BRITAIN IS NOW A TOTALITARIAN STATE

I found this quote on the  Fassit  website today. It may sound like strong stuff. A little exaggerated, you might think. But I can tell you it is true because I have seen it all in action and experienced it directly myself.

 

Social, Services and Family Law in Britain today is evil and destructive. The system is populated by perverts and wierdos as well as just plain incompetent fools – particularly within the Social Services. No wonder the youth of the country are becoming more dysfuntional on a daily basis.

 

Britain has become a rotten society, as the Bishop said to the press today. He is on the front pages of at least some of the newspapers.

 

Here is the quote.

 

‘We live in a country where at present a minority of gutless, ignorant and cruel individuals stand more unaccountable than ministers in our own government. An unaccountable minority making lives hell for thousands of families and their precious children each year.

An unaccountable minority who escape prosecution for their perjurous crimes committed against innocent families in unaccountable family courts wrapped in secrecy.  Unaccountable legal representatives who pretend to care right at the start only to deceive and ignore nearing the end.

These are draconian laws, but made worse when twisted by local authority officials using a safety net of unaccountability. Abolish all secrecy in the Family Courts and let the daylight of open inquiry illuminate their work.” Fassit

It is lawyers that make the law nasty. Take a look at this.

http://www.lawyersorgraverobbers.com/

Supermarkets – The Modern Robber Barons

I was standing at the cashier in Sainsburys the other day trying to persuade the cashier to swipe my Sainsburys car park card so I could leave with my shopping.

 

She was refusing to do it because you have to spend a minimum of ten pounds on your shopping, otherwise Sainsburys charge you ten pounds for their car park instead. I had only spent about five pounds. Not enough for the greedy Sainsburys robber barons.

 

Actually, I hadn’t even wanted to spend even five pounds really as I had only been forced to return to the supermarket to exchange shorts I had bought for my nine year old son that had been incorrectly labelled by Sainsburys. They were the wrong size for him; therefore, utterly useless unless I went back and swopped them for the right size. That was the only reason I had had to go to Sainsburys in the first place.

 

So they were going to charge me ten pounds for the privilege of correcting their error of sloppily labelling their clothes, forcing me to return.

 

Anyway, I  was politely insistent about refusing to pay a ten pound car parking charge for less than a hour in the Sainsburys car park just in order to visit their supermarket. So the cashier gave my parking card to a passing supervisor and asked her to go to customer services, where they could swipe it as they had ‘the authority’ to do it and the cashier didn’t have ‘the authority’.

 

Isn’t bureaucracy a wonderful thing ?

 

As I heaved a sigh of relief at managing to  have the problem sorted out, there was a sudden shriek from a harridan dressing in the Sainsburys’ uniform. “You’re banned from the supermarket”, she shrieked at the top of her voice.

 

A hundred people around me at the busy tills froze as she slammed her hand on the panic button and shouted for security men to throw me out of the supermarket.

 

Can you believe it ?

 

I can’t !

The Nasty Incompetence of Social Services

 

Hearing the dreadful news yesterday of two children murdered by their schizophrenic mother because of the nasty incompetence of Social Services reminds me that I too have been the victim of social services. 

My nine year old son’s Mother became mentally ill and was treated abominably by social services, as was our son.  

Mum is now too ill to be with my son and I ( almost certainly because of what social services did to her), so that is why I am a single father.

Social services did everything possible to wreck our family – and they succeeded too. They were also dishonest and utterly incompetent. They blatantly lied and made every effort to prevent me from having my son.

 

They told me they were considering having my son adopted rather than let me have him and openly used this as a threat to me, using the words ‘if I didn’t co-operate with them’.

 At no stage was I ever accused of being a ‘bad’ or incompetent parent. In fact the Family Court specifically praised me, and even social services from time to time gracelessly said I was a ‘good’ father because they were forced to.  

It is a an extraordinary tale. I am prevented from writing about it because of the law relating to Family Courts.

 

This  has made me even more determined to write about what I legally can in relation to Social Services.

 

Watch this space.

 

Meanwhile, have a read of this Daily Mail article about how awful social services are.

Social Services Abusing Children

 

THE LABOUR GOVERNMENT IS A THIEF

 

Talking about bailiffs, I have just had a visit from one of these idiots trying to recover a parking fine.

 

This is the first time he has called about this parking fine, originally for the standard £40. The note he left says his fee for calling just this once is £595.34p.

 

I happen to know the fee is a complete fiction and a blatant attempt at fraudulently extorting money from me, and entirely illegal. 

 

The last time I actually saw a bailiff I told him to p**s  off because I wasn’t going to tell him who I was – whether I was actually his intended target or not. 

 

I snarled at him he was a parasite. He seemed to come over all hurt and aggrieved, almost tearful, and said ‘You don’t have to get personal. I’m only doing my job.’ 

I replied no decent human being would doing that job; ie going around extorting money from perfectly ordinary law abiding people this  authoritarian Labour  Government brands as criminals for simply using their cars.

 

Then reason I know the fee is illegal is because I  have learnt about it at the CONSUMER ACTION GROUP forums – very useful. Do have a look. There is bound to be something it can help everyone with.

 

 

As a currently unemployed full time single parent my only income is about £100 per week of state benefits. Parking fines of £40 for completely ludicrous circumstances, rapidly escalating by hundreds of pounds is a monstrous act of extortion by the government. It is time we all did something about it.

 

What about everyone simply refusing to pay any parking fines at all. That would sort the thieves out because there would just be absolutely nothing they could do about it except change the law.

 

This government is rapidly making Britain into a totalitarian state – just like those wacky dictatorships like Burma etc.

 

 

Supermarkets Rip Us off

 

 

 

I noticed in the supermarket today that the only loose new potatoes were Jersey Royals at £1.99p a kilogram. There were no other loose new potatoes at all.

 

When I asked an employee at Sainsburys why they  were not still selling the Cyprus new potatoes they had been selling for weeks at less than one pound per kilo – that’s half the price of the Jersey Royals – he said that Sainsburys always stop selling the cheaper Mediterranean new potatoes in order to force customers to pay twice the amount of money for the much more expensive Jersey Royals when they come onto the market.

 

Is that a rip off or what ?

 

If you want to buy loose new potatoes at the price of less than one pound a kilo that you have been already paying for weeks, Sainsburys deliberately make sure you have to pay twice as much for the Jersey Royals, which are exactly the same type of potato. It is just that one lot is grown in the Mediterranean and are cheaper, and the other lot are grown in Jersey and are more than twice the price.

 

Paying two pounds in money for one kilo of potatoes is ridiculous. Many types of meat can cost only about two pounds per kilo weight. Ordinary chicken, for one.

 

We must be really stupid to let supermarkets get away with this kind of rip off manipulation. They are just plain nasty.

 

That reminds me. I was in Waitrose supermarket the other day and I saw their ‘Select Farm’ chickens at £1.93 per kilo. The size was described as 4-5 servings and the weight was 1.792 kilos. Then I saw a row of identical chickens at £2.90 odd per kilo. Except they weren’t exactly the same size; they were all one serving size smaller and described as 3-4 servings each.

 

When I asked a member of Waitrose staff why identical chickens (excepting one type being one serving larger) were two entirely different prices, one type being more than fifty per cent more expensive, they said they larger size chickens were ‘on offer’ and the smaller and more expensive chickens were not.

 

What do you make of that, then ?

 

Could it be even more manipulation. It’s a really good way of completely confusing customers and detaching any concept of prices for anything from reality.

 

Do you think this is why supermarket do it ?

 

JUDGE VOICES HIS CONTEMPT FOR BAILIFFS

MONDAY, 19 MAY 2008

DRAKES GROUP and a FORM 4 COMPLAINT.

This complaint was made to Middlesborough County Court in February 2008 by a disabled lady, who is confined to a wheelchair.

The bailiff’s certificate was revoked and compensation awarded to the lady.

A parking ticket had been incurred and a bailiff from Drakes Group ( now Marston Group) had visited her home early in the morning and clamped her car BEFORE knocking at the door. The car was clearly displaying a disabled blue badge and the warrant in the possession of the bailiff was in the name of Motability Finance. It was therefore clear to the bailiff that the vehicle in question was a disabled vehicle. The bailiff charged £553.36.

The bailiff also maintained that he had visited the house the previous afternoon which was denied by this lady as the family run a business from their premises with staff. Drakes Group, in attempting to prove that a previous visit had taken place provided satellite navigation print outs which the court dismissed as they only proved the bailiff had been in the vicinity….not at the house.
At the hearing, the Judge was critical of the bailiff, but in particular was most critical of the company; Drakes Group Ltd for the following:

RE: THE CAR BEING CLAMPED BEFORE KNOCKING AT THE DOOR.

“There appears to have been absolutely no reason to do that except to bump up Drakes’ fees…..which had already been bumped up, it seemed to me, by a heavily unjustified charge the day before”.

RE: THE ALLEGED VISIT THE PREVIOUS DAY.

“I regard it as significant that there is no copy of the letter left (the previous day). I am told that this is a system of Drakes, but Mr X is the only person who can carry the can for an unsatisfactory system.”

RE: THE CHARGES OF £553.36

“Looking at that document ( breakdown of fees) which contains five figures, there is a maximum of one which is accurate , all the others are excessive”. He also said that “it seems to me that Mr X is trained to seek excessive amounts by is employers”. The Judge confirmed that the “correct figure would probably have been something under £200 made up of the original £95 (PCN), letter and two visits if one took a favourable view about the first visit, certainly NOT £553.36″

RE: SUMMING UP, THE JUDGE SAID THE FOLLOWING:

“All in all, this is a disgraceful performance, which I find particularly disturbing since it seems to be in accordance with the policy of the employers Drakes Group Ltd. I find it a matter of considerable regret that there is no body which governs the company rather that the individual bailiff. If there had been, it seems to me that Drakes Group ought to be taken before it and deprived of any licence it had”.

“It seems to me that it is perfectly clear that firms of this sort ought to be licenced and ought to operate under a statutory code of conduct rather than regarding themselves as……having a licence to rip off debtors”.

Posted by Bailiffadviceonline

Perhaps I’d Better Start At The Beginning

The beginning isn’t so easy to find, though. Where is it ? Is the beginning where my wife suddenly, out of the blue, announced she was leaving me to run off with another man ? Or is the beginning of this story when I met my second partner and Mother of my  Son. Or does it really begin when my second partner started going mad. 

Yes, that’s mad. Stark staring bonkers. It was schizophrenia. It trashed my life and left me a single parent, which is where we come to now.

 

This blog is about this story. And boy, oh boy are there some gruesome details.

County Court Judge Keen On Unnecessary Home Repossession

 

This is a letter sent to an investigative  journalist who contacted me yesterday about mortgage repossessions.

 

It occurred to me it might be useful to clarify a couple of points after talking to you about repossession issues yesterday.

 

My impression of the County Court repossession hearing where the judge appeared to be a bit outrageous is that it was an extremely powerful example of the extreme difficulties facing people with mortgage difficulties. The court was deliberately unhelpful, or perhaps one might say it acted completely incorrectly and in a biased manner.

 

I would like to let you know that the hearings at the court are taped and the tapes kept for two years. I had always thought I ought to get hold of that tape, but that chore slid into oblivion as I have been busy with more pressing priorities. I might suggest you see a transcript because it might give you a juicy morsel.

 

If my memory serves me correctly ( and I think it does) a transcript of that tape (which I am entitled to acquire) will show the judge being literally ridiculous. 

 

I had already been given a six month stay by the court and this judge terminated this at three months solely  on the grounds I had broken the terms of the previous court order of three months prior by taking more than the (entirely arbitrary 28 days) to make a payment from a pension.

 

I did not technically break the terms actually, simply because I had followed correct legal procedure by going back to the court and asking for more time as it was entirely out of my hands how long the pension company took.

Legal procedure would demand that a hearing of the application for more time take place and whatever the result of that hearing would take the case forward to different terms to the previous order. That is it’s purpose – to vary a previous court order. In this case to request more  time. In legal parlance I think it is called a ‘directions’ hearing. Of course a judge might decide to let the status quo of the original hearing stand.

 

The result of my application was that it was heard by a judge in my absence who instructed that it was unnecessary for me to be heard in person as he decided and directed that as the case was to be heard at a ‘review’ hearing already scheduled for a few weeks hence at the three month mark, that this application of mine for more time be heard at that review hearing.

 

The upshot, therefore, is that the Judge at the review hearing entirely mismanaged the case with a clearly documented and vicious bias against me  and simply steamrollered over me, which deserves exposure. I have heard similar things are experienced in other repossession cases. The courts are not always sympathetic as is commonly thought.

 

After the judge found this technical excuse to terminate my previously ordered  six month stay and (spuriously) order repossession, he then addressed the other issue he was obliged to consider which is that the court can order a stay of the lender’s repossession request if it looks likely the householder might be able to regain sufficient income in the reasonable future (can legally be at any time within the lifetime of the mortgage, therefore potentially a very long time period of grace available) to maintain the mortgage.

 

The judge ignored (completely declined ) my evidence of forthcoming work which I was waving in my hand and he proceeded to make a superciliously dismissive  speech about how he thought it was not feasible or possible for anyone to earn an adequate income from freelance journalism, or freelance public relations consultancy. He would therefore order repossession.

 

The lender’s solicitor was surprised at the behaviour of the judge. We  had a lengthy conversation about it after the case.

 

As it happened I then proceeded to do some freelance writing work for two very large multinational companies.

I would like to let you know, however, that the combined effect of all the circumstances surrounding my failing attempts to fight off repossession now left me with impossible levels of stress, the net result of which was I could barely engage in work at all.

The curious thing, is that doing the bit of work I did was an absolute pleasure involving no stress at all despite it looking as though it ought to.

I was obliged to engage in re-mortgaging at that time to avoid looming eviction as the lender always kept me expecting  to receive an eviction notice at any time. I was always at three weeks notice of eviction for the next several months. I never really knew if I was actually going to be in the house in about three weeks time. It was horrendous.

 

With benefit of hindsight, I can now see that my ability to work has been seriously compromised by extreme stress since these events. My doctor insisted I acknowledge that as I was ignoring it. I am currently fighting a daily battle to get past the constant stress to get things done.

 

The stress has produced physical illness and it looks to be the likely cause of the failure of the abdominal surgery previously mentioned. This seriously compromises me and exposes me to an increased risk of cancer. The whole point of the surgery was to diminish the risk of cancer as a pre-cancerous state already existed. I am now imminently faced with an unnecessary repeat of that abdominal surgery involving five holes stabbed in my abdomen and a subtle re-arranging of stomach, oesophagus and diaphragm in what is called a fundoplication operation. Not fun.

 

You might understand it if I say that I would wish to sit down and spend at least eight hours a day trying to bring in an do the freelance work, but that I am surrounded by a sea of chaos, led principally by the artificial pressures brought about by the lender.

 

This demands that I give priority to the lenders aggravations instead of getting on  with the business of actually earning a living – which I am eminently qualified to do.

 

The other issue about repossession which it might be helpful to highlight is this.

 

Whenever a householder becomes involved in arrears, the only people he can ever have access to to discuss his mortgage and try and ‘negotiate’ with are very junior ‘call centre’ employees, often with very limited education and mental abilities, no ability or authority to ‘negotiate’ anything at all, and almost always with no communications skills at all.

 

Because these people simply  follow a specific ‘script’ and  standard list of questions, there is no meaningful negotiation possible. All they want is your answers to their standard list of questions. The minute you deviate from that and try and tell them what you need to tell or ask them they tend to interrupt and talk over you, rapidly reducing any conversation to a load of nonsense; the only upshot of which is reducing you to a harassed, threatened mess. 

You always feel threatened. They nearly always speak in a hectoring manner which tends to leave you a juddering heap in the best of circumstances. The displays of ignorance can be breathtaking.

 

When I asked one of these people if I could have a moratorium on my mortgage she sort of screeched ‘wotsat then’. I was speaking to a financial institution which didn’t even understand the language of banking. How can you sensibly negotiate anything with people like that ?

 

As all the lending institutions appear to have identical systems, quite indistinquishable from each other, the Council of Mortgage Lenders claim that lenders do everything possible to be helpful and avoid repossessions is utter rubbish. It seems, rather, to be quite the reverse, a blind steamroller of systemised encouragement of repossessions where many of them could easily be avoided.

 

strugglingsingledad 

 

 

MORTGAGE LENDERS DESTROYING OUR LIVES

My nine year old son and I are currently going through the repossession process yet again. We will shortly be homeless this time.

 

My son’s Mother became ill when he was a baby and was unable to look after him or even be with us. The building society were about as obstructively unhelpful as you could imagine and insisted on re-possession even though I had another mortgage already arranged to repay them with. Their legal executive was actually abusive just prior to the court hearing, spitting venomously ‘ We will get you thrown out of your house at this hearing regardless of what you say’.

 

In fact the court stayed repossession as the new mortgage was going to be in place within a day or two. But nothwithstanding that, the building society had completely ignored that and were obviously expecting the court to do so as well. They were simply intent on maximising aggression. It was appalling !

 

That was my first repossession experience in about 1999.

 

The second was last year. It is a long story, but the essence of it was I was completely misled by the building society when I had told them I was trying to struggle back into work as a single parent and somehow manage to look after my son as well.

 

The building society told me not to worry about paying the mortgage for the time being (half was being paid by the state anyway as I was an unemployed single parent) and then they immediately sent penalty charge notices and began the re-possession process, ignoring the fact they had said I did not have to worry about the mortgage for the time being.

 

Again, their behaviour was outstandingly aggressive and obstructive and there was absolutely no consideration of my  (extreme) circumstances whatsoever. They forced me to cancel vital, life saving surgery I was scheduled for and then, later, when recovering from surgery, they forced me to physically appear in court in a state of virtual collapse from what had been very recent (still in recovery period ) major surgery.

 

I was precisely seven minutes late for the hearing (the recent major abdominal surgery had made it almost impossible to walk)  and it (along with several other cases) had already been dealt with, repossession being granted by the court for several other people’s properties in separate cases, all within that seven minutes.

 

I managed to reverse that weeks later and was subsequently given a six month stay by the court, provided I cashed in a pension to extract cash to pay off the arrears  of only about £3000 to date.

 

When the pension company took  a long time to process their documentation, I asked the court for an extension of the 28 days they had given me to come up with the money. The court said, not to worry, no need to make that application as we will be seeing you at the end of the first three months anyway for a ‘review’.

 

At this three month review the judge said I had broken the court order giving me 28 days to pay the arrears and although he acknowledged that  it had not been my fault, it being entirely the fault of the slow processing by the pension company, he was ordering repossession then and there and not giving the remaining three months of the six month period granted me. I had, in fact already paid off the arrears by this point. This was an abuse of process by the court, and quite wrong.

 

So there was a repossession order granted when the arrears had been completely paid off and no arrears were actually outstanding at that point. That judge also sanctimoniously told me that he was of the opinion it was not possible to earn a living as a freelance public relations consultant or journalist (both of which I have spent my entire life doing) and he would therefore be obliged to order repossession as he could see no prospect of the mortgage being paid by virtue of me earning a living. This despite me showing a document offering me work.

 

How wacky is that. The judge had every legal excuse he might need to be lenient and helpful towards me, but instead he acted out the unbelievable aggression of the lender. 

 

I was finally sent an eviction notice giving me two weeks to vacate the property or the bailiffs would attend and throw me out at the end of that two week period.

 

I still had about £100 000 thousand equity in the house and the annual arrears would only be £6000. So the building society could have waited almost indefinitely for me to sort myself out without any risk to them getting all their mortgage repaid.

 

Meanwhile I had found another mortgage. I was a ’sub-prime’ customer, which means that regular building societies can pretend they cannot lend to you as you are deemed ‘high risk’. 

 

But, lo and behold, a lender which just happens to be a subsidiary owned by the same ordinary high street lender is willing to lend you a mortgage  incurring vast expense in the manner of ‘financial churning’ and terms on the new mortgage which almost guarantee you will be repossessed again and lose tens of thousand of pounds in penalty fees and possibly all the remaining equity in the house as it is like to be auctioned off for less than market value.

 

In the process of obtaining these mortgages I have experienced blatant deviousness from brokers. The most obvious being they knew perfectly well I was on state benefits and without a proper income and yet they advised which figure to pretend was my income etc and they knew the contents of the mortgage application were a fiction as I had no choice but to follow their blatantly dishonest instruction in order to obtain a mortgage. 

 

They had frequently made it plain that they arranged many falsified applications from desperate people like myself. They also always made false representation to me  that I was eligible for  a particular mortgage they would ‘definitely’ be able to get me at what was quoted as a reasonable rate of interest and then the interest always, without fail in every case, mysterious went up as they changed all the goal posts once I was completely ensnared in their clutches.

 

Of course, I would not have been desperate if the original mortgage company had been reasonable, and they could easily be so as I had  a couple of hundred thousand pounds in equity at the beginning of this process. 

 

The bottom line is that all this is a process which magicks all that equity away from me and into the hands of the mortgage lenders.

 

They are entirely dishonest.

 

If the original lender in 1999 had shown leniency owing to the extreme circumstances of my being a left a single parent after my partner became massively ill, I might now have increased that original mortgage by about £36 000 up to £136 000 from £100 000. But that house is currently worth about £900 000, which would leave me equity of over three quarters of a million pounds.

 

However, my current equity is actually about £60 000, making my total loss of nearly seven hundred thousand pounds, all of which has passed into the hands of various lenders by means of this process they have all connived at agreeing to organise between themselves.

 

My nine year old son and I now face eviction and homelessness. I will lose all that remaining £60 000 of equity, leaving me penniless after being effectively conned out out of my £900 000 house over a period of time.

 

After thirty five  years of owning my own house I am now unlikely to be able to ever buy another house because of the various strictures lenders impose.

 

I have twice recently seen the Council of Mortgage Lenders tell the media their members bend over backwards to help people in difficulties pay their mortgage and it is rare for people to be evicted if they contact their lender early and enter into negotiations.

 

This is a complete fiction (or more properly a lie), verified by my experience. All the lenders have a standard procedural framework for repossessing after just a few months of arrears and it can only be avoided if you come up with the money within that time frame and no longer.

 

Struggling Single Dad