A Brighton Boy Blogs

For anyone who read my original blog post Help Corporal Harry, I thought I’d let you know what has happened since.

1. The Facebook page has had almost 3000 likes.
2. The local and national press & media has covered the story in some detail.
3. A petition was set up to contend that “MOD should fund charities that treat ex-forces personnel in jail with PTSD” – sign the petition here
4. Harry has had some visits from PTSD counsellors, and has started to feel a little more positive in the light of all the support from the public.
5. Harry’s trial was on January 4th, at which he was found guilty of Theft of Gun, Theft of one round of ammunition and Possession of a prohibited weapon; however charges of Theft of box magazine and Possession of firearm with intent to cause fear of violence were dropped.
6. Harry’s sentencing hearing was due to take place on Monday 11th February, but has now been delayed until 18th February for reasons unknown, but hopefully connected to additional representations and appeals for clemency
7. Several Members of Parliament have been contacted; my MP, Caroline Lucas wrote back to me saying:

Dear Jon,

A belated thank you for your message and my apologies for not writing back to you sooner. I receive a vast amount of correspondence and that can create delays at especially busy times.

I have been appalled by the treatment of Corporal Killick and have written to the Ministry of Defence about his case. I urged the Minister to intervene to ensure that Cpl Killick gets the long overdue help and support he needs, rather than a prison sentence. I also argued that this case highlights ongoing failures to properly support soldiers that are suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and that the Government needs to address this as a matter of urgency.

I understand the court is due to rule next week and I have asked the Minister to respond before that date. I will be in touch again as soon as I hear anything and do let me know if you need any further information in the meantime.

Best wishes,

Caroline Lucas, MP for Brighton Pavilion

House of Commons
London SW1A 0AA

If you’d like to Help Harry, the best way is by spreading the word and raising awareness – and the best way of doing that is to visit the Help Harry page on Facebook, click the “Like” button, and then share their posts on your Facebook timeline.

I wanted to like it, I really did. But Windows 8 promised much and delivered only disappointment. Windows 7 is much better, and is going back on all my PCs.

Here’s the new features of Windows 8:

1. A confusing start menu
2. The inability to perform a single search across all documents, and data stored in Outlook and OneNote.
3. Faster startup

In other words, Microsoft is inviting its users to:

1. Spend money on a new operating system
2. Spend time and money installing a new operating system
3. Wave bye-bye to a remarkably useful piece of business functionality, thus making one’s working life less efficient

No thanks, Microsoft. Seriously, it’s OK. You do it if you want to, I’ll just stick with this much more useful set of stuff you used to offer me, when you appeared to care how efficiently I worked.

And what does Microsoft have to say on the matter? Essentially this… “people didn’t use it, so we removed it”.

So much for intelligence… in both senses of the word.

Corporal Harry Killick

My friend Harry Killick was a corporal in the Territorial Army. I last saw him at his farewell dinner just before he went to Afghanistan. While he was in Afghanistan he saw active service and returned with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, having survived an attack on his patrol. Finding it harder and harder to put it all behind him, and suffering from ever more vivid flashbacks, he took a gun from the barracks with the sole intention of taking his own life, and is now imprisoned and not receiving appropriate psychiatric treatment. His family and friends have started an awareness campaign which seeks initially to ensure that Harry receives the best treatment for his PTSD and that his sentence is kept to a minimum.

Your support would be greatly appreciated. Until it is clearer what can be done to change things for the better, please publicise the social media links below so that as wide an audience as possible can be updated with news as it arrives:

1. Please go and “Like” the Facebook page  facebook.com/corporalharry, and share it wherever you can (see screenshot below). You can share it on pages as well as on your own timeline.
2. Please follow the Twitter page  twitter.com/Corporal_Harry and retweet significant tweets

How To Share Facebook Page properly

If you’ve noticed this site being a little flakey over the last few days it’s because we’ve moved servers – all done now, so sorry if it’s caused you any inconvenience but normal service has been resumed.

When my company first started to trade with EU countries outside the UK, we started to receive EC sales list forms from Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs. Stupidly, we didn’t really register that we had to do anything apart from the declaration about EU sales on the VAT returns. Eventually we got a letter through telling us we had to pay a £500 civil penalty for failing to submit EC Sales Lists.

OK, stupid us, fair enough. So we paid it. A £500 fine, paid.

We also applied to the HMRC for the facility to submit our EC Sales Lists electronically via their web site, and when this facility eventually came through, we caught up in full with our EC Sales Lists backlog. But not before HMRC had slapped another £1000 of civil penalties on our account.

£1500 of fines for what? Had we evaded tax? No. Had we underpaid? No. Had we defrauded HMRC? No. We had merely failed to fill in a few pieces of red tape.

Let’s put this into perspective. Vodaphone underpaid their VAT by some £7bn. Yes, SEVEN BILLION pounds of underpaid VAT, and that’s perfectly OK with the HMRC. But if a small company fails to fill in a few bureaucratic forms, it’s a £1500 fine. Even after we’ve caught up with the red tape, AND paid the original fine. It’s disgusting.

What’s even worse is that although the entire case is still very much in dispute – at the independent review stage – the HMRC has now sent a debt collection company, Rossendales, after us. This rudely spoken bunch of incompetent heavies can’t even talk to us because whenever we go through their security process, the phone number we give them is apparently different from that given to them by HMRC even though it’s actually our correct telephone number.

So by way of allowing idiots to display their idiocy to the world as indeed they should, here’s the HMRC telling me it’s under review (expected completion 18th November) and Rossendales telling me to pay up within seven days (25th October)…

Rossendales – premature debt collection letter on behalf of HMRC

HM Revenue & Customs – civil penalty appeal review

OK, I’ve talked about the dire state of our economy, which is what should really matter to all of us, particularly those in power.

But let’s look at that one incident which has caused so much jabber and the use of so many hours of broadcast time and published pages. An MP, Andrew Mitchell, who has left on his bike through the main exit of Downing Street many times previously, is stopped by a police officer and told to leave by the pedestrian exit. What a petty, jumped-up, officious little jobs-worth! Yes, I mean the police officer, not the MP. What possible justification could he have for doing this apart from asserting his own sense of self-importance? What law was he attempting to uphold? The MP concerned had every right to be angry. But what a waste of time and money over something so ridiculously petty. Endless hours of wasted airtime & pages of newsprint. Yes, police officers deserve respect just like everybody else, including bike-riding MPs going through the gate they’ve always used. But don’t demand respect when you’ve shown none.

Let’s get this straight. The police are civilians in uniform, although they sometimes tend to let the power go to their heads because, after all, power corrupts. In certain cases of course, the very power the police are granted attracts the wrong individuals into the police force in the first place, like Simon Harwood, the one who killed Ian Tomlinson during the G20 protest. They like to see themselves as “The Law” but in fact they are nothing of the kind – they don’t make laws, they don’t test laws and they don’t execute laws. That’s for parliament and the judiciary. The police force I’ve born witness to is a place of a majority of honourable hard working people whose working lives are beset by the effects of officers who get drunk on power, individuals who indulge in corruption or nepotism or violence, and those who engage in rumour-mongering, or coaching & falsifying statements. Worst of all are the ones who protect those guilty of repeated offences, which occurred in the case of Simon Harwood; if he had been dismissed earlier, Ian Tomlinson would be alive today. Although in the minority, these incidents are destroying the reputation of the police.

Don’t make the MP apologise to the police. Make the policeman concerned stand up and justify his own actions, or go and find a new job where he won’t do any more damage. Please… for the sake of the police force and its reputation, as well as for the cohesion of our society. The misuse of power destroys respect, and without respect there is no authority, and in turn no power to effect change.

So here’s a thing… you’re in a damaged vehicle at high speed… there’s an experienced driver at the wheel… and you tear him away from what he does best, replacing him with someone who smiles nicely but has never driven a vehicle before. Does that make sense? No. But nonetheless, it’s what Britain did on the last General Election.

And now? It’s exactly as Gordon Brown predicted. A double-dip recession, followed by stagnation. And what do our fine politicians do? Yes… that’s right… they engage in petty squabbling and summary tinkering which is akin to rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic.

Worst of all, the only thing we seem to be able to talk about is what one MP may or may not have said to a police officer in an argument over which exit to use. Don’t we have more important things to talk about? Like how to save our economy? No. Apparently not. Let’s dwell on something of no importance whatsoever instead, it’s much less scary than having to face the real issues.

But will smoke & mirrors save David Cameron and his little childhood aristocratic friend Gideon “George” Osborne? Yes. Probably. Because the people of Britain have proved that they are actually that stupid.

See also People, Politics & the State of Britain, which I wrote shortly before the General Election.

Misleading search results for non-members entice you to sign up and subscribe

Genealogy is big business. But it’s hard to find some types of records, especially military service records. So imagine my delight when forces-war-records.co.uk came up on a couple of Google searches I was doing for my genealogical research. This sites tantalises you with a seemingly relevant search result and then refuses to show you any information which might verify whether it’s actually relevant until you’ve paid for a subscription.

Just to make it clear what the site shows you: whatever you search for, you get something that looks like it’s a scan of a real paper record with most of the content replaced with “Full Access Member Only”. What you won’t realise unless you perform a few searches is that it’s a strikingly similar image that’s shown regardless of the search, and it’s not a scan of a real record at all. Any details that might help you discern whether it’s a genuine match for your search subject are conveniently not there. That is, they’re not there until you sign up and subscribe.

So… I paid the £7.49 they were asking for a month’s access and, surprise surprise, the records they were alluding to were nothing to do with my research targets. I tried a few searches for some minor divisions of the army during WW2, which yielded nothing at all. I complained immediately and asked for a refund, but just received blocking tactics in reply. So… best advice is, don’t bother with forces-war-records.co.uk. Instead apply to the Ministry of Defence (MOD) at http://www.mod.uk/DefenceInternet/AboutDefence/WhatWeDo/Personnel/ServiceRecords/.

Just to make it clear, I completely get the point about “once you’ve given someone information, you can’t take it back”. It’s just that when you design search results in such a way as to convince someone you’ve actually got a real record, along with lots of convincing sales spiel intimating that whatever you want you’ll find it here… well, that’s going to make customers feel pretty sore when they find that the search results don’t lead to what they expected.

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04 July 2012 16:02:43 by jon
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I didn’’t need 4.5 million records, I needed one or two which you don’’t have, but I couldn’’t find this out until I’’d paid you money. Your payment processor will have to refund me. Thanks for being thieving self-serving swindling cheats.
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04 July 2012 15:43:47 by Support
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Can you let us know where we didn”t supply any service to you?
We gave you 4.5 million records access for the subscribed period: we have supplied the service you paid for.
Regards,
Forces Reunited Support
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Did your customer service agent answer your query in a polite and friendly manner? If not please let us know by sending an email to [email protected]
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04 July 2012 15:43:10 by Support
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Can you let us know where we didn”t supply any service to you?
We gave you 4.5 million records access for the subscribed period: we have supplied the service you paid for.
Regards,
Forces Reunited Support
————————–
Did your customer service agent answer your query in a polite and friendly manner? If not please let us know by sending an email to [email protected]
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04 July 2012 15:20:29 by jon
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Before subscribing I searched for “****** Silver”. Your site showed the merest stub of a record, but I had to subscribe to find out that it was nothing to do with my Father who was in the Army in WW2. In addition you apparently have nothing for, for example, the Army Kinematograph Service.

It’’s OK, I’’ll just complain to my bank & your payment processing company if you can’’t help me.
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04 July 2012 15:16:16 by Support
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Hello, I”m sorry you”ve experienced any problems using our site.
I understand you have asked for a refund: in order for us to consider a refund please state exactly where on our pages we have stated we can provide the information that you have now found we do not have.

We do need to know the exact wording and the page where this is stated, as we can”t consider assumptions.

We”ll then investigate promptly and you”ll receive an apology a refund and we”ll ensure that the error doesn”t happen again.

It is worth noting the following however:

a) Our searches are Free, you are never asked to make any form of payment unless you attempt to open a link to one of the results from your search and view the documents that we have provided in our service to you.

b) You may contact us or ask a question in our forums or read helpful tutorials without being asked for payment.

c) What we do offer for payment is the opportunity to look further into records already searched for, the moment you pay, we give you every record we have on that date (in excess of 4 million as of March 2012) and without any limit as to how many records you can view or how far you can see into each record.
Other sites offer differing levels and credits systems for in depth research often at the same time.
However your membership with us is very simple: we give you everything we have for everyone we have instantly.

d) We make it clear on our advertising and on our front page we have ”x” million records, we make no guarantees to have every record or even specific records, this is why the free basic search is there: it allows you to ascertain for yourself – and then, if you are still unclear our free helpdesk etc will assist.

e) Under the ecommerce (UK Distance Selling) Regulations 2000, the purchase of immediately available online services, there is no ”cooling off” period, as services are provided in full upon payment.

We do not offer a ”find guarantee” or ”a free refund if unsuccessful” type of service, and to be fair, no other similar company does so either.

 

Regards,
Forces Reunited Support

Regards,
Forces Reunited Support
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Did your customer service agent answer your query in a polite and friendly manner? If not please let us know by sending an email to [email protected]
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04 July 2012 13:51:46 by jon
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Having been shown absolutely nothing to verify that search results were relevant to my enquiries before subscribing, after subscribing I found that you have nothing of any interest to my research in your records. I therefore request a refund in full and you may entirely cancel my membership. I think you should stop trying to con people.

A major cockup at NatWest has left thousands wondering where their pay has gone. A telephone announcement greeted disgruntled customers ringing to complain, once their employers had assured them “it’s nothing to do with us”. Apparently something went wrong in some NatWest computer system resulting in no money for an unspecified number of customers including several of my family & friends. NatWest customers are regularly shown no mercy when they go slightly over their limits, but will the bank compensate anyone affected by this debacle? Probably not. Heads should roll…

Update: oh dear, the bad news just got worse and worse. What The Argus said…

As an Amazon Prime member I reckon 30% of my orders are delivered late thanks to one thing – HDNL/Yodel. Goods are despatched on time, yet somehow once they get into the hands of HDNL it all goes wrong. Even the tracking information that comes back to Amazon is confusing, misleading and erroneous. Mind you, HDNL isn’t alone… last Christmas CityLink’s server crash at their Hailsham depot led to thousands of deliveries in my area being woefully delayed. Sometimes these private courier companies even start to make the Royal Mail look good and reliable.

So… over to you… tell me about your experiences with couriers. Which one is the worst?