Parking charges are being introduced at a Gloucestershire beauty spot to help keep up services threatened by severe budget cuts.

Visitors to the 150-acre Crickley Hill country park will pay between £1 and £3 depending on their length of stay.

The county council said the money would safeguard services such as barbecue equipment, picnic tables and toilets.

The charges are due to be introduced next month. BBC.

So it’s going to be cheaper to travel to an out of town shopping centre than it is to go to the nearest open space to Gloucester and Cheltenham – that’s surely wrong?

How much money will this measure raise? A lot more than the cost of maintaining the services at Crickley Hill and another question the National Trust owns a lot of the land at Crickley Hill – does the Trust pay the council to maintain these services – anybody know the answers to these questions?

I guess this fits in with the Tories policy of taxing the poor on one hand and giving to the rich with the other.

So what happens to the money? On the one hand we’re told taxpayers to make £27 billion profit from bank bailouts instead of the £850 billion loss some predicted and on the other we’re told pensions require funding boost as they’ve whopping deficits.

So the government can make money from buying and insuring assets so toxic that they’re guaranteed to lose money whilst our pension funds can’t make money from assets that shouldn’t lose a penny?

Something smells here and it’s the salaries and bonuses of bankers again – whether our pension funds win or lose they still bank huge wads of cash.

Plans to make it easier for English local authorities to abolish outdated by-laws and create new ones will be outlined later by the government.

It will mean councils being able to sweep away bizarre regulations, such as rules on carpet-beating in Blackpool, or frying fish in Gloucester, without first needing Whitehall approval.

Instead, town halls will simply have to consult residents.

Local Government Minister Grant Shapps said it was all about devolving powers.

Gloucester City Council has unearthed 60 old by-laws that it wants to revoke and not replace.

In addition to 1968 regulations on frying fish and “other offensive trades”, it wants to call time on a 1947 by-law regarding the cleaning of ash pits and cesspools.

It also wants to get rid of a 1911 ruling requiring domestic servants to register with the council. BBC.

So when was the last time these by-laws where used, doesn’t the council have better things to do with its money?

For instance as a Gloucester resident I’d not noticed a lack of city chip-shops – the UK’s riddled with archaic by-laws which we have sensibly forgotten.

With the Con-Dems starting the most vicious public spending cuts in living memory it seems ridiculous to waste money addressing what is largely a non-existent problem

Still what else would one expect form a Tory other than an exercise to remove cash from the poor and place it in the pockets of the wealthy – this time its cash for its friends in law – what scam’s next?

Fears were growing in legal circles that it might prove impossible to try Asil Nadir on the multiple fraud allegations that followed the collapse of his Polly Peck Empire 20 years ago.

A lengthy jury trial of the 69-year-old would be a “prosecutorial nightmare” unprecedented in the history of the Serious Fraud Office, legal experts with knowledge of the case warned.

They suggested that there is a strong likelihood that the court would be persuaded by Nadir’s lawyers to throw the case out on the grounds that too much time had lapsed. They also warned that crucial documents may have been lost. Rumours have been circulating that some computer records have been corrupted.

Returning to Britain in a blaze of publicity, Nadir repeated claims that he is battling an “immense injustice and tremendous abuse of power”. His lawyers are expected to stress the practical challenges of undertaking a trial after so long. Simon Bowers, The Guardian.

These fears will turn out to be reality, why otherwise would the odious Nadir return – the real injustice is that a wealthy fraudsters skips the country and then returns a few decades later with the expectation he won’t even face a trial.

Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg has defended the coalition government’s analysis of the Budget.

Mr Clegg said a report by the Institute of Fiscal Studies (IFS), which said the Budget has hit poorest families the hardest, was “by definition partial”.

“It does not include the things we want to do to get people off benefits and into work,” he said during a visit to the Disasters Emergency Committee headquarters in central London. BBC.

So Clegg finds nothing wrong with the IFS report on the budget but he believes the IFS should include things we want to do to get people off benefits and into work – but want isn’t actually doing is it? So how could the IFS include them?

Unsurprisingly Clegg makes no mention of the public spending cuts which are going to put millions out of work. Clegg still wants a partial reading of the facts.

As I’ve said before arguing over whether the emergency budget is regressive or progressive is a moot point – the poor are going to be hit hard by the Com-Dems spending cuts.

It’s all over today’s news:

The coalition government’s first Budget has hit the poorest families hardest, a leading economic think tank has said.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) said the measures announced in the Budget in June were “regressive”.

Its analysis suggests that low income families with children are set to lose the most as a percentage of net income due to benefit cuts announced in the Budget.

The Treasury said it did not accept the “selective” findings of the IFS.

The IFS had already challenged the government’s claim that the Budget was “progressive”.

Its report concluded: “Once all of the benefit cuts are considered, the tax and benefit changes announced in the emergency Budget are clearly regressive as, on average, they hit the poorest households more than those in the upper middle of the income distribution in cash, let alone percentage, terms.” BBC

However, arguing over the budgets effect is something of a moot point as it surely doesn’t take the proverbial rocket scientist to work out that cuts in public spending will hit the poor hardest and the Con-Dems are determined that 80% of the deficit reduction is to come from cuts in public spending.

Still it’s amusing in a macabre way the Com-Dems response

A spokesman for the Treasury said: “The government does not accept the IFS analysis.

“It is selective, ignoring the pro-growth and employment effects of Budget measures – such as helping households move from benefits into work, and reductions in corporation tax.” BBC

What the Con-Dems are ignoring is their public spending cuts which are firmly anti-growth and anti-employment – and how is sticking millions in the pockets of the rich through corporation tax reductions going to help the poor.

Warning this is pretty techie and unless NAS box, mapped drives and online backup mean anything to you I’d skip this.

So you’re still with me – I’ve been using Mozy to back up my system over the Internet.

However I recently purchased a NAS box to relieve the pressure of data on my laptop and to add additional protection by storing my data on mirrored disks.

Now, I assumed, as it turns out incorrectly, that Mozy would backup the NAS box. As always assumption is the mother of cock-up’s and Mozy won’t backup mapped drives – well not unless I purchase a Mozy Pro server licence – which makes online backup ridiculously expensive.

So when my current 2-year-agreement runs out I’d thought I’d use a service that supports mapped drives – we’ll I’ve been looking and it seems a four leaved clover might be easier to find.

So when I read:

IDrive also has some backup features that might be welcome within small and media businesses. Mapped network drives can easily be backed up, and scheduled backups can be set up within the client or by using a web-based management console. Stuart Andrews, PC Pro.

So I checked IDrive’s website and yes IDrive supports backup of mapped and external hard drives and all for $4.95 US dollars a month – so if you’ve a NAS box IDrive looks the affordable online backup service to use.

Lynn on Holiday in France

Sadly Lynn won’t be with us – a victim of breast cancer – it might sound a cliché but I was privileged to have known Lynn – a wonderful person who we all greatly miss.

Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader and deputy prime minister, has admitted that he changed his mind about the timing of spending cuts prior to the general election, despite publicly telling the electorate weeks before the poll that early deep cuts would be “economic masochism”. Hélène Mulholland and Patrick Wintour, The Guardian.

I can’t help feeling the end is nigh for the untrustworthy piece of shit that is Nick Clegg come election time Lid-Dem voters aren’t going to forget his betrayal.

The taxpayer is spending more than £15m a year to send the children of British diplomats and military officers to private schools such as Fettes, Winchester, Roedean and Marlborough.

The subsidies – costing as much as £30,000 a year in school fees – are being paid by the Foreign Office even when the diplomats have returned to the UK and then stay on for years. Patrick Wintour, The Guardian.

Chaminda Jayanetti at A Thousand Cuts points out

The logic – applied both by the current government and its predecessor – is that as these diplomats and officers spend time abroad, it is best for their children to go to boarding school rather than move abroad with their parents. And the perk continues even after the parents return to Britain, because it would not be in the child’s interest to have to change schools midway through their education. It’s about continuity, you see.

Continuity, of course, that is suddenly of no concern to ministers when their housing benefit changes will force families to leave their home and move to a different locality, taking their children with them. A Thousand Cuts.

One rule for us another for the rich.