Discovering a cheap local flight to Tenerife a week ago and pissed off with freezing in Somerset I flew to out last Tuesday morning to a week of glorious, warm, balmy weather. I try to avoid the Brits on holiday so I stayed in the capital Santa Cruz which is about 50 miles North of the resorts favoured by the Brits and is entirely Spanish other than the Germans who have occupied the North West corner of the island to the extent they alone of the non-Spanish airlines are allowed to fly in to Tenerife North airport close to Santa Cruz whilst the rest of us have to go to Tenerife South, some 40 miles from Santa Cruz but only 10 or so miles from the Brits beach resorts.
Its always interesting to see how well Johnny Foreigner runs things compared with the UK. The bus service was brilliant, cheap, frequent and linked in to both airports and ferries. The police were numerous and visible on the streets especially in the evening. No yobs, no litter and very clean. Ex pats I spoke with all said how good the medical care was.
Clearly they have had a lot of money from the EU to extend their port. I counted 7 container gantry cranes but only saw one general cargo ship being loaded with a few on deck containers so the gantries were a complete waste of money except for the manufacturers presumably, the Germans.
Ditto for their new tramway system using state of the art Alsthom French rolling stock. The French and Germans certainly know how to milk the EU unlike the Brits! That's why today UK announced a rise in imports and a fall in exports and the Germans a 18.5% increase in their exports in the last year. Being in the EU is, was and will be the death of UK manufacturing. I remember writing a paper to this effect on this in the Civil Service in 1972 but it never saw the light of day thanks to E Heath and the rest of the Europhile gang.
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