Happy New Year

Bus fares have gone up by 50 per cent, an increase of £480 per year for the average worker commuting by bus.

Energy bills have gone up for the second time since October, or the third if you are a pensioner, on the same day that Ukraine has cut the supply of Russian gas to Europe. I am all for energy independence, but it cannot be established overnight.

Romania and Bulgaria have joined the Schengen Area 20 years after, it turns out, Tony Blair insisted on giving big business what it wanted, the absolute right of Eastern Europeans to work in the United Kingdom, whereas France and Germany placed them under the restrictions that were favoured in Cabinet by John Prescott and Jack Straw, many things but always the protégé of Barbara Castle, and on Labour's National Executive Committee by Dennis Skinner and Mark Seddon.

And the New Orleans attacker turns out to have had in his truck the ISIS flag that we were all supposed to be delighted to see flying over a Damascus that was under a regime with scarcely a Syrian or an Arab in it, since as much of Syria as Israel did not yet want had been declared the homeland of every Wahhabi, Salafi and Deobandi in the world and of nobody else. Expect Ahmed al-Sharaa to be proclaimed Caliph very soon. And consider that Shamsud-Din Jabbar was a former United States Army Staff Sergeant who had worked as an information technology team chief for the 82nd Airborne Division's 1st Brigade Combat Team, having been born in Beaumont, Texas. Well, of course.