Tunisia to join the EU?

Foreign Secetary David Miliband is renowned for his original thinking, but his latest wheeze to expand the European Union to take in not only the rest of the old Soviet bloc but also parts of North Africa and the Middle East is surely a piece of blue-sky thinking too far.

The argument over whether Turkey should be part of the EU has been hotly contested but there is at least some historical basis for regarding that country as part of Europe.

But while there is always a good case for closer international co-operation, there surely comes a point beyond which the concept of Europeanism becomes meaningless. Kirghiztan, Uzbekistan, Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia are not part of Europe and never will be.

To quote Margaret Thatcher in a not-altogether-different context: "No. No. No."

Update: A nice line in outrage here from Letters from a Tory.

Thames Gateway "is potential catastrophe"

I can't say I'm that surprised by this assessment of the Thames Gateway scheme, but if it does turn out to be the disaster MPs predict it won't necessarily be because of bad planning, or even the fact that it originated with John Prescott, but because it's a fucking awful place to live.

No substitute for experience

I am not, in principle, opposed to the idea of governments of all the talents, but the idea that you can take people who have been successful in one milieu and expect them to be able to repeat that success in the political arena has always seemed a dubious one to me.

So it doesn't greatly surprise me that Alan West has become the latest of Gordon's fresh talents to find himself in political difficulties, following on from the controversies that have surrounded Mark Malloch Brown, Digby Jones and Ara Darzi in the months since their original appointments.

A conspiracy theorist might see it all as evidence of a dark plot by Labour MPs to get rid of a bunch of outsiders they never wanted in the government in the first place, in the hope that next time round, the jobs might actually be handed out within the PLP.

Tempting though that theory undoubtedly is, I think it just shows there really is no substitute for political experience.

Scrapping ID cards tops your wish-list

Last week I asked readers of this blog to vote on what they thought should have been in the Queen's Speech that wasn't, listing ten policy ideas which I personally favour. The fairly unambiguous result is that the single policy which would you would most like to see is the scrapping of ID cards.

There now seems to be a growing consensus on this across the political spectrum. Gordon Brown still has the chance to ditch the scheme as an unwanted hangover of the Blair years, and given their own stance on it the Tories would be unable to criticise him for doing so, as they undoubtedly would if he attempted to reverse other aspects of the Blair legacy.

The full results of the poll, listing the ideas in order of popularity, were as follows:

• Scrapping ID card scheme 79pc
• Four-year fixed-term Parliaments 53pc
• Abolition of the Barnett Formula 52pc
• Referendum on EU Reform Treaty 51pc
• Fully-elected House of Lords 49pc
• Proportional representation 48pc
• Cap on party funding 35pc
• More action to combat inequality 34pc
• Full year's maternity pay 14pc
• Immediate end to airport expansion 14pc

The level of support for abolishing the Barnett Formula is scarcely surprising, given who the author of this blog is, but the degree of backing for other enthusiasms of mine such as fixed-term Parliaments and PR is encouraging.