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”.