23 December 2010 11:37 AM
It's Christmas, so it's time for Mario Lanza
This year's clip is the great Lanza as Lt Pinkerton with Kathryn Grayson as Madame Butterfly from the 1950 film, The Toast of New Orleans. In this scene, the restrained Anglo-Saxon David Niven, as Grayson's manager, has to watch from the wings as she is forced to submit to full-on Italian passion from Lanza.
It of course has nothing to do with the European Union, which is why I'm offering this clip as a Christmas present to all of you who have been kind enough to read this blog over the past year: it is five minutes and 43 seconds out of the muck of Brussels and into the bliss of another kind of Europe.
Happy Christmas to you all. Enjoy the holidays, because in the New Year the EU will enter a new period of economic idiocy. For the struggling countries of the eurozone, 2011 will be a meat grinder. Britain, thanks to Cameron, will get dragged into the carnage.
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17 December 2010 3:55 PM
Cameron at the European Council: so who's the silly monkey, then?
It was a sarcastic reference to the game parents play when they want to distract a toddler's attention from something that would otherwise make him howl -- Mummy slipping out the door, or the doctor approaching with an injection. Up goes the stuffed monkey toy, clink-clink go the keys: 'Look this way, no, no don't look that way.'
And they were dead right. At his press conference, Cameron wanted Britain to look away from the really horrible part of what had just happened.
The real issue at the council ('No, don't look that way') was the decision to amend the EU treaties to establish a permanent bail-out system for the eurozone. When Cameron went into this summit, he was insisting that, if he were going to support that, then Article 122 of the Lisbon Treaty had to be amended at the same time. This is the article which the ECB and the other euro-fanatics used to sweep aside the 'no bailouts' clause of earlier treaties when peripheral members of the eurozone such as Greece went over the debt cliff.
Article 122 just says that if a member state is 'seriously threatened with severe difficulties caused by natural disasters or exceptional occurrences beyond its control,' the EU can give it financial assistance.
Now, when the treaty was presented to the public, they were led to believe this meant helping a member state hit with earthquakes or tsunamis or infectious epidemics. Interpreting 'natural disasters' to mean a pack of spendthrift liars taking over the Greek government for a lot of years was not mentioned as a possibility.
But the Article has been interpreted just that way, and it is that interpretation which has led to the United Kingdom being sucked into the bailouts for the eurozone -- now and until at least 2013.
And by the way, you will remember that when the Lisbon Treaty was finally ratified, Cameron and Hague wriggled out of their commitment to give the the British a referendum, on the grounds a referendum would only be granted if other, further powers were given beyond what were already handed over in the Lisbon Treaty.
Well, at that time Cameron and Hague -- and all the British people - were oblivious to the fact that this unexploded bomb of a power way lying in Article 122. Once the eurozone fanatics set it off, Cameron should have called for a referendum, on the grounds that this extraordinary interpretation of Article 122 amounted to shifting new powers (and more to the point, new billions) from Westminster to Brussels.
But of course he didn't. Now it is too late.
So instead he limped to Brussels saying that if he were to agree to the setting up of this permanent eurozone bailout structure (which would exclude the UK) he wanted Article 122 to be amended at the same time so that Britain could not be dragged into other, future bailouts through the same interpretation of the article.
Of course, Cameron failed. The eurozone gets its mechanism, and Article 122 remains unamended. Some fine words were spoken by other leaders about how that interpretation wouldn't happen again, but anybody who believes that what a Frenchmen says tonight he is still going to mean in the morning really shouldn't be let out in Brussels alone.
Which all explains Cameron's absurd press conference. He did his masterful stride to the podium, and immediately launched into yet another pronouncement on how successful Britain's resistance to the increase in the EU annual budget had been.
For those with you who have other, better things to remember, here is what has happened: Cameron had said he wanted zero increase, the European Council outvoted him and said a 2.9 percent increase would be fine, and the European Parliament wanted six percent increase. In the end, the increase was 2.9 percent. Cameron bragged today about how the council hadn't done the usual thing and split the difference with the parliament, and this was a victory.
Yet in other words, Cameron didn't get what he wanted on the budget, but he was so desperate to find some sort of 'triumph' in Brussels today to distract from the eurozone bailout disaster, that he was clinging to this budget nonsense: 'Look at the silly monkey! Look at the shiny keys!'
However, when he was tried to demonstrated this was a victory for his kind of thinking, he made the mistake of going back over it, saying how in every member state nearly every kind of spending had been cut, so the EU budget had to take that into account.
Well, if the EU were to take that into account, the budget should have been cut, not held at the zero percent increase Cameron wanted. It most certainly should not have gone up to 2.9 percent. And as for not splitting the difference -- Cameron wanted zero, the parliament wanted 6 percent increase, and now the increase is just a sliver below 3 percent. That looks like splitting the difference to me.
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16 December 2010 4:53 PM
Cheapskates! Give him 'the rank he was proud to honour at the time of his death'
What brings this thought to mind is a petition that has just dropped onto my desk on 'the rank and pension of soldiers killed on active service.' It seems the bureaucrats are operating policy that is somewhere between insulting and immoral. The policy is this: unless a member of the armed forces had held his rank for at least a year before he was killed in action, the Ministry of Defence will only pay the pension linked to his former, lower rank.
So www.soldiers-pensions.co.uk have organised a petition for an Early Day Motion in the House of Commons to get this policy changed, 'and considers that the family of Sergeant Matthew Telford of Grimsby, promoted to the rank in June 2009 but killed by an assassin in Afghanistan in November of that year, along with Guardsman Jimmy Major of Cleethorpes and three other soldiers, should be paid the full pension appropriate to the rank he was proud to honour at the time of his death.'
How the hell is David Cameron allowing this to happen? And I just don't want to hear from some Tory that 'we can't control the details.' Or is the excuse from the Tories going to be that the LibDems don't want to let the Government look after the families of soldiers killed in action? This is no detail. It demands fixing.
I have my suspicions how this is happening. A generation back in Whitehall, a huge number of leading civil servants had war experience. Now you have some academic whizz kids from Oxford and Cambridge whoe interests are far removed from soldiering. They have reduced all kinds of back-up for the troops because they do not understand-- or, may they burn in Hell, do not care -- what the troops need.
Go to the website and sign the petition: maybe that will let Cameron know that at least the British people, if not their highly-paid bureaucrats, know what the troops are due. Protection for their grieving families, for a start.
www.soldiers-pensions.co.uk
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