Pace the injustified slur, naming 10 famous Belgians is easy, even if the Singing Nun, the Mannekin Pis and Hercule Poirot are declared ineligible (and Jacques Brel counts five of most other countries’ famous people in our book) – and there could just be another one soon, in the person of Finance Minister Philippe Maystadt, who could become the father of a whole new economics after his proposal that Belgium levy a robot tax on factory machines to get humans back to work: it’s a great idea, and why not take it further and ban construction machinery from the roads to get the shovels back into navvies’ hands – and no doubt computers can be included under the tax, so that in no time, in a dramatic return to Victorian values, while the Belgian economy may not actually start booming, the country will have the world’s biggest quill pen industry.
