26 July 2012
What are the burning issues of the day, just 24 hours or so before the grand opening ceremony for the 2012 Olympic Games, held in London?
The first raspberry is awarded to the official, within the Olympic development team, responsible for the flags of all competing nations, who managed to show the northern Korean flag instead of the southern one (or vice versa, the boo boo is just as bad).’.
‘My lovely’ wishes to join her voice to the millions who are clamouring to get the price of milk increased so that a farmer can at least make a decent profit. It is totally ridiculous that milk should be sold for less than a bottle of mineral water and she supports farmers in their fight for a modest increase to make it worthwhile to continue to produce this basic food.
There is talk about loosening checks at airports to speed up the immigration control, at least, this is what ‘my lovely’ tells me, which I suppose, she read in some newspaper or other.
Of course, she is right to point out that these terrorists will stop at nothing not even setting up a child as a suicide bomber. This has become even more topical following the 10-year-old who managed to board a flight from the USA to Rome going through all the so-called security checks unchallenged. The last check, surely, that should be been carried out, is a physical head count of the seated passengers. As the airline concerned failed to do this simple check the additional passenger was not discovered. (Having flown thousands of miles and sat through the safety routine prior to takeoff-which usually includes a passenger head count -knowing the number of seats available for passengers,. why not simply count the empty seats. then and take this from the known total. Surely this would be a lot easier than the present system which sometimes takes different stewards three or four attempts before they can agree the number of seated passengers.
Then there is the biggest worry of all, the state of the economy. Today. our Chancellor of the Exchequer, informed Parliament that our GDP for the last quarter, was – 0 .078% . In other words , higher negative growth then was forecast. This, the Chancellor explained was the result of the appalling financial mess left by the Labour Party coupled with the uncertainty within the Eurozone, which has already bailed out Greece and Spain but which, in this latter case, appears not to have been sufficient to rescue the Spanish economy, which is leaving an air of uncertainty over the whole Eurozone. I fear that we have not heard the end of this particular problem and the financial markets are beginning to reflect it. For examples the FTSE index fell 2%, in one day, on this pronouncement from the Chancellor. This, despite what my stockbroker had been telling me, that most of the problems within the Eurozone were already factored into the market, which I took to mean that bad news and already being anticipated and should not have caused a dramatic drop in the FTSE index. It seems that I was misled!