Tuesday 5 July 2016

Random Thoughts

New Top Gear Team?
Tory contender Leadsom was ‘worst minister ever’, say civil servants who worked with her
Perfect for the job then...
Good Old Nigel. Resigns and says that he may drop into the parliament from time to time. Lovely job at £76,000 + expenses.

What a bloody choice.
The most important thing to Tessy is the ability to kill millions of people....
...Instead of this!
Standard Life (still in Scotland) having to suspend trading in its property accounts.

Oh look!

Please let me make more of a mess.
Munguin thought I should have a picture, seeing as I'm a leading contender. Fox and Crabb? Pffffff! Why bother?

13 comments:

  1. Would it be possible to get that "living abroad" map with the percentages of national population as well?

    I have a theory...

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    1. And, in sort of answering my own question:

      http://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/migration/data/estimates2/estimatesmaps.shtml?1t1

      Now, I just wish it was clearer on if it's mapping migrants *to* or migrants *from*

      Anyone have any ideas?

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    2. Difficult to say, Illy. Difficult to believe that between 20 and 40% of the population of Canada is either immigrant *(unless of course you count the Europeans who took the land from the native Canadians) or that 20-40% of Canadians have moved abroad.

      Anyone else?

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  2. I am pretty fed up with the BBC in Scotland trying to make an issue of Scottish fishermen voting to leave the EU and why they think that is a good thing.
    As I understand it,it was Scottish fishermen who sold their licenses to the Spanish and the only thing standing between those who didn't and a Newfoundland situation is EU conservation measures.
    As with most Tory unionists,many of the people who own these boats are only interested in a fast buck and to some extent have been forced into this by loans which have to be repaid to the banks.
    Without regulation of fishing activity,there will be no fish left to catch and I would not expect a freemarketeering right wing Tory government in London to do anything about that.
    We need to protect the fishing industry from itself.
    None of the candidates for Scotland's new dictator in London seem to me to have either the will or competence to last very long so we are in for a lengthy period of instability.
    May wants to fast track the Trident replacement program,presumably because she thinks Scotland may be out of bounds shortly as a parking space for them.
    The money would be better spent on fishery protection vessels to enforce conservation measures but that doesn't fit with their ideology.

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    1. Don't trust most fishermen and farmers. The last thing they care about is Scotland's future.

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    2. The fishermen are being used as prawns.

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    3. Ha ha Alexander.... you're here all week, I assume! :)

      That is my understanding of it Bringiton.

      At some point the EU allowed for the auctioning of allocated fishing quotas in various seas within its remit. Many fishermen, not just in Scotland, but in Cornwall, and Wales (and presumably in France and Portugal... and wherever), took the opportunity to sell their entitlements, together with their boats. Some said that they were getting on, and their sons no longer wanted to follow them into "the fishing" (or they had no sons...or daughters); others saw the chance to make a very considerable amount of money, and to add to that by selling their very expensive boats.

      It was hard luck for the people who didn;t own the boats (and the quotas), but it was a huge windfall to bigger fishermen.

      I'm sure that's not the whole story and there will be many exceptions, so please don't shoot me if I've over-simplified it. (Rather explain!)

      I also agree that without the conservation we would be out of fish. Where as I believe that some species are returning to viability in the North Sea because of the steps taken by the EU.

      Again, if I'm wrong please explain!

      Dan. I don;t klnow too much about fishermen. As I said, I seem to recall what Bringiton was saying. But I know that farmers seem to be forever pleading poverty, and yet I've never seen a poor one.

      For a while I worked with the wife of a hill farmer, supposedly the poorest kind. She was often furious with him for having missed deadlines for EU grants...some worth over £10,000. He didn't care for admin, so he just ignored the final reminders. Incidentally, his wife was French and worked 4-6 hours a week teaching because she enjoyed it. NOT for the money!

      I wish I could be so blasé about £10k

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  3. Seeing the photo of Madam May reminds me of a howler by our Tory friend Dean a couple of days ago on the Scotsman(?) comments page where under his Tory Tory Tory moniker he refers to independence seekers as "Knuckle-dragging, bug-eyed drones".

    If it had been posted by someone like Niko, whose opinions I respect, I might have felt offended. But coming from a supporter of a party who are shortly going to be led by Madame May seems to me to be a trifle ironic and a bit of an own-goal.

    The whole purpose of the EU referendum would appear to be an attempt to appease and appeal to the real knuckle-draggers who support UKIP and all it stands for. Similarly, the blatantly crass message from Madame May to "GO HOME" with the implicit threat associated with it was solely designed with the same objective. I think we all saw prime examples of "knuckle-dragging" in George Square after the referendum and recently in France and I'm pretty certain there were no Scottish independence seekers in their midst.

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    1. I'm surprised at Dean, John.

      But I completely agree with you. To call independence supporters in general, knuckle draggers is rather obviously ridiculous.

      I've never met a UKIP supporter or a BNP or EDF or Britian First person, but I'm sure they are not ALL knuckle draggers. Certainly the ones we've seen on the tv hating foreigners becasue they are foreign couldn't be otherwise described.

      The tyre fitter and his comments about Scotland... and the woman, widely shown on Twitter, who thought that she had voted to get rid of Pakistanis (because clearly Pakistan is in the EU) and a few who said they voted to leave, but didn't really know what the EU was and what it was about, see, tp me to come into that category.

      I rather thought that UKIP's Scottish leader took the biscuit when he (an MEP who wants to get rid of the EU) pondered aloud that it was ridiculous for the SNP to send MPs to Westminster when, after all, they wanted to do away with the place. HUH????

      Oh for the manners and decorum of the Icelandic or Irish supporters at the Euros.

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  4. That Leadsom character looks like the sort of person you'd be stuck with every evening if you went on a cruise. She'd probably have a shiny gold ball gown in her luggage. The type who feels strongly about British Summer Time. I'm never going on a cruise.

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    1. Ha ha ha ha ha ...love it, Agatha.

      You've just put me off the notion of a cruise!

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  5. # bringiton

    There has been a run of letters in The National recently on the way the fishing industry in Scotland was brought to its knees by none other than the fishermen themselves.

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    1. Thanks Bill. I suspected that was the case.

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