Time for UN talking shop to take action
THE annual list of salaries being paid to local council bosses was published last week, and it made for deeply depressing reading. Almost 3,000 town hall pen pushers were paid over £100,000 last year and a number of chief executives were earning around or in excess of £500,000.
Do the services your local council provides warrant that level of reward?
As the collection of rubbish is scandalously allowed to drop from being a weekly round, libraries are closed and roads increasingly turned into potholed dirt tracks, this is simply not acceptable.
A private business failing on this level would not be allowed to continue.
So when they send out the council tax statements next year, let them attach a question asking us to rate how they’re doing.
Anything less than a 50 per cent score means the whole damned lot of them are turfed out.
HAVING attempted
(and failed) to take on the Royal Family, Meghan Markle has now switched her attention to the English language. She has apparently tried to trademark the word “archetype”– something to do with some podcast she has in store.
This is a word that dates back to the days of ancient Greece and first entered the English language in the 1540s.
Meghan, many of us have an idea of certain words you might like to register for your personal use. But it’s unlikely you’d approve.
SINCE the dawn of time, crises have always exploited the glaring weaknesses of individuals and organisations. Faced with the most challenging of events and circumstances, their responses fall lamentably short of what might be expected, their flaws exposed for all to see.
Regrettably, the war in Ukraine has done precisely this to that once revered body, the United Nations.
Set up in 1945, in the aftermath of the Second World War, just like anything else in its late seventies it is starting to show signs of age.
Much like Joe Biden.
Its ineffective and impotent reaction to the massacre, rape and pillaging of Ukraine surely adds strength to the argument it is no longer fit for purpose.
The original intent behind its formation was made plain in its mission statement all those years ago. It was to be an international organisation committed to “maintaining international peace and security, developing friendly relations among nations and promoting social progress, better living standards and human rights”.
Any chance they could take a look at events just 4,000 miles away from their cosseted, well-paid existences in the giant purpose-built skyscraper in New York and seek to provide some leadership to try to end the suffering of millions of Ukrainians?
The inner chamber of the UN Security Council was addressed via videolink by Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelensky last week. Accusing Russia of the “most terrible crimes” since the Second World War, Zelensky scolded the UN for giving Russians “the right to sow death” in his country. Demanding the UN actually does something, he went on: “Are you ready to close the UN? And the time of international law is gone?
“If your answer is ‘No’ then you need to act immediately.” He then played council members a video showing bound, murdered and burned civilians and mass graves dug by Russian troops.
The UK ambassador to the UN, Dame Barbara Woodward, described it as “harrowing”. Her US counter-part Linda Thomas-greenfield said “we stand with the people of Ukraine”.
Highly unlikely to have them trembling in the Kremlin, but one must realise they love words rather than actions at the UN.
Yet all the time Russia is allowed a permanent place in the Security Council –
the heartbeat of the UN – you can safely assume no action will ever be taken against Putin as Russia can, and does, simply exercise its veto. Just last week its representative to the UN said Ukraine was the aggressor and Russia merely defending itself – and he did it with a straight face.
Booting them off the Security Council would allow a discussion on a possible response based on facts, rather than the palpable fiction put out by Putin’s regime.
No one is suggesting it moves a bluehelmeted army into Ukraine, but the UN must be seen to do something. It owes its birth to a determination to avoid another world war, and in that it has been a success.
Its high water mark probably came during the Cold War in the 1960s, when, again, it displayed purpose and strength and helped avoid a nuclear war.
Time might have moved on from the 1940s, but the United Nations has not.
Out of touch and rapidly running out of time, the UN must unite on a new, more decisive course, or else it becomes little more than a toothless talking shop.
THE shameful delay in granting Ukrainian citizens desperate to come to the UK the necessary visas is another scandal that tracks directly to the Home Office. Never forget, this is the same bunch of incompetent no marks who gave us the Windrush debacle and, in 2018, provided such dud information over illegal immigration to its then boss Amber Rudd she was forced to quit as Home Secretary.
In the 51-page application each Ukrainian must fill out, one question asks: “Are you a war criminal?”
That’s sure to catch out the next Radovan Karadzic, isn’t it?
Meanwhile, local authorities reportedly tell families offering homes to Ukrainians they must drain any pond that might be in their garden and if their power points are deemed to be too low, they will be barred from welcoming anyone to their home.
Just think: a Ukrainian child whose father has been killed in the war, mother has been raped and grandma bound, shot dead and left to rot in the streets is denied a home in Britain because someone has a water feature in their garden. How has it come to this?