It’s not often you’ll find a Frenchman slagging off EU farm subsidies, but that’s precisely what World Trade Organisation Director General (and Peter Mandelson’s predecessor as European Commissioner for Trade) Pascal Lamy is doing. Is international pressure to scrap the … Continue reading →

Turkish bird flu confirmed as “the highly-pathogenic H5N1 strain that scientists worry could mutate into a human virus and spark a global flu pandemic likely to kill millions”. Hurrah!

I was wondering what the next area for Blair’s EU presidency to fail in would be. They’ve already buggered up sorting out the budget, the constitution aftermath, CAP reform, data retention, very nearly Turkey, and doubtless numerous other less prominent … Continue reading →

Bird flu confirmed in Romania. Tomorrow the test results on the virus found in Turkey should reveal whether it’s the deadly H5N1 strain – with its 50% fatality rate. And still the government has only 900,000 doses of the vaccine. … Continue reading →

Blair government in complete policy U-turn following “turns out it wasn’t either popular or properly thought through” shocker! – This time those stupid data retention proposals they were trying to push through the EU to avoid having to have a … Continue reading →

As such, things put here to remind me to read them later: “Is there anything left to argue about in economics? Anything interesting, to be more precise, or important?” “A couple of days spent clicking around the economics blogosphere last … Continue reading →

France attacks Peter Mandelson for “going beyond the principles of his mandate” in trade talks with the US. Mandelson has a mandate? Mandelson has principles?

I feel a migrane coming on, so will shortly be unable to see. So in the meantime check out how much just one government department is forking out on consultants via our Justin and the generally top chap that is … Continue reading →

Ha ha ha! Thanks to Amazon’s “Customers who shopped for this item also shopped for” thingie, I’ve just had my suspicions confirmed – bloggers are all self-obsessed onanists. On the page for our man Worstall‘s anthology of British blogging (in … Continue reading →

Public Service Announcement: Human Rights group Liberty has organised some potentially interesting public meetings this week as parliament returns to discuss Blair’s mental anti-terror legislation. On Wednesday at Central Hall, Westminster, 6:30pm they’ve got an interesting line-up of speakers to … Continue reading →

Defence Secretary John Reid: “Iraq has achieved in 14 months what it has taken this country several centuries to achieve” Eh? I know this country’s gone to shit recently, but I still don’t seem to recall car bombs and suicide … Continue reading →

.eu domain pre-registration now open, prior to the launch of the new web address wotsit in the new year. Bad news for Eurosceptics though – someone’s already booked fuck.eu – although screw.eu, stopthe.eu, leavethe.eu and ihatethe.eu are all still available. … Continue reading →

Blair government in “ill thought-out legislation” shocker! Yep – once again a supposedly bold initiative is being dropped because they didn’t think it through properly – this time the pub smoking ban. Which for those of us who like a … Continue reading →

Why! It’s the Blair government!. Yep, much as with the whole mad cow disease thing – and bovine TB, for that matter – rather than fork out on funding vaccination research and production they’ve sat on their fat city-based arses … Continue reading →