Help Please

.
Around fifty rabbis and Jewish mystics took to the sky above Israel earlier this week, praying and blowing ceremonial horns so as to ward off the swine flu pandemic from affecting their country.

Quoted in an Israeli newspaper, Rabbi Yitzhak Batzri said, ‘We are certain that, thanks to the prayer, the danger is already behind us’.

I wonder if we could get them to repeat the exercise over the UK?
.

Unfathomable & Inconsistent

.
The mind of the UK Border Agency is unfathomable and inconsistent.

They have just refused visas to the Lahore Pipe Band who were going to compete in the World Pipe Band Championships in Glasgow. It didn’t seem to matter that this pipe band has competed in the same competition for the last four years!

They also knocked back most of a trade delegation from Lahore even though the British High Commissioner in Islamabad gave them his recommendation. Perversely, they agreed the Mayor of Lahore could visit, but not his wife!

Glasgow MSP Anne McLaughlin said members of Lahore Pipe Band faced problems in securing visas to visit Scotland last year before they were eventually granted and added, ‘For this to happen once was bad enough, to repeat it this year is a disgrace’.

I have every sympathy for the Scottish Culture Minister, Mike Russell, who said:, ‘The Scottish Government is in touch with the UK Border Agency to discover the details of the case and we will do everything we can to help.’

I wish him well for, if he can improve the workings of this arcane government agency, he will be doing all of us a favour!
.

I Can’t Resist It!

.
It is reported that some of the animals escaped from Marwell Zoo last month. A bit like Parliament really!

Sorry - I couldn’t resist it!
.

Jobs For The Boys

.
So ‘Mandy’ Mandelson has returned from his holidays and will take over the government as Acting Deputy Prime Minister for a while.

Not bad for a chap that has been fired from government a couple of times and isn’t even an elected MP!
.

I Had The Wrong Job!

.
I sometimes wonder if I had the wrong job.

After all the fuss about MPs expenses, there is now one brewing about the 1,183 Metropolitan police officers who misused their corporate credit cards and who have now been given amnesty. It seems that they will not be punished but will be given ‘training and guidance’.

‘Training and guidance’? In what one might ask.

Ignoring the basic question as to why
police officer would need a corporate credit card in the first place, one has also to ask why anyone who commits a fraud should get away with it. This is especially the case with police officers who are the very ones supposed to prosecute fraud.

Jenny Jones, who is a member of the Metropolitan Police Authority, has said that she finds it, ‘unacceptable that the police have just let these officers go with guidance’. She is absolutely right and it is a scandal that both the Metropolitan Police Authority and the Independent Police Complaints Commission have agreed to such a situation.

In my past lives, the accountants responsible for checking staff expenses have done so with a strict and tiresome attention to detail. This is as it should be. But it is odd that it didn’t seem to be the case with MPs and now 1,183 police officers.
.

Much To Be Thankful For

.
Despite my occasional grumbles, we have much to be thankful for living in Britain.

For a start, we don’t suffer from the sort of typhoons that cause so much devastation in the world as witness the latest one, Morakot, which has struck Asia causing much death and destruction. In China, almost one million people were evacuated from their homes in advance of the typhoon’s landfall and we still wait on details of damage to property and life.

Consider how this country comes to a standstill at the slightest fall of snow, and compare that with what has achieved in China. They evacuated nearly a million people! Just think how much organisation that needed and the amount of transport, accommodation and feeding it required.

Yes, we have much to be thankful for.
.

Happy Christmas?

.
Rail and postal strikes, economic downturns, typhoons in Taiwan and China, war in Afghanistan, and 'Mandy’ Mandelson in charge of the government for a few days (has anything changed there?), etc., etc.

In the midst of all this bad news, Selfridges have already opened their Christmas shop. And good for them as Christmas is the one time of the year when we can forget all the bad news for a few days!

Happy Christmas!
.