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MIND OVER CHATTER ARCHIVE

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Pulling Sir Freddie's teeth: Mad dentist strikes

It is a sobering thought indeed to note that our country at the moment is led and represented by a pompous autistic, an arrogant young twit with the skin and tact of a rhino, a fiscal manager who looks perpetually confused, and an ignorant gender bigot. But it is to the last of these alone we must turn again this morning, for she is without doubt the greatest danger to our culture and freedoms since Hitler.

Early in 2008 (Grievous bodily Harman) nby described our Deputy Prime Minister as 'deranged and divisive', and subsequent events have only hardened our view. This person who now, astonishingly, harbours an ambition to be the first female Labour leader, has ventured out from her 1973 Wimmin's Camp of gender balancing and into the rest of the world - a place of which she understands precisely nothing.

The opening paragraph above used the words 'ignorant'and 'bigot', so let us examine whether such harsh judgement is fair. Harriet Harman is clearly unaware of how basic liberties are protected and nurtured, but this is a kind conclusion: it could well be she knows perfectly well how this is done and undone, but simply doesn't care. Suffice to say that in three pieces of legislation to date, she has put the 'needs' of her own gender (most of whom don't recognise or want them anyway) above both the European Courts and simple common sense. The EU Human Rights Court will throw out this latest Prostitution Bill as sure as eggs are eggs, but we proceed anyway: ignoring social advice, trampling on experience, angering a cross section of society - and thus wasting an enormous amount of time passing a law that is unconstitutional in EU legal terms.

Ms Harman is a bigot purely because she represents but one gender, and believes the other one is to blame for everything - divorce, child neglect, paid-for sex and the breakdown of our economic system. In this black and white context, she is the Iain Paisley of her age, only less attractive - and infinitely less charming in private. But the latest Problem With Men she has discovered concerns Sir Freddie Goodwin and his pension plan. Here again, Harman's guiding light is controlling ignorance.

Nby readers know our view of Goodwin well enough. In 2007 we described him thus:

'....a vain and silly man who has - in purchasing ABN Amro - paid far too much to buy something of no commercial use. In the City last week, not a single person whose opinion I rate could find one sound business reason for the deal; and thus we are drawn inexorably to the conclusion that Sir Badloss must have a very small penis indeed.'

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Surveillance, Freedom of Information, and the shifting sands of power

 

 

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Re: Britain

The prefix 're' sums up contemporary Britain quite neatly. Its culture is risk-averse, profit-fixated, and largely uncreative: thus it is forced to fall back on 're' time after time.

Many cinema films are remakes. When these run out, old ideas are turned into returns - of Batman, the Jedi, or any other hero that might be to hand. Most of the West End's theatreland is showing revivals, and when not doing that features re-engineered ideas from other media: The Producers - the Stage Play; Mamma Mia - the Musical; We will Rock You - the Queen collection....andonandonandonandon.

Restaurants and shop chains are regularly revamped and brands relaunched. News stories broken at the start of a day are rehashed until nightfall on 24/7 news stations.

Political Parties are repositioned, because they can no longer live up to the old one. Government cock-ups spawn reviews, in which the data is revisited and then the report quietly filed somewhere more private. If a policy gets bad press, it is immediately reconsidered, reshaped and then regurgitated....in the hope that this will reassure people.

Yet the three 're' words we need today are largely absent from the scene. They are renewal (of ethical values and behaviours); revitalisation - of our national genius for invention, risk taking and having a go; and reform of our Constititional processes. Not one of the current Parties truly wants any of these. Peopled by the bland and supported by complexifying civil servants, they fear all radical change.

And that makes us probably the most unhealthy society in the developed world.

Taking liberties

Two important reasons we are rapidly losing basic freedoms are first, extremists filtering into a fellow-travelling host population; and second, ethically bereft citizens who have either forgotten how to behave - or never knew in the first place.

But probably just as much restricted liberty comes from nothing more complicated than government incompetence in targeting nuisance.

The Home Office has lost track of terrorists (and let the first wave in anyway) so now we've all got to have ID cards. The police can't get tagging technology to work or keep up with petty crime going unpunished, so now we're all going to get eyeprints and gene data stuck into our passports. Speed cameras either don't make any difference or don't work, so now the suggestion is obligatory 2-way Satnav in every vehicle.

And of course, ISPs claim they can't halt the Tsunami of spam going through their switchgear (what a joke) so now they simply spam out any email containing an image and/or over fifteen recipients.

But this won't be the reason liberal democracy comes to an end in Britain: that will happen because everyone's too busy or distracted to care.

Dear Everyone in charge

This is really all most people want: a stable life with reasonable expectations, a better education for their kids, the elderly looked after with dignity, protection from commercial scammers, safe communities in which to mingle freely, a form of public health provision that is both targeted and efficient, a degree of job satisfaction, a hobby or interest, access to sport, time to relax while founding and building a happy home - and above all, genuine empowerment towards a community say and responsibility, alongside a level of trust in those tasked with spearheading the running of that community.

There is no way on Earth that the disparities of wealth and mendacious commerce we have in the UK today could possibly support and complement such a devolved, fairer, more 'grown-up' role for our citizens. Any government in this frightening future will have to extract far more money from the super-rich businesses and individuals who currently do what they wish with little or no government interference.

This is not a call for 'wealth redistribution', because such an idea has never worked - and anyway runs contrary to both the appetitive nature of Homo sapiens, and the inequities of ability in all societies. Rather, the vast majority of more fairly raised taxes should go into backing community entrepreneurs, conservation schemes, holistic social education, effective population control, medical research and provision, local agriculture, socially useful technical innovation, and craft skills at all levels.

 

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2008:

a final word on stimulation and welfare

For all its ludicrous 'New' prefix, Labour remains a corporatist political Party: a believer in Big and On Message and hubris-fuelled promises that quickly become a hostage to fortune. It likes One Size Fits all and universal largesse - both of which reflect the movement's fundamental inability since 1997 to recognise the difference between the deserving and the desultory. It is this lack of discernment which lies at the heart of its abject failure to deal with the current fiscal, economic and human crisis.

The Party which belatedly dumped Clause Four clings still to the principle of No Means Testing. In practice, what this means is a Government genetically unable to accept the idea of targeted relief. This is a pretty fundamental problem given that in the current crisis, if Britain is not to finish up both morally and financially bankrupt, targeting should be central to relief strategy.

I do not attach the term 'relief' solely to the individual employee: I associate it equally with business. The sheer size of the bailout for banks doesn't make them any different for me to any other welfare cheat; and equally, the innocent victim-families over-persuaded to borrow by banks are no different to the fundamentally healthy small entrepreneurs currently being strangled by those same banks. I'm not one for uncaring Survival of the Fittest, but I do think young primates deserve our help more than pea-brained dinosaurs.

Some of the damage done by untargeted relief is already in the past, worse luck. I have yet to find any economist or politician able to tell me why we didn't just bail out the Northern Rock savers and let the corporate entity go to the wall. Equally, nobody seems able to explain why we spent more on rescuing our financial system than the Americans did - their economy being 37 times the size of ours, an' all.

The biggest lesson of all I take out of Globalist Bourse-financed capitalism's latest bust is that it is not a small world: that as some of us always suspected, Theodore Levitt was talking out of his hat, and Milt Friedman was a theorist whose daft ideas never produced anything other than chaos in practice. It is a very big, culturally and economically multivariate world. A world which - taken as one entity - the G20 leaders have been less than impressive to date in their 'ideas' as to how to get the show back on the road.

I think it should be the job of all those who oppose More of the Same to put forward the following cogent argument:

Smaller, community-level targeted relief and growth-support policies carried out by devolved and accountable government is far more likely to build for the future. So far, national and supra-national schemes have had minimal effect, rewarding only those who failed in the past. Only targeted support will give the best opportunities for the most deserving businesses and individuals. We only have a limited amount of money: let us ensure we get the best possible value for that money.

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With every week that passes, Brown's regime becomes more and more Nixonian

 

As the Greengate affair rumbles along in the background, it is hard for those of us who remember early 1970s America to ignore the parallel: an increasingly controlling Executive, fears for personal liberty - and a man at the top with serious personality dysfunction.

Despite the chalk and cheese of their politics, Nixon and Brown do share striking similarities of background and character.

They had puritanical backgrounds with domineering fathers, were intellectual prodigies, intensely private - and awkward in company and public, at the same time giving the impression of being - while heterosexual - somehow 'not quite right'. The 1960 anti-Nixon slogan 'Would you buy a used car from this Man?' seemed to fit immediately; but I've also now lost count of the number of women who find Brown 'odd' - in one case remarking, 'I wouldn't leave my children with him'.

The observations may be unfair, but there is something abnormally untrustworthy in the dissembling, shifty nature of these men - an ethical doubt borne out in both cases by shadows and clouds after every episode - and strangely locked cupboards where nobody may go.

Both were manipulative in their cultivation of 'poor me': Nixon the small-town farmboy who 'never had it easy like the Kennedys', and Brown the young man agonising about potentially lost sight - a fact the politician kept to himself until he needed a sympathetic leadership image. Dicky wrote about 'Five Crises', and Gordon continues to insist he is the best man in crises. Nixon had his Kennedy to envy, and Brown has his Blair to hate: 'it came naturally to them, but I've had a to work at it' is also a shared view of their lives - displaying an obvious desire to be seen as noble and heroic.

Fellow sufferes from indecisive depression, they instinctively disappeared from the stage when blame was being assigned. They expected people to accept ridiculous explanations of dubious behaviour, and had associates who insisted they were very nice really - but swore obscenely at aides (or screamed at secretaries) in private.

I was struck by the remark made by Lord Frost that there was 'a good Nixon and a bad Nixon'. This is probably true of all of us to some extent, but the black hat/white hat schizophrenia is something that sticks to Brown in precisely the same way as to Tricky Dicky: they meant well. And so ergo, the ends must surely justify the means.....because of course, they had our best interests at heart.

This is perhaps where the most chilling comparison comes into play. Ever since the Watergate Affair, every political scandal has become the lazy journalist's excuse to slap 'gate'on the end. But the arrest of Tory MP Damian Green (although oddly, few are calling it Greengate as yet) may well at last merit that suffix.

The emerging facts have been giving me a curious case of deja vu all week. Say what you like, this smells bad for New Labour - and my hack's instinct says there is rarely smell without excrement. We have a Home Secretary (Attorney General) denying all knowledge of an operation known to others with less reason to know; we have a Leader of the House (Congessional majority Leader) arranging secret meetings with a Speaker, overrruling that Speaker with Executive subterfuge (Haldeman), and then a Chief Whip (Erlichman) using the familiar despicable pressures to get the vote out and defeat Opposition motions for full enclosure. If ever a person sat in utter contempt of the House of Commons, then that was Harriet Harman (Howard Hunt) last Thursday, grinning inanely as both Opposition Parties poured doubt, scorn and dismay all over her disgraceful performance.

Then a letter from the Cabinet Office to the police surfaces, insisting on an investigation into Home Office leaks involving 'considerable damage to national security'. And for some as yet unclear reason, the police seem on solid ground when they pitch up at the Palace of Westminster, bundle their way past the Sergeant at Arms and start searching a legislator's office without a warrant. This strikes me, using my common sense, as the action of senior plods pretty damn certain that they were acting on a government brief. Which, in a way, the Cabinet Office letter was.

I will always defend the right of our security services to do what the Americans call 'bad shit'. There are, after all, lots of exceedingly mad and nasty folks out there who would do it to us without batting an eyelid. But this is a Government led by a man who thinks he has a Higher Authority - an arrogant and obsessively driven man who always thinks he knows best - and has established form as a man who plays the national security card as an airbrush to make his historical errors disappear. The Home Office has plenty to cover up - including (obviously) mendacious cock-ups about people entering the country who shouldn't have done.

Last Friday, a small piece on page two of the FinancialTimes pointed up the increasing Conservative frustration with Gordon Brown's persistent deferral of a promise to brief the Opposition prior to any election. The pledge (allegedly made nine months ago) said that the process in relation to some of the key fiscal and economic factors would begin on January 4th 2009. There is no sign at all of this happening, and this in turn suggests two obvious hypotheses: one, there is yet more smelly stuff the Government doesn't want the Opposition to know; and two, Gordon plans a snap election during which most of the damning facts are unavailable to both electorate and Opposition. (Lest we forget, this is what got Tricky Dicky re-elected in 1972)

Meanwhile, the Cabinet Office letter has moved the case closer to further senior figures. We are now at the stage with Watergate where Woodward and Bernstein needed Deep Throat's guidance to establish a Presidential order. In my view, there are heads which will roll in the end, although the Prime Minister was probably uninvolved personally. But whether that opinion is correct or not, we should all chew very hard on this undeniable reality: had Green been the recipient of leaks from his own Deep Throat a few years from now, GCHQ would have known about it instantly - and we would never have known about the content at all.

(Also posted at LibdemVoice, 17.12.08)

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Let's accept the pain, but think harder about why it's happening

I have decided after some reflection that the best new silly name for our Chancellor is Analgesic Darling. Perhaps the new US President will become Barack Obalma, or the French one Nicolas Sarcosier. Almost all elected politicians now seem to care for nothing beyond keeping the People sweet and thus staying in their positions of powerlessness.

It occasionally amuses me to think what contemporary British leaders would've done after Dunkirk in 1940. Itself a disastrous defeat spun into a 'glorious rescue', Churchill abruptly stopped the spin a fortnight later when he told the electors "I have nothing to offer you but blood, toil, tears and sweat". People alive at the time have told me again and again how that wake-up call - however blunt - was a huge relief after years of dissembling appeasement: 'at last we're getting real - now let's get on with it'.

I'd imagine Miliband would have told Hitler (as his tanks grouped outside the French seaside town) that "This is Herr Hitler's last and final chance to withdraw, otherwise we shall get jolly angry". Darling meanwhile would stress how impractical invading over water is - "It hasn't happened for nine hundred years" - and Brown's insistence that, compared to Poland, France and Holland, Britain was far better equipped to resist invasion would assuredly have become the new broken record. As for Mandelson - who knows? He would be urging the Warmington-On-Sea bank manager to repair the brave ships back from Dunkirk, ready to reinvade the Continent "once Mr Hitler has come to his senses as I'm sure he will - he's a charming man really, I was his houseguest for a while and nothing was too much trouble and those pretty blond SS boys in their shiny boots look absolutely dreamy".

The Government's terror of taking the British people into its confidence reflects of course the deeply patronising and superior attitude all those at Westminster have always had towards the poor, defenceless and misled: their assumption is that we will all collapse with a nervous breakdown - as opposed to seeing truth as the tonic for which many have been asking for over five years.

As a few enlightened media observers - and almost everyone at senior levels in commerce - at last accept, the $6.1 trillion invested worldwide to date on 'repairing' the global financial system is not only having no effect, it was never going to. We must now file this disappearing cash mountain under 'being seen to be doing something'. (Unconsciously, Gordon Brown gives this away by calling the Tories 'the do nothing Party'. If only there was enough intellect on the front bench of that Party to bury him permanently for saying it.)

The cash burned in the name of global neo-liberalist madness was far too little far too late. A stitch in time, by comparison, would've done the trick for nothing. But that time was 2002, when only a Bull future was seen - as opposed to a credit-fuelled rally against the start of a long-term Bearish environment. And yes, hindsight is a wonderful thing: but many of us railed against the credit mechanism back then, too.

The simple bottom line is as follows: the policy of this and other governments around the world is to get people spending again, thus incurring more debt, thus incurring an even bigger disaster when new marketing targets for lending can't be met....thanks to bolted-horse credit restrictions. Only by looking at it in this light can one appreciate how utterly insane 'fiscal stimulation' is.

It is time to stop putting off the pain: we must take the hit, and take it now. No more anaesthetic: from here on everyone needs to bite leather and try to ignore the sawing sounds as best they can. But part of the problem is that very few people have a clear idea of what the hit should be - and how we can avoid more collisions with fantasy in the future.

We have arrived where we are - in both a long and short-term sense - for one major reason: human hubris. We've had it ever since the bigger brain was fitted 700,000 years ago, and short of evolving into another species right now (technically impossible) the only solution is to allow for it in every system we produce for everything.

As nby has suggested for some time (The Point) there are two theoretically opposed groups in society - the globalists and the politically correct - who for their own reasons wish to pretend respectively that (a) men and women live by bread alone and (b) men and women are nice and fluffy and terribly sensitive. Both have a vested interest in denial of reality: and thus what we've arrived at in the West is multinational corporate irresponsibility alongside hopelessly untargeted social rules and benefits.

Happily, we have neuroscientific and social behavioural data to hand today which show that the overwhelming majority of humans get a far bigger kick out of having fun with their families than making money; that many personality traits are both inherited and socialised; and that, when things get too easy (or the idea of pack cooperation is rejected) we become quite unfeasibly greedy.

The problem is that none of this learning has been taken on board by anyone in a major Western government. There is one leader on the planet at the moment - President Da Silva of Brazil - who has come out of the closet to say 'the first thing we need to do is escape from the madhouse'. Everyone else is still drivelling on about jolts and kick-starts and ensuring nobody suffers...except for Harriet Harman (who thinks gender balance is the answer) and Jacqui Smith (who's gone MI6 native and clearly believes an overdose of Hobbesian repression is what we nasty, brutish voters need).

The view of this highly esteemed but regrettably tiny organ remains the same, except with the new added urgency ingredient: forget fixing globally aligned banks and bourses as the only course - it can't be done. Remember instead that, as a naturally commercial species, sapiens man no longer has an objective. It ain't production targets and it ain't command economy, fuelling either with credit is the ultimate folly, and doing them at the expense of families and communities is costing taxpayers a fortune.

What we need above all is to ditch trickle-down economics in favour of trickle-up political reform - a pressure for fundamental reform the Establishment can't ignore. The best way to achieve this is by the internet - before GCHQ effectively closes it down as a means of protest and enlightenment.

My offer for interested parties to get in touch about this still stands. So far we have ten recruits: join up with this acorn by emailing to john@johnaward.netjohn@johnaward.net

 

 

 

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THEY CAME ILLEGALLY. I DID NOT KNOW WHO THEY WERE AFTER. THEY HAD NO WARRANT. I DID NOT KNOW THIS. NEXT TIME I WILL ASK. I HAVE DONE MY DUTY.

This is the gist of Speaker Martin’s defence. It is the defence of a man (and his sergeant at arms) who know nothing about their jobs - officials who had far less of a task than the men who faced Charles I – a Monarch who did at least have a legal warrant to arrest five MPs, the ‘birds who have flown’.

It was pretty pathetic stuff, this statement. Worse still, it showed that a sloppy police operation by a bunch of chippy coppers (who deliberately misled the sergeant at arms) could quite easily have been turned away at the outside gate; but they succeeded in gaining access to the secret and private files of a Shadow Minister about his legal business. Once in the MP’s office, the police illegally objected to their presence being filmed, and ejected a senior Tory MP without the legally required explanation. It would be good in the light of this completely unauthorised trespass, perhaps, if MI6 concentrated on tightening up on House of Commons security.

We would all have more faith in the Speaker’s statement were it not for the leaks about secret ducks-in-a-row meetings, and the now certain knowledge that the operation was masterminded by the Cabinet Office. Are we really to believe that the most centrally responsible Minister Jacqui Smith knew nothing about this? Can we accept the bumbling drivel offered up to Paxman last night by House Leader Harriet Harman that she too was ignorant of it and somehow still has confidence in the Speaker and sergeant?

Above anything else, this case shows up the woeful ignorance of police, Ministers, Speakers and public about how our libertarian democracy works – and how few sabots would be required to destroy its engine. But the most willfully ignorant of all (and why are we surprised?) is the Prime Minister himself, who laughably argued during yesterday’s debate that the police claim to be defending national security had substance. He should perhaps explain to the British people – having infuriatingly refused to answer the Opposition’s questions – how immigration department cock-ups and lies in relation to dangerous immigrants remaining unknown could possibly be in the interests of national security.

We should remember one vital fact in all this: these are the amoral, dissembling, hypocritical and arrogant Ministers asking us to give £12billion of our own money to have their pinched goblins spy on us. The mind boggles at such astonishing nerve. And the request demands the loud cry of “No, no, no – and no again!”

 

 

Why the John Sergeant affair is a metaphor for the democratic dilemma

How strange our contemporary media are. The old show Come Dancing is relaunched as Strictly Come Dancing, and becomes a hit chiefly because it uses celeb contestants - who demonstrate week in week out that 'strictly' has become one of those Orwellian words meaning 'loosely'.

This is fine for the sniffy judging panel, as it allows them to patronise and insult these out-0f-their-depth good sports, and thus tell the audience at home precisely what they should think.

Sadly for them, John Sergeant has been so obviously taking the mickey out of the format's pretensions for the last few weeks, he has become the Nation's favourite. As of last weekend, the former TV journalist could've trodden on his partner's head at every turn and still come top of the poll.

"Look" whinged the show's Arlene Phillips, "This show is supposed to be about dancing skills". What complete rubbish: it's just another game show. Without the incompetent celebs, the show would be going out at 1.35 am on Ruritanian TV Gold. Ms Phillips was no better than an unlikely Mugabe trying to reinterpret the nature of her office. Eventually, this hypocritical woman took to insulting Sergeant in the tabloids, as a result of which John rapidly concluded he could do without the grief.

But in the media age, this is a frequent dilemma: not only do those in charge not know what they're at, the audience don't appreciate how to make a proper judgement. Plato said that without an informed electorate, democracy must inevitably degrade into the rule of the rabble. While in one way, the audience sticking two fingers up to the show's experts is to be admired, the accusation that they chose on the 'wrong' basis would be justified - were it not for the double standards of the experts.

If ever one wanted a metaphor for democracy in Cool Britannia, then this is it.

 

 

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George Osborne may be a twit, but that doesn't mean he's wrong about Brown's borrowing

Hypocrisy in public life may be almost universal these days, but some things never change. Perhaps out of national loyalty, perhaps because they're dim - or a bit of both - Osborne and Cameron have been woefully slow to put the Brown & Darling Moneyborrowing Emporium in the dock. But now that the Shadow Chancellor has finally said what so many commentators are thinking, oh just listen to the howls of crypto-patriotic rage from those who have landed us in this mess.

As the BBC finally got round to mentioning this morning, Osborne is simply doing his job - and better late than never is probably the grown-up response. 'Don't mention the War' isn't going to get us anywhere.

Two huge fictions have been put about by New Labour since the return of Campbell and Mandelson to the fold. First, that we are in a good position to borrow because the Government has prudently paid back our Foreign Debt over the years. This is a lie, plain and simple: the Debt has been getting bigger since 2002. (See Nailing the Lies)

Second, that it's OK to smash through our debt/GDP ratio, because at 45% it's one of the lowest in the G20. To which the answer is 'no it isn't even though yes it is'.

The impression is often given with debt/liquidity announcements that this is merely the Government's deficit. But of course it is the Nation's deficit. The Government owes 45% of what we've all made in terms of output over the years. Because it's one of the lowest doesn't make it alright - it means the Western world is broke to a greater or lesser extent. If the last year hasn't demonstrated that, then nothing ever will.

More to the point, credit risk is (especially now) not assessed on the basis of one's debt compared to others - but rather, on one's ability to repay. And on that basis, no leading nation is in a bigger hole than we are.

Consider: the UK has $52billion in reserves - a mere $8 billion of which is in gold. When the world is going belly up, gold is ultimately the only thing people will accept as payment. (See gold manipulation)

Italy has twice the reserves and 8.5 times the gold. France is in almost exacly the same position. Germany has three times the reserves and eleven times as much gold.

Britain's debt collatoral is the worst of any developed European nation - without exception. Who cares if the US debt ration is higher at 65%? They have enough deep storage gold in Fort Knox to pay everyone off tomorrow....allegedly. They also have vast natural resources and - so far - a strengthening currency.

If you want a barometer of confidence in the UK - which, if you recall, was going to get through this Depression far more easily than any other G8 nation - look at the Pound's performance recently: as predicted here (Lookout) in a fortnight it has gone from 1.26 Euros down to 1.16, and from 1.74 to the dollar to 1.49.

There are cynics who suggest Brown's pressure on the other G20 states to spend in the same reckless manner is merely him wanting everyone to come on board his Titanic. I don't think the bloke is that street-wise: I think the Brown/Darling problem is a belief that any action will do - just so long as it's seen to be action.

My own view of Osborne remains the same: he is a lightweight with no more idea what to do than anyone else. But sometimes the chimps are right about the cage temperature. A run on the Pound is exceedingly likely, and nby continues to advise all its readers to get out as quickly as possible.

We should forget right now any thought of 'Iceland couldn't happen here'. Of course it could: there are a number of nations who would be delighted to see the UK bankrupt at the moment - EU goblins who want us in the Euro and under their thumb, Russians keen to push out their frontiers, and Chinese who want their annexation of Africa to go ahead unremarked and unhindered.

Lest we forget, Iceland has been largely baled out by Moscow, South Africa's bank by Beijing, and many multinational banks by Arabs. This is geopolitics we're dealing with here: we need to get real and understand that by spending in this manner, the UK is dooming itself to satellite nation status for the next two generations.

 

 

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Blame who you like, but voters increasingly know where the responsibility lies

As our surreal culture plunges deeper into a morass of avoided responsibility and the pursuit of blame, most people one meets ask "Where is it going to end?"

In Haringey, a child is brutalised and sixty social and medical professionals fail to notice. A senior psychiatric guru 'explains' this by saying on Radio Four "there is a monitoring disorientation syndrome in such cases".

In Jersey, a children's home made infamous by apparently grisly excavations is downgraded to 'mere investigation' status by a police chief who describes the bizarre catalogue of evidential errors as 'slight inaccuracies'.

Gordon Brown's explanation for selling gold at $237 an oz in 1999 is 'broadening the investment portfolio'. His Chancellor's interpretation of the credit crunch is that it was 'unforeseeable'.

Hank Paulson persuades Congress to spend seven hundred million bucks to bail out his mates, and then (following one dead-cat bounce lasting a week) proclaims the operation a major success. Meanwhile, all major world markets head south again - and only billions of dollars in quietly sold gold reserves can keep the dollar in the running as a global currency.

Adam Applegarth tells a Parliamentary committee following the £80 billion demise of Northern Rock that it was not his fault because 'the business model was completely robust'.

Opposition Leader David Cameron foolishly attempts to lay the blame for Haringey on the Prime Minister.

Eric Daniels of LloydsTSB insanely tries to pin the credit crisis on central banks printing too much money.

Alex Salmond accuses of England of stealing Scottish oil when every piece of data shows English money gushes northwards at a far greater rate, the SNP sits in both Parliaments, and half the London Cabinet is Scottish.

Lord Mandelson alleges that Tory overspending in the 1990s made it very difficult for New Labour 'to pay it back in the decade after 1997'. Every Government website shows the debt increasing from 2002 onwards.

It's 8.30 pm now, and I could carry on building this list until exhaustion took over. Those perpetrating these assorted fantasies and denials would in turn carry on doing this forever were it not for the inevitability of them, ultimately, falling flat on their faces.

For while New Labour congratulates itself on having the Campbell-Mandelson cynicism back in charge (and the Conservatives smile about their continuing lead in the polls) the word coming back from the street is that - at long last - real people want more than just to change tweedle-dum for tweedle-even-dumber. They are sick of the gloss, tired of the excuses, and bored with puerile smears about who was on what yacht, who said black and who white, or how deep or shallow the recession is really likely to be. And to date, they don't think Clegg is likely to be any different either.

There will be no storming of the banks, no riots to establish better representation, no mobs demanding 'Reform or Revolution'. Indeed - for a year at least - the tiggy-blame catch game will continue.

And then, when the full enormity of the mess is exposed, ordinary people will start to change their behaviour. At present, I don't believe anyone knows either what forms that will take, or what the outcome might be. All I can tell you is that a careful reading of all the latest polls suggests one overwhelming thing: the majority of voters do not believe in any Party's ability to solve the UK's rock of huge debt and hard place of falling income.

Yesterday a reliable source told me that Conservative market research suggests the current tripartite dash to have the biggest tax cuts possible is seen as incomprehensible to younger voters and almost criminally mad among the older age groups. While I am not surprised, I am greatly reassured: the British have finally realised that what it says each week at the bottom of this column is, unfortunately, true.

 

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IF IT AIN'T BROKE, DON'T FIX IT. IF IT IS, ER, UM....

'We are ruled by clocks, fools and liars'

G K Chesterton, 1912

The vast majority of economic commentators, observers and analysts still start from the assumption that the global finance system in general - and Bourse-financed economic growth using remote shareholders - is the only clock in town.

The problem seems to me (a mere layman) that this conviction doesn't so much fly in the face of the facts as crash into a snow-capped mountain of contrary evidence.

At the moment - despite some $3.8 trillion dollars worldwide thrown at the mechanism - the clock is running backwards and sounding the hour in a casually informal manner, up to and including the number thirteen. What's more, having at last taken the back off this fine example of 15th Century Italian workmanship, there seems not to be any original mechanism as such - just a complex Intel Inside chip board, plus a note from the infamous Preppy Donald Hedge saying 'Urgently called away to Bolivia - good luck'.

Like so many aphorisms in our language, 'If the clock ain't broke, don't fix it' is a piece of fortune-cookie sagesse which doesn't actually say what to do if the clock is not only broken, but completely knackered. The quick answer of course is to buy a new one (preferably before shelling out trillions of dollar bills on the fixing project) but to date this is only on the radar of folks generally dismissed as dangerously naive anarchists with an airport runway hole-digging habit.

So if I may, I'd like to suggest a midway point between the most right wing GOP devotee and the last surviving Stalinist Rainbow Warrior. Let's keep the beautifully elegant fifteenth century Italian shell, and put a regulator inside to save the simpler new mechanism from its proven ability to go dangerously mad at frequent intervals.

There, I've done it - I've said the R word: naughty me.

The financial community has framed the concept of regulation (and rendered it a despicable boo-term) with consummate skill. The term has come to conjure up images of ten thousand bureaucratic goblins sabotaging the vital process of entrepreneurial wealth creation. However, there are two gaping holes in this presentation of the arguments in favour of promoting basic honesty and social decency.

The first is that nobody has ever in history lost the plot of entrepreneurial wealth creation with quite the spectacular success of ten thousand banking goblins in recent years. And the second is those who wish only to speculate on entrepreneurial success without breaking the law or harming the community will have nothing whatever to fear from regulation.

Naturally, the Financial Services Authority itself needs to be remodelled. There needs to be a much closer relationship with commercial reality - and the Serious Fraud Office. But as a former advertising man, I can tell you that thirty-five years of the Advertising Standards Authority (quite one of the most pedantically anal watchdogs one could imagine) have produced not only more honest communications campaigns, but also more creativity and entertainment than you can find in any country without one.

The simple reality remains that the mechanism for financing business is terminally dead. We may have nailed its feet to the clock casing with unwilling taxpayers, but it is a former, non-functioning and stone cold mechanism. It has been killed by interfering and greedy remote shareholders, screaming children on trading floors, insane Russian doll debt-structured products, carpetbagging Hedge Funds, and the inevitable hubris that accompanies human folly.

We need a new commercial culture which frowns on malpractice. But while we're waiting, let's keep the original fifteenth century borsa idea of speculating on great new ideas, and use a simple, twenty-first century pendulum (automatically regulated by an onboard computer) to keep tulip obsession under control.

Is that really beyond us?

 

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The Play’s the Thing

Watching Barack Obama’s victory speech earlier today, I was struck by its resemblance not so much to a coronation as the last monologue in a somewhat overlong play. The feeling intensified as second lead Joe Biden came out to accept the applause (perhaps for his role as Banquo) following which the troupe as a whole took a bow. The only element missing from the performance was a shout of ‘Author! Author!’ – but the worrying thing is that this play has no author. In fact, it has no plot either.

America will wake up later and justly congratulate itself on what this election has shown: that people who say they’re going to vote for a black man will do so, that an inspirational and charismatic person who asks for sacrifice as well as support is back in the White House, and that the optimistic belief is still there at the heart of American culture. But the very banality of the slogan Obama employed to sum up that hope – ‘Yes we can’ – only feeds my continuing worry about this man: where’s the beef? What is his strategy? Does he have one? Yes we can do what exactly – join the unemployment lines?

Political ‘operators’ of my acquaintance smile patiently, and then explain why – given the current global mess – Barack’s very vagueness was his strength. He’s not committed himself to anything, see? That is like so neat. He simply said ‘McCain is just more Bush. I’m not Bush. I don’t sound anything like Bush. I’m not even the same colour as Bush – so vote for me’. But actually, Obama hasn’t done that at all in my view; rather, he has committed the worst of all crimes in politics – to promise big and general (and thus set up expectations) without the experience or money necessarily to satisfy those raised hopes.

Hillary Clinton found out big-time the level of intransigent resistance in the US medical profession to broader and more just healthcare insurance. Bush discovered very rapidly what American business thinks about any form of nationalisation – even when it’s offering a straw to the folks clinging on by their fingernails. And going back to the last truly charismatic Presidency, the Kennedy brothers learned very early on that racial intolerance, organised crime and the Cuban problem would not bow to rhetoric. Indeed, one or more of these endemic problems may well have killed JFK. As a black man, President Obama will be the most protected leader in American history. Waving placards that shout ‘Change!’ is quite likely to evoke the response ‘No you Can’t’ from those who see their privileges challenged. Lest we forget, 48% of Americans voted yesterday for a bumbling incompetent partnered by an ignorant and corrupt airhead. For many of those people, anything was preferable to change.

My point is simple: what the struggling people in the US don’t need right now is to be let down again. This Presidency needs to present a change from Clintonian politics as much as from Bush politics.

The new President will inherit an America unrecognisable from the one which John Kennedy inspired. While not bankrupt, the country has a serious short-term cash-flow problem. The dollar’s leading role is under threat and being supported by vast amounts of gold-price manipulation. The US car industry is on its backside. America is hated by most Islamics, and threatened by cynical, opportunist and anti-libertarian leaderships in Russia and China. The ecological problem is near to tipping point. The nation is embroiled in an unpopular and expensive war against the wrong people – but a cause that must draw a line somewhere, or see even more Islamist triumphalism. And above all, despite some short-term (and almost certainly short-lived) stock market optimism, America is at the heart of a financial China Syndrome which nobody really knows how to stop.

In my view, what constituents expect a politician to do is every bit as important as what actually gets done in the process of enacting durable change. President-elect Barack Obama should go for some early quick wins: setting the tone for a genuinely new kind of politics, sending a clear message of determination to the Opposition, and disguising the very limited room for manoeuvre he has. It seems to me that he has some kind of mandate to shift the economic emphasis away from fancy-wrapping financial products and back where it belongs – at the entrepreneurial sharp end of providing real services and making stuff. And in foreign policy, he has a golden opportunity to make his ‘funny name’ work hard in the Middle East, Africa and Islam generally. Perhaps this is already the plot: whether it is or not, he certainly needs to get one - and then make sure he doesn’t lose it. 

The world might all be a stage and all of us players upon it, but it isn’t a movie in which the good guys triumph because…well, because they just do. The stage-management of Obama’s White House campaign has been on the one hand technically brilliant, and on the other something of an empty vessel. As You Like it isn’t going to cut the mustard from now on. If he is to avoid Othello’s sticky end, the first Moorish President should heed the soldier’s words:

Now, by heaven,
my blood begins my safer guides to rule;
and passion, having my best judgment collide,
assays to lead the way

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Some new models we need rolling off the production line as soon as possible

'Business model' has become at one and the same time a cliche, and a tarnished term. Business models previously described as 'robust' have proved anything but.

Although those in charge refuse to accept it, the reality is that business itself needs a new model; and this will be a meaningless change unless modelling is applied to the feet of clay apparent in all areas of our civilisation.

In classic tabloid style then, here are ten interdependent new models that would help UK society towards long-term recovery and rude health:

1. An education system based on self-esteem, taking responsibility, the needs of others, personal development, and good health practices - as much as academic achievement

2. A State/individual relationship based on reduced powers of the former and increased responsibilities for the latter: obligatory community service for all from ages thirteen to fifteen, and the reversal of our suicidal drift towards 24/7 surveillance of all movement and communication

3. Radical constitutional reform to make Britain's suffrage and representation models genuinely accurate - and protect citizens against politicians with a short-term 're-elective' focus. The key points would be scrapping constituency-based MPs entirely, a smaller lower-cost Commons legislature, an accountable Executive, and a second Chamber whose membership is beyond Commons control and subject to non-universal suffrage.

4. A One Nation approach rejecting multiculturalism. Genuine religious and cultural tolerance, but one unequivocal citizenship, legal and educational model to which all must conform

5. Genuine and broadscale devolution of administrative and spending power down to district and community levels, alongside a dramatic reduction in central government powers

6. A political model based on contemporary social needs and trends - not controlling, privately-financed Parties. The State to fund all election costs and communications- both to be capped at maximum levels. All other contributions to Parties or 'Movements' to be strictly illegal

7. A State medical model based on patient-facing service, continuity of primary care, preventative advice and professional vocation, rather than crypto market principles and faceless primary practices. A rejection of the current funding model in favour of a scheme 25% funded by commerce, 50% based on means testing and 25% from local taxation

8. The replacement of Bourse-dominated business finance with a mixed system using private wealth initiatives, local government finance schemes, and trading platforms where the dominance of any one purchasing mechanism is subject to the same monopoly rules applying to other areas of commerce.

9. An engineered move away from the 'remote shareholder' model of financing business, and towards on-board shareholders taking the long view on financing entrepreneurialism. In short, a return to the initial historical aims of borsa

10. Taxation based on the encouragement of support for society as a whole, rather than an elite group somewhat speciously termed 'shareholders'. Specifically: tax breaks for guided philanthropy, entrepreneurial risk, ecologically sound and clean manufacture, employee partnerships, private ownership and community contribution; punitive taxes on profit margins above 40%; higher taxes on multinationally owned concerns, pollutant products,unhealthy foods and multiple food retailers; a huge shift away from national to local taxes; zero taxation for two years on new fields used for food production; and graded purchase tax on locally grown versus carbon-footprint foods.

 

Join in with email feedback HERE

 

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Obsessive stock market focus is precisely what we don't need at the moment

While sad folks like me keep an eagle (not to say vulture's) eye on the Bourses, there are professional and psyche-driven reasons for this: I am a journalist with a history of mental illness. But as the FT's Martin Wolf wrote to nby recently 'Second-guessing short-term market movements is a mug's game unless you have insider knowledge - which I don't'.

Mr Wolf is a beacon of sound sense in the current darkness. Perhaps inadvertantly, he has put his finger on what has always been the flaw in a Bourse-capitalised, free-market and shareholder form of capitalism: obsessive, unbalanced and greedy twits looking only at the short-term.

Let us take Thursday (16th October's) trading as an example.

As is now becoming almost normal, dumping of gold prior to the FTSE's opening kicked things off. The metal (the best safe-haven on the planet) fell $19. On 9/11 - following an act of war - it fell (net) just six dollars.

For two hours after opening, stocks continued their daily trek south - the result of $3.2 trilion of your and my savings being sacrificed to their unlikely salvation. At which point the bail-out of UBS whacked the index up 200 points. One bank in one country.

Three hours later, this all-powerful market which does all our deciding for us these days had a rethink and dropped 200 points. Bang on cue, the Dow opened, saw the drop and did the same.

Because somebody with gold reserves didn't like this, more precious metal was dumped to persuade the market that equities were the place to be. This was 100% effective in causing goldprice.org to crash for the rest of the day, and to zap the NYSE up 400 points in an hour.

'Markets surge on UBS bail-out' enthused the BBCNews website.

'Gold crashes on Dow surge' yelled Bullionvault.com, thus demonstrating at a stroke their inability to tell chickens from eggs, or indeed which way the clock goes round.

Overnight in London - in an act of bare-faced cheek notable even by banker standards - Lloyds pitched to make the terms of its taxpayer bail-out less stringent so it could pay the shareholders a dividend. Darling sent a text to Zog along the lines of 'are you serious?' Oh yes, they answered - absolutely.

It can get a little wearing when grinning BCG Mekons on morning telly keep patronising us with their piffle about how this is the only way to run a railroad. Governments bankrupting their citizens to save the hides of Alzheimered traders, while all the while throwing gold bars at mad speculators betting on whether bankers want to pay a dividend to the impatient dummies whose sawdust-filled heads nodded in agreement to the payment of $200 billion in bonuses this year.

Surely nobody has a better idea than that?

Hence the point of nby's Opinon column today: ignore this shower, because right now their posturing, directionless, insane refusal to accept that Hal is in the machine will - if you watch it too closely - only drive you potty as well.

Go to work. Find a new customer. Make a fair profit. Improve the product. Make it in as Green a way aspossible. Go home, help cook dinner and kiss the kids goodnight. That's far more important - both for you and the world - than the antics of autistic onanists.

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16th October 2008

'Lloyds TSB lobbied the government to ease the repayment conditions attached to an emergency injection of taxpayers' money.

The urgent attempt to renegotiate parts of the bail-out terms - and allow rescued banks to pay a dividend to their shareholders - came as the stock market wiped out all of the gains made in the euphoria following the bank rescue package, amid anxiety that the global economy was plunging into recession.'

We wrote the Op below a week ago. As the above shows, there's no reason to change it as long as the nonsense from this shower continues.....

Appeasement is getting us nowhere - time to get tough with the bankers

Although a clear majority of people in Britain and the US feel strongly that there is a moral case for asking the banking community to sort itself out, the argument being used 'on the other side' (and this is increasingly turning into two opposing sides) still holds sway: 'now is not the time for moralising and blamestorming: now is the time for emergency action'.

There is huge power in this argument - and, on the surface, obvious practicality. But welfare dependency rules apply no matter which end of the social and commercial spectrum is involved.

Until today, nby remained a grudging supporter of this 'necessity'. But now there are other considerations and actions which must be taken into account. These do not involve vengeance: rather, they concern the need to establish some rules and responsibilities in all this mayhem.

First and foremost, will it work? An increasing number of banking commentators believe no government is any longer big enough to bankroll the banks. Just a 5% recapitalisation of major retail banks in the UK would gobble up half the total tax budget: the way this Government spends money, we can ill afford to give anyone anything, let alone half of everything to a tiny minority.

This can only end in printing money, followed by ruinous inflation.

Despite all the recent actions, the markets remain nervous; they keep on demanding faster action and more money with fewer strings attached. It is becoming obvious to thinking observers that, for the bankers, nothing short of a blank cheque will do. In classic spineless fashion, New Labour this morning effectively offered them that in terms of working cash.

As the rich are fond of saying about the NHS 'this is a bottomless pit'.

But while nothing will ever be enough for the banker mentality, nothing any government might do in 2008 will ever be enough to change the commercial market reality.

And that reality is, the banks have lost all confidence in each other. (Haven't we all?)

With a phobic patient's fear of the improbable, the last thing one should do is indulge it by facilitating avoidance behaviour. What we are effectively doing at the moment is indulging banker phobias with taxpayer's money. As there is no end to this process, it would be as well not to start.

The correct strategy for the restoration of sanity is to force the patient to do what he or she doesn't want to do. And, in the specific case of the banking fraternity, to remind them of why they exist.

Financial service institutions exist to profitably help decent people invest in the community, save for retirement, and insure against loss; and to back business creativity where it seems to be based on sound plans.

The rediscovery of this mission is crucially important for recovery. As well as accepting responsibility (rather than running a fantasy blame league) the banks must now take responsibility for their fate. It lies in their hands, not in our pockets.

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The triumph of desperation over experience

'Whatever it takes' is the new Government mantra we hear roughly two hundred times a day now. Absolutely vital, pull together, no time for novices and so on. Only in such a context of dire panic disguised as Dunkirk reassurance could Peter Mandelson have returned to government.

It is a sign of the long-overdue backlash against pc that a number of the cartoonists and commentators over the weekend chose to focus on Mandy's sexuality. Not wishing in any way to be left out (while recognising his elevated status) nby was quick to recognise his new identity as Little Lord Fondlebum. But the truth about Mr Mandelson goes well beyond his predeliction for The Other Side.

'Come back Peter, all is forgiven' may well give the Zanu-Labour faithful another straw onto which they can scramble, but one must also cling to the wise adage 'let us forgive, but not forget'. Twice in Britain and once in Europe, Mr Mandelson has been caught - if not conclusively with his hand in the till - then certainly with his delicate nose in the trough. He is an abuser of privilege.

He is also promiscuous, in every sense of the word. He lacks loyalty, loves intrigue, and is an even more deadly silent briefer than Gordon. The Devil will indeed find things for idle hands to do, but the She-devil with a roaming portfolio will quickly find people to do over.

One only had to see Alistair Dali's wretched performance on Marr's Sunday breakfast-meeting to realise how easy he will be to destabilise, how completely he has lost the plot, and how cleansed of ideas he is. Having denied the very existence of a crisis for nine months, Salvador is today keen to tell us he warned of its arrival all along.

When asked if he would put up taxes, he piffled and stumbled into a cringe-making stream of woffle about the Tory legacy and how we are "in a much stronger position to borrow now than we were then". Given that we owe £200 billion more than we did in 1997, this is the best example of rubbish one could wish to hear on air from a politician. What puzzled the viewer even more was the concept of feeling strong enough to borrow. Is this, then, what the rich and solvent do - borrow? The thought of the globe suffering an uber-prime credit problem is indeed surreal.

Mandelson will enter this government of weak, muddled and frightened folk with all the arrogant hubris we have come to expect whenever he minces purposefully into the ring. He will put backs up, twist noses out of joint, and bend opponents out of shape. He will look energetic, and energise the media around his hyper-active presence. He will work hand-in-glove with the disgusting Campbell to conjure yet more mirages acting as solutions. In short, he will reinvent Blairism.

Because the Cameroons are on the whole not that bright, I would imagine they will be on the back foot for a day or two. On the same Marr programme, George Osborne once again failed to impress. My take on the Shadow Chancellor is that he's smug, and still largely ignorant about why and how this crisis can only get much, much worse before it gets better.

What the smart Cameroons like Hague need to remember is that Blairism only ever succeeded when economic times were good, easy and lax. People will believe anything when they're in the money and on the piss. But Mandelson or no Mandelson, the bad news will simply keep on pouring in: the borrowing requirement, the unemployment rate, EU disunity, the retail and commercial failures and a continuing crisis in global banking: all the Paulson plans in the world are as nothing now the ripple effect has begun. In this environment, lobbing Mandy the Tactful Flying Brick into the pond can only make matters worse.

The Blairite Borrowers are a busted flush. Two queens united in mutual hatred are not going to trump anyone - even if the new queen is also a knave.

 

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Tomorrow belongs to Me *

The extraordinary performance by Sarah, Gordon and audience inside the GMAC arena last Wednesday was one of those flesh-creepy events we will all relate to our grandchildren some day.

I remember forty odd years ago seeing Tory politician Selwyn-Lloyd interviewed about his arrival back at Croydon Airport with Chamberlain in 1938, after the signing of the Munich agreement effectively gave Czechoslovakia to the Nazis. "I was embarrassed by the crowd's wild cheers" he said "And horrified when, later from the upper window of Number Ten, Neville said 'I have brought you peace in our time'".

Anyone featured on the ever-vigilant and invasive BBC audience cameras during Brown's 'come-back' speech will cringe in future years as they are shown shouting, clapping, cheering and weeping through the emptiest, most lachrymose and dishonest speech ever made by a politician in my lifetime.

My faith in the British electorate was salvaged the following day when, after scanning the online press forums in detail, I was able to calculate that anti-Brown opinion was running steadily at 25-1. But the shocking sight of a Party for whom I occasionally voted in my youth soaking up this tasteless melange of ham acting and Campbell's soup was genuinely painful.

It is a long time since I was on anything resembling 'the Left'. Moving over to the Liberals around 1970 - thence to the SDP and back again - I now find myself (like so many Englishmen) desperate for nothing more than reality. At present this probably means, for me at least, a more regulated financial economy and a better targeted, more censorious approach to social welfare. But reality in any shape or form would be good.

What we saw earlier this week was an audience gorging themselves on delusional promises for the future, and the alleged 'success' of stupid economic hardness mixed with spendthrift spending for the past decade or more.

This is the Labour Party which gave us giant wheels, Domed elephants and firework displays, the great gold giveaway, increasing disparities of wealth, mad foreign adventurism, celeb mania, sucking up to plutocrats, NHS ward closures, drug rationing, institutional weapons corruption on a grand scale, and the inexcusable waste of vital medical funds on the sort of IT hype from which real people shied away years ago.

And now, with the Exchequer empty, all borrowing limits smashed, no money for either armed forces or prisons, huge liabilities taken on needlessly, growing unemployment, a global credit crisis and a plummeting currency, this is the same New Labour Party prepared to fill its Kleenex with incontinent eyewash.

Eyewash about Co2 emission cuts of 80%, three million lives being changed, free cancer drugs, free nursery education, eliminating child poverty by 2020, £15 billion more to be spent on new NHS treatments, universal health checks for everyone over forty, more neighbourhood police, and higher conviction rates than ever.

This was indeed Gordon's Indian summer - for aferwards, all the indians must have come out of the hall and wondered 'how?'

There are no metaphors any more for the British political Establishment - head in the sand, fiddling while Rome burns, whistling Dixie: they're all utterly inadequate....as indeed are those at whom they might be aimed.

In 1979 - for all her ghastliness and bigoted blinkers - we had the Mad Handbag waiting in the wings to rid us of a very real cancer: a Trade Union movement quite prepared to challenge the sovereignty of the Mother of Parliaments.

Who is there now to challenge the Hedge Fund Sherman McCoys, the disgustingly crooked and incompetent banking fraternity, and Mother Russia?

Cameron's crew are (with the notable exceptions of Hague and Davis) hopelessly confused about what they have to offer, what is going on in the world, and what might happen next. Hague is (if my sources are correct) hacked off with the whole merry-go-round, while after his commendable one finger up to the elite running conservatism these days, Davis too continues to feel that he has nothing in common with the wah-wahs.

As for Clegg...he too has proved a bitter disappointment, little more than Blair III -This Time it's Boring. The one single MP who has had this whole crise de coeur taped since Day One - Vince Cable - now also finds himself sidelined, and not a little tired.

Somewhere at the outer reaches of this mess there sits the man (or woman) who sees The Main Chance coming. He may be in Parliament, he may be a prospective candidate. He may be in a PR agency - or perhaps a Hedge Fund manager. She may even still be at University. She might be running some shadowy organisation called things like Forward or Gender in Europe - believe me, there are lots of them about.

As for the existing shower, they are nothing but a bunch of smug Von Papens convinced they have everything under control.

And if you don't know who Von Papen was, then look it up: this is, after all, the Age of Google. When everyone can know everything, and go to University, and be freed from poverty, and live on thin air....and who knows - if we all applaud hard enough without thinking hard enough....anything is possible

 

 

 

 

 

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It's just you and me folks

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Correct procedure

 

Last weekend, we may have seen the clearest example yet of how misguided our culture is. Hopefully, it might act as some kind of turning point in the gradual shift from The Lost Plot to a society able at last to find itself.

I refer to the case of Jordon Lyon, a ten year-old boy who drowned in a local lake. He was, at the time, helping his stepsister who had got into difficulties. Why am I telling any of you this - you know the grisly details as well as I do. However - as befits the title and traditions of this column - I want to take a rather different perspective from that of most of the weekend media.

I will start with Kay Burley. Ms Burley anchors the Sky 12-2.oo pm daily slot, called Lunchtime News with Kay Burley. This woman brings nothing to the programme in the way of opinion, journalistic analysis, or indeed anything that adds value beyond expensive hairdressing. The names Walter Cronkite, Ed Murrow and Richard Dimbleby would (I must assume) be unknown to her.

Kay Burley gained an 'exclusive' interview with Jordon's parents, Anthony (stepdad) and Tracy. (I say she did, but in all probability some other drone did the groundwork.) During this major event, she put enquiries of quite stunning insensitivity - not, I hasten to add, by travelling North, but from her podium of power in the Sky studio. This included asking Mrs Ganderton why - with suspicious undertone - she hadn't been with her son at the time, a groundless accusation that reduced the mourning mother to tears. (She had been looking after a neighbour's child). After Mrs Ganderton's collapse had been unsuitably observed in extreme close-up, the haughty Burley said she would "turn to Mr Ganderton while your wife composes herself".

The marvellous 1980s film Network remains the best and most wickedly funny destruction of modern television news coverage. Ms Burley is - down to the last pin-stripe in her chastity-suit - a Scarfe cartoon of the caricature created by Faye Dunaway in that film. Again, I feel sure she has not the slightest awareness of this.

Next, the parents themselves. Near catatonic with shock after attending a traumatic hearing, it was clear that at the best of times these two folks are not the sharpest cards in the pack. Very clear, however, was how an appalling personal disaster had made them painfully aware of exactly how badly our police forces - and their 'ancillary' units - have lost the plot. "S'just not right is it?" the husband kept asking.

But what, exactly, is Just Not Right?

In beginning to answer this desolate question from a man who isn't even the boy's natural father, let's move on to the following day, when an interesting, intelligent report about the tragedy's hearing was rudely interrupted as BBC24's duty anchorman said "I have to stop you there Aswan (or whoever) because we're going over live right now to the Labour conference".

At the Labour conference, the Big News was that Gordon Brown's limo had arrived at the venue. "Yes" began the anchorman, "there's the Prime Minister getting out of the car, followed closely by his wife who is wearing...yes, it's a red dress".

So perhaps the first thing Just Not Right is that a right now live gawp at Mrs Brown's red dress is deemed more important and interesting than a good journalist analysing the sad death of a boy with but a decade of life behind him.

The torrent of Just Not Right that flows from here onwards is busy drowning our civilisation.

Odd as it may seem to some, by far the worst part of this episode is the decision of the Auxiliary Officers involved not to turn up to the inquest. I find it hard to call this anything other than a disgraceful act of unthinking cowardice.

Close behind is DCI Philip Owen's statement to the press. The man who heads up Wigan police's detection division told us that "these officers are not trained to the same extent as police officers.....they wouldn't know how to deal with a situation like this".

How many ways can one interrogate this silly observation? What exactly are these officers trained to do? Are they trained as human beings who witness mortal danger and thus decide to pitch in? Are they required to be able to swim? (Astonishingly, the answer is 'no'). Are DCIs required to have an iota of common sense?

Next up for judgement must be Legacy Man and his chump Charles Clarke, who tried to stem a high tide of crime by quickly hiring lots of people with no calling beyond their desire to be in a uniform.

Finally, we are surely entitled to ask how it is that a ten year-old boy who sees his step-sister in danger knows exactly what do do, but two adults with the word 'police' in their job titles don't.

Patronising as it may seem, I am enormously encouraged by this boy who, in a world full of step this and extended that, knew enough from his various parents to risk his life for another. Also I am warmed by the degree to which those with whom I've discussed this case feel (as I do) that while Jordon's death was tragic, it has not been in vain: one day soon perhaps - in the future world of computelly interaction - police officers will not be able to spout party-line crap without sixty million citizens shouting 'bollocks' in unison. While to some the internet offers the potential for tyranny, I prefer to hope that it will force humbug back down the throats of those who utter it.

To those who ask with boring frequency why my bombardment upon the antipodean gangster Murdoch knows no end, I can only respond by saying that Murdochs produce Burleys. To those who see celebrity obsession as harmless, I ask if they can read this piece and still say that.

As to the officers concerned, I may seem to judge them, but we mustn't. In 2007, it has become a crime to tell the truth: "I was scared. I funked it". Courage to me is doing something of which one is deeply afraid. For all I know, the two auxiliary community officers were ordered by their superiors not to turn up at the inquest. Perhaps one day they will have the courage to fess up to their cowardice. Perhaps even their senior officers might do the same. (23.9.07)

 

THE ONLY THING BROWN HAS TO FEAR IS HIMSELF

 

Most of us call things wrongly with disturbing frequency, and I'm no different. Having said consistently that the Prime Minister lacks the self-belief to call a snap election (he has, after all, seen four opinion polls - all assuring him of an easy win - and still not decided) I'm beginning to wonder if even he can genuinely brood and agonise over what looks increasingly like a walkover.

The fact is, I rather fancy Gordon Brown is now being predictably ruthless about the issue. With the Conservatives all over the place - and Cameron facing a conference distracted by his falling popularity and the likelihood of a November election - the PM is very likely to make the announcement straight after what will be aTory bunfight. (But - Brown being Brown - another poll study next week showing a resurgent Boy David would send the New Labour leader back up to his office for more nailbiting inaction).

Having thought Brown would never get the job (and probably mess it up if he did) you may wonder why my overall judgement of him hasn't changed - given that he is now Prime Minister, and has made what most observers see as an excellent start. So perhaps I should explain why, if anything, his actions since coming to power have only firmed up my judgement of the man. As always, the approach remains ' ignore what he says, observe what he does'.

First up, it's important to note that the PM hasn't actually made a very good start at all - it's just that people are gullible and his spinners (whatever he says) are still hard at it. His approach to the flooding was to say nothing until the waters had receded, and then make a fleeting visit to Sheffield. The money he set aside to help the disaster was both hopelessly inadequate and (as usual) not all new money at all. His next gambit was to get up to his old 'run up flagpole and leak' nonsense on the subject of Iraq, as a result of which the US administration got completely confused - and fairly aggressive. Thus speeches had to be hastily withdrawn, and Gordon was forced to give grovelling reassurances. Having done that (natch) he started pulling troops out of Iraq like the place had cholera or something - as well as insisting that it wasn't happening.

The foot and mouth and blue tongue outbreaks were serendipitous- there's not much anyone can do about that stuff, apart from ignore jittery scientists and maintain a cool head. Brown has distanced himself from these affairs - rather like he did over Iraq. As for the attempted bombings - well, he made lots of sympathetic noises (what else was he going to do?) and then - having talked prior to his Coronation about increasing personal liberties - offered the police and security services a further raft of new powers. He followed this by cuddling up to Fraulein Merkel, and agreeing to help her force through the most undemocratic, controlling and utterly unnecessary constitution in European history. (See Life in the Wrong Lane)

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Do markets really decide?

 

It's a tricky question, but on balance it takes about two seconds to formulate a reply along the lines of 'no'.

There are two reasons for this. First, inanimate things don't decide anything, because they don't have a brain. Sometimes consumers decide, and sometimes other folks do. Second - and closely related to these 'other folks' - while markets being allowed to 'decide' sounds very brave and take-it-like-a-man, it's amazing how the main beneficiaries of market fluctuation run for cover when the decision is less clearly in their favour.

We may all be back in caves and trees by this time next year, but those responsible will still be offering loans to Mr & Mrs Wayne Ug from the safety of large ocean-going yachts. For as we have seen on four separate occasions so far in the credit fudge, the only ones still standing when the fudge hits the fan are the taxpayers.

This is not Friedmanite economics as I understand it, but setting this reality to one side for a moment, there are three schools of thought about where the West is heading commercially and financially as 2007 draws to a close. One says pear-shaped any day now, another says if we hold our nerve everything will be dandy, and a Third Way says it'll be one of those two. Regular fans of nby will know that I'm firmly in the tits-up camp (mind you, I have been since 2005,so what do I know?) and my instinct tells me that the longer you lie on a volcano, the bigger the bang when you get off. Bit like Heather Mills-McCartney, really.

Three stories last weekend did strike me as especially pertinent, however. The first was by the Sunday Times' financial guru David Smith, who devoted a whole page (itself flagged on the front page) to 'Credit Crunch: how worried should you be?' He spent 3000 words saying maybe you should be, and maybe you shouldn't - it was hard to tell. It was a remarkable piece of fence-sitting, in which one paragraph about a total collapse of the banking system was followed by another imagining a slow climb back to the sunny uplands of eternal growth. A lot of journalism is like this, and always has been. But this chap is supposed to be a leading expert. I smiled in admiration as I got to the end of the article.

The second was in the Mail on Sunday, and discussed the way in which three or four hedge fund masterminds have spent the last few months using speculation to manipulate the price of oil upwards by roughly 40%. That's an awfully large increase, and an awfully huge amount of profit for no more than a dozen or so carpet-baggers. In fact (as several experts confirmed in both the FT and the Sunday Times) there is no shortage at all of oil; thus, you and I are paying over a quid a litre for petrol at the pumps so a few troughers can demonstrate their remarkable skills.

Call my sense of humour darkly macabre if you like, but these days I laugh out loud on reading this sort of stuff. The Mail's censorious account of monstrous racketeering really did have me giggling by the third column of the piece. The amusement for me came (as usual) from thinking of parallels. Alex Salmond poisoning Japanese whisky output to treble the price of Scotch. Jonathan Porritt radiating the Middle East and Texas in order to double the interest in clean transport. Or Diageo putting crack cocaine in alcopops - and then increasing the price tenfold, explaining that this was a socially responsible attempt to curb binge drinking.

The third was in Saturday's Telegraph, and noted (two months after nby did) that all New Labour has done with education is make the aspirant lower-middle classes pay (at least partly) for City College or fully private schooling - having forty years ago abolished grammar schools that provided exactly the same (probably better) quality free to everyone regardless of social background and solely upon ability.

However, the Telegraph went a headline hilariously too far with its 'parents flock to private sector' angle. The figures simply didn't stack up: a 1% rise in market share for private education is hardly a stampede to get little Dean into Rugby. One sentence noted with obvious desperation that 'in some wealthy areas, whereas two years ago 37% of children were privately educated, the figure is now 41%'. Stop the presses Scoop,we need a special here.

What in the name of tediously scrolling down this screen, you're wondering, has all this to do with anything?

Simply this: a journalist paid a whopping salary for his wise opinion offers everything up to but not including the opinion part of the deal, in an article about how free marketeers want the market to decide, and then the taxpayer to cough up when the market makes a decision not in their business model. A dozen fat slobs cause over thirty million citizens to pay over the odds, in order to manipulate a market whose decision to pump out more oil was also not to their liking. And a government repeats, over and over again for a decade, that they have cut taxes when all they've done is change taxes and double them - while a right-wing newspaper blatantly misleads readers into thinking that millions more Britons are having to starve in order to send their kids to public school. The market, it said, was deciding - when it quite clearly wasn't doing anything of the kind.

It kind of puts into perspective what a long, hard, uphill slog it's going to be restoring our civilisation to at least some semblance of the ethics that once made it unique.

The solution to this laughably obvious collapse in commercial and governmental morality is not the abolition of capitalism and democracy, but the reform of capitalism, and the restoration of a civic sense felt by the vast majority to be infinitely more important than money. The catalysts to get things rolling will be the bursting of cheap borrowing's South Sea Bubble, and the democratisation of Britain's electoral system.

Mervyn King is right, and Gordon Brown is wrong. Only a large dose of reality can teach grinning gluttons that at the end of their muddy little track lies the cliff edge. Getting working people to bale out incautious idiots will never achieve anything beyond encouraging them to do it again. (13.11.07)

 

 

Let us now blame junior men

 

Early in my career, a senior adman said to me "Any system is only as good as the people working it". His use of the verb was intentional, in that 'working the system' in the 1970s meant screwing it.

Following Mrs Thatcher's new broom, it was hoped by many that the Jobsworth-cum-idle types working the system would become extinct - threatened as they'd be by market pressures. It is one of the myths surrounding Baroness Thatcher that she cut the percentage of the workforce engaged in the public sector. Far from it: the Civil Service in particular was bigger when she left office than when she arrived in Number Ten.

In 2007, 'systems' to guide jobsworths have developed to a stage where they appear to be designed for folks who've had a frontal lobotomy. During PMQs last Wednesday, David Cameron described Darling's missing twenty five million ID details as 'a systemic failure'. He is wrong about this on almost any basis of relevance to the case.

First and foremost, it was a Human Resources failure. Some minor apparatchik who knew the rules perfectly well thought 'sod it', and sent a massive amount of sensitive information through the post without so much as registering it, let alone using Special D. Why on earth was such a drongo employed in the first place? Although the Union involved would have us believe that overwork caused an oversight, this is palpable bunk: that's like saying that an 'overworked' surgeon left a vitally needed human heart on a slab rather than immediately placing it in a sterile deep-freeze ambulance container.

Second (and more broadly) this represents a cultural failure. I refer not just to the 'let's stick a notice up and that'll solve it' tendency, but also the apparent desire of so many people today to assume that every rule is somebody else's responsibility - or doesn't apply to them. Across the full range of government - from armed forces procedure through to regulations for the maintenance of water-supply infrastructure - direction is blithely ignored. Last week, I waited four hours (after making three strong complaints) before an anti-infection gel dispenser was refilled at the main entrance of Weymouth hospital.

A complete re-engineering of citizen attitudes would be required to change this. After each flagrant example of poor behaviour in such instances - and subsequent disasters - we are always treated to junior ministers and senior officials saying "Well, I think the important thing is that we can learn the lessons of this appalling situation". The problem is, we don't seem to learn any more.

Third, there was a failure of Civil Service attitude. Ho-hum, we seem to have lost the population's personal details. Ah well, they'll turn up - in the meantime, let's send them again. When - thirty days later - they hadn't surfaced, the Chancellor was forced to make a humiliating statement to Parliament.

It is a terrifyingly ironic situation we find ourselves in. Civil servants are quite happy to let things drift because they have gold-plated pensions and will never face either re-election or the chop. And senior politicians used to the aphrodisiac of power will do anything which presses balm onto the electorate (whether this be effective or not) so they can have yet more years of riding about in a world hermetically sealed from day to day reality.

Fourth, there has been a failure of policy. As any sane human being of maturity could tell you, there is no such thing as 'twenty-five million secrets'. Keeping that number of details secret is the goal of those not grounded in reality - whom nby calls the Wuts*. Exactly the same flaw (along with the obvious possibility of absolute State power) is apparent in the whole idea of an ID system. Access will be restricted, but lazy and/or greedy individuals will find ways round that. If the regular arrival of state secrets in Moscow from 1942 until 1982 doesn't make this clear to deluded control-freaks, then nothing will.

Finally, there has been a failure caused by Prime Ministerial tramline vision, and his inability to accept that any strategy he follows might - just possibly - be wrong. Gordon Brown's much-vaunted 'apology' was a narrow affair indeed: he apologised for the 'inconvenience' caused to Benefit recipients. No remorse was shown in relation to exposing a majority of the electorate to rampant fraud. Disgracefully, he went on to suggest that with a 'Tory' level of Revenue staff cuts, the situation might have been worse. How exactly? Does his logic suggest that the fewer the hands at the wheel, the more private information will be dished out?

Predictably, the Prime Minister announced a review. So look, he seemed to say when challenged by the Opposition Leader: I've apologised, I've blamed somebody, and there'll be an enquiry - what is your problem squire? But a review is merely another system, another procedure, another House of Lords crony to be leaned upon in the event of his or her finding anything embarrassing - or criminal. (To be specific, my Junior Treasury source has already questioned Brown's definition of 'junior' in relation to the Civil Servant involved. This is presumably like the Palace's definition of a 'distant' relative of the Queen in the blackmail affair of three weeks ago.)

I think there are two issues at stake here, and both are far more important than any one event.

The first is that Brown's spin-free, open, libertarian, competent and 'strong' difference in style is well and truly dead and buried. Those commentators who argue this is 'the end of the honeymoon' are mistaking small tiff for multiple adultery. Only a series of spectacular own-goals from the Opposition can save this Government from henceforth being a paraplegic duck.

Secondly - and this is simply the nature of cyclical politics under our system of constant media-glare - the Administration that has taken over from Blair's is behaving more and more like that of Major after 1992: the way seems so littered with tired ideas, banana skins, underservedly saved skins, sleaze, and indifference, there is no room for any real progress to be made.

The real problem for the Nation is that atop this heap of mediocrity sits a man who shares the same blind obstinacy as Margaret Thatcher - but none of her will, decisiveness or conviction. (20.11.07)

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This may not be the end of Brown, but it is the start of something better

 

Perhaps the most oft-quoted example of positivity without undue optimism is the Commons statement by Churchill in 1942: the old toper remarked that Rommel's defeat was not the beginning of the end but 'the end of the beginning' of final victory. While Gordon Brown's 'style' of Government is unravelling before our eyes - as he is surely doing behind locked doors - Churchill's measured assessment is a perfect guiding light for all those who want to see an end to this Establishment, and the arrival (at last) of a new ethical dawn.

For all that he is mentally deformed and totally unsuited to either team politics or national leadership, the Prime Minister's personality will thrive on last-redoubt bunker government. There are still (in theory) eighteen months before New Labour must face the music, during which anything from unpredicted national crisis to Conservative own-goals might dramatically snatch Brown from the back molars of electoral slaughter.

I very much doubt it, if only because the main crisis is both widely expected - and more likely to be a final coffin nail than a daring leap to safety. But there will be more protestations of strong leadership, more 'fresh starts', more lies and more stunts before this particular game is finally over. Best to get in a good stock of silver bullets, crucifixes and scandals to ensure the Undead are finally banished to the Other Side.

What I think we can be certain about now is that the confluence of historical catalysts is in place, and a growing current will take all of us (whether willing or not) into the new zeitgeist. But if it's no longer a question of 'if', the matter of 'when' is still very important: this process could take twenty years, or two - from here on, it all depends on us.

Four years ago, the US TV series Desperate Housewives - easily the most seditious programme to come out of America in years - declared open season on surreal examples of political correctness, feminism, corporate life-imbalance, indebtedness, sexual license and anything else it could take a swipe at.

In the intervening years, major American writers and academics have blown their incorrect cover, been subjected to the usual East Coast hail of hate - but found support and survived.

Since the start of 2006, 'spin' has become a four-letter word that people shrink from using in polite company.

After years of central bankers unwisely propping up global 'growth' with low-rate, indiscriminate lending, the likes of Mervyn King have finally started to say 'call time, and call in the debt'.

Leaders of all races, cultures, communities and religions are calling for an end to appeasement, and an acceptance that soft-pedalling on asylum seekers, mass immigration and extremism must stop. During 2007 - especially since Blair's disappearing trick - firemen, policemen, social workers, backbench MPs, Health Workers, pension quangos, prison authorities, radio talk hosts and virtually every other kind of opinion influencer has argued that crazy sentences, drink laws, debt levels and gambling developments are the antithesis of what's required to bring some sanity back to our culture.

This year, three separate corporate bodies have criticised the Government for dragging their feet on carbon output.

Since the middle of September, I've met people actually finding it hard to get a loan. (And in every case, deservedly so).

Three weeks ago, a senior corporate opinion leader delivered a devastating critique of Birtist Management Consultancy syntax as 'gibberish'. Other business speakers have begun to question whether (if utilities greed can't be contained voluntarily) we need obligatory infrastructural investment and price control. Even some of my more Friedmanite chums are asking if laissez faire economics can possibly always be the answer. Several are now joining the chorus questioning the inevitability of Globalism.

A fortnight ago, our abysmal soccer performance against a tiny Balkan nation finally made the FA's Chief Executive wonder if high salaries paid to overgrown children were really the way to introduce excellence into the grass roots of the beautiful game.

Last week, senior American bankers started to admit that the 'toxic' sub-prime crisis is not just a blip. On Wednesday, a remarkable piece by Gillian Tett in the Financial Times gave four frighteningly well-argued reasons why sub-prime must and will spread to the broader economy - and all of our lives.

What we are seeing here is an end to blind optimism, and the revival of empiricism: 'I have seen the present, and it doesn't work'. The next stage will be the emergence of socio-political observers calling for a new approach to how we elect and how we are governed. Simon Jenkins and Rod Liddle are already leading the charge. It is too early yet to tell whether the Conservatives will be mown down by this, or step to one side, or shout 'My Kingdom for a horse'. Whatever they do, the process is unstoppable. (27.11.07)

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The Second Chance

As the years pile on and the seventh decade beckons, I'm beginning to understand just how important it is to give folks a second chance.

There's more to this than love, peace and philanthropy: the second go given to someone who cocked up (or ran amok) the first time around can reveal hitherto undiscovered treasures - and at a heavily discounted price. My final few years in advertising held one or two triumphs of hiring so-called 'old lags' who wanted another crack at life. Great football managers often do the same - most notably Brian Clough.

In one's private life, people who failed us, seemingly 'screwed' us (or were just plain nasty to us) become demons with the distance offered by time. Yet it is extraordinary how - on occasionally meeting examples again twenty years on - I now realise I must have been equally at fault, if only because they're obviously very decent people with all the same problems of health and finance that come to us all.

With most reasonably balanced individuals, maturity brings a degree of calm and rather more wisdom to soothe the aches and pains. Sadly, our contemporary media do not allow this reality to brighten up the dark colour of their hasty judgement: once a love-rat, always a love-rat, and all that.

On a tiny advertising stage twenty-five years ago, I was the gruff Planner, the northerner who didn't suffer fools, the ruthlessly ambitious nasty piece of work in too much of a hurry. There was considerably more than a grain of truth in all that, but once established, the image stuck long after such behaviour had been consigned to the past. In the late 1980s, Michael Bungey saw more than this in me, and offered The Second Chance I badly needed. He and others allowed my last decade in the business to be one of Autumn Gold.

What astonished (and horrified) me on arriving at the then Dorland was how many people greeted my arrival with ridiculously tall stories about what an unmitigated shit I was. Most people were won over in time, but others just needed to believe the Hobgoblin propaganda. Later still (in relation to others in need of a second chance) I noticed how often these very same diehards were the first to condemn and the last to forgive. I met one only three weeks ago; he badmouthed a friend of mine who (also in the early years) had something of a wide-boy reputation. Nothing I said could persuade this chap from his relentless spittle of hatred.

I think the extrapolation from this is simple enough: big people don't like others to fail. On the whole, they enjoy the renaissance of somebody written off. Small people revel in all this, because it ensures there are others with further to fall than them.

I am also bound to observe that, disturbingly often, the judgemental moral pygmies are the very ones on their fifth chance - but still blowing it. For these people, I have developed a life rule from which I rarely waver: give them the second chance, accept it when they don't take it - and try to forgive. But what you shouldn't do is forget. To forgive these folks is divine, but to forget their modus operandi is dumb. For they are the ones who will never change - and should thus be avoided. (10.12.07)

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Time to take the money out of politics

Hardly has the dust settled on the Jewish Donor Conspiracy than the Islamic Conspiracy of Imran Khand hoves into view (£300,000 worth of electoral law evasion) alongside Lord Ashcroft's Tory donations of nearly £3million over five years, dished out with an air of spend, spend, spend to Conservative candidates in marginal constituencies.

Call me old-fashioned, but the TUC bankrolling penniless, disenfranchised Labour MPs in 1897 seems to me entirely justified given that the playing field of the day belonged to Eton School - and offered a heavy slope in the ruling class's favour. In 1997 - and now in 2007 - the word I'd use is unacceptable. As for wealthy Tories getting help from the likes of Ashcroft, the only clean word that springs to mind is unpalateable.

There are a number of important issues here, and they should not be obscured by the unimaginative tabloid sub-editor's obsession with 'sleaze'. For the real problem - unelected influence - goes to the very core of our libertarian democratic system.

First and foremost, there are certain times when - via a mixture of big money, vote concentration and time aperture - relatively small interest groups can dominate British politics. Usually, such influence is to the detriment of the majority's needs. During the last four decades, we have seen this in relation to the Liberal Party (when Heath tried to stave off a Labour Government) the TUC (when undemocratic block-voting could have undermined Parliament's sovereignty) the media (when Murdoch power threatened to give him two million votes to everyone else's one) dodgy foreign interests (when half-mad oil-barons almost bankrolled the Opposition's campaign in total) illiberal religious interests (when Islamic concentrations in Bradford and Leicester got perilously close to legalised privilege) and now 'secret' (aka bent) donations threatening to give power to already rich people at both local and national level.

In this context, I would offer the view that British electoral politics are no less corrupt today than they were under the Rotten Boroughs of eighteenth century England.

Second, 'unelected' must surely now be applied as a term (by all rational observers) to many of our sitting MPs, in that such 'elected' representatives are - in over 250 cases in the current House of Commons - there thanks to a minority level of support in their constituencies. The single transferable vote (STV) system is one of the keys to truly devolving responsibility and democracy in our culture. This and this alone can break the stranglehold of the Big Two parties, neither of whom represent electors in the meaningful sense of that verb any more. Make 'first past the post' the system of choice, and you immediately open the influence door directly to anyone who is rich and can count.

Third, like it or not, Britain's new mega-rich have found ever-more insidious ways (underwriting City Colleges being the latest) of getting the Establishment's ear. And the Establishment's ear - be it New Labour or Conservative - is elephantine in proportion, but utterly lacking in shrewd discernment in relation to the schmooze it is hearing. As the CBI's more wealthy members (and the TUC's bigger battalions) have demonstrated in the past, politicians like power - but they recognise that under the current system it takes money - ' in large amounts' as Ron Moody's Fagin opined - to achieve it and protect it.

Penultimately (but perhaps most important) the 'lost deposit' system - quite genuinely imposed to stop the lunatic vote getting any representation - is retained today as an utterly cynical means by which grass-roots concerns can be denied access to the political process. To me, 'disenfranchised' is simply the arse-side of a coin called 'unelected'.

Finally, in a bizarre and almost obscene rebuttal of its origins, New Labour's soi-disant 'reform' of the upper chamber has produced nothing more than a latter-day Etats-Generals - the wealthy and aristocratic 'parlement' sop given out to the democratic dupes in the years before France's 1789 revolution. Scroll down the list of the new life-peers 'enobled' by Blair and his seedy apparatchiks, and you will see only drones ever-prepared to do the Government's bidding - regardless of either constitutional or national interest.

The solution to this cess-pit of unearned influence is extremely straightforward: the banning forthwith of all donations to political parties, and the creation - however bitter the taste may be to most of us - of a tax-funded pot available to all realistic political groupings for the furtherance of their aims.

There are two major objections to this. The first is once again the 'keep out the loonies' barrier of maintaining a high cost of entry. My answer to this is that if only money is keeping out the loonies, then we are in a parlous state indeed. The second revolves around the 'bottomless pit' fear: that everyone and his mother will want to stand for Parliament and thus make a mockery of the electoral process. Again, I think only a modicum of imagination is required to make something practical of my term 'realistic political groupings' in the above paragraph. A research study of 8,000 voters (ruling out all those parties obtaining less than, say, 7% of voting intentions) would have a margin of error at almost zero, and cost very little in the greater scheme of things.

An additional way to avoid the bottomless pit, of course, would be to say up front that the pit is finite: there are £20 million in the fund, and that's yer lot. Make of it what you will, guys - but each of you will have to make do on what's available.

How would it be apportioned? Well, most definitely not on level of support. Let us say for example that five Parties passed the research 'Primary' - Tories, Labour, Libdems, Greens, BNP - and a new lot called The Clean Reform Party. Then quite simply they would be given 20% each and told to get on with it. Each would have equal (but very limited) access to Political Broadcast airtime. And all would be banned from undertaking 'paid-for' advertising beyond leaflets clearly and only setting out the policies they advocated.

None of these ideas are pie in a cloud-cuckoo sky. They would instantly remove massive wealth and unelected influence from any role in our Parliamentary system. No, the reason they won't be enacted is because they would destroy - in the only positive sense of that verb - the stranglehold dinosaur Parties have on our system of government.

In the US, the log-cabin to White House story is almost impossible today - simply because for nearly a century, both major Parties have been unassailable institutions based upon the patronage of massive fame and wealth. This ghastly system has produced (among others) Warren Harding, Richard Nixon and George W. Bush. If the same fate is not to befall our democracy - in most senses, the cradle of libertarian democracy - then we must find a way to put pressure for change upon those running what's left of the United Kingdom into the ground.

(13.12.07)

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Civilisation may end with a whimper, but its decline begins with a sneer

As I was watching a 'Best Ever' movie compilation on television the other night, something clunked into place inside the infernal machine that is my thinking system. It wasn't something I particularly wanted in that place, clunked or otherwise. But there it has remained, and I can't for the life of me get rid of it.

The film in question was Monty Python's Life of Brian, and the blasphemy case Mary Whitehouse and others tried to bring against it. The film itself looked as funny as ever, and as an added bonus there was the hilarious TV debate between Muggeridge and a gay bishop on the one hand, and Michael Palin plus Jon Cleese on the other. Not only did Cleese run languid intellectual rings round St Mugg, Palin uttered one of his best lines, telling the self-styled 'open-minded' Bishop that he was "so relieved" the old puff had brought his mind ready-opened.

It was all a jolly jape, but the sequence left me with an uneasy feeling that has been nagging at me on and off for a couple of years now. I think I'm finally ready to put into words what the unease consists of, but for various reasons I do so with trepidation. You see, it's all very well for mega-bright University students to argue cogently about why Brian was harmless, but for some of the thicker folks wondering what to think about Christianity thirty years ago, I'm not sure it was harmless at all.

Towards the end of his life, I happened to work with Alf Garnett's inventor Johnny Speight. His creation Til Death do us Part represents a similar case to that of the Pythons biblical epic, in that while all we frightfully erudite intellectuals spotted immediately that Alf was an appalling bigot, lots of dockers all over the country thought him a good ol' boy setting an example to all of us. Speight had come to realise this, and people I know who've met Alf's player Warren Mitchell tell me he had the same equivocal feelings about the monster Garnett. It was yet another case of the elite being too clever by half.

From here on, this piece sinks ever deeper into the murky waters of potentially patronising reaction - but that won't hold me back any more. As 2008 dawns, I'm more certain than ever that taking the piss is fine for those who know its various levels, but not for the drongos who just fink it's a bit of a larf, like.

The late Peter Cook remains a hero of mine. A man who punctured pomposity more precisely than any other Twentieth Century Briton, he took a giant scimitar to the ruling class from 1960 onwards - whether that class consisted of Macmillans, Wilsons, Blairs, Union leaders, senior policemen, high court judges or soccer managers. His sketch Entirely a Matter for You (written and then peformed live on stage within five hours of the Thorpe judge's summing up) is a gem that everyone in awe of brainless authority should hear at least once in their lives.

But like so many of the satirists and Pythons and 'alternative' comics of the last four decades, Cook was a very bright and classically educated man. He knew why the Establishment was funny - but a huge proportion of his audience probably rarely got beyond the custard-pie element of laughing at Those in Charge. In the end, a generation of educationally mediocre people grew up thinking that all authority figures must be plonkers, because those clever blokes on the telly like John Mortimer, Clive Anderson, Ian Hislop, Eric Idle, Alan Bennett, John Bird and Rory Bremner just couldn't help seeing the funny side of them.

This is not as sweeping a generalisation as you might at first imagine. By the time you've ridiculed judges, politicians, teachers, vicars, fathers, housewife mums, coppers and royalty, there's little or nothing left to look up to. This is fine if you were born into a position on the class system where you're more likely to look down than up. But for those at the bottom (being advised on a daily basis in school that odd behaviour and giggling at PC Plod is fine) the experience is both disorientating, and likely to breed an attitude of contempt. I'm not sure that Essex Woman's contempt for Prince Philip and brainless adoration of Princess Diana is much of an improvement on cap-doffing and knowing one's place.

Of course, the obvious defence offered by those who have unpicked the culture over the last half-century is that if the Establishment behaves in a crass and hypocritical manner, then it deserves every brickbat thrown in its direction. I back this view entirely, but would nevertheless like to know what exactly is going to replace the old system. Certainly, nobody of sound mind can imagine that delusional pc apparatchiks, la-la land politicians, greedy commercial chieftains, social workers, feckless Underclass males and foul-mouthed stand-ups are the ideal raw material for a stable, law-abiding society where people look out for each other.

The easiest charge to lay at my door on the basis of this piece is that of young Leftie become aging curmudgeon along the heavily-trodden trail of Kingsley Amis, and all those other Angry Young Men who became Grumpy Old Men. This seems to me fair game, but doesn't answer the fundamental concern: given most human pack members need to sign up for what the Alphas think is best for everyone (or face anarchic chaos and the encroachment of rival packs) who and where are the Alphas today? And if and when they emerge, what good will be served by tabloid journalists hounding them into forced retirement?

Unquestioning obedience is a terrible idea. But relentlessly negative mickey-taking is almost as bad. Perhaps there is a new humorous form floating in the ether somewhere, via which better ways of running Britain can be made to tickle ribs rather than poke chests: I don't know, and to be honest I doubt it. Either way, knocking the house down is a bad idea if the only alternative is a pigsty.

(7.1.08)

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Could Hillary still be the main event in America's last-chance saloon?

When notbornyesterday called Barack Obama as the likely Democrat winner in Iowa last year, it did so with a sense of sadness. The editorial view remains that Hillary Clinton would make a better President, and engage in genuine reform with the minimum of rhetoric.

I felt (and still feel) that an experienced fixer with real inside experience of the White House and Congress is precisely what the USA needs at the moment. For me, there is a lesson to be learned from the Kennedy/Johnson ticket in 1960: while JFK gave Americans a vision, he was a novice when it came to Congress in general and getting liberal laws passed in particular. It was typical of his successor LBJ that he knew precisely how to exploit the Congressional sympathy vote following Kennedy's assassination. In the first few months of 1964, for example, Johnson pushed through more integrational and welfare legislation than Bobby and Jack had managed in the previous three years.

Of course, the likelihood of an eventual Obama/Clinton ticket in 2008 is distant bordering on surreal: I cannot imagine why Democrat bosses would ever go with a ticket on which rode a black man and a left-liberal woman.

What makes 'real issue' politics so fascinating to sad folks like me is that - probably more so in America than anywhere else - people really will get off their butts and vote to stop something. Thus Hillary Clinton's victory in New Hampshire (where the 40+ female turn out was truly amazing) did, I suspect, reflect the feelings of middle-aged women who are tired of talk and hungry for walk. The female gender has always been more practical and pragmatic than the male, and nowhere was this more clearly evidenced than in the Comeback State two days ago. They clearly see Clinton as a walker, and Obama as a talker.

Once again, the media are obsessed with 'why oh why were the polls wrong?' when taking off the pc blindfold would reveal the truth instantly: nobody likes admitting they ain't gonna vote for the black guy. Faced with socially correct mania, people lie to market researchers.

What the bosses in Denver's smoke-free Democratic Convention rooms will be asking themselves six months from now is, how many US States are like New Hampshire? Obama remains the clear leader among digruntled Republican voters. While John McCain seems to be not so much forging ahead as foraging in the issues, we must all remember that this is a man who has been Jon Stewart's punch-bag joke guest on The Daily Show for some years now: Reagan and Schwarzenegger notwithstanding, do Americans - in their current mood - really want an affable loser in the Oval Office. The sheer weight of media attention on the challengers strikes me as making this the most difficult task in history for a GOP candidate.

As I said last November, most grown-up American voters want change. What New Hampshire women have said is that they want deliverable change - and Hillary is their woman.

I still think Obama will get the nomination, chiefly because (a) he is rock-solid among young voters of both parties (b) enough older Republicans would rather have him than McCain, and (c) in the redneck States, Hillary Clinton is one small diagnosis up from cancer. This last point may well hold the key to both nomination and election: while Clinton polarises, Barack Obama has the 'let's hear it for a fresh start' New Frontierism that gets people excited.

But I sincerely hope I'm wrong: for Hillary Clinton really would change America - and in a way that would enable it to face an uncertain future without becoming illiberal.

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