There are nigh on two hundred thousand Meditteranean migrants currently languishing in camps in southern Italy.

Italy is going the same way as Greece. High unemployment, a Banking system near to collapse and an emergence of populism that wants out of the European Union. Like Greece, Italy is one of western Europes cultural jewels in its crown and yet, despite all that Italy has given the world, nobody wants the migrants and nobody now wants or can help.

Worse, the migrants are going to still keep coming in the hope that they can get a better life in the West and if you take any notice of the socio political and economic forecasts, the movement of people from Asia and Africa to the west of Europe will continue for decades to come. This problem is not going to go away.

I fully appreciate that many of the East European countries will never ever accept these people into their closed societies and whilst this reality is uncomfortable to deal with and problematic to understand to modern western countries, its left to the West to do what needs to be done. And it can be done. Britain as much as any other nation has proven that it can absorb high numbers of migrants within a very short space of time. Difficult yes, but not beyond the extraordinary talents of the British.

You only have to see that since 2004, which is only a short time ago, Britain has received somewhere between three and four million migrants from the EU. Despite it all, despite our limited housing, we have been good hosts to these millions of people allowing them free and immediate access to housing, education, health care, employment and all our other public services. Yes it's a strain and yes at times it's a burden but Britain did it. We managed to achieve its aims and welcome people who wanted to escape their poverty and get a better life in the West.

And so, if we can do all these wonderful good and kind things for that group of migrants, we can most certainly do it for the people now languishing in Italy. Italy needs Europes help and unless we provide it Italy will be destroyed. Like Greece they've enough problems to deal with and we in Britain should help them.

Germany provided the lead on this issue. It's been at a cost I know but better to try and fail than turn your back and do nothing at all. Britain should extend the hand of friendship to our Italian cousins and accept willingly and freely without the use of any leverage or bargaining chips, all the Meditteranean migrants currently left in limbo in southern Italy. Despite the high numbers we in Britain could achieve wonderful things. We've done it with the millions of EU migrants and we can most certainly do the same thing for the two hundred thousand in Italy.

We have just returned from yet another wonderful week in Poland. As in this topic here are we to believe that here are less disabled people in Poland compared to the UK? Or is it that we just have more scammers making a mockery of our benefits system...I took photographs virtually overtime we passed a car park and as you will see, there are only one or two disabled designated bays and guess what, each time they were empty! 

SSAFA Forcesline

Since 1997, we have offered our confidential, free and non-judgemental helpline for the Armed Forces Community. During 2016, the team answered more than 25,000 calls and emails. Contact Forcesline on 0800 731 4880 - lines are open between 09:00 and 17:30 Monday-Friday.

SSAFA also have a drop in Help Desk at Franklin House Council Customer Services . This is covered by SSAFA Volunteers on a Tuesday between 1000 and 1400 . The volunteers are there to help and assist Serving members of our Armed Forces , their families and of course Veterans and their families.

If you know of somebody who needs SSAFA help please tell them to phone the FORCESLINE or phone the County SSAFA. 24/7 help line on 01432 273932

Belmont Rural Neighbourhood Plan referendum
 

Information statement

Herefordshire Council gives notice that a Referendum relating to the Belmont Rural Neighbourhood Development Plan will be held on Thursday 7 September 2017.

The question which will be asked in the referendum is:

Do you want Herefordshire Council to use the neighbourhood plan for Belmont Rural to help it decide planning applications in the neighbourhood area?

I had trouble trying to load up documents. To see all click on link above.

'Stay In Lane' Signs Would help here.

Note: The NEW 3rd lane in Edgar Street is for traffic heading for Whitecross or for traffic wanting to go all the way around the roundabout and back down Edgar Street ONLY! It is NOT for people to cut back across to go over the bridge! Traffic for Ross Road needs to be in the left lane and traffic for Belmont or Abergavenny please use the middle lane.

 

What a shambles - of course it is only our money. 

Blueschool House was after all a perfectly useable building for the previous occupants - if slightly shabby. Now it seems it will be a monument to muddled thinking, poor decision making and failure

http://councillors.herefordshire.gov.uk/documents/s50048737/Cabinet%20Report%20-%20JCSH%20Budget%20Update.pdf

To little or no fanfare the foot/cycle path between canal road and station approach has opened. I'm assuming this happened recently. I used it last week instead of walking up the private road and around Morrisons. Much more direct and very useful but nobody seems to know about it

***** IRAQI & KURDISH owned shops raided again! ***** 

All of these shops hide behind names such as: Polski Sklep, Zabka, International Food, Kubus and Super Sams to name just a few and to be totally honest NONE of the shops that have been raided over the past few years including those in Eign Gate Hereford mentioned above have ever been Polish owned! 

The Polish community have been unfairly tarnished and labelled causing divide within the community unnecessarily.

This topic has been created to highlight these issues and if you click on ANY of the past police and trading standards raids listed below within this topic, you will clearly see that all of the shops and businesses mentioned are not owned by Polish people and the only connection is the produce that they sell, alongside produce from many other nations. Sometimes the staff employed maybe Polish or European to help sell these products.

Some of these shops even have the cheek to steal their names and the logo's from big corporate legit Polish companies and appear to get away with that too! Names like Zabka, Kubus and Biedronka are all large Polish companies and brands.

The ONLY Polish owned shop in Hereford as far as we are aware is Edysia at the very bottom of Eign Gate (opposite Peacocks) 

Here is a list of previous raids in Hereford along with the names of the people prosecuted or facing prosecution.

• International Food Mr Rekan Gafoor 
• Zabka Mr Ali Omar Shukir
• Zabka Mr Zardashit Karem Salh
• European Food Mr Mohammed Bakhtyer
• Mila & Supersams Mr Heman Jamel

The underground subways are so so different in Poland. All of the subways we used (and there were white a few) were all well lit up, with CCTV and spotless! No rubbish, advertising posters or graffiti anywhere! 

What started as a noble cause designed and intended to bring help and protection to minority groups of difference has now evolved into a form of social engineering political correctness madness that's seen our society become obsessed with issues of gender, ethnicity and sexual orientation.

So engrained in our social awareness of this issue and its accompanying odd language that's been introduced to control our thinking and our expression of our thoughts or views, we've managed to rob our young children and young people of their carefree childhood and adolescence years before they reach adulthood. We've sexualised them and confused them all in the pursuit of the perfect world.

The consequences to this madness is instead of playing, being young and hopefully happy, our children and young people are mithering themselves about issues of sexual orientation and it's all been done and achieved by adults who've lost sight of one single inescapable humanity fact. Life ain't perfect and no one person ever is either.

Years gone by one was either heterosexual or homosexual. Perfectly normal in every single species. Whether it crawls, walks, flies or swims difference exists and there is nothing wrong in this. Nowadays we've labelled everything and everyone to the point where the Gay community have evolved into the LBGTQ community with their own flag and in most urban areas, their own office areas.

Indeed, if you simply focus on the lettering LBGTQ, this as much as anything supports my point about political correctness and the language applied to its aims. Not so long ago it was simply the Gay community. Now, so that everyone gets their own letter it's L for Lesbian, B for Bi sexual, G for Gay, T for Transgender and Q, according to the Internet is Questioning and or Queer.

The direction we are going, pretty soon, we'll begin to exhaust the remaining 21 letters of our alphabet to label everyone else who hasn't been aptly described within LBGTQ. There's an emerging group of people who now see themselves as Gender Nuetral. They'll get their own letter soon. One particular journalist activist refuses to acknowledge her birth sex of female and will not respond to the addressing term of Miss or Mrs. This person wishes to be addressed as 'They', which apparently adequately describes the multi layered personality and orientation traits that make up the whole of this individuals characters and nature.

Recently, two Transgender men have been engaged in a tabloid dispute regarding who gave birth to their child first. How did these two men deliver their child into the world in the delivery room? Because they both were equipped with a womb. Why were they equipped with a womb that allowed the foetus to gestate and be born? Because they're women. And why are these two happy men who've delivered their children into the world so worried about who gave birth first? Because our buggered up society repeatedly told them you are a man, a woman or whatever and whoever you wish to be and because of our social engineering creation that is political correctness, we'll see to it that you can ignore your breasts, your penis or ****** and be whatever you wish to be in our perfect world.

Course, not even the establishment or ruling elite who propagate and perpetuate this political correctness have managed to protect everyone in pursuance of their perfect world. Me! Being male, white, English and heterosexual, I fall outside their areas of interest that now leave me alone, afraid and very unprotected by the evils of man, woman and those who are gender neutral.

I was parked in the Welsh Club car park for no more than about 10 minutes early this morning, while I dropped off my son to play football on the meadows, when I got back there was a guy putting a ticket on my car. I have been told by a friend now that I should not pay it because it is not a penalty, can anyone else through any light on this please?

The Guardian - 24th June 2017
 

Is your smart meter spying on you?

The French are getting heated up about their meters collecting data on their daily lives. Perhaps the British should be concerned too

They are the mini-computers being installed in 30m UK homes and businesses in an £11bn programme that will allow the energy companies to remotely monitor our gas and electricity usage. But could smart meters also become the new spies in our homes, raising fresh fears about a surveillance society as they track our daily activities?

Campaigners in France, where a similar installation programme is taking place, think so. On holiday in Bordeaux recently I was struck by posters advertising a demo called “Stop Linkyâ€. Linky is the name of French utility giant EDF’s new smart meter, but it has sparked a more vociferous backlash than here. “Dites NON! aux compteurs communicants LINKY,†posters shouted ahead of a demo in mid-June, with others planned around the country.

Lawyers for Stop Linky are preparing a class action against EDF and its subsidiary Enedis, which is implementing the programme. Lawyer Arnaud Durand claims smart meters pose health and privacy issues. He calls them a “Trojan horse’†that could harvest vast amounts of data about our activities. Even rudimentary information has commercial value. “For example, a telemarketing company will know if it’s a good moment to call your house.â€

In Britain, privacy campaigners share their fears. Guy Herbert of NO2ID says: “Smart meters are presented as an environmental and power-saving initiative. But it’s a highly surveillant model. It can tell how many showers you have had, when you are cooking, when you are in and out of the home.â€

Evidence of the race to monetise the data from smart meters is already emerging. A video on the website of Onzo, a British analytics company, says: “We take energy consumption data from smart meters and sensors. We analyse it and build a highly personalised profile for each and every utility customer.†It will have “the ability to monetise their customer data by providing a direct link to appropriate third party organisations based on the customer’s identified character.†Last year Onzo was at a “consumer goods hackathon†hosted by Procter & Gamble to help sell more detergent, shampoo and toiletries.

But, as Herbert says, this is not just about commercial activities. The Investigatory Powers Act also hands the authorities access to bulk data, including energy data. “A smart meter is also a smart controller,†he warns.

Are these fears overblown? Bernard Lassus is head of Enedis, the company that has already installed 4.7m smart meters in France. Study after study in France, the US and Canada have disproved health fears surrounding the meters, he says. The French meters transmit energy consumption data once a day and contain no more information than a current meter. Data is not individualised and cannot be sold on to third parties without active prior consent by the household.

In Britain, the industry body Smart Energy GB takes a similar line. “Your smart meter stores and transmits simple information on how much energy your home has used. Personal details like your name, address and bank account details are not stored on or transmitted by the meter. Your supplier can’t use any data from your smart meter for sales and marketing purposes unless you give them permission to do so.â€

But we all know that once data is out there it is used in ways we didn’t anticipate. A smart meter bill introduced in this week’s Queen’s speech also says there would be new “powers to make changes to smart meter regulationsâ€.

It’s not even clear if smart meters will result in more transparent or cheaper tariffs, with some warning it is turning into an £11bn white elephant. And can someone tell me why our programme, near identical in size to that in France, is somehow costing us more than twice the €5bn it is costing them?

Just a device to read your utility bill - I don't think so. At the moment not compulsory to have one installed - yet!

Not exactly a riveting topic I admit, but one which is likely to be in the headlines shortly.  Yesterday (Tuesday) Worc CC held a public meeting to brief its council taxpayers on why it was getting into bed with Herefordshire Council to build a PFI-funded state-of-the-art waste incinerator.  Each authority will be committed to divying up £350M for the new plant.  Herefordshire's Cabinet is due to discuss the plan tomorrow (Thursday).

What I would like to ask well-informed and knowledgable followers of The Voice is this: I was told that at one time HC considered building its own waste disposal unit at Rotherwas, as it would have produced sufficient energy from the waste's heat to be fed to the new factory units which we are told will one day grace the re-branded Skylon Park. 

This is such an emminently sensible eco-friendly idea that I think the person who told me was pulling my leg. Is there a grain of truth in this story?

I am pleased report that Belmont Rural Parish Council approved last Thursday (08 December 16) to reinstate the goal posts on the play area behind Northolme Community Centre.

These will be installed as soon as the right conditions arrive.

I will post an update when this work is completed.

Take 17 of the poorest EU member states, and there's plenty to choose from, lump them together and add up their sovereign wealth, GDP and any other economic factor that'll estimate a nations wealth, and that combined sum total will not surpass the wealth and economic power of Britain.

Britain is the second largest contributor to the Brussels EU funds and its second lowest beneficiary. Indeed, if you factor in the levy that Britain has been required to pay twice during the last decade that punishes us for our economic success story of growth, jobs and wealth, we actually pay more in than our closest economic rivals Germany.

Factor in the contributions of Britain, Germany, Italy and France and you'll calculate that these four nations of the 28 member states account for 64 percent of all the EU funds received in Brussels. Whilst all pay in something, what the poor get out to fund their poverty stricken countries can often be as high as 200 times the size of their annual contribution.

The population of the entire European Union is just over three hundred million people. Britain accounts for over a fifth of that number which probably goes some way to explaining why we take more EU residential migrants and are the first choice of destination of the other member state citizens.

So, you'd think that given we've provided all our free of charge public services that include housing, health care and education to many millions of people and their dependants, we've been extraordinarily generous and giving hosts, you'd think that in some small part they'd treat us with a little kindness and understanding? No such bloody luck!

Our problem in extricating ourselves from this Union essentially boils down to one bloody thing. Nigh on 11 billion quid! For probably the one and only time in the history of this neo communistic model of globalisation madness that sees the wealthy giving and the poor taking so that we all end up as f.uck.ed up as one another, not one single member of the remaining 27 is in disagreement. The rich don't want to pay anymore and the poor don't want to be given any less which means, unless I'm a fiscally illiterate bloody idiot, we're about to be buggered over and have the lips of the poor member states clinging onto our cash cow teats for decades to come.

We ain't leaving the European Union!

I have MAJOR concerns over these two tree's on the Belmont Road, I have mentioned this several times over the years but nothing is seems to be done about it. These tree's are an accident just waiting to happen! The roots have pushed out the wall beneath. 

Between Theresa May's visit to the London tower block fire & Jeremy Corbyn's