EU:cock-up and conspiracy!

Being a believer that all politics is either cock-up or conspiracy, I evinced the view a while back that failure was deliberately programmed into the Euro launch so as to create a political union that would otherwise be totally unacceptable to voters. I also said that what they hadn’t expected was such a devastating outcome as the present, which puts the whole EU concept at risk of complete meltdown. Monnet himself is on record as saying that political union would have to be brought in by stealth, as people otherwise would not accept it. What they have now is both cock-up and conspiracy, no mean achievement.

Was I being paranoid?

This is what none other than a former Chancellor of the Exchequer, no less than Nigel Lawson, had to say only last week

The third group of Europhiles had a different agenda all along. They fully understood the dangers, yet promoted EMU precisely because a crisis could be overcome only by full fiscal and political union. For them, this was the objective. But such union is only practicable if it is the clearly expressed wish of the majority of the peoples of Europe; and that is manifestly not the case. Contempt for democracy has always been one of the most striking and least attractive characteristics of the European movement. It lies at the heart of the present crisis.

Has he been reading my blogs?

But it’s not all bad.

It is nice to think that the well-known British generosity to foreigners is not suffering during the cuts. The overseas aid budget, which rose by a measly 16% last year to £9 billion, is due to rise by 36% to £12.6 billion. So that’s all right, then.

And the Americans are buying our entire fleet of Harrier jets. Well, why not? We don’t have a carrier for them – and neither for the first time in our history do we have a warship based in home waters. Welcome to Planet Loony, al Qaeda!

Why do men watch pornography?

A while back there was a TV programme of this title. I didn’t watch it for two reasons.

The first was that it was clearly yet another ruse to screen soft porn under the cloak of a faux ‘in-depth investigation’.

The second was that it was a remarkably silly title because the answer is obvious, and also implies that women don’t.

At about the same time there was another programme under the same guise called ‘Does size matter?’ Another silly title because the answer to that is equally obvious. But it was hilarious. To make the point (whatever it was) a Welsh rugby team paraded around naked as jay birds, each displaying what appeared to be a shrivelled walnut between his massive thighs.

My exposure to porn (and I really must choose my words carefully) is very limited. Years ago I was at a management course for aspiring big shots. Part of the course was for every member to describe his job and his approach to how it should be managed, in the form of an informal after-dinner presentation.

One such was a senior police officer from the Yard. He returned from his week-end break bearing an attaché case and a film projector. He then announced that after dinner we were to reconvene in his room where he would show a selection of the material confiscated by the ‘dirty squad’ (the Obscene Publications unit, which was so corrupt that it was disbanded in its entirety by Sir Robert Mark, as I recall, about which more anon).

There was a mad dash upstairs, not a single absentee amongst this group of 40-ish, professional, Rotarian, golf-playing, middle class pillars of society. It was also an effective piece of aversion therapy.

But it demonstrated that the idea, if not the actuality, of porn stretches beyond frustrated saddos, if only out of curiosity. Our speaker also revealed that Friday night in the police canteen was porno night; the front row was always monopolised by women, so bang goes another misconception.

Some years later, I went by executive jet to Frankfurt for a demo of new computer stuff. The other members of the party were all senior suits. We were taken to dinner to a place far out in the forest. After dinner I repaired to the bar where I found myself alone. On asking where the rest of the party had gone, I was told that they were all at the ‘pornokine’ upstairs! I preferred the beer.

What this does seem to demonstrate is that most men will watch the stuff, probably out of curiosity and possibly only once.

There are voices being raised to ban it. The experience of the Obscene Publications unit at Scotland Yard shows very clearly that the inevitable effect would be corruption on a massive scale; the trade is said to be worth $97 billion a year. Sir Robert Mark memorably said that a good police force was one that caught more crooks than it employed.

This does raise a question about our sense of values, at least in the ‘Christian’ west. Why do we regard viewing the act of creating life as obscene when we are quite happy to allow the act of extinguishing it acceptable?

To me, the ultimate obscenity is the portrayal on our screens of the most vicious and gratuitous violence and slaughter, as epitomised by ‘The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’ and others of the genre.

Do Germans have a sense of humour?

Is the stereotype about Germans having no sense of humour in any way correct?

When I had a day job my authority was twinned with a small town in Germany. One of the Stadtdirektor’s staff was  Schneiderkin, who was completely off the wall.

On one visit he stayed with us. We took him to a fine restaurant in the village owned by a Swiss (apple dumplings to die for!). I told Schneiderkin that I didn’t think the owner was Swiss at all. ‘Who do you think he is?’ he asked. ‘Martin Bormann!’ I replied. When he had finished splitting his sides, he said ‘I vill ask him’. He then engaged the owner in a lengthy conversation in German. When he came back to the table he said ‘He is definitely Martin Bormann!’ We had a good giggle. I recounted this story to our German principal on one of his visits to Kingston. He gave me a very cold look and replied ‘Ve should not talk about such things!

Later I went to Malawi on an assignment that was a shambles from the beginning. The guy originally chosen as Team Leader pulled out at the last moment, so I found myself travelling to Malawi without a second member of the team. My preference as a replacement was an Irishman who was not qualified but knew IDA rules backwards and would have been good company (the Irish always are). True to form, the IDA selected a German ex-customs officer who knew nothing about law reform and spoke very limited English, as I was later to discover.

I went to meet him at the airport. He didn’t arrive but his baggage did (well, that’s Africa). I was unable to raise him on his mobile so I went back to the airport the following day on the off-chance that he might be on the J’oburg flight. I was expecting to see a tall, smartly dressed professional type.

Instead the very last passenger off the plane was a short, fat little scruff who looked as if he had slept in his clothes for quite a long time and was a stranger to the razor. First stop the ATM. Having first dropped his wallet, keys, small-change, mobile and passport on the floor, he eventually found his card. After struggling with the ATM for some time, he admitted defeat. He couldn’t remember his password! He told me that he needed money quickly because he only had a €20 note. When I asked him why he had left home with so little he said that, actually, he had found the €20 on the floor of the lounge in J’oburg.

He told me that the reason he was late was because there has been a bad-weather delay at Frankfurt. When I asked him why he didn’t phone to let me know he revealed that he didn’t have roaming for Malawi.

You will understand that by now I am beginning to believe that the German reputation for Teutonic efficiency is just another stereotype.

It quickly emerged that work was not a priority in his life. His key interests were beer, sausages, and jokes (yes – jokes). He kept up a running stream of one-liners like ‘A man knocked on my door and said he vos collecting for der old peoples’ home. So I gave him my mother-in-law!’ And ‘A man knocked at my door and said he vos collecting for der schwimming pool. So I gave him a bucket of water!’

That sort of stuff can get a bit wearing after two months.

One anecdote was about a job in Vietnam. At a restaurant with his Vietnamese counterpart he was asked ‘Do you like dock?’ ‘Yes’ said Norbert ‘I love duck’. When it arrived, it didn‘t look like duck. ‘Are you sure this is duck quack-quack?’ he asked. ‘No’ was the reply, ‘Dock bow-wow!’

One morning I caught him in the office looking very doleful. He said his laptop had crashed –hardly surprising as he had left it switched on all day in his hotel room where it had no doubt received the tender ministrations of the cleaner. He was not bothered by having lost all his data. It was his joke book that was the key absentee!

However, since he did no work whatsoever – not a tap – I assume that there was no data on his files anyway.

So one person destroyed a whole raft of German stereotypes – punctuality, efficiency, industriousness, financial prudence, lack of humour.

We used to call each other ‘Dr Warsteiner’ and ‘Dr Heineken’ just to confuse the ghastly programme officer.

I liked him.

Whatever happened to laughter?

Donkey’s years ago – at least 55 - there was a lovely Hollywood film called ‘The Golden Age of Comedy’, which was a compilation of the wonderful  comedies produced during the silent era and in the 30s – Laurel & Hardy and the other greats. The closing line in the film was ‘Whatever happened to laughter; there used to be so much of it about?’

‘Stone me’, as Tony Hancock was wont to say; there is now so much doom and gloom, but who is making  us laugh by way of compensation?

The House of Commons was once a flourishing source of wit, the stealthy insult (‘Mr Attlee’s car drew up at the House and nobody got out!’), the polished put-down, the instant repartee. Not any more, it seems. The last good shaft I can remember was when Gordon Brown was making a speech that was so full of management-speak it could only have been written by his understrapper, Ed Balls.

‘That’s not Brown’ called out Heseltine, ‘It’s Balls!

Of course, the ineffable Nicholas Soames would always put John Prescott off his stroke whenever he rose to speak by booming ‘Gin and tonic please, steward!’. But that was more public schoolboy banter than wit.

One golden rule of politics is never to get on the wrong side of your civil servants if you are a Minister. One such had made himself very unpopular but Nemesis arrived when he was making a very elegant speech (composed by his staff of course). When he got to saying ‘And now, Mr Speaker, I come to my proposed solution', there was written on his brief ‘And now you are on your own, you bastard!’

The law courts were always a rich vein for really professional put-downs. One of the greatest of all time was FE Smith (Lord Birkenhead in later career). Here’s a few samples

Judge: ‘I have listened to you for an hour and I am no wiser’.

Smith: ‘No, my Lord, just better informed!’

Judge: ‘Have you heard the saying by Bacon, the great Bacon, that youth and discretion are ill-wed companions?’

Smith: ‘Indeed, my Lord. And has your Lordship heard the saying by Bacon, the great Bacon, that a much talking judge is like an ill-tuned cymbal?’

Judge: ‘You are exceedingly offensive, young man’.

Smith: ‘Indeed, my Lord, we both are. The difference is that I mean it and you can’t help it!’

Another corker from Smith was:

Judge: ‘You must not show contempt for this court, Mr Smith’.

Smith: ‘I was not showing contempt, my Lord, I was trying to conceal it!’, although I have also heard this attributed to Mae West during her obscenity trial. (One of hers which I have seen attributed to others is ‘His mother should have thrown him away and kept the stork!’)

Lord Justice Darling was another lawyer with a wicked tongue, although I can’t find any quotes from him. In one case he sentenced an old lag to a very long period of penal servitude. The old villain complained ‘But, my Lord, I shall never live long enough to serve it’. ‘Never mind’ said Darling. ‘Just do as much as you can!’

One from Lord Elwyn-Jones at a dinner I attended years ago. Mr Justice Stable was about to open a criminal trial when one of the jurors asked to be excused. When the Judge asked why, the juror said, ‘Because my wife is about to conceive this morning’. The Judge replied ‘I think you mean she is going to be confined, but whether you are wrong or I am wrong, it would seem to be an occasion on which you should be personally present!’ That must have been in the 1960s when I heard that, but total recall is a sign of senility

All I can say is ‘Thank goodness for cricket’, not necessarily for the game but for the instant ‘sledging’ humour that accompanies it. Here’s one from the late, great Fred Truman. The batsman hit Fred for an easy catch but the fielder let it go between his legs. ‘Sorry, Fred’ he said, ‘I should have kept my legs closed. ‘Aye’ said Fred ‘ So should thy mother!’

Another of Fred’s put-downs was told to me by Dickie Bird, the great umpire. Fred sends down a snorter that destroyed the stumps. ‘Well bowled, Fred’ said the posh Southerner batting. ‘Aye’ said Fred, ‘T were wasted on thee!’

The ultimate rejoinder was probably from Ian Botham. Warne (his great drinking mate) was bowling when Botham came to the crease. ‘Hello, Beefy’ he said, How’s your missus and my kids? ‘The missus is fine’, replied Botham, ‘But the kids are retarded!’ For probably the only time in his career the gobby Warnie was struck dumb and never said another word.

And finally, about 25 years ago I worked quite closely with Sir John Banham when he was boss of the Audit Commission. ‘Auditors’ he told me, ‘found accountancy too exciting. They stalk the field after the battle, spearing the wounded!’. I bet that one has been told at every auditors annual bash since.

Nukes & nutters........

The possession of nukes is demonstrably a very strong deterrent against foreign aggression. No country that possesses such a deterrent has yet to be invaded and for obvious reasons. And the more fanatic the country possessing nukes, the more hesitant we Western peacekeepers are about changing the regime. Thus, to continue your dialogue re Iran, we either perform a pre-emptive strike before Iran's uranium is weaponized, or we allow them to develop a nuclear capacity and do our best to placate them. It is pretty clear that the US does not want Iran to become a nuclear power and will, along with Israel, take out their key nuclear processing plants. This was successfully achieved in Syria. Too bad it was not also done in Pakistan and Korea.

Our leading Republican contenders for the Presidency want to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power even if it means invading the country. Militating against this view is a strong body of opinion that does not want to repeat our invasion of Iraq on the erroneous grounds that they possessed weapons of mass destruction. At present, we are weighing fuzzy intelligence on the subject, curbing Israel and risking waiting too long to do anything. Everybody in the US wants Iran's nuclear potential to be limited and nobody wants another war. It looks like we are determined to be irresolute.

The Egyptian people have reared up again. Let's hope this time the US will not plunge in with all four feet in its mouth by lauding the glories of the proletarian masses and their fanatical Islamic underpinnings. A good test of such fanaticism is the public reaction to the young Egyptian lass who bared her body in Facebook in protest over her county's Neanderthal values. I would not sell her life insurance. More to the point, we should have learned by now that being in the Middle Eastern frying pan is preferable to the fire. Egypt's military is the only institutionalized force in the country capable of running the government. It has not done a bad job, comparatively speaking, and has managed to keep the fanatics at bay. It also tolerates Israel and for that alone should maintain its dominance until the Arab world experiences a Reformation.

Syria, meanwhile, is doing an excellent job of engineering its own grave. The regime will fall because Asaad's ham fisted tactics will only deepen enmity and hostility toward him and his Alawite minority. No doubt the West is already feeding and arming the rebels and no doubt also that the protests will be hijacked by the Syrian equivalent of the Muslim Brotherhood. What a shame for a country as great as Syria to be subject to the myopia of a frightened leader whose inheritance from the golden age of Arab rule amounts to nothing.

Merckel, Merckel uber alles!

Your Teutonic Dominatrix appears to be well in charge of Western affairs at the moment. She has forged a cunning plan for the EU and the euro that will solve both political and economic problems and whip the recalcitrant Brits into compliance. Bottoms up, lads, you are in for a nasty lashing. Just put a eurocent in the cup as a tribute to your new currency. I wonder if notes will be printed with an image of her maj?

That looks like the scenario if Wolfgang Schäuble is to be believed. There is nothing more beautiful than rows of nations, like soldiers in steel helmets, goose-stepping together in a uniform line. The cadence is called in German, eins, swei, drei as Herr Kameron shouts 'eyes right' when the UK contingent marches past a grandstand on which the Dominatrix is seated. He holds a red, white and black banner emblazoned with the euro sign in the center. The slower-moving club med contingents bring up the rear. Somewhere in the middle are two circus wagons pulled by panzers. One contains George Papandreou and the other Berlusconi. Both men prowl their cages in disgrace and hide their faces as the pass the grandstand amid boos and cat calls from the throngs of spectators wearing arm bands with the euro symbol on them.

The good news is that not a shot was fired. Indeed, the entire affair was planned, executed and institutionalized with nothing worse than a few editorials doting on some rather unsavory characteristics of the new leaders. Odd, the editors have not printed anything lately, in fact, they have not even been seen. The Daily Telegraph and the Times have stopped printing altogether while the remaining rags all bear a euro emblem on the upper right hand corner of the front page of each edition. Broadcasting House is closed, emptied of its contents which were taken away last night in lorries escorted by the Metropolitan Police. One observer noted that the police cars bore the euro emblem on each front door and under which were crossed sabers.

The reaction here in the USA has been predictable. President Obama canceled the remainder of his trip to Indonesia remarking how much he admired and respected the German people. He also said something about a new relationship with Israel. Otherwise, very little although it has been reported that language schools from coast to coast have enjoyed an enrollment spike for German classes.

Locally, the wine shop has been closed by city officials in favor of a bier haus featuring German and a few other Northern European brands. Our mayor just ordered a new Mercedes SUV as did the president of the local bank. The newly established Mexican restaurant was closed this morning. A sign in the window read 'Coming Soon, the Hofbrauhaus'.

Europe: 'a worn-out welfare society.....'

So here, after much devilling on my part, are the runners and riders in the great Euro Sweepstake (I have popped in US and Japan for comparison. My source, which I have now forgotten, said that the Japanese figure was sovereign debt but it is so out of kilter it may include domestic debt, but the point is made nonetheless). The UK bond rate is now 2.2% whereas we are told that the ‘real’ rate for Greece is 30%.

    Country            %GDP        

1.          Sweden            36                 

2.          Switzerland     52                 

3.          US                      63                 

4.          Holland             65

5.           Spain                 67

6.           Austria              72

7.           UK                      80

8.           Germany          82

9.           France               86

10.            Belgium             94

11.            Portugal           106

12.            Ireland              109

13.            Italy                   121

14.            Greece              165

15.            Japan                238

Spain is a bit of a puzzle because sovereign debt is not the obvious cause of its woes. Without research, I am guessing that theirs is a ‘sub-prime’ problem caused by the mad dash into speculative property development on the back of cheap money – same as Ireland but exacerbated by criminality and the confiscation without compensation of expats’ homes legitimately acquired, which has effectively killed that huge segment of the market for all time, plus appalling unemployment (over 40% amongst the young), an over-paid and unsackable public sector, low productivity and an unaffordable and  unsustainable welfare structure.

An interesting dimension is that the UK is Spain’s biggest debtor by far, so at least they will be getting their money back, and not in Euros, either.

The biggest kick in the teeth this week has to be China’s contemptuous description of Europe as ‘a worn-out welfare society’.

The EU has now brought down 6 of the elected governments in the 17-strong Eurozone, and installed unelected Eurocrats as Prime Minister in Italy and Greece. One of them confessed to not knowing what a CDS is. I bet he knows now! The Greek joker was the one who fiddled the books (with the help of Golden Sacks) to get Greece into the Euroclub in the first place, so presumably he will be equally adept at prising  them loose again. Meanwhile, they are rolling a snowball downhill.

As for Italy, over the past 10 years only Haiti and Zimbabwe have had a lower growth rate.

Back here, the big worry is not sovereign debt but stagflation. We have a stuttering growth rate and high inflation. We are told that to get the economy moving we need to spend more. Well, to a simple old country boy like me the answer is obvious. You put more money in peoples’ pockets. You do this by cutting taxes and raising the bank rate. The latter not only brings down inflation, making the pound in your pocket worth more, but it increases the incomes of the millions who have bank deposits. But what do I know?

May you live in interesting times.

EU to censor Slapdash & Poor?

Oh what fun!

The Petit Grenouille and his Teutonic dominatrix are having a fit of carpet-biting over the rating agencies putting out news that is not to their liking, especially the latest goof about France’s AAA going to AA and back again at the hit of a computer key.

So typically they want to censor the agencies by barring them from changing their sovereign ratings i.e. their opinion of the credit-worthiness of a country rather than simply an investment vehicle. The EC has just put out a consultation paper (not that the EC has a stellar reputation for consulting the hoi-polloi).

So how likely is this to come about?

Well, for starters all the agencies are US-based and it is unlikely that the US government would lend a sympathetic ear to a proposal that would breach the US constitution.

But what would be the effect if did impose this piece of blatant censorship? At the moment critique, the agencies would have to state that they were unable to provide a rating for the country under review, as clear a signal as you could get that a downgrade was likely – except that investors would not know whether this would be AA+ or junk. The consequence is obvious.

Now, it’s true that the agencies are far from infallible. They made a complete horlicks of it when the ‘crunch’ arrived three years ago. S&P have just downgraded the Isle of Man to the same as the US – AA+, although it does not have a penny of sovereign debt and is barred by law from producing a deficit budget. And the Big Three – Moody’s, Fitch and Slapdash and Poor - have a dominant market position, so the spread of opinions is quite thin.

Of course, it is too much to expect that the EU is after wider competition. This has never been known in any circumstance affecting Europe. But we do get a clue that one of these cockamamie proposals is to require the agencies’ methodologies to be approved by an EU body that will be their minder. The intention is to impose uniformity, not competition.

In its characteristically underhand way, what the EU is really proposing is a European agency that would dance to the Ode to Joy, presumably headed up by Dr Pangloss.

But what they are not explaining to the public is that even if Club Med is rusticated, the debts, including many mortgages, will still be in Euros. Translating these into drachmas, lira or whatever would vastly increase the amount outstanding in devalued local currencies. The obvious move will be capital flight, which is already happening big-time. The City seems to be one of the beneficiaries, plus the London property market, which has seen busy activity from Greek buyers. Ah well, one man’s meat is another man’s poisson! (Yes, that’s supposed to be a pun, not a typo).

Has the Dirty Digger lost the plot?

The end of the Jackson trial has also ended Sky News’ self-immolation.

For almost the whole period it abandoned its early evening news transmissions, preferring to broadcast live from the court from 5.30 p.m. to 11.30 p.m. The inevitable outcome of this would have been massive flight to BBC, C4 or ITN. There is a very strong likelihood that these viewers will not come back. We used to watch Sky 6 o’clock news, but we switched to the Beeb. It is vastly superior.

So what possessed Sky to do this? Did it seriously imagine that anyone other incurable saddos were in the least interested? Did we not have to put up  with a nauseating surfeit of gut-churning, toe-curling, sick-making, maudlin grunge when this weirdo went to meet his Maker? I had Jacko marked down as a Bad Influence when I saw my 8-year old grandson cavorting around with his hand grasping his crotch in imitation of  Wacko’s stance.  He seemed to spend his adult life trying to become a honky and ended up as a freak. What’s to like?

It does make one wonder if News International has been afflicted with institutional insanity. We are still going through the phone hacking farce, with MPs, none of whom could lie straight in bed, coming over all indignant when it seems like only yesterday they were fawning over the Dirty Digger and vying with each other to get the OBN from him.

And we now hear that his red-headed understrapper spent a wad on gumshoes to spy on – well – just about everybody of significance, including Fl. Lt W. Wales. What filth did they expect to expose? As a result, one of our great institutions, the NOTW, is no more, the only paper that exposed the Pakistani cricket fraud although what was going on stuck out like a greyhound’s gonads.

Of course the MPs had to go and blow it by being as vulgar as the aforesaid NOTW, calling the Crown Prince ‘the only mafia boss in history not to know that he was running a criminal  institution’ under the protection of Parliamentary privilege. Not exactly Parliamentary language, but we no longer expect any standards from our legislators. But it let Young James off the hook!

My guess is that NI will get out of the print media altogether, except that the huge losses on the Times especially enable NI to set-off against tax via their tax shelter in Delaware.

Of course, there will be those who will say ‘Frankly, my dear, I couldn’t give a damn. The problem is that NI has long been a blue chip, and will be the repository of large pension fund investments.

Washingto: den of corruption?

I just read an intriguing account of an interview between a current events and special interest weekly tv program entitled "60 Minutes" and a man by the name of Jack Abrahamoff. The latter was jailed about 4 years ago for corruption as a Washington lobbyist. He is sorry and in his efforts to seek forgiveness he is telling all, or at least a lot.

He insists that Washington remains a den of corruption and that legislative action geared to suit one's particular needs can be easily bought if one has enough money. His MO was to snuggle up to congressional aides, preferably chief aids, and at an appropriate moment offer them an extremely high paying job at Jack's lobbying firm after the staffers leave their current jobs. Through this technique, says Jack, he was able to 'own' the staffers who in turn gave him priority access to the elected officials for whom they worked. Two such elected officials were brought down with Jack, one of whom was from Texas, Tom Delay.

That's another sordid story.

How sad it is to find such extensive corruption in contemporary Western institutions. Everything we were taught in primary and secondary school about our government and how it works was a big lie. I doubt our teachers were party to the lie, as they too were victims of government propaganda about its integrity, morality and sanctity. I even carried these beliefs with me to Africa and Asia during my 30 years tour as a development consultant. It was absolutely shocking to return home to find that the difference in corruption in the third world and the USA was that in the USA we can afford it.

As the onion of corruption is peeled, one becomes less and less enamored with and interested in our dear leaders in Washington, our state capitals and our counties and cities. The new law of governance is that the wheels of the US bureaucracy are greased with payoffs. Our national civil service is an employment agency managed by the administration in power to reward supporters.

Democracy is a cover for political party machines to secure and sustain power in conjunction with commercial and industrial giants who rely on government contracts, or legislation, to maintain their corporate status and rank. Honesty and good intentions are no longer of any significance and those who might initially subscribe to such naivete are soon turned by their seniors and mentors into functioning parts of the political machinery. The slim few who still adhere to the concept of statesmanship are but voices crying in the wilderness.

There is no turning back; no bloodless means by which we can regain credibility among the electorate. Indeed, credibility among the ruling elites of other world nations is gained not by our integrity and honesty, but by our skill at maintaining power while balancing competing and corrupt interests. While we once abhorred corruption in countries like China and India, we now take lessons from them. Those few who are exposed and persecuted for corruption are not the victims of crime as much as victims of having embarrassed the administration or senior members of congress.

This is all a bit unnerving as admission of our deteriorating ethics offers little insight into where the loyal citizen should bestow support, assistance and indeed monetary contributions. In a deeper vein, many Americans are confused and confounded by what do to by way of making improvements. A critical mass is lacking to foster revolution, but the day will come when the public will explode over governments indifference, self interest, elitism, lack of empathy, inability to solve problems and constant propagandizing about what it will one day achieve.

Tension is mounting, especially among youth and the unemployed. Wages are largely frozen (for those who are employed) while the cost of living is skyrocketing. Government is seemingly powerless and whatever it proposes in the form of solutions is immediately castigated by the opposition. Our finance and banking sector is out of control and has been handsomely rewarded for corruption and incompetence. Wall Street does whatever it wants with an occasional slap on the wrist followed by the issue of huge bonuses.

Yet, we are told, we will never achieve wealth by making rich people poor. Riding on the back of that caveat, rich men have been lining their pockets with reckless abandon. Such behavior prevails while many, many, American families work two jobs just to keep up, not to get ahead. I also read that many jobless people have simply given up trying to find permanent work and to file for unemployment. The paperwork involved in the latter is not worth the effort. Black economies result, as does crime. 

Lest we forget.........

And so Remembrance Day is with us again. I ask myself if the British are undergoing a sea-change in their attitudes, especially to their recent history.

The ‘two minutes silence’ was introduced after WW1. It seemed to fall into desuetude sometime after WW2 – I have no sense of when because I spent most of my young adult life abroad. But it has been back now for some time and it seems to be quite rigorously observed. I happened to glance at a soccer match on a TV in a local pub on Sunday and saw the two teams standing to attention in rows. Apparently they were observing the silence as they would play no soccer on Remembrance Day itself.

The BBC’s excellent ‘Countrywise’ programme was given over to related topics. One such was a piece about Slapton Sands where the Americans rehearsed for D-Day. Shortly before, German E-boats strayed into a full-scale amphibious exercise and in the ensuing mayhem more American were killed than on D-Day at Omaha Beach.  There is an immaculately preserved Sherman tank on the beach-front as a memorial.

It also covered Lavenham Airfield in Suffolk, an area that I know well. It was a US air-base during WW2. The farmer who owns the lands has perfectly restored the old control tower which now stands as his personal tribute to the 26,000 US airmen who lost their lives in the bombing campaign over Germany in addition to the 55,000 RAF men who died. And in the bar of the Swan Hotel in Lavenham there is a preserved wall that carries the signatures of the aircrews who patronised it, such as General Andrews who was killed in action and who is commemorated with Andrewsfield which is now a flying club from which I have flown quite few times. The wall is almost a history of WW2, with the early signatures being English, then Polish and  Czech, until the arrival of the Americans in late 1942.

Finally, it went to the National Arboretum Memorial. This is absolutely stunning, and commemorates the British servicemen and women who have died in the 43 conflicts - yes, 43 – since WW2 in which we have been engaged, 16,000 names in all and rising every week. To devote so much industry and talent in creating this masterpiece can only indicate a very acute sense of history and of respect for the dead.

Where I live, there is a memorial in a small parish  church to American airmen who were all killed during WW2 when their aircraft crashed into a nearby mountain when taking  them back to the US on completion of their tours. There are fresh flowers on it the whole time. Goodness knows who puts them there. Every year the Stars and Stripes is raised on the mountain top to commemorate the anniversary of the tragedy. There is also a service there, which this year was attended by members of the space shuttle crews.

There is a War Graves Commission cemetery in another tiny parish church adjoining a war-time airfield, marking the graves of the airmen who were killed flying from there. Some were in their 50’s and still on active service!

When I think that WW2 is as remote in time for a 20-year old today as the Battle of Omdurman was for me at 20, I find it astonishing that there is so much respect shown by the younger generation. Perhaps it is because it is men and women from their generation who are dying in our present useless wars.

We British are a funny old lot. Maybe it’s our mongrel blood that makes us totally unpredictable. When I was a kid during WW2, our quiet country village was invaded by Italian POWs. They were enormously cheerful and friendly – maybe they were just delighted at being safe. They had no guards and were just dropped off a truck in the morning and picked up again in the evening. The ladies of the village gave them tea (and a little more, I suspect, there being almost no men around).

They were replaced by Germans who I suspect were captured in the Western Desert because they were all marvellously tanned. Apart from one or two old timers these were powerfully built young men, and they were very friendly to us kids. They got the same treatment from the villagers. They were also stunningly hard working without any supervision at all.

A while back I saw a TV documentary about a POW camp in Yorkshire. At the end of the wart the rule was ‘no fraternisation’. Fat chance. At Xmas 1945 they were all invited to church and to lunch afterwards, despite stringent food rationing.

And some time in the mid-80s a guy came into my office bearing a beautifully made wooden pencil box. The maker had carved his name and home address in it and it was apparent that it had been made by a German POW. Amazingly we were able to track him down, and we attended a party at which the Burgomaster returned it to him. He said that his time as a POW in England were amongst the happiest days of his life. He had been sent to work on a farm where he was treated with nothing but kindness and lived there as a member of the family.

Now the crooks who run FIFA have decreed that England will not be allowed to wear the poppy for their game against Spain. The idiots don’t seem to understand that this is not triumphalism but a show of remembrance, respect, and a warning about the consequences of going to war.  There is nothing vengeful about the British (when the great German fighter pilot Adolph Galland died, there were more RAF types at his funeral than German fliers).

The Euro: tragedy to farce....and back!

The Euro crisis seems to go from tragedy to farce and back again in a single day. How to make sense of it all? The chattering classes have much to say but little of any value and almost nothing that enables us to understand the real issues.

The whole Euro project is fundamentally flawed. Brussels knew this at the time of its planning and launch. It opened with the ‘growth and stability’ pact. Who were the first to breach it? Why, the two countries that  put it in place to prevent  the Club Med from going on a spending spree with an artificially cheap currency. I speak of France and Germany, of course. So why did they do such an irresponsible and uncharacteristically reckless thing? Because it was all in the Master Plan that the Euro should get into difficulty, enabling the Franco-Teutonic Axis to push for political integration. A Europe run by France and Germany, with the remainder as client states of the Big Two – the EUSSR. Not since the Holy Roman Empire and Charlemagne has there been such a political union. It would be the summit of French and German foreign policy over 400 years that they had unsuccessfully tried to achieve through major wars.

What they had not bargained for was the Euro going tits-up quite so spectacularly.

The built-in flaws were that the Eurozone created a grouping of 17 members all with their own fiscal and economic policies. The EU has no common treasury, no taxation powers, no bonds and no proper central bank that can act as lender of last resort. If the Euro is to survive it must be given all those characteristics. The price to be paid is that individual member states will lose their own taxation powers, control over budgetary and economic policies, their central banks and borrowing powers, in addition to loss of the ability to fix interest rates which has led to the current crop of disasters.

And we have heard much about the crisis being caused by the profligacy of Ireland and the Club Med. Well, not quite.

First, Ireland and Spain roared into inflation with mad-cap expansion of property development on the back of cheap money which the home governments could not control because they have no power over interest rates.

And we hear a great deal about sovereign debt, personal debt, all kinds of debt, in fact. What we hear nothing about is saving. But in  a closed currency zone the simple arithmetic will tell you that when the economies within that zone are hopelessly out of balance, with widely differing levels of efficiency, production costs, wage-levels, cost of living and the rest the whole edifice will become out of kilter because if Germany is racking  up massive savings through its dominance of manufacturing industry and it huge export market the counter effect is debt on the part of the less efficient economies i.e. the Club Med. Savings on this scale suck the life-blood out of uncompetitive economies.

One size fits nobody. (And if Brussels believes that it can dragoon the ex-Communist counties into exchanging the Kremlin for the Berlaymont they are nuts!).

Add to this widespread corruption, poor revenue collection efficiency, weak leadership, snail’s pace decision-making inherent in getting agreement from  17 different governments – and here we are!

As ever, Europe’s leaders are falling back on the old stand-by. If all else fails, lie your way out of it!

Only days ago we were told that the Greeks could not leave the Eurozone because there was no legal mechanism for it. Ditto the EU. Now Merkozy tells us that if the Greeks don’t boss-up, they will be out of both!