No I Don't Really Know How to Follow That Either.

I suppose I could talk about the situation in the EU but having spent so long lobbying to have Britain excluded from those discussions it seems counter-intuitive to explain to them what's going on.

Anyway the 26 EU members who did agree to the idea of an accord are now debating the details of that accord. Hungary and the Czech Republic have both raised the question of a uniform tax policy versus national sovereignty. I can only assume that this is a subtle little hint to the Republic of Ireland because having had a quick glance over their most recent budget I would have thought they would have welcomed the opportunity to run it past a grown up before enacting it. The main thing they've done is raise the VAT (sales tax) to 23%. This is 3% higher then the 20% rate in the UK including Northern Ireland. Given the relatively small geographic size of Ireland, it's shared language and common culture this will most likely mean that most Irish people will simply travel to Northern Ireland to do their shopping. This will shrink the size of the Irish retail sector and make the economy more reliant on the agriculture sector which is itself overly reliant on exports to the UK. So by retaining national tax raising powers Ireland has actually managed to undermine it's national sovereignty.

These problems are transferable across continental Europe especially in the smaller nations like Portugal, Belgium and the Netherlands so the harmonisation of tax policies to minimise these sort of negative effects is something the Eurozone nations need to discuss at great length. I think I've already explained how to make those negotiations run more smoothly and productively.

Oh and you remember that nuclear power station the Japanese started to shut down following the earthquake/tsunami in March. Well ten months later they've finally managed to shut it down. Seriously if that happened in any other country even one as technologically advanced as Britain I think at this point rather then talking about the nuclear reactor we'd be talking about what to do with the giant radioactive crater where the nuclear reactor used to be.