CHRISTMAS TIME IN THE UK AND SOME RANDOM THOUGHTS

Thanks to Cynical Highlander for pointing me in the direction of this.

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Seen on Twitter:

BBC: The oil business is finished? Expert: No

BBC: It's over for North Sea? Expert: No

BBC: But it's catastrophic isn't it? Expert: No.

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Well, Ed, Tony said it was just for show...

Yep... just for a laugh...Nigel Farage started it by saying he felt threatened by people on the train speaking a different language. (Amazing when you consider that his wife is German and his daughters speak German fluently... but maybe he feels intimidated at home too...it would certainly explain why he spends so much time in the pub and elsewhere!!). I wonder if, when they are in Brussels, on a train, or more likely in a bar, the UKIP lot all speak Flemish or French to each other in order not to put the locals in a state of fear?
Anyway, you'd kinda hope that if people were going to have a go at immigrants for speaking 'foreign' on our trains, they might make a wee bit of an effort not to mix the possessive pronoun "OUR" with part of the verb "to be" ..." ARE"...
Oh, and what the hell is the hyphen for?

JIM MURPHY HA HA HA.... ICELANDERS THE MOST CONTENTED PEOPLE IN THE OECD

The Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) an international organisation of those developed countries that accept the principles of representative democracy and a free market economy has published a list of countries whose populations are content with their way of life. The top 12 are illustrated to the left <== (click on pic for larger image).

Now I don’t know how this organisation gathers its information, but I imagine that it is in as respected a statistical form as would be expected from a world body and no more or less so that the well known polling companies in the UK. (The ones that predicted a hung parliament with a Liberal/Conservative coalition.) The figures relate to 2009.

So, in view of that, I was interested in three things about the figures... and I thought that maybe Jim Murphy might be interested in them too. As a supposed socialist, after all, he should be interested in ordinary people’s satisfaction with life, rather than the state of the nasty Tory markets (snigger):

• His beloved UNITED Kingdom, with its supposedly wise and prudent government, steering us through the economic downturn with Mr Prudence Brown at the helm, does not appear on this list, suggesting that after 13 years of benign Labour rule, the people are not as content as he would have had us believe;

• Ireland appears as number 7 on the list. Despite Mr Murphy insulting Ireland’s economy and by association its government, the people of Ireland are 7th most content of all the OECD countries;

• The country at the top of the list is Iceland. Mr Murphy fair got ladled into Iceland; the failure of it, the basket case nature of it, backward looking and so on... and his boss Dr Brown, perhaps spoiling for a war that he might just win, used anti terrorist laws against this country, because an Icelandic bank’s English subsidiary, registered in London and regulated (or not as the case may be) by the FSA, went broke.... Well anyway, its people, despite the financial meltdown.. and an errant volcano or two, or three.... are the happiest in the OECD.

After Liam Muppet Byrne giving the Liberal-Conservative government an excuse for tax rises by admitting that he had left them not a penny piece in the Treasury, today it is the turn of Jim Spud Murphy to eat crow.