[Gllug] Someone with a postcode database do me a favour

[M.Blackmore]

On Sun, 2008-05-25 at 22:18 +0100, Chris Bell wrote:

> 
>    It seems there was a recent ammendment that gives temporary workers
> with
> over 12 weeks continuous employment the same rights as permanent
> staff.
> 
> Temp workers to get equal rights after 12 weeks | The Register
> 
> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/05/21/uk_agency_workers_government_agreement/
> 


Interesting. Hadn't heard that had been accepted - last I heard was
Blair had dismissed it as a possibility few years back. 

I thought the Govt. had specifically opted out of EU social legislation
back in the late 90s (another of Blair's "betrayals" of old labour
values... not that I was ever an advocate of the dinobour movement,
being a green anarcho-syndicalist at heart really >;). Some things must
be EU binding, or its the Brown influence being brought to bear.

And what a political tragedy he's turning out to be - somehow manages to
make everything he does *seem* to look like a pratfall, when if you
actually examine the *real substance* of policy principles and outcomes
the Brown inspired elements of the last 11 years have in general been
very successful indeed - some of the most successful - probably the most
successful - in all of the Anglo-Saxon economic models. Meanwhile the
"impossible in the modern globalised corporate world" Scandinavian
socio-economic model grows in strength and vigour year on year - just
look at the stats in black and white. 

Someone likened it to the bumblebee - aerodynamically impossible to
achieve flight but no one has managed to tell the bumble bees that yet
so they just keep on doing it in magisterial disdain of classical
economic theory. Only now we know better - whoops our aerodynamic
theories were a crock of sh*t and the bees knew better all along how to
make things work!! >;>

Campbell is my local MP. So far all I've heard from the local
triumphalist tories is nothing of any material substance and mostly on
slinging mud at Brown - and I have a horrid feeling from my experience
of pressing them for some beef they don't have anything of material
substance to put forward and will by default fall back onto the old
nostrums of the 80s, and let (US mostly) corporations rule the land even
more completely (and I consider selling out to foreign corporations de
facto treason). 

I notice the green chameleon rhetoric has disappeared. 

It really seemed that for a moment Campbell may have "got it" about the
economic local cycle enhancement and its massive - truly massive! -
LOCAL job and small firm foundation growth that would come to pass from
a German style shift to microgeneration of electric energy and whatever
carbon biomass or liquid fuels we can do without hitting food production
too much. Alas looks like he too is giving up on this and will instead
give 5000 intinerant labourers jobs for a decade or so building nukes,
give a couple of hundred third rate technicians jobs to run them (what
first rater would want to simply monitor or grease monkey a power
station for the rest of their lives??) and pour 10 times as much
billions of quid into the coffers of US and French energy consortiums
than the microgeneration network would cost to give the same number of
watts and employ hundreds of thousands of Britons. 

Have they been convinced that microgen can't deliver (in which case
someone had better tell the Germans - and when it comes to tech policy
who do YOU trust - the British Oxbridge Arts Tripos civil service
advisors, or the Doctors of Engineering who advise the German
government ... and who's track record would you cite?).

So if not convinced technically - WHAT HAVE THEY BEEN THREATENED WITH BY
THE CORPORATIONS if they don't accede to letting them steal the
taxpayers money and send it abroad for the corporate shareholders
benefit rather than spreading the money over all of the British people
and hundreds of thousands of forever lasting jobs that can't be shifted
overseas, but are an essential element of indigenous economic resource
supply and the "endogenous growth theory" Brown was so (unfairly by
people utterly ignorant of what was meant by endogenous economic
cyclicals) lampooned for back in '97 & '98?

Sounds like Microsoft all over again to me. Only more expensive and on
biosphere corrupting scale. 

Sorry I'm stoned out of my skull on opiates and rambling even further
off topic than usual this evening - bad weather brought a nasty bad hit
of autoimmune illness - and slipping back into my "other role" as local
economic development and environmental economist and technology policy
wonk...in the mists of time... 
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