Raedwald

Corporal works of mercy

2012-01-31T07:33:00.001Z

The two Romanian gypsy girls had gone down to the Naples tourist beach with a few trinkets, maybe to sell, maybe to provide cover for a morning of purse and wallet thefts. These are tough girls - hanging around London ATMs ready to grab a wad of dispensed cash from the slow and unwary, I've seen them front-down police officers, refuse to move on. But even tough little thieves get hot on an Italian beach; they went to swim, struggled, drowned.

The two nineteen year old lads had travelled together from their village in the Congo, paying down with stolen funds their places on a leaky fishing boat that would get them into Europe. The boat never made it. The bodies of the boys, still together, were washed ashore on a Lampedusa beach.

What the two incidents have in common is the treatment of the corpses. In both instances these were not only left for many hours on the beaches concerned, but in both instances photos have emerged of holidaymakers getting back to sunbathing and swimming around them. Now I know that depth of field and skilled photography can fool the eye, and those bathers who appear just yards away are probably a hundred feet distant, but the photos don't lie in showing their exposed corpses lying alone and only partially covered, unbarriered and unguarded, with no officer or official respectfully watching over them.

The care, preparation and burial of the dead is one of the corporal works of mercy that establish our humanity. Let us be shamed that our attitudes to these people in life should not last in death. We are all equal in death.

It's Monday it must be Greece

2012-01-30T08:11:00.000Z

It's Monday. Check the Travelcard, fix the diary for the week and throw another £50 billion at Greece to keep it solvent for another fortnight. In fact, much of that money goes back to the French and German banks that own Greek debt, and therefore to bolstering those nations' credit ratings. The Greeks end up not a Euro better off but with a further obligation for their grandchildren to pay for the German and French banks solvency. It's a sort of reverse Robin Hood tax - taking from the poor to give to the rich.

It won't work, of course. But that's never deterred the Federasts from anything.

Just a bent little frog

2012-01-30T07:27:00.000Z

So Sarkozy, with news of brown envelopes, tax breaks, sleaze and Presidential corruption, is proving that he's just a bent little frog after all. Like so many French Presidents, the stench of peculation, theft, bribery and dishonestly surrounds him.

The Kermits may be happy to be led by such people. We, you may be sure, are not.

The Court of Special Pleading

2012-01-27T06:50:00.000Z

The ECHR is not an appeal court in the way the Supreme Court is. Appeals procedures in both criminal and civil justice systems ensure that only the most significant and relevant cases, those likely to lead to a change in either the law or judicial process, reach the old Middlesex Guildhall for careful, lengthy and expert consideration.

But the ECHR is not an appeal court. With a backlog of over 150,000 cases, it is a Court of Special Pleading, grown from an Age of Entitlement. Wherever governments make rationing decisions - rationing Welfare housing, or access to tax-funded medical services, or tax-funded education - there will always be those unhappy with their ration, who want more. While national governments can ignore the whining of self-interest, the ECHR opens its doors to allow them to make a case as to why they should be treated differently to everyone else. Wherever governments design and deliver systems of criminal justice the ECHR opens its door to those who want better treatment than their fellow convicts, who want jury decisions overturned on grounds not forming part of their national law, who want special consideration and personal preferment. It stinks.

Don't mistake me; I think there is a role for a pan-national court to make recommendations to national governments to change their domestic laws. Scandinavian socialist eugenics, the birth-cradle of Nazism, Toynbee's Utopian Fabianopolis, gave us the compulsory sterilisation of the mentally retarded until the 1970s. However, the court's power should be limited to recommendation. Its decisions cannot be binding on democratic nations making their own legitimate decisions on the rationing of Welfare or the penalty for any particular crime.

We once had a Court of Special Pleading ourselves; called the Court of Requests it was empowered to make decisions at variance with the Common Law, to challenge the law. It eventually collapsed under the weight of backlog of cases, as everyone sought special pleading. The ECHR may be headed the same way.

Sunni Delight

2012-01-24T06:28:00.001Z

The threat, bluster and economic warfare now being mobilised against Iran by the West is delighting both the Sunni dominated middle east and Wahabbi Saudi Arabia. To get the west to go to war against the most powerful remaining Sh'ia force in the region whilst keeping their own hands clean suits the remaining despots very nicely indeed. And the west, as gullible and myopic as ever, seemingly having learned nothing from Iraq, is heading straight into catastrophe.

Far better to call in all those favours from Israel and have that belligerent little nation act as the west's proxy; the animus between Israel and Iran is widely understood, the fight would be a fair one and Sunni chauvinism would be blunted by a Sh'ia 'champion' in the arena with their widely-loathed common enemy. We would, of course, keep Israel plentifully supplied with arms (to the benefit of our own industry), albeit discreetly, and guarantee the integrity of Israel's pre-1967 border. But that's all.

Labour peers disconnected

2012-01-23T06:31:00.000Z

Labour peers (including Paddy Ashdown) are demonstrating just how disconnected from reality they are in opposing Welfare caps as the government's proposals pass through the Lords. Even if IDS' welfare reforms have missed the opportunity for real and fundamental reform, they are at least dealing with an aspect of welfare that aggravates the majority of voters - benefits claimants living in grand homes at the taxpayers' expense. As the Indie points out, this is just as much an irritation to the 'squeezed middle' as the equally scandalous fat-cat rewards at the other end of the scale.

The British people have, as a whole, a pretty good idea of fairness. It's fine for Richard Branson and Alan Sugar to be wealthy, but not fine for some unknown thieving muppet to equal their wealth by skimming all the profits from your pension fund. It's understandable that a 20-something soccer player or pop tart behaves stupidly with unaccustomed cash wealth, but inconceivable that a 20-something derivatives trader is entitled to do so. Labour peers should realise they're backing the wrong horse; Cameron's vulnerability is his closeness to the obscene earnings at the top end, not the benefits piss-takers at the bottom.

Bon Mots from Meades

2012-01-22T06:38:00.000Z

Jonathan Meades has a formidable mind. I still relish the throwaway line shattering smug pretention that he voiced on one of his architectural history TV progs "Lutyens is known to have designed eleven houses, thirty-seven of which are in Surrey".

His piece in the Telegraph urges us not to blame the slum estates of the sixties for the criminal behaviour of the underclass. Not that he likes or approves of the architecture, you understand, but because those who live in Albany refrain from crack dealing in the stairwells whilst those who live in Ernest Bevin House do not. Meades sums it up;

exclusion – initially expressed through truancy and minor delinquency – is wrought by people on themselves, by their irresponsibility and failure to integrate, because their life is an incompatible synthesis of primitivism and envy, of ill-education and consumerist desire

Unfortunately he stops there, hesitant perhaps at wandering too far from architectural history. More, Jonathan, please.

Two observations on the Costa Concordia

2012-01-21T07:10:00.000Z

Firstly an observation. As Richard North posted several days ago, stock pictures of the ship in port show a large EU symbol on the bows, aft of the ship's name. Since then I have searched largely in vain for a shot of the waves lapping around the symbol as it slowly sinks beneath the sea. Aerial photos of poor definition show that it's still there, but none of the flush of hi-def close up pics of the wreck show this at all. Can there be a little bit of news manipulation here?

Secondly, many have commented that the ship is lying on the opposite side to the gash in her hull, which is counter-intuitive. I can think of only one explanation, based on the free surface effect. In a vessel with a high centre of gravity, turning to port or starboard, or even the operation of bow thrusters, may induce a 'lean' in the direction of turn. Normally this doesn't signify, but with an engine room deep in water and without longitudinal bulkheads, this may cause the mass of water to shift to the opposite side of the ship beyond the point of recovery of vertical stability. Unlike proper sea going ships like the QMII, which can take an Atlantic storm, modern cruise liners are like steel shoeboxes. If this is the case, I would expect MAIB to comment on the sea conditions in which it is safe for such British flagged vessels to operate.

Don't worry M'lud it's normal

2012-01-20T14:11:00.001Z

The story that urine has been found in food and drink served to judges and counsel at Snaresbrook Crown Court has led everyone to leap to the conclusion that vengeful crims have deliberately adulterated their lordships' nosh. The reality may be more innocent, and hidden in the story;

A source told The Sun: 'Hygiene inspectors started an investigation. People are worried there might be someone working in the kitchens with a serious grudge against the legal system. They've suspended the entire catering staff including many old women who have worked there for donkey's years.'

I seem to recall that widespread geriatric incontinence among the aged kitchen staff at my own boarding school lent the food a piquant flavour that cannot have been unfamiliar to many of our learned friends at Snaresbrook. And I daresay it does no-one any great harm.

Hockney and Spielberg

2012-01-19T06:52:00.000Z

Just a few years ago, painting was old hat. The Turner prize never went to a painter. Saatchi didn't pay top dollar for paintings. Painters, even very good ones such as Freud and Patrick Caulfield, were relegated to the second tier. Unless of course the paintings were produced by spin machine or manufactured by impoverished art students in an East End factory, painting just wasn't cutting-edge. I'm not decrying the importance of the YBAs as a phenomenon of their time - Rachel Whiteread, Sarah Lucas and Tracey Emin will, in time, rise in reputation against Damien and their auction prices will equalise. But like the post-punk age, we've all been hanging about waiting to see what will follow the age of the YBAs and Saatchi, and the answer may well be ... painting. Certainly if Hockney's exhibition at the RA is anything to go by. Worth a trip up to London for, and worth £29.95 for the softback catalogue.

Spielberg's Warhorse is worth waiting for the DVD release if, like me, you prefer to weep in private. The thought of being stuck in a cinema full of the openly lachrymose is really quite an unpleasant prospect. The moral message - good overcomes evil, love conquers all - is one I wholeheartedly support. It's a theme that also runs through every film made by the Disney studios, some of which are dreadfully crass in artistic terms, yet worthy still if they manage to win a single convert from the cinematic world of violent death and human degradation.

Both Hockney and Spielberg, each in their own way, scores a small victory for Good.

What would MAIB make of it ...

2012-01-16T07:30:00.000Z

The red tops are picking up the gossip and rumour around the grounding and sinking of the Italian cruise liner: The captain was seen to spend the previous evening in the bar with a stunning blonde. As an act of braggadocio he promised to set an alternative course to get close enough to the Isola del Giglio to signal to someone on shore, but got too close. He fled the ship with the women and babies, covered in a blanket. All, to date, unjustified and unproven allegations that no doubt will be repeated and fill many column inches.

Thank goodness for our own dear MAIB.

Welfare must be local

2012-01-16T07:14:00.000Z

Following on from the post below, I think this issue is the crux of the debate on where the whole right-of-centre is headed. Nick Drew is a wise old bird with much high-level real life experience in politics and local government, and I take his points below. Wherever local governance entities just distribute largesse from on high, there will be unfairness and corruption; the people attracted to such duties will include many seeking to gain from graft, peculation, sleaze and fraud. However, the same doesn't hold where Welfare costs are levied and borne locally. As James Bartholomew wrote in the Speccie;

So what happens if you are, say, a young mother in Switzerland with a little baby but no husband or similar on the scene and nowhere to live? There is no countrywide answer to this question because it is not dealt with on a national basis. It is not even dealt with by one of the 26 cantons. It is dealt with by your local commune. There are 2,900 of these and their population can be anything from 30 to 10,000 or more.

Officials from this ultra-small local government will come and investigate your individual circumstances. The father will be expected to pay. The mother’s family, if it is in a position to, will be expected to house and pay for her. As a last resort, the young mother will be given assistance by the commune. But the people who pay the local commune taxes will be paying part of the cost. You can imagine that they will not be thrilled at paying for a birth or separation that need never have taken place. Putting yourself in the position of the mother — and perhaps the father — you can imagine that you will be embarrassed as you pass people in the street who are paying for your baby. Instead of feeling you have impersonal legal rights, as in Britain, you are taking money from people you might meet at your local café. No wonder unmarried parenting is less common.

A similar system applies if you need means-tested benefits. Those made redundant receive, for a while, generous unemployment insurance payments from the cantonal governments. But once these payments run out, people depend again on their local commune. You would be cautious of claiming fraudulently because, if you worked in the black economy, your chances of being spotted would be high. And so it is that Switzerland has the second highest rate of male employment in the OECD. Britain’s rate is about 50 per cent worse.

I simply don't believe the Swissies are any more moral, fair, equitable and uncorrupt than Brits, or that the fairness and probity exercised by the Swiss communes are beyond the capacity of local Welfare panels in the UK.

IDS' great behemoth of a Welfare State is as doomed to failure as its predecessor.

IDS reforms start to show cracks

2012-01-13T07:24:00.000Z

IDS' much vaunted Welfare reforms have always been regarded with huge disappointment by this blog. With all the best intentions, he has merely replaced a centralist, bureaucratically moribund, top heavy, expensive and inefficient system with an alternative centralist, bureaucratically moribund, top heavy, expensive and inefficient system. Like a Great War general, Duncan-Smith has sacrificed billions for an advance of a few inches.

Toynbee almost tells the truth this morning when she states "Voters think two sensible things about benefits: citizens needing help should be well cared-for and the healthy should be deterred from malingering". You just need to modify the word 'well' to 'adequately'. The cracks appearing in IDS' reforms result from a sensible assessment that they will achieve neither aim.

You simply cannot design a universal Welfare system from the top, as IDS has tried to do. You can't do it.

Welfare, above all things, must be local. IDS would have done better to throw the 10,000 page benefits manuals out of the window and simply allocate the entire benefits budgets to local offices with total discretion to distribute it as they thought fit. Seriously. Welfare recipients also need to be more 'visible'. Currently, the person who gives them money is a vague 'they' completely unconnected with their neighbours, their local traders or the driver of the bus that takes them to the Post Office. Administering Welfare payments and benefits at the most local level would target resources to those truly in need, be flexible enough to vary with changing circumstances and above all eliminate free riders. A fraudulent IB claimant may fool the benefits assessors but they can't kid their neighbours for very long.

IDS had his chance and he blew it.

Directors' pay

2012-01-12T06:48:00.000Z

The pay of directors of public companies is no business of government. It is very much the business of the owners of those companies - you and I, anyone with a pension pot. Currently directors' pay is determined by a remuneration committee, whose members are appointed by, er, the directors.

It is a simple matter to change membership of the remuneration committees to persons appointed by the shareholders, or in the case of institutional investors (often themselves also plcs) their own investors. This will result in bonus structures where bonuses are paid where the return to shareholders is good, and withheld when it is not. It will go far to end the culture of obscene and unwarranted levels of pay amongst those at the top of public companies.

Miliband refuses to tell the truth. What's news?

2012-01-11T07:26:00.000Z

As Miliband's sulky, petulant face stares out at us from the front pages today, a picture of privilege, cosy as a comfortable member of that Political Class so alien to the British people, we learn that he refuses to tell the truth and admit that the Labour party was largely responsible for the basket-case economy that the UK must now bear. Why is this worthy of coverage?

But whilst the Political Class is unwilling to shoulder any of the blame it is doing very well. The economic crisis is leaving MPs untouched For as long as they blame their chums the Corporates, and as long as the Corporates blame their chums the Politicos all is well for both groups. As Jeremy Warner writes in the Telegraph today

There is no hardship for those seen to have caused the slump. Bankers and company bosses are paying themselves even more than they were during the boom; the wealth divide continues to widen. Bankers are one thing, but the situation has become equally repellent at many of Britain’s leading companies. Ben Gordon of Mothercare and Manny Fontenla-Novoa of Thomas Cook are just the latest among Britain’s elite of corporate bosses to receive humongous rewards for abject failures in performance. What makes cases like these particularly galling is that the CEOs of publicly listed companies are not, generally speaking, wealth creators, but mere hired guns paid to manage established organisations.

The problem for Miliband is that Labour is the Big State, corporatist, centralist, tractor planning party. Labour can no more embrace Localism than it can reject Rousseau. So we get to look at Miliband's sulky petulant mug instead. Some choice.

Campaigning against the Big Three

2012-01-10T07:46:00.000Z

Christopher Kelly's tax funding proposals will establish the current big three parties as the official "parties of State", grossly unfairly advantaged by incumbency, crowding-out new parties from a chance to enter Westminster and stiffling much needed political reform of these cosy private metropolitan clubs that between them have a membership of fewer than 1% of the electorate. Their take from the tax-pot may start out as modest, but once established there will be no control over their subventions from the public coffers to build their private organisations. Kelly's myopic and timid recommendations, intended to achieve a weak consensus rather than guarantee democracy, will lead this nation along a path on which lurk the most dangerous threats to our national democracy.

It is time for the ordinary people of Britain to act, not in forming a new political party, nor in supporting an existing fringe party (though we can do both of these as well) but simply by campaigning as individuals against the hegemony of the Big Three. Please note these points; they will keep your campaigns legal.

The regulated period for the next election starts in May 2014. As an individual voter, you can spend up to £10,000 in that year to May 2015 without having to register with the Electoral Commission.
Whatever you spend, you should record all expenditure. Guidance on what counts can be found on the Electoral Commission's website.
DO NOT try to co-ordinate or form groups or reproduce graphics and slogans from a central source. This will lead the EC to aggregate all your electoral expenditure.
DO deposit copyright clear material at Wikimedia that can be used or incorporated by other individual campaigners
Consider setting up a website separate to your blog for the NO campaign that bears your identity as promoter; any newspaper ads or posters you place will also have to declare your identity

Full guidance can be found on the Electoral Commission website HERE, but don't get bogged down in detail. Start saving now for 2014 - we can all afford a grand for a newspaper advert, and once more people get the idea the thing will spiral.

NO VOTES FOR THE TAX THIEVES

Players and gentlemen

2012-01-09T06:41:00.000Z

Apologies for the light blogging recently. The demands of work are curtailing even my usual ability to take advantage of each waking hour. At the moment all we most experienced old hands are back to 12 hour days in turning a very challenging corner. It's not without benefit. The HR people have been told to get back into their suite, close the door and keep very quiet. The marketing people are carrying out an inventory of their fonts with orders not to disturb us with silly requests, and the IT people have been told that unless they fulfill our ad-hoc requirements within 48hrs we can implement our own solutions. In other words, managers are back to managing. It's the very English solution of sending in the gentlemen and bringing on the players when there's a hard job of work to be done. We're back to leadership and skill rather than system and process, flying on manual. And I have to say it's not without some pleasure.

So please bear with me, as normal service will be resumed just as soon as I accommodate all the demands into a re-organised day.

Abbot's bigotry is from another age

2012-01-06T07:34:00.000Z

Dianne Abbot usefully demonstrated yesterday how out of touch she is with modern Britain and how much we've moved on since the days of Gene Hunt and his Quattro and Abbot's stalled development. For most people in the UK today, except for a few deluded and out-of-touch politicians, race isn't an issue. Abbot therefore sounds like some old golf-club bore longing for the return of Empire and proper race distinctions.

I shall file her future pronouncements under 'witless'.

HUF makes Budapest even better value

2012-01-06T07:04:00.001Z

The fall in the HUF from around 350 to around 390 to the £ makes Budapest an even batter value destination for British travellers; EU duty-paid ciggies at HUF 710 a pack now work out at £1.82 and half a litre of beer at HUF 360 £0.92p. Roll on Easyjet's summer schedule rather than the unusable winter departures.

The Zloty too has fallen from around 5.20 to 5.40, which will stretch spending power.

This is my kind of Europe; floating exchange rates and national currencies, but free movement of goods and open borders to trade. Computerised banking has made the old arguments about the transactional costs of dealing in a multiplicity of currencies redundant.

I'll bet Greece dreams of a floating Drachma ...

Magyar unease

2012-01-05T06:34:00.000Z

The late Lord Soper was not so much a 'ranting Methody' as a member of the liberal establishment, a mainstay of QT and Any Questions, a prolific columnist and the public face of Methodism. I'd give a lot to be able to hear his views on the new Hungarian constitution. Surely he couldn't argue against the Fidesz party's explicit references to God in the new constitution, nor against the party's "Family, Home, Work, Health and Order" mantra that saw it elected with over a two-thirds majority? Or perhaps he could.

Fidesz doesn't particularly like Islam. Nor is it keen on the US cults now making inroads into Eastern Europe - the Jehovah's Witnesses and the Scientologists. So part of the new constitution is a restriction that limits the benefits enjoyed by churches to those which have been active in Hungary for at least ten years and have at least 1,000 members. Others are not illegal, you understand, just unable to enjoy the same tax breaks and benefits as the Catholics and the Jews. Amongst the religions unable to meet the bar are the Methodists. I'm sure Donald Soper could have made a case that this was de facto illegality, but it just scrapes inside the provisions of the European Convention with regard to Freedom of Religion. And this is typical of much of the new Magyar constitution; you have the feeling they wanted to go further. Requiring all media to register with the government, including those with an exclusively online presence, is just a fag paper away from requiring bloggers to obtain State licences and a potential breach of Freedom of Expression provisions.

As in previous posts on this, I'm not condemning Fidesz. I'm just uneasy.

RIP Searle

2012-01-04T07:56:00.000Z

Searle was by all accounts an eccentric chap. This was not an unusual characteristic amongst those who had survived the Japanese death camps. As a cartoonist, he had a truly unique ability and insight, for which we must be thankful. And perhaps the most amusing aspect of Searle's series of cat cartoons is that by all accounts he wasn't at all fond of cats.

Young cat already regretting puberty

Euro federasts have no love for Europe

2012-01-04T06:48:00.000Z

Sometimes it's the little things, tinged with geekiness, that reinforce my love of Europe. Brickwork, for example. Once the art of brickmaking had been developed in stoneless Flanders it spread outwards across the continent, finding an early home in East Anglia with strong Flemish design influence, but also reaching Eastern Europe, where the stepped gable transmuted into baroque machicolations. The rail gauge, 4' 8½", almost universal in Europe except, unexpectedly, for Ireland and Spain, and exactly equivalent to the wheelbase of horse-drawn carts and wagons used since Roman times. I love our quirks, our differences, and Europe's defining national characteristic, its cheeses. I'm very proud to call myself a European.

My Europe isn't the Europe of the federasts. For them, Europe means homogeneity, a dull equalised sameness, a bland and mediocre non-identity. Bruce Anderson writes in the Telegraph this morning on how these ideologues, exactly like the Marxists before them, love their ideology more than they love Europe; they are, indeed, prepared to see Europeans suffer in poverty, see lives and families ruined, and see a generation of lives spoiled in order to preserve the ideology. They love federism more than they love Europe.

It's because I love Europe that I want to see the baleful powers of the EU destroyed.

Party donations cap farce

2012-01-03T06:24:00.000Z

With apologies to those of you who have read this here many times before, the parlous state of the main parties is wholly of their own making. They've gone from mass-membership political parties with powerful and effective local structures to centralised Metropolitan clubs from which the grass roots are excluded, in the process losing many millions of members and their fees. Their common agenda in the centralisation of State power and the emasculation of local decision making saw even the Tories lose over a million members between 1979 and 1997 when they were actually in government. They are no longer recognisable mass-membership parties but national political consumer brands. The combined membership of the big three doesn't even reach 1% of the UK electorate. Their long-term aims, supported by a Mandarinate willing to sacrifice democracy for the sake of what they see as 'stability', is to become the three permanent Parties of State, funded wholly by the taxpayer, and with the ability to exclude all newcomers from Parliament. This monstrous silent coup is taking place under our noses.

Today the Mail reports that Clegg is to seek to implement a donations cap but without increasing State funding. What bollocks. Clegg is facing the next election with a share of the poll that may not even reach double figures, with a probable membership of no more than 50,000 and no money in the bank. Of all three parties, he needs tax funding the most desperately and it's utterly disingenuous to pretend he isn't after greater tax funding whether up-front or through the back door. He's hardly likely to give away the LibDems' advantages of incumbency in the face of a determined challenge for third place from UKIP.

There's really only one answer in reforming UK politics, which means loosening the stranglehold the big three have on our democracy, and that's not to vote for any of them - a 'No votes for the Tax Thieves' election campaign from the grass roots. However, under PPERA this may not be quite as simple as it seems - there are regulations about non-party campaigners which we need to look into. Watch this space.

For what we are about to receive ......

2011-12-31T10:00:00.004Z

There has been a sense that this break has been the last leave before the big offensive. A feeling that rather than being the raucus, uninhibited celebration of the end of the old year and the starting of the new, it has been a time of rest and recuperation, of checking equipment and buckles, making good defects and preparing to go over the top. There are very few to whom I've spoken over the holiday who don't believe that 2012 will be a year like few others. Just as August 1914 marked the end of the nineteenth century, 2012 could mark the end of the twentieth.

The advice I'm giving myself is to be prepared for anything, to learn from the Jews who left Germany in 1938. Lives and the bonds of family are infinitely more important than wealth and property. Change can come suddenly, violently and unpredictably and we will need one another, will need to rediscover the benefits of mutual assistance, once the realisation comes that governments will be as powerless and insecure as a fishing shack before a Tsunami.

There's also been a shakeout going on around the world in which the division is marked not by politics or ideology but but by morality. Those who would follow the Archangel Michael and take a spear to the Devil, who would oppose sleaze, peculation, jobbery, corruption, fraud, deception, nepotism, inequity, selfishness and the compassionless exploitation and use of others please line up this side. We're going to be fighting hard against a determined enemy in 2012.

As for currencies and economies, the Euro will collapse in 2012 of course, as will the economies of Greece, Italy, Japan, Ireland, Spain, Belgium, Portugal and probably France. Yes, Japan. And intergenerational conflict will loom large - and not as simple as generations X and Y versus the boomers. We boomers must really learn that life is about quality, not quantity, and that sucking in the resources of the planet to extend our lives by another quarter-year really isn't the most equitable use of resources. Frankly, we need to start dying in larger numbers. Then X and Y can have our stuff whilst they're young enough to enjoy it.

There will be destruction and disorder; our traditions, our honour, our kinships will be thrown down as much as our churches and our council halls. We must rebuild. We must make an alliance between the generations that uses the strength of the young and the wisdom of the old together to build anew our communities and culture.

Over Christmas a memory has returned of something I've forgotten for forty years - the late-night service of Compline we used to celebrate in the school chapel. It's always been my favourite text in the breviary (well, the pre-1974 version, anyway) not least because my Latin at the time was good enough to realise that

Hostémque nostrum cómprime,
Ne polluántur córpora

Didn't quite mean the same as the sanitised version sung by the monks;

Our ghostly enemy restrain,

Lest ought of sin our bodies stain.

But mainly I loved the line "Brethren, be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil goeth about as a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour".

And if I've any advice to impart for 2012, that's it.

The State fails, so the people pay

2011-12-29T07:01:00.000Z

Shifting the responsibility for licensing pubs and clubs from magistrates to the State has been the most colossal failure. Magistrates had a fair degree of discretion as befits those to whom we devolve such powers and although a licensing refusal could be appealed it rarely was; once the bench had decided that a landlord or landlady was no longer a fit person to hold a licence, then time was up. The State's petty functionaries could be allowed no such discretion, and licensing decisions based on a tick-list designed to ensure that Moldovan lesbians were treated equally have given us instead High Streets clogged with half-clothed drunks as they spill from places the old magistrates bench would never have permitted.

But rather than admit defeat and retreat the limit of the central State, the government in a move so incomprehensible it must be genius has decided that this 'binge drinking' nuisance will be best solved by imposing a minimum alcohol price on supermarket wine. "Yes, I admit that it hasn't worked and that we've got it wrong. But by leaving it as it is and charging you an additional £700m in tax instead will at least ensure our chums in Diageo continue to do well even if it cripples the micro-brewery in your village"

It stinks like rotten Mackerel.

Shoplifter's Charter

2011-12-27T09:46:00.000Z

The post-Christmas sales on Oxford Street are traditionally the time when the 'bridge and ferry' gangs of South London catch up on their shoplifting. They have several factors in their advantage;

1. Going 'possed up' means the one or two security guards on duty are much less likely to detain you, and that the detainee can be freed by force if required
2. The huge crowds provide good cover, especially if six or eight of you hit a store at the same time
3. Security guards aren't heroes. They know you carry knives, and they know their hi-vis vests aren't made of Kevlar.
4. Most police are still on leave, and those on duty won't even respond to a shoplifting incident
5. Even the kind of legitimate shoppers who use the same shops you target are unlikely to be from that cohort of society who will intervene to stop you.

I've no idea how much stock Oxford Street loses to shoplifters at this time of year (Bill Quango might know) but clearly it's still profitable. And Oh yes, there's a point number six;

6. Don't target the same shop at the same time as a rival shoplifting gang ...

The town of two Christmasses

2011-12-24T13:09:00.000Z

As 'banned' commented on a map of the Austro-Hungarian Empire I used to illustrate a post a couple of weeks ago "They've missed out Trans Carpathian Ruthenia. They always do that".

It's hardly surprising. This tiny Statelet has a population that speaks four different languages, descended from fourteen distinct ethnic groups including Bogomil, Lemko, Slovak, Hutsul, Romani and Rusyn. It's spent so much of its history being owned by someone else that the canny Carpathian-Ruthenians have given up completely on the idea of independence, only seeking a certain degree of internal autonomy from whichever State at the time happens to be ruling them. At times they've even tried to hedge their bets, as in the 1920s, when they fought equally for both the Communist and anti-Communist armies around them.

The capital is Ushorad, or Uzhhorod, Uzhgorod, Unhvar, Ongvar or Ingver. They've never really decided. They don't get much mail, being connected only by rail to the nearest noteworthy place, Chop. The city has an airport of international size, but with only one terminal and flights to just two destinations, Kiev and Budapest. But more importantly, they have two cathedrals, orthodox and Catholic, and a religious identity utterly ambivalent between the two. Thus the people of this town of Trans Carpathian Ruthenia will all celebrate Christmas twice this year, once on 25th December and once on 7th January. And such is the delicate diplomacy of maintaining such a fissured cultural identity, they all seem happy to celebrate both, whatever their personal faith.

The snow is lying in Uzhhorad now, deep and crisp and even. Aunt Olga and Aunt Natasha are making their way across for first Christmas with gifts of knitted foot-cloths, whilst Aunt Irina and Aunt Julietta are still knitting their nose-scarves for second Christmas. All is quiet at Uzhhorad International Airport, the last flight having left last week, but gliding down the approach path can be heard the sound of faint bells and the glow of a ruby-nose light .....

Have a fastastic Christmas all.

History is too important to be left to the Political Class

2011-12-23T08:52:00.002Z

In a naked attempt to appeal to Metropolitan France's million voters of Armenian descent, Sarkozy is introducing a law making it illegal to deny the Armenian 'genocide'. As a result, Turkey is enraged and history is distorted. One man's genocide is another man's pogrom or massacre or internecion. It's as if Ed Balls proposed making it a crime in the UK to deny that the potato famine was a deliberate attempt at destroying the Irish. And if that, then why not the Indian famine of 1897 - 1900, when millions died as we did nothing? Of course man alone is rarely solely responsible for the scale of the greatest depridations. El Nino caused the conditions for the Indian famine, an oomycete blighted Ireland's potatoes, and Typhus, Cholera and Diptheria always claimed more victims of displacement than murder and rapine. But scholarship, balance and academic honesty have little place in the minds of politicians, crude creatures of deception and trickery that they are.

Of course our own cadre of school leavers and graduates will be unable to take part in this debate, history teaching in England for the last decade or so having been restricted to the Romans, Slavery and the Third Reich. If It's not Hitler, Hannibal or the Hottentots they won't have heard of it. But as the current spat between France and Turkey shows, it's desperately important to understand your history. Our children should be given the opportunity to understand ours.

Consumption or investment?

2011-12-21T06:50:00.001Z

The Speccie offers a provoking thought on why 'starving the beast' (lower tax rates) has not led to smaller government in the US; the government simply resorts to borrowing against the future. Now, it suggests, "Requiring the American people to actually pay for all of the government they receive is, as Niskanen and others have convincingly argued, the most effective way to limit its growth".

This may be fair enough as far as government services that are consumed as soon as they are produced are concerned - policing, teaching and so on - but what about government investment? Should the costs of a new school with a 60 year life be charged wholly to taxpayers during the two years it takes to build? Should the government undertake investment at all, or leave this to the market and rent the school, so that all spending is consumption? And what of R&D at Aldermaston and GCHQ that will benefit this nation ten years hence? 'Serve the check' may seem a simple and attractive mantra for we anti-Statists, but I fear it's hardly as simple as that.

Monbiot rant

2011-12-20T06:53:00.001Z

A vintage piece of Monbiot polemic in the Guardian today damns libertarianism;

Modern libertarianism is the disguise adopted by those who wish to exploit without restraint. It pretends that only the state intrudes on our liberties. It ignores the role of banks, corporations and the rich in making us less free. It denies the need for the state to curb them in order to protect the freedoms of weaker people. This bastardised, one-eyed philosophy is a con trick, whose promoters attempt to wrongfoot justice by pitching it against liberty. By this means they have turned "freedom" into an instrument of oppression.

To a point, Lord Copper. Monbiot names the TPA, the Adam Smith Institute, the IEA and Policy Exchange as leading a libertarian movement that robs the freedoms of the masses, accuses libertarians of being in bed with the big corporates, and imagines that a Big State will curb them. What trite nonsense. We've had a Big State since 1979, and since then the corporates have enjoyed an unprecedented period of growth in complete synergy with government; nothing could be more antipathetic to libertarianism than the oligopolistic corporates that smother free market capitalism, yet government over-regulation skews the advantage in favour of the corporates who can devote entire departments to complying with regulation and against SMEs and mom-and-pop businesses for whom it's an often unsustainable burden. Central Statism and Corporatism are bedfellows.

The protection of the freedoms of the weak has never been on the agenda of a Big State that has consistently sought to destroy and disempower the horizontal ties of self-help, mutual support, local institutions, the family and community. It's the State that destroyed the Friendly and Provident Societies and mutual insurance by the weak, and a State fearful of the independence of the working class as an alliance of the weak that has systematically destroyed every authentic grass-roots working class movement in the country. Freedom comes through Burke's 'little platoons' , not an authoritarian Rousseau-esque central State that seeks to abolish all ties of blood and belonging in favour of a direct relationship between the State and every powerless individual.

George, the Leviathan State is not good, is not benign. And as for Clare's Elm, no farmer ever denuded the land as much as a wartime State rapacious for timber for trench props and shell boxes and armed with the power to requisition and destroy without recourse.

The Death of the Euro part 17

2011-12-19T06:35:00.000Z

The death of the Euro could have been orchestrated by Puccini. In La Boheme, a tubercular young seamstress named Mimi dies - but her death is necessarily prolonged whilst Musetta, Schaunard and Rodolfo sing some songs. The poor ex-soprano spends a long time unconscious as the orchestra and voices around her enjoy themselves. No doubt if Angela Merkel had written the libretto, Mimi would then have risen from the sickbed four dress sizes smaller and would have embarked on a vigorous round of cleaning and cooking.

Today, Jeff Randall in the Telegraph pulls together all the coherent seasonal predictions of the death of the Euro, terming it inevitable. And so it is. But like Mimi, it's taking an awful bloody time to get there.

Stilton can't market, er, Stilton

2011-12-19T06:16:00.001Z

For early risers, this lovely little scoop was claimed by R4's 'Farming Today' this morning. A cheesemaker in the village of Stilton is actually making the traditional cheese of that name - the creamy blue-veined Goddess of British cheese, best taken in scoops from the round with a white Port, to my mind - but cannot market it because the name is protected under EU legislation. Some half dozen dairies in Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire and Leicestershire nabbed the exclusive right to the name by registering it as a PDO; no cheesemakers in the Cambridgeshire village of Stilton were active at the time.

Contrary to expectations, this isn't going to provoke an anti-EU rant. PDO status is a Godsend to those of us concerned more with substance than name; I can buy a hard grating cheese exactly equivalent to Parmesan for half the price, likewise for fine sparkling wines made from Pinot Noir, Pinot Meunier and Chardonnay and second-fermented in bottle but not called Champagne, and air cured ham not called Parma. Now I shall doubtless be able to fill the larder with a fine blue-veined cheese not called Stilton.

Luvvies in a lather over livers

2011-12-18T08:10:00.002Z

At a time of crisis, one can always rely on the nation's luvvies to rally around the cause. In response to unimaginable levels of hostility from the perfidious French following Cameron's snub, a green-room alliance including Joanna Lumley, Ricky Gervaise, Bill Oddie and Roger Moore have launched a boycott of foie gras. With an impending downgrade of French AAA status, you may think a fall in goose-liver exports will hardly register in Bercy as an economic threat, but even this minor trade spat could signal the start of the very last thing we need in Europe - a trade war.

I urge you therefore to get your order in now for the new year; I commend Thomas Maieli's home-made foie gras terrine, best available in London through French Click (no connection). Foie gras, I am told, helps repair the damage caused to your own liver through festive good cheer, and thus can be almost classed as a medicine. Though one to be taken in the English, rather than in the French, manner.

City thieves should have their nostrils slit

2011-12-18T07:25:00.000Z

On the face of it, there was nothing wrong with the idea of an Endowment Mortgage. Instead of paying off capital directly, you diverted the same monthly sum to buying equities. Over the long term - say two or three full economic cycles - the rise in the values of equities would comfortably pay off the capital sum. Several things went wrong, most of them attributable to the greed of the fund managers. First up was a hefty commission paid to the Estate Agent who arranged the Endowment, then punitive management fees every year, and finally they managed to mis-invest the money in equities and funds that performed significantly worse than the FTSE 100. As a result, they killed-off the Endowment Mortgage.

Now of course the Observer reveals they've been doing the same to our pension pots. A saver who made contributions of £70,000 between 1994 and 2009 would have seen the entire £46,000 profit in the rise of the FTSE 100 swallowed in fees and charges by the financial sector. The UK financial sector currently makes 3.2% a year out of our investments, most of it fat salaries and bonuses enjoyed by traders and fund managers.

Frankly, this makes me want to see their nostrils slit with a rusty gutting knife, with ear-cropping for a second offence.

MPs lobby for a return to peculation, sleaze and corruption

2011-12-16T06:20:00.000Z

After trying an utterly novel expenses system based on honesty, integrity and transparency for little over a year, MPs are fed up and eager to return to the old ways of peculation, sleaze and corruption. Many younger MPs in particular are complaining that they only entered the House to get rich at the public expense, and the new systems simply don't offer them the opportunity to do so. Labour MP Barry Sheerman in particuar has stirred them up; pointing at the older and longer serving members of the House who grew wealthy and bloated from the public purse, Sheerman asks "Where are your weekend cottages in the New Forest? Where are your 52" plasma televisions? Why, your families even have to buy their own food from your meagre sixty-five kay salary whilst they should all be dining at public expense."

In particular, MPs want to return to a system of almost unlimited expenses with no public accountability whatsoever. "It's outrageous that we should have to account to the hoi polloi for every new canteen of cutlery or new carpet; expenses are private and should go back to being secret" said one. "We are not like ordinary people" said another "and we deserve not only different standards but all the privileges that reflect how special we are".

The next election is in 2015.

A sucker for Tallis

2011-12-15T20:37:00.001Z

For some weird reason, London is warm and pleasant tonight. After our regularly stressful but organisationally healthy meeting in EC1 I declined the pub and elected for a relaxing walk through the City. A lit church porch and open door prompted the thought for a few minutes of quiet contemplation but my mistake was evident as I sidled quietly into a rear pew. They were rehearsing Tallis.

Tallis has about the same effect on me as Kryptonite to Superman. Ninety seconds of Spem in Alium reduces me to a wet mass of snot and tears, utterly humbled and filled with love for Christ and Man. There's no defence. My response to Tallis is hard-wired. So I thought Uh-oh, and as that first impossibly sweet note hit the baroque piers and spiraled up to the vault my inner heart opened like a blossom to the Sun and I scrabbled in the Barbour for anything that could be used as a tissue.

Now it feels like Christmas.

Risorgimento

2011-12-15T07:06:00.000Z

Political union between a wealthy and developed industrial North and a backward and blighted South is nothing new for Europe; the Risorgimento that united the states of the Italian peninsula into the State of Italy in the nineteenth century is an example that lives today. The conventional story has heroes - Cavour, Garibaldi, Victor-Emmanuel - and its villains - the Papacy, the Austrians, Francis II of Sicily - and a valiant struggle after which Italy emerged against the odds as a proud and confidant State.

Not quite so, it seems. A carrelry of British scholars has for some years been challenging the conventional wisdom. The Mezzogiorno might actually be substantially worse off under an Italian State than it would have been ; the South was always a centre of rebellion against the State, and the fact that 100,000 men, half the Italian army, were needed to put down insurrections in the South in 1864 gives lie to a popular revolution that created the State, that after 1861 fiscal policies and customs duties were designed specifically to subjugate the economy of the south. Sicilian scholars are also contemptuous of the way in which Italian history has been purged, censored and bowdlerised in favour of the 'patriotic uprising' story.

Any in the Mezzogiorno who were foolish enough to believe that the Lire and fiscal union with the powerful and wealthy north would make them better off were rapidly disillusioned. The lessons of history are before us. Simon Jenkins writes in today's Guardian:

Already governments in Ireland, Portugal, Greece and Italy that sought outside help and austerity in return have been toppled by their electorates. Under the new "treaty" such disciplines will be doubled and trebled, and blamed on one country, Germany. It must be likely that electorates will refuse to submit. Bond markets will seize up, public spending collapse, unemployment and emigration soar and streets descend into chaos. It has already happened in Greece. Pro-treaty Europeans may regard such alarmism as "swivel-eyed". But such passions in European history should never be taken lightly.

Last week's summit saw a panic rush to political union, offering nothing beyond "more discipline" to alleviate the euro's existing straitjacket. This discipline seems certain to mean political crisis in many European capitals, where economic salvation can lie only in managed default and devaluation. Ever closer union has not brought stability to western Europe, any more than it brought stability to eastern Europe under the Soviets. It is quack constitutionalism.

He forbears to state the obvious - that both the Risorgimento and the Soviet Union achieved stability only with force of arms - are France and Germany prepared to do likewise?

Perfect knowledge

2011-12-14T07:27:00.000Z

There's a whole internet-savvy generation that uses the High Street as an opportunity to examine and test goods before returning home to find the best deal in the internet. The poor retailer maintaining expensive frontage and high staffing is increasingly doing so for the benefit of the manufacturers of the goods he stocks. This doesn't apply to time-limited or quality-critical goods such as cheese, fresh meat or flowers as much as for white goods and electronics, but nevertheless the 'imperfect knowledge' that previously gave the High Street a living is fast disappearing. If local retailers can't compete on price, what else can give them competitive advantage?

For the vendors of cheese, fresh meat and flowers the killer is not price but parking. Rapacious councils desperate to rake in every penny are killing their own High Streets with sky high parking charges and the rationing of parking opportunities. Again, what can such retailers do?

This is a hard one for economic libertarians who would generally rather the State didn't intervene to distort markets, but in the case of High Street parking charges one could argue they already were. Also in the case of a planning system that favours the giant corporations (whatever their complaints).

I'm not sure that Mary Portas has the right answers, but it's the start of a useful debate.

A Very Stupid Plod

2011-12-13T06:24:00.000Z

H/T the Magistrate

Inspector Fish is a Very Stupid Plod. He now joins Sergeant Smellie and PC Wilie (who arrested a student 'for making a snow phalus' [sic] ) in the Raedwald Hall of Shame.

Slavonia, Slovenia, Slovakia

2011-12-12T07:11:00.000Z

Just north of Krakow, as the single-track rail line turns East for the airport, I thought I caught a glimpse of a Vauban fort. Some later searching on Google earth revealed it in all it's pentagonal glory - lunette, caponiers, ravelin, glacis, bastion and sally ports - but Fort Kleparz was not by Vauban, or even 17th century, but built by the Hapsburgs in the 19th. Most of it is derelict and collapsing, but the enterprising Poles have turned the old barracks and magazines into a nightclub.

Central Europe is covered in such things, of course, and many more have fallen into ruin or been robbed of their 4m-thick brick structures to construct surrounding dwellings, only those with some continuing use such as a military stores surviving today. The reason for the position and orientation of the fort is clear from the map of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire below (clicky to make big); it was on the front line with Russia.

All those ethnic groups that made governing the Empire such a headache for the Hapsburgs haven't gone, of course. Mostly they are now separate nations. Mostly they are either in the EU or want to be. The Hapsburg Empire was no fly-by-night affair; it lasted, more or less, from 1804 to 1917. Economically, the peoples within it did well, with GNP growth exceeding both Britain's and Germany's during the 19th century, free trade within the Empire, the economies of a common security and defence system and a prototype Equal Opportunities policy ahead of its time in reserving civil service posts for quotas of ethnic minorities.

Norman Stone quotes Albert Sorel in saying that Austria-Hungary had not a government but a diplomatic service that also administered. Within that pithy observation lies the clue as to the Empire's fundamental weakness; that so much energy was spent keeping it together. It was the same for the Soviet Empire in its last few years. And ours. And so will it be for a Republic of Europe, if such a thing ever takes flight (imagine more Howard Hughes' 'Spruce Goose' than a Hercules). And so history circles all again, like a snake biting its tail.

5 more reasons to be cheerful

2011-12-11T10:27:00.000Z

5 Reasons to be cheerful

2011-12-10T20:32:00.000Z

If this is the beginning of the end for the UK's membership of the EU, here are 5 reasons to be cheerful and damn the miserable Aunt Sallys on the Guardian who foresee nothing but doom and gloom:-

We get to keep our own seat on the UN Security Council while France has to give hers up to Mr Von Rumpy
Our 200 mile EEZ gives us exclusive rights to the most productive fishing grounds in Europe
English has 375 million native speakers throughout the world and a further 1.4 billion for whom it's a second language; German has only 90m native speakers and another 90 million for whom it's a second language
The UK has had 120 Nobel Laureates; Germany, despite her far larger population, has only has 102 and France a beggarly 58
It's been 945 years since we were invaded compared with 70 for anywhere else in Europe

Any others you can think of?

"26 to1; er, 22 to 1 sorry oh it's 18 now, for certain"

2011-12-10T07:59:00.001Z

As far as exactly what the UK vetoed, or didn't veto, Richard North's latest post offers a clear and succinct analysis. Both he and Ambrose Evans-Pritchard are spot on, though, in their assertion that the complex reality of treaty amendment negotiations has lost out to the way in which events at the Council are being spun. The "26 to 1" meme is being repeated by news organisations throughout Europe with some glee; EU Parliament Chief Jerzy Buzek confirming source-credibility for this by announcing that there was an EU26 agreement to go ahead, but with a few countries needing to consult national Parliaments. "Twenty six versus one. That is a very good result" he said, and that's clearly the line that suits France and Germany, determined to push the UK from restraining their Euro-ambitions.

However, as EU Observer reports, it's not quite that clear cut. There is no certainty that Ireland, Austria, the Netherlands, Romania and Denmark can be part of a new treaty without Referenda, and given the current right-wing and nationalistic mood across Europe, considerable doubt that their respective Federasts will win the vote. There are additional hurdles to Finland, Latvia and the Czech Republic signing up. Hungary says it was misunderstood. Suddenly those 26 are melting away to 18. Over the next weeks and months we will see the spectacle of the domestic Federasts in each trying to steamroll through domestic opposition, and all this whilst the Euro continues to fail.

For my money, the odds are still on a collapse of the Euro before a new treaty is signed.

Still, the "26 to 1" meme has touched a national nerve and one can forgive a certain joie amongst those of us who delight in the Guardian's deep mourning. The Englishman's Castle sums the mood up with the 1940 Low cartoon "Very Well, Alone" and others of a military bent tot up the potential Order of Battle (what chance now a shared carrier?). But consider the real potential of the way this might shake-out; the UK, Ireland, the Netherlands, Austria and Finland together as a low-regulation, high productivity, outer-Europe, with the UK (as Coney Island mentioned in previous comments) as a sort of Hong Kong, linking Europe to Asia and the Americas as an even stronger and more powerful financial centre.

It's worth playing for, isn't it?

Celebrate the Commonwealth

2011-12-09T07:13:00.001Z

Well, I guess as we haul down those those old EU flags we'll need something to replace them with; no need to look too far, though .....

Euro still headed for collapse

2011-12-09T06:46:00.000Z

German history has a way of playing itself out like a film loop. When defeat is all but inevitable comes the final counter-attack, the forlorn-hope assault, with everything thrown into the battle. It was so in 1918 and in 1945, and is so today with the proposed treaty of the 23 that will clear the way for a final ditch throwing of liquidity into the Euro markets. After this, despite this, the Euro will collapse.

The fact is, Britain isn't alone, isn't the maverick outsider that France is painting us as this morning. When the people of the nations of southern Europe and of Ireland realise the extent of loss of sovereignty that their politicians have signed away the fires will flare again.

Still, it's a marker that we're now into the final phase.

Two minds on museum charging

2011-12-07T06:45:00.000Z

We were fortunate in having enlightened and dutiful parents and as a consequence there wasn't a holiday that didn't involve a day in South Kensington, Bloomsbury or Kennington. Once in, we couldn't be shifted until closing time, parking Mum near the cafe and checking back every hour or so. Our national museums were vast treasure houses crammed from floor to fourteen-foot ceiling with objects. Not here the solitary Ushabti that languished on the shelf of the Ipswich Museum, but a high Mahogany case crammed with a thousand, classified into Old Kingdom, New Kingdom, Theban Recession, Romano-Graecian and thence by stylistic form and convention. In just one case one learned taxonomy, art history, religious schism and the life-long basis of being able to discriminate. The great museums were all free, of course; intended as philanthropic gifts for the education and enlightenment of the English, a few foreigners being permitted to enter and gasp in wonder at the wealth of our culture.

From the foregoing you may imagine I'm wholly in favour of maintaining free admission to our museums. Not quite. You see, curatorially our museums lost their way sometime in the 1980s / 1990s. All these objects, the thinking went, discriminated against the stupid, those who couldn't be bothered to follow up a visit by buying a book or catalogue, or as I did, spending hours in the reference library self-teaching. What the stupid needed, they decided, was interpretation - aimed at a backward twelve year-old. The Mahogany cases packed with Ushabti disappeared to be replaced by a display panel and a single exemplar figure. From now on, the museum would decide what you learned and what objects meant - we were no longer to be allowed the opportunity to do so ourselves.

And so our great cultural treasure houses hid 95% of their collections away in store and replaced them with graphics panels, video screens and unconvincing mannequins. Worse was to come. Under New Labour, they adopted an attitude of abject apology for cultural hegemony; the museums became a giant apology for slavery, colonialism, European expansionism and for ever thinking that our cultural achievements were superior to those of a naked tribe of goat-keepers scratching in the dirt with sticks. The most sickening and kitsch exemplar of the New Museum came from the National Maritime Museum, with an utterly meretricious little tableau depicting two eighteenth century ladies taking tea at a Pembroke table perched incongruously over a ship's deck grating from which protruded a pleading black hand. Really. It was indescribably awful.

From that point my commitment to free museums disappeared. They had abandoned academic integrity for politically driven sycophancy; let them then stand or fall without my tax keeping them open. I even found a loophole; if you introduced yourself as a researcher, then the entire treasure-house was open to you on a bespoke basis. Many a blissful afternoon did I spend in the Norman Shaw building at the V&A being brought box after box of prints and drawings I had ordered up from the store, each day being a personally curated exhibition in which I got not only to choose the exhibits but could spend as long as I liked seated at a comfortable desk gazing on each as I held it my hands for as long as I wished, and without a single interpretive label in sight. And it was free. Sometime soon I shall ask the British Museum to produce a few score Ushabti for my personal delectation, and I shall spend a pleasant afternoon arranging them on the desk according the long-remembered taxonomy of my youth. Without a single interpretive label in sight.

The sound of Europe disintegrating

2011-12-06T20:42:00.000Z

Please try to find forty minutes to listen to "Greece - Broken marble, Broken Future" - not sure if it's available on iPlayer after tonight or if you need to wait until Sunday, but this is the sound of Europe disintegrating.

A postcard from home

2011-12-06T08:06:00.000Z

I'm in a Christmas mood this year unlike the past few and reminded that amongst the log-fired wonky pubs and bleak brown lanes that make up my home County live some of the weirdest creatives known to man. Any County that can host both Neil Innes and Brian Eno is really something special. As a seasonal treat, here's Innes' 'Accountantsea Shanty' ;

Cameron's bluff called on Europe

2011-12-06T06:59:00.000Z

Such brave words we've had from the Prime Minister on Europe; not one step further, a real repatriation of powers, a treaty re-negotiation, even the threat of a referendum if the UK doesn't get what its people want. And what audacious mendacity. Not a word of it the truth. It's now clear that Cameron will go along with whatever Sarkozy and Merkel have decided without anything in return for the UK, and will wriggle and dissemble and squirm his way out of any threat of a referendum.

In this not entirely unexpected betrayal of British interests, Cameron has proven himself responsive not only to pressure from the Franco-German alliance but from the US, which has been leaning heavily on the British government to do nothing that would rock a potential Euro settlement. The UK, it seems, is to pay the price for American financial stability.

Cameron is a politician very much in the mould of Chamberlain, ever ready to see the grievances of others as justification for appeasement. The Germans were angry about the Versailles settlement, so they must be allowed to recover the Sudentenland, the Rhine, Alsace, Danzig to calm them down; Hitler would become a benign Euro statesman, visiting the King at Windsor, taking tea at Balmoral, and fairies would play at the bottom of the garden.

Of course it's high time we ditched the Chamberlains and Halifaxes from our government. But this time, there's no Churchill waiting in the wings.

Bastardy and Crime

2011-12-05T06:04:00.000Z

The August riots were a God-sent opportunity for the nation's army of Sociologists and Statisticians, who have been seriously under-employed since the government halved the number of fatuous studies commissioned. First on the scene was the Ministry of Justice, with a statistical analysis that showed that 76% of those charged following the riots had a previous conviction, and they were likely to be in receipt of Free School meals or benefits, were more likely to have had special educational needs and be absent from school.

Next up was the Riots, Communities and Victims Panel, a brand new Quango set up by Nick Clegg to report on the riots. In a weasel conclusion, they announced that "Lack of confidence in the police response to the initial riots encouraged people to test reactions in other areas." or in other words when it was clear that the rioters were getting away with it, others were encouraged to join in.

And now the Guardian's joint study with the LSE has been published, and reveals that most rioting was opportunistic, a chance to steal and get away with it, that activity was orchestrated via Blackberry Messenger, and that many of the rioters disliked the police. With 76% of them at the time being convicted criminals, you may think their last prejudice a not unreasonable one.

There is one question that no-one has asked of the rioters so far to my knowledge; "did you grow up with your biological father?" You see, I think I know the answer to this already - that an overwhelming majority of them will be growing up or have grown up with an absent father - but it would be nice to see the figures.

BBC pensions - It's what we do

2011-12-04T07:04:00.001Z

For anyone who joined the BBC before 1996, the Television Tax provides a generous pension:

Example Retires at 55 after 30 years service on final salary of £60,000
30/60ths x £60,000 = £30,000 at age 60
4% reduction for early retirement at 55
You get £28,800 a year

After decades of overmanning, gold-plating, empire-building and staggering inefficiency, the vast bloated Soviet bureaucracy that is our national broadcaster has accumulated a terrifying pension liability on the most generous of terms - with some 17,000 staff in the pipeline entitled to this 'old' pension. The pension fund is forecast to be £2bn - £3bn short. With a freeze on the TV Tax and a falling payroll, the ability of current staff to pay for previous staff diminishes alarmingly. In fairness, they can't apply cuts retrospectively. Thus it's looking more and more likely that these obligations can only be met by diverting broadcasting budgets.

It may be that the only longer term option is to form a vehicle to inherit all the pension liabilities of the BBC, and sell-off most of the rest of the broadcaster to the commercial sector, retaining only World Service radio and News 24 / Parliament TV, to boost the pension fund.

Europe trades freedom for comfort

2011-12-03T08:48:00.000Z

Domestic peace and union were the natural consequences of the moderate and comprehensive policy embraced by the Romans. If we turn our eyes towards the monarchies of Asia, we shall behold despotism in the centre, and weakness in the extremities; the collection of the revenue, or the administration of justice, enforced by the presence of an army; hostile barbarians established in the heart of the country, hereditary satraps usurping the dominion of the provinces, and subjects inclined to rebellion, though incapable of freedom. But the obedience of the Roman world was uniform, voluntary, and permanent. The vanquished nations, blended into one great people, resigned the hope, nay, even the wish, of resuming their independence, and scarcely considered their own existence as distinct from the existence of Rome. (Gibbon, Chapter II)

These first Europeans as a result became soft; avoiding military service, they relied on foreign mercenaries to defend the Empire. Immured in the comfort of trade and modest prosperity they were content to put aside local allegiances and bonds of culture and nation, prepared to unlearn the ancient legends that defined them as separate and distinct peoples, and in the process lost the clarion that would rally them together in their defence. They burned their colours as symbols of superstition. Their identity was further diluted by mass immigration, as every aspirational would-be came to claim a share of the wealth and comfort;

A perpetual stream of strangers and provincials flowed into the capacious bosom of Rome. Whatever was strange or odious, whoever was guilty or suspected, might hope, in the obscurity of that immense capital, to elude the vigilance of the law (Gibbon, Chapter XV)

As a result, Rome fell not after brutal conquest, not after some epochian battle, but with a gentle shove at the border barrier by the barbarians. It was an uncontested walkover. And Europe plunged into its first dark age.

Next week, much of Europe is set to surrender its sovereignty and democratic freedom in exchange for the mess of pottage that is technocratic rule from Brussels. The prospect of financial hardship has frightened them in a way the unimagined prospect of democratic non-being has not. Comfort has triumphed free will. As slaves they will be fed, housed and cared for, more or less, whereas as free men they would have to fight, struggle and face failure and destitution. There are also many on our Island who would embrace the comfort of slavery over the hardship and uncertainty of freedom. For the sake of our descendants, and in obligation to those our ancestors who have shed a thousand years of blood in defence of our realm, they must not prevail.

EURO going, going ....

2011-12-02T07:54:00.000Z

Another day, and the Euro will become even more endangered. "In 30 years, I've never heard such talk from a bank chief" quotes the Mail, as the Bank advises us all to take cover as the imminent end of the Euro approaches. Meanwhile, in the Brussels bunker, Von Rumple calls on non-existent divisions and corps to move to his aid, but all he's got defending the Eurocapital are a few insane boys and some decimated BB rated banks. The Reich gold is in the alpine redoubt, as Generalfeldmarshall Merkel prepares for the Fifth Reich, jealously guarding the wealth that will back the new NordReich Eurozone from the ruins of the Berlaymont..

It's time to let the Eurobanks fall as they will. Apart from the banks, firms are strong and cash-rich and asset-rich; these will not diminish as the banks crash, and will enjoy a bounce and a recovery in share values once the drag of the bankrupt Euro financial sector is removed from the markets.

We're not going to move on out of recession without this major catharsis. It will be a huge hammer blow, but suddenly the chains and shackles will have been shattered and fall away, and the economy will rise. C'mon. let's get it done.

RIP King Leka I

2011-12-01T06:43:00.000Z

RIP Leka Zog, Son of King Zog the First, who didn't rule as Leka I. His son, born in 1982, also won't rule under the title Leka II. The House of Zogu goes on.

Ford, British Leyland and Fleet St Print Chapels

2011-12-01T06:24:00.000Z

The 1975 Employment Protection Act obliged employers to allow paid employees time-off to carry out Trade Union duties. This actually just recognised and enshrined in law the position then obtaining at the vast Midlands auto plants, and in Fleet Street, where the papers paid 'protection' money to the print chapels that included many TU officials drawing full wage packets without doing a stroke of work.

Folk forget it was the much-despised Murdoch who broke the back of these practices when he moved NI to Wapping. The car plants just became insolvent and disappeared. The law is an anachronistic little bit of Socialist legislation way beyond its sell-by date and needs to be quietly scrapped.

Cameron's announcement yesterday that it was to go in the public sector (and presumably the private sector, too) was just common sense.

Government fails to protect Britons

2011-11-30T06:00:00.000Z

The British people have a pretty highly developed idea of what's fair and what isn't. And it's nowhere near the idea of State-enforced inequality that Brown called 'fairness' and miles away from anything that Blair imagined, if his vacuous thought-process gave any attention to the thing at all. For it was Blair of course and his risible and narcissistic efforts to ingratiate himself with the US administration who signed the UK up to a grossly unequal extradition treaty with the US, intended to tackle terrorism but used in practice to extradite Britons running online betting sites or scamming UK banks. It was also Blair, of course, who signed us up to the European Arrest Warrant, which condemned Britons to automatic extradition on the writ of any semi-literate stubble-chinned Balkan police kapo.

If you've accidentally driven away from an Italian filling station not knowing that Benzene theft carries a 12 month prison sentence in Perugia, no defence. If you've photographed a Greek military helicopter, an offence carrying a five year sentence in the home of democracy, no defence. If you've inadvertently received a stolen mobile phone from Poland, no defence. If you've given the gamblers of Arkansas and Kentucky the option of placing dollar bets on the geegees on your UK website, no defence. That ignorance of the law is no defence may be fair enough when it's only the UK's own laws involved; to avoid offending now, Britons have to be aware of the laws of twenty-eight other nations - and they don't even have to leave the UK to break them. And don't imagine that our tradition of free speech is any defence; several Euro nations have laws making it a criminal offence to be rude about their President or politicians, so something I write on this blog today about the Mayor of Transylvania may see me extradited within 90 days.

Cameron's government are in no hurry to remedy any of this, of course. What is antithetical to traditional Conservatism - constraints by foreign powers on the freedom of the British citizen - means nothing to the young Dave and his party HQ cabal. However, the case of Gary McKinnon has galvanised backbenchers into forcing a debate at least. The US-UK agreement may even be subject to change. But the EAW? Don't hold your breath. Implementation is a treaty obligation - and as long as we're ruled from Brussels, Britons are wholly subject to the whims and caprices of the many deeply corrupt and primitive legal systems of those lesser nations beyond the Pale.

Planning for the collapse of the Euro

2011-11-28T06:41:00.000Z

The weekend papers carried such a number of articles on a single subject - how the UK is contingency-planning for the collapse of the Euro - that one suspects this was no journalistic coincidence but the result of a quiet piece of Treasury spin. If so, one wonders who it was aimed at - those European Finance Ministries who refuse to recognise the possibility of Euro-collapse, the financial markets, UK business and industry or you and I. But clearly the break up of the Euro is no longer 'unthinkable' in government circles, though it's taken a year of bloggers and commentators united views on the inevitable collapse of the currency to get there. And whichever way you look at it, it will cost the UK something.

It's the tendency of governments and more importantly of the mandarinate to pursue an economic creed long after its sell-by date that's interesting. Kinnock - in the sole achievement of a lifetime in politics - convinced his party to drop Clause Four on the basis that economic power was no longer about ownership, but about regulation. Only to see the most spectacular failures of regulation in the newly privatised / de-monopolised transport, energy, telecoms, financial and technology sectors. Gordon Brown even took the idea to the point that the nation no longer needed to own Gold, on the basis that it could regulate instead. Don't get me wrong - I never want to see the return of a State telephone service that rations copper lines, and the GDP boost we've enjoyed from the privatisation / liberalisation process has been important - but the wave of popular benefits doesn't include better pension provision or a lower national debt.

Now of course there's not much left to privatise except one huge gleaming asset - the road network. London's already demonstrated that road pricing can be lucrative; a capital investment of £160m produces a net annual profit of £90m (excluding the massive capital premium a private firm would pay for say a 25 year right to charge). Private Toll roads have a long history in the UK, being nationalised only in 1888. Perhaps it's time to flog off the Motorways?

The evil of Pankaj Mishra

2011-11-27T08:54:00.001Z

You will not have heard of Pankaj Mishra; he is a non-entity, without academic or serious literary credentials, undeserving of fame through his single claim to notoriety - having had an essay published in the Guardian. Niall Ferguson comments that 'it seems to be becoming de rigueur for mediocrities to build their fame on attacking those more successful than them', and this is the root of the matter. Ferguson, who holds a chair at the LSE and a professorship at Harvard, has suggested in his several books, lectures and TV programmes that colonialism was not an unalloyed disaster for the colonised nations. Mishra, unable to refute the point academically, and without the literary ability to do so otherwise in print, has resorted to the last refuge of talentless scoundrels and rogues by accusing Ferguson of racism.

By doing so, Mishra places himself intellectually firmly back in sixteenth century Europe amongst a people for whom neither the first or second enlightenments was even on the horizon, and where any departure from orthodoxy, every advance in science, cosmology, engineering or scholarship, could be denounced as 'heresy' and earn the heretic a place at the stake. Mishra is like a Dominican Inquisator, unable to refute or argue the passage of the Earth around the Sun or the impossibility of a literal Genesis, whose sole response is limited to an accusation that Ferguson refuses to accept the given word, that his arguments are unorthodox. But 'racist' is every bit as damning today as 'heretic' was in the sixteenth century, and Ferguson is absolutely correct in not allowing the matter to lie.

Mishra would drag us back to an intellectual dark age in which men of talent and vision would cower afraid of the Inquisitor's knock at the door, an age in which human advance in knowledge and scholarship is suffocated, writers afraid to write, historians fearful of drawing any conclusions contrary to Mishra's blinkered and bigoted orthodoxy. Just as the actions for 'heresy' are now rightly seen as sins against Man, and thus intrinsically evil, so must we now classify the denunciations by these new Inquisators of those they would label 'racist'.

Party funding insanity

2011-11-26T07:49:00.000Z

Sir Christopher Kelly's Committee has consulted comprehensively, deliberated and cogitated, and after all that has gone back to Hayden Phillips' corrupt and anti-democratic party funding proposals like a dog to its vomit. It is a conclusion that defies sanity. The electorate are to be deprived of any choice in the matter, and the three big parties are to be established as fixed and permanent State political parties to carve Westminster up between them evermore. Sinn Fein will get oodles of State cash, UKIP will get none, despite the party now running neck to neck with the Lib Dems in the opinion polls. Even the Speaker - a 'Party' of one MP, according to Kelly - is set to gain £67k of taxpayer's money.

The only option a voter has to deprive the State parties of cash is to cast a vote for a party that holds no seats in the Commons, like, erm, UKIP. For many voters, a vote against Kelly's corrupt and sleazy proposals will be more important than traditional ballot box loyalty.

Commentators have suggested that Kelly's proposals are already dead, that the proposed £10k limit on donations has effectively killed the report at birth. Perhaps so. But we shouldn't underestimate the cupidity and vice of our Parliament; MPs could still vote for a much higher donations cap, and keep the State funding proposal intact. Let's see where this goes, but I've said before I'll never consent to compulsory State funding of these private clubs in my name - and that this is the one issue that will propel me onto the barricades. And I'm damn sure I'm not alone.

Krakow concluded

2011-11-24T17:52:00.002Z

In Britain, the rail station coal-yards became car parks at about the time that diesel electrics replaced steam trains. One presumes that space heating for the station buildings was converted at the same time to gas or electric. Not so in Krakow. As Winter approaches, the main station coal-yard is alive with workers reducing a stack of fat tree trunks to uniform split logs. Alongside the wood piles are the huge heaps of coal, in a line from a heap of large, engine-block sized pieces that will need hammer-breaking to heaps of smaller, graded fuel.

All must be destined to be burned in the station's boilers and stoves over the next few months, and indeed it must have started already, for Krakow is one of the few heated mainline stations I've yet encountered. The entrance atrium, the ticket halls, the waiting rooms, the station restaurant, the shops and lavatories all pleasantly warm. This brings its own problems. I watched a station official exercising a sort of time limit on the elderly destitute, around half of them couples, who sat around on the oak benches of the waiting room as inoffensively as possible, sheltering from the bitter cold outside. A group of four men had reached their time limit; the official clicked over to them and few words were necessary. They picked up their bags and filed out to the square. I guess it was like our short-term parking restrictions; maximum two hours heat with no return within one hour or something similar.

You can tell a lot about a country by its rail stations. Unlike the shopping malls. Right bang beside Krakow's is the now ubiquitous Euro Mall; the same steel, the same glass curtain walls, the same layout, the same terazzo flooring and the same tenants as the Euro Malls I found in Budapest. It was Carrefour here instead of Match, but the Zaras, the H&M, the Swarovski, the McDonalds and Burger King, the Hackett and the rest were all the standard Euro-tat. I'll bet I can go to Bucharest, Warsaw, Bratislava or Belgrade and find exactly the same. Hugely popular with the locals, of course, but I found it profoundly depressing. I loathe homogeneity. And I'll bet the Mall's security staff won't even let the destitute past the door - my somewhat ragged and travel-battered Barbour came under disapproving scrutiny from a crop-headed blond boy in uniform and for a moment it was touch and go whether I'd get anywhere near the Zara frocks myself.

I found the bars last night after all. In a district called Kazimierz, between the old walled city and the Vistula. None of them truly old, but many the product of the interior decorator's imagination of what a brown bar should look like. In Winter, they told me, Krakow goes down to the cellars in Kazirmierz as the pavement cafes are disassembled to make place for the Christmas Market now under construction in the old town. The street corner bar, so familiar an adjunct to every residential city block from Zurich to Hamburg via Lille, Brussels and Amsterdam, is unknown here. I know. I walked twenty blocks around the back of the hotel trying to find just one. Instead are plenty of 24hr off-licences with shelves of cheap vodka and great floor stacks of cans. It can't be that Poles are unsociable - they're not - and must be result of some historic quirk. Still, it's a minus point.

The EU rag was far less apparent here than in Barcelona, Porto or Budapest; I didn't actually spot a single EU flag anywhere, though the Polish Bicolour was everywhere in evidence. The ghastly EU symbol was confined to something the size of a postcard on a few civic projects obliged to acknowledge funding, but there was no pride or belief in it - in complete contrast to Budapest, which revelled in EU membership as a Labrador revels in cowshit.

Darwin and Polish chickens

2011-11-23T16:47:00.000Z

Krakow is the only Shengen airport I've been to with beautifully messy smallholdings complete with crowing fowl within 50m of the Arrivals lounge. You come out of the airport onto a farm dirt track and a 200m walk to a rail-halt, a bus shelter on a square of bitmac beside a single rail line, that glories in the name of 'Krakow - Bilice'. There are more chickens here, too, just over the track. These are no ordinary chickens, though - these are Polish chickens.

Poland is bang in the middle of a thousand-year war zone. It's pretty flat, which means armies roll across it with ease, from Mongols going West, the French going East, the Russians going West, the Germans going East and so on. Now, there is nothing that poses a greater danger to Gallus Gallus Domesticus than soldiers. It's an observable fact that as armies advance, the chicken population in the path of the advance shrinks to somewhere close to zero. But perhaps not quite zero; chickens who have learned to roost in minefields, to refrain from vocalising the fact that an egg has been laid, and who can remain hidden and still in very small hard-to-reach places will survive.

As I watched the flock at lunchtime as I waited for the little thump-thump two-coach Diesel Unit for Krakow, I realised that these birds were at the peak of evolutionary development. They could hear the squeal of tank-tracks at thirty km, smell cordite at twenty miles and recognise military dress instantly. They would have tunnels and escape routes ready, a secret hen network across Poland that would pass them from farm to farm out of the path of invading armies. They were good. They'd survived a thousand years of being chased and eaten by soldiers. I watched the brave little cock erect his blue-black fan of tail feathers at me and saluted in respect.

I've been in Krakow for four hours now and I can tell that it's small. It also seems to be utterly bereft of the small warm brown bars full of companionable topers that exist everywhere else in Northern Europe; I've just recce'd at speed the entire old city and couldn't find a single one. So I'm back in a Soviet steam heated hotel resting my feet before a further explore tonight. It's about freezing outside, but dry, and the pavements are unforgiving.

The political class and corporate class are one

2011-11-22T05:06:00.000Z

On a day when no one is arguing seriously against the condemnation by the High Pay Commission of the naked corporate greed by the parasitic bloodsuckers who siphon the profits from your savings and pensions to fund their lavish lifestyles, only the Guardian seems to have got it right on the Spanish election. And the preceding paragraph doesn't make me some sort of Trot - I'm still the One-Nation Conservative I always have been. But the biggest threat to my core ideologies, to Adam Smith, laissez-faire capitalism and a Burkean Britain, comes not from the left but from an unholy Statist alliance between the political class and the corporate class.

And they will fall together. The scrawls of 'Vote Here' on the ATM machines in Spain, and the almost universal cries of 'they don't represent us' and 'they're all the same' are not manifestations of anarcho-trotskyist protest but of the Wisdom of Crowds.

The Winter of the World

2011-11-21T07:30:00.000Z

Half the population of Egypt is under 24, and half the population of Syria under 21. Half of the population of Gaza are under 17, and of Yemen 16. In other circumstances, this 'bulge' of a prime working-age cohort entering the labour market would presage economic boom, but outside of the BRIC nations if economies are stagnant and opportunities limited what it produces is a lot of angry young men and a market for assault rifles. Back in February, when the shoots of Spring were stirring, I wrote

What they have in common in their demands is not ideological; this isn't a war of competing ideas. What they want is a bigger say in their nation's conduct, an end to nepotism and corruption and a fairer go at prosperity. Much like our own young people, really. They want the rewards of a globalisation process that depends on the expansion of a global middle-class for economic growth; jobs and salaries, secure homes and consumer goods. The great sadness, and the great threat, is that they've probably missed the boat.

The twenty-first century will be utterly different from the post-war bureaucratic age we've known in the West; what it will bring we simply don't know - there are just too many variables, one can't model chaos. We can be sure that we can't stand immune from the tectonic shifts now in motion, and with no assurance that the tensions now manifest in the Mahgreb won't play themselves out here in the UK. All of which makes it even more urgent that we deal once and for all with the corruption of the political class, the denial of popular democracy by a repressive European Union and its domestic dags, and the growth of a fair and equitable society free of Socialist inequalities, distortions and jobbery.

Of the three objectives I stated for our own polity, the corruption of the political class is as entrenched as ever, with them now proposing to establish themselves as State parties at the taxpayer's expense, the EU is more repressive than ever, rolling nascent democracy into the dirt, and the unfair and unequal grip of Socialist ideology on our nation and society remains untouched. We face entering the Winter of the World with all the evils of Statism still in place, and unless we deal with them, we'll regret it eternally.

Britain is good for Europe

2011-11-20T08:18:00.000Z

A peaceful, prosperous Europe in which the rule of law prevails has ever been Britain's key foreign policy aim. Europe is a key market for our goods, and key customers of our legitimate financial services (insurance, brokerage, commodities, exchange rather than the buccaneer bankers who have screwed our entire economy) - why wouldn't we want a wealthy and stable Europe? Ever since we traded wool for Burgundy wine we've aimed to maintain a balance of power in Europe; between France and Spain, Germany and Austria, France and Germany, until recently by manipulating a series of bilateral or trilateral treaties but since the EU by playing a powerful broker role under a plenary treaty, always aimed at preventing any one Euro nation getting too powerful. By and large, our influence has been good for Europe. It's encouraging that Handelsblatt as reported in Der Spiegel recognises this;

But Germans have a better memory than the French of the complicated outsider role played by the Brits and its importance in European history. Would it be prudent to marginalize them and to eschew their weight in foreign policy? And what would Europe's defensive capabilities be without Britain? Without the Brits, would we have the European common market that we have today? And what position would Germany be in if its last closest major partner was the French?

Keeping the Hun Down, Ivan Out and the Septics In has been British foreign policy since 1945 and so far Europe has done pretty well out of it. Let's not shirk now.

Funeral in Berlin

2011-11-18T07:03:00.000Z

Cameron is in Berlin today to attend the funeral of his own words. Such brave rhetoric about using the UK's veto to wring fundamental changes out of Europe, the naive hope that the Euro 17 would give way before our shiny-faced boy, even a referendum over treaty changes, perhaps. Nein, Nein, Nein. No veto. No treaty changes for Britain. And no referendum. They won't permit it.

Of course it doesn't help that Cameron still comes across as a dilettante playing at politics; gravitas and the mantle of Statesmanship elude him. In opposition to our lightweight, Merkel is about as heavyweight as a Tiger II. And Germany takes this crisis deadly seriously, almost as an existential matter, and is prepared to play as hard and dirty as it takes to win. We're not. The entire German civil service is ideologically committed to a federal EU and every ounce of their talent and commitment is being thrown into this battle. Our own civil service is also at heart pro-EU, and no lights will be burning late in Whitehall to counter German moves. The ammunition they will feed Cameron will be dud. They really don't care - all Cameron needs to do is enough to assuage domestic discontent. Silly words will do.

Blower in the Telegraph has it about right. The Big Freeze is on.

Smoking in Cars

2011-11-16T08:06:00.000Z

Like those of the climate change liars, the 'scientific' assertions about cigarette smoke in cars just don't hold water. It's a fact that ambient levels of carcinogens in the air on a Westminster pavement are four times higher than those in a sealed car in which a smoker has just consumed a ciggie.

I did the numbers in a post back in March HERE

Why Vickers must happen now

2011-11-15T06:42:00.000Z

Just occasionally the toxic liabilities hidden by common consent in the depths of the UK banks surface. I'm talking about the $10 trillion of worthless derivatives, of course. As UK banks' direct exposure to Greece was discussed, there didn't seem to be a problem; direct loans of some £1.6bn were outstanding, and at risk. Pfft. Our banks are big enough to swallow that. Then came the 'but' - in addition there were worthless derivatives of some $60bn linked to Greek activities, which a Greek bank failure would expose. Ah, that's different, then.

Until we insulate the working economy from these liabilities, until the Vickers reforms are implemented, we will all be held liable for these toxic assets. 2019 is far too far away. We need separation by the end of 2012 at the very latest. As the Euro zone disintegrates, as surely it will, so will European banks start to fall and like a Fred West Open Day, the bodies in the cellar will start to surface. The buccaneer banks with their toxic derivatives must be allowed to collapse and go if trade, manufacturing and the real economy, all of which are robust, are to survive.

Youth unemployment timebomb

2011-11-14T07:26:00.000Z

Europe's youths aren't working. Youth unemployment in Spain is close to 45%, in Greece 40%, 30% in Ireland and Italy. In the UK some 20% can't find work. Yet modern Europe is a continent based on consumer consumption; the TV ads haven't changed since 2008. A snappy little Fiat, the latest iPad, a DFS sofa, financial products, designer coffee, a home and cat - all dangled as aspirational should-haves to two-thirds of a generation. The workless third are expected to be patient and wait, I guess.

That last sentence wasn't a throwaway. 30% youth unemployment can mean either that all youths can expect to be employed 2/3rds of the time or that 2/3rds of youths are employed all of the time and 1/3 for none of the time. Surprisingly, Spain, with employers who as a body avoid giving a permanent contract and its obligations to the young, is among the job-sharers; all young people tend to have some work, albeit short-term, with gaps between contracts. The UK is among nations that should be wary of creating the opposite, a cohort of adults who have passed through youth without having ever worked, for here lies a timebomb.

Those who have had work experience, albeit a series of short-term and insecure contracts, will settle into full-time permanent employment as soon as they have the chance. Those who have never had work experience by the time they hit 35 are unlikely ever to work during their working lifespan. This timebomb is the result of well-meaning but actually destructive employment protection measures of the kind promulgated by the Labour Party and the EU.

Let's ensure we're in the former group; if young people have to share flats (and costs) to even-out short term contracts, if they have to learn to live for twelve months on nine months' earnings (and both short-term tax breaks and better hourly rates would help here) and if they have to take the iPad this year and defer the new Fiat to 2013 this is infinitely better than creating a deadweight cohort of unemployable, unfulfilled and wrecked lives. The more flexible and less secure our youth labour market, the better the long term chances of all our young people.

Even 'bad' democratic decisions are better than this

2011-11-13T07:13:00.000Z

A warm welcome back to Richard North, who has returned to find that commentators all over the place, including in a Telegraph leader, are waking to the fact that our rule by a Rousseau-esque technocracy, an elite Euro Commissary, is a tad anti-democratic. These are people who tell us we must sacrifice democracy and liberty in order to be truly free; who tell us they know best, that they have the solution for a Utopian continent, and that everything they do is for our own good. And neither are they lying. These people really do believe the truth of their 'project', believe that riding roughshod over nations and democracy will somehow produce something universally good, fair and equal for all the peoples of Europe. However, as Janet Daley points out in the Telegraph this morning

What the architects of the dream, and even those of us who are caught in the backwash, will have to accept is that capitalism is probably incapable of producing enough wealth to cover the cost of limitless “social protection” programmes as well as providing uniform levels of prosperity for all working and non-working citizens.

It's all about trust, and the Euro-elite simply don't trust voters to make the 'right' decisions. They're blind to the greater truth, that even 'bad' decisions made democratically are better than 'good' decisions made by a dictatorship.

The £1.47 security-tagged Chop

2011-11-10T08:07:00.000Z

Last year for the first time the local supermarket started tagging roasting joints, which at the time I found extraordinary. Well, it seems meat theft has reached endemic proportions; everything now bar mince and sausages now bears a security tag that must be de-activated at the till. Including the £1.47 chop for last night's supper.

And overnight the parking meter some ten metres from my front door was 'done'. And I didn't hear a thing. Oh well, off to the station. And just hope they haven't stolen the copper signal cables again this morning.

Either the Hun shits gold or France is next

2011-11-09T22:42:00.000Z

Maybe Spain, maybe France. But until the constipated Hun shits out gold, the Euro-rot won't stop.

Time to lynch the clown

2011-11-09T06:53:00.000Z

Italy has something of a history of being led by posturing clowns, or at least by corrupt and evil men who hid their vice under a mask of clownish buffoonery. Yes, the priapic Berlusconi was such a one, as was the absurd Mussolini, but also Andreotti, a Mafia stooge convicted of murdering a journalist and Craxi, mired in graft and corruption, within the recent past. Some had a jackdaw-like compulsion for geegaws, like Francesco Cossiga, who scrounged sovereign orders from just about every State on Earth, including our own Bath, to the point where his entire torso from neck to groin was not big enough to wear them all. None have failed to provide the average Englishman with an innate sense of moral superiority and greater worth.

Hatfield Girl has remarked that the wealth ghettos are intact; the streets are filled with gleaming new cars, the women are beautiful in their Autumn fashion, the restaurants are full, the sparkling shop windows bursting with actinic lamp glare and expensive goods. In fact just as I report the state of the City here - just the same. In fact what we're both seeing is the financial crisis itself, in which financial sector profits have been privatised but losses nationalised. We're looking at the privatised gains and not the socialised pains.

No doubt Berlusconi will manage to avoid jail, like Andreotti before him. Perhaps he is already suffering from Saunders' Syndrome, an Alzheimer's-like condition brought on by judicial proceedings. Italians haven't used the Gadaffi solution since Benito and Clara were hung upside-down like rabbits in the game larder.

Coal, the greenest fuel

2011-11-07T06:50:00.000Z

The insane obsession with both wind and solar PV technologies, both hugely expensive and producing tiny yields of power, ignores the greenest technology of all, one for which we have massive existing reserves, and one that can be developed locally at relatively low cost - coal pyrolysis. Simply, this is heating coal without allowing it to burn, and capturing both the volatiles given off and the hard waste remaining. One of the UK's last coal pyrolysis plants, at Carrickfergus, is shown below. Even non-engineers can see how simple it is.

About half of the gas output is Hydrogen and 35% Methane. Hydrogen is the real vehicle fuel of the future, and Methane can go straight to existing domestic supplies. Carbon monoxide is also produced; this can be hydrolised with Hydrogen to make Methanol, used to produce biodiesel. By-products include coke and coal tar. Coke can be burned as a smokeless fuel in domestic fireplaces, and coal tar can be further distilled to provide a range of useful products. There are small amounts of Sulphur (Sulphuric acid for batteries) and Ammonia (fertilisers and explosives) produced. Pretty much everything can be used.

Coal. The greenest energy source.

Tread softly, but carry a big stick

2011-11-06T12:31:00.001Z

Nick Drew's piece should be read widely. And H/T Nick for this Economist piece.

Well what do you bloody imagine they're for?

Kropotkin and Europe: Co-operation through conflict

2011-11-06T08:53:00.001Z

Most informed commentators in the Sundays are of the opinion that if the Euro-17 plan fails, Europe will fail and we'll all return to the dark ages, as competing nation-states impoverishing themselves in competition (or war) with no winners. It's a bleak scenario, a Darwinian competition, an Ayn Rand world of pure selfishness and the pursuit of self-interest in which the most ruthless and best-equipped win. Yet such a scenario flies in the face of all nature and all human experience. And herein is the paradox of altruistic self-interest.

Kropotkin, better known as an anarchist than as a biologist, observed that the species that survived and flourished were those where there was co-operation between individuals who otherwise competed for food, mates and territory. Modern research has confirmed this to be true even at the level of the microbe; that 'altruistic' co-operation amongst competing individuals provided greater benefit than pure conflict. And scientists have reconciled this with Darwinism - the fittest are those who are able to benefit from reciprocal co-operation.

In 1980 Robert Axelrod carried out a large-scale experiment with players adopting strategies suggested by fellow academic game-theorists in a 'prisoners' dilemma' situation. The winning strategy was Anatole Rapoport's 'Tit for Tat' This provided a better chance for survival than anything else. The strategy has the following characteristics;

Be nice: cooperate, never be the first to defect.
Be provocable: return defection for defection, cooperation for cooperation.
Don't be envious:: be fair with your partner.
Don't be too clever: or, don't try to be tricky.

Users of BitTorrent will recognise the strategy as applied in regular unchoking; selfish participants are punished, reciprocal co-operators are rewarded. But can this be applied to competing nation-states, where conflict may mean war? And how does the EU fit in here?

Well , the EU is an organisation that not only allows but encourages free riders, with no sanctions for nations that cheat or don't play fairly. In evolutionary terms, such a group will not succeed - all members will achieve less than in a group that applies effective sanctions to non-conformers, where defectors are punished by co-operators. The mutual powers that the EU-17 are belatedly seeking, of direct control over national fiscal management, are exactly the powers of sanction that could make the bloc work. The paradox is that each member of the 17 must remain fundamentally in competition with all the others. It's a circle that can't be squared.

Europe's real future and best chance of survival may actually be as 27 nations whose economies and currencies are competing against eachother, co-operating in conflict.

Guy Fawkes Day

2011-11-05T08:23:00.000Z

It is quite right of course that the nation today commemorates Guy Fawkes, who today stands alongside Robin Hood as an iconic national hero who did his bit to free Britain of tyranny. As an effigy of the Speaker of the House of Commons is burned on countless bonfires across the land, and Squeaker Bercow, like Gorbals Mick before him, disappears in a shower of flames and sparks, the British people make their annual reminder to the political class to beware.

Sorry, you can't change history

2011-11-04T05:58:00.000Z

During my lifetime the African continent has made the most phenomenal social advances. In the cities with power supplies, refrigerators, aircon units and televisions equip even the humblest shanty or shack; cellphones have enabled those cities to avoid the 'copper cage' telecoms stage altogether, and cheap jet travel from city to city has bypassed the expense of building roads and railways. The death-toll from simple preventable disease has plummeted. Something else is noticeable as well; modern Africans all wear Western-style clothes that cover their breasts and genitals.

It must be extraordinarily difficult for today's young people to imagine the African continent as it was in the 1950s and 1960s. It was the staple of our childhood cinema and television; Armand and Michaela Denis were household names, we never missed an episode of 'Daktari' (with Clarence the cross-eyed Lion), and every other wildlife documentary was set in the great rift valley or on the savannah. Africans were of two distinct types. Firstly were the educated, Westernised inheritors of Empire who shared our values system and our tailors. Then there were all the primitive village folk, in loincloths with bone earrings, who were variously porters, unskilled labour or wildlife poachers. Grinning women with huge swinging dugs and infants on their hip waited table, and blokes with flapping todgers ran around the place joy-shrieking. The nudity was, quite frankly, what made these programmes and documentaries interesting to a young English chap.

All the academic and historical evidence supports this depiction as more authentic than not. Not everywhere, of course; not in the nascent cities, nor in places with the lengthiest history of colonisation or civilisation. But generally in that swath of the continent south of Addis Ababa, north of Pretoria and east of Kinshasa.

Instead of trying to censor history, we should celebrate that the people of that continent have advanced so far in so short a period of time. You really can't overlay the present on the past with any degree of academic honesty.

Eurotank crushes Greek democracy

2011-11-03T14:48:00.000Z

As an object lesson in the power that the EU can bring to bear when threatened, George Papandreou is feeling the full force. He is being crushed by a cabal of thwarted Euro-Socialism through his own PASOK party and every member of the Euro-Socialist PES grouping, including Mzz Ashton and five other Commissioners and significant numbers from the European Council, Council of Europe and European Parliament. PASOK supplies 8 MEPs and the Fisheries Commissioner, Maria Damaniki, all of whom are furious at Papandreou for threatening their comfortable existences. The truth has never been so obvious that these people are a class apart, willing to sacrifice their own nations and peoples on the altar of EuroFederalism and for their own deeply corrupt self-interest.

However, the Referendum is out of the bottle now and it won't be as easy to get it back in. If Papandreou resigns and the Referendum is cancelled, I predict fury on the streets of Athens. These are serious times indeed.

Will Kelly damn UKIP?

2011-11-03T07:11:00.001Z

I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that the future centre of gravity of British politics will be determined by the way in which the recommendations of Sir Christopher Kelly's committee into party finance are implemented. Peter Oborne reminds us in the Telegraph this morning that UKIP could be set to become the third force in Parliament, replacing the Lib Dems. Oho. Not if Kelly repeats Hayden Phillips' deeply corrupt and undemocratic funding recommendation they won't.

Phillips recommended that parties get £3 each year for each vote cast for them in the last election. This favours incumbency, favours the existing party triumverate, locks in stasis (mandarins would call this 'stability') and mitigates against any new parties gaining recognition. The Lib Dems would be funded on the basis of their 2010 high, not their 2011 lows, and would go into the 2015 election with a wholly corrupt advantage, and keep the balance of the political centre on the left. Never mind that forty-five millions of electors are given no say in whether they want tax funds to go to the parties - making the move also a deeply and dangerously anti-democratic one.

Kelly will no doubt conveniently ignore, as did Phillips, the proposal made by Helena Kennedy's 'Power' Inquiry some years ago now. This was for a separate funding poll slip to be taken into the voting booth; electors could select any party to receive £3 a year of tax funds, not necessarily the one they were voting for, or could choose none at all. Thus voters who object to tax funds being given to parties could veto funding made in their name, and electors could make an intelligent choice about whether to fund UKIP whilst voting Conservative, or to fund the LibDems whilst voting Labour. It was a fair and equitable proposal, and therefore deeply unwelcome to the mandarins and to the State political class.

But make no mistake. The Kelly report will be the most important thing that happens in British politics this year.

There's only one story today

2011-11-02T06:42:00.000Z

It won't last until a Greek referendum in January. There's doubt it will last until the end of the month. The Euro-stitch up is coming unravelled faster than a cheap sweater from Asda. China has snubbed invitations to buy up Euro debt, and even the US is rattled. Yet Greece comes somewhere in the global GDP league between Denmark and Columbia - hardly a major league player.

The demise of the Euro was inevitable. The only question was when. It seems it might be 'now'.

Votes for the Dead?

2011-11-01T08:20:00.000Z

John Donne may find some philosophical comfort in it, Wellington and Nelson will no doubt agree that a whiff of grape would shift 'em whilst poor Ethelred will not have made up his mind yet.

Thanks to the Telegraph for this.

One Nation

2011-11-01T07:30:00.001Z

The times are certainly a-changing, perhaps more rapidly than at any time I can recall. Take the rewards of the most senior figures in our society, the Supreme Court judges, Generals, university Vice Chancellors. They can expect a working life in which the 'relativities' are maintained with a chauffeured car and a domestic servant as part of the job and in retirement no-one is much surprised to find them in a spoof-Lutyens house in Hampshire of the kind that requires a ride-on lawnmower. Fair enough. Yet these people were the 'Establishment', the privileged elite, the ruling class, against whom we protested in the 1970s through music and satire. Now their rewards - and status - are as nothing compared to those that head and manage the transnational corporates; they are as far below an investment banker in income terms as an unemployed teen is below a GP.

And this is what's happened since the 1970s; a new class of the global super-rich has grown almost without notice, and with them a top-tier of earners in the City and global finance, and the CEOs, skimming the cream off the assets they manage for anyone in a pension fund or with investments. The fact that it's not their money that enables some 140 corporates to control 60% of invested wealth is an irrelevance - it's the fact that global corporates act solely for their own ends that matters. The nurses and teachers whose pension funds they manage (rapaciously) don't share in any increased quality of life, don't even get a sniff of the wealth and privilege that those who invest 20% of their earnings enjoy.

As Mary Riddell comments in the Telegraph, for the first time both main parties have picked up the zeitgeist. There is a national recognition that these rewards are too great, the differentials too wide, that these folk have piled wealth upon wealth for themselves just because they can. Though the MSM tags the 'occupy' protests as anti-capitalist they're not; they're anti-corporatist. And if they're against globalisation they're not protectionist; they oppose the way in which international capital can dodge and evade national regulation, not the idea of 'a fair go' for any nation in the global marketplace. Above all they're a reminder that 'One Nation' finds a deep resonance in the English soul.

Mandelson claims victory over Cherie

2011-10-30T07:10:00.001Z

With his recent purchase of a £12.5m mansion in Chelsea, Peter Mandelson has claimed victory over Cherie Blair in their long-running and frequently bitter house-owning competition. "Cherie owns more" said a source close to Mr Mandelson "but Peter's are bigger. And in better taste. Hers are cramped and a bit suburban". It is understood that Mandelson is also providing a luxurious 'State Bedroom' in his Chelsea home for former Prime Minister Tony Blair that trumps the bedrooms that Cherie has decorated in the couple's own Connaught Square terrace and Palladian country cottage. He has also acquired a new pet; "Peter's got a cat. We think it's to keep Cherie away; she absolutely can't stand them, and had that poor Downing Street moggie killed by the SAS."

Mr Blair himself is abroad this weekend, receiving the Gold Medal for International Humanity from the president of Tashkentistan in a lavish award ceremony that was scheduled to include several condemned criminals being boiled alive in butter, Tashkentistan's traditional method of execution. Mr Blair is said to have asked for the executions to be brought forward ahead of his visit because of a butter allergy.

Growth

2011-10-28T06:27:00.000+01:00

Economic confidence is at the heart of growth, and we just don't have it. New construction orders are lagging, not for want of opportunities, as Scobs has commented, but for want of investor and lender confidence. Yet build a new shopping mall or launch a new heavyweight food chain and people will come - they want to share the confidence, the brashness, the exuberance and actually will success. Someone with confidence that their career is going somewhere other than redundancy will sign a new car loan, buy a new sofa or build a loft extension. Manufacturers will invest in that new CNC milling machine, transport firms in a new tracking system.

The one change that will boost domestic confidence beyond measure is certainty over our future in the EU. We will rediscover the Commonwealth - never mentioned by Cameron or Osborne, yet the most noble and steadfast achievement of our sainted Monarch has been to keep the Commonwealth alive through decades of government indifference. The UK has a unique role in bridging continental Europe with the Anglophone Commonwealth, the hub of a free-trade system that serves to enrich all. But we must shed the shackles of an EU system utterly antipathetic to our national character; the Statism, the beetling bureaucrats, the Napoleonic laws, the police spies and brigades of gendarmes. Those things are Europe's unfortunate legacy and must stop at the Channel. Our waters must be free and serve our nation first, and we must deter like the Hornet - we may be too small to kill you, but can inflict a sting of such pain you won't risk conflict with us. In short, casting off the shackles of the EU will bring a surge of hope, confidence and economic growth to the UK like nothing else.

All we have to do is persuade the boy David and his permatan chums to do the bidding of the British people.

A mixed lot

2011-10-27T07:27:00.004+01:00

There are a couple of pubs we usually adjourn to after a meeting in EC1. One is London's most hidden pub that until relatively recently was actually in Cambridgeshire. It was sited in what was a 'peculiar' of the Bishop of Ely, and was licensed by Ely magistrates rather than City ones. The other is an old 18th century corner-house on Watling Street, a pub since the 1500s, that survived both the Blitz and the 1960s. It was outside the latter yesterday evening that we came face to face with a trio of 'occupy' folk from St Paul's doing a bit of an explore. Three girls in stained anoraks with unwashed hair and bangles who may even have looked attractive after a hot bath, a decent dinner and a day with the hairdresser stared in quiet fascination at a row of loud men in suits quaffing £4 a pint lager. The suits stared back, equally fascinated. They looked as though they were on the point of soliciting drinks, or money, but couldn't quite do it and moved on.

In one of those peculiar flashes of insight I imagined a similar scene in that same place some half millennium earlier. The English Reformation may have been many things, but it wasn't a benefit to the common people. Overnight, they lost hospitals, schools, the dole, charity, shelter and social care, none of which would be re-provided by the wealthiest in the land who enjoyed the plunder. Least of all was the Reformation of benefit to women. The nunneries offered a real alternative to life as a chattel, where women could live together and govern themselves, protected by stout walls and piety, owned by themselves and not by men. When Henry's agents pulled down the walls and ejected the sisters onto the street just such a group as our occupy protesters must have wandered the City, gazing in fascination at doublets straining over the fat bellies of London's new middle class.

Simon Jenkins writes this morning in the Guardian

There are serious gaps in the transparency of modern democracy. Between elections, the traditional mediators between electors and those in power have withered. The "customary associations and little platoons" have dwindled. Power over policy has been removed from parties in parliament and at the grassroots, from trade unions, from the professions, from local government, from intellectuals, even from the formal civil service. These conduits have been replaced by thinktanks and lobbyists working in private collusion with ministerial staffs. When David Cameron in opposition said that lobbyists were "the next big scandal waiting to happen," he was right. But that was before he came to power. ..... (the 'Occupy') protest is more a dull ache of frustration at power being dispensed in corridors rather than streets, a power that is ever further from their grasp.

1979 was a watershed in British politics. Before, we berated the grasp of something called 'the Establishment' on power, and the reaction against it in the 1980s gave us a rainbow alliance of greens, anarchists, wimmins, Trots, oddballs and wierdos in the Town Halls, all antipathetic to Mrs Thatcher. That, too, was billed as a 'reformation' of politics. Unfortunately it was. It led to the most ruthless centralising of power the nation had seen since the Second War; the Conservative Party alone lost a million members between 1979 and 1997, me amongst them, as local associations were disempowered. Like that other Reformation, it succeeded only in making things worse for the majority and created a powerful closed-shop metropolitan political class.

As the Chinese are said to say, beware of what you wish for.

It's the little things

2011-10-26T11:39:00.000+01:00

First toad-in-the-hole of the year last night; I learned how to make this as a student, more than thirty years ago, and it still hits the spot. And I've got the other half for tonight. And yes, the middle did fall a bit out of the oven, but hey ..

Remember, Cameron ditched Sir Patrick

2011-10-26T07:00:00.001+01:00

The redoubtable Sir Patrick Cormack would no doubt still be going strong in Parliament now, writing his letters longhand with a fountain pen, had Cameron's metropolitan and Statist party evinced the slightest understanding of what he stood for. Sir Patrick told the Guardian in 2007

I've had masses of letters from people who say they vote for me not because I'm Conservative but because they think I'm an independent-minded local parliamentarian. I've always taken the line it's country-constituency-party, in that order.

As Cameron's tame Parliamentary sheep bleat "Leader. Party. Europe" they're a million miles from Sir Patrick's old-fashioned sense of priority, from his sense of service owed, of public duty, of responsibility. Maybe it is time for a new Conservative Party, one that provides a comfortable home for all the Sir Patricks still extant.

Party funding reform and Europe

2011-10-25T06:26:00.000+01:00

The Conservative Party is in the uncomfortable position of having a grass roots membership in the constituency associations unequivocally opposed to the EU and an isolated Metropolitan party HQ unequivocally in favour. Tory MPs are caught in the middle, unsure whether to annoy the party bosses who hand out junior ministerial jobs or local voters who still retain a minor role in candidate selection. UKIP hovers in the background, ready to repeat its undertaking not to stand in constituencies where the Tory candidate is anti-EU and yesterday's Tory rebels will no doubt have had an eye on 2015.

Yet the resolution to this impasse in the Party may come not from some cosmetic compromise, not from Cameron's banal and mendacious assurances over his Euro-sceptic credentials, but from changes in party funding. Sir Christopher Kelly's committee is about to publish its report on political funding. The three main parties are moribund, with a combined membership of fewer than 1% of the electorate. They're also broke. If Kelly's report throws them back on voter donations and caps large donations they will be far less able to ignore the voices from the backwoods, but this is the long-shot outcome. Far more likely that Kelly will recommend throwing in tens of millions of public money to allow the State parties to suckle at the teat of the taxpayer and maintain policies unsupported by their electors. However, what actually happens will be extremely sensitive to public opinion; the best chance now for all on the right apposed to the EU is to mount a campaign against State party funding, for only by depriving the pro-EU central State HQs of this oxygen will the voices of the people be heard.

Corporatism is the enemy of Capitalism

2011-10-24T06:24:00.001+01:00

H/T Greg Tingey
Greg has pointed us to the New Scientist, which reports the findings of a team of Swiss scientists who have turned their analytic skills to the ownership of business enterprises. The full piece is well worth a read, but the headline findings are that;

1,318 of some 43,060 global corporates (3%) directly generate 20% of global operating revenue, and between them own firms that generate 60% of global revenue
147 'super corporates' control 40% of the wealth of the network

Now of course without reading the primary research paper and finding the definitions used for 'wealth' and 'network' and so on in accounting terms we can only be fairly sure that the research shows that a small number of global corporates with complex links control a large part of the world's economy. In recent weeks I've offered arguments that support the contention that the corporates are the enemy of capitalism, of laissez-faire capitalism, because of the use of their power to restrict and control competition I've also offered arguments that the corporates are beyond the actions of any single government, making a nonsense not just of national tax and regulatory regimes but of the G8 itself.

Importantly, I've also stated that this isn't some engineered global conspiracy by a shadowy group wanting to take over the world. That's the stuff of kids' comics, not rational debate. The economic power of the super corporates has arisen because it's what they do; mergers, acquisitions, takeovers, horizontal and vertical integration and maximising profit in a world marketplace have grown the super corporates as inevitably as soil, water and sunlight will grow green plants. The problem is, however benign their origin, they exercise tremendous power over our lives outside of any democratic control; we are all disenfranchised by their scale and reach. There's not even a formal framework for dialogue between our elected governments and the dominant corporates. I've no idea what the answer to any of this is - except that occupying St Pauls' is fairly pointless - but the picture is becoming clearer.

The top ten super-corporates named in the study are:-

1. Barclays plc
2. Capital Group Companies Inc
3. FMR Corporation
4. AXA
5. State Street Corporation
6. JP Morgan Chase & Co
7. Legal & General Group plc
8. Vanguard Group Inc
9. UBS AG
10. Merrill Lynch & Co Inc

Learning from the past

2011-10-22T08:02:00.002+01:00

The Social Democrats, Liberals, the Kadet party, the Russian SDLP, the Socialist Revolutionary Party, Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, Anarchists and the Constitutional Democratic Party perhaps had little in common with each other in St Petersburg in 1917, but all were absolutely united in opposition to the Tsar and the ruling political class. Russia was suffering from stagnant earnings and high inflation, had committed her armed forces to two disastrous wars in a decade and the concentration of wealth and power in the same tiny minority that also dominated politics had alienated the vast majority of the population.

The Russian Revolution was not a single incident, not 'the Russian Revolution 1917'. Rather it was a process that started at the beginning of the twentieth century and culminated with the deposition of the ruling political class almost two decades later. The Revolution was iterative. Popular pressures and demands rose in a series of waves that were temporarily assuaged and defused or that didn't have the inertial energy to overtop the breakwater, but each time a wave retreated yet another political movement grew, more of the populace became militant and antipathetic to the ruling class, and the inevitable overturning-mass grew in scale until eventually the regime was swept away not in the mighty storm of later Soviet poster art but with a feint shove.

Russia's political class had chance after chance to avert the Revolution; had they implemented land reform, had they ceded power to a truly democratic Duma, had the Grand Dukes who ruled the Court and owned the factories been divested of their obscene wealth, then Russia might still be a constitutional monarchy. But time after time they couldn't bring themselves to effect change that would deprive themselves of wealth and power, and so the iterative Revolution proceeded to its final and inevitable outcome.

Over the next month Britain's beleaguered ruling political elite will face the force of the next wave of popular discontent. On Monday they will fight desperately for Euro-Federalism in the face of the nation's antipathy, and in November they will attempt to push through recommendations from the Committee on Standards in Public Life that hundreds of millions of taxpayers' money be stolen to pay for the failing and moribund State political parties. The bankers' bonus pool of some £8bn will be announced at a time when the poor and elderly are freezing in homes they can longer afford to live in, and the Winter soup-kitchens on London's embankment see long queues. This won't be the wave, but it will see more popular discontent, greater popular engagement with anti-political class movements, a more entrenched popular opposition to a corrupt and sleazy regime, and Britain will take one more step forwards towards fundamental reform.

The evil of the EU Con Trick

2011-10-21T06:51:00.000+01:00

Greece in 1974 was a nation of old women in black dresses and overburdened donkeys carrying heavy loads up steep narrow cobbled paths under a sky through which roared the F4 Phantoms of Nato's air defence system. The millionaire shipowners moved in international circles, transported by BOAC, whilst the poor were fishermen and subsidence farmers. Fierce shepherds with sharp knives and Lee-Enfield rifles guarded the rocky uplands against wolves and the twentieth century, occasionally raping and dismembering any hippy travellers careless enough to cross their path. The idea that any nation could grow from this to one with a per capita GDP of $30,000 in thirty years is risible; and as Blue Eyes has pointed out, Greece retains a sewer system that can't even cope with toilet paper.

Yet this was the great EU con trick. Jam for all, paid for by a Ponzi banking scheme and transfers from the wealthy to the marginal EU nations. Expectations were raised, poor and gullible populations were led to believe that the change was permanent. The intention of the authors of this gigantic fraud was that Europe would be cajoled into political union before the money ran out and the Ponzi scheme collapsed. It hasn't happened that way.

Now Europe's margins are being forced to shrink back to where they would have been with free trade and open borders alone, without all the funny money. Sure, the wealthy nations are being forced to continue the transfers, less now to ease the transition than as a desperate rear-guard action by the Federasts to keep their dream alive at the cost of the people of Europe. Now is the time for the conned and gulled peoples of Europe to do to the EU what the people of Libya have done to Gaddafy. The evil has gone on long enough.

Poison dwarf Bercow fights for his plunder

2011-10-19T07:15:00.000+01:00

At a time of great national austerity, when the population are being asked to make substantial personal sacrifices, it is the duty of those in positions of public responsibility to lead by example. The Speaker of the Commons is the nation's First Citizen, the most senior commoner in the realm, and therefore in a position to set the standards of behaviour to be expected from all those who occupy high public office. So how does poison dwarf Bercow, the worst Speaker in historical memory and a disgrace to the Chair, react to this? By fighting to protect his privileged wedge, of course. His message to the nation is clear - "Grab all you can while you can and sod everyone else".

Will no one rid us of this noisome little dribble?

Libertarians should support riot sentences

2011-10-19T06:53:00.000+01:00

The right to personal freedom doesn't include the right to set fire to your neighbour's house, or to encourage others to do so. Nor does it give you the right to steal his goods, slap his wife or destroy his garden. Libertarians are first in the ranks of those who claim the right to defend themselves from such incursions - often violently - and not just a few claim the right to inflict retribution beyond the degree of harm faced, such as those who would shoot unarmed burglars. So I'm at a loss to pick up dissent in Libertarian circles against the confirmation by the appeal court of the four-year sentences imposed on two thugs who used the internet to incite riot and violence. So it's fine to shoot a burglar dead, but not OK to jail one who encourages his mates to burgle you?

What's behind this of course is those who want to apply double standards, those who imagine it's fine for them to incite violence, revolution, anarchy and criminal activity on the interweb, but not OK for those who disagree politically to do so. I've made my own position on this very clear in the past, that I'm unequivocally opposed to the use of violence in any form to achieve political ends, and those who do so on the internet must face the same penalties as though they were rousing the howling mob on the street. Libertarians should support these riot sentences.

Barclays makes the gorge rise

2011-10-18T07:09:00.000+01:00

I'd defy anyone with a peck of concern for our nation to read Bounderby's brief piece in Speccy Coffeehouse and not feel the gorge rise in their throat. The junk-rated oil firm that Barclays are gambling £11.5bn of taxpayer-backed (no lose, no cost) funding is rated BB by Standard & Poors; the Barclays executive behind the deal is Hugh McGee, ex-Lehmans. It's a bit like putting the captain of the Titanic in command of the QEII. And the reason Barclays are gambling on such a risky, insecure deal is of course that the profits will be huge if it comes off. If not, you and I will pay.

Incidentally, the slogan below is only rivaled by one (for those who have kept livestock) I saw on the side of a rail maintenance van - "Jarvis - serving Britain's railways".

Guardian claims the 99% as its own

2011-10-17T07:07:00.001+01:00

It was inevitable, I suppose, that the Guardian should claim the 99% as its own, despite its fat-cat public sector readership and bloated staff making up a goodly number of the 1% in the UK. Thus "The fight against global climate change is down to us - the 99%" thus neatly ignoring the gratuitous and obscene profits made by the green energy wing of the 1% as a sort of global climatic con trick. "Occupy protests are reclaiming the psychic space" claims Nina Power, in an article based on the premise that the 1% have established a mind-control system which the tinfoil hats of the protesters have foiled (pardon the pun). A millionaire columnist (no, no, not Lady Toynbee - her piece of guff will come tomorrow) even declares "I'm part of the 1% but I support the 99%", a sentiment with which many of the papers' readers will agree.

Of course 'we're the 99%' now has the same sort of cachet as declaring 'I'm Spartacus'. The 'Mail' will doubtless run a piece under the strap "Squeezed Surrey homeowners against HS2 are the 99%", the Glasgow Herald will declare "Scots 99% bear the brunt of cuts" and ASDA will launch a TV ad campaign under the slogan "The 99% shop with us". Tee shirt factories in guangdong are no doubt going flat-out producing derivatives of the slogan in more or less meaningful English; "Fish Glass 99%" perhaps or "99% Rap Queen Bus". Cautious statisticians will declare "We're the 95%, + or - 4%".

That's the thing about a good slogan. It can mean anything to anyone.

Whatever happened to .......

2011-10-16T10:16:00.000+01:00

Number 47 - Gordon Brown

Once a familiar figure on Britain's television screens, Brown enjoyed a brief period of wealth and fame earlier in the century with his unique brand of Scots surliness, sociopathy and violence. A troubled personal life and mental health problems followed the cancellation of his show shortly after the first series, and he returned to Scotland from London and quickly faded from the public eye. Today he can often be found squatting in a puddle of his own urine outside Kirkcaldy 'Iceland' alternatively growling and shouting at shoppers and soliciting money. He has refused offers from old friends in the area and sleeps in an old Astra van at the edge of the disused municipal tip.

The Post-Apartheid struggle for equality

2011-10-16T08:11:00.000+01:00

Labour's policy of Apartheid, or separate development, for black and ethnic groups in the UK badged here as 'multiculturalism' has led to gross and entrenched inequality in a nation that believes fundamentally in equality of opportunity. The ethnic townships into which Labour funneled immigrants - Bradford, Luton, Burnley, Thamesmead (SoEaTo), Tower Hamlets - with dedicated funding, support services, health and education provision that were separate from the services and provision for the majority population have failed abysmally.

Labour's Apartheid policies even went so far as to deny the immigrants access to a basic driving test in English, insisting that they should be able to take the test in Swahili, Urdu, Tagalog or Sylheti, but without changing the road signs in the townships accident rates have soared as the immigrants collide with one another and with pedestrians, unable to read the simplest road instructions. Even the township bus companies have been encouraged to license drivers who can't speak a word of English as part of Labour's 'separate development' creed; this effectively confined them to the homelands, unable to integrate, unable to work elsewhere and unable to enjoy wider British society. The entrenched disadvantage among these people from Labour's divisive and discriminatory policies have condemned a whole generation to poverty and inequality.

Ending Apartheid in the UK will not be easy. Entrenched attitudes from racial separatists on the left such as Jonkheers Harriet Harman, Ed Balls, Yvette Cooper and Hilary Benn are deeply embedded in the immigrant municipalities; even Ooom Benn, whose influence is palpable, is in favour of racial Apartheid. They will oppose bitterly the integration of the immigrant communities, and their equality with the majority population. As these old racist relics gather on the stoep for dagga and a dop they are unaware that British society has moved on, that their own racism isn't reflected in a population accepting of race and colour as irrelevant distinctions. But their divisive Britain has gone - it just refuses to die.

Indignant or Occupy?

2011-10-15T08:31:00.001+01:00

In Brazil, Russia, India and China it will be a normal Saturday for the educated young aspirational middle classes; they will browse the global chain stores, take a coffee in a global coffee shop and return to their apartment with some token of global brand identity; a bottle of Johnny Walker, perhaps, or something from Agnès B. Over the weekend, before they return to their careers in aerospace, electronics, marketing or energy they may well tune their satellite TVs to news broadcasts of their old-West counterparts out on the streets today. The Indignant movement started in Spain, a protest by the educated young that the middle class lifestyle had evaded them. No Vuitton belt or bottle of Jim Beam in Seville. The Occupy movement started in New York, a protest by Americans who claim 'we are the 99%' and that the 1% have deprived them of an aspirational middle class lifestyle. No cabin in the Hamptons for those stuck in Alphabet City.

"International capital is mobile, and is running circles around the world's governments, frankly" speaks an economist on Radio 4's Today as I type. The author of 'The Price of Civilisation', Jeffrey Sachs, appeals for the return of a humanistic and communitarian ethos in America. The blurb for the book includes

Sachs goes deeper than an economic diagnosis. By taking a broad, holistic approach—looking at domestic politics, geopolitics, social psychology, and the natural environment as well—Sachs reveals the larger fissures underlying our country’s current crisis. He shows how Washington has consistently failed to address America’s economic needs. He describes a political system that has lost its ethical moorings, in which ever-rising campaign contributions and lobbying outlays overpower the voice of the citizenry. He also looks at the crisis in our culture, in which an overstimulated and consumption-driven populace in a ferocious quest for wealth now suffers shortfalls of social trust, honesty, and compassion.

This is, of course, true. And the Occupy protesters and the Indignant protesters on the streets today are essentially angry about the same thing. The balance of global power has slipped away from the political class and towards the global corporates, not in some sinister conspiracy but through the wholly natural behaviour of monopolies and oligopolies in excluding competition and strengthening their grip. We, the West, are spent-out; the corporates have squeezed about all they can from our markets. The burgeoning markets and debt-potential of the BRICs are now their focus, rich honeypots of spectacular GDP growth and rapidly expanding middle classes, young populations and a sort of societal energy that powers rapid change.

Corporatism and the power of Leviathan States and Super States are the enemies both of laissez-faire capitalism and classic Liberalism, but the targets identified by the protesters are as fatuous as these things usually are; "... the WTO, the IMF, the ECB, the UN, the G8, the banks". The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars but in our selves. Both strands of protest today are by essentially 'an overstimulated and consumption-driven populace in a ferocious quest for wealth', by a furious young fighting for material gain. In 1968 they fought for Love; in 2011 it's for Money.

Update
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"You are right to be indignant. The fact is, the system is not working right ... We've socialized losses and privatized gains. That's not capitalism. That's not a market economy." – Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel laureate in economics, speaking to Occupy Wall Street.

The Minister's In Tray

2011-10-14T07:01:00.000+01:00

Mr Letwin read the HR expert's memorandum again with dismay. "Under no circumstances" it stated, in 14pt bold, "are staff to retain 'In' or 'Out' trays on workstation horizontal surfaces in contravention of the Department's clear desk policy". The minister had already been forced to hide his red box in a cupboard, stuffing it as full as possible with the pile of ministerial correspondence that fouled his workstation horizontal surface (the term desktop, the IT people had declared, was reserved for the vertical computer screen). His permanent secretary seemed to have no difficulty in maintaining a clear WHS, so why was he burdened with paper? Letwin resolved not to be defeated.

The following day he arrived at the ministerial building just after 6am and made for the ministerial secretariat. His pigeon hole (or hard copy information distribution node) was crammed. Stuffing the papers and envelopes inside his overcoat and holding his arms across his chest, he nodded perfunctorily to the Nigerian security guard as he hopped down the steps and back out of the building. Dawn was breaking in St James' Park and the pigeon-eating Pelicans were yawning hungrily. As he passed a litter bin, Letwin discarded a report on NHS contracts for Kangaroo Meat. The following bin received a bundle of letters from arms lobbyists. He avoided the eyes of a dog walker as he dumped the minutes of the Wind Turbine Advisory Committee. As he rounded the Hydrangea Pool and crammed the last bundle of constituency correspondence into the bin beside a discarded White Lighting can he froze; just thirty paces ahead on the path was the terrifying figure of the Cabinet Secretary. Sir Gus was also frozen in a rictus of embarrassment. Then Letwin noticed the documents stuffed inside Sir Gus' coat lapels, and the handful of A4 documents clutched in his gloved fist and frozen above the mouth of a litter bin.

"Morning Gus" he called "brisk out today"
"Yes, Minister."

Rape and spoilation

2011-10-13T02:55:00.000+01:00

Richard North has a few succinct and hard-hitting words on the effects of the common fisheries policy. Our island waters should be teeming with an abundance of marine life, which if sustainably fished inshore by boats under 10m and further out by boats that can stay out for a few days will provide an inheritance for all the people of these islands who come after us. Instead our inshore waters have been turned into deserts, raped and spoiled by the Spanish factory ships that hoover up every living sea creature for fertilizer and chicken meal.

Fishing is a hard life and one no fisherman would recommend to his children. Yet it formed the backbone and character of countless villages and communities around our coasts, employment and independence, and fed us through two submarine blockades. Marine stocks have the chance now to recover - it's not quite too late - but we must exclude the Spaniards in particular from our waters. Richard estimates we have lost £100bn to Spain alone.

Dr North rightly reserves his contempt for the weak and spineless political class who have sold away the birthright of Britain's children - our fish stocks - for narrow self-interest, short term expediency and the nauseous stench of political jobbery. And as the foreign beam-trawls scrape the British sea bed into a barren waste, what's our Prime Minister's greatest concern? Oh, stopping teenage boys watching porn on their PS3s.