Political Penguin

When I originally started this post about a fortnight ago I intended to come back to it but haven’t. Partly due to other things taking up my time and equally a sheer bit of laziness. I had thought it best to write the whole post in one go mindful of the possibility of meandering off the point if I were to split it up. However I’ve decided that if I am to ever finish it then I’m going to have to do it in smaller bitesize chunks. So here’s the first part.

Another of those, I’ve been meaning to write this for a while but didn’t get round to it and this time there’s a bloody good reason. This one’s a biggy.
So to just do a little overview, we’ll be covering:
The Environment
Climate Change
Inequality
Economics
Tax
Trade
Energy policy
National security
The EU
Foreign policy
Recycling
and last but not least, Bulgarian made childrens wooden toy trains.

So where to begin on this one? OK, we’ve had the news that there’s only two European countries that are well on the way to meeting their obligations under the Kyoto agreement on the reduction of carbon emissions. These are Sweden and our own little plucky island. Good news of course, after years of being called the ‘dirty man’ of Europe we’re now up there with the moral high ground when it comes to the environment and we can patronise the others for not being as committed to saving the planet as us consciencous Brits.
However, and I’m sure regular readers will know my style by now that there is always an ‘however’ waiting to pounce at inopportune moments. Are we really so squeaky clean as this news portrays us?
My inspiration for this article comes from no less a source than Gordon Brown. While the Penguin’s were away in Germany over Christmas and New Year, I was admittedly, starved of my regular dose of news, at least in a language that I speak fluently. However, a brief 15 minutes of catching CNN brought a statement from Gordon Brown in the House of Commons for which I have no clue what debate it was but the pertenent statement he made was that 75% of toys coming into the UK for the Christmas just gone were from China.

As I had nothing else to do at the time this got me thinking and the threads of this post are very much the deliberations that passed through my mind. Britain is importing 75% of the toys that were presumably purchased last Christmas from China alone. This does not include those imports from other countries that send us the toys our children play with. So I pondered on the point of what toys my 11 month old son plays with at present. Before he was born, from certain branches of my family we received various items, mainly clothes and ‘hand-me-downs’ but also some toys. These toys were of the plastic or fabric variety that befits a newborn and at that time I noticed that virtually without exception they all had ‘made in China’ somewhere on them.
This led me into a bit of nostalgic patriotism of why aren’t things made in this country anymore which is often easy to slip into. My own childhood was dominated by Corgi and Dinky cars, Hornby Railways and Scalectrix, all made in Britain. I then realised that actually, it wasn’t, if they did play a part in my childhood play habits, then they were all completely overshadowed by Lego. I had absolutely shitloads of the stuff (although this might have been helped by winning a national Lego building championship when I was four and getting lots of sets as a prize). Lego however isn’t a product of our little island, it’s native land is Denmark and is produced both there and in Switzerland. At school there were deep rivalries between the Lego kids of which for some reason I became the ringleader and the Playmobil kids another toy that I believe is native to Germany.
Enough of my childhood, back to the main issue. Increasingly we find that the toys our children play with are not made in this country or even in near neighbours across the channel. They are manufactured on the other side of the planet and shipped over to us to indulge our consumeristic needs.
As the first year of my sons life is nearing its close I have taken stock of the toys that have accumilated over the time. It is interesting to note that they fall into two distinct categories. Those purchased in the UK which as far as I’m aware, with no exception were all made in countries other than the UK and primarily in China except the Duplo Lego which we already know where that’s from and those toys sent from Germany which on the whole were all manufactured in Germany apart from a plastic aeroplane with some strange writing that I’m assuming is Polish.
Now when I was in Germany I did some price comparisons which I alluded to in a previous post on the relative cost of Windows XP in Germany compared to the UK. I also looked into the price of childrens toys in the local store and compared them to comparable products that are available here or those that we had already purchased.
First up is those plastic cup things that you can either stack one way to build a large tower or the other way where they fit into each other. The ones we got from the Early Learning Centre cost