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11th September 2013: The world's gone mad and I'm the only one who knows
13th August 2013: Black is white. Fact. End of.
11th August 2013: Electric cars, not as green as they're painted?
18th June 2013: Wrinklies unite, you have nothing to lose but your walking frames!
17th May 2013: Some actual FACTS about climate change (for a change) from actual scientists ...
10th May 2013: An article about that poison gas, carbon dioxide, and other scientific facts (not) ...
10th May 2013: We need to see past the sex and look at the crimes: is justice being served?
8th May 2013: So, who would you trust to treat your haemorrhoids, Theresa May?
8th May 2013: Why should citizens in the 21st Century fear the law so much?
30th April 2013: What the GOS says today, the rest of the world realises tomorrow ...
30th April 2013: You couldn't make it up, could you? Luckily you don't need to ...
29th April 2013: a vote for NONE OF THE ABOVE, because THE ABOVE are crap ...
28th April 2013: what goes around, comes around?
19th April 2013: everyone's a victim these days ...
10th April 2013: Thatcher is dead; long live Thatcher!
8th April 2013: Poor people are such a nuisance. Just give them loads of money and they'll go away ...
26th March 2013: Censorship is alive and well and coming for you ...
25th March 2013: Just do your job properly, is that too much to ask?
25th March 2013: So, what do you think caused your heterosexuality?
20th March 2013: Feminists - puritans, hypocrites or just plain stupid?
18th March 2013: How Nazi Germany paved the way for modern governance?
13th March 2013: Time we all grew up and lived in the real world ...
12th March 2013: Hindenburg crash mystery solved? - don't you believe it!
6th March 2013: Is this the real GOS?
5th March 2013: All that's wrong with taxes
25th February 2013: The self-seeking MP who is trying to bring Britain down ...
24th February 2013: Why can't newspapers just tell the truth?
22nd February 2013: Trial by jury - a radical proposal
13th February 2013: A little verse for two very old people ...
6th February 2013: It's not us after all, it's worms
6th February 2013: Now here's a powerful argument FOR gay marriage ...
4th February 2013: There's no such thing as equality because we're not all the same ...
28th January 2013: Global Warming isn't over - IT'S HIDING!
25th January 2013: Global Warmers: mad, bad and dangerous to know ...
25th January 2013: Bullying ego-trippers, not animal lovers ...
19th January 2013: We STILL haven't got our heads straight about gays ...
16th January 2013: Bullying ego-trippers, not animal lovers ...
11th January 2013: What it's like being English ...
7th January 2013: Bleat, bleat, if it saves the life of just one child ...
7th January 2013: How best to put it? 'Up yours, Argentina'?
7th January 2013: Chucking even more of other people's money around ...
6th January 2013: Chucking other people's money around ...
30th December 2012: The BBC is just crap, basically ...
30th December 2012: We mourn the passing of a genuine Grumpy Old Sod ...
30th December 2012: How an official body sets out to ruin Christmas ...
16th December 2012: Why should we pardon Alan Turing when he did nothing wrong?
15th December 2012: When will social workers face up to their REAL responsibility?
15th December 2012: Unfair trading by a firm in Bognor Regis ...
14th December 2012: Now the company that sells your data is pretending to act as watchdog ...
7th December 2012: There's a war between cars and bikes, apparently, and  most of us never noticed!
26th November 2012: The bottom line - social workers are just plain stupid ...
20th November 2012: So, David Eyke was right all along, then?
15th November 2012: MPs don't mind dishing it out, but when it's them in the firing line ...
14th November 2012: The BBC has a policy, it seems, about which truths it wants to tell ...
12th November 2012: Big Brother, coming to a school near you ...
9th November 2012: Yet another celebrity who thinks, like Jimmy Saville, that he can behave just as he likes because he's famous ...
5th November 2012: Whose roads are they, anyway? After all, we paid for them ...
7th May 2012: How politicians could end droughts at a stroke if they chose ...
6th May 2012: The BBC, still determined to keep us in a fog of ignorance ...
2nd May 2012: A sense of proportion lacking?
24th April 2012: Told you so, told you so, told you so ...
15th April 2012: Aah, sweet ickle polar bears in danger, aah ...
15th April 2012: An open letter to Anglian Water ...
30th March 2012: Now they want to cure us if we don't believe their lies ...
28th February 2012: Just how useful is a degree? Not very.
27th February 2012: ... so many ways to die ...
15th February 2012: DO go to Jamaica because you definitely WON'T get murdered with a machete. Ms Fox says so ...
31st January 2012: We don't make anything any more
27th January 2012: There's always a word for it, they say, and if there isn't we'll invent one
26th January 2012: Literary criticism on GOS? How posh!
12th December 2011: Plain speaking by a scientist about the global warming fraud
9th December 2011: Who trusts scientists? Apart from the BBC, of course?
7th December 2011: All in all, not a good week for British justice ...
9th November 2011: Well what d'you know, the law really IS a bit of an ass ...

 

 
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This article by Christopher Hope in the Daily Telegraph today (15th November 2012) ...
 

 
Expenses watchdogs round on John Bercow
The effectiveness of the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (IPSA) is under threat after a boardoom coup organised by the Commons Speaker John Bercow, ousted board members said last night.

Ken Olisa, who is quitting the watchdog in January, said he had never experienced such “non-stop hostility”, including personal attacks on him, from MPs in the Commons during his three year spell at Ipsa.
 
Four out of the five strong board at Ipsa quit after Mr Bercow ruled that they would have to re-apply for their jobs rather than be offered new terms when their existing contracts run out in January.
 
Rather than reapply, the board members – Mr Olisa, charity head Jackie Ballard, former appeal judge Sir Scott Baker and Professor Isobel Sharp – all stood down, leaving only Sir Ian Kennedy, Ipsa’s chairman on the board.
 
They were upset because they said Mr Bercow had changed the appointment process, forcing the board to reapply to a vetting committee comprising a former MP and a member of the speaker’s committee which agrees Ipsa’s funding.
 
Ms Ballard said the changes “looked like there was not an acceptance of the vital importance of the first letter in the word Ipsa, I - independence".
 
In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, Mr Olisa, who has donated his £10,000 a year salary for working for Ipsa to charity, said he feared the watchdog’s independence was at risk.
 
In the three years since it was published Ipsa has been the subject of several reviews by Parliamentary committees and bodies that could be seen as “an implicit attempt to erode confidence in our independence”, he said.
 
He complained that the attention was disproportionate given that Ipsa’s budget was the equivalent to the taxpayer subsidy used to bring down the price of food and drink in the House of Commons’ bars and restaurants.
 
He said: “The fact that Parliament felt they could put so much pressure on us, all of the time, shows us that independence is under threat. You don’t see this with Ofgem or Ofcom anybody trying to somehow undermine the regulator.”
 
The timing could not be worse, because Ipsa is nine months into a12 month review of MPs’ pay and pensions.
 
“I was expecting that we would have a smooth transition to the next Ipsa – because we are right in the middle of the most critical [project]. It is a little bit like surgeon doing an operation and half way through with the heart open and the chest open he says ‘OK I have finished now’.”
 
The fear now is that a new and inexperienced Ipsa board – which will be appointed by the end of the month - will agree a potentially unpopular big jump in pay and perks for MPs next Spring.
 
Mr Olisa said: “I am not sure that the new people - who I don’t know - will have any stomach for a fight with Parliament in their early days – why would they? We at least had the fury of the scandal to give us extra strength in the early days.
 
The most likely solution will be that Ipsa will recommend MPs’ pay is linked to a multiple of average national earnings.
 
But he warned that Ipsa had uncovered found an “enormous gulf between what the public and what MPs have been saying” about what they should be paid, adding: “Reconciling that gulf is the big challenge for Ipsa.”
 
Mr Olisa said the changes to the reappointment process combined with MPs’ aggression had forced him out. He said: “The hostility exhibited towards us has just been non-stop throughout the three years we have been there.
 
“So when hostile people get on the selection panel and the whole process is managed by those who have been hostile to you it is a pretty clear signal.”
 
Mr Olisa blamed Mr Bercow – who he has only met once – for effectively forcing him out by changing the way board members were appointed. He said: “I am upset we have this bump in the world that did not need to happen.
 
“John Bercow made it fairly evident to me that there was not any point in me applying. He did not make my job impossible he just made it deeply unwelcome to consider applying.”
 
Ms Ballard also told The Daily Telegraph she had quit because of concerns about the reappointment process and the repeated attacks on Ipsa. She said: “The board had a lot of concerns about the process that the speaker wanted to use and in ways which were different to the ways in which we were originally appointed. It looked there was not an acceptance of the vital important of the first letter in the word Ipsa, I - independence.
 
“He put an ex-member of parliament on the interview panel and a member of scipsa [speaker’s committee] on the interview panel, and the board was seriously concerned that that was not a positive step.”
 
Ipsa was created to clean up the Parliamentary allowances system in the wake of the MPs’ expenses scandal, triggered by revelations in 2009 by The Daily Telegraph.
 
Last week, several MPs whose controversial expenses claims were revealed by that investigation, joined a public call for a new system of state regulation of the press.
 
A spokesman for Mr Bercow said: "It is untrue that the Speaker has sought to remove members of the board of IPSA. The Speaker's role is to apply the law concerning the appointment of board members based on merit through fair and open competition. The legal advice to the Speaker was unequivocal on this statutory requirement. The recruitment was undertaken by an independent panel without interference from Parliament. A former MP was on the panel to provide working knowledge of the role of MPs, with the remaining Panel members not having held elected office. The Chair of IPSA, Professor Sir Ian Kennedy, was also a member of the recruitment panel. The current board members were perfectly entitled to apply for reappointment by going through the fair and open competition process, but they chose not to.”
 

 
The GOS says: Yes, I think we can all see what's going on here, can't we? Do I need to spell it out?
 

 
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