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Questions Of The Day (Politics)
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Mick Harper
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This is, I assume, what they have discovered. HS2 is just not a game-changer, especially now that domestic air travel involves hours spent in security checks. The very last justification for HS2 was that 'it added much needed capacity to the west coast mainline'. Spending fifty billion (or whatever the HS schemes currently cost) on ramping up the existing network would have kept the northerners happy for years. Not that one can ever be happy being a northerner, but you know what I mean.

You are not quite correct re Concorde. This was a game changer and did not impinge on the 'majority of folks who just wanted cheapness reliability and comfort'. (Apart from being taxpayers.) Though on roughly the same subject it would seem 'we' (i.e. Airbus) got on the jumbo bandwagon just in time for the end of the jumbo bandwagon. Whether a jumbo bandwagon is a mixed metaphor too far I will leave others to judge.
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Mick Harper
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Did you see them? Practically tearing each other's clothes off. I know sex is legal in France but this was an entente going too far. Nor is 'having an unexpectedly long session with just the prime minister and President Macron in the room' advisable from the diplomatic point of view because it is open to either man to claim they agreed such and such when they may not have done. This happened when Harry Truman flew out to Wake Island for a showdown 'man-to-man' with McArthur over Korea policy. It turned out the general was a more shameless liar than the president when claiming what was agreed.

However, close relations with France at the national level is quite a good idea since they tend to hold our destiny in their hands rather than vice versa. Yes, it 'plays well to the base' being rude to the French but, generally speaking, it is worth letting their fishermen catch their bouillabaisse in our waters in order to have trade rather than migrants flowing freely across the channel. I mean of course La Manche.
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Mick Harper
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BBC confirm Gary Lineker will return to presenting Match of the Day after his suspension on Friday. Agencies

Everyone did the right thing and lessons have been learned. The world can return to pondering less weighty matters.
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Mick Harper
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Rishi Sunak's luck is holding. Now he's given a photo op with the Prez and the Prime Minister of Australia and it was like the Three Musketeers with Rishi short for Richelieu. Just a week after being Sidney Carton in Paris. You only had to picture Boris clowning around or Theresa not clowning around to see the Tories have finally got themselves a winner. Or at any rate a loser since both of those won an election and he won't.
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Mick Harper
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I am still working out my own personal demons about him. My brain recognises with complete clarity that he is doing a good job, my atavism can't get past seeing an oily counterjumper who has somehow been taken on as a senior buyer at Harrods.
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Mick Harper
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British Prime Minister breaks off from California summit to give press interview:

I was pleased that the issue with Gary Lineker has been resolved and I look forward to watching Match of the Day again. [Glances down at PR notes.] Especially as Southampton managed to get a point at the weekend.

This week's staff changes:

Mr G Lineker to Chairperson, BBC (formerly Presenter, Match of the Day)
Mr T Davie: to Presenter, Match of the Day (formerly Director-General, BBC)
Mr R Sharp: to Gantry Colour Man, Match of the Day (formerly Chairman, BBC)
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Mick Harper
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Richard Sharp's position is pretty amazing when you think about it. Everybody in this country (except me) is either right or left so there cannot be objections if the Chairman of the BBC is on the right (or on the left). But 'a donor to the Tory Party' is not on the right (or the left) he is fighting in the trenches. He simply cannot be a suitable figure to uphold principles of impartiality.

When the business of the £800,000 loan to Boris immediately before his appointment came out, he obviously should have resigned on the spot. Not for reasons of impartiality but for reasons of common decency. When the Lineker affair broke, he should obviously have resigned all over again because his own false position was clearly exacerbating the problem. His subsequent enforced silence means he should have resigned once again.

But the worst of it is that he can't be sacked. No doubt he should be but this would be quite different from removal-by-resignation since it would raise the impartiality issue once more. The BBC Chairman and Governors clearly ought not to be appointed by the government at all if impartiality is such a big issue, but someone has to do it, and the record of random assemblages of the great and good making these decisions is pretty woeful in itself.

Perhaps they should appoint me to do it.
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Mick Harper
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Not to flog a dead horse or anything but it is becoming increasingly clear that what made everyone's mind up was not Gary Lineker -- he may be paid the big bucks but he's not important -- it was the rest of the MoTD sportcakes downing tools. They are not important either but the prospect of nobody else daring to fill their shoes and therefore all BBC sports coverage being reduced to a skeleton service is not just important, it is not to be borne. So Gary had to return. Without, be it noted, the issue being resolved in any way. It was pure status quo ante.

Nor will this vaunted 'review' help. The impartiality of the BBC has never has been resolved ever since Reith forced it to adopt Reithianism. ("Thou shalt do what the DG says.") Nor will it ever be, and not just for the BBC, unless we become a country of Applied Epistemologists. A prospect not to be borne.
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Wile E. Coyote


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Mick Harper wrote:
The impartiality of the BBC has never has been resolved


It's pretty simple really. It is the job of the Director General to defend in public the Olde ancient rights and freedoms of the BBC, first granted in Magna Carta, whilst in private reminding his staff what the fuck will happen if the government decides to ever end this inequitable poll tax that the managers and the employees of the BBC benefit from.
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Wile E. Coyote


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Prior to Gary tweeting, I was under the happy impression that I was useless at sport because I was not an ultra-competitive, selfish individual like a Nick Faldo or Buster Motteram. Listening to Gary is a constant reminder that I was simply untalented.

He really needs to be fired.
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Mick Harper
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You raise an interesting point about right-wing sportsmen. In the old days this would have been all of them. They were oafish figures that read the Sun -- those that could read -- and believed hanging was too good for them. Today's sportsmen have -- thanks to their agents reading them the riot act -- joined the middle class and evince liberal values. Should anyone ask.

"Congratualtions on the hat-trick, Billy."
"Fanks, Bwian."
"And what do you think of the Gary Lineker situation?"
"'anging's too good for him, Bwian, in moy o-pinion."

It couldn't happen. Though when nobody's looking they are pretty unreconstructed largely, one would think, because professional sportsmen are now the only sector of society that does not (because they cannot) go through the normal finishing school of upper secondary and lower tertiary education. Football academies are not academy schools.
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Wile E. Coyote


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There is a lot of post Brexit frustration that Brits have to queue in line to get their passports checked with Americans, Canadians, etc. whilst EU nationals are zipping straight through their European airports. I have to say that these EU folks are taking it remarkably well, given that we are delaying all their flights.
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Mick Harper
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'anging about's too good for them.
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Mick Harper
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This US/UK/Australia tie up is a lot more significant than they're letting on. A lot more. And it isn't quite what it seems. A lot less. Consider the three countries' present position in the world:

Britain: Doesn't have a clue what it's supposed to be, or do. Its armed forces are so small it isn't even a regional power and its only strategic asset, nuclear missile subs, can only be renewed if it accepts US control of the missile codes, rendering them a US strategic asset, not a British one.

USA: It's finished as the world policeman -- it's been a grotesque failure every time it's tried -- yet it is still the world's leading economic and military power. It would be going too far to say it isn't even a regional power but it has given up trying to control Latin America, and there isn't anywhere else in the world where it's top dog. Ukraine has demonstrated that the Americans can, as it can anywhere in the world, hand out equipment and money on the grand scale but that doesn't give it control. Everyone's learned how to be an Israel. Thanks, Uncle Sam, now fuck off.

Australia: They discovered a few years ago that just saying some disobliging things about China brought speedy retribution and nobody lifted a finger even to protest. Much less lend a hand. Australia finds itself all on its ownio with a potential enemy which also happens to be its biggest trading partner. By far. Bigger than the next three countries combined. It too has had to retire as a regional power now that China has arrived in the South Pacific waving chequebooks.

So what can the Three Mouseketeers do? Ah...
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Mick Harper
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They have to decouple from NATO for a start. Ukraine has brought home the fact that Russia is a European problem. Or, as may be, opportunity. There is no longer a need of either the US or the UK to hold the balance and as the Europeans are constantly pointing out they mean balance and not the English-speakers' traditional policy of à outrance. Without the Americans pushing NATO forward and now with Finland and Sweden pitching in to help, it will soon be a policy of live and let-live. Ukraine will have to pay the price whatever that proves to be.

So where next for the three stooges...
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