Dawn

Dawn

Monday, December 21, 2015

The Elections; Customer orientation; The EU; Swans and Carols; & Syria

THE GENERAL ELECTIONS: The worst possible result? No party will be able to achieve a governing majority without allying itself with more than other party. So, a tripartite coalition. A by-word for stability. President Rajoy is surely on his way out. Indeed, he might not even be given the chance to resign – unless he does it soon – as the 3 left-wing parties could well vote to prevent his investiture. An interesting sidelight . . . The socialist party, the PSOE, could well dump their current leader – the man who made much of the PP party's corruption in his debate with the president – and the frontrunner for his replacement is the president (we have a lot of them) of Andalucia - universally recognised as the most corrupt region of Spain. I guess it makes sense to someone. Commentaries, in English, here, here, and here,

CUSTOMER ORIENTATION: The British company, Npower, has been hit with a £26m fine for not treating its customers properly. Not for being corrupt, just for being nasty. If this gets reported here, people will be rolling on the floor with laughter. This is the basic plank of all corporate planning for Spanish energy suppliers. Their specialities are lack of information and incomprehensible bills. Not to mention crooked meters.

THE EU: Nice letter to The Times, posted at the end of this blog. Probably representative of the majority of Brits now. Especially since the Prime Minister suffered the latest setback to his goal of getting substantive change to the way the institution operates. I say “institution” but it's clear that the technocrats and bureaucrats who run it believe they already have a supra-state in place and can impose EU police on the borders of members against the will of national governments. Where is today's George Orwell? If you want to see a cynical view of Cameron's manoeuvres, click here.

FINALLY . . . SWANS: There's a little bit of doggerel I've always loved:

Swans sing before they die.
'Twere no bad thing
if some people died
before they they sing.

Being a humanistic atheist. I always think of it during the Xmas carols season.

THAT LETTER TO THE TIMES:

SIR – Crises are exploited by euro-zealots to suck powers from member states into the European Union’s acquis communautaire – a veritable black hole for national sovereignty.

However, the EU has become too big and bureaucratic to exercise its powers in an effective or even honest manner. The EU has not received a clean bill of health from its Court of Auditors for 18 years and its Sisyphean effort to make the dysfunctional eurozone work has dissipated all its energy and accelerated its decline.

Incompetence in the handling of relations with Russia and the migrant crisis are just two glaring examples of recent EU bungling. An EU border force would be a catastrophe.

It is now clear that the EU is going to fail. Furthermore, the eurozone’s inevitable break-up is a real threat to Britain’s prosperity. We should ignore the hackneyed, doom-laden propaganda about the consequences of leaving. Britain’s trade deficit with the EU is more than £50 billion annually, ensuring that we will be able to secure a sensible trade deal on exit.

We should leave the EU, join the European Free Trade Association and the North American Free Trade Agreement, and seek to rekindle closer relations with the Commonwealth and the Anglosphere. Economies smaller than Britain’s, such as those of Canada, Australia and South Korea, prosper on their own. We will be as successful outside the EU in the future as we were for many centuries before we joined it.

Gregory Shenkman
London W8

Not just 1 but 3 fotos for Facebook today. All on the Syria question, specifically the case for British intervention and from the indispensable Private Eye.





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