Many thanks to Tizzy for going without blogs for a week. I know it must have been tough. She emailed me this roundup of the past week in mainstream media, to contrast my roundup of the news from the blogs:

My first blog-free week and already I miss my regular reads and the links that take me to new and old sites. I’ll have to monitor my stress levels of going cold turkey. Incidentally, I am not reading any comments from on-line MSM sources either since they are, in effect, blogs, neither am I reading Sharpe’s Opinion!

This week, I learned how to pronounce Total (reminiscent of how Nestle’s suddenly became Nestlé) but wonder if, and how, Stu did? Muttering to myself about morphic resonance, Dawkin’s memes, Kant, and pyramidology.

Stories that have caught my eye this week:

Total, and migrant workers

If it is acceptable for a Lincolnshire worker to work alongside someone from, say, Devon why would a government go into a spin to stop wild cat strikes by workers who can’t accept working next to a Portuguese chap?

Mandelson read a statement to the House of Lords and stated that all Total workers were being paid the ‘same rate’ as British workers, wherever they were domiciled.

This means that Portuguese workers were probably being paid at least double what they could expect back home. I say probably, based on the published figures of national minimum wages (MW) of c.€6000pa in Portugal for adult white-collar workers compared with UK MW of c.£12,000 (there is no MW in Italy). I have heard reports there may be a whiff of gangmaster-type activity by the subcontractor who supplied these workers.

One can easily conclude that subcontactors within the EU will generally be able to undercut similar firms in the UK with British workers on their books, and so the strikers have a point. The point, though, was their apparent misunderstanding of what Gordon Brown really meant by his puffing ‘British jobs for British workers’ just before the election that never was. I’m glad we were enlightened in this week’s PMQs and the confusion by all British workers has now been cleared up. Where would the United Kingdom be without the Unite in it?

BBC – they don’t get it

Carol Thatcher, the well-known BBC personality, was castigated for referring to a black French tennis player as “the golliwog frog” this week. Golliwog: no. Frog: apparently OK.

I’ll readily admit to finding the general news ouput from the BBC to be turgid though do not agree with the nigh on daily assassination attempts on the BBC, as a whole, by all and sundry. But they do bring it on themselves at times:

Jay Hunt, controller of BBC One, said: “This is not her working in a private space and she was not in the pub with her friends. She was sitting in a BBC green room on BBC premises surrounded by a diverse production team on The One Show speaking to a BBC-booked guest, a BBC-booked celebrity and in the presence of a senior production worker from Comic Relief. In those circumstances she was effectively operating in a workplace.”

Do we now have offence by proxy?

Then up pops Jeremy Clarkson in Australia and calls our Prime Minister a “one-eyed, Scottish, idiot”. Some may ask where’s the story, others only know Clarkson is a BBC presenter. Again, that Gordon is a moron and a Scot has been set aside. However, the RNIB took Clarkson to task for the juxtaxposition of one-eyed and idiot. I can only asssume their upset confirms the RNIB’s own belief that Gordon is an idiot. In the words of the RNIB’s campaign manager, Steve Winyard,, “…let’s try to forget about it”, as he rushed around the newsrooms.

More worrying for me was the invitation by Mr Winyard to Mr Clarkson to meet up and have his mind re-conditioned. Jeremy shouldn’t be first on that list, Mr Winyard.

Obama-watch

He doesn’t like Britain – not as much as Hillary does, reportedly. Just a coincidence, then, that Tony Blair was with Barack in the National Prayer Breakfast.

“He [Obama] praised “My good friend Tony Blair – who did it first and perhaps did it better” at the head of a list of personal acknowledgments.”

Two heads are better than one, it would seem – have I offended someone?

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I’m really bloody well missing what’s going on in the blogs!

I don’t think I can put her through another week of it, poor lady.