Twelve Stars

Just to break up the metaphysical whinging that is your normal fare while I'm in Devon, I'd like to present a true story that I'm calling "Comically amateurish attempts at political bias".

This story come from the Western Morning News- apparently, voted Britain's best rural newspaper. The banner doesn't tell me who voted in that particular poll, though I imagine it would have been people who live in rural areas and so don't have the opportunity to read any of the competition. But I digress.

So, the European Union. The New Labour party like it because it's a shot in the arm for our economy what with all that cheap Bulgarian labour and free trade which, as we know, disproportionally favours large, established economies like ours. Hey, I never promised that my report would be free of political axe-grinding. But I digress again.

Some elements in the Conservative party have realised that most voters are xenophobic, paranoid and not given to thinking about large, complex issues they cannot directly affect. As such, their main plank is to use the EU much as religious Republicans in the U.S. use Islam and secularism- by making up injustices and generally railing against it as much as possible without actually crossing the line into racism. Since conservatism is all about unequal economic laws and the right-wing factions many European countries are plagued with, they focus their complaints on red tape, legalism and general "Eurocracy".

A number of other parties don't have quite the same focus or restraint, and they are the British Nationalist Party, the UK Independence Party, and so on. So far as I know, UKIP had only one celebrity endorsement: a chat-show host who lost his slot when he wrote an article in the Daily Mail, the thrust of which was "Arabs have never contributed anything to society" and that we'd be better off shipping them back to Darkystan. He subsequently got booed off with shouts of "zero" and "the ladder" and "An empirically justified understanding of optics" and so on. He then joined the UKIP, but later formed his own splinter party when they didn't make him leader. But I digress thrice.

(Lib Dems and Greens, and I, welcome the Union on cultural grounds, but dislike the economic structures it imposes with varying degrees of fervour. OK, OK, I'll stop with the background.)

So, this news story. Under British Law, any flag that is not a national emblem of somewhere is considered an advertisement and as such, you need planning permission to fly it. Many local councils, and increasingly hotels, like to fly three flags: The flag of the country (say, the cross of Saint George), the red-white-and-blue Union Flag, and the golden stars of Europe's flag.

People go ahead and do this without filing a request for planning permission. The UKIP has a tactic which is to then flood the local council with reports of this 'possible infraction of the law'. Wait, did someone say legalism and red tape? Oh wait, that was me. Sorry.

So councils are getting fed up with this ridiculous situation, and want the golden stars exempted from the planning permission requirements. Now let me quote directly from the article.

The Office of the Deputy Prime Minister yesterday confirmed that it intended to extend the exemption to include the EU flag, although a spokesman insisted that this was not the same as giving the flag "national status".

And now let me quote you the headline this article ran under.

Prescott wants national status for the EU flag

I find that delicious. It illustrates my idea of how far into an article the average Europhobe reads, and is a delightful example of "clarification" as applied to journalism and apologetics. The sooner I can join a socialist intentional community, the better.

...fking dial-up...