Is there any point in Parliament?

According to the BBC, a Parliamentary Committee has decided that Ofsted has "got too big to function properly" and its responsibilities should be split up to separate its educational responsibilities from its child protection work. However Downing Street has announced that they have no plans to make any changes.

Now one of the areas where I believe MPs can contribute to this country is not by standing up in the House as part of a routine "Yah-boo" act, but by quietly contributing, largely behind the scenes, to parliamentary committees. Most members of these committees are usually MPs with particular knowledge of the subject covered by the committee. Their reports and conclusions are invariably well worth consideration, and invariably their findings are ignored by government.
This of course gives rise to the question, "Why should MPs bother? "  Why not just take an even longer break, there is no real purpose in them attending the House if their hard work is to be ignored..
Parliamentary committees should have more powers and the government of the day should be obliged to give full and proper consideration to their findings, and indeed, provide an explanation as to why they are not being adopted. We should have more parliamentary committees, one for each of the government departments, and they should have to vet and approve the departmental budgets.

Immigration

So now we  clearly know where the LibDems stand on immigration.
According to the BBC,
'Vince Cable has criticised David Cameron over his promise to cut immigration to "tens of thousands" of people a year.
The Lib Dem business secretary said the prime minister had been "very unwise" and that such a target was Conservative - not coalition government - policy.'
So it is now very clear, Cutting emigration is not LibDem policy.

If the people of this country foolishly decide to adopt AV in the forthcoming referendum, with statements like this, there is only one party that will be the winner, the BNP!

Safety Instructions

Mrs EP bought a "Matchbox" type vehicle from Sainsburys for our grandson.

Being a responsible grandfather, I naturally read the warnings before totally ignoring them!

However it does seem that items 3 and 4 are mutually contradictory, unless Sainsburys expect me to get a pair of scissors and cut out the warnings for retention.

Single Fathers - Why don't they get the support given to single mothers?

We read all the time in the newspapers of all the support being given by the state to single mothers and one would assume that single fathers trying to bring up a child would get similar help.
The son of close friends of ours has recently been put into this position.  His wife died of cancer when their daughter was just over three years old and he has been left in the difficult position of trying to earn a living and look after the child. Far from offering help, the Social Services seem to want to prove that he is incapable of looking after a child, and particularly a girl by himself, presumably with the aim of taking her into care and possibly adopted.
Why shouldn't a father be capable of raising a daughter? Why is it acceptable in the eyes of Social Services that a single mother should be provided with accommodation and encouraged to raise her child, however dissolute her life style might be, yet a widower father who dearly loves his child is given minimal help? As he remarked, apparently the only males whom are considered capable of bringing up a child, in the eyes of Social Services,  appear to be gays!

Fortunately, in this case, the grandparents are prepared to help to look after the child, but like myself, they are well past their biblical "use by date" and are finding a round trip of sixty miles nearly every day is getting a bit too much at their ages. Is it too unreasonable for the state to give the father some help with day nursery costs, or perhaps some assistance to find affordable accommodation nearer to the child's grandparents so that they will be able to take and collect their granddaughter from school when the time comes? Here is someone who wants to work, who doesn't want to live at the expense of the state. It would cost the system a lot less to give him a bit of support now until he can get organised and back on his feet, than for him to "throw in the towel", loose his job and go on the dole. But the way the system works, if he did the latter, he would get all sorts of help.

This is not the first time I have come across this problem;  When I was working a member of my staff lost his wife, leaving him with  two children. I gave him as much latitude as I could with timekeeping and the like and other members of our shift were prepared to assist by covering his duties if necessary. But he got zero help from management. If it had been a female member of staff losing her husband, I am quite sure that our personnel section would have been rushing around offering every assistance.

There is definitely severe prejudice against fathers bringing up children by themselves, and it is even worse in these two cases as the fathers were widowers, not unmarried females bringing fatherless children into the world in order to provide a state meal ticket.

So I mist reiterate my original question
Why don't single fathers get the support given to single mothers?

Phone Hacking - How do they know?

How does one know one's phone has been hacked?
Surely a reasonable question to ask, and one for which I have so far failed to find an answer.
In the recent cases, it was not so much the phone that was hacked, but the voice mail which are recordings held by your phone provider containing messages from other people who were unable to speak to you directly. I don't own a mobile phone, but my daughters both tell me that they listen to these messages using their mobile phone following which they erase them.
It is a simple procedure, and you need a password in order to hear the messages.

But my question still remains, how do you know someone has been listening to your messages? Surely unless the person leaving the message can confirm that they have told no-one else the contents of the message, and you don't subsequently tell anyone of the content, you only know it has been hacked if some third party also has the information. Research amongst family members failed to reveal any single item of information which they could honestly claim was only known by them and one other person.

Now, I'm not disputing the fact that phones have been hacked, but in view of the ever growing list of failed politicians and "celebrities" who are making the claims, I am becoming more sceptical about the whole affair. Of course, politicians, as has been shown, will do anything for money, whilst these so-called "celebrities" (many of whom I have never heard of) will say anything for publicity (and were probably stupid enough to leave the default password on their phones).

But in spite of all the column inches and extended news bulletins, my basic question "How do they know" remains unanswered.

Why buy a Daily Newspaper?

Ever since I started work, I have bought a daily newspaper. At first it was the Express ( a good paper in its time), then the Mail, and then for most of my life the Telegraph.
For the last few years, I have had an annual subscription to the Telegraph, which provided it, seven days a week, for little more than half price, but even with this reduction, I have reached the conclusion that it is no longer worth the money.
Now I realise that a newspaper can't compete with radio and television in terms of providing up-to-the-minute news, but until the last few years, my newspaper usually provided considerably more in-depth coverage and background information than the television, along with reasonably impartial informed comment. Of late, however, I have felt that the standard of news coverage had declined, particularly in respect of events outside this country and the proportion of non-news items, in which I have minimal interest, has been on the increase. This situation is at its worse on a Saturday, when the assorted supplements, none of which I would purchase if offered individually, amount to some 120 pages or so, plus a “magazine”, as compared with the 36 pages in the main paper of which approximately half is news.
Ever since I got broadband and have been able to read the news on line, I have become more aware of what is happening around the world, and the fact that much of it is not being reported in the UK . With only the Murdoch media empire making a charge, I can now read news from most countries around the world where frequently the local version differs considerably from that published here. Even in non-English speaking countries, the media frequently offers an English version on the internet, and if they don't, various bloggers do.
With the saving, I am considering a new laptop, or possibly one of these tablet PCs or iPads, which will enable me to sit in my arm chair and read the news exactly as I do now.

Mrs EP approves of the decision as long as I buy her the Radio Times or equivalent so that she can organise her TV viewing; she suggests the Daily Mail on Saturdays as she prefers their TV supplement. At 80p, its a considerable saving on the £2 for the Telegraph and its unwanted supplements!

Incidentally, when I first started to buy a daily newspaper, most cost 1d (one penny in the good old money), with the Telegraph and the Times costing 1½d. Now the Monday to Friday Telegraph costs £1,  which is 160 times more than it did back then! (an increase of 16000%).
Whilst I'm no friend of Royal Mail, it is worth noting that a postage stamp then cost 2½d and that it now costs 46p for a first class letter. So from a situation where a stamp cost 2½ times the cost of most morning newspapers, we now have one where it costs less than half the price of the Telegraph. Perhaps postage charges aren't as bad as we like to think!

So we'll see how things go; possibly I'll need to buy a book of crossword puzzles or Sudoku; or are these available on line and I've just not found them yet?

Cameron: "Britain is to blame for the world's problems"

I was incensed to read in this morning's Daily Telegraph   
"Cameron: UK caused many of the world's problems"
He may have been to University, but he clearly learned his history from some politically correct source and it clearly bears little resemblance to the history that I was taught at school, or indeed reasonably accessible facts.
He demonstrated his total lack of historical knowledge on his last visit to the US when  he was apparently totally unaware of the fact that Britain entered World War 2 against Germany in 1939, long before America. In view of his ignorance in not being aware of what happened as recently as 1940, one would have thought that he would have shown enough sense to keep his mouth firmly closed about earlier times.

This "taking the blame" culture seems to have stemmed from Blair who though it necessary to take the blame for the Irish potato famine, and in this sense Cameron has shown that he is truly the "Heir to Blair". Now apparently we caused the world's problems.
I would argue that this is totally contrary to the facts.

In general, the Colonial powers kept the peace for many years in countries which are now racked by civil war. This applied not only in the British Colonies, but also in the French, Dutch and Belgian colonies.
Yes, we went there to exploit the natural resources, but what is wrong with that? We weren't stealing them, because no-one had any interest in them. But at the same time, it was in our interest to keep the peace, we stopped the warring tribes and were totally impartial in our actions, never favouring one tribe over another. We maintained peace in large areas of the Indian sub-continent, through Burma, Malaysia, Singapore (an unoccupied swamp) as far as Borneo. And all this with probably less personel than the average County Council today! Peace reigned, the standards of living of the indigenous inhabitants improved (demonstrated by the rapidly rising birthrate) and we built many of the new facilities such as  railways and harbours.
Then came independence for these countries and so-called democratic governments, followed by dictatorships and chaos. I cannot think of any of our ex-colonies except Australia, Canada and New Zealand that any reasonable person would now consider to have a democratic government..
Does anybody think that Pakistan, where Cameron made his ridiculous remarks, has a democratic government? How can we possibly be responsible for what is happening there where political leaders are routinely assassinated, and those who survive go to live elsewhere with huge fortunes?
Look at Africa; currently there is civil war in the Ivory Coast, we have had genocide in Rwanda and in the Congo whilst Rhodesia has been reduced from one of the richest countries in Africa with probably the highest standard of living, to one where people are daily dying of starvation and their life expectancy is one of the lowest on the continent, being less than half ours in the UK.
How on earth can the actions of Britain (or any of the other ex-colonial powers) when they were in control be responsible for what has happened since?
As far as I am concerned the man's a total idiot.