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Google on "UK Unfair Dismissal" It's an entire industry in the UK populated by ambulance chasing lawyers and other drones. It produces nothing and has destroyed millions of UK jobs. Some employers have even paid up to people who have never worked for them; that's because the law is so slanted against employers, and it's cheaper just to pay the fraudster than pay the fat-cat lawyers.

Of course not. But there's such a thing as "non-performance" invalidating a contract. I'd say that employment is much more like marriage than a sale contract. It depends on good will between both parties every day of the week, and the constant pursuit of common interest. Once the relationship breaks down, and conciliation efforts fail, then both parties should simply move on. Why would a good employer want to "unfairly dismiss" a worker who was fully committed to his/her job? This makes no economic sense yet we are supposed to believe that this happens regularly. What generally happens is that there are personality clashes with right and wrong on both sides, yet the law only offers redress to the employee. The law treats a job as a right and a property on one hand, whilst treating it as a normal business contract on the other. The resulting muddle and meddle actively destroys employment opportunities.

There has been at least one complaint from a member about theft of their gallery images by other websites. Bedlington.co.uk takes this very seriously and will take all necessary measures to protect against copyright theft. In order for site administrators to serve a take-down notice on the other party(s) you need to provide an administrator or moderator with the URLs (from your browser address bar) of your material, and the matching URLs of the offending material. If there are more than five or six offending URLs then the first few plus a count of the total will suffice. Do not remove or hide your material as this will frustrate the process. Things might not happen quite as fast as you would like, but happen they surely will!

An employer has a absolute right to decide who works for them, just the same as an employee has an absolute right to decide who they work for. A particular job if not yours by right - which was what Scargill was trying to sell! Because employers don't have a vote the market is slanted against the employer, so the market redresses the balance by relocating jobs beyond the "unfair" rules, becoming a lot more cautions about the number of people employed, and who is given an opportunity. So, in order to be seen to redress what one side may occasionally see as an injustice everyone suffers. The solution to such "injustices" is to minimise the practical effect by making it easier to gain alternative employment, and employers less circumspect about what they say and do with respect to their loyal workers. That also frees up the whole labour market, in the sense that "wage bargaining" is no longer necessary - wages set themselves. The entire economy benefits from reduced disputes and a free flow of skills. Once government and law start poking their nose into the labour market it's a slippery slope to hell. We've been conditioned to believe that all the improvements to working conditions since the industrial revolution have been made by law and regulation. Fact is that the vast majority of those improvements (and more) would have happened anyway, in the court of public opinion and of free markets, and we'd have been a lot more prosperous as a result. There is a role for government and law, but like the rest of our experiences, it is only at the extremes, and where criminality is evident. Government and business do not mix!

"17 new heads and 14 new handles" -> http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b03qdqf1/Newsnight_16_01_2014/ skip right to the end.

To which sage advice I would only add the "Mick McGahey Rule" (not at all understood by Mr A. Scargill): Never let you dreams of how the world might be blind you to the way things really are - set realistic, easily identifiable, and achievable goals, that addresses the immediate problems. ----------------- Reflecting on your final paragraph I'd say: Despite eternal political meddling (entirely counter-productive, and effectively buying your vote with your own future) in the jobs market there is still what passes for a market out there. If wages are low it's entirely because there are too many people willing to work for that sort of money, and so you should consider applying your skills to something that produces better rewards. It may not take too many people to do that before the market forces wages up. If more job opportunities don't exist then it's likely because politicians have legislated them away. For instance Miliband's present "jealousy and envy" campaign against banker's bonuses will inevitably cause such people to move elsewhere, taking their earnings, tax revenues, and all the other related jobs, with them. Here so called "job protection" legislation has made it much more difficult to find an alternative job and much riskier for employers to let people demonstrate what they can do. There was an age before all that nonsense when you could walk straight into a job, and if it didn't work out walk straight into another one. All the unfair dismissal garbage has done is to provide jobs for lawyers, built an entire edifice that produces absolutely nothing yet has to be paid for by the public purse, makes UK employers very reluctant to employ people in the UK, has exported innumerable jobs to other countries, and defocuses firms from getting on and doing the business. Sensible politicians know that it is almost entirely counter-productive, but none at all have the guts to get up and say so! Every time you see the words "fair" and "unfair" you should smell a rat. Life is never "fair" or "unfair", but it can be reasonable. Beware of politicians promising any sort of market reforms - you may just get them!

After Microsoft's buy of what little was left of Nokia's prestige brand you'd have thought that it would have been Windows Phone all the way. Microsoft isn't known for it's cuddling up to major competitors, or for promoting open source software. A move towards Android would really have made major sense a couple of years back when Mr Elop took the helm at Nokia. But a "Microsoft plant" wasn't going to countenance anything but a tie-up to the mother-ship despite his attempted rationalisation. http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/jul/12/elop-explains-nokia-android He even killed off Nokia's own in-house Linux variant that had a large techie following, and virtually tore up Nokia's agreement with Intel to promote its MeeGo successor. There have been rumours that Nokia was working on an Android device for months though, but if there was any substance behind them it looked near certain that events would have overtaken the cunning plan. But, no! It really is looking like a Microsoft controlled company is going through with the launch of an Android device cleverly re-skinned to look similar to a Lumia Windows Phone - the sort of Android re-brand Amazon has done. http://gadgets.ndtv.com/mobiles/news/nokia-normandy-budget-android-phone-leaked-in-purported-live-image-471541 The timing of this is truly amazing as Windows Phone 8 seems to be getting some traction in the market at long last, and looks about to overtake Apple in the volume of units shipped. Why is Microsoft permitting a rival operating system? Surely this is going to look like planning for another failure of Windows in the mobile space? Well, it's certainly not going to impact on WP8 device shipments. But, it is going to say to other manufacturers - reluctant to risk yet another Microsoft powered phone failure - you really should offer consumers a choice of operating systems, just like our phone division does. And, Nokia may even make a little money out of it! It will probably be a nice bit of hardware that will persuade some of the customers it has thrown away to return to the fold, for the very reason that they were loyal to Nokia in the first instance.

I think "pretence" is a bit mean spirited. Maggie really cared about her country, more so than any PM of recent decades I'd say. If she went to promote trade for the UK then you can be pretty sure that's exactly why she went. She didn't use the office to enrich herself as others have, and had to embark on a series of lecture tours to stuff some money away for her retirement. Though there's no doubt that Denis had done reasonably well in business, and was more than competent in his day. Whereas... you do wonder how Teflon Tony acquired all his millions, and how both Miliband brothers are millionaires, neither ever having done a real days work in their entire lives! Update: That forced me to do some investigation; it seems that she left surprisingly little, and if it hadn't been for wealthy friends wouldn't have been able to maintain the lifestyle. http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/apr/09/margaret-thatcher-estate-family-secret You have to read to the bottom to find out: But heck, we could have guessed the last bit!

The thing is Adam if he'd called a ballot there wouldn't have been a strike in the first place. He refused to call one because he knew he'd lose. I've huge sympathy with the coal mining industry - my ancestors, like yours, were part of it. But this strike was so divisive it was a tragedy. Not only did Scargill ensure the demise of mining locally, but he split his own union in a way which can never be healed. He didn't (and still doesn't) care one jot about this or the hardship he caused. The understandable bitterness of local people is completely misdirected; they were used for a sinister political purpose. Now you can argue that they were sacrificed by government, but it came to the stage where the government had no option but to prepare for, and break, the strike. Sym thinks that "victory" was very near, Scargill thinks it was a victory. There was never any chance of a victory though, because the real purpose of the strike was a repeat of the 1974 strike which brought down a very weak and incompetent Edward Heath. He was the Tory idiot who got us into the EU - now if you are looking for a liar he's a self-admitted one! But no government worth the name was ever going to see a repeat of this, and they had a full ten years to prepare. The government did what a government has to do - rule for the majority interest, and survive to do it. Scargill did what Marxist plotters did and used his industrial power for purely political purposes. A majority of NUM members saw through this, but in typical Stalinist fashion Scargill overrode the majority will. I'm not so stupid that I think most of the local people around at the time can be convinced that they made a huge mistake in backing this communist agitator. But, I am concerned that the misplaced loyalty, half-truths and bitterness spill over into future generations. You just have to look around the world to see how indoctrination of children in one-sided views of history, and in particular transferring your bitterness, impoverishes future generations. In its extreme it ends up in narrow-minded old men, with a view to their own safety, sending children to their deaths wearing suicide vests! People not around at the time need need to know the full story, and be credited with the intelligence to make up their own minds about history. I don't see much of this happening at the moment.

MacGregor never said there wasn't a list. He was asked about it and replied that he had never attended a meeting where such a list had been discussed. This undoubtedly was true, but it wasn't what he was asked. The Beeb interviewer simply wasn't doing his job! Again, no one lied! But Scargill was never properly nailed in interview about why he wouldn't make the strike legal either. The whole sad thing had nothing to do with who was or was not telling the truth, it was a matter of spin. Spin from Scargill that this was an Industrial dispute with a clear outcome: his aim was to bring down a democratically elected government. Spin from the government that this was simply another dispute: they'd decided to draw a line in the sand, and had long seen this coming. The winter of discontent had done for Jim Callaghan and indeed got Margaret Thatcher into power. After trade unionists dictating how the country as run for decades the public had simply had enough. There was agreement across the political spectrum that the Country had become totally ungovernable and that something had to be done. All sorts of things had been tried (Google on In Place of Strife which was talked about endlessly at the time and eventually vetoed by TUC bosses) and failed miserably. Even if you still believe that what Scargill did was justified or had any point, you have to admit that his timing was diabolical. It was an entirely different era were may of the ideas that are now owned across the entire political spectrum weren't generally shared. The things Sym comes up with here about market forces etc. would have been heretical to many trade unionists of the 1960's and 1970's. Maybe they still are to a few local dinosaurs, but they are the ideas the entire World (including ex-communist and communist countries) have been moving forward with for some decades now. Scargill, to this very day, lives in a dream world where those rules and ideas don't apply, and if they apply to other people they certainly don't apply to him! This is an interesting read: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-22079887

..and, as Neil Kinnock has recently pointed out, that's exactly what would have happened if Red Mick inherited the NUM leadership without the political manoeuvrings at the extreme left of Labour which excluded him. Kinnock puts the full blame for the debacle on Scargill's refusing to negotiate. He is - for once - spot on in his view. http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2009/mar/16/neil-kinnock-arthur-scargill-miners-strike I don't know if you can quote "clean coal" being a major factor at that point in history, ideas have changed a lot since then. It was chiefly that UK Coal was becoming too expensive against Eastern European product, as I think what you say partly acknowledges. It's a price the Country would have paid though if it hadn't been for the accompanying left wing militancy and disruption. Most people had had enough of three day weeks and constant industrial stoppages by then, and this included many miners, but Scargill misjudged that too. What we got at the time was this nonsense about lifetime job guarantees, not just for the strikers but for future generations. Any such promises given would have been completely worthless hot air, and the subject of endless future who-said-what disputes. No industry or government could have gone there. Labour were more than relieved that this didn't happen on their watch, and did absolutely nothing to reverse or mitigate anything later.

Did they really? I think the leftie journos at the Beeb are struggling to find any evidence of this, and you certainly have none. The reality was that no one lied, though there was plenty of the usual spin from both sides. There's a huge reality gap locally; people believing what they've been told to believe, or worse, what their parents told them to believe. If local people had travelled a bit more they'd have discovered that the Country at large held a quite different view. There was a lot of sympathy for the miner's families, but utter bafflement about what they hoped to achieve. That's why the NUM was split too. Calling fellow workers scabs because they saw this and you didn't was just plain stupid. And, demonising a PM who was doing her very best for the Country at large puts you on completely the wrong side of history.

And what sort of "victory" would that have been Sym? An overthrow of a democratically elected government kind of victory, by a Marxist agitator who couldn't even carry his own membership behind him? It was not a strike about pay or conditions. So what exactly would your victory have looked like? Where exactly did Mrs Thatcher lie Adam, or is this more of what someone who was around at the time told you to believe? She had a damn sight more integrity than politicians today! In fact Ian MacGregor didn't lie either, if you examine exactly what he said. Was it misleading? Well yes, but there was a lot of misleading BS going around at the time, and his was a politician's devious answer. The interviewers didn't ask the right questions, but then Scargill got off very lightly in interviews too. I'm not aware of anyone accusing Scargill of lying either; he obviously got his information from somewhere. At the time that there were going to be more closures seemed highly likely. Scargill though got the job by intrigue and manoeuvring. No wonder he feared democracy! The top NUM job should have gone to good old red Mick McGahey, but he was cheated out of it. Mick at least knew how far to push, and despite his leanings claimed never to mix the business of getting the best deal possible for his members with politics. Scargill did entirely the opposite and impoverished them for no identifiable purpose whatsoever. NUM members had the wrong guy foisted on them, and then blindly and stupidly followed him over the precipice, or at least the local ones did. The resulting hardship was directly due to the illegal strike, and once Scargill embarked on that course there was never any doubt about the outcome. You kid yourself if you believe otherwise Sym. The Country simply was not going to be held to ransom by a communist who as running scared of his own membership. That local miners were taken for such a ride, and kidded that there could be any other outcome but a total climb-down was almost beyond belief. That they blame entirely the wrong person - and actually the best peace time PM this country has ever had - for this, is the sad consequence of decades of political indoctrination. You know it's about time Scargill apologists put up a statue to our local hero. I will happily re-write the words to Lil Abner and we can turn the whole thing into a hit musical!

That's only part of the functionality of CCleaner. At least as important is the registry fix and clean, but that's the bit you need to be careful to save what it has removed. That probably sounds a bit more alarmist than I intended, as the default options are generally pretty safe. Another way of freeing space on Windoze is deleting unnecessary restore points - ones that you will likely never use. CCleaner can do this but there are other ways too. It's particularly safe to do this if you have a couple of external backups in the can anyway, and you know the machine is running stably. After some major upgrades the space you recover from this can make you very happy. Wise not to overdo this by not removing the most recent restore point though. I think that current versions of CCleaner save you from yourself here anyway by preventing you deleting the most recent one. See: Tools-->System Restore

If the site search did three letter words the database would be massive and the search results wouldn't be a great deal of use. This is deffo a case for using the page search in your browser (CTL+F). 'Orses for courses I think!

Interesting that the art market is booming. One or more economists put this down to QE. As the stock market is certainly not over-inflated generally speaking, and seems to represent fair value with "blue-sky" stuff actually depressed for once, then there would seem to be a large divide between ordinary investors and the mega rich. The mega rich of course can easily chose where they pay their tax - a fact which Mr Hollande seems to be blissfully unaware of. Or, possibly, the mega rich may know something ordinary business people don't know.

Someone else who doesn't read the "small print" at the bottom? Didn't say Avast was best, said one of the very best. I wouldn't presume to make that choice, except that when something is free then at least it's worth a try before parting with money. Speaking personally I've installed Avast on dozens of machines, many for other peeps, and no one (except someone here) has had anything but praise for it. I've used it myself for several years across at least half a dozen machines. By contrast I've found Norton an absolute pain to use, and the first thing I do with a new machine is try to get rid of any "free" bundled Symantec products - this is not always easy! And, the free version of malwarebytes has always done a good job, so why part with money on that too? Another free product you should look at is CCleaner to remove unnecessary clutter, and free up disk space. Now someone here had a disagreement about that a while long back but what they said was totally contrary to my own long experience. It has never screwed up a machine that I've used it on and I've been using it regularly on many machines for at least a decade. It's only sensible to save the registry entries it removes just in case, but I can't remember ever having to restore the saved entries. If I had to pay for CCleaner I would, but once again the free version does all the job you need to do, and does it well. The only irritation is the constant updates, with always the default option to upgrade to the paid-for version, but at least the product is being constantly improved and updated. https://www.piriform.com/ccleaner/download

So I win the bet then? Why on earth would you pay for an AV when one of the very best is completely free?! http://www.avast.com/en-gb/index

So... the icebreaker that was to rescue the stuck Russian ship is stuck in the Antarctic ice! This brings to mind the news that there's a massive 50% more ice in the Arctic this Summer than last. If you remember last year we were told it was global warming surely to blame; this year the "excess ice" is simply normal seasonal variation. The same instantly variable spin which differentiates climate from weather I think! http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-25383373 Climate Change: A terribly important, yet elusive, phenomenon that warrants countless billions of others people's money being spent on wholly ineffective and vain attempts to influence nature. But, once a minuscule proportion of those costs are billed to the concerned party, instantly reduces in importance, and becomes a gross imposition.

Didn't you miss the second one? And what's wrong with simply right clicking on (an unoccupied place on) the taskbar? You should leave CTL+ALT+DEL as one of the last resorts, because with many operating systems it won't pop up any sort of dialogue and you will lose your entire session - something you don't want to get into the habit of doing! Even with Windows an accidental second keying could spell disaster. Malwarebytes is a useful addition to your regular AV program. It often picks up stuff that's not necessarily a virus but has been sneaked on to your system. My bet is that it will find something on your machine, and that won't be false positives aimed at selling you the paid-for version!

http://www.energysavingtrust.org.uk/Take-action/Find-a-grant/Green-Deal-and-ECO Or as Gordo would certainly tell you, it's a global problem: Why is Germany so expensive? Well the idiots have turned their backs on nuclear because of their tree-hugger lobby - Germans are always easily sold on crazy ideologies! Things will only get worse there as they progressively bottle themselves in, whilst their neighbours gleefully build new nuclear stations on their borders to profit from their stupidity. Why are we currently in trouble on supply? Well... a certain former government couldn't make its mind up on nuclear and didn't put the ground work in place, so we have lost a decade! Mind you the current lot have been slow off the mark, and it's only the stark prospect of the lights going out real soon that has actually got them off their backsides! The net result of the political muddle is we are having to pay far more for nuclear than would have been the case if Teflon Tony had made a timely commitment. The results of the politician's failures will be felt for decades to come, long after the true reasons are forgotten. Note the relatively low cost of electricity in Paris where governments of all political shades have been firmly focussed on just getting on with it. We can thank the French for their foresight, and their supplying us under the Channel. Without the connector we'd be in a lot more trouble than we already are. But... In other words the French are eyeing the higher prices Germans will pay for peak demand availability, and we are in danger of loosing another 5% of our supply. We can only hope they plough on with their nuclear program apace.

It's growing rapidly in the UK apparently, but never used it myself. Just wondering if anyone had any experience of other auction/fixed-price sites? http://uk.ebid.net/ eBay really does need serious competition, they are far too greedy, dictatorial, and service levels are near non-existent.

And.. for the record I'm wrong again - that almost certainly isn't Molly Hattersley holding Roy's hand either!

Great stuff! Well everyone has the year of the shiny new tarmac wrong then, I will put a note on the ones in the gallery. Your 1987 one looks like the tarmac has had a year's run-in then, so it's all consistent. There's that lass with the massive box brownie on her right shoulder again too! Gave up filming picnics myself round about 1958, that colour film is still around here somewhere and has never had a public show. Hope to locate it real soon!

That tome of all wisdom about Bedlington - bedlington.co.uk - says these pictures are actually 1980: http://www.bedlington.co.uk/community/gallery/sizes/897-1980-miners-picnic/large/ Which means the County Records Office is only 8 years out in its guess! http://www3.northumberland.gov.uk/catalogue/dserve.exe?dsqServer=w2k3calm1.woodhorn.org.uk&dsqIni=Dserve.ini&dsqApp=Archive&dsqCmd=Overview.tcl&dsqSearch=%28%28text%29%3D%27roy%27%29&dsqDb=Catalog&dsqPos=2