Sellafield and the Oxfordshire Arson Attacks.

Here in the UK Channel 5 is currently broadcasting yet another awesome if slightly heavy season of Celebrity Big Brother (CBB). As I mentioned on Tuesday (13/1/15) the main theme of this season is the limits of freedom of speech and the right to offend.

One area where this will be particularly relevant to viewers is in the area of office politics and employment law. Recently the increased protections for minorities be they gender based, racial or based on sexual orientation has led to ethnic minorities, women and homosexuals taking advantage in the work place to use their minority status to secure unfair advantage over their co-workers.

Although I wasn't able to work it into the original post I actually have an example from my own life of how this can work. Back in 2007 I was volunteering at Croydon Council funded mental health rehabilitation project. Rather then being prepared to accept the benefit of my skill and experience in good grace Croydon Council decided to make this experience as difficult as possible for me. Firstly they threatened to withdraw all funding for the project forcing me to lead a bit of a campaign to keep it open. Then they sacked a supervisor that I worked quite well with in favour of a lesbian who really had it in for me.

As part of this grudge this women would tell anyone who would listen that I was constantly intimidating her because I was homophobic and hated lesbians. Obviously if she'd ever made a formal complaint on those grounds I would have been able to bring in my lesbian mother who is also a government lawyer who helped draft the relevant legislation in to act as my advocate during any disciplinary process. However as the only example of "intimidating behaviour" this woman could come up with was the fact that I'm quite tall a formal complaint was never made and this was all kept quite snidey.

In the end I pointed out that I couldn't put up with this foolishness while still trying to prepare for the COP 13 Summit in Indonesia and walked away. Obviously me writing a resignation letter and then not turning up for work again was too complicated for Croydon Council to understand so officially I was sacked after suffering a severe psychotic episode. That ruling obviously makes it hard to understand why I have been classified a psychologically fit for work and therefore cannot claim what used to be known as incapacity benefit.

Looking at my previous post and what I hope will be my next post it certainly looks as though someone was acting crazy during that time.

So on Tuesday the UK government announced that it will be cancelling the GBP9bn private contract to clean up the site of the Sellafield nuclear power plant. Although we've been assured that this wasn't performance related a new public body will now be tasked with rehabilitating the Sellafield site. Nuclear power has long been a controversial issue within climate change negotiations. However as the UK has a USD165bn, 120 year contract to clean up after a single nuclear power plant I'm still inclined to think that I'm in the right and the nuclear lobby are in the wrong.

Overnight there has been a series of serious arson attacks in the county of Oxfordshire targeting a cottage, a funeral home and the HQ of the local council. Obviously the cottage is a reference to the home of my grandmother who died during COP18 meaning that the funeral home is the funeral home that buried her. In this metaphor I think that council offices are simply council offices.

As a bit of an aside you may have heard that yesterday book publishers Oxford University Press - who I don't think are even based in Oxfordshire - have instructed prospective authors not to make reference to bacon, sausages or other pork products in order to avoid offending potential Muslim customers. Therefore these arson attacks that could be ruled as acts of terrorism could be a reference to Islamic terrorists who seem very easy to offend or anti-Muslim terrorists who are likely to be strengthened if as a society we continue to compromise in the face of ridiculous Islamist demands.

11:55 on 15/1/15 (UK date).


Edited at around 12:55 on 15/1/15 (UK date) to add: For the sake of clarity I should point out that the 120 year Sellafield contract was cancelled after 8 years which is half-way between 5 years and 10 years.