The most recent Conservatives Abroad conference was held on the 12/13 of October 2007 in Mijas Costa, close to Malaga, at the elegant Beatriz Palace Hotel. In addition to the Chairman, Lord Taylor of Holbeach and Lesley Taylor, our International Branch Director, there was a positive herd of MEPs and MPs to entertain us. The evening prior to the conference day, we were transported to Marbella’s Restaurant Relicario, there to be wined and dined. It disturbed me a little that a relicario in Spanish translates to a reliquary or deposit for relics. I wondered if the local organizers were being snide about the ages of the delegates. The food, however, did not in any way resemble relics and was enjoyed greatly by all – well, those at my table, for sure. MEP Richard Ashworth, Chief Whip of the European Parliament, made a concise and amusing appreciation of the improved position of the Party after the PM’s decision not to hold an election and the consequences of that decision.

The conference day dawned bright and warm as one might expect in the south of Spain in October and the hotel staff had organized a room suitable for the 60-odd delegates plus head office and parliamentary people. It was astonishing to find that Western Europe hosts so many CA branches, but disappointing to find that the one-time four branches in Portugal have shrunk to one and that Carol Torz is apparently running the whole thing single-handed. It was also encouraging was to find that there are some very strong feelings about how head office could help to provide support for the Party, primarily by campaigning for a life-time vote for expats. For instance, there are many of us living outside the UK but within the EU who have been expats for more than 15 years. We are therefore disenfranchised, in that after 15 years we are mostly not eligible to vote nationally anywhere. There is a distinct feeling that if we were to be given the vote again we could make a significant difference to voting figures. Various solutions for how to vote were proposed but the consensus was that the existing system of voting in the constituency where we were last on the electoral roll was the easiest to administer. It does have the disadvantage that one can only vote by proxy or by post. Since postal votes are only sent out a very short time before an election, the postal choice is impracticable, thus leaving the proxy as the only choice. Individuals can of course get their proxy a postal vote in the relevant constituency.

Giles Chichester, MEP for the South West of England and Jorge Moragas, MEP for the Barcelona area had a fine presentation of the pros and cons of Britain’s entry to the Euro, while Jacqui Lait entertained with answers to a wide variety of questions and items of policy. All in all, it was a very satisfactory conference and a good opportunity to meet at least some of the names that attach to the various branches and some of the people whom one normally only hears or reads about. This morning’s newspaper reviewer for Sky News 24 was John Gaunt who authors a column in the ‘Mirror’. Rather rudely, I thought, he suggested that David Cameron had had a brain transplant. Gaunt was delighted by the revelation in the papers that Mr Cameron is now wanting residents to have the opportunity of voting as to whether their councils should be able to raise taxes. This, added to the more recent statements made by our leader, makes Gaunt believe that Mr Cameron is turning into a very different person from the one he, Gaunt, had taken him for. I’m personally all for it. On top of that Mr Cameron is looking for heavier sentences for convicted rapists, and also the Home Secretary is in trouble for an apparent failure of screening in the selection of up to 5,000 illegal immigrants for government jobs in security sensitive areas. The Government looks more and more to be up against the wall as MEP Richard Ashworth said in southern Spain.

We also heard today that doctors in the UK are saying that tax on alcohol should be raised massively in order to reduce the amount that people are able to buy and drink. Is this an example of ‘head in the sand’ narrow horizons? One need look no farther than Sweden to see that high alcohol prices do not by any means decrease people’s urge to drink excessively. It is not so long ago that Sweden’s prices were almost prohibitive and maybe they still are, but that did not stop the Swedes from drinking. Far from it; drunken Swedes, teenagers among them, were to be seen at all times of the day, in a totally incapable state on the streets of the capital.

Felix Begur

Disclaimer - the thoughts in this blog post are those of the individual and not those of Conservatives Abroad.

I detect great concern and not a little dissatisfaction among our members with the recent policy statements by David Cameron and Mr Willetts concerning grammar schools. This is especially surprising in view of the ‘somewhat selective’ education which Mr Cameron received. I had thought that if there was one thing which the Tory Party defended it was the right to a selective education. There was a time in my life when I wanted to repay some of the benefits I had received from a grammar school education and went on a so-called mature student course at teacher training college (in Sheffield). Closer contact with the concept of comprehensive schools convinced me that if this was to be the trend in the future, then I wanted no part of it. Other considerations added to this to make me leave

Sheffield’s hallowed halls (that is what Ha Ha means, isn’t it?) and I returned to the world of aviation. I remain convinced that grammar schools should not just be acknowledged and retained as they are, which was Mr Willetts reaction to criticism, but need to be fostered and increased in number.    

  Tony Blair is in the last throes of relinquishing the premiership and is trying to make sure of his legacy. A reasonable success in Northern Ireland ought to be enough, but he is looking to wider horizons. He junketed with the other G8 leaders in Rostock and left G. Brown in the

UK while said leaders spent millions of Euros on a moderately successful meeting where already promised monies were slightly increased, to the great dissatisfaction of Sir Bob Geldof. It is a mystery to me why they don’t spend some of the money on chartering a small cruise liner which would make life much more difficult for the protesters. I read and heard that the 7 kilometer fence which surrounded the G8 dignitaries cost 8 million Euros. That could have been saved, as could the cost of transporting 16,000 police to protect them plus their overtime and accommodation and food. All of those together could surely have sufficed to rent a medium size cruise ship. George Bush could have sent an aircraft carrier, I suppose, but the cruise ship would provide more luxurious surroundings, as well as isolating them from any danger of seeing even one protester.     T.B. is also aiming at recycling. How can he possibly consider what passes for recycling in the UK as being anything serious. He plans to have 50% of household waste recycled by 2020. That seems positively euphoric when we see that the UK ‘recycles’ a mere 27% today, and a large part of that is co-mingled waste where, for example, paper sent for recycling contains plastic, bottles and cans which have contaminated the paper so that the whole mess is sent to a landfill. Germany recycles 57% of household waste and

Switzerland manages 60%. The Swiss also have systems whereby household detritus can be taken to incinerators which then heat subsidized housing. On arrival, for instance in a car, the car and contents are weighed on arrival and departure, the difference being charged at a specific rate. Any Swiss household waste which has not been recycled is bagged and is charged at €1.00 per 30-liter bag. These are examples of what can be achieved. By comparison, areas of

London and

Liverpool are on record as having recycled less than 10% of their waste. Aluminium cans worth £800.00 per ton are often rejected, while glass which can be favourably recycled have been so badly sorted that they are used as roadfill. There’s a long way to go to reach the Blair Government’s aims.    

Until the next blog . . .   Felix Begur

Disclaimer - the thoughts in this blog post are those of the individual and not those of Conservatives Abroad.

It’s been a mixed late winter here. First of all, there’s hardly been any rain, so the pyromaniacs will be on the prowl in summer. Some of them have been jailed over the last couple of years, but I expect there are some more hidden away. It also means that the water bill for this year will be enormous. The garden has to get its water from somewhere, and it looks like it will mostly be the scarce tap water. Down the hill, in Pals, they grow rice and have an annual Rice Festival when we are invited to partake of the Catalan Rice Recipes. The question will be – is there enough water to flood the rice fields? It can be amusing when the crop spraying helicopters arrive to suppress the hordes of mosquitoes which will be generated.

Added to the semi-drought, it’s been relatively warm, so everything is covered in blossom and starting to look gorgeous, but all a bit early. If we get a frost, the farmers here will be complaining that the grape crop has been frozen off as well, I suppose.

I see that the Lower House has been generous (with itself of course – blow the pensioners). ‘Members of Parliament voted to give themselves £10,000 each a year to spend on things like websites to boost “public understanding” of Parliament.’ [I thought that was what the Houses of Parliament website was for, silly me]. ‘The new allowance comes on top of the £20,000 office running costs allowance and the £7,000 for pre-paid envelopes. The money cannot be spent on websites featuring party political “propaganda”, with Jack Straw acknowledging that MPs might need to have a second site. One Labour MP predicted that the sites would be used for “shameless self-promotion”.’ [BBC text/politics]

I have already written to our Leader once about my lack of understanding of the Party’s rejection of the ID card scheme. Like many others, I had an ID card for practically all my working life and found it most useful, as well as obligatory, having spent, as already explained, much of that working life in uniform (military and later, civil), and in a European country that demanded that ID cards were carried at all times. Try shopping in one of the supermarkets around here with a credit card and no ID! I learned that the Party believes the cards will not cut benefit or credit card fraud, though I still doubt that. In a recent conversation it was suggested to me that the only way the cards could be really effective required the biometric data and this is the expensive option. Maybe so, but it occurred to me later that this is perhaps another illustration of the proposition made by Davis Davis, our Shadow Home Secretary. He has pointed out that Labour policy seems to be to bundle good, sensible legislation together with one or more features which ruin the whole thing. As a result, the Tory Party is obliged to vote against a bit of promising legislation because of the attached rubbish. Which of course implies that biometric data is ‘rubbish’: that is not my intention. I simply feel that the massive cost of the whole thing is unrealistic (and could be decreased), and therefore it gets a vote of rejection. Which delights Tony Blair who then says in PMQs that “the Tories voted against that too”.

I was amused by the attention the daily press gave to David Cameron’s migrating parting. Many of us would be glad to have hair to part!

Until the next blog . . .

Felix Begur

Disclaimer - the thoughts in this blog post are those of the individual and not those of Conservatives Abroad.