The EU is fifty years old today. The BBC has some good coverage of the celebrations and the history.
Category: current affairs
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Dick Knight irked by Rafa Benitez
Not interested in football? Look away now.
Dick Knight furious over Benitez comments about reserve football. Brighton has long had a strong reserve team that has been an important proving ground for new players and a good place for seasoned players to gain experience or get match time when, for example, returning from injury. Brighton also has strong youth teams too and uses the entire structure to develop new talent, which is useful when the purse for buying-in talent is small (both in terms of saving money by "growing your own" and by earning money by selling players on). Maybe Rafa needs to come and spend some time with some of the smaller clubs and see what real-world sport is about, and perhaps remember Liverpool’s history of transferring talented players developed by lower teams (think Mark Lawrenson).
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EU business loses out because we shout and point
An EU study says that businesses are losing thousands of euro of business due to poor language skills. Not surprising, really, although I have to say that I’ve found it to be exceptional that a business I’ve dealt with has not had a fluent English speaker (and I’ve dealt with thirteen of the 27 nations), except in Spain which seemed stuck in the dark ages when I visited last year. Having said that, it is presumptuous and perhaps short-sighted of UK-based businesses to rely on the superior education systems that exist elsewhere and that give most Europeans educated in the last twenty years at least a basic grasp of English.
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Drug bars and property prices
Hmm. Is it odd that I should read this news article and ponder what impact it might have on property prices? And I’m not sure about the Belgian idea of logging foreign number plates, as it is likely I will be driving along the roads between Maastricht and Tongeren and Lanaken complete with GB sticker.
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Community Club of the Year
One in the eye for Lewes DC.
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Flawed thinking
The LibDems want to introduce a tax on homes worth more than £1million.
So, aside from it being a tax on aspiration as well as a tax levied on those whose home has increased in value without them moving house, what’s to stop the über-rich at whom this headline-grabbing proposal is aimed from renting a home in the UK and actually having their main home (and, presumably, their principal tax liability) in some other country? Remember Mick Jagger in the Seventies? He moved abroad primarily to escape the punitive taxes on the rich, taking much of his money with him – and money held overseas can not be taxed in the UK, so the Treasury actually loses out, not gains, from such a policy.
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The Grauniad on Gillian McKeith and celebrity nutritionists
I’m not sure that I agree with some of the political nonsense about the nutritionist project being a “manifesto for rightwing individualism”. However, worth reading. via Tom.
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Centre of the Universe EU
Official, apparently: Meerholz is the centre of the EU.
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Between a rock and a hard place
The US has found itself in an unenviable position regarding Saddam Hussein. It would have been far more convenient, from their point of view, if he had died during the initial fighting concomitant to the invasion – I am sure that is why they expended considerable resources on trying the achieve that end.
However, having survived and then subsequently being captured, he was always bound to be a problem for them. Firstly, there was the problem of bringing him to some sort of justice – either in Iraqi courts, in US courts or in an international court. As the US continues to ignore the ICJ, the Iraqi courts always seemed the most likely venue – but without using the independent ICJ, it was always going to be open to accusations of being victor’s justice.
Secondly, once the inevitable guilty verdict had been found, there was the problem of what to do with him. Alive, albeit in prison, he could always remain the focus for protest and the hopes of his sympathisers. Dead, he has the potential to be seen as a victim or martyr, particularly by the Palestinians whom he supported. At least, after death, he is unable to make pronouncements, lead protest or be a general pain in the backside for the Americans and the Iraqi government.
The question must be: is it right to kill someone simply for reasons of political expediency? Surely, by doing so, the US and Iraqi authorities (and, by association, the British government with its so-called ethical foreign policy) sink to the same level as the dictator who also killed when it was expedient to do so. (And, is it right to produce television footage of his death for publication? Surely that is a breach of the Geneva conventions, although I suspect the Americans would argue that they do not apply in this case).