"Political Betting" is one of these rather cliquey blogs on which there is absolutely no point in posting if you don't belong: I don't the latter, so I don't the former. Their blog is run by some old guy who goes by the name of Mike Smithson. I've kept his title on the blog list because occasionally I like to pop over and read the comments, which always seem to me to be a competition in bitchiness. Well, that's always good for a laugh, isn't it? Smithson appears, rather like Admin the Numpty at the twee Labour "Hame", to dislike criticism, but where Admin operates a policy of disallowing comments he doesn't like, Smithson simply bars people who make comments which are disagreeable to him. As they now appear to have barred everyone who ever spoke up for the Nationalist cause, I have decided that they no longer serve any purpose on Munguin's Republic, so, I'm taking them off the blog roll, if no one minds.
Poor old Cameron. He goes all the way to the USA, gets a 19 gun salute, gets to ride on the super cool presidential plane Air Force One, and is relegated to the second half of the 6 o'clock news on the BBC by that devastating accident in Switzerland, and the fact that unemployment is up again. Now he's been knocked off the headlines in the Telegraph by the attempt on the life of the American Defence Secretary who was visiting Afghanistan today. And still Cameron makes a speech saying that what our troops are doing in Afghanistan will make the UK safer. We know he is out of touch, but by that much?
Talking of Cameron, does any know if they teach table manners at Eton? I suspect they do. Maybe he just thought he was being one of the guys or something, but when it got round to him on the news, the BBC showed him at a, no sorry, THE baseball game, which the President was NOT going to miss for anyone, getting "tore in", as we say in Dundee, to some burger, or hot dog, or some other item of American cuisine. I know he has a big mouth but I was wondering just how much more he could cram into it. Wouldn't it be embarrassing for us, I thought, if he choked to death. But all was well, he didn't, so threat of embarrassment over.
Talking about embarrassment, although not for Scotland, ?Sir? Dave Richards (they hand them out to anyone with a few bob these days), chairman of the English Premier League made a cringer of a speech accusing Fifa and Uefa of stealing football from the English... shortly before he fell into a pond, at a gala dinner in Doha. Well, there's always one, isn't there?
The joy with which employment ministers met the 'slowing of the increase in the upward rate of unemployment', was perhaps a little over optimistic. They expressed themselves sure that this was sign that the UK had turned a corner: George Osborne's policies were after all working. (Yeah right, and I'm Harry Potter.) They were positively gleeful that public sector redundancies, at 37,000, were more than matched by private sector jobs created at 45,000 in the last three months of 2011. But only a few hours later, I read that, in the same period, the number of people working part time, because they couldn't find full time work rose by a massive 110,000. It may be marginally better than being unemployed, but if you need a full time job, only having a part time one (sometimes with no guaranteed hours) is plain miserable. No things aren't getting any better, but at least ministers can make the figures look that way, if they feel like it.
