George osborne

[Bob Dunkley]

I agree there Cappy, i was in New York Queens power station ,and I was bosun on the Norwegian tanker BALDER BORG. we were on charter to Texaco running from anywhere the east coast of the states ,but always back to point 14 (San Fernando) In Trinidad. My best friend a matros (AB) called Helga, called me and said have a look at the new deck hand this guy around 22 yrs old was standing there in a suit and had a briefcase with him.it turned out he was the son of the Norwegian vice consul in New York. His Dad sent him away to toughen him up.1st job I gave him was to get loads of twist (waste) and we had him in the spillage trough under the manifolds cleaning up oil, after a couple of trips down to point 14 and back a few puffs on the Trinidad ganja and a couple of sessions in the blue grotto he was ok .But couldn't take the pace and asked to be put ashore in Sandwich Massachusetts, but the couple of weeks he was there made him more of a man,Helga told me he even lost some of his posh Norwegian accent. The captain told me his dad was impressed and to thank the crew for helping him.

[Bob Dunkley]

I was on the Demoducus Blue funnel ,And I had all of that wisdom, strength, & beauty ,all it done for me was got me a DR for conduct taken out of Taiwan in hand cuffs and put on a plane to Singapore.to re-join, luckily I managed to get a Norwegian ship there instead of re-joining the bluey.

[cappy]

####always said give anyone a chance many suprised me..and that was good to see.....some were pretenders and could waffle for england but couldnt cook it ....i have one or two friends would not take there family into there business ..it doesnt work easily ....you cannot make someone what they are not...they will fail and be weaker for it ..and then of course it will bring into play the blame game ...which is the final step of anyone who cant do the biz.....just my view cappy

[vic mcclymont]

As a parent we all have exercised our influence irrespective of our positions. when it has come to give our kids a lift up in the jobs market.
Regards
vic

[j.sabourn]

Vic I never put any pressure on my son to go to sea. If he had shown that inclination I would have gone all out for him also. However he didn't which I was a bit relieved about. It is only the last time that I saw him he was asking questions about my time at sea, as he is now in his 50"s I have no apprehensions on giving him advice today, just pleasedin made it on his own judgements and not followed me blindly. The bloke Patrick I mentioned yesterday came tome3 years ago as his son wanted to go to sea and he wanted a reference. As he had just been in court for indecent exposure ( urinating up a back lane and full of beer) had to be very careful how I worded it, he was cleared of the court case, however the one I wrote to the seamans union saying he would be an asset to the industry had no effect, so had less influence than what I thought. The union out here was the equivilant to the pool in the uk. Are or were a law unto themselves,so was the pool in the uk. Cheers JWS.

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Vic I never put any pressure on my son to go to sea. If he had shown that inclination I would have gone all out for him also. However he didn't which I was a bit relieved about. It is only the last time that I saw him he was asking questions about my time at sea, as he is now in his 50"s I have no apprehensions on giving him advice today, just pleased he made it on his own judgements and not followed me blindly. The bloke Patrick I mentioned yesterday came to me 3 years ago as his son wanted to go to sea and he wanted a reference. As he had just been in court for indecent exposure ( urinating up a back lane and full of beer) had to be very careful how I worded it, he was cleared of the court case, however the one I wrote to the seamans union saying he would be an asset to the industry had no effect, so had less influence than what I thought. The union out here was the equivilant to the pool in the uk. Are, or were a law unto themselves,so was the pool in the uk. Cheers JWS.

[j.sabourn]

Vic I never put any pressure on my son to go to sea. If he had shown that inclination I would have gone all out for him also. However he didn't which I was a bit relieved about. It is only the last time that I saw him he was asking questions about my time at sea, as he is now in his 50"s I have no apprehensions on giving him advice today, just pleasedin made it on his own judgements and not followed me blindly. The bloke Patrick I mentioned yesterday came tome3 years ago as his son wanted to go to sea and he wanted a reference. As he had just been in court for indecent exposure ( urinating up a back lane and full of beer) had to be very careful how I worded it, he was cleared of the court case, however the one I wrote to the seamans union saying he would be an asset to the industry had no effect, so had less influence than what I thought. The union out here was the equivilant to the pool in the uk. Are or were a law unto themselves,so was the pool in the uk. Cheers JWS. This post has come up 3 times and can't delete the other two jws anyone know how to eliminate 2 unwanted posts, Js

[Des Taff Jenkins]

Hi John.
Was having dinner up the club with my wife, son and daughter on Wednesday, we were talking about that shooting of the Aussie girl, I said it has always been the same in the States, and that when I was in Galveston in 49, me and my mate were going ashore when a police motorbike and side car went screaming past, the bloke in the sidecar had a machine gun, the bloke at the gate said you boys should go the other way there's trouble with the N#$^S, later we could hear firing going off. My daughter said, why were you in Texas? I said picking up a load of wheat: she said but why were you there, you know why, I was at sea, so even your kids forget what you used to do. Mind you she wasn't born then.
Cheers Des

[Bob Dunkley]

my mate told me he was ashore in Mobile Alabama, it was when the blacks had to step off the sidewalk to let a white walk by. The Negro coming towards him didn't give way and they squared up to each other, my mate was pissed so he punched the negro and knocked him out ,went back to his ship . Next morning he woke up and went ashore for a livener ,got the local paper and the front page news was WHITE MAN KNOCKS OUT JOE LOUIS.

[happy daze john in oz]

Like so many we were bombed out during the war. My father was stationed in Gibraltar so mum and I were with aunts and uncles. The dad divorced mum and for the next 8 years she did it hard, working where ever she could to make ends meet for us. She married my step father and things got better.
I went g to sea and spent a lot of money on mum to in some way repay her for all she had done for me.
Married and bought our first house sold it for a profit and then took on two pubs and a restaurant working 8 days a week.
But by working hard we made money and after six years came to Oz.
Found out that if you were prepared to put your back into it there was good money to be made.

We did well and are now in a position where we can do as we please. All the result of working hard and not being afraid to give it a go.
I have discovered that there is a terrible disease out there that effects so many, it is known as W.O.R.K shy syndrome and so many now suffer from it.
But if you do not have this terrible affliction and are prepared to work, sometimes at any task, there is wealth to be made.

After seeing how mum struggled for those years I was determined to never let myself go without from lack of trying.

Sadly so many of todays young, and some old wealthy do not understand the principal of a fair days work for a fair days pay.

[Lewis McColl]

A fair days work for a fair days pay!!!! it would all depend on what is deemed as a fair days pay for the work that you do. So how about Tony Hayward ex CEO of BP did he get a fair days pay for the Deepwater Horizon disaster $17 million +£8million in share options.
Or how about this fella, Under the deal, Goodwin will be paid £342,500 a year, down from the £555,000 set in February when he took out a £2.8m lump sum on which RBS paid the tax. He will keep the lump sum and the £2.6m bonus he was paid in his last year at the company. This is the guy that chopped 18,000 jobs from Nat west bank and bankrupt RBS or nearly to the tune of £49 billion , which the UK tax payer had to pay for the bailout.

So zero hours contracts are they fair, no pension rights, from work & job opportunities my generation (Baby boomer) had it a lot easier than todays generation , jobs were easy to come by , housing was affordable. It is very easy to point the finger at the young today and call them lazy and work shy. Norman Tebbit said get on your bike a lot did even myself when shipping was going down the pan. The collapse of British Manufacturing industry hit the North of the UK a lot harder than the South. Scotland & Wales , the NE&NW of England wiped out and have never recovered. The young people of the North who want to get on have either had to move abroad to Canada, Australia and down to London area to find work. Every one of my sons friends he went to Uni with from the NW of England moved either abroad like my son or down to London. What a wonderful legacy my generation and the older generation have left for our children & grand children. But we have not finished screwing the kids in the UK yet, no not by a long way, we have even ensured they are well and truely shafted by pulling out of the EU. Bank of America have just announced they are moving to Dublin as their European operating Hub, so now the jobs in London will start to disappear.

Some here I know will rip me a new one for saying the above as is their entitlement but I don't think many can pick to many holes in what I have said. Some cannot understand why the Labour party are starting to look more attractive as government, well I don't, my concern is it will not be a Labour government of my choosing, I am a Blairite / not a Brownite/ as Tony Blair said last Sunday the Labour movement has swung to far left and the Conservatives have swung to far right , there needs to be a middle ground. I seriously hope that British Politics looks at what has happened here in France . Macron and his en Marche party has blown the old guard out of the water.

Emmanuel Macron, chosen by voters to succeed François Hollande as President of France, stands in the centre ground of politics. But he is not a traditional politician. *Indeed, he has never held elected office before, having been brought into government as Economics minister by François Hollande. Prior to that he was a banker, with Rothschilds.
* *He has achieved the "impossible" in traditional politics,*reaching the runoff of a presidential election, and then winning it, without the help of any traditional or even new political party.
* *Macron has been presented as a French equivalent of Tony Blair or Barack Obama, a charismatic leader, a militant moderate at the centre ground of politics, an economic liberal with a social conscience, a great speaker, and someone with a massive ambition to succeed. *But while Blair and Obama played by the old rules of politics, working their way up in a party and then moving the party in their direction, Macron has played by the new rules, building up his power base outside the traditional parties – a tactic of the "new politics" that has been up to now more frequently exploited by the far right - as with Nigel Farage in the UK - or the far left - as with Alexis Tsipras in Greece. *
* *Macron's case stands out from the rest in so far as he is neither extreme left nor extreme right but – if the expression is not a contradiction in terms – extreme centre. His political enemies on the far left have taken to calling him, the former investment banker, the candidate of "extreme finance".
* His case also stands out by the way that he rose to power so fast, and without the backing of any political party at all*. *Macron's *machine, "En marche " ( In movement)* is not a party, but a "movement", basically a grass-roots movement supported by hundreds of thousands of people across France who have become disillusioned by traditional politics and politicians. In this respect Macron is* an anti-system politician,* like Donald Trump or Nigel Farage ; but in other more significant ways Macron is a classic product of the French "system".
* * His parents were doctors; and he was educated at one of France's top lycées, the Lycée Henri IV in Paris. He later went on to the ENA (Ecole Normale d'Administration) - the graduate school attended by countless future French top civil servants, leaders of industry* ministers and presidents. Following that he*worked for Rothschilds, before being recruited as economic adviser by President Hollande . In this respect he is very much a product of the system – which is no doubt why he does not believe that the way to change the system is to defy it, but to change it from within. In this he has already made a big start.
* *Creating "En Marche" as a movement, not a party, was a masterstroke. It enabled men and women from other parties, from the Socialists, from the Modem, from the Greens, even from the Republicans, to give support to the Macron cross-party movement, while remaining members of their current party. Examples include former prime ministers Manuel Valls (Socialist) and Dominique de Villepin (Republicans), or Daniel Cohn Bendit (Greens) and François Bayrou (Modem) who all gave their backing to Macron even before the first round of the presidential election, while there were still official candidates from other parties in the running.
* * After his victory in the first round of the Presidential election, he immediately received* backing for the second round from both Republican candidate François Fillon, and Socialist candidate Benoît Hamon – and*was endorsed too by outgoing president François Hollande.

* * Having won the Presidential election, Macron's next challenge is harder: it is to get French voters to elect enough candidates running under the banner of En Marche to give him a working majority in the National Assembly, and form a government of consensus politicians. Success in this is by no means a foregone conclusion as the parties of the left and the right, the Socialists and "La France Insoumise" on the left, and the Republicans and the National Front on the right, are all determined to ensure that this will not happen.
* * But maybe it will: maybe this is what the new politics is really all about. *In the UK, Labour moderates and many Lib Dems are already dreaming of replicating a pro European movement like En Marche to beat the hold of the hard liners and militants over the two main parties.