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.
Salon debunks today’s Telegraph panic-piece by noted hysteriac Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, where it is claimed that the Chinese government are about to dump the greenback, causing the US economy serious problems.
Is it true, as Wikipedia reports (possibly from this source), that people from Hertfordshire are nicknamed ‘Haycocks’ or ‘Hedgehogs’ in the same way that people from Yorkshire are ‘Tykes’?
It’s a sunny day in August, and things are very quiet at the ICA, normally the alternative staff canteen for Whitehall mandarins.
And we’ve gone from the in-your-face noise of Pride to the quieter pleasures of the West Sussex downs on a sunny afternoon.
The odd website planningdisaster.co.uk is campaigning against the new Planning Bill, and specifically the idea that NIMBYs won’t be able to stand in the way of developments like places for disabled servicemen’s families to stay in. OK, like wind farms, roads and airports.
The website is supported among others by Friends of the Earth, the National Trust, and an organisation called EnoughIsEnough that seems (from its campaign material) to be a sockpuppet for the Green Party. It’s a Google Maps mash-up that allows you to see where new developments covered by the Planning Bill might go, from nuclear power plants to wind farms.
So FotE, Greenpeace and others are all supporting a website that gets people riled about new wind farms and tidal barrages. Either this is counter-productive campaigning (from their point of view) or they are assuming that wind farms do not face opposition from NIMBYs, which I think most people know is not the case.
The new EU treaty draft has been published – pdf available here.
This American-sounding statement caught my eye on page 5:
“The Union shall act only within the limits of the competences conferred upon it by the Member States in the Treaties to attain the objectives set out therein. Competences not conferred upon the Union in the Treaties remain with the Member States. […] In areas which do not fall within its exclusive competence, the Union shall act only if and insofar as the objectives of the proposed action cannot be sufficiently achieved by the Member States, either at central level or at regional and local level, but can rather, by reason of the scale or effects of the proposed action, be better achieved at Union level.”
Dinner tonight at the very cool and clean Alba restaurant on the harbour in St Ives. Friendly service and thoughtful local food on the upside, slightly overpriced and portions on the small side, however. Probably one of the best places to eat in the town, but you pay for the reputation – and the fantastic view.