Buddy, peut vous épargner un sou?

EU political machinations against the UK clearly continue apace. Christian Noyer the French equivalent of the governor of the bank of England has evidently been wound up by his political masters, such as his organ grinder the French prime minister Francois Fillon, cherleading, or Mario Draghi Italian governor of the ECB, or Sarko himself, all part of the elite European rulership - and then pointed at the UK.

There is little need to link to it, as even the tabloids have noticed and have commented.

A country’s credit rating is based on its, well - credit worthiness. The worse it is the higher the interest rates it has to pay to borrow, a bit like people really. One of the reasons Greece and Italy are in such difficulties just now.

Put bluntly it’s ability to pay its debts. How safe it is to lend them cash. The world can be in little doubt that whatever else the UK is, unlike Greece, Italy, or even France for various reasons as an examples, about as safe a haven as it is possible to find in the current world economic climate.

The only real threat to the UK’s ability to pay its bills is probably the EU and the Euro crisis.

No one would really take such comments seriously, except this particular individual happens to be the governor of the Banque de France. A bank that is effectively, in turn, the glove puppet of the European Central Bank (ECB). It's main reason for existence these days being simply to implement the interest rate policy of the European System of Central Banks (ESCB).

Clearly M. Noyer is not fit for purpose as the figurehead of even a hollow shell of a bank and in a rational country would be removed from office.

Clearly we would also be foolish to expect anything other than , not necessarily entirely justified reflexive overweening pride and slightly irrational Franco centric behaviour from France.

Another brick in the wall?

Cameron and Sarkozy have signed a deal to share military resources. It was kept pretty much off the public’s radar until it was a done deal. Did parliament get any say so?

It seems Cameron has locked the UK into it for the next 50 years. It is not clear if it can be got out of.

It is doubtful if any of the UK’s politicians will ever seriously try.

Cameron is busy trying to spin it up into great news and it is for the pro EU political elite.

It is difficult to reconcile this with his earlier bluster about not signing away any more of the UK’s sovereignty without a referendum. But this will be yet another instance where a slight change in the newspeak name of the thing magically utterly transforms it, so an old promise can be safely ignored and discarded. He is taking a leaf out of Gordon Brown’s book, on the Labour Party election lies manifesto.

What it actually is is a tacit acknowledgement that thanks to his incompetent butchery of the UK's defence capability the UK is no longer capable of acting effectively on the world stage without support.

What it actually means is that the UK can now no longer act militarily, in many respects, without France’s agreement.

A mutual defence pact is one thing, even military co-operation, or joint expeditionary forces - but signing over a veto on when you use your military to a foreign power is a whole other ball game, more akin to treason.

Not that UK politicians have not been happily signing away sovereign power for decades, so he can reasonably expect the supine UK electorate to put up with that as they have done with so much else that more self respecting citizens would do something about.

Sadly it is probably unlikely there will ever be a tea party movement in the UK.

What is Cameron’s agenda? One suspects ever closer European integration and the construction of a seed of a EU military. How long before a "money saving treaty" with Germany comes along?

Then there is the argument that can now be used by the political elite that If co-operation works in this areas then why not others? They will then subtly suggest, as they so often do, that it will allow ‘Europe’ to be more ‘independent’ of the US.

US politicians still somehow happily seem to imagine the EU is an unmitigated good thing for the US, despite plenty of evidence to the contrary. Is it that they think they know the nature of the beast? It wasn’t so long ago they thought it was a good idea to fund the Taliban...

French appeal to the ref over Agincourt

I find reveisionist so-called ‘historians’ truly incredible.

Now it seems they have set their sites on Agincourt of all things.
The fact is the French were thrashed by a numerically inferior force, thanks to a large extent to the longbow and the trained English archers who used it to such effect.

Apparently French revisionists are trying to excuse the defeat by claiming the poor French were the outnumbered underdogs and the English ‘war criminals’, though there is nothing to suggest the English violated the rules of war that existed at the time. Talk about sore loosers…

The documentary evidence in favour of the accepted versions is pretty solid. Maybe they should concentrate on finding the historical equivalent of the urban myth.

A short comment on Mme Sarkozy and ‘that’ picture

The Sarkozys are on a state visit to the UK. President Sarkozy really seems to be looking to improve/upgrade the relationship between the UK and France. He looked smart, hansom and businesslike, his wife Carla, a former model, looked beautiful, cool and sophisticated when meeting the Royals.

As mentioned she is a former model and there is in existence a tasteful enough nude photo of her, taken before she ever imagined she might ever became the ‘first lady’ of France, that is going to be auctioned at Christies.

There is nothing she need be embarrassed about, she was honestly making her independent way in the world and that was a part of it. It owes something in style to the French artist Georges Seurat. If it were in oils no one could argue that it wasn’t tasteful art.

But the good old UK tabloids seldom fail to make us look like lowlifes. The visit proved and opportunity too tempting for them miss. They published the picture together with a leering two faced “Welcome to Great Britain, Madame Sarkozy”.

If it was not intended to be a calculated insult it could easily be taken as such. It could certainly be represented as such by anyone so inclined. Especially if they considered the politics of the tabloid and the government.

If a paper wished to publish the picture, maybe it would perhaps have been better to have done so before the visit, or wait until it was done. Or better still just printed an article to accompany it rather than trying to be ‘clever’.

Yanks overtaking, French wine

Ahead of the Vinexpo wine fair, in Bordeaux, France, the French President Nicolas Sarkozy, is coming under pressure from vintners to do more for their wine industry, as the Gallic taste for vin ordinaire withers on the vine.

It seems America is now set to overtake France as the world's number one wine drinking nation. Figures show that French national consumption has fallen so low that the Americans are set to overtake them by 2010.

Finally! Perhaps a slightly more rational reason for the French to dislike the Americans so.

There is a ray of hope for the French producers in that their export market seems to be improving somewhat. One wonders if this is more in the top end of the market.

Much of the problems the French market has had in competing with New World wines in the last decade or so is that, whilst their good wine is often very good, their lack of consistency and reliability in the quality of the medium priced end of the market, causes customers to shy away from their products, in favour of the much more consistent quality of the New World wines.

One sometimes suspects Gallic complacency has been their undoing - and possibly an underlying sense that foreigners are not sophisticated enough to tell when they are being sold plonk.