V8 Skateboard

Thanks to Peter Risdon, news of a V8-powered skateboard.

It had to be in Australia. "We haven't built any safety features into it at all, really - apart from a big red button and the ability to run away from it, that's about it."

Dear Santa, I've been really good this year.

Flight Decked?

Oh dear. It seems that Tory peer-to-be Howard Flight has put his foot in it. Cameron has told him to apologise, and apologise he has, and furthermore the apology was "unreserved".

What has he been saying? That the Jews were to blame for the Holocaust? That Global Warming Climate Change Chaos is a criminal conspiracy? That immigrants should be rounded up and sent home?

None of the above. His crime was to say:

We're going to have a system where the middle classes are discouraged from breeding because it's jolly expensive. But for those on benefits, there is every incentive. Well, that's not very sensible.

Labour have called the comments "shameful" and said they showed how "out of touch" the Tories are, and Plaid Cymru have called them "disgraceful". Brendan Barber, of the in-touch-with-the-people's-mood TUC, said that Flight was "an insensitive throwback to the worst of 1980s politics". Man-of-the-people Eric Pickles has said that he found the comments "personally repugnant". David Cameron was clear that he didn't agree with the remarks, and was sure that Mr Flight would want to apologise. Which, after a brief interlude, he has. Shame.

The Tories are planning to remove child benefit from families where someone earns more than £43,000 a year. This will prove a slight disincentive for those familes (who may be accurately called middle-class) to have more children. At the same time, families on less than £43,000 (which will include those on benefits, or should) will continue to get the full child benefit that they do at present. I would be grateful if anyone could explain how anything Mr Flight said was wrong. The first two sentences are pretty much uncontested fact, or at least reasonable assumptions. It can only be his comment that encouraging those on benefits to "breed" is "not very sensible" that is causing controversy.

Paying people to have more and more children (i.e. breeding) when they can't even afford to support the ones they have is indeed not very sensible. I can see the argument for helping anyone who finds him or herself on low or no wages to support children they already have, and that is reasonable and humane. But the current system pays the feckless to be even more feckless. In an age of reliable contraception, there is no reason why anyone should have children they can't afford. Why I should keep on paying for Che'lsee to pop out her fourth and fifth sprogs while sitting at home watching Jeremy Kyle is a mystery. The noises from the Left are as expected. But for Cameron and Pickles to join in an attack on a man who is only saying what many ordinary people are thinking shows a lack of balls.

I happen to think that Flight is wrong on the issue of the higher earners. If you are earning over £43k, you can afford a couple of children, and these are the kind of people who are the least likely to have children they can't afford in any case. His remarks on the incentive that those on benefits have to produce even more children are spot on.

The Coalition - gradually revealing themselves as New Labour with a new coat of paint.

Better Off Out

Sue has a nice bit of music to accompany a headline in a major English newspaper that I thought I would never see:

GET BRITAIN OUT OF EUROPE

(Which should, of course, read "out of the EU" - Britain isn't leaving Europe unless there are some pretty powerful tugboats out beyond the Irish Sea.)

The Daily Express has come out in favour of a British withdrawal from the EU. Leading article in the link above. They are also running an online petition, linked in the article. I have signed.

Regular readers will know that I love Europe, meaning the European Nations. As a Brit, I feel part of Europe emotionally, and I believe that co-operation between European nations is a good thing. What I can't stand is the unaccountable, corrupt and profoundly undemocratic European Union. I voted 'yes' in 1975, when what was on offer was membership of a trading bloc. That is nothing like what the EU is today, after 35 years of name-changes and mission creep, and at no point have I, or any other Briton, been asked my opinion on whether I want to be part of it. This is not xenophobia: this is a belief in independence and self-government, democracy and accountability, and a hatred of corruption and self-serving elites.

Perhaps this is the first crack in the dam.

Happy Thanksgiving

I know I have some regular readers from across the Pond, so let me take this opportunity to wish all of them (you know who you are) a very Happy Thanksgiving.

This week I am mostly ...

... training to become a Door Supervisor. I need this badge to carry out my new job, and I was appointed on the understanding that I would train and get the certificate within three months.

That's £295 for the training and £245 for the certificate (renewable every three years), and my employer will neither pay the costs nor give me time off to do it. So I have been working almost continuous shifts to carry forward four free days to so the course. Nights and days; days and nights. My body-clock is utterly scrambled. The upside of that is that the qualification is mine and not the company's, and I won't feel any guilt about using it outside my normal working week.

It's quite good fun, and a long way from the bald, tattooed hard-man-in-a-leather-jacket image of the traditional 'bouncer'. I have no experience of night clubs, so a lot of it is completely new to me, and quite an education.

If this blog has been a bit quiet recently, that's why.

Normal service, etc.