There is one major flaw in this article and the headline. ASLEF called the strike on Boxing Day, not the RMT. Bob Crow has absolutely nothing to do with ASLEF. I realise that people may have issues with him personally, but at least try to report the facts correctly when passing judgement.
- CK, Gwent, 21/12/2011 15:21

the admittedly hilarious sight of university lecturers trying to picket the campus.

ha, ha, ha!

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/artic ... nions.html



And what the hell is this?

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We need to avoid the moral panic that turns everybody into headless chickens as soon as they hear the cry ‘r-a-a-a-a-cist’, and we need to think and act coolly.

well said steve, this is the 1st time i'v seen someone talk sense, this should never have happened, the whole racism thing is getting out of hand, i used to be a manager of a childrens nursery and we were getting told not to celebrate things like halloween etc cause it offended other cultures, however we were instructed to celebrate all the other cultural holidays to adhere to their wishes, surely this cant be right, it's like we are living in someone elses country, i have never been racist in my life but the f.a and government are actually turning my head in some situations, and i think they are actually promoting racism with their different views about situations, if there were no witnesses at the suares incident it should have been thrown out, however i think in the john terry case there are deffinately witnesses, if that was a normal day to day workplace terry would be suspended pending a police investigation.
- Karen Fulton, kirkby liverpool, 23/12/2011 03:10

... it has started to take money from Europe. It has confirmed that it has taken £3 million in grant money from the EU over the past four years.

There is also a loan, from the European Investment Bank, which is an EU institution. The BBC has borrowed £141 million from the EIB over the last nine years, and £30 million is still outstanding.

Many people might think that a public broadcaster with a duty to balanced reporting might be a bit cautious about pocketing EU money, given that the European Union has been in the news a bit lately.

The Corporation has said the grant money didn’t go to its news department, but just to 'research and development'.

The Euro-bank money? That went to BBC Worldwide, the arm which flogs programmes abroad. Nothing to do with news or the licence fee, so that's all right, OK?

It's not all right at all, not by a long chalk. The BBC may not have noticed, but its coverage of European matters is regarded by a very large number of its paying customers, and by a large number of elected politicians, as a historic disgrace. Taking money from EU sources is an outrage and a betrayal of licence fee payers. Only a badly overblown organisation with spectacularly complacent management would have considered it.

If the BBC cannot survive on an income of £5 billion a year, and needs to go begging for more in Brussels, it is too big. It doesn’t need reform, it needs radical surgery.

The BBC wants you to be impressed by a cosmetic cut to a football pundit's inflated pay. But what is required is a broadcasting version of the Beeching cuts that were once so enthusiastically deployed to halve the size of the railways.

But what is required is a broadcasting version of the Beeching cuts that were once so enthusiastically deployed to halve the size of the railways

The BBC may not have noticed, but its coverage of European matters is regarded by a very large number of its paying customers, and by a large number of elected politicians, as a historic disgrace. Taking money from EU sources is an outrage and a betrayal of licence fee payers.

the Beeching cuts that were once so enthusiastically deployed to halve the size of the railways.

Didn't they object to the BBC because it played down Cameron's veto?

Disability charities should have done much more to prevent the exploitation of the benefits system by those who are not disabled. They should not have made the ridiculous claim, commonly heard a few years ago, that more than one in 10 of the population are disabled. They should have insisted on proper policing of the disability welfare system to limit the distribution of money and perks to those who actually needed them.

By perpetrating the pretence that many millions of people are disabled and nobody has wrongly milked the system the charities are putting themselves on the side of cheats and thieves. They become the ones abusing the goodwill of the great majority.

I do not blame the charities alone. The medical profession bears heavy responsibility for ticking the boxes whenever people turned up in surgeries complaining of bad backs or that their children had Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. The benefits system was based on an assumption that GPs were honest and knew their duty to the public, and both of those trusts were misplaced.

But members of the general public would be less likely to give the verbals when someone in a disabled parking space looks perfectly well if they thought the disability charities were on their side too.