Down with shortism

The joke that Dave made about the Speaker was as follows:

Someone reversed into Bercow’s car. He got out, looked at the damage and said ‘I’m not happy’. The other driver said ‘Well, which one are you?’ Boom, boom. This is similar to the Aussie cricket joke which they tell constantly. After the 7 dwarfs started their shift a load explosion was heard. Snow White rushed to the pit head. ‘Is anybody hurt down there?’ she called. A voice came back ‘England is going to beat Australia’. ‘Well, at least Dopey’s alright’ she said.

There has been an interesting development here with the NHS. Our son’s local hospital, the Hinchingbroke in Cambridge, has been handed over to the private sector in its entirety to function as an NHS hospital but with the NHS having no management role. I guess that this is experimental, but if it succeeds we may well see the NHS become a funding institution instead a service provider. The NHS is unmanageable if only on account of its size. It is reputed to be the largest employer in the world after Indian Railways and the largest state monopoly outside China. Could this be a way to go in the US?

Still on the NHS, a friend has just returned from hospital in Liverpool where he had a stent inserted. The menu in the cardiac unit offered two choices – chicken and vegetables or burger and fries!

I see that the vultures are now circling over Spain In anticipation that its economy is next in the game of Euro-dominos. The problem is rooted in housing. Ireland has some 300,000 new-build houses unsold. Spain has 1.5 million.

Ireland’s problem was caused by over-exuberance in the building industry which was able to borrow cheap money at a time of rising inflation on account of the Government being unable to raise interest rates to cool down the economy – the price of the ‘one size fits all’ idiocy of the single currency and ECB.

Spain effectively destroyed confidence in its housing market through hanky-panky. It is reported that in Andalusia alone 300,000 expats have had their homes sequestrated and in many cases demolished by the authorities without any compensation. This is said to affect around 900,000 people. The reason is that in the boom years, thousands of homes were built without proper formalities – planning permissions, security of title etc – as a result of criminal conspiracies by crooked politicians, lawyers, estate agents, public officials etc. The scale of fraud appears to be so huge that it must have been common knowledge. We hear stories of OAPs living in their garages without any services because the wrecking ball has visited them. It is estimated that the value of the property is €60 billion.

So farewell, then, to the expat market forever.

A puzzle; we were watching a TV documentary about Israel. There was an interview with young American Jewish immigrants with small children who had built a house less that 1 kilometre from the Gaza security fence, surely one of the more dangerous places on earth. What kind of parents would put their kids at this risk? The immigrants from US seem to be the most fanatical, but then if you choose to leave the comforts and safety of the US to live in a war zone I suppose you must be.