I like quiet & peaceful Sundays; it’s the way life’s supposed to be. Away from work and politics, blue sky, low sun – it’s lovely, and such a change from yesterday’s downpour.
One son went to the opera for the second time in a fortnight (yes, I know, but there’s a girl involved) telling me it was based on a Shakespeare play about two lesbians by “Giacomo Somebody-or other”. It turns out it was Mozart’s Cosi Fan Tutte (boy, is he going to be disappointed). Another son is whizz-kidding his way around computers and is so engrossed that I only see him when the kettle boils for tea or the smell of cooking emanates from the kitchen.
I’m probably not alone in noticing how the front pages of the papers are reporting on Libya, Syria, Egypt and the Middle East in general lately with our own domestic politics largely confined to the inside pages or smaller front page paragraphs. Even NewsnetScotland is taken up with Libya and al-Megrahi and Germany and France have the same problems.
All the topics in the British media are presented as little things but they add up to a greater whole: the British Bill of Rights; closing down media comms; ACPO; troughing on a grand scale; the NHS; state education; the police force; the welfare state. They’re all separate articles or reports but what they add up to is a grand re-organisation of our country’s infrastructure along the lines of the EU-preferred model. It will be a shake-up of our politics but a shake-down for us.
Have a look at THIS front page of the EUISS, for example.
The European Union Institute for Security Studies (EUISS) is an agency of the European Union. It operates under the Union’s Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP). The EUISS is an autonomous agency with full intellectual freedom. As a think tank it researches security issues of relevance for the EU and provides a forum for debate. In its capacity as an EU agency, it also offers analyses and forecasting to the High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy.
I’ve obviously had a mis-spent youth; I thought that ‘autonomous’ meant independent or self-contained rather than beholden to another institution for funds and patronage.
I’ve been waiting patiently for more than a year for BrusselsLeaks to get its act together but, apart from a tantalising message in March this year that they were “coming soon”, there’s been nothing. I wonder why.
Turkish airstrikes on Northern Iraq are continuing but aren’t mentioned. Perhaps the Kurds aren’t as important as Bono, Bercow and Bieber.
Bulgaria, a member of the EU since 2007, also has its problems. Its biggest oil company hasn’t been paying its taxes. No surprises really: globalised corporations = globalised scams.
Instead of getting their own house in order the EU is considering banning the import of Syrian oil . Nose, face, spite, cut.
In England, which doesn’t officially exist any more, the government and the Crown Estate have attempted to downplay concerns about its investment in the UK’s fledgling offshore wind industry, after plans to build a giant 10MW turbine in Newcastle were this week shelved. I’d like to think this was because the govt realise that climate change and its taxes were a pox on the people but, sadly, I don’t think it is. There’s no investment in our country, no manufacturing and only the financial services sector keeping us afloat at the moment. We’re going down.
As for Cameron sorting out the Human Rights Act as founder signatories of the ECHR and working from ‘within Europe’, I have as much faith in that as in the scientists who think aliens will blast us out of the universe because our carbon emissions are threatening the planet.
There’s something nasty in the woodshed and it’s about time we went in with a pitchfork to uncover the truth. Our government can’t be allowed to continue down this path; if it does, we will see the end of this country as a sovereign nation openly acknowledged in the media and, when that happens, it will be too late for anything other than violence – and I’m not talking #Londonriots. No wonder they’re looking at more powers to restrain freedom of speech and freedom of association with a ‘new & shiny’ Bill of Rights. Don’t trust them.
Calling England 