The € crisis; farce or tragedy?

 I don’t know whether to laugh or cry over the European debt crisis because I can’t make up my mind whether it is farce or tragedy. At this time it’s the former but on my prediction that Greece will default in less than a month it could rapidly become the latter.

It’s definitely déjà vu all over again.

When the banks went tits-up in 2008, the ‘moral hazard’ question was why should the US taxpayer prop up Lehman Bros and its creditors when great reward for great risk have gone hand  in hand. Isn’t this reducing banking to a casino where if the bankers win they keep the moolah but the taxpayer picks up the losses?

Now the question is why should the northern taxpayer pick up the tab for Greek incontinence?

In the earlier case, the US Government let Lehman go to the wall pour encourager les autres (which of course was overseen by Hank Poulson, latterly boss of Golden Sacks, Lehman’s biggest competitor).

The outcome was a collapse of confidence in the whole banking system, not quite what was intended

In the current case, the plain answer is that if Greece makes a disorderly retreat there could be another run on the banks and on the debt of solvent countries that have liquidity problems, especially Italy and Spain.

One outcome of all this is that the European leaders have shown that not one of them is fit to lead a pig to market, as my old man  used to say.

At the outset they maintained that Greece wouldn’t need a bail-out. It has had two.

They maintained that the Greeks would not infect other countries. They did.

They said that the banks would not need to be re-capitalised because European countries never default. Don’t hold your breath.

The US government is in competition for the pusillanimity prize.

It supported a private-sector rescue plan for Bear Stearns. It nationalised Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. It delivered the coup de grace to Lehman whilst rescuing AIG.

But at least it did something. The European leaders can’t agree on a single thing. National governments, the ECB and the European Commission all seem to be going off in different directions. Coats are now being trailed that bond-holders may have to take a bigger haircut from Greece than they have already signed up to.

That’s pretty good way of further damaging confidence in the banking system.

But ‘Keep buggering on, Inches’, as Winston used to say to his valet.

Foxy Knoxy; the movie...

And so to Foxy Knoxy, now a little of the hysteria and dust has settled. (One could normally expect ‘Amanda Knox; the Movie’ soon but of course that has already been done. It was produced on US TV whilst the appeal case was sub-judice. Contempt of court, anybody?

Pardon my mirth, but at such scenes of joy and rage one could scarce forebear to laugh.

We have the Italians getting drama-queenish over US media accusations that somehow their police are not perfect and that their judicial system is slow and incompetent.

We have the US media squawking about a ‘show trial’ (like Jackson’s Doctor, perhaps) and miscarriage of justice for convicting such a nice, all-American girl, plus a painfully slow appeals procedure that strung out the hearing for 10 months although the court only sat for 11 days, and in any event took 4 years to come to trial. This does not happen in the US, of course. There it takes 20 years, and you still get topped.

So let’s have a peep through the media fog.

What was the judgment of the Appeal Court? Well, we don’t know because nobody has told us. Was it ‘Not guilty’ ‘Not proven’ (should they have such a thing in Italy)? Was it ‘Unsafe and unsatisfactory verdict by the lower court’?

Does it matter? Well, yes, actually, because if it was the last of these it is actually saying that because both the police and the prosecution made such a balls of the whole case that she should never have been convicted. Therefore, if they have a presumption of innocence in Italy, which as far as I am aware does not exist under the Code Napoleon elsewhere in Europe, then she was innocent. (Even if she did it, which on the evidence as now reported seems most unlikely).

So what was it all about?

A large part of the defence case rested on the undoubted fact that the prosecution, aided and abetted by an enthusiastic media, drip-fed lurid details of the case so that by the time it came to trial the jury were bound to be irreversibly prejudiced against the accused. There were frequent illegal leaks that tainted the whole proceedings. The media only published the prosecution evidence.

On those grounds alone the appeal was almost certain to succeed. But the weaknesses of the prosecution case were that they were unable to show motive, there were no witnesses to show that Knox was present at the time of the murder, there was no reliable DNA evidence (it was contaminated by police bungling), the murder weapon didn’t fit all the wounds (which actually suggests that there were 2 knives), and the confession was under duress and later withdrawn.

One of the curiosities is why the West African drug dealer, who was convicted separately earlier, was not called to give evidence – an arcane aspect of Italian criminal law, perhaps.

The only certainty about the whole affair is that Knox will make a lot of money, much good may it do her.

Money talks....in US elections.

America is in a near permanent state of electioneering. The 2012 campaign is in full swing although we are 13 months away from the next presidential election. Money spent and received by this ridiculous process is at the core of the issue.

Money is the critical factor in winning elections.

States with early election proceedings such as the Iowa caucus, the Florida straw poll, and New Hampshire's first primary all profit from campaign money spent by the candidates. Realizing this potential for state income, New Hampshire's earliest primary date is being pre-empted by at least two other states. Where will it all end?

Another remarkable trend is the growing protests movement against Wall Street. Starting in New York, the protests have expanded along the East Coast and to California. Some say they are inspired and backed by trade unions, while others write them off as capricious youth exercising their liberal sentiments en route to maturity.

In any case, it is about time someone took to task the miscreant behavior of some Wall Street denizens. Recent media comments here indicate a growing disdain for 'over the top' executive salaries with particular contempt for multi-million dollar payoffs to failed and fired executives. The pity is that we need to wait for another generation of American youth to take command with the hope that they will reinstall moral and ethical values in politics and commerce.

‘Money talks

I don’t deny.

I heard it once.

It said ‘Goodbye!’

The race to the White House; tortoise &....another tortoise?

Herman Cain is shooting up in popularity. I still believe he is unelectable, although Attila the Hun could beat Obama given the manner in which he contributes to social division in America. Cain, like his pizza empire, is a populist who is chuck full of common sense homilies that seldom pass second thought investigation.

His international knowledge and experience is zero as is his political resume. Likeable, yes, but electable , no way. Two weeks in office and Congress would serve him for lunch. His recent rise in popularity is largely the result of Rick Perry's demise.

Rick is a walking archive of closet skeletons that would have prevented a wiser man from even thinking about the presidency in the first place. They are now haunting him and will continue to do so as long as Rick continues to dream beyond his personal means.

We are left with Mitt Romney. And that is not a bad consolation. He has experience, a sound track record, business acumen, a clean house (as far as anyone can tell) and presidential bearing. That he is inclined to put his audience to sleep is regrettable, but not grounds for divorce.

Unlike O, he campaigns as someone who knows what can be achieved by a president and what cannot. He is not making promises that he cannot keep, or at least making a sterling attempt at keeping. While O promised the moon and delivered dreams, Romney has a credible plan for economic recovery and what's more it sounds achievable.

The big question is O's re-electability. He still commands considerable loyalty among black and Hispanic minorities. His popularity among Jews is waning as they are beginning to abandon their allegiance to Democratic Party liberalism in favor of Republican Party conservatism. This trend has been accelerated by O's generally unsympathetic policies toward Israel.

His staunch support and promotion of labor unions paid political dividends in terms of campaign contributions, but a sharp backlash is apparent. There is a strong anti-union feeling in America that is being unleashed by O's flagrant use of labor union influence to achieve his political ends. His payoffs to unions such as giving the auto workers a significant shareholding in General Motors is one of many examples.

O's lackluster track record is another issue. He has poorly and unconvincingly managed the national debt and his only major achievement, health care reform, is fraught with uncertainties over its cost and effectiveness.

Read us in My Telegraph.

As you know I also publish our blogs on My Telegraph.

I have just downloaded a flag counter which show the hits and where they come from world-wide. The surprising outcome is that we get far more than on blogspot.

To get into this, go to the Daily Telegraph ‘home’ page; scroll to the foot of the page. Got to ‘Comments’; go to ‘My Telegraph’; then all you need to do is register.

You will then be able to see all the comments on ours, and read and comment on everybody else’s  blogs.

It’s easy!

So farewell, then, Greece...Euro next?

Einstein is alleged to have said ‘Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result’. So we must accept that the EU has gone completely off its collective trolley in dealing with the sovereign debt crisis.

The Germans have again been shanghaied into stumping up more gazillions to get the Club Med out of the poo. But what are the realities? We have said here a number of times that Greece is beyond redemption. Cyprus is the same but too small to affect the situation. Greece can’t continue in the Eurozone. It can’t pay its debts. The obvious solution is for it to leave the Euro and reschedule its debts. This does not mean default as such; simply that the creditors will have to wait a few more years for its money. Of course, Greece will not be able to borrow on the world money markets, but an enforced diet of austerity is just what the bloated old crook needs.

Spain is the victim of its own dishonesty, especially in the property market where it allowed speculative building to boom off the back of artificially cheap money (as did Ireland) and then fouled its own nest by dispossessing more than 50,000 expat house-owners through corrupt planning and land transfers by their own officials. But their problems are not beyond recall, neither are those of Italy and Portugal. But apart from Greece, which is bust, the problem with Club Med seems to be liquidity rather than debt.

Ireland seems to be coming out of the woods, mostly because of the admirably determined and courageous way they have tackled their problems, and partly by telling Brussels to go forth and multiply when it tried to force the Irish into giving up their favourable corporation tax regime – the main plank of growth and recovery.

European banks, especially the French, will almost certainly take a crew-cut over sovereign debt rescheduling but this won’t bother them too much; as we know, modern banking is gambling with the customers’ money, keeping the winnings, but passing on the losses to the tax-payer.

When we had our banking crisis in 2007/8, there was much gloating from the French. Not enough regulation, they said (you know how much they enjoy regulation). ‘We order things much better in France,’ they would say. Today the big French banks have lost a third of their value. Societe Generale bought a Greek bank that had been owned by the army (I thought that it was only in places like Burma that the army ran commercial enterprises), as did Credit Agricole. Both were up to their ocksters in Greek bonds that are likely to end up nearly worthless.

The latest victim is Dexia, a giant Franco-Belgian bank; it seems to have acquired a huge liquidity problem along with a huge amount of Greek debt, and is hitting the inter-bank lending famine that caused our crash 3 years ago.

The Paris and Frankfurt stock indices have both fallen by 25% in the last quarter.

Oh dear. But then, déjà vu is French, innit? Schadenfreude pour moi!

In fact, the UK economy seems much stronger than the doomsters tell us. The 10-year bond rate is as strong as it has been for 60 years as money leeches out of Europe; the AAA  rating has just been renewed; the GDP-debt ratio is relatively low; and most Government borrowing has long-term redemption dates, so is clear of the debt crisis facing the sick men of Europe.

Heffer's back!

As I predicted when he left the Torygraph, Heffer is back at the Daily Mail where no doubt he will remain until the editor at the DT is replaced. He is somewhat more subdued than he was previously so perhaps the megalomaniac who runs the Daily Wail has told him to tone it down a bit.

Unfortunately, this means that he is less than entertaining than of yore. I used to look forward to a good Heffer rant twice a week.

It also looks as if he is called upon to perform six days a week.

In advance of the Tory Party conference, he is calling upon Dave to start acting like a Tory. In particular, he wants Dave to move ahead on Scottish independence (fat chance, Simon – the canny Scots will never get off their English gravy-train), a referendum every time there is an EU treaty change (under existing law this is available but not automatic), repatriation of the Common Agricultural policy (I think he means ‘scrapping’) and repatriation of powers over employment, social policy, the environment, and health and safety.

Simon joins Quentin Letts, the best of the Parliamentary sketch writers; Tom Utley whose father was the great Peter Utley on the Torygraph; and the outrageous Richard Littlejohn as the big hitters at the paper.

So there it is; hold your nose, go to Mail Online and enjoy.

The world's gorn bloody mad.....

My neighbour Ken, an old soldier with a strict routine, used to march into ‘The Compasses’ (Heffer’s favourite pub) at precisely 1230 every day. He would take his pint, sit in the corner, open the Daily Express, skim through it and exclaim ‘The world’s gorn bloody mad!’

How right he was.

At 6 pm I turned to Sky News to see the latest on the travails of the world. And what did I get? The opening statement in the trail of Michael Jackson’s doctor. Instead of taking a few minutes this went on for precisely 43 minutes. We then had 15 seconds on Milliband’s speech to the Labour Party conference, followed by sport and the weather.

Believing in the conspiracy theory of politics, I assumed this was a Murdoch ploy to wipe out Ed.

This should have been followed by an hour  of ‘Jeff Randall Live’, but was it?

Nope!

Another hour of the trial. So I switched to ‘Quest means  Business’ on CCN. And what did I get? More of the same. So I switched to BBC News, and – that’s right – the same.

So I went to Al Jazeera, the best news service by a long chalk, and eventually got real news.

What an insult to the viewing public that we should be treated so contemptuously.

Daft DT headline of the week:

‘Satellite crashes over Canada and the Indian Ocean’. Must have been a bloody big satellite! Perhaps they meant ‘Satellite debris......’

What's the point of education?

I am unconvinced that all the criticism about education in the UK is totally justified. Sure, the records show that there is a lot of bad teaching in sink schools, but a lot of it must be down to bad parenting and little monsters who won’t learn and can’t be disciplined. As my old dad used to say ‘You can’t educate pork’.

I read a piece that compared GCE maths in 1970 to a present-day exam question. The 1970 question was incomprehensible to me, it was that difficult. The current question quoted was ‘Write 50,000 in words’. To check this I looked at a book of specimen questions for today’s maths GCSE. They were too damn difficult for me!

Some of the commentariat seem to think that there was a Golden Age when discipline was strict, teachers were competent, and bright little boys and girls went on to Grammar School, fame, and fortune.

My experience 60 years ago is that certainly discipline was far stricter than now, with corporal punishment, and the ultimate sanction of expulsion at the sole discretion of the Headmaster. Teaching ranged from mediocre to inspired.  One afternoon per week was compulsory and competitive games, and another afternoon was set aside for more cultural pursuits, such as chess and amateur dramatics. None of my set achieved much in the way of fame, but many went  on from working-class backgrounds to university, the services, and the professions.

In my own case, it was a mixed bag. For some reason I was taken out of the 4th Form and put in the 6^th. I thought I was Jackthe Lad amongst 18 – 19 year old men who were awaiting National Service before University or whatever, and went to the pub at lunchtime. Educationally it was all a bit much because at one and the same time I was taking ‘O’ levels which were not taught in the 6^th Form, so that was self-study, together with ‘A’ levels. I scraped through everything, but I still believe that I left school only half-educated.

The one big advantage is that in those days you were educated for education’s sake (whereas at the secondary moderns you were factory fodder), the Aristotelian concept of knowledge being in itself inherently satisfying, and not just the busy acquisition of facts to get a good job but the cultivation of knowledge for its own sake.

Now education is directed at the work-place where it has manifestly failed; it is now widely recognised that the main cause of youth unemployment is not the shortage of jobs but the mismatch between what the employer needs and what the schools offer.

Letter from America...

The best TV in years is being shown here in the US in the form of the Republican presidential nomination debates. Mitt Romney is holding his own while Rick Perry is squirming like a beached eel in his efforts to wiggle out of accusations of dubious political intent thrown at him by almost all of the contenders. Mr. Nice Guy, Herman Kane, won the Florida Straw Poll which is only significant to the 3,000 participants who voted, and for the fact that Romney and Perry trailed far behind.

Bachman has fallen way south in the ratings after having won her straw poll in her birth state of Iowa. Rumors persist that Chris Christie, Governor of New Jersey, is reconsidering his position about running. Pundits are unanimous in their praise of Christie.

Fareed Zakaria conducted a riveting interview with Tayyip Erdogan this past Sunday on CNN. It was revealing, but one critical question as to why Turkey is treating its Kurdish minority so harshly was never asked. I see a parallel between Turkeys' Kurds and Israel's Palestinians. Erdogan is not exactly pro Israel and still smarting from having been refused entry into the EU on ethnic grounds, Turkey is ready for a fight. Erdogan said he expects to send a Turkish naval escort along with the next relief armada to Gaza. That could be nasty.

Abbas was true to his word in requesting UN recognition for Palestine as a state. This of course will expose the US and Israel and a few other powers as a tiny minority when the US blocks the request when it is presented to the Security Council.

In a sense, O is correct in stating that a solution to the Palestinian issues must be found between them and Israel. Problem is, the two remain light years apart and Israel will not budge an inch on the West Bank settlements. The cat is among the pigeons and  Abbas did what was necessary from his perspective.

The pleasures of air-travel.......

I guess that the badderation we get just trying to board the plane has a negative impact on tourism. We know quite a few people who no longer take foreign holidays because of the hassle at airports.

Most of the ‘security’ is a very unfunny pantomime.

At our regional airport (no international flights) the passengers mainly consist of ‘suits’, kids travelling to and from our public school, and oldies, of which we have a larger than usual number. Hardly terrorist material. And yet it’s belts off, shoes off – the full Monty and more stringent than either Gatwick or Heathrow. To the best of my knowledge not a single terrorist has been detained in what must have been hundreds of millions of searches world-wide since 9/11. (Of course, the jobsworths will say that this proves the system is an effective deterrent).

Then there’s the nonsense of having to take the lap-top out of its bag. Now, a lap-top is quite a good place for a bomb, as there is space in the spare battery compartment and a ready source of power. But if I was a suicide bomber I would put the lap-top in my hold-baggage.

The system doesn’t work either. Time and again we hear of breaches by investigative reporters, the latest being a guy who travelled the length of the US wearing a .38 automatic. He told security that he was a war-vet with a load of shrapnel in his insides and asked not to be patted down because he was wearing an incontinence bag. That was enough to get him through.

I am not suggesting less security. What we need is more common sense.  Almost every day we hear of cruel idiocies, like the old lady who was required to remove her breast prosthesis and the man whose colostomy bag was burst by an over-heavy pat down. Rick Perry tried to legislate against feeling genitals and breasts but the security lobby threatened to boycott Texas. At Southampton Airport recently, an elderly lady had a gift-wrapped box of acrylic paints in her hand-baggage, a present for her grandson. Security made her cut off the wrapping. The box was shrink-wrapped and clearly stated the contents ‘24 tubes of acrylic paint’. Security made her break open the box and proceeded to carefully examine each tube. They were then placed in a sealed plastic bag. Crazy!

My answer is to out-source it to the Israelis; El Al is the most threatened of all airlines, but a friend who flies with them regularly says security is a breeze because they have no hang-ups about racial profiling, they have very efficient scanning mechanisms, and they use their commonsense.

Then there’s the airports themselves. Their managements seem to regard passengers as getting in the way of the smooth running of the business.

Gatwick is a nightmare for arthritics like me, as you have to stagger up a steep walk-way from the ground floor to departures on the first floor. The signage is appalling; for example, the business class lounges are scattered over three floors but there is nothing to tell you which lounge is where. And I had to try all three before getting the right one. It is all being ‘improved’, but the woman in charge of this has been in her job for 27 years, so I am not holding my breath.

Luton has no ‘drop-off’ at departures, so you have to go to a ‘drop-off’ car park at least 200 yards away where for £1 you are allowed 10 minutes on pain of a penalty of £80!

Antigua is a nightmare of inadequacy, built in the ‘60s and now handling several jumbos at once so there is nowhere to sit. Terminal 3 at Heathrow is falling down.

And check-in? Don’t get me started!

At business class check-in at T3, the cold-eyed Eastern European clerk rudely asked if I had a visa. Apart from the fact that you don’t need a visa to enter my destination, she had my passport in her hand which was open at the visa page showing a 60 days entry permit.  She failed to provide a wheelchair even though my booking was marked ‘special assistance’, and didn’t bother either to give us an invitation to the lounge or even tell us where to find it.

We were bumped off our connecting flight even though we had our boarding cards and seat reservations and were at the boarding gate, and put on the next flight two weary hours later. On arrival we discovered that our luggage has travelled on the first flight contrary to all security rules, and had been searched in our absence. (This is worrying because there is a racket there of planting contraband and then ‘fining’ you anything up to £2000 to avoid arrest).

To be fair, I remonstrated with the BA check-in at Kingston, on my return from Jamaica, that I had reserved seat  24 A not 1A and it was only when he gave  me a big Jamaican smile that I realised he had upgraded me!

Grumpy old git..........

As I get older I guess I am getting grumpier.

What I find particularly annoying is the amount of pish and tosh, garbage and rubbish, balderdash and piffle that we have to endure daily from the chattering classes. Ignorance mixed with arrogance topped with indolence.

By way of example, there was this young spark on Radio 3 telling us that ‘today, September 15^th, is the anniversary of the Battle of Britain when the RAF defeated the Luftwaffe; over 300 of their planes were shot down, and the RAF only lost 31’, as if the BoB all took place on a single day.

Wrong, sonny. It lasted all summer. September 15^th was the day that the RAF knew they had won because nobody came. And nobody got shot down.

And I didn’t see any commemoration on TV or in the media.

I know it is easy for my generation to be critical of the lack of knowledge of our history by a younger generation. After all, the BoB is as remote from today’s 20-year old as the Battle of Omdurman was when I was 20. But the Battle of Britain film has been showing almost continuously for more than 40 years, so surely most people would have seen it by now.

Then we had the numpty on TV telling us that water was flowing down a Scottish river ‘at 20 knots per hour’. And a performance of ‘HMS Pinafore’ (admittedly Aussie) with the Captain sporting a moustache. Give me strength!

There was a TV show this week about the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. The commentator referred to ‘enlisted men’. Only the Yanks have ‘enlisted men’, matey. We have ‘other ranks’ or, more generally ‘squaddies’. Incidentally, I was also appalled by the foul language used by the instructors. When I was an officer cadet, this was an absolute no-no. The instructors were there to train young men from all sorts of back grounds to be ‘officers and gentlemen’, not yobs with posh accents. Shortly after I was commissioned, I used the word ‘bloody’ when dressing down a scruffy squaddie. I got a roasting from the Company Commander who happened to overhear me. I never did it again.

The DT carried a ‘humorous’ piece about the Battle of Dale Farm. The writer said the land on which the ‘travellers’ had built their illegal dwellings was not an unspoilt piece of greenbelt but a former scrap-yard. It wasn’t. It was woodland and open farm-land.

All these incidents were scripted, not off-the-cuff. The perpetrators had not bothered to follow the elementary rule of journalism – check your facts. It’s not only the ignorance that gets up my nose. It’s the sheer laziness.

To add to my grumpiness, we had a red-haired youth by the name of Danny Alexander, who is Treasury Secretary or something (Lib-Dim, of course) who seriously told Jeff Randall on TV that the UK ‘should join the euro when the time is right!’ No wonder the government is in the merde if he is in charge of the books.

On a lighter note, the recent death of the great actress Googie Withers, reminded me of the announcer on a BBC comedy show years ago who said ‘And now your very own Googie Withers - and what to do if it does!’  Auntie has always been a bit naughty.

And all this talk of ‘productivity’ reminds of an official trip to Germany many years ago. A member of the party was a Yorkshire coal miner in his day job, by the splendid name of Jim Hawkins. One of the German hosts politely asked him ‘Und how many men vork in your mine, Jim?’

‘About two of the booggers’ he replied. The German stood there, eyes revolving.

Arab spring.....or winter?

Now that the euphoria of the Arab Spring is waning, the realities that we should have recognized from the start are beginning to materialize, the most significant of which is the prospect that we have created a monster. Dr Frankenstein has been outdone by what the new world order must contend with in the Middle East. The USA has long been criticized for supporting and subsidizing dictators. Bush the younger changed this perception with the extremely clumsy ouster of Saddam Hussein. This act was followed by O's heavy political, economic and military support for the demise of Ghadaffi and Mubarak.

Having topped the devils we know, new demons are waiting in the wings with wider public support, enhanced religious fanaticism and hostility toward the West. Following my theory that the Arabs will remain friendly until we stop feeding them, our time is limited. This is because the spawn of the Arab Spring is highly unlikely to be palatable to the West.

It will expose Israel to the unchecked ill-will of the Arab masses. It will reinforce the spread of Islam and with it radical Islam. It may well end up supporting Turkey's bid for soft domination in the Middle East which may not be all that bad provided Turkey harbors no ill will toward the West for not allowing EU membership. Of course, the opposite is true and Turkey is already planning its revenge, threatening to freeze relations with the EU should Cyprus be granted its rotation for the EU presidency.

We in the West will be forced to check the new Arab leaders and this will involve penalties for non-compliance with our wishes. As they are largely under 30 years of age and possess the emotional mentality of adolescents, they will rebel rather than compromise. The implications of this scenario are horrifying and even though they may not come to pass, the threat is real and as such it challenges the capacity of Western statesmen to employ their most profound diplomacy.

Sadly, the idea of statesmen has been replaced with politicians. I cannot think of a single Western leader capable of handling the situation. Moreover, the American public is becoming fed up with concessions to the Middle East. This spells volatility among the governing and the governed. The Israel lobby in Washington must be very hard at work swaying legislative opinion back toward Israel.

 

The Indians are coming.........

With attention focused on the woes of the euro (and as Confucius said ‘Few things in life are more agreeable than seeing your neighbour fall off his roof), little has been paid to a major trend in Britain, which has been stealthily attracting foreign direct investment from where it counts for the future – the emerging markets, particularly India.

Last year the UK was the recipient of around £80 billion in foreign direct investment by way of acquisitions by the emerging markets. This is proportionately 4 times FDI in the US.

TATA, the Indian conglomerate, has, over the last 10 years, acquired Jaguar- Land Rover which is now having record sales and profits, and expanding its work-force when nobody else could make a go of it. It has Tetley Tea, Corus, the rump of ICI and goodness knows what else. It is Britain’s largest manufacturer, bigger even than British Aerospace, with around 40,000 employees. TATA Consultancy also employs nearly 5000. And they are not newcomers. They opened their first operation in UK in 1907.

Of course, Britain has a particular attraction for Indian investment. There is a multitude of historical, economic, social, sporting and other ties. In essence, India and Britain are joined at hip and thigh, as the saying goes. The enduring gifts of the Raj were the English language and the English common law – and cricket! There are over 5000 words in the OED which are of Indian origin – bungalow, khaki, askari, char etc. There is a large population of Indian origin. London has one of the largest Hindu temples outside India. Indians integrate well into UK society and intermarriage is not infrequent as it is with other races. They are law-abiding, industrious and enterprising. They also feature prominently in the Sunday Times ‘Rich List’ including No 1!

An Indian woman features in the list almost as a parable of individual enterprise. She came to England as the wife of a doctor. She tried a ready-made Indian dish in a supermarket and pronounced it to be rubbish. When she told the supermarket bosses, they said if she could do better they would sell it. So she did. And they did. And now she’s in the Sunday Times ‘Rich List’ of women.

Cemex (Mexico) now owns Ready-Mix Concrete. Thais have reopened a steel-works up North. The Japanese own Pilkington Glass. General Electric have Amersham Life Sciences, Telefonica has O2, and so it goes on.

The fact that foreign-owned factories tend to be much more efficient (Honda, Toyota, Nissan) leads to the inevitable conclusion that British industry was ruined in the 70’s by a toxic combination of megalomaniac union bosses and weak management. British workers, properly led, are as good as any.

Europe tends to be avoided. They have ‘national champions’ that their governments prefer to subsidise rather than be acquired by beastly foreigners. France, for example, declared yoghurt to be ‘strategically important’ when there was a bid for Danone. Long may it continue.

And the Chinese are coming, too.

Britain has just signed a double-taxation agreement with China. This will help British investment in China.

But it will also entrench the UK as the world’s biggest tax haven by the creation of ‘special purpose vehicles’ for vast amounts of Chinese money-laundering.

Europe: 'the end is nigh' says Janet Daley......

Janet Daley wrote another blockbuster article last week, although it has its problems. She predicts the definitive end of the euro as we know it, but should be cautioned not to take a final body count until the war is over.

She also opines that European actors have little or no regard for democratic principles when dealing with common currency issues while at the same time states that leaders are powerless to take the necessary corrective monetary actions because their electorates will not allow it.

My own feeling is that she wants to set her record straight in order to say 'I told you so' when all hell breaks loose.

My opinion has long been that Germany would be preoccupied with reunification for about 20 years for stabilization purposes; afterwards look out!

The future of Germany is heavier on my mind than it has been for some time.

As the theory goes, Germany will eventually revert to norm. The norm being some form of European domination precipitated by the Hanseatic elite with the hoards of Huns following behind.

Germany is already responsible for seriously pissing off the Turks for decades of promises for membership in the EU and then slamming the door on the day.

Meanwhile in Paris, The Tree Frog must be at his wits end for want of silver bullets to not only save the Union but to be a visible part of the solution.

Greece and the Euro: after hubris........nemesis!

‘So they go on in a strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift., solid for fluidity, all powerful to be impotent. And so we go on preparing more months and years for the locusts to eat..........’

Winston accurately sums up the state of European leadership.

We are looking at the possibility of a financial and economic tsunami that will sweep over the Eurozone and affect the whole world economy.

And what do Merckel and Sarkozy do? Diddlysquat! They have meetings. They give reassurances. And have hissy fits when others, like Tim Geithner, attempts to give advice.

What needs to be done about the euro-mess has been obvious for weeks, but Europe’s Big Two are more concerned with their election prospects.

Greece’s debts must be rescheduled, meaning that the creditors will just have to wait for their money. The Greeks have no intention of honouring their promises to reduce the public sector, to privatise hopelessly inefficient state enterprises, to cut expenditure, to reduce the debt burden. If they don’t get their next tranche of bail-out they will go broke at the end of October, but they are gambling – probably correctly – on the EU stumping up on yet another load of ECB wonga. Lack of probity in Greek financial politics is a tradition as old as the modern state of Greece.

The central banks must recapitalise the commercial banks because a liquidity problem is gathering momentum that led to the crash of 2008, when banks were unable to borrow from one another. French banks are particularly exposed and the situation for the Germans is not pretty, which goes to show that the Masters of the Universe are numpties. Who on earth would lend billions to the Greeks?

The chatterati maintain that there are only two alternatives – for Greece to leave the Eurozone, which is financially unacceptable, or to have full monetary and political union, which is politically unacceptable. Oh dear!

And after Greece, the sharks already smell blood around France, Italy, Spain and Portugal.

Will it be a case of ‘the hour findeth the man’? If so, will it be a Winston, FDR or Maggie? Or will it be an Adolf?

And how appropriate in a Greek context that nemesis now follows hubris!

What the papers say..............

I might have got that elusive knighthood if I had taken life more seriously but I could rarely resist the temptation to exploit the funny side of things.

When I was assisting Mugabe to start his reign of terror in Zimbabwe in 1980, I had to visit remote polling stations by light aircraft or helicopter. On one trip up to the Zambezi valley, we took with us a couple of Commonwealth Monitoring Force officers from Papua New Guinea. They were squat, fat ugly little blokes whom we dubbed ‘Fred and Barney’.

We flew for a long time on a single fuel tank so that we could run it dry and fill it completely at our next stop at a bush airstrip. As we got to the last drop the pilot winked at me, said nothing to the passengers, and let the donkey stop. There was a pregnant silence and then some agitated chattering behind us, before we re-started the engine. But we were not finished with our cruel deception. I flew the aircraft most of the way back to base, and as I started the approach to land the pilot folded his arms, turned around in his seat and engaged the couple in conversation. As it appeared that nobody was landing the plane, to say that this caused consternation would be a massive understatement. But as they were senior officers, we thought that some mild-Mickey taking would be in order!

Sorting out my archives the other day I went to a 30-year old Filofax (remember those? Very 1980s but the word is not now even in the spellchecker). I used to note down stuff from the papers that had escaped the sub-editor. Here are some samples.

‘The most frightening factor about AIDS is that it can be spread by normal sex between men and women. This is still rare in Scotland’.

Scottish Sunday Mail.

The above came when the government and the media were predicting that we were all doomed and that there would be an HIV death in every fourth family by the end of the 80’s. How they love to worry us the better to control us.

‘A Wales vs. England drinking contest was called off when the Welsh team turned up drunk and were forced to withdraw’.

Western Daily Mail.

‘Gommes dismissed four men for boiling their underpants in the tea urn.

Wycombe Midweek.

‘A sheep wearing a hat was one of four occupants taken into custody by the Narcotics Bureau near Port Elisabeth’.

The Citizen.

‘Wanted: four drivers immediately. Zimbabwean passports essential but not necessary’.

Zimbabwe Herald.

‘Labour Councillors believe that including formal qualifications in adverts discriminates against job applicants what done badly at school’.

Reading Chronicle. (I reckon the sub was having a larf on that one!).

‘The Court of Appeal has overturned Raymond Mohl’s drunk driving conviction on the grounds that he was too drunk to understand when the police told him he had a right to a lawyer’.

Ottawa Citizen.