You could soon be getting calls on your mobile phone asking if you want to speak to any number of cold callers, nosy parkers, tabloid gossip hacks or council snoopers

A new company called Connectivity [www.118800.co.uk] is about to start offering a service which allows you to dial 118800, give an individual’s name and address, when they’ll try to connect you with any of 42 million British mobile users.

They claim that the call recipients’ privacy is protected because they do not give out their numbers. They send a text or leave a voicemail announcing that someone would like to talk to them (with a caller’s name given) and a number on which to call them back (presumably at their own expense). However, it’s clear from the demo call currently on the 118800.co.uk website that callers could give any name they thought likely the recipient would respond to – perhaps even a specifically enticing one.

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Those concerned about David Cameron’s cosying up to hard right parties on the eastern fringes of Europe, with the apparent aim of forming a new Europhobic faction within the EU Parliament (spancelled beast though this is) should not perhaps lose too much sleep over it. Jew-hating, gay-baiting, climate-change-denying illiberals like Polish priest Tadeusz Rydzyk are not at all his natural bed-fellows. But Cameron has an enemy at home to fight – the reactionary, little-Englanders who espouse the UKIP, who, he must think, can only be headed off at the next election by a strong show of hard-line Euroscepticism now. If he is elected without having to make concessions to UKIP, I predict that his new friendship with uncompromising right wing parties in Poland, Czech Republic, Latvia, Bulgaria and Lithuania will soon wither and die. I certainly hope so.

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