With a good turnout, the result in last week's Fun Online Poll was as follows:
Are people who commit suicide by throwing themselves in front of a train particularly inconsiderate?
Yes - 89%
No - 11%
So that's that settled, and Jeremy Clarkson vindicated. Thanks to everybody who took part.
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And lo, to The Big Topic of the weekend, Dave breaking with tradition of all previous British Prime Ministers* and exercising his/our veto. As Allister Heath concludes in today's City AM:
One argument that has been making the rounds is that the City is only attractive to global banks because of the UK’s membership of the EU. But then why does non-EU Switzerland have such a large financial and business sector, and why does everybody agree that non-EU Singapore, Dubai, New York and Hong Kong are London’s biggest rivals?
So far the prime minister has emerged as an accidental Eurosceptic; his dramatic shift in UK policy came about almost by chance and partly as a result of incompetent civil servants. But that doesn’t matter. History only remembers great decisions – it never asks why they were taken.
Correct. It is better to be right for the wrong reasons as it is to be wrong for the right reasons. What this whole Euro-bail out treaty is really all about is bailing out French and German banks (as The Guardian pointed out), and what seems to have been the deciding factor for Dave was the fact that Merkozy intended to part-finance this by clobbering UK banks with a Financial Transaction Tax.
In other words, the proposed EU Treaty changes have nothing to do with 'European solidarity' and will not solve the problems in the Euro-zone, this was just our Dave and Merkozy going in to battle on behalf of their respective banks, but hey.
Nonetheless, I am pleasantly surprised by all this, and I had I been in Dave's position, I would have done exactly the same. But how about you? Vote here or use the widget in the side bar.
* I'm probably wrong on this point, but given the ensuing hoo-ha, it certainly feels like it.
So Open, Their Brains Have Fallen Out...
2 hours ago
5 comments:
Dave did not exercise his veto there was nothing to veto. What he did was take a firm stance which amounts to the same thing so well done Dave. All we need now is for UKIP and the Conservatives to unite in one common goal to get out of the EU. Then graft some of UKIP's other policy commitments onto the Tory ones and hey presto the UK's social and economic woes will be properly addressed.
"If you're a eurozone bank ... you can now go to the European Central Bank and tap a ready supply of cash at an attractive rate.... banks can access funds for three years and can do so by offering collateral of lower quality than ever": and no doubt governments can borrow from those banks, so all's well and all shall be well. Hurray!
And when it all goes horribly wrong, none shall 'scape whipping. Except those responsible, obviously.
Anti, Tories and UKIP hate each other, and if they were to unite and get us out of the EU, well good stuff so far, but between them they would be the Home-OWner-Ist coalition from Hell.
D, that's the general idea, govt gives cheap money to banks to lend back to the government at a profit.
MW. Good point I forgot about that one. Overcome that by getting the EU to slip in LVT just before we leave. Yes, No. I know just being jocular.
Dearieme. Presumably the money the ECB is using is coming out of the taxpayers pockets one way or another. So when it all goes wrong there could be a need for a lot of piano wire and lampposts.
Just listened to a discussion on R4 with one person saying that what with the govt bailing out the banks, the regulators had an impossible task at which they ere bound to fail and the other saying that the task wasn't impossible and that the regulators just had to try a bit harder and no-one mentioned that a solution to the problem would the gov't not bailing out the banks in the first place, making the banks responsible for their own cock-ups and hence self-regulating. But I suppose that would let loose the Spectre of Unemployed Civil Servants upon the land and we can't have that.
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