POET Technologies Inc.

I am going off topic, quite deliberately, to test the opinions of this forum on a few political matters and to spread some calm in the midst of the feverish interest inevitable with all the recent news. I hope you will forgive me but I will try to make this of interest.

Over here, in the ancient part of the anglosphere, known in the vernacular as Blighty, we are 25 days away from a general election. We are being bombarded on all media by the various political parties and my irritation levels have steadily risen. I make an assumption, as fellow investors, that we are all capitalists at heart and share an interest in profiting from these desires. This means that most of us are not overwhelmed by a willingness to part with our money to governments who have an inordinate capacity to mis-spend huge amounts without apparent cost to them, given that we all accept payment for health, education, defence and support of the less fortunate as a given.

If you ask my brother (Sulasailor) or son (Oldgreg), they will try to tell you that my views are to the right of Ghengis Khan, but I dispute this. I am not Ghengis Khan (can’t ride a horse or swing a sword) but am happy to act as his political adviser and spin doctor – “Hi! Gheng – is it my wit or my tongue that is as sharp as your sword”.

We have a socialist party, known here as the Labour Party. They held power until 2010 and lost the election after some shoddy banking supervision and excessive market borrowing which left them wholly unprepared for the 2008 catastrophe which resulted in the rescue of several banks with household names. Some bankers were little short of greedy pillocks with the brain capacity to spot danger little short of non-existent. Rescue, in the region of £300 billion was, of course, paid for by the tax payer and funded exclusively by borrowing which the present government is still paying back. Curiously, Labour are seeking power again. They are supported by a few newspapers, such as The Guardian. This wretched landfill of handwringing, educationally challenged, whingeing, bleeding-heart hacks are trying to tell me that we should put these expensive sharks back in power. The Labour Party is led by one Ed Milliband, he has never had a job after university, other than as a political adviser, and cannot open his mouth without thrusting his hand in your pocket for more cash to spend on his ludicrous ideas. He is accused of being geeky, they are correct. This is my most kindly effort at a balanced opinion on the major opposition party

There is a Green Party. (Green is an acronym which, when translated, stands for Gigantic Repeated Expenditure Even Now, a better name would be: The Jurassic Party). Their views are differentiated from madness only by their capacity to appear on television and completely fail to understand that 500,000 new homes at £60,000 each in the UK will cost billions and to forget to include the price of land in their estimate. In the London and South East area the cost of each parcel of land alone for a house would exceed that. They would wreck industrial output, replace Gas, Coal and Nuclear with firewood and those bloody giant fans littering our beautiful countryside masquerading as electricity generators (and bird slicers) and which supply the grid for only 1/3 of the time – their introduction has cost in excess of £120 billion. The biggest industries would become flogging wattle and daub on roadsides to build new homes and selling alfalfa and fava beans in thatched cottages for food replacement, no wonder they are green. They are led by Miss Antipodean Woman, alias Natalie Bennett, barely able to hide her hatred of anybody remotely akin to a capitalist. Quite unclear to me why you’d vote for this shower, definitely not my cup of tea (brown not green thank you). Despite repeated attacks of major psychoses (their latest venture into popularity was to suggest the Grand National horse race be pulled for animal welfare reasons) they have 5% of the vote in opinion polls but this hasn’t risen for a while. Heavens above, 1 in 20 voters want a return to the ice age and hunter gathering, with entertainment by the White Heather Sword Dancing Society by candlelight, if they can persuade enough members to kill sufficient pigs for the tallow, they are pets after all.

We have a UK Independence Party. They essentially want out of the European Union at all costs, stop foreign aid, curb immigration, but are led by a highly successful investment banker, one Nigel Farage, who is an arch bloke, drinks beer in pubs, very articulate and who I like. He is much more clued up on how the world works than the aforementioned. There is a certain though understated dislike of immigrants

We also have a bunch of nationalists in Scotland and Wales. They want independence from the UK. and, despite losing a referendum on this very topic, are still harping on about it. Reality has muted their cause because the fall in world oil price and reduced take on Whisky exports has dented their sums, unfortunately the Scots don’t see this and, perhaps, don’t care. They have substantial support, however, in Scotland and current polls suggest they will virtually dominate the whole of Scotland but not Wales. They are largely reviled outside Scotland and Wales. We will have problems with this crowd.

The Liberal Democrats, led by one Nick Clegg, are a smaller mainstream party who believe they are middle of the road. They joined with the larger Conservative party to form a successful coalition in 2010 but, if you are in the middle of the road, you get hit by the traffic and they have lost a lot of support in current opinion polls. Their future is decidedly uncertain.

Finally there is the Conservative party led by one David Cameron. Sensible, approved of by me, more clued up about finance and have made a reasonable fist, in coalition, of improving our economy. Opinion polls are equally divided and they roughly equivalent to that monstrous Labour party at some 35% each. Only time will tell, but very interesting.

Thanks for reading this incisive and thoughtful resume of current British politics; must stop, off now to buy a horse and sword.

David