Category: Current Affairs

The Polish people have spoken, and with one voice (well, mostly) they have said “Sod off, Law and Justice“. A great victory for modernity and liberal Europeanism over the voices of fear and hatred. Yay, Tusk!

It seems that our gutsy Prime Minister has defended our island race from the tireless assaults of those wicked Europeans. Why do they hate us so much? It seems like every time there’s an EU summit, they’re trying to take over this scepter’d isle with their hateful rights and nefarious health and safety laws.

Or to put it another way, when are we going to get the Government to make an honest case for Europe?

Interesting report in the NY Times shows that it’s not just the NHS that’s having trouble with cleanliness. MRSA killed almost 18,650 patients in the US during 2005 – a rate of about 1 per 16,000 people. In England and Wales in the same year there were 1,629 deaths related to MRSA, about 1 per 32,000 people so half the overall rate in the US (though that’s just on a bare population figure, rather than per hospital episode or anything fancy).

How could I not be when we have such a wonderful upstanding press? Take the Daily Mail, which forever defends this island against politicians of a socialist bent, immigrants and those cunning, waxed-moustachioed Europeans. This fine example of all that is best about British honesty and fair play has, the Economist reveals:

[paid a Pole] to drive a Polish-registered car to Britain and spend a few days breaking parking laws and speed limits with a photographer in tow, to demonstrate that Poles and other eastern European immigrants flout British rules with impunity.

When challenged as to the accuracy of this allegation, the Mail reporter claimed it was OK because they only committed civil offences, not criminal ones.

So, in summary, deliberately procuring people to break the law is fine upstanding British values, slandering immigrants and deceiving your readers is an essential part of our proud island’s history, but exercising your right of free movement within the EU is an abomination that must be stamped out immediately. See also under “Human Rights”

There’s an article in Salon today (sub or click through advert, sorry) that really surprised me. I’d always assumed that American car parks were so big because Americans drove everywhere. It turns out that the causation may in part be the other way round: lots of planning regulations require developers to provide large numbers of on-site parking spaces – up to twice as many as would be required on a normal day. Thus, an academic study of Tippecanoe Co., Indiana, revealed that the county (pop. 155,000) has more than a quarter of million excess parking spaces: in other words if every car registered in the county was parked in a car park rather than at home, there would still be parking spaces for 250,000 other cars.

This is so far from the British approach (which is getting tighter and tighter on car parking provision in new developments) it makes my head spin.

The odd thing about the Conservative policy announcement today – where they pledged to match Labour’s public service spending over the next three years – is that the plans aren’t published yet and won’t be for a month or so. Talk about signing a blank cheque: if I were in the Treasury, I’d be tempted to put in a couple of joke commitments, just to annoy the Opposition. A gold statue of Kier Hardie, perhaps, or a really expensive metrication campaign. Right, Cameron, match that!

Ken Livingstone has been wooing London’s Polish community ahead of the elections next year, according to the Guardian. I may not be a Polish citizen (though it might come in handy if UKIP ever take over), but I’d think about voting for a man who offered pierogi.

Candidates in Brighton (Pavilion), take note.

Interesting article in the Age, in which the former Australian PM Malcolm Fraser suggests that Canberra should never commit troops to a US-led mission unless (as happened with Britain in WWII) a senior Australian Minister can be resident in Washington DC and a member of the war cabinet.

Not a bad idea for us, either, seeing what’s happened in Iraq.

The most startling thing about this story – where a 12-year-old was arrested for chucking a sausage at an old gent in a restaurant – is this line from his mum:

“[Being arrested] had quite a bit of an effect on him. He couldn’t sleep. He takes sleeping tablets anyway – but they didn’t work.”

Now I don’t want to be all Daily Mail here, but SLEEPING TABLETS? At 12? He may have more problems than occasional rowdy behaviour around pork products.