2913 days ago
It appears that the new five pound note contains traces of tallow which is fat from a cow. Very small traces as I shall demonstrate below but that has not stopped more than 100,000 snowflake millennials signing an online petition calling for the notes to be withdrawn and the bankers responsible to be hung drawn and quartered.
Okay I made the second bit up but an awful lot of folks are getting angry on behalf of vegans, Hindus, Jews and all sort of other minorities. As it happens the Jews are quite cool about it. The board of deputies says no Jews would have a problem unless they tried to eat the notes. How sensible but elsewhere the faux anger grows. It is the sort of faux anger
2913 days ago
The Tory MEP is on cracking form as he takes apart the millennial snowflakes protesting against Donald Trump, Brexit, etc. Spare two minutes of your life and watch it. It is superb stuff.
3921 days ago
A friend of mine from my Shoreditch days says that he is heading off to a weekend of eating drinking and libertarianism on the 15th March and would I care to go. It looks great but then comes the libertarian dilemma.
If you are a pure thinking individual I would urge you to check out the Freedom Festival here
There are some entertaining speakers: Mark Littlewood, Norman Tebbit, Toby Young, Dan Hannan and I am sure that it will be great fun. However:
a) I am not convinced that this is ideologically pure enough for a true libertarian. I see there is a debate “is immigration a boon or a burden?” If you score straight A’s on the Ron Paul crystal pure test you would not need that debate, the answer is obvious. There is another debate “is the conservative family falling apart?” Heck, when did we join that family to start with?
b) Maybe I am a libertarian because I hate the idea of being organised. One of the joys of Shoreditch life right inside the triangle was that the residents were a pretty crazed bunch. On a day to day basis I had nothing in common with the Lebanese cookery writer for the FT, the fat American artist gay couple, the super geek IT guy from Morgan Stanley or the Australian architect with his French wife who’d been there since the sixties. I struggle to remember the other residents but occasionally we’d come together like a Wild West town
3977 days ago
I stumbled on this video today where Tory MEP Dan Hannan, who is easily the cleverest Tory going, puts three Euro-loons (headed by the almost comical Lib Dem MEP Sir Graham Watson) utterly to the sword. This is a breathtakingly good indictment of the Evil Empire.
4308 days ago
If you do not understand that this is irony then you are probably a lefty. Perhaps we should put humour on the National Curriculum. Anyhow if you have missed #tweetlikealefty on twitter this morning here are some of the best comedy tweets.
@DanHannanMEP
What do you mean, give to charity? I’ve already called for higher taxes!
@DanHannanMEP
I support freedom of speech, but some opinions shouldn’t be tolerated in our society.
@DanHannanMEP
This isn’t about the deficit, it’s about fairness and equality.
@DanHannanMEP
If we reversed the Tory cuts, there’d be higher tax revenues and a lower deficit.
@DanHannanMEP
The trouble with referendums is people might not understand the question.
@DanHannanMEP
A one-off 20% wealth tax on the richest 5% would clear the UK debt.
4477 days ago
The crooked pie-eaters who run Greece have served up the usual offering once again today: “Give us the money we need but just a little bit more time to implement the cuts/reforms demanded.” This should ring a bell or two since we have heard this numerous times before. And each time the Greeks have got their dosh, so becoming more indebted, and then found excuses not to implement the reforms fully. At some stage someone must call their bluff.
Ever helpful Eurosceptic MEP Dan Hannan is again offering helpful advice to the Greeks, viz get out of the Euro.
4487 days ago
Tory Euro MEP and obsessive tweeter Dan Hannan is normally bang on the money. He wants Britain out of the EU, a smaller state, lower taxes, more civil liberties. Whilst he shares David Cameron’s deluded love-in with the Olympics, on almost every other matter his assessment is a) correct and b) invariably different to that of the Prime Minister. I still cannot figure out what he is doing in the Conservatives.
His latest run in with the left is on the issue of poverty. Hannan, rightly, regards poverty in absolute terms. The left regard it (wrongly) as relative. Thus Hannan has been slated all over twitter as some sort of wicked capitalist who wants to make poor people poorer and the rich richer. In a sense he does. If one defines poverty in relative terms then the least redistributive system of taxation will increase poverty. Conversely the most redistributive will reduce it.
4533 days ago
I had thought that the daft Labour MEP who said a couple of weeks ago that Britain should have joined the Euro was the thickest representative we have. But I fear she has competition from two of the new intake of Tory MPs: Louise Mensch and Chloe Smith.
The latter is a junior treasury minister. Go about half way through this Newsnight report from last night to see her being destroyed by Paxman. It really is a train wreck. The woman gabbles but fails to answer one question properly. She contradicts herself and leaves you with the unavoidable impression that she is just plain stupid.
As for Mensch, she has tweeted this morning that petrol is 9p cheaper under the Tories than under Labour and that this is a reason to vote Conservative. The reason it is cheaper is that the oil price has fallen which is nothing whatsoever to do with which party is in power at Westminster. Big Brother says he has reduced the price of petrol and that the 5 year plan is on track. Let all of us in Airstrip One celebrate and thank Big Brother. Well no thanks. Hopefully no-one will believe such an obvious pile of tosh.
Both of these women are seen as rising stars in Tory circles which says as much about how useless our Government is than about their intellectual failings. That such prize imbeciles fill up the sofas at Westminster and in Brussels, costing the grateful taxpayer an arm and a leg is just another indication that we have too much Government and too many representatives.
Would you honestly care if there were only 300 MPs rather than 650? Frankly I’d be happy if there was just one MP as long as it was Dan Hannan. Okay, I would not, even Dan could not be trusted as a dictator but if the USA with 250 million people can get by with 535 elected national politicians why, with 60 million people, do we need 650 (plus all the low grade expense pilferers in the Scottish & Welsh assemblies) representatives? The current system may provide work for otherwise unemployable imbeciles like Chloe Smith but it is a very costly way of reducing the dole queues.
