Jon and I washed cars today. Well, I washed and Jon played with water!

We had a day-trip to Dublin yesterday! We went to see Tim, Claire and Teagan to celebrate Teagan’s birthday. All in all it was a good day, but very long. The day started at 5:30 so we could get to the airport in time to catch the 8am flight and so we got to the party in a seaside town called Bray (just south of Dublin) at 11. After the party, we went to the beach (it was cold, but we were all wrapped up!) The beach there is a pebble beach like Brighton’s and forewarned, we had brought Jon’s wellies with us. All good fun. It was reasonably warm when the wind died down and the sun was out.

We then wandered over the the Sea-Life centre which was nicely done. The kids liked seeing the fish, especially the “Nemo” tank and the sharks! They have a centre in Birmingham too, so I think we should go to it at some point. We then stopped in at a pub for lunch (delicious!) but the kids were getting tired by now and it was showing. To round off our day, we stopped off back at Tim and Claire’s place to have a nose and a cuppa before heading back to the airport.

All in all, a really good day. Very very tiring though as Jon had a nightmare and woke us up at 3:30am! Today has been a recovery day…

The Register’s analysis over the conviction yesterday of Kamel Bourgass is interesting.

Pick of the quotes:

As Charles Clarke, being Home Secretary, ought to be aware, asylum seekers will not, according to his own Government’s plans, be allowed to have UK national ID cards. Asylum seekers do however already have their own biometric ID card. These were introduced in 2002, and Bourgass was an asylum seeker – a failed, absconded one.

and

His fingerprints should therefore have been on record. He absconded after the failure of his application, but a conviction for shoplifting in 2002 failed to identify him as a rejected asylum applicant.

So.. we have Charles Clarke saying that he needs to be able to track the general populace because of yet another failure in the immigration system. It’s self-evident that ID cards would not have made a blind bit of difference to this case. What would have helped is an immigration system that can actually deal with applications that fail. Fixing the fact that we only deport 5% of all failed asylum applications would be a far better use of money.

Both A small life and Neil
have posted their Who should I vote for? results, so here’s mine.

As you can see, I really dislike Labour’s policies atm! My anti-euro and euro constitution stance presumably gained me points with UKIP and I’d guess my free-market leanings give me the Conservative points. What I’m not sure about is why Labour is so negative.. maybe being anti-ID card pushed me further away?

According to the BBC, families of the employees of Rover are to stage a protest in London. Why?! I feel for the employees on the shop floor, but Rover is a failed business like any other. It’s been losing £20m per month! Come on.. the management could see this coming a year or so ago and should have taken steps then.

The Government should not bail out Rover any more than they should bail out any other company that goes bust.

Rover’s failure is not the Government’s problem.

Some good has come out of the election being called 15 months early…

I wonder if the next parliament will actually look at the facts concerning a national database?

The deadline at work was today and it all went really smoothly! Just as we expected!