referendum

Forever divided?
It had to come, a push back against the bungling by the PM and her unelected advisors on how Brexit should be going. Also that this would happen right under the nose of the PM. While just weeks ago the official Conservative Party Conference was at the International Convention Centre, ICC, in Birmingham, the other conference, the alternative conference, was held a short walk away at the Birmingham and Midland Institute, BMI. The ICC has been used many times before by the Conservatives for their big bash. The BMI was chosen for similar reasons, one of the promoters of the alternative conference has been there before but not during the official conference week. But then push back is very much the game at the moment; you could say the 2016 Brexit referendum result was just that and brought the need not just for an alternative Conservative Party Conference but a new look at all of our UK political activities. Tradition has it that politics is based upon divisions but the Left and Right carve up is looking worn, not least because long ago the Labour party abandoned its roots to become a virtue signallers' club.

An honourable man

Parliamentarian of the year, co-author of The Plan, MP for Harwich and Clacton, intellectual and genuine democrat Douglas Carswell is asking for a referendum on our membership of the EU. This is what he says:

Today I introduce a Bill in the House of Commons that would give the people a direct vote on Britain's membership of the European Union; the European Union Membership (Referendum) Bill.

All three political parties promised us a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. Yet it never happened.

Has there been an accident?

When Sun reporter Trevor Kavanagh wrote up his interview with Tony Blair in June of this year it carried the Blair quote:

"I would rather nail my testicles to a speeding train than be President of the European Union,"

this was a generous gift of Blair to the tabloids, if not the world. For then we could all wonder if Blair was talking bollocks yet again. This was a trait that served him well when in power, why should the old dog bother to learn new tricks?

European communities finance bill
Alan Johnson, the NuLabour MP for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle and Health Secretary, is to 'tackle' the problem of the sick note culture, reported today, 20th February 2008, by both the Times and The Independent. The latter opts to put the apostrophes around sick note culture, see HERE

An unstoppable force ?

What shall we do with the drunken sailor? is the opening line of perhaps the most well known sea shanty of all. What shall we do with an unwanted country? is not a long-lost verse of this shanty recently found by a ferreting musicologist-cum-folksong fanatic, but is my question to you; and the country in question is Belgium. These things have a sort of connection, in so far as the music for the shanty was written down in 1825, the Belgian Revolution establishing that country, using bits of Holland and France, was in 1830, and the words for the shanty were first heard in 1891. Some of us are dreamers, and so it could just be that, to keep their spirits up during the revolution, someone did hum the music.Then again, by the mid 1890s perhaps the whole song was popular in the coastal taverns of Belgium - could be.