The report by CTV news referred to an obscure article in a sunday newspaper that no other news station bothered with that stated in part, ‘British troops will be pulling out of Iraq next year,’ with CTV failing to mention (deliberately and with malice aforethought) that the thrust of that fabricated sunday newspaper article stated clearly that US troops would pull out next year - and - that British troops would have to follow suit. It’s so sadly obvious that the people who control the news at CTV have an agenda of anti-British reporting and actually go out of their way to misinform the Canadian public. They are not responding to all the inquiries directed at them and will in ‘no way’ (as a caller was told who telephoned their main news room) apologise for ANY news item they put out. Really. It seems their philosophy, like a lot of TV and radio news reporting is that if you just shut-up and say nothing it will all eventually go away. No it won’t. Not this one. This is not the first time this Canadian station has gone out of its way to deliberately misreport news from Britain, always making it appear that the British are struggling in a world situation they can’t handle. The part about the ‘British troops pulling out’ was made to look like they were about to do that because of the London bombings. Can you imagine what spiteful and deliberate racial hatred that kind of reporting reflects on the writer.

Many people in Canada are up in arms over this dreadful misrepresentation of the news and several letters have gone to two controlling organisations in Canada that look into such things. Other people have pointed out that Global TV and CBC TV have skewed the news to make it look unfavourable towards the British. A professor friend of Ken, our editor and publisher, who is not British has taken up the cry for some control of this anti-British racism which he says lurks just below the surface in many taught disciplines at the universty he lectures at, the University of British Columbia. You may recall a report on a Ph.D. named Susan Butt several years ago who lectured in her psychology classes there that Britain was a boil on the backside of life! Yes. All in all there is one good thing that comes out of all this - I left Canada years ago, and I’m glad I did. How sad it is I have to say that.

But sadly the cries are going out from every uptight and every upright corner of our society, bemoaning such a waste of money. Several British charities; and there are more cropping up every year with their tax relief on income and distribution, say the 61p per person could be better spent helping the worlds poor. So could the saving on petrol they pay by upgrading to petrol guzzlers instead of staying with an older vehicle for several years. A charity worker I know recently took over a relatively new Range Rover to use for charity work and said to me, ‘you know the petrol for the use of a vehicle has gone from £200 a month for the previous vehicle to over £400 a month now.’ Really. That’s over £6 pound PER DAY compared to 61p PER YEAR for the Royals.

‘But what do the Royals do for Britain?’ scoff a great number of people. They travel the world as representatives of this country promoting business and tourism, that’s what they do. And Britain has a lot of friends around the world where the culture is based on our early settlers, and visits of recognition by our proud and regal representatives are still very welcome and very much enjoyed. Except Canada that is, where the Queen’s recent visit was hardly mentioned in the Canadian media as she braved the rain under her Canadian see-through plastic umbrella (I was informed it cost the Canadian government $1.49 (wholesale) whilst on a visit to Sasketchewan.

Let’s face it, 61p a year is peanuts, in fact a packet of good roasted salted peanuts costs twice that! No, it’s not the cost that bothers our younger generations, it’s the Royals themselves. Society has been dumb-downed to where it’s okay to show up at weddings and funerals in blue jeans (which I have witnessed in the last few years) and those same blue jean bums don’t know how to act or behave around Royals.

To come to terms with this great big new burgeoning world of curtailed culture and soft societies - I have a plan. Get rid of the Royals. Sell off all their estates and palaces. Distribute the wealth gained to the poor countries in Africa. Just hand it over to them. And in five years when it has all filtered away somewhere let’s sell off the stately homes and send them that money. Let’s allow dumb-downed students to leave school void of the ‘pressure’ of having to really study and learn something. While we’re at it let’s allow the British army, the navy, and the air force wear any kind of clothes they like - like blue jeans. Yes, come on Britain, the last thing we ever want to do is make these half educated, half baked do-righters feel uncomfortable. Hey, we’ve let our nurses shuffle around hospitals dressed how they like, and we accept school teachers showing up in tight blue jeans and a T shirt that says Dallas Cowboys. It all makes that 61p just too much to handle!

The Europeans, especially Tony Blair and Britain’s labour government have looked across the ‘pond’ and witnessed just how this homogenization of countries economies have affected the well off against the not so well off. In North America there is the NAFTA agreement, (North American Free Trade Agreement) that has seen all the basic working class jobs in the US and Canada disappear across the border to Mexico where workers are paid less than $2 an hour to do the same job Americans and Canadians had done for $10 an hour. Merging countries together sounds good, particularly to those of liberal ilk, the ‘we’re all humans sharing this world’ type that in reality doesn’t gel. It’s like asking the owner of a Rolls Royce to come down to a Ford whilst the poorer member gets off his bike and gleefully climbs into his Ford. It’s good for have-nots but it’s no good for the haves. There’s also that loss of indentity. I know a few French expats who live and work in London and they never accepted the loss of their identity when the franc went out the window. It was just a small point in the overall issue of a united Europe but it still irks. And that’s our problem, we don’t want to see our £ symbol relegated to history, or feel that we, on this ‘sceptered isle, this other Eden’ become just ‘one of the crowd.’ With countries fighting and dying for their own culture and society it seems really odd that Europe wants to go ahead and join everyone into a ‘ring-a-ring of roses’ (in reality it’s a ring of stars!) and dump individual rights, and homogenize individual economies that stand and fall on your neighbour’s economy, and worst of all eliminate a country’s personal identity. It surprised me when the French and Germans joined this union, but not when Greece, Hungary, Italy, Lithuania, Slovakia, Slovenia and Spain did who see great advantages in being ‘signed up.’

So what happens now, particularly in Britain? I don’t think Blair will hold a referendum on accepting the constitution. I think also that by the time you read this the Dutch will have voted no as well. I think that all Europe needs is an economic policy on trade among its countries that helps the poorer ones and protects the better off ones. I think borders should come down but individual countries retain their own laws, their own economies, and their own identities. I think Europe should stop trying to out-do Uncle Sam. The latter, I think, is on its own slippery slope to big problems.

By the time you read this I’m certain Tony Blair will be back in power with his extra New Labour party and the country will continue to be politically what it is - a country that is run about as fair aa any country can be run, by a bunch or here-today & gone-tomorrow politicians who are in it for the game, the money, and their lucrative pensions.. Politicians in power don’t stay around too long. Re-elections, cabinet shuffles, firings and resignations keep our representatives on their toes, so to speak. It is hardly a career job. A four year stretch is the norm. An eight year stretch rare. With most of the rest of their time as politicians being spent arguing from the benches in parliament about anything and everything the party in power and the opposition care to bring up.

But ask yourself this, are elections that meaningful anymore? Does the majority really car? Let’s look at some facts. In America, that bastion of freedom and free enterprise less than half of the population bother to vote anymore. In other words only half of the people are responsible for electing the governing government. Only half. That’s half of those that are allowed to vote. Forget the 22% children and teens. Forget America’s nine million plus illegal aliens. And forget over half of the aged and retired who are too old and too uninterested to bother to vote. That leaves about half of the population as being eligible, and only half of them bother to vote, so in truth only one quarter of America’s population vote in their governments. Makes you wonder eh!

Then there’s the pollsters, those over-rated and over-paid and very often totally wrong opinion formers, (Canada's last election the polls had completely wrong) whom the political parties pay to help get the fence- sitting public to vote, and hopefully vote for them. Polls have long been recognized as little more than a smidgen of help in an election run-up, especially when you find out they polled all of 795 people and then tell us that their findings are ‘representative’ of how the country votes, give or take 4.5% - whatever that means!  But the trouble is that when it comes to casting our vote we truly don’t know who and what to vote for. In the end we mix our own ‘party’ preference with our like or dislike for the one person running each party, our local representative, and a glance at what the polls say. And who gets in really doesn’t bother us that much.

Which makes what is happening throughout Britain in this current election all the more interesting. The ‘postal vote’ is taking over. Stay home and send in a postal vote. It’s the way of the future. Birmingham has increased its postal vote from 16,000 in 2001 to over 55,000 for this election. And it’s the same everywhere. Seems we’re too busy, or simply had it up to here with politics! Let's face it, whoever gets in will run things their way, and on party lines, and we'll replace them next time - or not. Trouble is - who cares!

The first three to haul down the Union flag, amid a grove of palm trees in front of an immaculate white residency will be Tonga, Vanuatu, and Kiribati. These places of refuge and refind autocracy will be handed over to some local dignitary who will become, as the whole nation of India has become since the days of the Raj, an outpost of old colonialism with the visiable trappings of elegance and potentcy.

The residency in Tonga has been there 126 years. The building, an old four square timber bungalow is surrounded by old canons brought ashore by a British privateer after subduing the local Tongans way back in 1806. From the later arrival of the British High Commissioner the Tongans have always felt a special link to all things British. Who can forget the delightful Queen of Tonga in her open coach on that rainy day back in June 1953 when our Queen was crowned. And as they now say quite openly and honestly, not all autonomy is a good thing. There are places in the Old Empire and there will always be places where the ordinary citizen would prefer the British remained.

But as we enlightened world thinkers might smugly say, ‘ah yes it’s time we gave these people their countries back,’ we might want to note that the French have no plans to ever close their High Commissions in French Polynesia being New Caledonia, Wallis and Futuna. They keep a friendly link with the islanders and they keep an eye on the fact there is value in having a global presence. We British might learn something from that.

Whilst ‘old style colonialism’ is frowned upon by the worlds leading power America, consider for a moment what their tactics are right now. They are in an instructive mode of ‘democracy is good for you, and if you don’t think so, we’ll whack a few locals to prove our point.’ Isn’t that like the old style colonialism? You know those days when Britain, France, Italy and Germany were occupying other peoples countries, forcing their own ideas on them, then whacking them good and hard when they failed to see the good in it all? What goes around, comes around, and quite often it’s simply in a different package.

It might seem that the sun is truly setting on a once proud British empire - but it isn’t, to be precise. We will still remain in Fiji if only to look after the winnings of Vijay Singh! We fought for The Falklands and won our right to remain. And from Mauritius to Mandalay you’ll still find a neat white residency where flies the proud Union flag. No, the sun, the actual sun itself has never set on the British Empire, and never will. We have a presence in the world, a world we gave style and character to. We’re not whacking the uninformed with a form of democracy, we’ve already done a form of that, and to this day, wherever you go you’ll see some reminder of our proud Old Empire.

His son Brandon told his father many times that whilst he (his father) gets loud, clumsy, and offensive on his habit, he himself is elevated to a level of utter peace and acceptance. Brandon said sniffing cocaine and the taking of the more potent injected heroin gave him the release he needed to overcome ‘the wanton waste of living his life in the rat race of humanity’ and those drug induced trips he makes are ‘trips into the world that exists above the common and mindless existence that life has to offer us all, and that drugs was the only way he could survive the life experience. Brandon nearly got through on drugs. His father gets through on drink. To some degree we all have some kind of ‘habit’ or ‘fix’ that we need to get us through life. The vast majority of us are happy to settle for huge mugs of morning coffee or endless cups of tea to get us going, with more of the same throughout the day to keep us going. I firmly believe we all have many ‘habits’ that are ‘drugs’ in one way or another and are in place in our lives to ‘get us through.’ I still know many people who smoke. Smoking has long been recognized as a crutch upon which we rely to bolster our courage and at the same time settle us down. I once smoked, when I entered a room of strangers, or when I took my morning break away from my desk and endlessly ringing telephone.

Today I see tension everywhere. I see people walking along streets talking on little mobile phones almost oblivious to the world around them. I see traffic that is bumper to bumper from one end of London to the other. I pass through railway stations and underground stations that are a mass of moving people that have been like that since I can remember, way back in the 1950’s. Life is a race, a people race, and it wears us out and wears us down. We all have our escapes. I enjoy a drink: it soothes me. I enjoy the odd cigar: it soothes me. I enjoy the peace and quiet of my garden in summer and autumn: it soothes me. I am perhaps easily pleased, or should I say easily rested. Not so with so many people today. There is a tension, a new kind of tension everywhere. It’s aggressive, it’s explosive, and it’s getting a lot of people uptight. Drugs are a death sentence, and a crime, but I often wish there was something, akin to aspirin, that we could take to ease the pain.