Fog in the Channel...

Salut France, we share you're pain(s)

...continent cut off. Sometimes it's a case of 'if only it were true', but it does seem that we are not fully cut off from hearing the news of chronically stupid ideas that in the current climate may be in danger of drifting over the channel.

I'll actually skip over Sarko's silly little idea for taxing Internet access to subsidise last generation state broadcasting operations as it's so retarded that nobody who is not a card-carrying Brownite could regard it as anything other than a badly timed April Fool's joke. I have often expressed my admiration for Sarko, in particular his disrespect for the conventions of decaying French political shibboleths and who can begrudge him throwing a bone to his old school statist classes once in a while while his mind, or at least some part of his being, may me preoccupied elsewhere - and who can blame him?

From another perspective we should also remember that M. le President's predecessor toyed with the idea of an even more impractical 'per e-mail' tax, so perhaps we should be happy with even the smallest of baby steps away from the completely wrong direction. It is true that we should be wary of the stimulation that the idea of a brand new virgin tax may be causing in Mr Darling's underpants. We should also be ready to repel the general French assumption when it comes to the EU, that anything stupid that France does should be enforced on a pan-European basis. For the moment though, I'm prepared to see this idea as being, at worst, a submerged rock that only a ship as badly piloted as the truly rotten ship 'SS Labour' coming across the channel could hit.

Like most moderate Eurosceptics, I leave swivel-eyed xenophobia to those within the EU machinery with their hatred of anything outside the tiny outcrop of Asia where we live, especially if happens to be a more functional democracy than anything Europe has to offer. For all that, even if I'm going to lay off the executive branch of French government, I can't help treating taking the piss out of this decision from their judicial branch, especially as I can equally imagine some decrepit creature in our own courts coming up with the same nonsense.

Basically, a French newspaper has been fined for a piece of journalism on the state of the French champagne industry because they failed to fit in a suitable rider on the horrors of alcohol into the same article, thanks to the legal intervention of a set of busybodies whose name transliterates to the 'National Association for the Prevention of Alcoholism and Addiction'.

This is completely nuts (some people may suffer an adverse reaction to eating nuts including breathing difficulties and, in extreme cases, anaphylactic shock reactions), but I find it hard to believe that there are not elements in our own country's common sense elimination brigades that will be going to bed over-excited over a new line of attack tonight.

The march of government for the lowest common denominator goes on.