|
|||||
|
“Shame on you, Alex Salmond, for selling us out to the Bullingdon Club. The loss of 5.5m Scots would mean 5.5m fewer voices to say no to Cameron’s cronies.” Never thought of the argument from this perspective! More here: http://goo.gl/dIQQP The Queen was acting on the advice of her prime minister who was acting on the recommendation of a shadowy Whitehall committee – the so-called forfeiture committee – chaired by the Head of the Civil Service when Fred was awarded a knighthood. The decision first to give him a knighthood and then to remove it were political decisions. Tony Blair honoured a man who had built RBS into one of the world’s largest banks – with a balance sheet bigger even than the British economy. When RBS crashed, it cost tens of billions of taxpayers’ money to stop it collapsing altogether. David Cameron has been desperate for a symbol that the bankers have paid a price for the economic havoc they have wreaked. Few are likely to publicly sympathise with Fred Goodwin. They may note though that, unlike others who have had their honours removed e.g. Sir Anthony Blunt, the keeper of the Queens pictures who was a spy, Sir Fred the Shred has neither been convicted nor charged with any crime. Some may wonder why the man who was the chief executive of RBS cannot remain a knight when the man who was chairman of RBS or the chairman of HBOS can! I usually think Tory Mawhinney is a ghastly old windbag but when I heard this I laughed – hat tip. The appearance of two senior Google executives before a joint parliamentary committee on privacy turned into an ill-tempered debate about whether the search giant was being economical with the truth. The vice-president of Global Communications and Public Affairs for Google, David-John Collins, and the legal director and associate general counsel for Google, Daphne Keller, found themselves under fire from MPs and peers. The committee member and former Conservative party chairman, Lord Mawhinney, told Keller: "I hope you will take it as a compliment when I say you are extremely hard to pin down. You have ducking and diving down to a fine art. I congratulate you." We saw this yesterday and enjoyed it thoroughly – definitely Oscar worthy. I am cooking this later for supper tomorrow – not sure what Chinese 5 spice is yet but I am sure I will find it in the market. Serves 3 Set the oven at 160C/gas mark 3. Season the oxtail. Melt the butter in a heavy-based casserole. Brown the meat on both sides and remove from the pan. Pour in 250ml of water, bring to the boil, stirring in any pan-stickings and tasty bits, then reserve. Peel and thickly slice the onions, and let them cook in the oil left over a low heat. Peel and finely shred the ginger then add to the onions. Peel the garlic, halve each clove lengthways and add to the onions together with the five spice powder, the whole anise, the stock and the sugar, the soy, the reserved pan liquid and the tamarind paste, and bring to the boil. Add the browned oxtail to the onions and stock, cover and bake in the preheated oven for two and a half hours. Once or twice during cooking, turn the oxtail pieces over in the liquid. Check the tenderness of the meat; it should come easily away from the bone. If not, bake for longer. Adjust the seasoning and serve the pieces of oxtail in bowls, spooning the liquid around as you go. A note about the tamarind. I sometimes use block tamarind complete with seeds. Simply put it in a small bowl, pour over enough boiling water to just cover it, then leave for 10 minutes until cool enough to handle. Pour the mixture through a sieve, pushing the solids through so that only the large seeds remain. Discard them. Stir the resulting liquid into the onions. If you have ready-to-use tamarind paste, start with 2 tbsp, and increase to taste. You want the broth to be meaty and sweet-sharp. Nigel Slater, Observer, 29/01/2012 There persists an enduring belief that people get more conservative as they age – making older people more likely to vote for Republican candidates. In fact, studies show that people may actually get more liberal over time when it comes to certain kinds of beliefs. That suggests that we are not pre-determined to get stodgy, set in our ways or otherwise more inflexible in our retirement years. Harold Wilson’s famous remark "In politics, a week is a long time" was never more true than in South Carolina this year. An ORC poll taken for CNN between January 13-17 put Mitt Romney ahead of New Gingrich 33% to 23%. Yesterday, Gingrich won by 12%, a change of 22% in a week. PM Julia Gillard seems to be playing a strange waiting game down under now that she has refused to introduce fruit machine legislation until 2016 (to placate a independent in her coalition government after relinquishing the speakers chair to a member of the opposition/independent last year. When is a coalition promise a promise or a subterfuge. Mort, our down under correspondent has been requested to give his take on this and forecast when an election can be expected. |
  |
||||
|
© 2012 Git News - Hosted by 1simple |
|||||
Recent Comments