GOOD LITTLE BELGIUM

by John Clements

As I read my morning newspaper, the big economic story of the day is that the Prime Minister and a high-powered trade delegation are visiting India. They are there to boost British exports. A lot of money is involved if they succeed. To put this trade delegation and the Prime Minister's expectations into context, it was announced at the same time that British exports to India were not as large as the exports from Belgium. The Prime Minister at least wants Britain to leapfrog Belgium in the league table of exporting countries.

I’m glad the Prime Minister is not looking at pigeon racing! If he did, his worries for the UK versus Belgium might be even worse. Lo and behold he would find that the British pigeon racing industry exports hardly anything but imports vastly more than it sells and that little Belgium crops up again as being better than us.

If perchance he took it upon himself to look a little deeper into what lay behind this sorry state of affairs he would also notice that both the UK pigeon community and the Belgian pigeon community have a ‘Royal’ prefix attached to the name of their governing body. Ours is the RPRA and theirs is the KBDB where the ‘K’ stands for Koninklijkie, the Flemish equivalent of ‘Royal’.

Surely we must ask why this small country, not much bigger than Wales, is a rival to our export trade and better than us at exporting pigeons? Is it that the KBDB supports its own fanciers and promotes Belgian pigeons but the RPRA does not promote British pigeons? Surely we must ask what has our Government done about it? Answer: a high powered Prime Ministerial trade delegation. What has our  ‘Royal’ pigeon institution done about it? Answer: a few fraternal visits. 

February 2013

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