Labour’s new poster campaign, submitted by a Labour activist, features a picture of David Cameron and the text “Don’t let him take Britain back to the 1980s”.
Labour are once again in the pocket of their union paymasters. Strikes are happening, more are planned…
We all knew that Kingston Communications offer an expensive and dire broadband and telephone service. Karoo have recently had to pull the plug on disconnecting customers without any warning or evidence of copyright infringement. They can afford to be like this because they’re the sole provider of telephone and broadband services in Hull, and they’ve made it far too expensive for competition to move in. Their monopoly means they can treat customers how they want. Customers have no option but to be without telephone and internet services if they want to ‘take their money elsewhere’ as punishment for a shoddy service, as there is no ‘elsewhere’.
I’ve recently been trying to get a phone line and broadband installed for my student house. On 31st July I phoned at 9am and they carried out a credit check. I was told this would take until the 3rd or 4th of August at latest, and that they’d phone me back with the conclusion. On the 5th I received a letter informing me I must pay a £100 ’security deposit’ if I wanted to be connected as I either had bad or no credit rating, and that this wouldn’t be returned for 12 months. I presume it’s the the latter as I always pay bills on time. It wasn’t quite as straight forward as this however.
Karoo received a phone call from me requesting to pay £100 to them by card. I was told that this wasn’t possible, it had to be a postal order or cheque. I don’t require a cheque book, I’ve never wrote a cheque, not one company I use requests this as sole payment. Postal order was my only option. I was told I could speed the process up if I took my postal order to their office in Hull. The people downstairs would simply give it to the people upstairs. I promptly set off, having to pay £10 for the privilege of purchasing the postal order.
Once I arrived at the office there were three technical support staff, only stationed there for pre arranged appointments. Along side them were a bunch of telephones where customer service could be contacted. I spoke with the staff who wouldn’t take my payment upstairs, instead gave me a prepaid envelope and insisted I had to send it there. When I glanced at the address it was in fact that same office building.
This is where I am to date, 6 days on without even starting to set up my phone line and broadband service. I don’t even have an account with them yet as they won’t open one until the £100 is paid. They’re able to exploit their customers because we literally have no alternative. We have no market competition to turn to in order to punish a bad company. Ofcom desperately needs to step in and change this situation.
I posted previously about Tesco’s ridiculous alcohol policy enforcement. I argued that a 40 year old man with his daughter would not get the same treatment as us students experience, with the demanding of ID from everyone not just the purchaser. It appears Asda have got that one step further and ID’ed a 15 year old child because her father was buying a bottle of wine! You can read more about it here.
This needs stopping it’s absolutely ridiculous. There is no law against you purchasing alcohol whilst with another person whom doesn’t hold ID or is not of age.
I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while. Generally if a big shop is required a few of us go together in a vehicle. Contrary to what student life might have you believe, alcohol isn’t purchased on every occasion. We just buy lots when there’s a special offer on! Sometimes only half or one of us will purchase alcohol, and the rest will simply be shopping for food. It’s during this circumstance where Tesco’s policy on alcoholic purchases becomes an authoritarian law unto itself. If the individual buying the drink looks under 25 then they’re ID’ed, which is fair enough, we have laws in this country that stop under 18’s from purchasing alcohol. Tesco extend this policy to anybody you’re with! If there are four people doing four different shops and all paying separately, they all must provide identification or the customer cannot go through with his or her transaction.
I cannot fathom the reasoning behind it. All the policy serves to do is inconvenience legitimate customers. Let’s pretend there’s a bunch of teenagers, one is old enough and is purchasing alcohol, the others are not of age and they plan to go out of the store and get lashed on the streets of Hull. To bypass this policy all they need to do is send the person of legal age to the checkout. It’s no skin off their nose attending different tills, after all they’re not old enough anyway. The policy doesn’t work.
If a 40 year old man with his 13 year old daughter came to purchase alcohol, again I doubt there would be any problem. No ID would be required as the gentleman is clearly over the age of 18, and yet evidently the child is not old enough but must not produce identification. Why are groups being treated differently? As far as I’m aware the contract is between the customer and the supermarket, not whomever the customer might have arrived at the store with. If said customer decides to purchase alcohol so that under 18’s can get drunk on the streets then that is for the police to deal with, not for Tesco to attempt, and fail as mentioned earlier, to enforce.
The Irish are being asked to vote again on the Lisbon treaty, apparently they gave the wrong answer the first time. If they do indeed change their minds, and vote yes, Europe will need a President.
Who will be the glorified unifier of Europe? The Independent have their money on somebody you may remember, Mr Tony Blair. Apparently he has a lot of support, from the right people.
A senior British official said: “He [Brown] will have to swallow hard to sit down in meetings once again with Blair. But he accepts that there needs to be someone from the UK in the new global architecture. There is no opposition to the plan. Things have moved on, people have moved on.”
Other European leaders are also broadly supportive because they want a high-profile figure to represent the 27-nation bloc in the new alliance with the US administration. Mr Blair remains a popular figure in the US.
After initially trying to block Mr Blair as a possible candidate last year, the French President, Nicolas Sarkozy, has thrown his weight behind the former prime minister.
We didn’t get a vote on the EU constitution, we didn’t get a vote on the Lisbon Treaty. Then again I’m sure they’d make us revote until we gave the right answer anyway. Blair could be waved into a position which citizens of the United Kingdom did not get to vote for. He could be waved in, with the consent of a Prime Minister who famously bottled an election for fear of losing. Is this the sort of ‘democratic’ union we desire?
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