The sacking of scientific adviser Professor David Nutt by Home Secretary Alan Johnson might have caused astonishment, but the government has plenty of form when it come to flying in the face of scientific advice. In the early days of New Labour, much was made of “evidence-based policy” from Tony Blair and others. The 1999 [...]
It’s a clever ploy of Pizza Express to offer a “dieter’s” pizza. The Leggara range contain only 500 calories, 30% fewer than usual. This is because there’s no middle to the pizza, giving you the pizza equivalent of a doughnut or bagel, with a few leaves shoved in the centre instead. A nifty idea, perhaps, [...]
From 1st November, Air Passenger Duty is being increased. The rise, in two stages, hits long-haul flights hardest. In a year’s time, a family of four flying the furthest distance in economy will pay an extra £340, while a trip to the United States will cost another £240. APD will then be four times the [...]
Following a few links on the BBC’s news website to keep up to date with the latest on the MPs’ expenses scandal, I found that one link wasn’t working. I wouldn’t normally examine the error message on my screen in detail but the conjunction of letters in the middle rather leapt out at me. It’s [...]
It’s been so long since we heard an MP do anything other than complain that everyone is being beastly to them that it took a while to realise that David Taylor, Labour MP for North West Leicestershire, did something useful today. He called on the Government to clamp down on furniture retailers and their “limited” [...]
An American friend tells me that tonight is the start of the World Series. As far as Zebu goes, that’s the king of the herd. The contest has been running since 1903 and yet, even though there are, by most estimates, 196 independent countries on earth, only two take part in the “World Series”, the [...]
Despite the furore over our own MPs’ expenses, the far more staggering amounts of taxpayers’ money sprayed at EU officials largely goes unremarked upon. It may be further away than Westminster, but a considerable proportion of it is still our money. Only thanks to France’s Court of Accounts (Les juridictions financières) have we been able [...]
Pity the residents of poor Anglesey. Last year Walkers’ crisps wiped them off the map in their Brit Trips campaign. Now it’s happened again, with Weetabix running a £1m cash giveaway, the map for which has obliterated Anglesey and its 70,000 residents. It was Nia Williams’s children who spotted the gaffe first. “They have just [...]
The trousering of our money by most MPs pales beside the payoff to Glasgow City Council’s former head of education, Margaret Doran, whose redundancy package – despite only being in the job since 2007 – comes to a whopping £278,000. According to the Evening Times, she was made redundant because her department was broken up. [...]
Doesn’t it seem odd that MPs are being told to pay back money claimed on cleaning or gardening while those who had their snouts deepest in the trough, flipping the designation of their main home to avoid paying Capital Gains Tax or to wring the maximum possible from the poor taxpayer, get off Scot free? [...]
A great piece in Dizzy Thinks pointing out the banality of the twittering done by Lord Mandelson’s Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. Particularly ludicrous is the tweet for Get Online Day, which exhorts people to get online who are, er, already online. Great value for money at a cost of a mere £1.13 per [...]
Remember a few months back when BBC presenter Carrie Gracie was interviewing Lord George Foulkes about MPs’ expenses and he demanded to know how much she was paid? To everyone’s suprise, she admitted on air that her salary was £92,000. What a shame that after she showed him hers, she didn’t ask to see his. [...]
Stuck at lights, I found myself staring at a sign reading “MINI Cherished” outside a car showroom. Cherished? What on earth were they talking about? And then it struck me. “Cherished” is their way of saying “second-hand”. Looking on their website, they claim it’s a special sort of high-class second-hand, but second-hand is what they [...]
“Our sushi is delivered every day, spankingly fresh.” What would you assume from that claim on Pret a Manger’s website? Probably not that it is farmed salmon trout from Chile, which has been frozen and sent 7,000 miles by sea to the UK, where it’s prepared and packaged. Today’s Sunday Telegraph reveals that the fish [...]
Mary Wakefield in Saturday’s Independent picks up on the section in Complete and Utter Zebu about the uselessness of the unmanned biometric system controlling entry to the country which is being introduced as part of Britain’s “unbeatable ring of security”. The “live trial” at Manchester Airport saw so many people queried that the queues became [...]
No wonder the BNP has made such headway if our leading politicians can’t muster a better counter-argument than they did on last night’s Question Time. Were they told to call Griffin “Nick” all the time? It just made it all seem uncomfortably chummy, making him one of the gang, which is surely exactly what he [...]
Over a third of MPs have now repaid money they had previously claimed on expenses. Some £637,000 has gone back into the government’s leaky coffers. According to The Daily Telegraph, the figure is set to rise still further. As for those MPs grumbling that Sir Thomas Legg is introducing retrospective legislation, leading barrister Lord Pannick [...]
Theme: Guangzhou
Currently only £5.00 on amazon.co.uk. Click here to learn more or buy.
Have you encountered any prime Zebu? Know of good video clips of politicians, celebs or businessmen that deserve to be zebooed? Coined any zebusims? If so, do email us by clicking here.
