Once I found out which Church of England parish I lived in I could look up the figures. Poverty in England, parish by parish. It seems we are not doing well in the Parish of All Saints. Some results -
We stand at no. 12,635 out of 12,775 parishes no.1 being the least deprived. So there are 140 that are worse off than us.
Percentage of children living in poverty - 42
Percentage of pensioners living in poverty - 37
Percentage of working age residents living in poverty - 27
Percentage of people living in social housing - 36
Percentage of families with one parent - 35
Percentage of residents aged over 65 years - 11

This last would probably be higher if life expectancy were not below the mean:
Male - 69 years
Female - 75 years
plus a large immigrant presence, on the whole younger than the host population:
Percentage of non-white and non-British residents - 32

All is revealed here.

There are 60,000 people in my home town living below the poverty line. The demand on food banks throughout our United (but not all in it together) Kingdom is growing too rapidly for them to keep up. Thank you Cameron and Smirks, and a special thank you to Mr. Ed Milliband who couldn't give a shit about the poor. But keep chucking money at the Labour Party, union brothers and sisters, one day they might do something for you. No, I take that back. As long as you're chucking money at them they don't need to do anything for you - do they now?
Here's a little snippet about a food bank in Hull.

The film-maker, who appears in the film is called Sean McAllister, and he's a local gent. I caught the full film from which the clip is excerpted last week. It was worth a look. I did a search for Sean M. and found that he's a prize-winning documentary maker. I'd actually heard of one of his films, "The Liberace of Baghdad". It didn't sound like my kind of thing so I gave it a miss when it was shown on the telly. Too bad.
I asked my elder son if he knew about Sean M. and it turned out he'd been at school with him, though son is a few years younger. Small world, as some of us who prefer a small world are wont to declare.

By the way, Cod City* is still going for the 'city of culture' white elephant. Our elected unrepresentatives are spending £11 million trying to win the competition for it. I reckon about £6 million of that will go on 'consultation fees' and junkets for the bureaucrats who bar the way to the glittering prize.

*The cod are long gone, but the memory lingers on. Especially for the people who have never been here.

3.8 million children in the UK don't own a book, according to a survey conducted by, or for, the National Literacy Trust*.
Well, maybe some of them have a library ticket. They could always read online, but most probably don't.
But, as Chris H. pointed out earlier, there's more to books than just reading matter.

*Never heard of them, but I stick to my old caveat; never trust an organisation with the word 'Trust' in its name.

Addendum: I have heard of this mob. They're the ones who recruited Premier League footballers to pretend that they can read, and name their favourite tome. It turns out that these jokers are all childrens' authors by proxy, and their favourite books turn out to be the ones they get royalties for putting their names to.
I was going to suggest that these moneygrubbers would sell their own grannies. But maybe they already have ... Wayne Rooney's a collector.

According to a BBC poll 61 percent of the population support Wednesday's public sector workers' strike. So all the government lies are not working.
A missing figure from this survey is the percentage of the population opposed to the strike. It can't be high, as the BBC tells us that the strongest opposition is among the over-65s, but then tells us that just under half of that group support the strike.
The survey results, which must have come as a disappointment to the BBC, don't get a big splash. Slithy Gove's attack on the unions is higher up the running order. That's the little chap formerly known as 'Red Mike' Gove. The BBC's diffidence won't prevent the "Bolshevik Broadcasting Corporation" tomfoolery being aired by the hominids on the government benches.
The Conservatives are making noises about increasing the restrictions applied to the legally most restricted unions in Europe. Personally I hope they make unions illegal. Then we'll be forced to build working class organisations that cannot get into bed with the class enemy.

Another statistic: people admitted to hospital at the weekend have a ten percent higher chance of dying. This is being blamed on lack of staff on duty.
The government's going to have to come out fighting on this one if it wants the NHS to continue shedding workers and closing down hospitals.
We may soon hear that the research that led to this result is based on out of date figures, and matters have improved markedly.
Or we may be informed that the research was flawed.
Or someone at the Department of Health will declare that these figures are intolerable and action must be taken to bring them down.
Apart from a search for a method of massaging the figures nothing will be done.

Every time I've gone to wikipedia recently there's that unshaven, needy face giving me the Evil Eye. I was going to boycott the site for a while until I learned that there's an unobtrusive x in the upper right-hand corner. Press that and the bad screws are gone for good (I pray).
I've been trying to find out how much the randroid Wales is worth. No luck so far, apart from his claim that he's only worth $1 million. Nobody believes him.

While searching for the information I found this site, and learned that I'm the 655,895,612th richest person in the world. This places me in the top 11% globally. Still, Cameron and Osbourne are working on that. Third World, here we come!

73% of us approve of "peaceful civil disobedience (such as people staging sit-ins and occupying shops)" as a tactic in the struggle against the asset-stripping of the UK.

(I learned this reading Mick Hall's blog)

I am concerned that the military action in Libya could result in Britain being dragged into a prolonged conflict like the Iraq war

Agree: 71 per cent
Don't know: 5 per cent
Disagree: 24 per cent

A little snippet I heard on the radio the other day -
51% of the world's scientists are working on military projects. Keeps 'em out of mischief I suppose.

Where am I?
I was just doing a search for something I'd written and was pointed to a site called "Technorati". I'd seen the name on blogs but didn't know what it was. I assumed it was some sort of technical aid or advice site.
Anyway on the page I found a couple of references to my blog, but also an intriguing piece of information (or misinformation?). It seems that someone or something has a list of blogs in order of popularity, and I stand at number 2,506,937 on the list. Phew, the dizzy heights! My head is reeling.
The missing datum, of course, is the number of blogs being tracked, as the procedure is called. I looked Technorati up on wikipedia to find a figure of circa 27.7 million pre-2006. It seems that after Technorati claimed to be tracking another 56 million facebook blogs things get a little murky.
So what am I to make of all this? Nothing I suppose. It's just that it's better not to know that you are a statistic in yet another database, otherwise you begin to ask questions like "Why?". Well somebody reads this stuff, if only one or two people, but if a person starts to think about that a person is liable to get a little self-conscious.

Listening to the News Quiz today I heard something disturbing. A survey has revealed that one third of people in this country believe that God created the world less than 10,000 years ago, while less than a quarter believe in evolution.
I know that stupidity and gullibility are on the rise here, a result of an education system designed to produce unquestioning consumers rather than well rounded citizens, but I didn't realise that the rot had penetrated so deeply.
My only consolation is that I don't place much faith in surveys or in the people who conduct them, you pay your money and they produce your result. It's important to know on whose behalf the survey was conducted, but those figures ...

An interesting statistic on the radio (BBC Radio4) this morning; 50% of respondents to a survey on religion in Britain stated that they didn't believe in God. Now where are their opinions heard on the airwaves? I've listened to homilies from practitioners of Buddhism, Judaism and Sikhism on the BBC, but if you lumped the adherents of all those religions together they wouldn't amount to 10% of the population. Naturally I would expect no other policy from the BBC, voice of the established order. Shut us out, it makes no difference, our numbers increase.

I read that 80% of news coverage in our press is lifted straight from press releases. That explains a lot. Why get off your arse when the PR agencies, spin doctors and ad-men will force-feed you like a Strasbourg goose? Investigative journalism - that's one of those old expressions surviving in the vocabularies of ancients like me. Habeas Corpus is another.

Big Brother is watching, but not listening
Everyone has an opinion, here's mine.
Racism, yes. Note that the weasels of Channel 4 state that there has been no OVERT racism on their piece of shit programme. Translation - yes, there's racism, but we're not seeing it.
Then there's this word "culture" that's suddenly become fashionable. Not racism, it's a clash of cultures. Cobblers! Haven't the BNP been using this expression lately in reference to their anti-Islamic propaganda? It's not racism, it's cultural. Pure coincidence that 95% of British Muslims are Asian in origin.
I have to confess, shamefacedly that I was one of the alleged million extra viewers who tuned in on Tuesday evening to see what was going on. The answer - nothing. I've always avoided the Big Brother bearpit/cesspit before, and it seems I haven't missed much. I kept switching back and forth but all I saw was people sitting around looking bored; all I heard was a hissing noise intended, I think, to prevent the public hearing what was being said (covert racism?).
Neither Enemadol, the makers, nor Channel 4 are expressing any regret, contrition or intent to reform. Ofcom says it's up to Channel 4 to listen to the public. Is that it, Ofcom? What a parcel of moral bankrupts. All the public can do is switch off en masse. We won't miss anything. The liveliest parts get shown on the news.

The above statement that 95% of BritishMuslims are Asian is just a guess on my part, but it can't be far wrong. I daresay it's as reliable as the pollsters' count of Big Brother (Big Bully) viewers.
Tuesday's Guardian had a good headline; "One in five Home Office statistics are unreliable, says department head." Confusing, n'est-ce pas? Leaving aside that it should read, one in five ... is unreliable, it has to be a leg-pull. The head of the department of unreliable statistics issues a statistic on the unreliability of its statistics. It's like the Cretan claiming all Cretans are liars, or Pascal (was it he?) claiming that all generalisations are false, including his generalisation about generalisations. That way lies madness.
Luís Buñuel on statistics -
"It is impossible to read a single page in a newspaper without finding at least a dozen of them, most of which are blatantly false." Was he exaggerating? Was he generalising?
I'm no fan of Buñuel. I find his output rather seedy, but I'll except "Los Olvidados" and "Nazarín", to avoid accusations of generalisation.