Is It Really Too Much to Ask? (9 page)

Last week we were told, for the umpteenth time, that unless eleventy million pounds is raised by next Tuesday, the last airworthy Vulcan bomber will be mothballed in a shed, where it will be eaten by rats and used by birds as a lavatory.

You're probably fed up with these stories. We're always being told by those who rescued this plane from oblivion that they've spent the £100 you gave them last year and that now they will dangle from your heartstrings until you give them some more.

There are many worthy organizations that want your money.

Sick kiddies. Landmine amputees. Our Brave Boys. So why give it to a lot of people with adenoidal problems and cheap shoes just so they can indulge their passion for a plane that was used only once in anger in its entire twenty-four-year service life? You may remember. It flew all the way to the Falkland Islands to bomb the runway at Port Stanley. And mostly missed.

I understand your cynicism but if we take this argument to its logical conclusion, then there is no point in paying millions of pounds every year to keep the Tower of London upright. It, too, served no useful purpose when it was new and is now nothing more than a glorified safe, guarded by thirty-seven pensioners in silly dresses. Let's pull it down and sell the land to Wimpey.

Stonehenge is also a waste of time and money since nobody knows what it was for then, and now it's just a magnet
for lunatics. And why should I give Bill Oddie any of my hard-earned cash just so he can sit in a box, counting ospreys? Screw 'em. What have they ever done for me?

Happily, in this country, we are extremely good at preserving things that we think matter. Many of our magnificent old houses are kept in tip-top order and those who sit on the summit of the
Sunday
Times
's Rich List donate millions each year to keep a few dabs of Constable's oil in air-conditioned comfort.

Recently, Rowan Atkinson announced that he wished to build a splendid modern house, designed by an esteemed architect, in the Oxfordshire village where he lives. But the neighbours went nuts, suggesting that it would look like a petrol station and would consequently ruin the olde worlde charm of their surroundings. Yup. They were prepared to stone a national treasure to death to keep things as they had been for 200 years.

I experienced similar problems with my house, albeit on a smaller scale. Planners allowed me to make many modifications using modern materials such as glass and steel. But they were absolutely insistent that the door between the hall and the kitchen must remain. ‘It is a very important door,' said one expert.

It's not just doors, either. Beavers, stamps, hedgerows, bats, books, woodland, monuments, boats, pottery, sporting equipment, poetry, record players. Find something old and I'll find you a group of enthusiasts who are working round the clock to preserve it for future generations. I even know of one man who collects and restores vacuum cleaners.

However, we seem to have a very different attitude to machinery. After the war, for instance, most of the aircraft that had helped to keep Johnny Hun at bay were taken to fields in Wiltshire and Blackpool and chopped into tiny
pieces. We didn't need them any more in the jet age so Wellingtons, Lancasters, Blenheims and Sunderlands were simply scrapped. That's why, today, there are only around fifty working Spitfires in the whole world.

It was much the same story with Brunel's steamship, the SS
Great Britain
, which now resides at the docks in Bristol. This was a massively important piece of engineering, the first ocean-going steel ship to have a propeller, and it was big, too. A hundred feet longer than anything that had gone before.

I'm delighted to say the lottery fund stumped up much of the cost of renovating Brunel's masterpiece. But it drew the line at the 1,000-horsepower engines. Even though these were really what set the ship apart and made it interesting, it would not cough up and, as a result, the motors that visitors see today are electrically powered fakes.

Then you have the Science Museum. Only a tiny fraction of its exhibits are on show in London. The rest – some 200,000 – are housed in a collection of dingy hangars near Swindon. And, of course, a recent application to the lottery to turn this site into a full-on museum where visitors could see the cars and the missiles and the planes that made Britain an economic powerhouse was rejected in favour of a cycleway or some such nonsense. ‘Preserve a car?' To the Miliband boy and his mates, that would be like paying to preserve the bubonic plague.

Generally speaking, the job of maintaining Britain's mechanized past is the responsibility of wealthy individuals. Nearly all the working Spitfires, for example, are in the hands of rock stars and blue-bloods. It's the same story with most of our country's automotive history, and that's before we get to the traction engines that are maintained by a group of people who think Fred Dibnah was a god.

The idea of getting a grant or sponsorship to preserve a Type 42 destroyer or a Tornado is simply laughable. And that's why it is important we do whatever is possible to help the men in plastic shoes keep that Vulcan airworthy. Sure, it's not as glamorous as a Spitfire, which is why, when it flew low and slow over my house the other day, my children couldn't have been less interested. My dog thought it was noisy and wet itself. Nobody could really understand, therefore, why I was running about in the garden, pointing and grabbing my private parts.

It's true, of course, that this big, loud, delta-winged, retaliatory fist never did anything noteworthy. But since it was built, purely, to drop nuclear bombs on Russia, we should all thank God for that. And be grateful, when we hand over a hundred quid to keep it up there, that we still can.

3 October 2010

So far, David Cameron's cuts aren't too bad. A few middle-class babies will have to suckle on their mother's breast milk until they are fourteen, George Osborne has decided to use his own money to buy a Christmas tree for No. 11 and various workers on the tubular railway have been told to get out of their cosy ticket offices – that no one uses any more – and do a spot of work.

However, we all know worse is to come. Free swimming lessons for the elderly will end, greasy women in the north will have their flatscreen televisions confiscated and the navy could lose an aircraft carrier.

That's why I've spent the week racking my brains for a big cut that won't affect anyone. And I think I have an idea.

We must tell people who work for the European Union to stop pretending they can't speak English.

Let me explain. There are twenty-three recognized languages in the EU, which means there are 506 possible bilateral combinations. And because of the impossibility of finding someone who can translate Danish into Estonian, the EU now has to use a chain of translators, which, I'd imagine, massively adds to the chance of a misunderstanding.

Certainly, I know if I was sitting in one of those booths, translating a dreary treatise on fiscal stability from Welsh into Hungarian, I'd never be able to resist changing what had actually been said just a little bit. Maybe dropping in the word ‘nipples' occasionally. Or ‘testes'.

But worse than the complexity and opportunity for
tomfoolery is the astronomical cost. It's around €1 billion (£875 million) a year and, thanks to various lunatic Basques, things could get worse. The cost isn't just borne by taxpayers, either. If you invent a new type of nasal hair-remover and wish to patent it in all fifty American states, the cost will be £1,600. If you want to patent it across half of the EU, the cost will be £17,500 – thanks to a £12,250 bill for translation services.

For all we know, a Greek bloke invented the Apple iPad back in 1958 but he's still waiting for someone to translate his idea from Hungarian into Portuguese.

Plainly, something must be done, not only to save all the member states money, but also to make our industry more competitive. And it's obvious, isn't it? Those translators have got to go.

The raw data suggest this will not be too much of a hardship, even in Britain, a country famed for its blinkered attitudes to the noises other people use to communicate. According to official figures, 23 per cent of the population here can speak, read and understand French.

Unfortunately, these figures are nonsense. You may claim that you can speak French, by which you mean you can order a loaf of bread and ask for the pen of your aunt. But do you know the French for jump leads? Or Scart lead? Or collywobbles?

The acid test is to imagine yourself in bed with a French girl who can speak no English. Do you have enough to get by? Really? Because, trust me on this, if you say, ‘Et maintenant, comme le chien,' she is going to be very angry. And point out that it is, of course, ‘la chienne'.

That's the trouble with French. You may know the word for railway station but do you know if it's male or female? Of course you don't, which is why you would come a cropper
if you were asked to speak to Monsieur Nicolas Sarkozy about the possibility of sharing nuclear submarines. You'd probably end up giving him your mother's recipe for toad-in-the-hole.

No, when they tell us that 9 per cent of people in Britain can speak German, what they mean is that 9 per cent of people in Britain either have an O level in the subject or once went to Cologne on a business trip. They do not mean that 9 per cent of the British population could hold important talks with Angela Merkel on Chinese trade tariffs.

The fact of the matter is this: thanks to our absurd school league tables, only 5 per cent of A-level students sat an exam in a modern language last year. And even those that passed can hardly claim they were fluent.

So, without translators, almost everyone in Britain is sunk. But that is emphatically not the case with Johnny Foreigner, because contrary to what he may claim when you ask for directions, he does speak English.

English is the mandatory first foreign language for school children in thirteen EU member states. Couple that to the fact that most kids in Europe would rather watch Bruce Willis than some French idiot in black and white smoking a cigarette while pondering the meaning of his ham sandwich, and would rather listen to Lady Gaga than whatever it is the Italians call pop music, and you end up with a government statistic that does appear to be true. Around 90 per cent of European kids can speak English better than many people in Newcastle.

Things are less clear-cut with the older generation, but I'm sorry: if you can't speak English, then you are simply not intelligent enough to represent your region in the European parliament. Your neighbours may as well elect a table or a horse.

The time has come, therefore, for the whole continent to stop communicating with its silly grunts and noises, and take up English. We can explain to the French and the Germans that they may speak in their oh-la-la Gott-im-Himmel language when they go home at night but, to save money, it has to be English at work.

Who knows, we could roll this out all over the world, which would save the United Nations and the G20 a fortune as well. And we should, because it's ridiculous that taxpayers have to cough up simply because some halfwit from Zimbabwe thinks he's making a statement by speaking in ticks and clicks at important meetings.

Nobody really understands how language has evolved but we must understand that today, in a world of fast communications and global consequences for the smallest of things, it's time we waved it goodbye.

10 October 2010

Back in the summer, Mr Cameron made an impassioned plea for Turkey to be allowed to join the European Union.

He pointed out that for many years this great bridge between the world of Christianistas and Muslimism has been a NATO missile launch pad and that you can't expect someone to guard the camp and not be allowed inside the tent.

I'm sure that up and down Britain people called Nigel and Annabel nodded sagely at these kind words.

Many middle-class couples take boating holidays off Turkey's idyllic coast and come home with ornate birdcages and lovely rugs. Apart from the boatman who slept with their daughter, they like Johnny Turk very much.

How, they wonder, can the EU possibly turn its back on Turkey, with its lovely ‘for you my friend special price' traders and excellent restaurants, while granting membership to the revolting Bulgarians? And the Romanians, with their silly pork-pie hats and donkeys? It's ridiculous.

In the past, Turkey's applications were denied because they liked to cut off people's heads, and such a move would have infuriated the Greeks. Today those excuses no longer hold water. Turkey has abolished capital punishment, and infuriating the Greeks is now seen, especially by the Germans, as a good thing.

Turkey has even managed to sort out its prison system. In the past, you were beaten on the soles of your feet for no particular reason and male rape was encouraged. We know this because we've seen
Midnight Express
. Now, torture
is discouraged and the homosexuality is apparently quite tender.

It all sounds fine, then. But I've just spent a bit of time in Turkey and I don't think it's fine at all. And not just because the barmaid at my hotel had only one word of English, which was ‘no'. This made ordering a beer extremely complicated.

First of all, I didn't go to Istanbul or one of those turquoise coves you see in the brochures, because that would be like judging Britain on a brief trip to London and Padstow in Cornwall. No, I went to the eastern part. The region the Foreign Office advises us to avoid. Turkey's Lancashire. And I'm sorry, but the only thing I want less in the EU is rabies. It was absolutely awful.

In my view, a country must have certain standards before it can become a member of the EU, and my No. 1 line in the sand is: dead dogs at the side of the road. Of course, you occasionally see a rotting mongrel in Portugal and it's very sad. But in Turkey they lie there like the forest of single shoes we see by the A1. Thousands of them. Maybe they are used as handy direction pointers when one is having friends over for dinner: ‘Left at the Labrador. Right by the Dalmatian's head, and if you see the sausage dog, you've gone too far.'

The EU is supposed to be a group of civilized countries working as one. And I'm sorry again, but accepting a country that can't be bothered to clear up its dead dogs would be like Boodle's private members' club accepting a man who thinks it acceptable to masturbate in public.

Sadly, though, there are other issues that must be addressed. Petrol, for example. I realize, of course, that if you water it down a bit, you can increase profits dramatically. Furthermore, when your customer breaks down with a ruined engine, he will be many miles away, with no means of
coming back to your place of business with a pickaxe handle. But it's not on. Even the Spanish have cottoned on to this.

It's the same story with plumbing. The idea is that when you pull the chain on a lavatory, the contents of the bowl are taken far away from your nose; not fanned directly into the air-conditioning system, which itself is made from decaying dogs. This sort of thing may be acceptable in Mexico, but not in what should be seen as the world's boutique.

We must also address the violence. Yes, we have road rage in Britain and it's not particularly edifying, but in Turkey it seems that if someone carves you up in traffic, you are legally entitled to leap from your car and beat him to death.

And then there is the transport infrastructure. A road is a complicated piece of engineering. Foundations must be dug. Many different types of stone and gravel must be laid and compressed and hardened before a top coat of asphalt is laid. Filling a crop-dusting aircraft with grey paint and flying over the desert may be cheap, but you end up with something so bumpy that your eyes stop working properly and you fail to see the next military checkpoint.

Of course, we cannot deny Turkey's membership of the EU because it has military checkpoints. We have such things at Heathrow from time to time. And Northern Ireland. But when the soldiers point their automatic weapons directly at your head through slits in sandbag walls and there are tanks, it all feels very far removed from, say, the Dordogne.

I like the diversity of Europe. I like that the Spanish kill cows as sport and northern Englanders race pigeons, a bird the French call ‘lunch'. It's a wonderful melting pot, but some things would sit in the stew like a – well, like a dead dog, actually. And being asked for your papers by a man in a tank? That's one of them.

The problem is that Turkey simply doesn't feel European.
Poland does. Ireland does. Even Bradford does. But Turkey feels odd. It feels like part of the East. It's an interesting place and a nice spot for a holiday, I'm sure. There is economic growth, too, but having it in the EU would be as weird as having Israel in the Eurovision song contest. Oh, hang on a minute … No. It would be like having a branch of Primark on Sloane Street.

And there's the thing. Mr Cameron says it's not reasonable to expect someone to guard the camp and then not be allowed inside the tent. But that's not true, is it? My local policeman guards my house from vagabonds and thieves but that doesn't mean I want him to come and sit by the fire every night.

31 October 2010