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Can you speak fluent management bollocks? Would you like to draw a £60k+ salary in a role where the job description gives no clue as to how the position will benefit the people whose taxes will pay your salary? Well, Blaby District Council have just the job for you!

Seriously, we hear about high salary “non-jobs” in national and local government which get the reputation for being awarded to cronies of the ruling party. This post of “Director of Place” sounds suspiciously like one of those. Seriously, even the job title gives no clue as to what the purpose of the post is supposed to be for.  Maybe I’m just being cynical, and the “Director of Place” will perform a vital role in the delivery of services to the people of Blaby. But I’m not convinced.

The best argument in favour of continued UK membership of the EU is to look at agenda of the people who want us to leave. The vast majority of them are ideologues of the hard right, with a few hard-leftists and a rather larger group of borderline racist swivel-eyed xenophobes.

What they all have in common is a vision of Britain that is not the sort of country I want to live in. They’re all people for whom any form of social democracy is anathema.

The Tory right tend to keep quiet about their future Britain without all those pesky EU regulations and nonsense about worker’s rights. As quoted in Jonathan Calder’s blog:

Kwasi Kwarteng, Priti Patel, Dominic Raab, Chris Skidmore and Elizabeth Truss, who are all seen as rising stars on the right of the party, describe British workers as among the “worst idlers” in the world, and urge David Cameron to reform work places along the lines of the Asian, rather than the European model.

Yes, they look forward to a nation in which people work far longer hours in much poorer conditions in order to be competitive with the sweatshops of the far-east.

Yes, the Barclay Brothers, the Rothermere family and the pornographer who owns the Daily Express churn out anti-EU propaganda in the newspapers they own, like Britain’s very own version of America’s Koch brothers, and people fall for their simplistic populism.

But read the above quote and ask yourself: Is the Britain they want really the sort of country you want to live in?

Yet another pointless mass killing in America.

There are cries that “we must not politicise the tragedy”. Well, bollocks to that. “Don’t politicise” is just a code word for “Don’t talk about gun control at a time when people are listening”.

The truth is that, yet again, those who have successfully lobbied against every attempt to make it harder for people with untreated mental health problems to obtain military-style assault weapons have blood on their hands. The sort of weapons that enable psychotics to massacre large numbers of people have no use for hunting or self-defence. They are weapons of war. Elements of the rightwing gun lobby want the power to wage war on against their own nation. There is a word for that, and that word is “Terrorist”.

The ugly truth is that too many of the gun lobby would rather see dead children than give up on their fantasies of armed insurrection. They won’t say that out loud, of course, hence the ritual hogwash of “This tragedy would have been prevented if only we arm every kindergarten teacher in the land”.

As Teresa Nielsen Hayden said on Twitter “Americans love owning guns because it lets them pretend their safety isn’t a function of our shared society. They should grow up”. If you have to arm kindergarten teachers, you live in a failed state. In such an arms race, the only winners are the gun manufacturers, who are laughing all the way to the bank. Guess where most of the NRA’s funds come from?