Read this article on whatever website matches your political bias (Telegraph, Guardian or Channel 4), it won’t make a difference. The fact is the government is trying to “charge £100 as an upfront fee to parents who wish to use the Child Support Agency in future” and “The CSA would levy 7-12 per cent of any monies collected before the money is passed on to the parent with care of the child/children”.

Luckily, and bafflingly, the millionaires in the House of Lords seem to understand the common man better than the millionaires in the House of commons so have voted it down, but still, to make it clear

MPs are trying to steal money from children

for fuck sake. With them trying to steal the NHS, steal our money and give it to bankers, dodging taxes, making the education system worse, ensuring young people can’t afford houses and will work their entire lives paying for other peoples pensions never reaching the ever increasing retirement age the rich nowadays really don’t seem to be very attached to their heads.

Jason West is a 38-year-old father of three from Ash, near Aldershot. All his children are students at Ash Manor school, a specialist technology college. On 28 April this year, his youngest son came home from school, and told him about a CCTV camera installed above urinals in one of the school’s toilets. “When he told me, I couldn’t believe it,” he says. It turned out there were cameras in both boys’ and girls’ toilets

From this article. apparently this is to stop smoking. And it might stop the kids smoking in the toilet, but they’ll just do it somewhere else. So instead of your kids just smoking, they’ll smoke and have the headmaster look at their dicks.

It turns out violence existed before cartoons, rap music, single parents, atheism, this month.

It seems a remarkable coincidence that all the bad parents happen to live in the poorest areas of the country. Also weird that young men with darker complexions seem to get stopped & searched in those areas more often as well (but that definitely has nothing to do with not respecting the police, bad parenting again). Also strange that you get 2 years for thinking about stealing some fags but stealing £450,000 from the taxpayer gets you a pretty cushy job (even if you’re not qualified).

The wedding of Jordan’s Prince Ali in 2004 took place with a singular lack of fanfare, with an understated private ceremony and, in a move that some cash-strapped Britons might eye with envy, Prince Ali distributed the money that would have been spent on a big reception to hundreds of the country’s poorest families.

From this article on the worldwide coverage of my bonus day off watching the cricket (apparently something’s happening in London as well). Glad to know the media is insane everywhere not just here.