I don't have any objections to a pleasant milk-based coffee-flavoured drink – the drink in the picture is going to get drunk whilst I'm writing this.
But please don't call it coffee. If you top up a glass of wine with Irn-Bru, you wouldn't still call it wine would you? No, it becomes a wine cooler.
A link to the story in the media.
Because without a link some people might believe that this is all a conspiracy story. After all, I'm fond enough of commenting on stories of corporate greed, and this one is pretty unbelievable.
Apparently retailers have been cunningly claiming back VAT on purchases made by consumers who are travelling outside the EU. Perfectly legal, except that the total price that the consumers are paying is not reduced.
If you look at a invoice or receipt, it will usually have a line for each item listing the cost, and another line at the end totalling the VAT due. That charge for the VAT is supposed to be paid to the government. If VAT is not payable, it is not unreasonable to cross out the VAT line, deduct it from the total payable, and pay the reduced amount.
It would be amusing to try this in an airport shop.
One additional detail that has a bearing here, is that to claim back the VAT, the shops have to produce a copy of the boarding pass from people leaving the EU in order to claim the VAT back. Apparently the shops have been demanding a copy of the boarding pass from everyone and sometimes claiming it is for security purposes (which of course carries the unspoken threat of being arrested and if the airport police are bored, being prodded with automatic weapons and given a free body cavity inspection).
The retailers are claiming that it is too much like hard work to charge two different prices (one with and one without the VAT), which may well be a reasonable objection. If they don't claim the VAT back.
Now if there were a likely looking geezer speaking in a Cockney accent, hanging around the boarding gate for flights to the USA, and demanding a "Kray tax". And waving at someone dressed in a police uniform and carrying a machine gun, and saying that you uneed to pay or you'll get arrested, it would be something not entirely unreasonable to call it robbery.
So would it not be reasonable to call what these shops are doing robbery too?
It is approximately 70 years since the first nuclear fission bomb to be dropped was delivered to Hiroshima.
Which is obviously a terrible thing to have occurred. The death toll (approximately 80,000) from a single weapon was astronomical, but when you compare it with other incidents where civilians were killed in war (such as the Nanjing Massacre when between 40,000-300,000 Chinese were killed) it becomes a little less "special".
Yet those other massacres seem to be less well remembered despite many having a death toll comparable to Hiroshima (or Nagasaki). There is a series of conventions on the conduct of war (the Geneva Conventions) that includes provisions for prohibiting attacks on civilians.
However these provisions seem to be optional and widely ignored by military leaders and their political masters whenever it becomes inconvenient.
Radiation poisoning is one aspect that would seem to make Hiroshima "special" but there are other incidents where civilians continued to die after the initial attack :-
Even the notion that the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were so terrible that it should never be repeated does not make these incidents unique – gas attacks during WWI inspired the complete prohbition of chemical warfare (which worked out so well).
But Hiroshima is special; it is special to the victims, the victims' families, and the survivors. But that sort of special also applies to all of the other massacres of civilians; they are all special to those personally involved in them. And to be frank they should be special to everyone who believes that civilians should not be targets in warfare.
It is special in another way – it is probably unique in the effect on the Japanese governments past, present, and hopefully future in the sense that the government is opposed to warfare.
With all the fuss about Jeremy Corbyn being nominated for election as the Labour party leader, anyone would think that the mainstream (read "parliamentary") Labour party is terrified that the slightest whiff of a genuine left-wing agenda by Labour will make them unelectable.
Perhaps so. Anyone who remembers the height of the Thatcher era when Labour was unelectable could well be worried that Labour might again make itself unelectable. And some of that distant past unelectability may well have been caused by the policies.
But not necessarily the 'left-wing' part of those policies.
In the recent election approximately 1/3 of the electorate chose to vote for the Tories which means that 2/3 did not. And that does not inlcude those who failed to find somebody worth voting for. And given the widespread revulsion at the early plans of what the Tories plan to inflict on us indicates that people could well be interested in a genuine alternative.
And that alternative is not "Conservative-light" (I refuse to use the trendy spelling of "light"; apart from anything else, there's a word for someone as old as I am trying to be trendy … and that word is "pathetic").
There is nothing more repulsive than a politician pandering to the lowest common denominator, and modifying their principles to make them more appealing to "middle-England". Perhaps this is why Labour is loosing their core work-class support.
Labour should be for the working classes, but the working classes including everyone who isn't a member of the idle rich which includes many people who don't traditionally think of themselves as working class. Such as doctors, solicitors, surveyors, bank managers (not "bankers"), etc.
Take a look at the results of the Green party – a genuincely progressive party with left-wing policies – who went from 1% share of the votes to 3.8%. Despite being an unelectable fringe party with no hope of being elected, they massively increased their share of the vote.
Perhaps a Labour party with sensible left-wing policies would not be electable, but at least it would be honest. And who knows? Maybe it would be electable after 5 years of Tory mismanagement and punishment for those who weren't born with a silver spoon.
Crossing the road at a pedestrian crossing when you get 7 seconds every 70 seconds (I've just timed it) to cross the road is bad enough – we know pedestrians are second-class citizens who are supposed to tug their forelocks every time a car goes past.
But when you want to cross diagonally at a cross-roads, you are supposed to wait twice for the little green man to flash you. So a car driver on a major road has a not unreasonable chance of not having to stop at all whereas a pedestrian almost certainly has to stop and wait twice; and even if they are really lucky, they will definitely have to stop once.
Why?
Why can't the green light for pedestrians be long enough to allow us to cross diagonally? It's hardly an unreasonable request – unreasonable would be to ask for the little green man to be on for as long as the traffic light for cars was green.