Land of the Rising Sun?

A week is a long time in politics; in a quake zone it can seem forever. It was just last Friday that so much destruction was wrought on north eastern Japan. Few cannot have been moved by the images beamed around the world. As one US reporter said, it was like Apocalypse Now meeting My Worst Nightmare. Ocean-going trawlers thrown onto dry land, houses smashed like matchwood, and a death toll already over 11,000. An appeal has now gone out for more body bags and coffins as local supplies are overwhelmed. Our thoughts are with the relatives.

To make long term matters worse the quake and accompanying tsunami ... ironically a Japanese word ... has renewed the arguments about nuclear power, thought by some experts to be capable of generating one fifth of world energy supplies in the near future.

NIMBY ... or not in my back yard until “buddy can you spare a loan?” – all currencies accepted

For those with a long memory, you might recall that globalisation was touted as a sort of business panacea; embrace this concept and all will be well with international trade. A keen supporter, surprisingly, turned out to be Bin Laden himself (or perhaps one of the 20 plus people the CIA believe might be him.) He appeared in a video wearing a Taiwanese watch; carrying a Chinese Kalashnikov; speaking into a Japanese camera; and transmitted via a US satellite uplink, espousing his particular version of the Internationale.

Ah, things were so simple then. Now, it is not a good time to be a foreigner in a globalised, UK, world. Workers at nuclear power plants in Sellafield, and Heysham joined oil refinery workers at Lindsey to protest at the employment of non UK nationals, leading Lord Mandelson to proclaim that the strikers were pursuing the “politics of xenophobia”.