The British practice of taking laws – especially those from the EU – and applying them with a rigour unknown in the rest of Europe is known as ‘gold plating’. I’m reminded of this by the news that, after the July 1 introduction of a ban on smoking in public places, there’ll have to be No Smoking signs in UK churches. As someone has asked, when did you last see anyone smoking in a church? And will candles be exempt?

I regularly say that what I really dislike about nationalism is its divisiveness. In Scotland, the new ‘nationalist’ government has announced the abolition of the university fees system which, ironically, only the votes of Scottish Labour MPs secured for the UK as a whole. Here’s a comment on this from today’s Telegraph - From 2009 Scottish students will be able to attend Scottish universities for free. But English, Welsh and Northern Irish students who wish to study in Scotland will still have to pay £1,700 a year. However, under bizarre EU rules that permit discrimination within a nation but not between nations, students from the rest of the EU won't pay a bean. This means a Welshman studying in Scotland will find himself considerably worse off than a German doing the same thing. It is patent madness.

The writer goes on to say The United Kingdom is slowly becoming like one of those dysfunctional families that, when confronted with a restaurant bill, starts squabbling fiercely over who ordered the starter and who held back on the pudding. This, of course, is an inevitable consequence of devolution: regional autonomy means regional inequality, and all the sniping that gradually seeps in when citizens of the same state are treated manifestly differently. Remind you of anywhere?

Economics is one of those subjects in which there are as many opinions as there are people willing to express them. Especially when it comes to the housing market in Spain. Time, as I keep saying, will tell and I have two bets on the events of the next year or two. Meanwhile, though, here’s a recent comment which merits inclusion as [almost] the last thing I’m going to write on this subject for a long while. The author, by the way, is anonymous but I suspect it’s Gordon Brown - It's hard to know what lies behind [pessimistic] commentaries like these. A good old property crash and economic crisis is definitely in some people's interest, so there's no shortage of experts willing to go on the record and make their case, in the hope of talking up the crisis. At the same time, the economy keeps growing away, and house prices remain stable in metropolitan areas - except for those sellers who put their house on the market at very optimistic asking prices. Nobody seems to be making the basic distinction between housing markets in Alicante or Murcia and those of Madrid, Barcelona, Bilbao etc. The fact is that nobody knows what lies around the corner. Any crisis is going to hit not just Spain, but most of the rest of the EU where asset prices are equally inflated. Maybe UK-based analysts will be proved right, but maybe they are just making a name for themselves by playing on the fears of the hundreds of thousands of Brits who have invested in Spain? Easy way to get your name into the Daily Telegraph, nothing like a free bit of branding!

By the way, the two bets I have on are:-

Macro economic: Within 2 years, the decline/collapse of the housing market will cause considerable pain for those on the Spanish plain, and

Micro economic: No one will occupy any of the houses being built in front of mine within 12 months from 13 June. Despite more than a year’s work so far.

Finally, a possible explanation for my inability to find creosote products in my local shops. They’ve been banned by the EU. Apparently, if you want your poles treated with creosote in the UK, you have to send them over to companies in France, who will do the job and send them back to you. Possibly with a carbon footprint certificate attached. France, of course, is a founder-member of the EU.

But a question is left hanging in the air – Is this an EU law which has actually been fully implemented in Spain?