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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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Further to our recent article about Britain's least charitable charity, the RSPCA, we are pleased to find we are not alone. Here's a piece from Issue 1332 of Private Eye ...
 

 
What beastly behaviour
The RSPCA took some flak after its recent hugely expensive prosecution of the Heythrop hunt. Yet the kerfuffle about whether the charity was pursuing some sort of class war agenda distracted attention from the fact that it often sprays its supporters’ money about on private prosecutions that seem to be in neither animals’ nor people’s interest.
 
Of particular concern are its prosecutions of elderly and vulnerable people. In 2011, a 71-year-old pensioner from Manchester, Pauline Spoor, was prosecuted for cruelty to her pet dog, Dexter. He had arthritis, like her, and the RSPCA had him put down. She was convicted and tagged for three months. The RSPCA defended its decision to prosecute an elderly woman, saying it was “right and proper”.
 
Last year another pensioner, Georgina Langley from West Hougham in Kent, had her cats, cockerels and rescue dog taken away by the RSPCA. She was then charged with 13 charges of neglect (11 of which were withdrawn at the last moment, as is often the case). She pleaded guilty to two minor charges of not getting veterinary care quickly enough. The RSPCA put down five of her cats but an independent post-mortem, carried out on two of the cats by the Royal Veterinary College, found both were healthy. The RSPCA pushed for costs of £28,000 against Langley. The magistrate refused to order costs or a fine against her, returned a number of her animals and gave her a conditional discharge.
 
In 2007, the owner of an animal sanctuary in Sunderland, Clifford Spedding, who had been prosecuted by the RSPCA for cruelty offences, had his suspended jail sentence lifted and his banning order for keeping animals rescinded on appeal. Allowing the appeal, Judge Peter Armstrong said: “The appellant began to suffer from depression and was simply unable to cope with a large number of animals and birds that had been dumped upon him.” He praised the work Mr Spedding had done over many years to protect animals. Lawyers the Eye has spoken to cite numerous similar cases.
 
The RSPCA is thought to be the most prolific private prosecutor in the country – certainly no other charity prosecutes anywhere near as many cases. Its sister charity in Scotland, the Scottish SPCA, does not carry out private prosecutions, sending cases it has investigated to the Procurator Fiscal (the Scottish equivalent of the Crown Prosecution Service) instead. The same is true of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, which used to prosecute but stopped in 1992.
 
The RSPCA has continued to increase the number of private prosecutions since 2006, when the Labour government passed the Animal Welfare Act. Last year it secured convictions in more than 3,000 “cruelty” cases, at a cost of £8.7m.
 
Barrister Jonathan Rich, who has defended numerous people in RSPCA cases, describes the charity’s “Inspectorate” as “an officious, sub-standard, pretend police force”. It’s hard to disagree. RSPCA officers wear uniforms which are almost indistinguishable from police garb, leading to confusion about their powers when they doorstep people (in fact they have none).
 
The CPS often chooses not to prosecute elderly defendants or those with mental health conditions or other disabilities. The RSPCA takes a different view: it sends out press releases naming elderly and disabled defendants – who are then sometimes targeted by animal rights activists.
 
An e-petition asking the government to inquire into the RSPCA’s “vexatious prosecutions” has gathered more than 6,600 signatures in just a couple of weeks. Could 2013 be the year the RSPCA stops being cruel to human beings?
 

 
The GOS says: Yeah, you wish. Once these jobsworths have tasted a little power they're hardly going to give it up, are they? Especially when they can bleat self-righteously “we're only doing it for the sake of the poor dumb animals”.
 
There's only one way they're going to be persuaded to stop, and that's if the Charity Commission can be persuaded to threaten to remove their charitable status. And that's not going to happen because the Charity Commission are a bunch of power-hungry jobsworths themselves. These people stick together, you know.
 
Bastards.

 

 
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