The Consul in Chiang Mai, Thailand was recently closed. There is a sizable British community in and around Chiang Mai numbering thousands and we get no support. I recently renewed my son's passport and had to travel to Bangkok twice - once to apply for and once to collect it. It cost me £336.50 in air fares and hotel bills on top of the £72 for the passport itself and it can take up to 6 weeks. In contrast, my wife is Japanese; she applied at the local consulate and got a new passport in less than a week. In my capacity as a volunteer policeman I recently helped a German national whose passport was stolen. She had a replacement within 10 days. I have written to my MP and was initially ignored, so I wrote to the Home Secretary about the costs involved in getting a new passport and the Foreign Secretary about the abysmal level of service abroad. Neither has replied, instead delegating a response to a member of the British Consulate in Bangkok. This lady has not answered ANY of the questions I asked and instead wrote a lot of gobbledegook tripe about how centralizing services was giving better services. It is, of course, rubbish and the key points: cost and inconvenience were not even mentioned.

Save the NHS We all need the NHS. The doctors and nurses we rely on are at breaking point, we all know how desperately short of money the service is. Lottery money could save the problem easily. Don't let the government run it into the ground as an excuse to sell it off.

The plan to cut use of plastic bags is good for the environment and the government state that the 5p charge will go to charity. The reality is they are charging retailers 1p vat on each bag sold. Retailers have already accounted for their cost of packaging and vat is paid on the total price. Therefore every purchase now raises an extra 1p vat being paid directly to the government. This additional vat charge now means that non vat purchases will be liable for a 1p vat charge.

The citizens of Argyll and Bute is reject these appalling, destructive and cruel plans in their entirety. If allowed to happen, these cuts will rip into the heart of our communities at a time when depopulation is already a huge issue. Here is an idea of what is proposed: -Reduction in Additional Support Needs assistants across areas by 45%. -Withdraw services that the council is not required to provide for children under 5. -Move to 3 weekly collection for general waste (green bin). -Removal of Attendance Officer posts. -Removal of all School Librarians in all Secondary Schools. -Remove Discretionary Community Transport Grant Funding. -Reduce subsidies to freight operators in Campbeltown. -Increase Burial & Cremation charges by 20% over and above inflation. -Close 43 public conveniences. -Replace annual bedding display with grass areas. -Remove rose and shrub beds and return to grass. -Reduce Environmental Team. -Reduce street sweeping by 50%. -Further reduce staff (grass cutting, street sweeping, wardens, public conveniences). -Removal of Christmas lights installation. -These are just a small highlight of the proposed cuts that can be found here: https://www.argyll-bute.gov.uk/moderngov/documents/s103359/Service%20Choices%20Report%20-%20Appendix%201.pdf

As above it will mean higher payments for students and could put off future students attending uni. Is it not illegal to change the terms and conditions of a loan after it has been taken out?

Their actions are morally corrupt and fraudulent as they continue to award themselves full pay and more importantly are putting the lives of citizens in danger as the health service has no leadership. They did not inform the electorate that this would be something that they would do if people voted for them and so therefore have mislead the N Ireland voters.

To avoid or at least mitigate the continuing disenfranchisement of those who often do not vote, not from ignorance or inertia, but due to circumstances which make registering relatively complicated or impracticable - people who rent short term, people who have just moved, students away from home, etc. (cf. Danny Dorling, The i paper 2 Oct 2015). Areas where more people are owner-occupiers could end up with more MPs per person - perhaps 1 MP per 60,000 eligible voters as opposed to 1 MP per 80,000 in an area of mostly rented accommodation, or with many students, or with more deprivation. A fair democracy should represent everyone, regardless of the relative stability of their lives.

Jeremy Corbyn's political enemies are seeking to undermine his position as Labour Leader and have chosen nuclear weapons as their attack platform. We must not allow them to get away with it. Some helpful advice from a supporter - a great way to get this petition circulating widely is to share on comments on relevant online newspaper articles! For those of you that have the time .... Facebook 'misbehaviour'. A number of supporters have reported that Facebook is not sharing this petition. I have tried to do it myself and failed with a very unusual message. The petition has also 'dropped off' The Ecologist's timeline. I have now re-posted on Facebook with a perma-URL of https://www.facebook.com/TheEcologist/posts/10152959345741618 . You should be able to share from there. Either that or just copy the petition URL in the browser bar to your timeline.

The establishment of the West Midlands Combined Authority is the most important change in regional local government in the last 25 years. The new authority will have a budget of many billions of pounds. There are genuine concerns about the extent to which members of the new Combined Authority will be democratically accountable to local people in the control of both policy and finance.

This petition is highly important to myself and my family, our friends and the local community. This is because on 6th September 2015 my cousin Jarrad Joseph Grainger took his own life, he was only 21 years old. I am starting this petition on behalf of my auntie Nadine West - Jarrad's mother. We are wanting to stop this from happening to more people as this is an all to common occurrence these days. We need help in reinstating 24/7 care for Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services in Kingston upon Hull. Vulnerable patients do often need 24/7 care and sometimes need to stay in units for anywhere between a few days and months at a time, the closest unit to Hull is approximately 42 miles away meaning that when children/adolescents need to stay in the units they are kept many miles away from their families making it hard for them to visit making them feel even more isolated. We need to improve the care that Hull and East Yorkshire currently has to make it ALOT better than it is, patients need better care and for it to be more accessible. People searching for help who contact these Charities are often left for days or weeks without a reply to the shout for help, we need to change this urgently! The stigma surrounding Mental Health and Illness needs stopping, we need to raise more awareness about this to give people a better understanding, the more people that know about Mental Health/Illness the better chance we have at helping those in need. We couldn't help Jarrad and we lost him, we were too late. So we will do this in his memory, we will help those we still can. We will improve the services in Hull and East Yorkshire and we will prevent people deteriorating from Mental Health/Illness and we will save them. Jarrad Joseph Grainger, Forever Young - this is for you xx

We do not want to lose a great public service broadcaster whom not only provides excellent quality broadcasting but helps develop the industry and is independent.

The NHS is internationally envied for its clinical excellency, efficiency and moral courage. Following the purchaser provider split and changes under New Labour in the late 1990's, the introduction of private contracting has diverted profits from services out of the NHS into wealth creating companies. Subsequently healthcare professionals and patients have seen and felt the NHS change for the worse. Since this Conservative party came into government they have undertaken steps to undermine the financial viability and safety of care provided by the NHS through an ideological choice of chronic underfunding. To quote Noam Chomsky, "that's the standard technique of privatisation: defund, make sure things don't work, people get angry, you hand it over to private capital". They are now targeting staff and junior doctors. Following negotiations with the BMA doctors union, the department of health offered an unacceptable contract which would reduce patient safety, increase junior doctor fatigue, reduce recognized out-of-hours commitment, and significantly reduce take-home pay. When junior doctors refused the governments precondition to accept ALL of these proposals as a basis to a final contract as a condition of restarting negotiations, the BMA found themselves accused of ‘walking away’ from the table and informed that the contract would simply be imposed upon them in August 2016. Junior doctors, side by side with other healthcare professionals, work in an increasingly pressurised and under-resourced setting, and are known as the medical workhorse of the NHS. Their current working pattern is antisocial and labour intensive, as anybody who lives with or is friends with a junior doctor will know. Tiredness is compounded by a sense of disenchantment, which may explain why these professional healthcare groups did not feel energised enough to understand or stand up to the government on their introduction of the Health and Social Care Act in 2012. Legislation which is leading to the erosion of the NHS in the hands of a Jeremy Hunt, who prior to his appointment as health minister wrote of this ideological support for privatisation of the NHS. Junior doctors now face a situation where their self-perceived head to the ground and carry-on grafting attitude is being rewarded by a contract which is estimated to lead to a startling 20-40% reduction in take home wages depending on speciality, and longer and less protected shifts. The new system would provide us with the assurance of a 20 minute break per 11 hour shift worked. Fatigue from grueling shifts are acknowledged to cause impaired performance, a sobering and concerning fact for patients. We as junior doctors accept that our pay has declined against inflation for years. However, we are asking that this government's ideological CHOICE to devalue our profession, and take money and morale from junior doctors, when the financial privileges freedoms of the very rich and financial sector are protected, be acknowledged and challenged. We oppose government ministers with personal wealth of millions using our wages, which when compared to other peers with similar backgrounds in university and post-graduate years in training are modest, as another excuse to paint the NHS as 'unaffordable'. An NHS which is acknowledged as excellent in the care it delivers, and one of the most efficient services on the planet. This Junior Doctor contract campaign must form part of a wider effort to oppose the overarching plan to ultimately do away with the NHS. As things stand, in 20 years, I as a junior doctor will be working as a private consultant for a private health provider, possibly earning more than an NHS consultant, but paying for my own and my families healthcare in times of greatest vulnerability. I would not chose to be treated by, or treat on behalf of, private companies and insurance merchants for whom profit is the primary concern. A great many who earn less than me may go without the best chances of surviving illness due to their bank balance. I reject that future. I wish to work proudly as an NHS doctor, in the United Kingdom. I believe that patients also wish to be treated by a trustworthy NHS rather than a private company. An NHS staffed by motivated, valued and supported professionals and not by profit. Please sign this petition to support junior doctors, the NHS, and the public.