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“Are you thinking what we’re thinking?” Actually, you’renot even thinking what you’re thinking

A slightly better version of the Tories' campaign

So David Cameron is now hinting that there may be a switch in Conservative policy towards asylum seekers. Curious. All that talk of “Are you thinking what we’re thinking?” that he helped mastermind and now it turns out he thinks that was a bad idea.

Would a better line have been “Are you thinking what we’re thinking? Then can you tell us what it is, because we haven’t a clue any more? But we’d really like you to vote for us. Would you? Pretty please? We’ll do anything.”

This change of heart is relatively simple to explain. Cameron knows that the Conservative party has an image problem: basically, anyone under the age of 35 thinks they’re pure evil. He’s also discovered that if a party argues that we shouldn’t allow in more than seven asylum seekers each year from places that torture and murder you such as Zimbabwe, while greeting with open arms thousands of economic migrants from Australia and South Africa, it might be perceived as just the teenciest bit racist.

What? You didn’t know that the biggest groups of immigrants to Britain each year are (white) Australians and South Africans? And you didn’t know that most of them have come here to work, save up all their earnings then spend it all travelling around the rest of Europe rather than pumping up our anaemic domestic demand? Shouldn’t rely on The Sun, Express and Daily Mail for your news then, should you?

As an aside, In case you’re wondering where I stand on this, as far as I’m concerned, the more economic migrants the better. We should be thanking our lucky stars they want to come here to work their backsides off for us in jobs that none of us want to do. Or even in jobs that we do want to do, but we don’t have the skills for. Think about it: the hotel service industry is practically run by Poland at the moment; God bless EU expansion for our daily room service. And I know of several companies that would be floundering with an undertalented staff of posh kids if it weren’t for some highly educated Australians and South Africans bumping up the average IQ level.

Back to the Tories. A quick bit of maths: image of pure evil + covert racism = ?. David Cameron, former PR person, has done this calculation and realised that if he’s ever going to win an election, he’s going to have to appeal to people who don’t have to wipe froth from their mouths every time they’ve ventured an opinion.

Unfortunately, David, you’re still going to have to cope with the fact that a goodly proportion of your party, both members and MEPs/MPs, have sponges in their pockets for just such eventualities. Until we can be sure that the very second you lot get back into power, you’re not going to rip your masks off and go “Ha, ha! Fooled you! We are Beelzebub and his minions after all”, you’re not going to see our votes hitting the ballot boxes any time soon – or even in the next four years or so. Anyway, it’s a secret ballot so stop trying to sneak a peak. Cheater.

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UK concedes in EU trade talks

The FT is reporting the news that the UK has conceded some more of the rebate (effectively) to broker a budget agreement. Well, good. The EU has always been more of a self-support club than a simple single market, with richer members helping poorer members in order to avoid poverty, suffering and little things like wars in Europe (which always turn out well, don’t they?).

The idea that we, the fifth largest economy in the world, should be sucking money out of little countries like Poland was frankly disgusting and I’m glad that we’ve at least reduced the rebate.

The other good news is the French have at least agreed to reconsider CAP spending, previously locked at agreed levels until 2013. Currently, 40% of the EU’s budget goes towards CAP and as the current negotiations at the WTO show, the rest of the world doesn’t like that. While the French have their own reasons for wanting CAP to remain, not all of them bad, and most of the UK’s CAP subsidies goes on environmental conservation, rather than grain mountains, it’s still an idea that needs to be slowly squashed out of existing – or at least substantially reformed.

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Language learning getting worse in the UK

It’s almost a yearly ritual – the BBC article on the poor state of language studies in the UK. Still, I was fascinated to learn, after my earlier rant on the subject, the reason why the government decided to end the compulsory teaching of a second language in the UK.

The government justified its decision to end compulsion by arguing, in effect, that you can take a horse to water but you cannot make it drink.

Its rationalisation was that it was better to encourage more language learning in primary schools (although ministers held back from making it compulsory at this level) than to force reluctant 14-year-olds to persist with something they had already decided they did not like or could not do.

Hmm. Aren’t maths, English, PE and a load of other subjects compulsory? So why not a language? Or even two?

Maybe the government’s trying to cover up the fact there’s such a shortage of language teachers. Certainly, I doubt there’s the required number for primary schools. But with so many of our young adults going off to Asia to teach English as a Foreign Language courses, couldn’t we do the equivalent here? Maybe it would help with our rabid, insular xenophobia for all things European if we introduced more British kids to continental Europeans at an early age and got them speaking languages then.

Just an idea.

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Iraqi elections not spying on own people unlawfully the story

George Bush

Don’t you just hate it when an interviewee, even the president of the United States, refuses to answer questions on a subject, saying “That’s not the story. This is the story…” and then talks about something that clearly isn’t the story? With the alleged unlawful spying on US citizens on the front page of most US papers, President Bush still wants to claim the Iraqi elections are the real story. I don’t think so.

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A guide to Hungarian in the strangest of places

Of all the sites to find a guide to Hungarian language and culture, the last one I would have expected was the LinuxFormat blog. Yet there one is.

Hungarian looks like a fun language, with all those joined up words and suffices for additional meaning: German on steroids, really, although Hungarian is one of the few members of the Finno-Ugric group of languages, and is not an Indo-European language like German.

I’m tempted to add it to my list of languages to learn: after all, if JRR Tolkien was moved by the beauty of Finnish to learn it, I’m sure it’s sister language must be mighty nice, too.

I suspect it’ll be going on the bottom of my list, though, unless that trip to Budapest that we keep threatening to do ever happens. Somehow, I think the likes of Italian and Welsh are going to come in more useful.

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BBC director says BBC news needs to be better. Journalists say BBC needs to be better

According to the Media Guardian, BBC director of nations and regions Pat Loughrey “has made a call to arms to his journalists, telling them to break more stories and be more courageous.”

He also said reporters needed to go out on the road to get stories, rather than spending too much time in the office on computers, relying on “air-conditioned journalism”.

“One of the sadnesses of the technological revolution in journalism is that one can get by with so-called reporting that is entirely based on the PC.

”It would be tragic if we let new technology facilitate a sterility of journalism where the number of stories diminishes because we haven’t the energy or the enterprise to go out and broaden the base.“

No kidding Pat. But here’s the thing. How can the BBC expect journalists to be writing more and more stories for more and more media each day, while simultaneously cutting back on resources and staff? Something’s got to give.

Technology isn’t the issue. For the most part, journalists are just turning to the tools that allow them to do their job as best they can with the time and resources available. The real issue is the resourcing behind journalists. Unless organisations are prepared to let journalists spend time outside the office, maybe not delivering stories for days or even weeks at a time, when are journalists actually going to have the time to break these all-important, investigative stories? If organisations aren’t prepared to pay the expenses necessary to research stories, how are reporters going to do their jobs properly?

Yes, certain skills and techniques are dying away, and that’s bad news for everyone. But the issue isn’t one of laziness in journalists: it’s of media organisations refusing to fund journalism properly. Loughrey’s remarks are simply a smokescreen for the BBC’s own failures in resourcing.