Stop the Nonsense

This will hopefully be a new weekly thread, dedicated the self serving buffoons that festoon our local councils.  I can't for see any shortage of material to report on can you? 

First up is this little gem from Bristol.  As we are all painfully aware, these are tough times, and prudence should be a watchword for over free spending Little Napoleons down city hall.  But heaven forbid we should scrimp on the important things.  It is against this back drop that our story unfolds, as a black Lib Dem councillor has had to apologise to an Asian colleague for referring to her as a coconut, a smear insinuating that this person was black on the outside, white on the inside ( a rubbish insult, Bounty or Oreo would have cut closer to the bone).  What provoked our Afro Caribbean friend to use such a derogatory term?  The Asian councillor had suggested it may be imprudent, given the beleaguered state of the economy, to go ahead with a proposal to spend £750,000 on a scheme to educate the denizens of Bristol about the horrors of the slave trade.  I kid you not. 

Please feel free to leave any other "Clueless Council and Councillors" stories in the comments section, or even better, join and post your own.  We cannot Stop the Nonsense alone.

One of the most English of institutions is facing a bleak future.  The local pub, once the backbone of every community, is going through tough times, with estimates that up to 36 a week are going out of business, many never to re open.  Now I appreciate that in some ethnic communities, where religion forbids alcohol consumption, there isn't much need for a public house.  Fair enough, as we are told market forces drive everything.  But what about all the other ones?  I remember back in the eighties, when the monopolies commission decided to break the breweries stranglehold on the pub industry, instructing them to sell off great swathes of establishments that were only really viable because they were propped up by the companies that owned them.  Of course the valuable money spinners were kept, and the rest turned over for sale to all and sundry.  At first this may have seen a rise in independent pubs, but somewhere along the way, new companies began to snap up increasing numbers of the ones that failed, or weren't sold.  Their business plan was along the lines of franchising, you bought the lease, but had to purchase all your booze through them, at a price fixed by them.  The squeeze was on.  At first everything went smoothly, but there was trouble on the horizon, in the face of massive supermarkets, driven not by making profit on beer, but selling it at a loss to drag customers through the door.

For years the tradition of the land was for a couple of swift ones on the way home,

Some charity, this is why I refuse to donate any more, has hit the headlines.  Bookstart, whoever they may be, have decided to re write "What Shall We Do With the Drunken Sailor?" and now instead of a lashed up mariner, the sing grumpy pirate.  Of course they claim this has nothing to do with political correctness.  they wnat to make it a more friendly cuddly experience, for parents to read to their bambinos.  What complete and utter tosh.  They didn't just stop at the main title, no, instead of shaving his belly with a rusty razor, you now sing "Do a little jig and make him smile!"  You can almost picture the meeting they had to come up with this.  All sat round with their green tea and muesli bars, as they brainstormed a way to emasculate the ancient nursery rhyme.  Oh how they must have hugged themselves with glee, thinking they had struck yet another nail in the coffin of binge drinking.

While we are on the subject of "Charidee" the god awful