Non!

The French voted non, and the smeg has hit the wall. The Nederlands will be voting on Wednesaday, and they will also vote no. There is a good piece by Nick Assinder, we like Nick, on the BBC website this morning that explains it all, click. As I mentioned recently, the French no vote will mean Blair can claim there is no point in holding a British referendum. He'll be privately very pleased about that since he couldn't possibly have engineered a yes vote. I think he should still have the referendum (as promised). Other countries like the Nederlands for instance, haven't cancelled their referenda because the French rejected the treaty.

There seems to be a lot of head scratching and beard stroking going on now. I don't think the grand wizards made any plan for this eventuality. As it stands, unless the French hold another referendum, or they retify the treaty without it, the constitution has died because it won't be legal unless all 25 states back it. Blair now finds himself in the unfortunate position of trying to sort this out as he takes over the European presidency in July. It's a good day for the Eurosceptics.

Now here's something funny. The governemnts plan for ID cards has been given a price tag of 6 billion GBP. Now that's a lot of money and, to put it in perspective, that comes out at around 93 pounds per person. Originally the figure was put a little lower (85 pounds person) but that was before the tax was factored in. Yes, we do apparently have to pay the governement tax for the privilidge of holding an id card which 79% of the population don't want. Currently it's not clear where the money will come from, but the original scheme would have meant each person would have had to actually pay 85 pounds for their id card. Now, here's the funny thing, the London School of economics has done an independent study to determine the cost of the newly proposed scheme and has concluded that the government got the maths wrong. It could cost as much as 18 billion pounds or nearly 300 pounds per person.

Of course, something like this is a vast undertaking with many unknown factors, and costing such things are indeed problematic. But a descrepency of 300% is surely more than a little worrying. The LSE has claimed that the government has conveniently not factored in such things as updating of biomentric and other data, dealing with the refusniks (like me), and some technology costs. I would suggest that the technology cost is an enormous unknown quantity since they haven't decided yet what form of biometric data they will stael from each and every one of us. It has been suggested that each card would need to be updated on avaerage, at least every five years, just to keep the biometric data intact. The governemnt plans only a 10 year renewal period.Click.

Yesterday we went and climbed a mountain, actually, no point in lying about this, it was more like a big hill, and there were steps so it wasn't like the north face of the Eiger. Then we had lunch with Andy and Vivian. Andy's been a homemaker for too long. He puts garbage in the fridge to stop the insects coming and he washes everything before throwing it away.