Britain the new Canada

Days after being warned we could be the new Greece, it seems we are now to become the new Canada as the Government looks to copy Canadian tactics in dealing with the deficit.
I always associate the North American country with brightly dressed policemen, maple syrup and ice hockey but apparently in the nineties it turned a huge deficit into a surplus within 5 years and the Lib Dem Cons aim to use its blueprint.
How the Canadians did it was by cutting the budget of everything including healthcare and education which saw hospital waiting lists shoot up with thousands of nurses losing their jobs and hospitals closing. It cut 12% of the civil service workforce and didn't replace leaving teachers with the result of class sizes growing substantially and scrapping special needs classes.
I predict riots if the Con Lib Dems did that here but the overall idea of using the examples of other countries i agree with.
France has the best Healthcare so copy that system. Finland has the best education system so have a look at how they do things and apply it here. The Netherlands the safest roads, Japan the best rail system and the Canadians the world's best banking system.
It is hard to find any 'best of' list that Britain tops so if we are in the mood to borrow things from other places, look to borrow the ideas that made these places the leaders in their field rather than struggle on with the mediocre and terrible like we usually do.
Another plus to becoming the new Canada is that everyone likes Canada and modelling ourselves on a country which lives side by side in harmony with French people may rub off on us.
Erm, let's have another look at that Greek option again.

Soccer Aid

From the start i had better say that i am very much for Charity. Any type of charity if it is for orphans in Romania or the starving in Ethiopia, i give it my full backing and whatever is sloshing about in my jeans pockets at the time.
That said, there is something that gets my goat about Charity events like the Soccer Aid charity match going on today.
It includes professional players such as Ryan Giggs, Henrik Larsson, Zinedine Zidane, Jens Lehmann and Alan Shearer and the rest is made up of celebrities from film and television. All to a man, highly paid and earning weekly what the average person earns annually.
Before the game they are showing the sick and dying in some of the poorest countries in the World and the player gives a solemn voice over informing us that all it would take to save this child's life is an inoculation that costs £1.50 or a £5 mosquito net. My reaction is always, well give it to them then!
Why appeal to us and then wait months for £20m to roll in when you have 60 or so multi-millionaires running around a patch of grass who could easily donate double that and buy even more injections or mosquito nets then trying to squeeze a few quid out of the other 60m of us?
The footballers alone could probably find that by rooting around the back of their sofas.
Apparently the 'stars' give their services free. Very good of them but i'm sure the starving kids would prefer it if they stumped up a few quid to buy food instead rather than score a penalty against the bloke who used to present Have i got news for you.

Idiot BP

As the B in BP stands for British, it doesn't look good that one of our companies are so inept at their job that it has ended up polluting thousands of miles of Americas coastline with oil.
It looks even worse when the boss comes up with the insensitive line ' I want my life back' when he is being interviewed for American television. I dare say the 11 people killed on the rig have more of a claim to wanting their lives back then you Mr Hayward.
There was a great interview on the television this evening where some BP wonk was saying what a public relations disaster this had been for BP in America and it wasn't enough to say sorry to Americans, you have to apologise to them in a certain way for them to accept it.
I'm not really sure what that certain way is and he didn't elaborate so we are left to wonder just how do you say sorry to Americans for what BP has done?
In Britain the wrongdoer has to either resign or be forced out to appease us but i don't know if the Americans go for that approach.
Personally i would go for the 'hands up, no excuses, we screwed up' angle which may garnish a small amount of sympathy or even the heartfelt 'We promise to do everything humanly possible to put this right' and maybe throw in a small tear wipe at the end.
I imagine what he meant was BP will hand over billions of dollars to clean up its mess, keep it's head down and hope it's all forgotten while Tony Hayward gets his life back again.

Britain's drink problem

Britain has a drinking problem, go to any city centre on a weekend evening and it's not hard to notice it. It isn't a new thing, i did my fair share of getting drunk and throwing up in my youth but it just seems worse these days. Most shocking is the amount of young girls brawling and falling down drunk.
What is different now is the advent of alcopops such as Bacardi breezer and hooch which taste like squash or fruit juice and get knocked back like they are.
The latest wheeze is to put the price of alcohol up so high that it prices out the younger members so they drink less and don't get quite so inebriated.
This solution will punish all and would obviously hit the profits of the brewers so expect them to fight against this idea.
The simple solution would be to reduce the strength of the drinks. Most lagers, beers and alcopops are around 5%-6% proof. Why not just make the standard strength 2%-3% instead?
If the brewers can make it 6%, they could easily make it less and the only victim is the person determined to get off their face.
Personally, i'd raise the age limit to 21 as well as 3 years more maturity before hitting the pubs could only be a good thing.
It's a problem that needs sorting but the solution they are considering is the worst for everyone.

Cya Fergie

Good things to say about Sarah Ferguson are harder to find than good food in a branch of Little Chef but if we try really, really hard...nope, can't think of anything.
At least when her sister in law Princes Diana got caught out she had the decency to arrange being photographed coming out of a children's hospital afterwards, Fergie hasn't even got that much cunning.
Instead, she runs off to America to appear on Oprah and blame alcohol for being such a money grasping basketcase.
Drink affects people differently but whereas i tend to laugh a lot and tell jokes really badly after a few, she obviously tries to sell access to her ex-husband for half a million pounds.
Maybe she was drunk when she was pictured having her toes sucked that ended her marriage or hiring the woman her father was having an affair with so they could continue there affair.
The Duchess commented, "I love the fact that Americans embrace me. I said I was sorry for whatever I had done in the UK, and they embraced me and said, 'OK, we'll give you a second chance.' And they have given me my life back, the American people."
You can keep her American people and if you give her a couple of dollars she will let you suck her toes.

Condemning another Israeli atrocity

It has always amazed me what Israel can get away with. It seems that because of what happened to the Jews 60 years ago, they now have a free pass to go around doing whatever they like to whoever they like. What especially gets my back up is the way people try to defend the Government of the country who cause these atrocities.
The treatment of Palestinians is one of the greatest crimes of the last 60 years but they continue to go on dishing out massacres and inhuman treatment and still they get billions of pounds worth of aid while Gazans are digging through the rubble of their former homes struggling to rebuild after the last wave of disproportionate attacks.
Now it has stormed an international aid convoy bound for Gaza, killing 19, and blamed the ship passengers for attacking them with sticks and metal bars. A reporter on the ship said the commandos had began firing before they had even landed on the vessel and as Israel is well known for attempting to cover up it's misdemeanours, we have no reason to believe the Israeli version of events. It recently admitted that two demonstrators who we were told were accidentally killed by rubber bullets were actually shot dead with live rounds but they only came clean after the press exposed them. It has already been found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity during its inexplicable attack on Gaza 18 months ago.
Israel needs to be reigned in, it likes to paint itself as the victim in the Middle East but it has instigated more conflicts than all the rest put together and is making noises about starting up another one with Iran.
The United Nations needs to get its act together and if America uses its veto to block any action, the rest of the World need to impose their own sanctions.
If it was any other country their would be uproar and resolutions flying about the place but Israel have the holocaust trump card and play it at every opportunity.
It is about time we stopped falling for it and told it to begin acting like a responsible state because something needs to be done regarding bringing Israel to book for its deplorable actions.

Last Again

If you consider Germany for a second, you think of decent cars, mullet haircuts and men in leiderhosen slapping each other around the face. What you do not think of is their musical pedigree.
Regardless of this the good people of Europe have decided that Germany is this years musical powerhouse and voted it the Eurovision champions.
To be fair it was a halfway decent song, a bit quirky but not the usual Eurovision fare which is usually a song about us all loving each other and peace on earth which is commendable but does not usually make for a banging tune.
So it's all off to Berlin next year and a perfectly functional evening.
The United Kingdom came stone cold bottom and off we go blaming everything else except the fact that it was a rubbish song and the singer was no great shakes either.
We bleat about how ridiculous it is all after all we gave the World the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and and the Who and forget that we also inflicted Timmy Mallet and Mick Hucknell upon it.
If we want to stand a chance of finishing above Belarus next time, we should do what most of them seem to do now and put forward one of our major artists.
We should say 'There you are johnny foreigner, you give us the million album selling MaNga and we give you Leona Lewis or Muse so stick that up your 1980's style jumper'.
Personally, i was a massive admirer of the Armenian entrant and believe that she should have won.
No idea what the song was like or even how well she sang it. Who cares how she sounds when she looks like that.

Updating the curriculum

As much as it surprises me to say it, the new Government seem to be making a good fist of things so far.
The reforms they are declaring seem to be mostly Lib Dem ideas but nothing there at the moment that seems too scary and pretty much all i agree with.
The latest wheeze is a slimmed down curriculum for schools although no decision yet on what subjects will be axed so maybe i can suggest a few.

Metalwork: As much fun as it is to spend a year making a set of nutcrackers, when will this ever be applicable in later life unless you wash up on a nut laden desert island with only a set of precision tools and a lathe?

Shakespeare: The only time Shakespeare comes in handy is when you want to out smart-arse a smart-arse by continuing their Shakespeare quote they only used in the first place to be a smart-arse.

Historic Royals: Unless you are on a quiz show, you will never, ever, ever have to recall who was the reigning monarch in 1477. As long as you recognise the present one so you don't get arrested for passing on fake bank notes, that's all you need to know.

Square Roots: I have never met anyone who has had a moment when they have cursed themselves for having forgotten how to work out the square root of a number.

Religious Education: Be good go to heaven. Be bad and spend eternity being forked up the backside by the devil.Why take a year to say that? The form teacher could slip it in one morning before taking the register.

Periodic Table: The amount of times i have had cause to regret not knowing the chemical symbol for Nobelium or Ununpentium? Nil.

If you are still at school and you find your nutcrackers are wonky, have no idea who King Edward I married or are panicking over what the chemical symbol for Potassium is, don't worry. You won't ever need to know them anyway.

Handling Kim Jong il

The film Team America World Police has completely ruined Kim Jong Il for me. As he prepares his armed forces to do whatever he has in mind to South Korea, i just picture him sitting in his palace singing about how ronery he is.
There is a serious situation brewing over there with a nuclear armed North Korea run by a lunatic and big pals with China and South Korea with 25,000 American troops protecting it. I should be worried but all i can think of is Mr Jong trying to say the word inevitable.
North Korea has been blamed for sinking a South Korean ship although they deny any involvement and has warned retaliation by their neighbours would mean war.
What makes this even more tense is that North Korea is no Iraq or Afghanistan. It has a massive military and although it obviously could not withstand an American attack, it would take large swathes of South Korea and the surrounding countries with it and with nuclear weapons that can reach the American West coast, Californians may want to upgrade their insurance policies.
The military might, and especially the nuclear threat, is what has saved North Korea from the recent trend of forcing democracy on countries whether they want it or not. That and the wild card, China.
If China decide, as they did previously, to back North Korea against the Western forces then we are all in for a bumpy ride.
What worries me most is the fact that Kim Jong Il is old and by all accounts the recipient of a couple of strokes recently. He may just be thinking in that crazy mind of his that he wants to go out with a bang before his heart jolts him one last time.
The Americans, in that way of theirs, cannot be threatening or make demands because Kim is not a bluffer. When they previously condemned him for test launching a long range missile, he just tested another by sending it straight over Japan.
Kids gloves and a cool head is needed, not Hillary Clinton riding into town shouting her mouth off making demands.
Kim is obviously a maniac but maybe he is just ronery, so terribry ronery. Damn that film!!

Who Loves England Then?

It seems that you can't pick up a newspaper or magazine lately without a World Cup wallchart falling into your lap. All the media pundits are predicting who will beat who and which nation will walk away with the trophy.
Taking a quick glance it seems perfectly set up for a Spain v Brazil final with both avoiding each other until the last game.
As for England, we should comfortably get out of our group and there is a possibility that we would meet the Aussies in the next round if they finish second so i may find myself in the shocking position of actually cheering on the socceroos if only so we can have the pleasure of knocking them out.
As there are only 32 countries being represented, that leaves a lot of the globe with no home team to support so how many of them will adopt England as the team to cheer for?
Our closest friends, the Welsh, Scots and both sets of the Irish will be urging on anyone we play and the places that have now tenuous links to England, namely the Australians and Americans, are there with us so no St George flag waving there.
As we share a queen with Canada, they may be tempted to urge on Walcott and his boys if a ice hockey game isn't on at the time.
The Eurovision song contest has proven time and again that we have no real friends in Europe and Argentina and Brazil have the South American vote all tied up.
The Africans have a choice of countries from their own continent to choose from and thanks to Mr Blair, we would be seriously wasting our time looking towards the Middle East for support.
Nope, it seems that nobody loves us although we can guarantee our National Anthem will be greeted with admiration and pride in Liechtenstein. The tune of their national anthem is exactly the same as ours.
It's you and us Lichtenstein against the World!!