It's not cricket!

There are those in this nation of ours who believe that the game of cricket forms a central part of our identity and our way of life. Booker happens to be one of those people, hence a robust piece from him on the effect of the EU on the game, opening by reminding us that in 1971 Edward Heath assured voters that, apart from "certain changes to the law ...

Posted on EU Referendum

Rogues' Gallery

The News of the World is back on the case of the errant MEPs today – and what a vile lot they are. In a series of stories, the paper first picks on how the "EU blows millions on fact-finding freebies for MEPs", telling us that "high-flying British MEPs" are jet-setting to holiday paradises for jaunts of unimaginable luxury - leaving cash-strapped taxpayers to pick up the bill...

Posted on EU Referendum

If you read just one article...

If you only have the time or inclination to read one newspaper article, then may I humbly suggest you read this one from yesterday's Daily Mail? The paper is not a regular stop on my travels around journalism which is why I have only just found the piece by former Chief Constable of West Yorkshire, Keith Hellawell. But its observations of...

Posted on The Waendel Journal.

The real morons

In the days when national newspapers had agricultural correspondents and still took a vague interest in events outside the Westminster bubble, the main story retailed by Booker in his column today would doubtless have filled a few column inches in the papers earlier in the week. As it is, it is left to Booker to record another example of the catastrophic handling ...

Posted on EU Referendum

Wellingborough Socialists being coy?

The grouping, Independent Socialists in Wellingborough (ISW), are publicising a debate taking place at a local venue titled "Are Religion and Socialism Compatible?" The Independent Socialist Councillor in Wellingborough, Paul Crofts is using his blog to promote the event just as ISW used their blog to do so back in...

Posted on The Waendel Journal.

Serbian Eurovision Misfires.

I wonder how many months will be allowed to pass before the EU, the BBC and the western media in general finds itself able to admit that the EU's Kosovo project and the EU's Serbia project are both in trouble. But please, let's not spoil the songs. It was the perfect Euro-vision, to sing Serbia into the fold, except, Folks, now it won't be happening.

Posted on The Tap Blog

Cherie & Gordon Trash Smuggo's 'Legacy'

Thursday may well see McStalin with nothing more to do than contemplate his ‘legacy’. Smuggo had the best part of six months to prance around furiously daubing everything he could with ‘Brasso’ in a vain effort to polish his, at considerable expense to the Taxpayer. Now McStalin will have two years to try and buff his legacy up. Expect it to cost us a lot more.

Posted on The Huntsman.

'New Labour New Danger' Was Prescient

At a similar moment of polling desperation in 1996, the Conservatives tried to characterise Blair as devil eyes with their 'New Labour - New Danger' posters. That at least had to its credit that it was ahead of its time. Portraying Tories as Toffs is a generation behind. Labour are in serious trouble, lost at sea, floating further and further away from land ...

Posted on The Tap Blog

A political crisis

The "global food crisis" has afforded no end of opportunities for just about anyone with an axe to grind (not least this blog) to air their reasons as to why the world is running out of food. Variously, population pressure, increased consumption of meat, global warming, poverty and insecurity have all been blamed, and there are many more reasons ...

Posted on EU Referendum

Did Germans Win Both World Wars?

The question asked at first glance sounds ludicrous. Germany quite clearly was defeated in WW1 and WW2. The sense of the question comes clearer, however, when you look at who Germany's enemies were. If the US had not intervened in both wars, it is probable that Germany would have won on both occasions. But who are the Americans?

Posted on The Tap Blog

The BBC's Long Walk from Reality

So the BBC is at it again with another controversial dramatisation. This time it is the drama "The Long Walk to Finchley" that has become infected with the Hollywood disease of turning reality into fiction. An opportunity to chart the astonishing political ascent of Margaret Thatcher, which is a remarkable enough tale in its own right, has…

Posted on The Waendel Journal.

"Brussels will become the diplomatic capital of Europe"

So said Robert Cooper today at a conference organised by the University of Kent's Brussels offshoot the Brussels School of International Studies.
Cooper, is the Director General, General Secretariat of the Council of the European Union and author of the groundbreaking book, 'The" Breaking of Nations'.


Posted on England Expects

America Must Re-Orientate Away From Europe

In a Thanksgiving address to the nation President Bush (Senior) tonight hailed the emergence of a ''new Europe'' but affirmed that the American commitment to the Atlantic alliance would remain strong and stable ''as long as our friends want and need us.'' That concept of NATO's purpose, in effect America committing itself to protect Europe ...

Posted on The Tap Blog

Union Modernisation Fund must be scrapped

The news in the Telegraph today that the Labour Party is just about insolvent shows its administrative incompetence begins at home. Labour is not alone when it comes to incurring debt to fund its political operations. The Conservatives are paying down their own debt and the Lib Dems struggle to live within their means too. But where Labour…

Posted on The Waendel Journal.

Ceci n'est pas une revue

If The Sun has got it right – and it looks like it might – the MoD has managed to extract some more money out of the Treasury. And, if that is the case, the £200 million which the paper headlines – to be allocated over two years - will be genuinely "new" money, and not simply a recycled announcement. The rest of the paper's story need not detain us. Just about all of it ...

Posted on Defence of the Realm

"Europe" writ large

The elephant continues to skulk, unseen, no more so than in the lead editorial in The Daily Telegraph, which complains that, "Business needs less, not more, red tape". The proximate cause of its complaints is the government's new legislative programme which, it says, "will make life tougher for small firms on two fronts". One is the plan to extend the right to request ...

Posted on EU Referendum

The BRIC Takes On The EU Over Kosovo

BRIC countries have vast natural resources. Currently they have cheap workforces, as well as growing levels of consumption. People living in these countries account for almost half the world’s population, while the combined GDP of Brazil, Russia, India and China is about $US 15.5 trillion.


Posted on The Tap Blog

Yet again, we are superior

Britain and Europe, as we know, are superior to the United States. If we do not know it then many a deranged, furiously spitting commentator and letter writer both in the MSM and on the internet will tell us. At length. The EU, in particular, is never backward about coming forward on the subject of European superiority.

Posted on EUReferendum

I Hate Gordon Brown

The Tap gets a handful of hits from people searching under 'I Hate Gordon Brown' every day. I'm not sure why but today the number of such searches has gone up fourfold.... Why is the already unpopular Brown sinking to a new level of contempt, if that was possible, at this moment?


Posted on The Tap Blog

No newts is good newts …

… usually. But, in this case, reported by The Daily Mail, Leicestershire Council is less than happy, having spent £1million on safeguarding a colony of great crested newts – which did not exist. The story is also reported by The Daily Telegraph, and neither newspaper – for once – has any problem mentioning the elephant. The Mail refers to the amphibians ...

Posted on EU Referendum

The underfunded MoD

A £14 million fleet of 25 armoured "mine clearance vehicles" – desperately needed by British troops plagued by mines in Afghanistan – is being sold off, unused as "army surplus", at a knockdown price of less than £4.5 million – a loss to the taxpayer of nearly £10 million. The vehicles are Caterpillar DV104 "Armoured Heavy Wheeled Tractors"...

Posted on Defence of the Realm

Theatre and practice

No, not a misprint – we did not mean to write "theory and practice" only to have the automatic spell-checker substitute a different word, as it sometimes does, with unfortunate effect. Watching the political scene from our lofty heights, we observe two different phenomena. One is the reality, the practice, of government – the nuts and bolts of the management of this country ...

Posted on EU Referendum

Bring On The Toffs

In 1997 when Labour came to power, government spending was GBP800 million a day. If this had been carefully tended, the boom years that have followed that date would have been sufficient to buy Britain one of the largest Sovereign Funds in the world. Instead Britain was fed on a glut of election-winning cheap money...

Posted on The Tap Blog

The elephant lives!

They are at it again … ignoring the elephant, even though it is alive and kicking – and dumping dirty great turds on the carpet. Leading the fray in the eyes-wide-shut brigade is the BBC which retails the news that Postcomm's chairman Nigel Stapleton is calling for Royal Mail to be partly privatised "to safeguard the quality of the UK's mail delivery service" ...

Posted on EU Referendum

The mother of all speeches

It was perhaps best summed up by Reuters which paraphrases Defence Secretary Robert Gates, saying: "The US military should focus more on winning in Iraq and preparing to fight other insurgencies and less on possible big wars with other countries". The trouble is, as Gates rightly observes, that this is not always the main priority of the military. "I have noticed," he says ...

Posted on Defence of the Realm

Carnage

... or death by one thousand cuts. Today, over 80 of Tony Yewdall's newly calved pedigree guernsey cattle were slaughtered. We covered the story of this farm's Tb problems here in 2004, but last November two further reactors were identified by the skin test. Defra moved in to blood test the cattle. Why, when the herd had ongoing Tb problems ...

Posted on Bovine TB blog

Wash your mouth out with soap and water

Chancellor Angela Merkel is travelling in South America (and I thought she had given up on her endless flitting round the world and settled down to being the leader of Germany) and in her absence, as the German media wrote indignantly, the Dalai Lama will not be received either by the President or the Foreign Minister,


Posted on EUReferendum

Labour Activists Emulate Monster Raving Loonies

Labour's fightback in Crewe and Nantwich, based almost entirely on presenting the Conservative candidate Edward Timpson, along with David Cameron, Osborne and Boris J as 'toffs', seems like a irrelevance from another age...



Posted on The Tap Blog

Fax machine law?

At first sight, the headline looks pretty damning for the Eurosceptic cause: "EU targets Norway's water quality". And the UPI story is even worse. European Union officials, it tells us, say Norway needs to build new sewage treatment plants and clean up polluted harbours to comply with EU water quality standards, despite it not being a member of the EU ...

Posted on EU Referendum

Bushmasters for the Army

Picked up from a French defence website via a reader, we learned of a rumour last month that the British Army was poised to buy 24 Australian-made Bushmaster MRAPs. As far as we can be certain now – in the complete absence of any statement from a British minister or the MoD - this is no longer a rumour. According to The Australian ...

Posted on Defence of the Realm

'Deluded' in Basra

The unidentified source for the Telegraph's quote that HM Forces have been following a 'University of Arizona' approach to strategy in southern Iraq sounds as if he's judged the situation there pretty accurately - although 'rigid and unimaginative' could go for virtually the whole of the Brown Administration's activities, and then some. In Anbar there has been success ...

Posted on Man on the Grassy Knoll

Mendacity, Incompetence, Spin, Panic: a Typical Labour Day

One thing which citizens want and, save perhaps in the extremes of a major war, to which they are entitled is a sober and accurate assessment of the prospects for our economy and general prospects so that they might make informed decisions on how to deploy their resources. From this Government, whose Head lies to himself every morning in the shaving mirror ...

Posted on The Huntsman

Has rising fuel cost enabled Labour tax cut?

Without the slightest recognition of the irony of his actions, Alastair Darling has done what the government has been saying it could not do and increased personal tax allowances by £600 (for one year only) - at a cost of £2.7 billion - to offset the abolition of the 10% starting rate of income tax. Each time it was suggested that increasing the...

Posted on The Waendel Journal.

Rumbles from the East

We hate to say it, but we were writing about China on the brink in February – albeit that we had some help at that time from the Telegraph’s Beijing correspondent, Richard Spencer. Nevertheless, we had been writing in a similar vein the previous December, the combination of our two pieces suggesting that the Chinese economy is much more fragile than was generally reckoned...

Posted on EU Referendum

Government response to economic crisis

While people rightly discuss the speculation about how far house prices might fall and the effects on the economy of the credit crunch - and Labour's inability to stimulate the economy having wasted our tax pounds - Caroline Flint's briefing notes tell us how the government will manage the effects of economic difficulties in Britain (click to enlarge)...

Posted on The Waendel Journal.

Where our money goes

Some of the numbers turned up by the Tories' review of government business support are mind boggling. To start with, there are some 3,000 individual schemes, delivered by 2,000 different agencies and costing more than £2.5bn a year. Around two-thirds of the money is spent simply telling businesses where to find advice and what grants are available....

Posted on The Purple Scorpion

BBC wordplay on terrorism reports

Just imagine if an off-duty police officer got into his car in leafy Surrey and the car exploded because it was rigged with a car bomb. It would lead the news and spawn follow up stories. But if it happens in Northern Ireland the BBC's editors feel it only merits a single short online piece and about 15 seconds in the middle of a news round up…

Posted on The Waendel Journal.

Now you can blame the EU

Despite the insistence of the groupuscules that the EU is responsible for the post office closures, which is currently the subject of controversy, we have
robustly maintained that this is a home-grown affair, brought upon us by our own government, without the intervention of the EU. However, a piece in yesterday’s Daily Telegraph ...

Posted on EU Referendum

Where is that international community?

First there was the Burmese cyclone, now we have the Chinese earthquake. What do these events have in common? Yes, they are likely to result in many deaths and no, we are not going to know how many for a long time, if ever. But that is something they share with the far greater disaster of the tsunami two and a half years ago...

Posted on EU Referendum

Labour set to lose Slough Council

Just one week after Labour took control of Slough in the local elections, an internal party row appears to have led to a series of defections to the Conservatives according to the Slough Observer: Cllr Diana Coad, the Tory parliamentary candidate for Slough, has confirmed enough Labour councillors had defected to her party on Sunday to…

Posted on The Waendel Journal.