Hello you Pretty Things.  I’m having a Bowie moment.  What a fabulous album, Hunky Dory.  I was going to pick a track to play but one quick glance and there was nothing I wanted to leave out.  Now *that’s* a compliment for any artist.

As the opening line from WordPress started out, Hello World?  Waiting for a response, an echo….  I’m in a bit of a whirl at the moment. Who’m I kidding, I’m always in that kinda whirl.  I am so in awe of the universe, of planet earth, of mankind, of – right at this moment – David Bowie.  I’m musing on the amazing accident which is Life on Earth or, indeed David, Mars – now that we know there are actual living (not dormant) organisms in ice we can pretty much assume there really is life – on Mars.

Back here on planet Earth it’s the same old same old.   The Baroness, Patricia Mawhinnie, Scotland gets away with blatant lies and perjury.  Quite a coup for your ordinary mortal, let alone one elevated to the breathtaking heights of a Baroness and number one legal authority in the little country of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland – yes, the Attorney General no less.  She who makes the laws and administers them.  She who personally supervised the passage of a Daily Mail Edict that Thou Shall Not Employ an Illegal Immigrant on pain of Dea….. or ten thousand pounds fine.   And in order to make sure that you can prove that you really did check out your employee’s passport she required that thou shalt take a photocopy of same by way of “evidence”.  So the lady employs a cleaner, at the princely sum of £6/hour in central London – no seriously!  The cleaner from Tonga claims The Lady never asked to see a copy or her passport.  The Lady says she did – and that it was fine.  Bowie just laughed (Andy Warhol).  What she cops to is failing to take that all important photocopy so that we didn’t have to take her word for it – “evidence”.  So she takes a 5k fine.  Let’s pause there a moment.  The maximum fine is 10k.  If you are the highest law officer in the land, the very highest law officer who actually helped draft that very legislation, who helped push it through the parliamentary process and when you completely and utterly flout your own law (in pursuit of a good cleaner at a knock-down rate) you only get half, that’s *HALF* the full fine – tell me, what the fsck have you got to do to get the whole fine?

I guess I have to say thank you.  Because in all the forty years I’ve been employing people, black, white, pink, purple and green I have never stooped to the task of demanding a valid travel document, to wit, a passport.  Call me old fashioned.  I figure this person is walking around the place looking for work.  If they’re good I’ll hire them.  If they show promise I’ll hire them.  It may be me but I figured that I paid the government to make sure that the people wandering around at liberty are those that The Great Ones deemed were fit and proper people to be doing so.  I never figured that having paid you to do the friggin job that I should have to do it for you!  I guess they want to convince me of the adage I’ve been trying to break from all my life – If you want the job doing well, do it yourself.  How about, “I paid you to do it now fsck off and leave me to earn your wages for you.”

So, just for the record – one I am completely proud of and I am willing to defend by throwing myself on the mercy of that part of the judiciary that has to pick the bones out of the nonsense that BS Mrs Mawhinney and her friends have cooked up in the last 13 years and using, guess what, the Baroness Scotland Defence.  “If it please M’lord, as this is no more serious than forgetting to pay the congestion charge why don’t you send a message to HMG that tells them to fsck off an leave me the fsck alone?” …wages,  earn, your, etc, etc…. – I have never asked any employee for a passport and I never shall.

But I digress.  If that beating on the door is who I think it is maybe I shouldn’t have but then I’m getting old and might die soon so why on earth would I give a proverbial shit?

So, back to The Bewley Brothers, the thing about this BS, this Lady Scotland…it’s the lies, don’t you know.  Yes M’am, I say that you lie, that you tell big fat porkies and, worse than that, you are willing to sacrifice this poor £6/hour exploited Tongan woman in pursuit of your deadly desire to cling on to your power and to avoid the ignominy of being found out to be not just incompetent but a charlatan, a fraud, a play at being lawyer who can’t even abide by the laws you had the unique privilege to frame and foist upon the rest of us.  You are a liar, M’am BS.  But I pause.  There is the faintest possibility that I do you a disservice.  That I mistake such gross incompetence, being entirely unthinkable in one who holds such high office, and that you really did, despite all the “evidence” and contradictory testimony call for, sight and review this woman’s passport.  So I have to ask how, as a trained lawyer, as someone who stands as the highest law officer in the land, as someone who stands not only in judgment on the rest of us but someone who actually determines how we shall be judged by constructing the very laws that we shall abide by, how, how did you not notice when you examined this woman’s passport that it had expired two month’s previously?

You see, that’s the bit I don’t get.  I mean, you and your colleagues were so suspicious of the average employer that you figured the only way you could take them at their word was to require them to produce a photocopy of the employee’s passport, right?  What was that meant to be a photocopy of, exactly?  The outside cover?  There’s only one page that I know of that anyone cares about.  That would be the page which contains the issue and expiry dates, amongst other things.  So, let me get this right because I would hate to falsely accuse you of anything.  Perhaps I could assist you best by offering you a multiple choice question, the traditional preference of the terminally dim.

Is it that:

1. You’re a despicable liar who will say anything and risk any consequence to any “lesser” mortal if it serves your own ends?

2. You are so freakin dim that having followed the letter of your own law, you did indeed demand to see a passport, checked it, failed to notice that it was two months beyond it’s expiry date and having done so omitted to photocopy the offending document – despite the fact that better than any living soul on this earth you knew that this was an absolute requirement punishable in the alternative by a fine of ten thousand pounds – or for those in especially privileged positions who are supposed to know better, a mere five thousand……?

3. A combination of the above?

4. Shurely shome mishtake?

BS?

I think we should be told.