RANT OF THE DAY....

I was talking with one of my neighbours yesterday morning and he told me that he hadn`t bought a newspaper for years and years. The reason? Because they were always full of bad news. So too is the news on television and radio; it seems impossible to avoid it and the really depressing thing is that the more you listen, look and read, the worse the news seems to get.

Almost as if to prove my neighbour right, as yesterday unfolded, a string a bad news - some of it tragic - grabbed my attention. Too many things to recount them all here but they included, of course, the outrage in Afghanistan when five more British servicemen lost their lives and even more were seriously injured. It again got me thinking that if we are going to stay there despite all my instincts telling me we should just get out and leave, then we surely are entitled to expect our`European allies` to share more of the burden that we have taken on. I don`t hear HM Gov. pressing the case about that as forcefully as it should be pressed and it makes me angry.

And speaking of our `European allies,` we also heard yesterday that the infamous Lisbon Treaty was finally signed and sealed when the Czech Prime Minister, Vaclav Klaus, finally gave in. And whilst brave servicemen and women are fighting a losing battle in Afghanistan, the political elite of Europe will now be more concerned with who might be the President and who might be the High Representative for Foreign Affairs. Mercifully, it looks as if Tony Blair`s star is on the wane and we might end up with some Belgian nonentity as President of the European Council. As long as it ain`t Blair, that`s fine, although I would still have liked to vote for a President rather than have one foisted upon me.

Whilst Blair may not get that job, there are dark rumblings that the High Representative job might go to David Milliband, the UK`s Foreign Secretary. He looks more and more as if he`s doing his gap year, so difficult is it to take him at all seriously, but if our European partners led by Rosa Klebb lookalike Angela Merkel and Sarkosy the Gallic Dwarf want to continue their nonentity quest, then Milliband of the Remove is their man. What really makes me angry though is that I`m paying for all this nonsense through my taxes, I have no say in what`s going on and any notion I ever had about the will of the people being paramount has totally disappeared in the welter of lies, broken promises and self-serving arrogance which characterises the European Project.

There, that`s better.