Disunited Kingdom

When I last visited Sirmione in Italy I gained free access to a museum because I was an EU citizen. 

When I last visited Budapest in Hungary I was able to ride the city trams free of charge because I was a Senior Citizen of the EU.

In all of my frequent visits to Europe I knew that if I needed medical treatment I could get it without my bank balance being raided. 

I could also make phone calls on my mobile without the charges being ramped up.

I was able to cross from one country to another with no more bureacratic hindrance than crossing from England into Scotland.

When staying in hotels in my own country (UK) I've benefited from efficient and pleasant service from staff who were recruited from other EU countries.

When admitted to hospital I received superb attention from doctors, nurses, health care assistants, and cleaners, many of whom were from the EU (and beyond).

I eat vegetables that have been picked from fields (sometimes in freezing or wet conditions) by workers from other EU countries. Far from 'stealing our jobs' (we currently have low unemployment rates) they are doing work that many of those who are unemployed don't want to do.

The quality of our rivers, our coastal waters, and the air we breathe, the safety of our cars, and much else are controlled by EU regulations that we ourselves have helped to formulate.

Far from being a 'Vassal State' 'Shackled' to Brussels, and 'Dictated to by an unelected bureacracy', we have jointly participated in Europe's future with other elected leaders, and an elected parliament. We have been able to opt out of a single currency, and to opt out of the Schengen 'open borders' agreement.

We have benefited from cross-border policing, national security, medical and scientific co-operation and co-ordination.

We trade freely not only with millions of people on our doorstep, but with 70 other countries around the world via agreements made with the EU. So far, there are only provisional separate agreements with a dozen of them.

As for 'Unelected bureacrats', since when were Civil Servants ever elected, in any country?

And yet our nationalistic tub-thumping Brexiteering government expect us to replace all this with what? .. Turbo-boosted Optimism! WHY?! Because a slim majority of us voted for it after being fed dreams, aspirations, and lies instead of real facts. Some of those voters phone radio stations, and when asked to explain why, or what is it they could do outside the EU that they can't do now, they come up with garbage such as .. "I want to eat fish and chips out of newspaper again" (nothing to do with the EU), "I want to control our borders" (we already do), and "I want to buy curved bananas" (tabloid newpaper myth). Thankfully, nobody has yet said, "I want our money to return to £sd!" (Also nothing to do with the EU).

And now our new (undemocratically chosen) arm-waving blustering Prime Minister has a parliamentary majority of only ONE (and that's even counting the dubious support of Northern Ireland's DUP). There's only one solution now .. a General Election and an end to this madness.

What do we want from our Political Leaders?

All this media furore on the subject of Prime Minister Brown's alleged bullying of his staff (most of which has recently been thrown into doubt anyway), coupled with our apparent obsession with the man's general character, likeability, and so on, leads me to wonder why our democratic process has progressively turned into an "X Factor" competition without the music.

The Conservatives have been putting up huge billboard posters showing an airbrushed pretty-boy photo of their leader David Cameron and a message saying "we can't go on like this".

It's all become too personalised. It's a beauty contest. Where is the information on what the Parties are really proposing to do? Even when the Conservatives feel able to feed us with the odd policy proposal or two, after a couple of weeks have gone by they've changed their tune and the policy's been altered.

Who cares if Gordon Brown is a difficult man to work with? Who cares if he gets angry when he can't get things done that he wants done? It's what you might expect from someone who has anything about him with the demands of the top job on his shoulders.

Successful War Leader, Winston Churchill, was famously grumpy, irascible, prone to excessive drinking and bouts of depression. The people who worked with him accepted that and got on with the job. Now we have a load of wimps in No.10 Downing Street who can't hack it.

Clement Attlee, who led the immediate post-war Labour Government wouldn't have had any success at all in today's popularity stakes; he was quietly spoken and looked like an old-fashioned High Street Bank Manager. And yet Attlee successfully led a government that revolutionised a bankrupt British society after the ravages of war; he nationalised the railways, gas, electricity and water, and set up the National Health Service. And he did all this within 5 years.

I don't want our political leaders to be fussing about how popular they are, how nice they are, how good looking they are, how well they come over on television, how many people they are going to upset with some policy or other. I want them to be people with some kind vision about what kind of society they want, and have the ability to inspire the people around him to come up with the goods.

I don't think it is necessary for our Prime Ministers to be invited on to chat shows to demonstrate they are normal human beings who are able to weep in public about their personal tragedies.

Whatever one might think about Labour Party policies, Gordon Brown stands head and shoulders above the Conservative's David Cameron and the Liberal Democrat's Nick Clegg, both of whom appear to me to be lightweight wimps blowing around in the wind.

Who is Gordon Brown?

A regular American contributor of comments on this Blog responded to my last post about UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown by confessing to knowing little about him, nor even having seen a photograph.

Gordon Brown acquired a good reputation early on as Tony Blair's Chancellor of the Exchequer and was well known for his frequent use of the word "prudence" to describe what drove his financial policies.

Unfortunately, on the other side of the coin (geddit?) he was driven by an overwhelming ambition to replace Tony Blair as leader of the Labour Party and Prime Minister. In fact the story goes that when Blair was elected Leader he promised Brown that he would in due course make way for him at some stage. This made for a difficult (and sometimes imposssible) relationship between these two key men in government.

When Brown eventually realised his ambition last year he changed from the "Iron Chancellor" into the vaccilating Prime Minister, and also became haunted by some of the policies that he had been responsible for as Chancellor.

Some of his less savoury acts as Chancellor included imposing a tax regime that led to the near destruction of the insurance and pensions industry, and removing the financial incentives from the state of marriage.

He is the man who introduced a lower rate of income tax set at only 10p in the £ between the level of untaxed income and the level at which the normal rate of 22 pence applied, thus helping the lower paid. This is the same man who, bizarrely, last year slashed the normal rate of 22 pence to 20 pence (with a great fanfare) but at the same time abolished the 10 pence rate that he'd introduced a few years earlier. The result, this year, is that those of us who are reasonably well off are now better off, but those who are struggling are now worse off. (So much for the Labour Party being the party for working people and the disadvantaged.) The outcry within his own Party has been such that he has now been forced to promise some kind of refund for those who have suffered by the latest tax change.

After ten years of Labour Government the rich are richer, and the poor are poorer. We couldn't have asked for more from a typical Tory Government!