Blogging for politics and prizes
I would like to start today’s blog by mentioning my dreams for world peace, an end to hunger and by suggesting it would be nice to all hold hands and solve problems with global warming. Hopefully these good intentions are sufficient for the Nobel Prize committee to send me a nice medal and, more importantly, one million euros.
Unfortunately I’m not the first to have the idea. Carla Bruni, the multi-talented and very attractive wife of Mr Sarkozy launched her new blog this week – and within minutes it had crashed due to the enormous number of people trying to visit the site. Darn, why does that never happen to me!
Even more annoying the site looks very nice as well, and is largely devoted to charitable cause like tackling illiteracy and SIDA (AIDS), putting the rest of us even more to shame. In my defence I do wonder how much of it she writes herself? How many hours does she spend scratching her head trying to think of interesting things to write about without giving away state secrets or causing embarrassment to important people.
Not that French politicians need much help in embarrassing themselves. This week it erupted in the news that Frederic Mitterand, the Culture Minister in France, had been up to no good with male prostitutes in the backstreets of Bangkok.
The ’source’ of this startling news – a book he wrote himself a few years ago. Now I guess I’m an old-fashioned kind of person, and if I had been engaged in such activities I would probably keep them to myself, but I guess for some people any publicity is good publicity.
He went on the French news to explain that just because he was homosexual, paid for sex with Thai prostitutes, and referred to them as ‘boys’ didn’t mean he was a paedophile, or was encouraging the sex tourism business. Well you can’t blame him for wanting that cleared up.
Meanwhile M Sarkozy has apparently just got a twitter account, so he can keep the world updated with every detail of the forthcoming conference on climate change. I’m not sure how constructive the meeting will be if all the participants are rushing to twitter about what was just said instead of focussing on the bigger issues, but it probably won’t achieve much anyway, so they might as well enjoy themselves.
(Note: for those who don’t know twitter, it’s a system for publishing very short messages on the internet that tell everyone interested what you are up to – interesting if you are Mr Obama (or Mr Mitterand on holiday…), less so if you are like me and mostly busy with rather mundane things.)
And since we can speculate that next year’s Nobel Peace Prize will be awarded to whoever was first to twitter and blog their good intentions across the internet, rather than those who actually spend their lives struggling to make the world a better place, you can expect a lot more ‘let’s make the world a better place’ type posts from me from now on.
We just have far to many policians. its layer upon layer, so theey have not got enough to do and idles hand get into mischief. when I was working I never had time for anything like this just to busy.
The layers for me are.
1. The EU
2. Westminster
3. Regional Assembly
4. County Council
5. District Council.
6. Parish Council.
We could function far better if we got rid of 1,3 and 4. Thats a reduction of 50%.
I just cannot see how we can continue to afford all these people.
France of course also has its fair share of layers – communes, cantons, arrondissements, sous-prefectures, prefectures, departments, regions, national, EU…apparently there are 500,000 elected officials in France.
There are frequent proposals to abandon local government at various levels eg merging communes, combining departments into regions, passing commune functions to prefecture level etc but curiously they don’t meet with much enthusiasm from those who are very happy with their current positions…
It’s shocking the amount of money that gets poured into the whole system – every commune has to have at least a maire, often an assistant, often more – and of course a little town hall to go with it (even communes which only have a handful of people – there are 36000 communes in France, many very small).
As you might guess it’s the ‘local mayor’ system I’d do away with first (give it to sous-prefectures to manage), then worry about merging departments into regions levels afterwards.
I’ll reserve judgement on the EU for the moment, but tend to think that most are less in it for themselves than local politicians (hard as that may be to believe!)
You see Boris they always want to get rid of the local people. it should be the other way round. I do not need people in Europe telling me how to live my life. Its like a company that gets larger and larger. It takes all the power away from its branches and regions and puts the all into head office. it continues to expand and finds it cannot keep control of things from head office and has to send power back down the line. This is what needs to happen in Europe. every decision than can be taken at a local level should be . But the complete opposite is happening. if it continues it will be the death of the Eu as eventually some one some where will say no more and the break up will begin. They just never learn from history. When france and germany had a single currrency so many years ago it ended in tears then.
People want their independence and as soon as they realise that everything is being done to suit Germany just watch what happens.
Boris
I think you are more likly to find out about local coruption than further up the line. If you look at what our MPs have been doing that they tried so hard to cover up. The Eu books have never been signed off for years that you would be in prison for if you had done it. So I would think the higher you go the greater the coruption. and the harder to find. Are the French people not bothered that the EU accounts have not been aproved by auditors for years, as I am.I would not give them a further penny till they had.
Its complacency that has caused so many of the problems we now have. this blind trust that is given to political leaders is very dangerous.
Phew feel better for that. Now back to cutting the grass. It has been so mild here were were on the terrace yesterday lunch time for drinks in short sleeve order. Rain over night then blues skys and sun that has dried it all out today.
Mrs N is at her art group this morning so i also have lunch to prepare. Easy tuna pasta with home made pasta sauce. and a bottle of Italian Red Montepulciano d’ abruzzo if we have one left. I sometimes think we can find better wine in England than any other country. have you found good French wine at good prices.
We eat at lunch time and a light snack in the evening, so we tend to have finnished our work by lunch time so if a second bottle is opened ( very rarely)we can doze it off.Now I really am off to cut the grass. cheers.
It is seeing the mischief that mayors get up to that turns me against them, but sadly I think you’re right – the higher up the scale they get the worse they behave. I’ve never been tempted to enter politics myself.
Glad the sun’s out, it is here too (it wasn’t earlier). I’ll probably go for a bike ride this afternoon if it holds up, now that’s something I wouldn’t do after a bottle or two of wine. In fact very rare exceptions aside we never drink at lunchtimes, since it stops us doing anything useful in the afternoon. 6pm on the dot and we’re both rushing for a drink though…
We aren’t wine connoiseurs though, and I don’t know how our local prices compare with those in the UK. I know that a couple of our regulars in the gites who know more about wine than we do take quite a lot of it back with them, so I guess there are good deals to be found.