Labour Party leader and Aliens

So Red Ed is not dead after all, but very much alive and kicking, after he came from behind on Saturday to beat his brother David in the Labour Party leadership election by just 1.3%. David had more support from MPs and party activists, but Ed won through thanks mainly to the votes of union members.

One of his first tasks was to try and rubbish Tories’ claims that he was now in the unions’ pockets. However, they (the unions) will undoubtedly consider him as THEIR man, and will demand their pound of flesh somewhere down the line. He will discover that it’s rather difficult to appese them whilst trying to keep some of his MPs happy as well. He also informed the media yesterday that since his election on Saturday afternoon, folk have been joining the Labour ranks at the rate of one per minute. That’s 1,440 a day; 10,080 a week, or over one million new members within two years. Surely those new members, along with the existing party faithful, should be enough to see him safely into No 10 at the next election, as long as he remembers to bow the knee to the bigger unions as well, of course.

I see that trainee nurses are now to attend lectures on how to listen to patients, and show compassion towards them. Now, maybe I come from a bygone age, but I was led to believe that kindness and compassion towards their fellow beings was part and parcel of a nurse’s job. Indeed, we were told that it was more of a calling for them, and not so much of a job. The scheme has been added to the nursing student curriculum at Edinburgh’s Napier University following a £1 million, 3 year survey of patients, relatives, and nursing students sponsored by Ann Gloag, Stagecoach tycoon and former nurse. It seems ironic that the money was given by a woman who went to court, and successfully managed to get the public banned from part of her Kinfauns Castle estate in Perthshire. Is that the type of compassion that she had whilst a nurse, and is it the kind of attitude that she would like the student nurses to have?

Hundreds of bird watchers have flocked to Norfolk to catch a glimpse of a yellow-bellied flycatcher, which has been spotted for the first time in Europe. The 5 inch bird, which usually migrates to Mexico and Central America, is obviously no coward, as it has landed up to 4,000 miles off course. Maybe it just got fed up of going to the same bogs over there each year, and has heard that one can get around here fairly easily using Ryanair.

Talking of flights, and folk who are involved in such, it is being reported that the UN is to appoint a space ambassador to act as the first point of contact with any aliens who want to make contact with us after landing on our planet. They are set to give the job to Mazlan Othman, a Malaysian astrophysicist, who is currently head of the little known Office for Outer Space Affairs. Presumably, they will be intellectually more advanced than us, and to save room in their craft, they will probably be sent by their leaders as individual sort of flatpacks, to be assembled on touching down here. I would imagine that their first words might be, “ Greetings, Madame Othman, we come in pieces”.

Arrogance, Banks, and Football

What on earth is going on in the Scottish Parliament? We have Anne McLaughlin, Scottish National Party, who is to be sworn in as a list MP this week, secretly filming photos inside the building, and posting them on her blog. Although there are no firm guidelines on photographs being taken by workers in Holyrood, there ARE other things to be considered, such as respect and trust. I would think that she will not be accorded those in abundance by opposition MPs when she takes her seat. If she is voted out at a subsequent election, or decides for some reason that she would like another career, I don’t think she can depend on getting a phone call from David Bailey CBE.

 

Scottish Labour leader Iain Gray claimed yesterday that Scots could benefit from the “next stage of global economic development” if Labour policies were followed. Maybe he’s forgotten that Labour have been in charge for the past 12 years, and that a certain Mr Brown has been running  the economy, as Chancellor and now Prime Minister, when he’s not engaged in that other pursuit of his, saving the world.

In Westminster today, four disgraced members of the banking community were to be smuggled into the building to avoid having to face protests from angry workers. Those four are just some of the high flyers who managed to bring the UK’s financial services industry to its knees, but are too scared to face hard working bank employees. Having watched them on TV news bulletins, their so called apologies seemed to be rehearsed, half hearted, and insincere, and I must concur with John McFall, the committee chairman, that at the end of the meeting, they were as arrogant and unrepentant as ever. They can well afford to smirk, as the Government seems unable, or unwilling, to punish them.

 

Turning to football, we find the same kind of arrogance and incompetency coming to the surface. The guys running the Scottish Premier League have decided that the league programme for 2009-10 will begin on August 8, only days before Scotland meet Norway in Oslo in a World Cup qualifying tie. The manager, George Burley, asked that they have an earlier start to the league, and then leave the weekend before the international free, so the team could have a few extra days together. So far, they haven’t agreed to this sensible suggestion. Of course, it is not the first time that they’ve clashed – last May, Burley asked for talks to be held between the SFA and SPL over fixtures, as his first game in charge was wrecked with call-offs as it came immediately before an Old Firm game.

 

Burley himself is under scrutiny this week – he’s known for months that there was to be a Celtic-Rangers game this coming weekend, yet he arranged a get-together for the Scotland squad this week. There has been the usual spate of call-offs, and due to the freezing weather and the fact that Scotland doesn’t have one decent indoor facility, it looks as if the venture has been a waste of time. It seems to me that well paid people at the top in Scottish football arrive at decisions without giving a thought to the consequences, or the adverse effects they will have on our game.

 

A happy (or otherwise) note to end with :-- Research has shown that a bachelor is three times more likely to go mad than a married man. I tend to disagree, especially if the married man is the father of a bride-to-be, as the average price of a wedding is now £22,000.