Gosh, we won the war in Iraq and we can move on to the next bête noire Iran which has nuclear weapons. On the day his memoirs are published, Tony Blair says we may have to do something military about it as they have been partly responsible for the previous mess in Iraq. Iran with its former iteration of Persia says, we were a superpower 2,000 years before the West and Russia, so leave us alone. It all seems a bit familiar to a baby boomer that grew up under the threat of The Bomb. Should I get married? Should I have a family? Should I save for a pension? Ironically, investing in the Stock Market currently seems the least bad option with near zero interest rates.
Tony Blair’s memoirs are described in part as amusing by one foreign reviewer where the relationship between Tony and Gordon starts off as two lovers eager to get with life, the marriage has a midlife crisis over whose job is more important and ends with Gordon being described as a bully with no emotional intelligence. To cap it all, Tony says the Coalition have got it right on the economy. More learned people than I will point out what the memoirs don’t say, but might end up reading them myself. Peter Mandelson’s comments ought to be interesting after saying what a wonderful job Gordon did in developing a strong UK economy (sic) only a few weeks ago when his book The Third Man was published.
You cannot be serious?
The French and British are supposed to share aircraft carriers to save money? One has to wonder what rarified air some people breathe or if they have heard of the word history. French bloodymindedness kept the UK out of the Common Market for decades starting with its forerunner the European Coal & Steel Community. The latter was gently structured to make it unattractive to the UK to join with the inevitable result that the economies of mainland Europe and the UK diverged. The EU is much more bureaucratic than if the UK had joined early. And to this day, the economic cycle of the UK follows the USA more than mainland Europe making not joining the Euro a good decision. The only opportunity to join it when the UK would have benefited passed in the late 1980s, when Mrs Thatcher refused in spite of pleas from the Chancellor and Foreign Secretary. Perhaps it was naive to expect any gratitude from the French after Allied resources put General de Gaulle back in power after WW2. For people who put weight on the oft-mentioned special relationship between the UK & USA, let me quote one of General de Gaulle’s pithy but less well known sayings, “In politics, there are no special relationships, there is only self interest”.
It’s a matter of class
Thanks to the internet am finally able to watch Our Drugs War on Channel 4. The second programme shot in New York is by far the best. With a choice of US$15,000 a week selling drugs or a US$7.25 per hour minimum wage sweat job in McDonalds, which job are you going to do? The prevalence of drugs among different social classes seems much more uniform than you might expect. People in the judiciary take drugs too! But most surprising is the different approach taken by the law enforcement agencies with different localities. Arrest a few black kids from a poor area and that’s alright, the police are doing their job. Try the same tactics in a white middle class area where drug taking is just as common, and there would be a real political problem.
Hot Air and apartheid
Reminds me of my time in college where the Common Room was a popular place for a smoke. Grammar school kids tried drugs straight away whereas public school guys had already done so. Two weeks of sixth form at school was enough so decided to do my A levels at Cambridge Tech or Cambridgeshire College of Arts & Technology to give it its proper title. Incredible days looking back on them where one of the more memorable things perhaps was the author Tom Sharpe. He was an engaging History teacher, a very keen photographer, ardent communist who drove around in a battered old VW beetle. If you haven’t guessed from reading his books, the Fenland Tech is very much based on Cambridge Tech and his first book Riotous Assembly is set in his native South Africa in the days of apartheid. The books are indeed riotous reading but best taken one at a time, with other stuff inbetween.
And one of the subjects which came up in A level Geography classes was the threat of a New Ice Age – no mention of global warming.