A reason to detest the 'Oirish' : During the 'troubles', a prize euphemism that is just so typically 'Oirish', there was one reporter/commentator I always trusted - Kevin Myers. He was born in the Republic but educated in England and this duality allowed him to mix with both sides of the divide which he did very much at 'street level'. It thus provided plenty of opportunity for his sardonic but realistic observations to range across all sides in the war. He has a piece in the Sunday Telegraph today in which he looks back in anger at "the grotesque legacy of the Good Friday Agreement". He confirms what I have long suspected, that we, the Brits, were within a whisker of defeating the IRA who were riddled with informants and suffering huge casualties. It was Major and Blair who sold the pass following the sustained bombing attacks on London during the '90s. However, what has been forgotten is that for 30-odd years the Republic refused to take any helpful, indeed, even any humanitarian, measures to assist in the defeat of the IRA:
- "And it has to be said, war is what the Republic of Ireland tolerated. Even after the British Conservative party had abandoned its strategic and historic alliance with the Ulster Unionist Party, and insisted that constitutional nationalists must be brought into government in Northern Ireland, the Irish government continued to allow the IRA to use its territory as an operational base."
- "No IRA atrocity - La Mon, in which a dozen Protestants were incinerated alive by home-made napalm, or the murder of the British ambassador and his secretary in Dublin, or the extermination of the Mountbatten boat party of children and octogenarians, or the Remembrance Sunday massacre at Enniskillen, or other beastialities too numerous to list - was enough to make the Republic of Ireland destroy the evil in its midst."
As Myers points out, there is blame enough to go round, and round again, but the one thing that is a certain is that the war could have ended at least a decade earlier if the Republic had sealed its border. Its failure to do so, with the implicit acceptance by the majority of Irish voters, is a disgusting and dishonourable stain on their history. That's why I don't like them and if any idiot comes on here to tell me that I'm being racist I will happily agree, but then again, when a group of foreigners with the connivance of their general public try over 30 years to blow the arms and legs off me and mine, I tend to get rather shirty!
Hurrah! A recession: There's always a silver lining, and it's an ill wind that blows no-one any good, and ... perhaps that's enough wise, or dumb, old saws. Even so, as we head in to exceedingly rough economic weather, perhaps even storm force, there is a good side. During the 'good' times, 'Hash Broon' ladled out state money (or my money as I fondly think of it) to anyone and everyone provided they had a strong union. Of course, the services that were provided not only failed to improve, they actually declined - just look at your local schools as but one example. Now, however, he can no longer buy himself popularity because, what I like to think of as the providers of last resort, the tax-payers, simply cannot afford it any more. He is forced to borrow zillions just to keep up the funding that he has already committed himself to, so there's no chance of increasing the spending. He will, in fact, already is, trying to save money by reneging on his international obligations to fight the good fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, but this will come at a huge price in terms of our standing in the world and our relations with our biggest and most powerful ally, the USA. But the good news is that the pressure on the home front, particularly those departments of state with insatiable, Billy Bunter appetites will be ferocious. Already, 'Postman Pat' Johnson, the Health Minister, is proposing a voucher scheme by which patients will be able to tout their 'business' to what they think is the best hospital available which will force NHS Trusts to become more efficient thus leaving the inefficient to wither on the vine. Existing and proposed plans to cut the national welfare bill will be forced through by a desperate government irrespective of its political colouring. Perhaps, at long last, the state behemoth will be cut back to size.
Wind in the Willows: Another area of state spending (for which, read: taxes on you and me) likely to come under pressure are all these spurious so-called anti-global warming initiatives. Christopher Booker repeats yet again in the Sunday Telegraph the malicious folly of wind turbines and now, the latest wheeze, the £20bn, repeat, £20bn, Severn Barrier:
- "Its 300 hundred turbines would, we are told, have a 'generating capacity' of '8,640 megawatts (MW)'. But, as even the Sustainable Development Commission tacitly recognises on its website, these would generate, thanks to the variation of the tides, only 22% of capacity, namely 1,900 MW. This is £10 million per MW, even more than the £8 million per MW of those ridiculous off shore wind turbines"
- "One modern nuclear power station costing £2.7 billion, could generate almost as much electricity as the barrage at barely an eighth of the cost.
He goes on to point out what is hardly ever mentioned by the HAFs (Hot Air Fanatics) that the Severn Barrier, just like all those wind turbine sites, will still require a plethora of newly-built, traditional power stations to provide back-up power when the tides or the winds are not operating. If, like me, you wondered why we put on such a sycophantic show for that funny little Hungarian-Frog and his gorgeous babe, sorry, wife, you should understand that when (not 'if') we go nuclear we will have to buy it from the Frogs because, over the last few decades, all those anti-nuclear dipsticks have forced us to fall behind in the latest technology.
'HilBilly Blues: I wrote on another blog that I was thinking of opening a book on how long it would take 'Miss Spoke' Clinton to file for divorce starting from the day she admits defeat in her presidential bid. I reckoned that it was 10 to 1 on that she would do so within a year. Of course, a lot would depend on the Clintonian finances, it being a truth universally acknowledged, that 50% of f-all is, er, well, exactly that! On the other hand, if good ol' Bill has been minting it with all these mysterious, international, wheeler-dealer contracts he's been engaged in, then why would she wait longer than the day after to get shot of the old rascal?
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