Ditch this wretched shackle

Against every military maxim, the EU Parliament and Commission are hell-bent on reinforcing failure. The Euro is crippled; like the Heer in 1945 it lacks metaphorical air cover, fuel, munitions and transport but keeps surviving due to tactical moves of desperation, sometimes brilliant, that squeeze every gram of advantage from each embattled position. 

And now with proposals for Euro-wide extraordinary wealth taxes - preferably in a form that will also catch non-Eurozone EU nations - it is moving to the equivalent of calling-up 15 and 16 and 65 and 66 year olds. Already parts of Europe are plunging into real poverty, and the spectre of disease and hunger, of Typhoid, Diphtheria and Cholera, not seen in Europe for seventy years, broods menacingly over the economic wreckage and spoilation caused by these zealots. With a fanaticism bordering on lunacy, they will see Europe burn to cinders before they will relinquish their belief in the Euro. Human lives and an ocean of human misery are of little consequence to the Berlaymont Gauleiters strutting like fat pheasants in their insulated, privileged world of make-believe.

But across Europe ordinary people are coming to recognise the enemy in Brussels, and the danger it poses to their very way of life. It's not 'populism' but a hunger for real democracy that is driving members to UKIP and its equivalents across Europe. People are choosing between freedom and the Empire, and more and more are backing freedom. The harder the Empire tries, the more support it loses.

Margaret Thatcher - Stateswoman

The release of Baroness Thatcher's death certificate describing her occupation as 'Stateswoman' was something that could be disclosed without fear of contradiction from any quarter. Even her enemies would concede that she strode the world stage with the foremost of that breed. Statesmanship is not something that can be acquired by an individual; it must be bestowed by a caucus of informed opinion.

Blair's tragi-comic cavortings in his attempts to reach that status keep us all entertained, but besides real statesmen he is a pygmy. And Brown seems sensibly to have avoided the ridicule that such a bid on his own behalf would earn. Both will be there tomorrow, still in Margaret's shadow as just ex-Prime Ministers, not as elders and Statesmen. One has only to imagine, in the event of the sudden death of either, the snorts of derision that would be caused if either's death certificate made that absurd claim. But for Thatcher, the term is no more than the simple truth.  

Polly's wish may come true

Lady Toynbee has long urged the governments of Europe to tax the wealthy in order to fund the recession. Now, it seems, not only will her wish come true, but Polly herself will be able to share in the noble sacrifice. If Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in the Telegraph is right, and EU finance ministers move to taxing holiday homes, Polly's Tuscan retreat will certainly give her the personal opportunity to contribute a great wodge of cash to the tax-starved club Med administrations.

No doubt readers will share Polly's undoubted joy at the news.

Thatcher Library

A Thatcher Library, in the form of those US (ex) Presidential libraries, will no doubt be a good thing. American Presidential libraries are actually public libraries, administered at taxpayers' expense by the National Archive and Records Administration (NARA) under the Presidential Records Act. We don't have such provision in the UK, so Margaret's would have to be privately funded. And perhaps this is more suitable, under the circumstances. Part archive, part museum I would expect permanent exhibitions on both the Berlin Wall and the Falklands. And just as the Reagan Library sells copies of the famous RR Stetson at $209.95, the Thatcher Library could vend tasteful copies by Mulberry of those handbags at a similar price point. Or the 'Thatcher Steampunk tank Pashmina and goggles' perhaps. 

Of course no Thatcher venture would be complete without some hideous embarrassment caused by her wayward son, so we'd have to expect a concession stand run by Sir Mark offering gay men's underwear with 'Thatcher' embroidered on the waistband and no doubt these will prove popular also with the gangsta types who wear their jeans half way down their bottoms.

Thatcher and Sid

The pub juke box was belting out Boy George for the third disk in a row; eyes were fixed on the mechanism as the arm lifted the 45 single, jerkily returned it to it's slot in the fan-array of black plastic ... and then returned back to the same place to lift it out again. There was a soft groan from the bar. The London after work pub crowd was complacent; it had been three years since the IRA's last major mainland bombing and Londoners, who recover quickly anyway, had almost forgotten the threat. This was a workers' pub, which is to say well-frequented by students and the unemployed with a leavening of actual tradesmen - mostly painters, for some reason - having an after-work pint. 

" 'Ere maigh, izzat your Standa'?" Came a voice in my ear. I nodded and passed it across. "See 'ow me shares have done today" the voice explained. It didn't need to explain further. Thatcher's Gas privatisation in December 1986 had made shareholders for the first time of hundreds of thousands of small investors. Though some had taken to buying the FT on the basis of a £250 shareholding, thereby wiping out their dividend, most relied, in London at least, on discarded Standards to keep track of the share price. 

Many preferential small shareholders cashed in immediately, walking away with a fat profit, but no matter; share ownership, once something arcane and foreign to most people, had become commonplace, something of which your neighbour had experience. Those who recall the impact that it had didn't find at all extraordinary Vince Cable's suggestion that the government's bank shares be sold off preferentially to small investors; most folk can find £500, particularly if this represents a real discount on the share market price. Unlike the feeble-minded Osborne, Thatcher could see the scale of social impact such a move would make.    

Thatcher and municipal anarchy

On the roof of County Hall, the GLC's offices across the river from Parliament, a massive banner proclaimed the daily count of London's jobless. Red Ken's direct challenge to the government didn't end with annoying MPs using the terraces; a series of refusals, obstructions and challenges led the government in a fit of pique to abolish it - and didn't they wish they could have abolished every large metropolitan council in the country. This was the era when a new rainbow alliance of lesbians, greens, socialist workers, radical feminists and academic Marxists had displaced old Labour from the town halls; the archetypal Labour councillors - male, middle aged, white, ex-manual workers, proud to wear a suit, and who called the cleaners 'love' and 'petal' without thought - had been ousted.

In place of men who had done their national service we had Greenham Wimmin who promptly declared their municipalities nuclear-free zones, a Chief Executive who used 'sexist body language' was dismissed, and flying tribunals to root out sexism and racism swept the country. In the People's Republic of South Yorkshire attempts to eradicate 'love' 'flower' and 'pet' from the language met an unexpected reactionary pushback - from the Yorkshire miners, who could no more stop using these terms to their canteen ladies than they could understand their own inevitable demise. 

In the face of this municipal anarchy, Thatcher centralised with single-minded ruthlessness. She took from local councils whole rafts of powers and competencies they had enjoyed for generations and instituted Direct Rule from Whitehall. It may be that she had little choice. But the effect was to mortally wound her own party; over a million members of the Conservative party walked away between 1979 and 1997, many because they had, at local level, been disempowered. Local government, in the form in which had previously existed, ceased to be. Councils became what they are now - branch offices of Whitehall departments, taking instructions predominantly from Brussels and Westminster rather than from their own aldermen, portmen and burgesses in Council assembled. 

Homeopathy on the NHS

Justifying the £4m - £12m spent annually by the NHS on Homeopathy, Dr Sarah Eames claimed it worth it on the basis of 'positive patient outcomes'. Now given that Homeopathic remedies can have no physical effect whatsoever, any statistically significant patient outcomes must be down to the power of mind over body, or the benefits of positive thinking. And if Homeopathy, then why not Crystal Healing, Shamanism, and the people who tinkle little bells over the unwell? In fact, why not do away with conventional medicine altogether and administer cheap chalk placebos to the ill?

The earliest Christian doctors - monks and friars - fortified by arab scholarship soon learned that faith and waiting for God were not enough, and that the scalpel and Henbane could achieve so much more. By all means let cranks of all varieties do their good for the sick, let's have Nigerian tribal fetishes set up on the nursing stations and Dayak hermaphrodites doing the frog-spirit dance in the aisles, let's have joss sticks, tinkling bells and glittery crystals hanging from the light fittings, but for goodness sake let's not waste money on it. The perpetrators should do their thing for free - and be grateful they're given access to ward-fulls of sick people to play with.

Lady Thatcher

The greatest post-war Prime Minister, and thank God she was in office when Argentina invaded the Falklands. There are negatives, but they're for other times. My favourite scurrilous and apocryphal Spitting Image anecdote? The Prime Minister took her Cabinet out to dine at a conference restaurant. The Maitre d' approached her to order.

"I'll have the British steak"

"And the vegetables?" the Maitre asked

"They'll have the same."

Welfare slavery reprise

It seems some on the left are actually catching-on. Back in September 2012 I wrote

By reserving to itself the duty of care of our less fortunate fellows, the State also creates a barrier to the fulfilment of our own obligations to our neighbour and community; Welfare measures intended with best intention to end the human indignity of the Poor Law and the stigma of poverty have themselves at the start of the 21st century created a Welfare slavery that condemns entire generations of families to a culture of idleness and ill health, deprived of the dignity of work and belonging, alienated from the mutual rewards of citizenship, barred from fulfilment and deprived of that human solidarity "of the poor among themselves, between rich and poor, of workers among themselves, between employers and employees in a business, solidarity among nations and peoples ". Surely to God it's time to end their captivity.

Now Simon Danczuk writing in the Telegraph today;

Anyone who has lived with or spent time with people capable of working that have been parked on benefits for a decade or more will know the tragedy I’m talking about. We should all experience the feeling of satisfaction after a hard day’s work, the pride at getting a promotion, the sense of achievement from making a difference in the workplace. But for those trapped in welfare dependency these experiences will never happen. This is a criminal loss of human potential and something everyone interested in progressive politics should rail against.

IDS reforms are not the answer - but they're a start. 

Army manoeuvres 1913

1913 was, weatherwise, generally a rather dull and cool year in which both sunshine and rainfall were limited. Perfect, in fact, for the second of the large scale army manoeuvres carried out before 1914. The first, in 1912, had exposed Haig as dangerously incompetent. Haig commanded a crack Aldershot 'Red' force with an established command structure, against Grierson's rag-bag 'Blue' force made up of scratch units including Yeomanry and cyclists (classed as cavalry). Despite having all the advantages, including being the attacking side, Haig screwed up monumentally and Grierson walked all over him. 

The 1913 manoeuvres again had a crack 'Brown' force under French of two Infantry corps and a cavalry division against a scratch 'White' force under Monro of Territorials and Yeomanry. This time there was no mistake and Brown duly won. White, however, did remarkably well - making excellent use of aircraft as spotters, motor transport and cyclists, by now correctly classed as mounted infantry. French had not done well, however. The problems in co-ordinating the movement of 50,000 men and 25,000 horses in the field had not been overcome and the generals were then practising very much a war of rapid movement. The stars were the aircraft, and they were to prove their worth in 1914 at the Aisne and the Marne.

Yet the following year it was French and Haig that led the BEF of 75,000 men in Belgium. Grierson died of a heart attack shortly after landing.  

Between now and next year there will be a great deal of guff that portrays farmhands and factory workers flocking to the colours in August 1914 and 'in the trenches' a month later. This will all be bollocks and can be disregarded. The trenches didn't come until later, and the only men sent to France and Belgium were the BEF and slightly later those trained men in the reserve. That first phase of the war, very much a war of movement, was fought by the professionals and no doubt lessons had been learned at Brigade level and below from the 1912 / 1913 exercises that served them well.

Dead sheep

Hill sheep are not entirely stupid. In a driving blizzard, they will huddle together in the lee of a stone wall. Normally it works. But when the snow just goes on and on and the drifts cover them they die where they shelter, only to be found by the hill shepherd's dog, or when the snow thaws. 

Radio 4's 'On Your Farm' broadcast this morning is shocking and powerful, all the more so as it features only the voices of a single reporter, Sybil Ruscoe, and those of hill farmers now burying their dead stock. Hill farmers are as tough as their stock, and their voices were steady, but beneath the laconic accounting of stock losses the tension they were feeling was audible, a quiver in the voice that they could not disguise or repress. The loss is not so much the lambs but the breeding ewes - and to lose 250 from a flock of 500 may be a terminal event. 

There will be no government aid, and this is ideologically right, though it means a further diminution in those working lives we used as a nation to hold iconic of our island breed - the hill farmer, the trawlerman, the forester - and no doubt the survivors will be the toughest and most resilient of their kind. 

But please, no whining or pleading today for the indolent urban welfare underclass and their 42" plasma TVs. I'm really not in the mood.

Pity the poor Grauniad

Pity the poor Grauniad. In the away-with-the-fairies world that many of its writers inhabit the issues couldn't be clearer; austerity measures should cause riots on the streets, the parks should be filled with homeless workers displaced by the housing benefit cuts, NHS workers should be on strike and in order to escape recession all the government has to do is employ more people at even higher wages in the public sector. It's a strange, twilight fantasy world and it's so out of touch with the country that one feels the hacks are continuing to write solely to an audience of each-other.

'Where are the sistas?' Wails the paper; 'where are the street activists?' and most puzzling of all to the hacks, why has the Guardian lost the fight for public support for welfare largesse? In fact, just getting the word 'welfare' back into common speech was half the victory; when this blog first started, using the word welfare was a bit like saying handicapped instead of disabled, or bastardy instead of illigitimacy. And there's another word for something that is more widely recognised than Guardian hacks would ever imagine - the concept of an underclass. Mick Philpott exemplifies membership; idle, welfare-scrounging, violent, sexually exploitative, poorly educated, a nightmare neighbour, costing the rest of us a disproportionate fortune in police and criminal justice, social work, special education, health and housing and management services. Everyone who lives in contact with them at some level recognises them - except Guardian hacks, from whose Strawberry Hill gothic villas such life is invisible. 

You see, if the Guardian's Leveson-loving writers (with a few honourable exceptions) were proper hacks instead of luvvies playing Lady Bountiful, they'd be running columns headed 'Where are the journalists?' For there seem few resident at York Way, N1.

Unintended consequences

I don't know why, but this made me smile this morning. 

You may have noticed a newish trend for retro-fitting external wall insulation to blocks of flats; 4" or so of mineral wool batts covered in a coloured render. Not only do they dramatically cut heating bills for those in old solid-walled apartments, they are proving very popular with green woodpeckers. Once they're through the render on a corner, it's short work to create a warm, snug, waterproof home to raise a family in at safe treetop level. And as birds learn very quickly from each-other, these are proving more popular than the harder work of hollowing out a burrow in a live tree.

The devil is always in the detail

Back on 6th March I quoted Ambrose Evans-Pritchard - "An internal devaluation is achieved (under EMU) by forcing unemployment to such excruciating levels that it breaks the back of labour resistance to pay cuts. It is the polar opposite of a currency devaluation that spreads the pain" - to precis the Eurozone's approach to the crisis, to squeeze real wages whilst leaving the profits of firms and corporates intact. 

The Guardian reprints a piece that underlines Draghi's innate mendacity in letting this particular cat out of the bag; he recently presented a chart showing each Eurozone country's real output value (i.e. excluding inflation) against each's nominal (i.e. including inflation) wage growth. 

The point Draghi was making was that the blue countries (Germany & co) were 'balanced' whilst the naughty red Club Med countries had let wages outstrip productivity and therefore breaking the back of labour resistance to pay cuts was the answer. 

In fact this isn't the case.

Labour cash for Blow-ins

It can be hard being a blow-in, parachuted into a strange constituency miles from home about which you know nothing, yet with huge expectations from London party HQ over your ability to clock-up votes for the Party. The Guardian quotes Peter Wall, former Labour General Secretary "If you can't afford to take a couple of months off work, pay for accommodation and travel, abandon your family and pay for your own materials you are screwed. In other words you need to be a political insider whose boss is supporting them; a trade union official or very rich". Labour's answer, it seems, is more cash for Blow-ins. But wait; what's this in the same story?

"After 12 years of David Miliband as MP, the local Labour party has opted for a local candidate, a woman born and raised in the area. Karen is a bus driver with a disabled husband, who has lived in a three-bedroom home for years – but the coalition thinks they have too much space and has cut their housing benefit."

Hmm. So no need to pay for accommodation and travel there then, or for Karen to abandon her family. And since she's a local choice, local party members will be more willing to pay for 'materials'. It's unlikely her bus company will give her paid time-off, but as she's on income support anyway that may not be too much of a blow. And with a PSV she can drive the party campaign coach, to boot. And with every confidence that she'll be elected she will face a new dilemma; whether as a serving MP to continue to occupy a three bed Council house ...

Plastic History from the BBC

I sat through BBC's 'The Village' wondering why a production so lavishly funded would be so short of horses. The story was ostensibly about a farmer attempting to harvest a huge, post-war sized field of wheat by himself with a scythe. And no horses. One wondered how he had ploughed the field in the first instance - perhaps he harnessed his downtrodden wife and sons to the plough. And no farmworkers, either; in reality, even small farmers in 1914 employed several agricultural labourers, particularly a farmer who owned his farm, one of the rural elite when a tenancy for two or three lives was the norm. And though the thing was called 'The Village' it was actually a small market town, complete with municipal baths in which the town's women spent their leisurely day like Roman matriarchs. Public baths in reality of course were for public hygiene rather than leisure; places of carbolic soap and harsh treatment to rid a crowded town's poor of lice and fleas.

Either the writer Peter Moffat knows very little of his history, or this is yet another deliberate distortion of history by the BBC. The Telegraph's TV critic Ben Lawrence knows no better either; "This was drama as history where the past is definitely another country" he writes this morning. Dickhead.

This isn't petty picking at minor problems of costume or props - a Sam Browne worn the wrong way, or a car not yet in production - the whole thing is so fundamentally flawed, so historically dishonest as to do real harm to the memory of the harshness of pre-Great War rural life. So, in place of this sanitised, plastic BBC history I offer you two good alternatives;

washing the corpse - from das Weisse Band

First, Michael Haneke's 'Der weisse Band' - available in full length on Youtube though with Spanish subtitles  http://youtu.be/lpOwFLER47E

The second of course is Peter Hall's 1974 film 'Akenfield' - still available on DVD, but this clip gives a flavour. With horses.

Mouth-breather fatboy bangs rattle on pram

Kim Jong-un, North Korea's mouth-breathing fatboy, knows something that the Western analysts don't. It could be that his prison-nation is facing starvation, or that a domestic insurgency is bubbling away dangerously, or a US counter-cyber-attack has killed his military computers, or that China has finally got tough and given him an ultimatum. Whatever the cause, the fatboy has felt it necessary to demonstrate to his slave-people his he-man credentials; for Jong-un's substitute for significance in the trouser department are his missiles. In the carefully released snaps from the fatboy-bunker they are shown as targeted towards the US - but it's also a reminder to China that they can equally easily point North, and to the North Korean people that he has the overwhelming means to massacre them should they disobey. 

Fatboy learning his letters

Unlike China's new leader, who has not been reticent in showing his glamorous wife in public, Kim Jong-un's wife has never been seen. Some commentators blame a slow-puncture problem. Others have suggested that he's eaten her.

After riddance of Miliband rubbish, what about Qatada?

Peter Oborne is spot-on this morning. David Miliband is nothing but a greedy little failure throwing the sort of petulant hissy-fit that he could have learned from Edward Heath. Yet as Oborne points out, the BBC, Guardian and Common Purpose media establishment are reacting as though JFK had ceded the 1960 Democratic candidateship to Adlai Stevenson. Miliband was no JFK. He was just a spoilt, privileged rich kid with no experience of life and an enormous sense of entitlement who believed politics was the surest route to great wealth and fame. I hope he makes a success of his new life in America, and I hope even more that he never returns to the shores of this land.

In the farce that Qatada's continued avoidance of deportation to Jordan has become, it is important not to blame our judges. Unlike the rag-bag collection of untrained, unqualified political has-beens with a key to the dressing-up box who make up the ECHR, the Master of the Rolls sitting with LLJ Elias and Richards applied the law perfectly in rejecting the Home Secretary's appeal. We've dug ourselves into this mess, and though Mr Othman deserves little more than a trip to Tower Green and the keen blade of the headsman's axe we must dig ourselves out by the same convoluted legal means.
 

Privatising the scenery

You can't blame developers. Flogging the 'view' - something that doesn't belong to them - has always been a trick in their armoury to increase profit at little extra expense. So London's river is now lined on both banks with shoddy twelve-story blocks, almost identical, with galvanised balconettes, Ogee roofline and the universal use of coloured render stripes in blues and burnt orange. Immediately behind them are wide strips of undeveloped brownfield land. Dwellings built here won't have any view of course - it being blocked by the riverside apartments. You could easily fit half a million new dwellings on London's brownfield sites - but most of those left undeveloped suffer from not having a 'view', not being near the tube or DLR or having 'bad neighbour' development adjoining. So not attractive to housebuilders.

So of course the developers are looking at London's green belt; here there are free views a plenty. Well, at least until another speculative developer builds their estate over them. Short term profit, long term losses. Louis MacNeice's verse always come to mind

Splayed outwards through the suburbs houses, houses for rest
Seducingly rigged by the builder, half-timbered houses with lips pressed
So tightly and eyes staring at the traffic through bleary haws
And only a six-inch grip of the racing earth in their concrete claws;
In these houses men as in a dream pursue the Platonic Forms
With wireless and cairn terriers and gadgets approximating to the fickle norms
And endeavour to find God and score one over the neighbour
By climbing tentatively upward on jerry-built beauty and sweated labour.

Who would lend money to a bank?

Who would lend money to a bank? Well, all of us - everyone who operates a current account. Under UK law money paid into your account is a 'chose in action' and becomes the bank's property. You become merely a creditor of the bank I was reminded of this last year - with the matter still not resolved - when I became the victim of card fraud. Or rather, the bank did. When the fraud department asked "Have you reported this to the Police?" it was a question intended to verify the validity of claims rather than to elicit a useful response; the banks know very well that the Police won't take reports of card fraud from customers, as I explained to the clerk on the phone "No - it's your job, not mine, to report it to the Police - it's your money, not mine, that's been defrauded".

It's a fundamental point, and one which I suspect is not readily apparent to account holders with Cypriot banks. The banks don't put your savings in a safe and guard them - they gamble them recklessly, squander them in ill-advised ventures and lend them to people who can't repay them, and at the end of it all if the firm becomes bankrupt you are just another creditor with a shared claim on what assets remain. The government, of course, have intervened by guaranteeing deposits up to a certain amount, but this is a policy, and not a legal obligation.

Max Hastings in the Mail today calls the Cypriot action "One of the nastiest and most immoral political acts in modern times" - that is, requiring the shareholders and investors to take the haircut rather than the taxpayer. Well, frankly, it's not. Those savings haven't been 'stolen', they've been mis-invested in firms (banks) with an inherent risk of failure. One balances the risk of lending one's money to a bank and its failing against the risk of keeping the cash under one's bed and its being stolen.

And this is the real danger of Cyprus; not the legality or morality of the action, but that it may propel investors across Europe to feel better protected with their cash hidden at home than on loan to a failing bank. Once a run starts, once confidence goes, the whole fractional reserve edifice inevitably comes tumbling down.