At 12:59 the chancellor announced that the A380 Kingskerswell bypass would be built. At last. The south west also got a small gift in that our water bills will go down by £50 per household. South West Water is the most expensive in the country and even with this 50 quid it will still be the most expensive in the country. On the down side (there always has to be a down side) my heating allowance arrived to day and is for £200 which is 50 quid less than last year. You can't win them all.
Public sector workers ( some of them ) are going put on strike on Wednesday. The ones that will effect the most people , unless you happen to be travelling in or out of Heathrow, are the teachers. Parents of younger children will be effected if they are working as they will have to either pay for extra child care, stay of work or risk letting their loved ones spend the day on the streets. Other disruptions will be to rubbish collections and to parking attendants. Piles of uncollected rubbish littering the streets and cars parked anywhere their owners feel like parking them will be an added hazard to anyone trying to move about. To add insult to injury Union St and Fleet St will be closed from 10:00 am to allow the striking workers to march through town to force home their message.
And what exactly is that message? Well I'll tell you. It is that supposedly well educated and allegedly intelligent people haven't got the brains they were conceived with never mind born with. Funds for public sector pensions have been paid for, until now, out of a seemingly bottomless pit called the tax payer. When I was a teacher the government took 6% of my salary to pay for my pension. When I worked for Stagecoach they also took a percentage of my wages to pay for my pension. The difference is Stagecoach invested the cash they took from me and put the proceeds into a pension fund. So when I get my pension from Stagecoach it hasn't been paid for by some one who got on a bus and paid his fare sometime last week. But the 6% the government took from me all those years ago wasn't put in a fund to grow and pay my pension. The money the government collected from you and me last month in the form of income tax is what is used to pay my teachers pension and I am getting a little concerned that us tax payers might not be able to sustain the level of giving required to keep all us public sector pensioners in Pensions. So is the government, twenty years too late in my opinion, but better late than in 10 more years. Hopefully they will manage for the next 20 years, after that I probably won't care. But what about the long term future, it isn't a problem that will go away unless the effects of global warming come upon us faster and much more savagely than most people expect.
So; don't go on strike, manage with what you get or eventually you won't get anything.
I know that Transport Malta and Arriva have recently amended the routes, but do we really now have a Sliema-Enfield Town link, as spotted on this bus on the Strand in Valletta?
And when they get to Enfield I assume there is a return journey. Would my bus pass get me there? It'd be cheaper than Ryan Air even if it did take a day or two longer. Well done, once again to Arriva because if nothing else, they really are having fun in the sun in Malta
