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Here's the thing I don't understand about Gordon Brown, or one of the things I don't understand about him - during a standard morning at Number 10 he moves Britain ever closer to the heart of the EU, which is obviously shit. But in the afternoon he holds press conferences with British news dudes and bandies about nationalistic phrases like "British jobs, for British people!" Huh? Say what?

You can't have it both ways. You can't sign up to a union that allows workers from all over the shop to come here and under-cut the wage demands of Northern and Welsh and Scottish people and then express outrage at the loss of jobs because of it.

If I hadn't resigned from the world I'd give this sort of thing more thought, but watching those engineers and oil refinery workers freezing their cods off on their picket lines I couldn't help but wonder if any of them have given any thought to using the same policies that have caused all this mess to their own advantage. Why not go and work abroad is what I'm saying?

If I was an engineer or had twenty years experience grafting away in an oil refinery I'd be off to Dubai or one of those other hot sandy places before you could say maasalaamah. Why don't UK workers pack up their pots and pans and move abroad? Britain is such an average place to live. Not just these dudes who are currently protesting, I'm talking about anyone. What's the UK's appeal? It's a miserable place and you can buy Daddies sauce and baked beans all over the world now so that can no longer be an excuse.


One gets the feeling that a lot of these dudes in Grangemouth (lovely place) would rather live in misery in Scotland and eat battered mars bars for tea than enjoy a regular income and a better than average standard of living by moving to Poland or Bulgaria or Romania. But why?

I'd be off in a heart beat me. No worries. Unfortunately, we're almost phobic about foreigners aren't we? Which is why we still call non UK citizens 'foreigners." Foreign - strange, alien, unheard of. We have a genetically inherited siege mentality when it comes to continental Europe and it's to our detriment.

Because we're an island and because we've handed out Europe a six-pack of whup ass regularly over the centuries, we're suspicious of them all and plagued by an ignorance that of all our most unpleasant national characteristics, I find it to be the most unpleasant. The most unpleasantest..unpleasantsome.

Eastern Europe is lovely. I think most people assume it to be still under communist control and everyone living there is surviving on dog casserole and state provided gin rations. To be fair, and with all due respect to Grangemouth, even if it was, that still sounds like an improvement in living standards.