Monday 1 February 2010

Quelle surprise!

There's a shock:

Sure, we are better than North Korea, Zimbabwe, Cuba, Eritrea and Burma, which make up the tail end of the Index. But in any index of free countries, it is a bit galling to fall behind Chile. Galling, but certainly fair.

3 comments:

john miller said...

Oh and just to show what a free country it is, the Sports Minister, whose name I can't be arsed to spare a few neurones to, is to ask the FA to EXPLAIN THEIR STANCE on John Terry, the England soccer captain.

Now I detest football with the best of them, but how did this delusional cunt ever think it was any of his business? Is that why he was elected? To safeguard the morals of the national team? Perhaps he could look a little closer to home when it comes to morals...

bayard said...

FFS, we're 11th out of 179. We've beaten all other European countries apart from three. We've beaten Japan. It's nonsense to say that "only the top ten are free", it's not a fucking race. So perhaps only those who score above 77 are "economically free", in which case we missed the line by half a point. Hardly the cause for mass sackcloth and ashes, is it? Also, a score that only the top 5.5% can beat is a pretty limited definition of "economically free"

Much more to the point is the slippage, -2.5%, which puts us in the bottom 13, along with the likes of Eritrea, Uzbekistan and Ecuador.

bayard said...

Sorry, I've just noticed that it was only the good Dr Butler who produced the "top ten" tardery, the Heritage Foundation set the bar at 80 which puts us in the same "mostly free" "shit-pit" as the US. I'm still not going to break out the sackcloth just yet.