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Joseph Walker

Listed below are comments made by Joseph Walker between Tuesday, 20th October 2009 and Wednesday, 9th December 2009 (14 Hours Ago) .

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PM Glass Box 5:47pm on 09 Dec 2009 They can't tax the rich, despite appearances the rich own us.

Ahhh, democratic Britain. Isn't it wonderful?
PM Glass Box. 5:37pm on 07 Dec 2009 Isn't time those arguing on behalf of the free market that the financial industry will simply move elsewhere had put to them by journalists the point that the places they may move to are places where democracy barely exists.

I would have thought this is a crucial point, because if the bankers win the argument, the precedent it will set and the message it will send with regard to the state of our own democracy may have very damaging social and political effects.

Why is it so difficult to ask questions like this? The banking industry and its acolytes and lobbyists are having a field day with their vacuous arguments because they are hardly ever confronted by these wider questions.

Can I suggest 'the public' aren't just 'very angry'? There is some actual thinking out here.
PM Glass Box. 5:17pm on 07 Dec 2009 Banking

Was Sir Fred Goodwin "a Beckham"?
Big Lorries. 9:25pm on 01 Dec 2009 Douglas Parrish (17)

Funnily enough far more women cyclists than men have been killed by lorries in London. Transport for London says this is because they are more inclined to wait at junctions and obey red lights.

Do you ride a bike Douglas? I mean have you actually ridden a bike while being overtaken by an articulated lorry on a narrow lane for example? Or do you think cyclists that are stupid enough to ride down narrow lanes are asking for it?

When you took your lorry down such a lane and you came upon a cyclist, did you always wait, sitting behind them at fifteen miles an hour mile after mile until they turned off or the road widened, or did you just barrel through, unaware that the slipstream alone could pull an inexperienced cyclist into your wheels? Or that the mere sudden surprise of a juggernaut suddenly arriving a couple of feet from your shoulder doing thirty or forty miles an hour can cause a rider to veer into and be struck by your vehicle?

I do a great deal of bike riding - rural and urban. Tanker drivers mostly seem to get it in terms of a cyclist's inherent vulnerability, but the rest are a very mixed bag, ranging from the murderously insane, past the apparently stupid and witless, right through to the patient, skilled and courteous. The problem I have is I never quite know which type I've got coming up behind me at two or three times my speed until they're on my shoulder, which I suppose, if and when the worst ever happens, will be too late.

Nope, I really can't wait until the day when the truck roaring up beside me just two feet from my thigh and with each of its thirty wheels nearly as high as I am not only weighs up to 44 tons, but is also now 83ft long!

Still, what's a few hundred crushed and mangled people and their shattered families, when we've got buying stuff to think about?
Big Lorries. 7:06pm on 01 Dec 2009 Douglas Parrish (13)

Yup, I admit it, I'm biased. I have an irrational problem with the fact that in London alone in 2005, 20 cyclists died on the road and 338 were injured. And more than half of those killed died under the wheels of lorries.

Still, it must be worth it for all the extra stuff I can buy.
Big Lorries. 5:48pm on 01 Dec 2009 Why not try asking Mr.Denby to ride a bicycle along the road while being overtaken by one of these abominations?
The PM Glass Box. 6:01pm on 11 Nov 2009 More Annual Remembrance Day Misery

I'm beginning to truly dread this annual gratuitous and overblown demonstration of smugness. In recent years, every one of the BBC's programmes that mentions it takes on a pompous and formulaic approach, rife with insincerity. The simple fact that WW1 resulted in the deaths of a million men, while not exactly forgotten, has been reduced to a mere central fact around which a bizarre and complex annual ritual has been constructed.

Right now Britain has just finished fighting a war that killed probably hundreds of thousands of civilians and hundreds of soldiers for reasons people still don't understand. We are now in the process of doing a similar thing in Afghanistan. Very little broadcast by the BBC appears to attempting to directly connect these annual celebrations with what is still going on on our behalf. Why? There seems to be a fascinating correlation between the annual growth in the amount of abstract ritual being applied to Remembrance Day and the new depths to which Britain's bloody military involvement in questionable foreign campaigns sinks. Is it because the BBC is more interested in appearing to represent all opinions (an impossible aim of course and one which it singly fails to do) than it is in taking controversial positions on the basic wrongs of aggressive wars.

How about some straight forward questions being asked about how it is we can 'remember' past mistakes in this extraordinary annual ritual while simultaneously conducting a military campaign which is far more questionable in terms of its political rights and wrongs than the one Britain engaged in nearly a century ago?

Remembrance Day should be a deeply political event and it is a great shame the Establishment, for it's own ends and with the BBC's help, has emasculated it in this way for it's own ends. Wasn't "Never Again" once the motto linked to this event? Who, if anyone, decided that had to go?
Hugh in Afghanistan. 5:19pm on 10 Nov 2009 Hugh Sykes shows us how it is again. Thanks.
PM Glass box for monday 5:41pm on 26 Oct 2009 Banker's Bonuses: where it's going.

Last week I went to see a friend. I suppose I shouldn't be too specific, but he's currently working in part of a large ten-bedroom Georgian country house in a couple of hundred acres near my home. It's not his, but his friend's who is selling it. He showed various actors and celebs around over the Summer. Anyway, the final buyer was (guess what?!) a banker from London buying a second home in the country. So if you want to know where some of that bail-out money went...

Turns out it was a steal (quite literally I'd say) at 7.5 million quid.

Can this be right?

I realise the BBC is apparently often hobbled by its (in my view) selective need to acknowledge that all opinions are equally valid, but on this matter can there really be more than one reasonable view? So How about a piece that tells it how it is when it comes to public money being spent on private luxuries by the former heralds of the free market?

It shouldn't take much research to discover what the bankers are spending their bonus money on.
The PM Glass Box. 7:45pm on 20 Oct 2009 JM (46)

I was taking Straw's word for it. He described himself as having "drawn the short straw" with respect to having to step in a few days ago after Home Secretary Alan Johnson said He wouldn't "share a platform with a Fascist".

Parliament's weakness has nothing to do with the media. They exist symbiotically. Skilled operators like Griffin has used the media with great skill - it's done him far more good than harm. It is the lack of strong ideas, commitment and overt ideology that has damaged Parliament as well as its relationship with Government. This has left many politicians to discredit British democracy by pursuing their own financial interests and political careers. I say 'overt' ideology because the recently discredited ideology of free-market economics is one belief that is still alive and well and exists comfortably across all parties.

This gives Griffin, a man very committed to the ideology of Fascism, an open goal because, with the virtual banishment of the Left from politics, there are almost no Parliamentarians left with a strong enough argument to confront him effectively. This is a worry. The likes of David Miliband and Harriet Harman simply do not have a hope of dealing with people like Griffin.

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