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BT Chief To Become British Government Minister
judgecorp writes "BT chief Ian Livingston is leaving the British telecom provider to become a government minister. The executive has been appointed a seat in the House of Lords, which enables him to become Minister for Trade and Investment without having to be elected as a Member of the lower house of Parliament. Livingston has seen BT go from a £134 million loss in 2008 when he was appointed, to a profit of £2.5 billion in 2012. It still has a monopoly over certain sectors of the British telecom market, and has won all the contracts so far for rolling out broadband to rural areas."
I've had the misfortune to have to deal with this Ian guy and he's an UTTER UTTER c--t.
BT is a disgraceful company and the amount of people in the company I work for who have needed to use BT and been royally screwed over by them is shocking.
At least he's leaving BT and going in to government where this behavior is expected I guess.
As a dual British citizen, I can only say this:
his appointment to the House of Lords is a strong argument in favour of getting rid of the undemocratic House of Lords, or at least making it an elected body.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
I had occasion recently to look at the makeup of the Lords Science and Technology Select committee. Approximately half of them are Fellows of the Royal Society. The committee includes notables like the world-famous embryology researcher Robert Winston as well as other high flyers in the science and high-tech world. The chairman is Lord Krebs who has headed up the Food Standards Agency as well as the NERC in the past. His day job is Principal of Jesus College, Oxford. Being a member of the House of Lords is not regarded as a "real" job, they get paid a daily allowance if they attend the Chamber during a sitting and/or take part in committee work.
On the other hand the US Senate committee on Science etc. has three times the number of members of the Lords committee. Most of these elected representatives have been professional politicians for their entire adult life and have never been anywhere near a science or research establishment, never mind working in one. The current chairman is Jay Rockefeller, a fourth-generation scion of one of America's ruling families who has been in the Washington "bubble" since election to the Senate in 1984. US Senators get paid $174,000 per annum for the 150 days a year they are supposed to turn up at the Capitol plus expenses, staffs etc. and a very generous care package (medical, pension etc.).
As a dual British citizen, I can only say this:
his appointment to the House of Lords is a strong argument in favour of getting rid of the undemocratic House of Lords, or at least making it an elected body.
So you say that only professional politicians should be able to hold government positions?
For anyone who's lost -- the United Kingdom has this strange political system where you need to be a member of the legislative branch in order to serve on the national executive: only members of parliament can be ministers of Her Majesty's government. This would appear to imply that it is impossible to appoint a specialist as minister, since only professional politicians have a chance to be elected to parliament; in practice, appointment to the Lords is used as a workaround.
...will include several hundred million GBP that they will get for selling off land around the Adastral Park "Research" site. That's land that was compulsorily purchased for an RAF airfeld, which was ultimately "given" to BT. So it's taxpayer's land. BT has been leaning on the local council to rewrite their land use policies to allow the farmland to be built on. They intend to build a new town of 2000 homes right next to a European Special Protection Area that is also an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (think National Park, without the planning restrictions).
The land value will go from 6,000 GBP per acre to at least 500,000 per acre when BT get planning permission. And the worst bit is that this kind of house building is exactly what the district does NOT need - we need new housing in all the scattered villages where low-income people live and work, instead of in one place where are no jobs.
Please can we stop tarmacing over the entire f**king world?
"Cock Up Your Beaver" does not mean what you think. This sig is intended to clog filters and annoy do-gooders