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.
Blog
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Planningdisaster.com: bananas
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.
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EU Treaty
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.”
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Alba restaurant, St Ives
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.
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Tre, Pol and Pen
Sitting in a cafe in St Ives, reading this week’s The Cornishman, I was struck by a court case recently heard in Truro. A driver from St Ives was fined and banned from driving for speeding. He was called Joseph Wygleneacz, and his lawyer was Dieter Kehler.
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Jane enjoying the English summer
Porthmeor Beach, St. Ives
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Ten years ago
Ten years ago, a spunky young newsletter called Need To Know was reporting the launch of Mac OS 8, the Unixy future of the Mac (BeOS, not Steve Jobs), a new program called Alexa that allowed you to annotate websites, and Netscape shares dropped 18%. Wish I’d bought Apple shares around that time.
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More honoured in the breach…
And another thing! A few commenters on that same thread are going on about how this is much worse than cash for questions (back in the mid 90s), but the key thing to remember, and which is often forgotten, is that the cash for questions row was about MPs making a personal financial gain, whereas the allegations in cash for honours were about contributions to party funds.
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A convenient link
Political debate and trust has sunk to such a low level in this country that several mouth-breathing contributors on Nick Robinson’s Newslog are saying things like “isn’t it convenient that the announcement of no charges in the cash-for-honours affair came as the polls closed in the two by-elections”, or “is it just coincidence that …”.
To these people I say: yes, you stupid bloody morons, it is a coincidence. Labour WON the by-elections, remember?
I also get the strong feeling that for many contributors nothing, short of God descending from heaven and personally exonerating Tony Blair, would have convinced them of his innocence. No charges? The CPS are Labour stooges. PM not arrested – obviously he’s had a word with the police. I would say people with that level of understanding shouldn’t be allowed to vote, but since they assume that the PM has god-like omnipotence to bend the nation to his will, I’m guessing they don’t bother.