, we will have to offer much more generous terms if our country wants to continue borrowing money.  We may not be able to source funds at all.  Gordon Brown has applied for a new “credit card” and the lenders have told him that they don’t consider him credit-worthy.  This affects us all.  How is the prime minister going to meet some, or even any, of his many spending promises if he can’t borrow the money to do so?  More money printing?  The U.K. is looking less and less solvent by the day.  This is a desperate situation and unfortunately the people responsible for it are the same people still in charge.  It’s a tragedy. 

Leaflets, Leaflets, Leaflets
I’ve been out over the last few days in Leverington delivering the first batch of the new Conservative “In Touch” leaflets.  These have to go all the way across the county division in which I will be standing (later this year) for a county council seat.  Walking for miles hand-delivering thousands of leaflets have shown me two things.  The first is that the people of my division are as passionate as I am about local politics.  I’ve enjoyed many personal and telephone conversations with them while en route.  The second thing, sadly, is I’m not as fit as I thought I was!  All this walking has made me feel like my bones are made of glass!  Time to start putting some hours in on the treadmill again, I reckon!  And maybe cut back on the bacon sandwiches a little!

Posted in My Campaign, Leverington, Credit Crunch | No Comments »

05/03/2009 by Steve Tierney.

A Tax On Oxygen
I’m sitting here reading the news that the Bank Of England has, today, begun its ‘Quantitative Easing’ (Printing Money.) We’ve all known it was coming. I’ve personally dreaded it because its a short-sighted and exceptionally dangerous thing to do. Trying to explain to people who aren’t interested in economics why money-printing is bad news is difficult because its easy to get bogged down in ‘clever’ terminology and mathematics. But everybody instinctively understands that you can’t conjure money from thin air. Not without serious consequences, anyway.  If you could, we all would.

The real truth about Quantitative Easing, as I’ve said before, is that it is a stealth tax. Every pound ‘printed’ devalues every other pound in the world. The more you print, the less the existing pounds are worth. So every time the government ‘invents’ another lot of cash, they are stealing directly from your pockets and from your bank accounts and from your future earnings. If you have UK Pounds stirling there is no way to avoid this stealth tax and since the Bank Of England has expressed their intention to continue printing each month this is an ongoing cumulative tax on us all. No specific one activity is being taxed, you can’t escape it and it’s not targeted at a specific industry or goods. Consequently, the best way to view it is as a tax on the air we breathe. That too would be inescapable and ongoing in the same way. I wonder if the government would get away with it if people made that comparison more often?

Campaign Launch
I’m presently working on the wording and photographs for my forthcoming campaign as County Councillor for the Roman Bank And Peckover Ward.  I’m standing (as you might guess) as a candidate for the Conservatives.  If anybody who reads this blog is interested in volunteering to help with the campaign; deliver leaflets, canvassing and other assistance, I’d gratefully welcome your help!  Give me a call on 07831 616127, or email me on me@stevetierney.org
The areas my ward includes are Wisbech North, Leverington, Gorefield, Newton and Tydd St. Giles, all in Cambridgeshire.

Posted in Gorefield, My Campaign, Wisbech, Leverington, Tydd St. Giles, Newton, Credit Crunch | No Comments »