Michael Connarty, MP for Linlithgow and Falkirk East at Westminster has just been interviewed by BBC One Scotland’s Politics Show about the strike at Grangemouth refinery. An economist in former life, Connarty condemned Ineos for ‘macho management tactics’ and ‘attacking the workers’ pensions’ through its imposition of a two-tiered pension scheme without consultation or negotiation with the union. He said ‘why we’re in this situation is [Ineos are] doing things that no sensible management would do’. The pension scheme at the centre of the dispute is in surplus and Ineos have reportedly rejected independent auditing of the accounts. Connarty suggested that Ineos’ ‘maverick way’ of approaching management has a political rather than economic agenda–’why have you provoked this strike now?’ The one obvious conclusion–Ineos are seeking to break the power of organised labour at the Grangemouth complex.

The poster below was spotted on the wall of the Chapelle Notre-Dame de la Santé, at the Bastide Saint-Louis end of the Pont Vieux in Carcassonne–in this instance, the god-botherers are shaming so many soi-disant ‘progressives’, particularly those who proclaim sympathy or support for the pursuits of god-bothering, while at the same time supporting the Chinese military industrial complex.

Irony: \ˈī-rə-nē \ noun, Latin ironia, from Greek eirōnia, from eirōn dissembler : incongruity between the actual result of a sequence of events and the normal or expected result

It’s worth remembering that not everybody suffered under the 10p tax rate.

The entire workforce of Somerset print firm Butler and Tanner – 287 employees to be precise – was yesterday made redundant. Sacked without warning and with immediate effect. And this while the company and representatives of Unite were in talks at ACAS in Bristol, with strike action hanging in the air but not yet implemented.

We are told that Butler and Tanner is now being put into receivership. Yet on Thursday of last week company chairman Mike Dolan told PrintWeek that this would happen if the threatened strike went ahead. So Dolan is a liar as well as a corporate bully. He had previously accused the union of “election fraud” after a ballot of workers resulted in a 92% vote for industrial action.

Dolan then conducted his own ballot, but Unite’s Ann Field says that this was boycotted by the “vast majority” of union members. The company boss claimed that his ballot showed a majority of union members to be against a strike. A majority of those few union members who took part in his unofficial, informal and irregular ballot.

And to add insult to injury, along with receiving ungrammatical dismissal notices the sacked workers have been told that they will not receive their salary this month. The redundancy letters state that the company is “unable to invoice sufficient work to pay this month’s wages.”

So how can Dolan declare that Butler and Tanner’s suppliers and creditors will be paid in full?

Mike Dolan is a bounder and a cad.

Fucking catholic genocidal maniacs and scum.

I would kill catholics at the drop of a hat and promote labour and union leaders to the highest realms of governmental apparatus in order to make it so.

Frankfurt School Rules OK.

Not only that — the death instinct inherent in religious ethnocide and mass extermination immanent in the major monotheisms should be wiped off the face of the earth. Hitchens and Dawkins are pussies when it comes to the real deal.

Relevant (to something-or-other)

Die Weltwoche

At the opening of his boutique for luxury menswear in Zurich, designer Tom Ford ponders the subject of body hair. “I talked to my father about it, he’s 76. And he can’t understand the world any more. Everyone is shaved everywhere. When a woman is naked, you should see lots of hair, he thinks. And he’s right. That’s natural, pure, animalistic. But that’s my personal taste. It is something that really preoccupies me though… We were doing a photo shoot with a big group of naked men, all heterosexuals between the ages of 19 and 60. The older ones had full, natural pubic hair, the under-40s were strarkly trimmed, and a few had none at all. I asked the younger ones why they were shaved all over and they replied: because my girlfriend likes it. … It’s a hairless generation, their sexual socialisation happened with porn films that showed no pubic hair. I grew up in the seventies where porn films were still porn films, it was sweaty and hairy.”

Truefact.

Some were dismissive of the attempts of the Iraqi government to exert control in Basra:

The negative sum nature of war is most obvious when, as predictably happened in Basra, the stage of bloody stalemate is reached. At this point, both sides typically want to come out of the fight with some gains to show for the exercise. Fighting on, they sometimes achieve this and sometimes do not. But the losses incurred in the process ensure that both sides are worse than they would have been with an immediate ceasefire.

In this respect, Basra is a microcosm of the whole Iraq war.

However, the negative sum appears less negative than it did. Basra, in relative terms, appears to be blooming.

three years of being terrified of kidnap, rape and murder – a fate that befell scores of other women – Nadyia Ahmed, 22, is among those enjoying a sense of normality, happy for the first time to attend her science course at Basra University. “I now have the university life that I heard of at high school before the war and always dreamt about,” she told The Times. “It was a nightmare because of these militiamen. I only attended class three days a week but now I look forward to going every day.”

She also no longer has to wear a headscarf. Under the strict Islamic rules imposed by the militias, women had to cover their hair, could not wear jeans or bright clothes and were strictly forbidden from sitting next to male colleagues on pain of death.

“All these men in black [who imposed the laws] just vanished from the university after this operation,” said Ms Ahmed. “Things have completely changed over the past week.”

In addition, the Iraqi government seems to be increasing its monopoly of violence, and their hold on the streets of Basra. Sadr has also decided not to fight. If Basra is a microcosm of the whole Iraq war, then we should all hope that this fragile and hard-won (by Iraqis) security is replicated throughout the rest of the country suffering persecution at the hands of terrorists and undesirable foreign infiltrators.