Poolside ..... politics!

Down at the pool in the continued hot weather it is nice to find a sun lounger in a place where you can have a mix of sun and shade. Some people are continuing to flout the rule that say loungers cannot be reserved. These seem to be a group of elderly Spaniards who leave their towels and newspapers and other odds and ends on sun loungers while they go off and head for the beach or do other stuff. One of them got a bit huffy the other day because some of his newspapers had disappeared. Someone else returned them to him; they had blown around a bit in the wind.

However, people are beginning to look askance at the loungers covered in hotel towels, and more so at the old grumblers when they turn up and blithely take over the sun loungers. Will there be a revolution down at the pool?

Watch this space!

Out in the wider world, away from poolside politics, life is going on. There’s a fair amount of stuff around at the moment about the children of illegal immigrants being taken from their parents and kept in different places. There is historical precedent for that kind of behaviour but in regimes that we thought we had fought against and defeated. Now it’s happening in the USA. Some people have been asking if this is legal and if it comes from a law set up by the democrats, either by Clinton or by Obama. The original idea of this may have originated with POTUS himself. Some folk would like to blame Obama for everything.

Well, I read this somewhere:

 “There is no federal law that stipulates that children and parents be separated at the border, no matter how families entered the United States. An increase in child detainees separated from parents stemmed directly from a change in enforcement policy repeatedly announced by Sessions in April and May 2018, under which adults (with or without children) are criminally prosecuted for attempting to enter the United States.”

There you go!

Melania Trump is reported to have said that she “hates to see children separated from their parents”. This has been taken as meaning that she has spoken put against her husband’s policy of taking illegal immigrants’ children off them and keeping them in separate detention centres.

Has anybody asked Mr May for his opinion of his wife’s policies? I wonder what he would say. Mind you, I suspect he backs her all the way.

The First Lady role is a rather special one. The French, whose presidents’ wives always used to be anonymous, seem to have been trying to develop the role. Sarkozy seemed to start a trend, if I remember rightly.

But the First Gentleman role is not really well developed.

Do we ever hear about Mr Merkel? Is there a Mr Merkel?

Now, who said this about the European Union?

“Leaving would cause business uncertainty, while embroiling the government for years in a fiddly process of negotiating new arrangements, so diverting energy from the real problems that have nothing to do with Europe.”

 And when was it said?

Well, it was Boris Johnson in February 2016.. Our politicians are men of straw who blow with any old wind.

However, I read that Mr Feijoó, President of the Autonomous Community of Galicia, does not want to be leader of the Partido Popular. Nor does he want to be the President of the Spanish Government. Galicia was, seemingly, the extent of his ambition. But then a cynic I read today says that there will be time for further ambition when his term as President if Galicia expires - a couple of years hence.

We shall see!