Whose country is this, anyway?

I returned from a visit to America over the weekend. After landing at Gatwick, we had to walk about a mile to reach the Passport Control. Now, the walk didn't bother me. After 8 hours on a plane, it was a relief to get the legs moving again .
What exercised me more was a bloody great sign at Passport Control that informed me and everyone else that we were approaching the "United Kingdom Border".
What is that all about?
Is it there in case people might mistake London Gatwick for Lisbon or Port of Spain- or wherever it is they are flying to ?
I don't think so.
Or might its real purpose be to demonstrate that we - by which I mean the Government - are "doing something"?
That's probably more likely.
This administration may not be able to expel foreign murderers and rapists; they certainly can't keep track of legions of 52 year old Iranians entering the country to study Computer Sciences and then forgetting to leave once their visas expire. In fact, there isn't a great deal of anything particularly useful they can achieve at all when it comes to keeping immigrant numbers to tolerable levels.
But they can erect a bloody great sign that wouldn't have looked out of place in some outpost of the old Soviet Empire, to reassure the natives that they are indeed, Doing Something. What is really strange and something that neither the Immigration Service or the Home Office seem able to explain, is the location of the sign.
If the UK Border starts at the Passport Control desks, what is the great swathe of Gatwick that you have to cross before you reach " the Border"?
No Man's Land, perhaps.

As a footnote, if anyone reading this happens to be of non-GB extraction and want a simple way to get to stay perfectly legally once you are in the UK, irrespective of your eligibility, here's all you need to do.
Get down to Oxford Street in London and simply hang around for a while. Fairly soon you will be approached by a young person waving a sheath of handbills Take one. You'll find it's from some sort of Language School or other offering you an English language course for the knock-down, never-to-be-repeated price of £350. Go along, register at the school, pay them the money and Hey Presto, you're suddenly a bona fide student, eligible for a Student Visa and, as things stand, eventual full-time residence in the UK. If you are really lucky, you'll never even have to attend a single class.
It beats the hell out of all of the hoops you have to jump through to be allowed to stay in any other country in the developed world doesn't it?

Consigning the British to the dustbin of history

A museum is a place where you display items of historical, anthropological or scientific note. It's where one goes to explore the way things were and generally get in touch with objects, people or events that are no longer a part of mainstream life.
For the last few weeks, Not so Flash Gordon has been banging on about the need to emphasise and celebrate "Britishness". He has recently published a book extolling the bravery of British Forces during the second world war. He has asked the great unwashed to share with him their view of what constitutes this elusive quality of being British. And when Lord Baker suggested a Museum of Britshness, Brown jumped on the band wagon so quickly it hadn't even had a chance to start rolling.
The reason for his sudden love affair with Great Britain became clear when he slid into Lisbon on the 13th December for the signing of the Treaty that isn't a Constitution (even though it shares 98% of the same same objectives as the failed Constitution). By putting pen to this document, Brown ceded power in key areas such as immigration, security and justice to the European Union and reduced our own Parliament to the role of second fiddle behind the, unelected, EU Commission. According to the EU web site, this process will improve democracy for us all. What it actually does is reduce Great Britain from the status of a sovereign nation to that of an outpost on the fringes of the Greater European Empire.
So, now we all know why Brown was so keen on the Museum of Britishness. He knew it would be necessary once he had he so recklessly consigned Great Britain and all things British to the dustbin of history.

Recycling rubbish is old hat

All over the world, groups of people with qualifications in ologies the great mass of humanity didn't even know existed spend their lives discussing topics of great moment. Most of these discussions occur in locations that the rest of us have to save up to visit for the holiday of a lifetime. I believe the theme of the latest conference is the effects of carbon emissions on Global Warming. It is taking place in South East Asia and has attracted 3000 delegates from all over the globe flying in Business Class and staying in four and five star hotels. Since this is a politically important conference to be seen attending, most of the delegates, of course, are spending other people's money to attend it. But, hey, what's the point of being the world's leading authority on the effect of regular baked bean consumption on the atmosphere if you can't parly it into the odd trip to the South Seas?

Anyway, many of these self-declared experts will spend much of their navel fluff collecting time trying to work out new ways to get us to recycle just about everything and anything we can. This is entireley laudable snce we should spend the planet's resources with a little more care than a drunken sailor on a wekend pass. But, what gts my goat is the patronising, lecturing, hectoring attitude they adopt when laying down the law to the rest of us.

For anyone over the age of about fifty there is nothing remotely new about reccycling - except for the name of course.

When I was a street urchin growing up in Central London virtually everything I had to wear had already been worn by many other people before reaching me. We didn't know the clothes were recycled. They were simply hand-me-downs.

In an era of large families and meagre budgets, it was the only way that most mums could keep their kids clothed. Most children I went to primary school with wore clothes that had been broken in by several older siblings before they got to wear them

Waste of any kind was not merely frowned on but almost a criminal offence. Much of our regular pocket money came from collecting empty lemonade bottles and returning them to get back the deposit they carried. Sometimes, in our enthusiasm for recycling, this involved swiping a crate of bottles from the backyard of the off licence and then returning them in dribs and drabs to the front counter to get the deposits back

Rag and bone men were a regular feature of street life. When they came around with their horse drawn cart calling out " Old rags and lumber", the housewives would trade old bits of furniture, bundles of old bed clothes and the like for money or goods in kind. It wasn't that rare for over-enthusiatic kids - encouraged by the totter - to drag out their mum's best, and probably only, coat and swap it for a gold fish or a balloon. Two streets from where I grew up there was a totter's yard run by a man called Arthur Allen. There, we did a regular trade in bundles of old newspapers, rags, lead ( don't ask where we got that!) and other recyclables including bike frames and wheels. In fact, our regular visits to Highbury to watch Arsenal play on a Saturday afternoon were funded by our newspaper and rag collecting activities.

So, there is nothing remotely new about recycling. In poor countries around the world people still have to do it not out of any sense of moral duty but simply to stay alive. Unfortunately, none of them will ever be able to afford to fly half way around the world to tell a posse of climate change experts how to go about organising it.