Vote Conservative !

For more expensive wine !

"The ban on cheap multi-buy deals will not apply to pubs, clubs and restaurants and is aimed at curbing binge drinking, especially by teenagers "pre-loading" on very cheap alcohol before they go for an evening out."

 I suppose enforcing existing laws on public drunkenness is a ridiculous idea. Far easier to penalise everyone. It's all about rewarding personal responsibility, you know.

I am going to take a weekend off, spend a night or two in France and fill the people-carrier to the gunwales with the more bearable products of Carrefour and Leclerc. About 300 bottles should suffice, and that nice M. Hollande needs the taxes.

(see also "a substance abuse counsellor has been charged with murder and drink-driving after she allegedly stuck a pedestrian and drove for more than two miles with the dying man embedded in the windscreen.")



For concreting over England !

More than 1,500 square miles of open countryside - over twice the area covered by greater London - needs to be built on to meet housing demand, the Government’s planning minister Nick Boles has said.

I suppose stopping letting half a million people a year into the UK is a ridiculous idea. Far easier to ruin the countryside and build on some of the best agricultural land in the world. Who needs food ?




For electricity bills, utility bills and train fares all increasing faster than inflation.

Who needs to keep warm in the winter ? Us Brits can take it ! 





For an India - EU trade deal which would allow 30,000 (above existing numbers) Indian IT staff into the EU  - because there are still one or two UK IT people earning over £30,000! The BBC were plugging it this morning on Radio Four. The Institute of Directors are very keen.

 "CEDEFOP (2010) estimates show a labour shortage of 12 million in the EU in 2020 cutting across all levels of workers."

You may have noticed how few unemployed there are in the EU.

"In 2007, about three million jobs were unfilled in sectors such as information technology (IT) and engineering (EurActive, 2007)."

Must be why IT salaries have gone up so much in the last six years.

(In India for IT staff it's like the 80s in the UK - wage rises three times a year, go to a jobs fair and pick a job from half a dozen offers. A former colleague told me that two years back he'd trained up three or four people so that they could move his job offshore. He trained them in .NET technologies, they went back to India to start supporting "his" applications - and immediately left, armed with their new skills, to work for a competitor! He's still supporting the apps - the company he works for seem a tad 'burned' by the experience.)