Lavengro in Spain

M-metric Britain

A man has been jailed for driving very fast. The BBC says:

Brady was clocked at 172mph in a Porsche 911 Turbo in a 70mph zone on the A420 in Oxfordshire on 27 January.

and then:

Insp Percival said the 172mph speed equated to 77m per second.

So does m mean miles or metres? I think we should be told.

Teenage Bush

No, no. Calm down! It's about the President of the USA. Click here (wmv 3.81 MB)

Anyone who was confused by the title of this message might like to look at the BBC's problems with Pussygate. The viewers of a children's TV programme voted to call the programme's cat ... Pussy!

Shurely shome mishtake

The BBC says:

 Four new cases [of foot and mouth] near Egham have emerged in the last two weeks - just days after officials declared the UK free of the disease following the August outbreak.

That has been blamed on the virus escaping from leaking pipes at the nearby Airfreight laboratory site.

Oh, the perils of using a spell-checker! My emphasis.

La question de Lothian-Ouest

The UK is Europe’s famously awkward member: it doesn’t use the same money as everyone else (which very nearly cost me £10,000 last week because of Northern Rock, not to mention what the bank creamed off the top of the deal in setting its exchange rate), and it isn’t in Schengen (which is why I need an extortionately-priced British passport – a hundred euros last time – to go to and from Britain). And it is opposed to the Constitution. Basically, the country expects to pick and choose which bits of the EU it wants to be associated with.

The latest thing is that with the upcoming Lisbon summit the UK is banging on again about its opt-out from the justice system. But now people have started asking just why British MEPs can vote on matters that affect other countries of the EU but not their own semi-detached country, which is exempt from so many matters that come before the Parliament.

Now, haven’t I heard that argument made somewhere before?

The Zimbabwe card

Gordon Brown is a British Eurosceptic who was well known as Chancellor for his unwillingness to attend EU meetings of finance ministers. He has now found an excuse not to go to the Lisbon summit as Prime Minister, thereby causing problems in the EU. No great surprise there, but this claim for support of human rights in Zimbabwe comes from the man who quite happily found the money for the British end of the illegal Anglo-Saxon invasion of Iraq. And … Brown recently attended a meeting of ASEAN with the unspeakable dictators of Myanmar (formerly Burma), who are also regarded as untouchable by the EU, and his moral scruples remained unruffled. But that meeting was not organised by the EU and he saw nothing to gain from being awkward. So he wasn’t.

How rich is a doctor?

The McCanns are hiring the Belfast legal firm Kingsley Napley to query the DNA evidence from Portugal. This is the firm that dealt with the Omagh bomb. Presumably this kind of thing doesn't come cheap. And how many documents have to be translated to and from Portuguese? That will be somewhere around twelve cents (eight pence) a word -- and a lot more if it has to be sworn.

Doctors are not on the breadline, but are they able to pay for all this out of their own pockets? For that matter, are they still drawing their NHS salaries even though they don't seem to have done any work for more than three months?

Northern Rock, a Spanish view

I am no expert in international banking systems but this caught my eye. It is from an article by Walter Oppenheimer in today’s El País about the British government’s handling of the Northern Rock crisis.

...

The crisis has brought to light the fragility of the British financial system: the crisis of the high-risk mortgages in the USA has directly affected a bank that had no direct link with the American problem. Britain’s vulnerability seems to lie largely in the secrecy of the system: no bank knows to what extent its rivals might be affected by the American mortgages and they refuse to give each other liquidity.

The crisis has also called into question the current mechanisms for preventing and solving crises. The initial announcement by of the authorities on Friday did not calm savers and shareholders, but had the opposite effect: the shares crashed on the Stock Exchange and the savers ran to withdraw their deposits. As well as the low level of confidence generated by politicians and managers, the fragile mechanism of compensation for the depositors also seems to have played a role. Not only because the State guarantees a rather modest maximum amount (43,100 euros), but because savers may wait months to receive this money.

Northern Rock, Spain and the ECB

An article in Saturday's Independent says:

Unsurprisingly, Mr Applegarth was trying to make light of his predicament yesterday by portraying Northern Rock as a hapless victim of events beyond its control. Three Spanish banks had availed themselves of a similar facility with the European Central Bank over the past week, he said, and nobody had batted an eyelid. His difficulty, he insisted, was a temporary problem of liquidity. There was no question of Northern Rock going bust.

The Bank of Spain has roundly denied that any Spanish bank has sought emergency funding from the ECB and has stated that 'as in practically all the Eurozone' liquidity operations with the ECB have been perfectly normal. This statement has been fully supported by the country's finance minister.

Spiegel and the McCanns

There is a sensible article about the McCanns on the Spiegel International site (in English).

What can I say about Britain?

What can I say about Britain? The Labour Party is trying to reinvent the British Empire, the Conservative Party is as stupid as ever (it was John Stuart Mill who first called them the stupid party), and the LibDems have the misfortune to have a leader who is not only older than the tabloid press approve of, but actually appears to know what he is talking about. And that’s the last thing that the media will allow in a politician.

I am, of course, talking of the British media that have still not recovered from their horror and consternation at discovering that the Portuguese authorities intended to investigate the disappearance of Madeleine McCann all by themselves and in their own way, with typical Latin phlegm and serenity, instead of handing the case over lock, stock and barrel to the ‘Anglo-Saxon media’ for them to investigate it with typical British hysteria and emotiveness. For example, the other day the Portuguese police came out with the quite unremarkable comment that they couldn’t be sure that they would ever find Madeleine’s body. And every journalist in Britain who has ever touched the McCann story immediately came in his/her pants. Nor is it only the newspapers that have always been known for their sensationalism that write drivel about the woman who reported the disappearance of her daughter to Sky News (at 22.11) before she reported it to the police (at 22.40) and then blamed the police for being dilatory in handling the case. When a neighbour offered to call the police for her, Kate said that she had already done so. That was not true.

I boarded a service bus in Wrexham. There were two narrow, steep steps to get on, you pay the driver cash, then a sharp turn into a narrow gangway. Then the bus set off with the door open and the driver chatting to his mate, who was hanging on just inside it. A woman sitting just behind the open door was holding a baby. The baby dropped a dummy. The mother got out of her seat, holding her baby, and retrieved the dummy from the top step just by the open door as the bus rounded a bend. No-one seemed to regard this manoeuvre as at all strange. Radio Brainless was blaring from the speakers. What a change from Barcelona, where all buses are adapted for wheelchairs, you have a prepaid ticket to stamp in a machine, no bus ever moves a centimetre with its doors open, the notices about not distracting the driver mean what they say, and background music is non-existent.

Barcelona airport was designed for the Olympic Games by a top-rate Catalan architect, Ricardo Bofill. It is a light, airy, well-appointed structure with glass panels and open views over the airport runways. From the door of the terminal to the waiting area is perhaps a hundred metres. On arrival from the UK, EU passports are examined cursorily by uniformed police officers who seem pleased that you have chosen to visit their country. On arrival at Liverpool airport, on the other hand, it is as if the plain-clothes functionaries who scan every single passport are doing you a favour by actually letting you into their country.

Liverpool airport has been enlarged with a view to Liverpool’s year as the European Capital of Culture 2008. I do not know the name of the architect, who will have gone into hiding if he/she has any sense of shame. The waiting area is windowless, the monitors showing departures are placed precisely so that they cannot be seen from the seating area, and once through the boarding gate passengers are held on a staircase (there is no lift or escalator) that is made of metal girders bolted together in open view and with the stairs made of those metal footplates with raised criss-cross patterns that you find in factories. We were greeted at the entrance to the security area by a man whose obsequiousness suggested a previous career as a third-rate head waiter or doorman at a strip joint. Having scrutinised my passport, he called me Peter and enjoined me most earnestly to have an enjoyable flight. Things became a little confused and instead of both of us going through the same checkpoint, as we should have done, I went to a different one. This meant that I had no bag to put through the machine while Jane had two. Despite all the notices about only being able to take one piece of cabin baggage through security – and we saw a man being told to put his bum-bag into his suitcase before entering the security area for that reason – no-one said a word to her.

As we waited, a fellow passenger was informing the world at large that, while the official population of Britain was put at fifty to sixty million (he said thousand to start with and had to be corrected) there were in fact some fifteen to twenty million illegal immigrants – and what problems they cause! ‘Look at London with its congestion charge. If we didn’t have all these extra people in this country that wouldn’t be necessary for a start.’ This, as a modern-day Dr Doolittle might say, is what the British population call a comprehensive education.

Is there really any point in Britain continuing with the pretence that it is capable of running a livestock industry?

My house sale is completed and the money arrived in my Spanish bank on Thursday. Fortunately though, it had been converted into euros on Monday, before sterling started to slide following the run on the Northern Rock. I am very pleased indeed to have my assets safely out of sterling and in euros.