George Soros on the EU

George Soros has warned that, "I am terribly concerned about the euro potentially destroying the EU. There is a real danger that the solution to the financial problem creates a really profound political problem."

Asked what kind of change is needed, he said, "Germany needs to realise that the policy it impose on the euroarea - the austerity programme - is counter-productive. It cannot actually succeed."

"At the moment they [the South] is being pushed - unwittingly, not with bad intentions, but the effect is that they are being pushed into a long lasting depression and that is what is happening to Europe. And it may last more than a decade, n fact it could become permanent, until the pain is so big that eventually there may be a rebellion, a rejection of the EU, and that would then be the destruction of the EU, which is a terribly heavy price to maintain to preserve the euro, which is meant to be just a servant of the EU."

On whether the euro will survive, he said, "It could last quite a long time, the same way as the Soviet Union, which was a very bad arrangement, lasted for 70 years. However, I think that eventually, it is bound to break up the European Union. The longer it will take, and it may take generations, those will be lost in terms of political freedom and economic prosperity. The solution is to me a terrible tragedy for the EU. And it's happening to the most developed open society in the world. To me it's a terrible tragedy. It doesn't have villains, because I don't think that Germany is doing it with bad intentions but its happening out of a lack of understanding of very complex problems."

 

Source:Open Europe Blog

Do you trust Trip Advisor?

We all use it these days. Booking a hotel direct or through a travel agent is becoming a thing of the past. And to disclose my hand, I am a Trip Advisor Senior reviewer (wow!).

 

But there was a TV documentary a while back (which I didn’t see) that questioned whether TA was quite as objective as it appeared.

 

Although I am sure it has some pretty effective mechanisms for cleaning out scams, it is a certainty that some will always get through.

 

There are the hoteliers who pay for Joe Bloggs to write a glowing review on the place, even though he has never been near it, or even heard of it. For a modest recompense he will be quite happy to e-mail a review written by his benefactor.

 

Then there is the opposite, writing a review that rubbishes the competition.

 

More difficult to trap are those actuated by sheer malice; there’s a lot of nasty people out there who will slag off a place because of some grievance, such as being chucked out of the bar for rowdy behaviour.

 

A couple of years ago, my daughter booked a hotel in the Caribbean for 2 weeks. I checked it out on TA. There was a review that claimed it was a dosshouse, attaching photos of peeling wallpaper, dirty bathrooms etc, etc. She reported back that the place was 5-star and immaculate.

 

There’s a couple of things that TA could do about this.

 

The first is that when a review is obviously ‘rogue’ , it should be deleted. For example, if there are 100 five-star reviews and two are one-star, those two are probably malicious.

 

Our hotel here in Chiang Mai has been awarded a plaque for ‘Trip Advisor Winner Best Value Hotel 2012’ and has just got another award. It ranks 16 in the top 25 hotels in Thailand. There’s some pretty stiff competition from hotels that may charge 10 times as much

 

And yet it has two reviews that rank it as terrible.

 

I happen to know the circumstances.

 

One complained that the taxi driver from the airport didn’t know his way to the hotel (having not read their booking confirmation that the hotel provided free transport for guests), and that it was too remote from the fleshpots of downtown Chiang Mai (not having looked at the location map provided with the booking). They departed and demanded their deposit returned (not understanding the meaning of ‘not refundable”). They wrote a review that was published without them having spent a single night at the hotel.

 

The other had a 7-day tariff, departed after one night, also because they wanted to be within walking distance of the fleshly delights of downtown, and then got angry when they were charged the rack-rate for their one-night’s stay.

 

The second is that reviews more than 2 years old should be deleted. The quality of a hotel can change for better or worse almost overnight. A review of more than two years old is practically worthless.

 

And finally, TA should get a grip on geography.

 

Ever since it opened nearly 14 years ago, our hotel has been in Chiang Mai, and it still is. Without any consultation, they have reclassified it as being in San Si, or Sansai. Even here few people know where that is. In fact it is an administrative district within Chiang Mai, a suburb bordering downtown. This is about as sensible as saying that Fulham is not in London because it’s a borough, or that Queens is not in New York for the same reason.

 

And yet  a hotel in Mae Sa, which is miles outside Chiang Mai, is classified as a Chiang Mai hotel.

 

What is puzzling is that TA is owned by Expedia, the international booking agency and the one that I consult in preference to all others, and yet this bizarre decision may lead to a falling-off  in bookings.

 

My advice is to consult at least two agencies, such a Late Rooms, before going firm.

 

Having said which, TA must be the agency of choice, None other can match it for its comprehensive coverage, and the reviews are entirely based on guests’ reviews, not on those of travel writers who are hardly objective, given that they are on expense-paid jollies.

 

Hillary posing for POTUS?

 Everything I read and see of a political nature gives me the impression that I read the book or saw the film. O's detractors have finally realized that he will not go away for another four years. In anticipation of that event, one can rely on the various factions of the Republican Party doing whatever they can to subvert, delay and derail his nanny state programs. In addition, we can all expect campaigning to begin very soon for the 2016 election; guaranteed boredom.

 

John Kerry was given a quick pass for becoming Secretary of State by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The big news about John, these days, has to do with his ethnic origins. His great grandfather was a Czech Jew and somewhere along the line John morphed into a Roman Catholic with a very Irish surname. We should now expect a bit more of dear John after that revelation.

 

Too bad Chuck Hagel, the candidate for Secretary of Defense, was not as fortunate. He is known here as a RINO, a Republican in Name Only, because Chuck is about as far left as O himself. For a while, O crowed about crossing party lines to select a Defense candidate, but that quickly quieted down once Hagel's political philosophy was exposed. I would call it left of center spiced with large doses of opportunism.

 

As a Senator, it would be expected that Chuck would have been given an easy pass by the Senate Armed Services Committee. Not so, especially not so from the Republican members like John McCain and Lindsey Graham and others who rendered torturous questions about his dovish convictions in spite of having served with distinction in Viet Nam. In response, Hegal was hopeless and even his democratic supporters could not seem to revive him. Hegal was totally unprepared for the questions and gave evasive, hesitating and clumsy replies to all questions. 

 

It was noted that if Hegal could not prepare for his hearing, how in the world could he prepare the US for war?  The word is, however, that Chuck will most probably be given the go ahead to become our Secretary of Defense. The US Senate is a close club and more often than not supports its past and present members.

 

Then it was Hillary's turn. As expected, she agreed to testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on her role in the events leading up to the terrorist attack on our Consulate in Benghazi. She was very smooth, lost her cool once and became emotional over the deaths of the Ambassador and three other American employees. Most of all, she revealed nothing.

 

She shed not a ray of light on the events before, during or after the attack and, like everyone else in the Administration at her level, she denied ever seeing the famous memo about need more security at the Consulate.

 

 She showed nerve, guts, sympathy, empathy and decisiveness albeit decisiveness about being indecisive and in the end, many concluded she was not illuminating recent history, but rather posing for the presidency in 2016.

Obama: a darker shade of pink (Part 2)

Nobody liked O's inauguration speech except the babbling diehards. It was full of apple pie and American motherhood with little content. It indeed espoused O's ideology of big government being responsible for all citizens by providing much more than just protection from foreign enemies.

 

 

We are rapidly heading deeper into a welfare state and those dependent upon government for jobs and handouts are ecstatic. Almost everyone on the right feels just the opposite as they vent their woe, worry and intense dislike of O on whomever is willing to listen.

 

The lack of content in O's speech, especially content having to do with our finances, economy and foreign policy was not the result of any lack of importance. On the contrary, O is petrified that any one of these areas could be his undoing and deprive him of the sterling presidential legacy he so reportedly covets.

 

 

Instead of coping with these matters head on, O's first effort after the inauguration was to tackle immigration issues. He is trying hard to cement the notion in the minds of Hispanic immigrants, the vast majority of whom are illegally here, that their salvation in terms of legal recognition will be bestowed by the Democratic Party.

 

Historically, the Democrats in the USA, or more precisely, members of political parties espousing the same principles as contemporary Democrats, have shamelessly wooed immigrants in an effort to secure their loyalties, especially at voting time.

 

 

As the party of minorities, Democrats have done a thorough job impressing immigrants with their dedication to human rights. This appealed to immigrants from Europe, Asia and Latin America in a big way.

 

 

Our Jewish population, for example, remains largely democratic in orientation for that very reason. A similar process is now being applied to illegal immigrants, especially those from the Caribbean, Mexico and Central America.

 

Meanwhile, in the Republican camp, just about everything possible was done to ensure white Americans that illegal immigrants were a blot on our demography and needed immediate dealing with including repatriation and strong border fences and controls.

 

 

A goodly number of white Americans swallowed this policy without reference to the fact that Hispanics, legal or il, were becoming systematically alienated by the political right.

 

 

As has been noted here and by many political analysts, this policy played directly into the hands of the Democrats who gleefully swept up the Hispanic voters and welcomed them into their fold.

 

Obama: a brighter shade of pink?

Would I be wrong in thinking that now Obama is free of elections he is showing his true colours and that they are  darker shade of pink?

 

And I mean in the British sense, not the American, where anybody who is not to the right of Genghis Khan is regarded as a dangerous pinko.

 

His inaugural address was very under-reported in the UK so I have had to scrabble around to get a handle on it, but I get the very strong impression that it would have gone down well at a Labour Party conference.

 

The speech was a strong defence of big government and ‘collective action’, a term beloved by those who believe that the state is all and that individuality is a sin. He spoke of ‘preserving our freedoms requires collective action’. Well, we all know what that means – interference by the regime in every aspect of life, which is the position in the UK right now.

 

I would have thought that the biggest problem facing the US is the financial state of the nation, and yet he only mentioned the deficit problem once, so clearly it is not  very high on his list of priorities. He believes that America can keep shovelling money into social programmes and maintaining and improving dependency measures indefinitely without addressing the money nexus.

 

This is exactly what got the UK and the EU generally into the present parlous state. It is like watching a replay of the Blair / Brown disaster of borrowing money to fund welfarism and to create a client electorate. There is now a belated recognition that you have to scale back present commitments or impose huge tax increases. O will not do the one and can’t do the other. The alternative is everlasting deficits.

 

The national debt is already reaching a point of unsustainability. I shudder to think what the state of the nation would look like if the humungous debts of the lower tiers of government were added to the pile. And we know that much of the state and municipal debt is the outcome of officials and politicians milking the public purse to give themselves outrageous pay-cheques and juicy (and unfunded) pension rights. Just like Greece, in fact

 

At the same time he is giving renewed commitment to ‘green’ policies that have already cost vast amounts of money for no discernible benefit, perhaps the most lunatic being converting food – corn – into ethanol under the  stimulus of huge subsidies, thus pushing up feed costs for stock farmers and prices in the shops.

 

As for foreign policy, it would appear that O is just not interested. There was little mention in his speech; nothing about Syria or the Algerian massacre in which there were US casualties. However, he has managed to thoroughly piss-off the UK government by putting his oar in the future of Europe just at a critical time for Cameron, on the eve of his keynote speech on the planned in–out referendum.

 

 

 

To add to this, we then had a threat that unless the UK strengthened its defence capacity it would no longer rank as a partner for intelligence exchange, the logic of which escapes me completely.

 

Obama, UK & In Amenas,,,,,,,,,,,,,

The Torygraph got it right.

 

 

O's message for the UK to remain in the EU was "breathtaking arrogance". Whatever possessed O to involve himself in Britain's internal affairs is beyond my comprehension unless he so dislikes the UK that he wants it to squander national resources by remaining a member. On the other hand, O may just be pandering to the Europeans who somehow adore him.

 

Some analysts believe O's disdain for the UK stems from his Kenyan father's experience under colonial rule. If this is the case, then O should be even more disdainful of France, Belgium, Italy, Spain and Germany not to mention our own colonial endeavors.

 

Now that Algeria's ham fisted efforts at the In Amenas gas facility resulted in American deaths, and now that France has upheld Algeria's actions in this matter, O will have to be careful how he characterizes Algeria's interventions. He cannot mimic France without an uproar from Americans who are appalled at the killing of hostages by both terrorists and the Algerian army.

 

The world press, including al Jazeera, has focused almost entirely on foreign hostage treatment with nary a word about the status of the terrorists involved. In fairness, Algeria has been less than forthright in its reporting of the incident and the numbers and nationalities of people involved.

 

 

Interestingly, those who are involved extend beyond the list of usual suspects. Suddenly, Norway and Japan are intimately confronted with terrorism in the Middle East given the loss of their workers at the facility.

 

 

Clearly, the terrorists are not discriminating and what was once a vendetta against the Western superpowers and so called American imperialism suddenly has a new international face. Quite possibly, the terrorists could not differentiate between the foreigners. Reportedly, they were only interested in mistreating the non-Muslims.

 

The In Amenas incident heightens the prospect of greater entente between France and Algeria. Hollande's outspoken support of the Algerian intervention must have been music to ears of President Bouteflika and his minions in the military. After all, they vowed to concede nothing to the terrorists; a domestically popular concession when their own people were being freed leaving only foreign hostages.

 

 

Moreover, In Amenas is a strategic installation producing some 10% of Algeria's natural gas. That is enough to make the difference between profit and loss in gas sales abroad.

 

Algeria is seriously xenophobic and could not possibly have accepted the invitation of an SAS type of operation from the UK, France or the US. It is likely, however, that any of these forces would have done a better job given their  training, experience and reputation for excellence in their work.

 

 

So doing, would also have taken the burden off of Algeria for bulldozing itself into the terrorist strongholds and killing everyone in sight.

 

 

On the other hand, it would be unfair to simply condemn Algeria for what it achieved. After all, they are committed to uprooting the jihadist and al Qaida militants who not only threaten Mali, but have been a serious threat to Algeria as well.  

 

 

Sex, politics & paradox...

Having now finished reading ‘Thomas Jefferson: the Art of Power’, I am struck by a modern paradox.

 

Jefferson’s father-in-law kept a concubine with whom he had a number of children. One of whom was Sally Hemmings, a light-skinned, long-haired beauty.

 

When Mrs. Jefferson died, Sally took over the matrimonial bed which she occupied for the next 44 years until TJ died.

 

This fact was widely known and much commented upon in the scabrous press of those times.

 

This had no effect on his career whatsoever, and he held high office almost continuously for many years until he became 2-term President.

 

The sexual behavior of politicians was regarded as of little political consequence until comparatively recent times.

 

It was fairly common knowledge in Fleet St and establishment circles that Lord Boothby was a bisexual who pleasured both Dorothy MacMillan and the Kray twin deviant; that Lloyd George was a serial adulterer; that Tom Driberg, in Cap’n Bob’s memorable phrase when  Chairman of the Commons Kitchen Committee, ‘ would bugger the restaurant waiters’; that Hutch the nightclub pianist and singer from the West Indies was in great demand amongst  upper-crust ladies, including Lady Mountbatten, on account of his prodigious endowment; that Princess Margaret would put it about a bit (the joke at the time was that Mag’s lover was on the stage - he had a small part in ‘Charlie’s Aunt).

 

The Profumo affair was not about the goings-on at Cliveden but was about John Profumo, Minister War, sharing his squeeze with a Russian spy, with horrendous implications for national security.

 

In earlier times it would have been regarded as the worst possible taste even to suggest that the great and good actually had sex lives at all. The papers would go out of business if they published anything in the least prurient. Even the NotW, when describing sexual intercourse, would coyly say ‘Intimacy took place”!

 

Cut to the 21^st Century, an age that has never been so promiscuous, and yet any kind of sexual deviation on the part of politicians is seen as a bar to high office. When people are at it like a frog up a pump, why should sexual adventures be seen as anything but part of life’s rich tapestry, and irrelevant in the extreme to a person’s capacity for public affairs?

 

If today’s hypocritical sanctions had been applied in our dirty-minded age, the US would never have emerged in its present form (Jefferson’s master stroke was the Louisiana Purchase which more than doubled the size of the US at a stroke); FDR had a long-term mistress (and looking at Mrs. R one can scarcely blame him); Ike would have been booted out because of his semi-public affair with Kate Somersby, possibly changing the outcome of WW2 and depriving the US of one of its best Presidents.

 

So when it might have mattered, it didn’t, and now it doesn’t matter, it – er- does.

 

A rich paradox indeed.

 

 

The Great Binge-drinking Crisis...

From The Sun to The  Economist, the media has been hyping the binge drinking ‘crisis’.

 

Really?

 

A crisis is the point reached at which you either die or recover. Is that where we have got to, or is it that every difficult issue  today is a ‘crisis’?

 

Let’s get a dose of realism into this.

 

There are two alleged problems – binge drinking by yoof and booze-related health problems amongst the elderly.

 

Drinking by the 15 to 25 age-group has declined markedly in the last few years, by around 30%. The media loves to lurk outside Saturday night watering holes to catch some teen-age slapper lying drunk in a pool of her own vomit, but might I suggest that this is atypical. It is surely not endemic.

 

As to the elderly, it appears to escaped the attention of the preachers that in the last 30 years life expectancy has increased by around 20 years. This means that the average oldie liver has had 2 extra decades of the hard stuff.

 

But accepting that here might just be a problem, what to do?

 

Dave’s characteristically daft idea is minimum pricing. This is just throwing dust in our eyes because he knows that the EU would clobber it. The drinks industry would be delighted if he actually managed to get this through.

 

A starting point might be to adjust the tax ratio between spirits and other alcohol.

 

50 years ago, the national tipple was beer. Spirits were a luxury. The controlled price for a bottle of scotch was about half-a week’s wages for a manual worker.

 

I am not suggesting a return to that kind of price discrimination, but the tax on beer should be slashed (which might also encourage people back into pubs; the traditional night down the local is now just too expensive). The tax on spirits should be raised sufficiently to create a significant price differential and hopefully reduce sales of vodka-based fizzy drinks that are almost exclusively pitched at the young market.

 

This would also benefit the Revenue in these straitened times.

 

The solution to disorderly binge-drinking is simple: enforce the law.

 

It is an offence for a barman to serve a person who is drunk. The licensing authority should be ruthless in barring offending licensees, together with the owners of the business to prevent them simply replacing one manager with another. In short, recidivists should be put out of business, even (or especially) the greedy chains like Pubmaster.

 

It is an offence to be drunk and disorderly or drunk and incapable, but the police do little. I guess they don’t want to clean-up the cells the following morning. In the old days it was a night in the cells, an appearance before the Beak the next morning, 40 shillings fine, and your name in the local rag.

 

Then there’s the liquor licensing laws.

 

The permitted hours are crazy. What possible public good is served by 24 hours licenses? 12 hours a day should be the maximum with 11p.m. as latest closing time.

 

Supermarkets should have to pay a license fee commensurate with their ability to pay. This might discourage them from selling booze cheaper than bottled water.

 

And finally………

 

My belief is that the 1980’s saw the apogee of hard drinking. In those days champagne  at opening time was the real deal during the Big Bang days in the City, and much business was transacted over 3-hour lunches at Simpsons, as I vaguely recall, now replaced by burger-lite and cocaine. Fleet St was fuelled by booze, and the quality of journalism has suffered since it went out of fashion. The Kings & Keys in Fleet St was the real HQ of the DT, and the Printer’s Devil was the haunt of the last of the hot-metal men.

 

Crisis? What crisis?

Al jazeera & Americans......

Long have I whinged over America's absence of any serious TV broadcast of international news. Non-Americans may find this strange as they can tune into CNN International and receive world-wide news almost on demand. The problem is, CNN International is not broadcast in America.

 

 

Instead, CNN offers predigested news items over heavily scripted broadcasts focusing mainly on what's happening in America. Annoyingly burdened with frequent commercials, CNN also provides nightly interview programs hosted by the likes of Piers Morgan and morning news specials hosted by the hyperactive and constantly switched-on Soledad O'Brien.

 

At other times, CNN America indulges its audience with daily pundit panels covering domestic events and typified by lack of depth, misinformation, and worst of all, boredom. Some of the misinformation comes from breaking news stories before the basic who, what, when, where and why of the item is clear. Such stories initially depend upon on eye witness sources for an accounting of events.

 

The several full days CNN spent on the recent Sandy Hook school Shooting in Newtown, Connecticut is an example of consistently getting facts wrong that were supplied by locals. In addition, CNN puts its own liberal spin on most of what it scripts and broadcasts. Seldom does CNN America offer any programming that cannot be understood by a middle-school level student. In another vein, American middle school students have nowhere near the understanding of world events than their counterparts in other developed countries.

 

Enter a first-class, serious, energetic and dedicated international news resource; al Jazeera.

 

Their recent effort to establish themselves as a cable news network has fallen flat owing to American prejudice. Namely, al Jazeera is thought to be pro-Arab, especially in its Arabic broadcasts. Never mind a short, but indicative history of event reporting that is truly international, intelligent, insightful, well presented and professionally reported. It is the latter that this Qatar government-owned satellite broadcast enterprise is attempting to sell to those Americans responsible for licensing cable TV.

 

In spite of its record for excellence, al Jazeera is finding it very difficult to break into the American TV media scene as a player. Having just purchased former Vice-President Al Gores small and unsuccessful satellite TV company, Current TV, al Jazeera hopes to expand the organization into a top ranking competitor to CNN, Fox News and MSNBC, another satellite newscaster owned by the NBC network.

 

No sooner was the deal between Current TV and al Jazeera announced than America's second largest cable telecommunications company, Time Warner Cable, expelled Current TV from its stable of broadcast organizations, thus depriving al Jazeera of Time Warner's large subscriber audience amounting about 12 million households.

 

Although there are other outlets for what is expected to be named, Al Jazeera America, this setback illustrates America's visceral distrust if not antipathy for an Arab-owned newscast company operating in the USA. Subsequent to Time Warner's dropping Current TV, it announced that it would keep the door open for Al Jazeera America to operate within its group.

 

These actions by Time Warner illustrate America's self-imposed isolation in the broadcast industry. In effect, American citizens are being deprived of access to meaningful, if not slanted, world news by prejudice, politics and, worst of all, public opinion. Indeed, public opinion dictates all broadcast activity because the public ultimately decides what it wants to watch. And what the public wants to watch is meticulously measured and published as ratings.

 

Just now, the Fox News company is enjoying high ratings while CNN and MSNBC are not. Efforts to increase ratings include almost anything other than the unbiased reporting of international news. For example, CNN enjoyed an evening of high ratings during its coverage of New Year's eve celebrations in New York's Times Square.

 

This spike was attributed by some to the presenters, Anderson Cooper of CNN and Kathy Griffiths, an off color commedienne, who put on what some considered a sex show. What's even more interesting is that both are gay.

 

Therein lies an important clue to the entire issue of informative versus popular news, versus anything else that happens to be on TV at any given time. For the most part, the public will tune into the most inane and spicy program available.

 

It is doubtful that the USA has a monopoly on this tendency. But that is no excuse for being deprived of complex and in-depth access to world events. Part of a broadcast organizations charter should be the social obligation to inform and educate the public in as unbiased a fashion as possible.

 

Time was, when the States had a pretty good record of achieving this objective, e.g. during the Walter Cronkite era. Today, spin and bias is the name of the game while outlets like MSNBC, CNN and Fox News have taken strong political positions of left, center-left and right respectively.

 

It is likely that even if Al Jazeera America is allowed into the fold, America's news programming will remain flat, biased, and shallow. After all, Al Jazeera America will eventually succumb to the struggle for high ratings and everyone knows what that means.

 

OMG! (Osborne must go).

 

The most important job in the UK at this time is Chancellor of the Exchequer. He has to deal with the most complex of financial, fiscal, economic and political issues during the most difficult of times since the1970’s.

 

So who is the intellectual giant minding the shop?

 

Step forward Gideon aka George Osborne, MP and First Lord of the Treasury. And what do we know of him?

 

Well, he’s a public school, Oxford-educated, wealthy Irish aristocrat.

 

He has a 2.1 in History, a mediocrity’s result. His practical work experience was 1 week folding towels at Selfridges. Thereafter, it has been only politics, first as a Tory researcher and then, at 30 an MP, Shadow Chancellor 4 years later, and Chancellor at 39.

 

So can anybody tell me what single qualification this young chap has for the most demanding of political appointments?

 

Not unexpectedly, he is turning out to be a one-man train crash.

 

His budgets have been met with something approaching derision, witness the ‘pasty’ tax. His reduction targets on both debt and revenue budgets have been missed. He has had some distasteful publicity over ‘yacht-gate’, flipping, and train fares.

 

His approach to financial retrenchment has been completely mishandled.

 

Whether you are Chancellor or Clerk to the Parish Council, public finance operates on two distinct budget lines, revenue and capital. If you cut the revenue budget, you must make savings on recurrent expenditure - staff, service levels, and (most importantly) sheer waste. If you cut the capital budget, you must cut investment in major works such as new airports, roads, schools, hospitals, and infrastructure generally.

 

George has made a big effort in cutting the revenue budget. In many of the wrong places.

 

Defence is the most important, the first duty of Government being the defence of the realm.  He has mutilated the armed forces to the extent that our navy is at its lowest ebb since Henry VIII. For the first time ever we have no capital ship in home waters. The army is at its smallest since the end of the Napoleonic Wars.

 

And he has increased the foreign aid budget by 37%.

 

But he has also been slashing capital expenditure, with disastrous effects on the construction and manufacturing industries, on employment, and on the economy generally.

 

He regards the Treasury as a part-time job, taking second-place to his role of Tory party election tsar.

 

We now learn from Peter Oborne that he is indulging in plotting and briefing against Ian Duncan-Smith, arguably the most successful Work & Pensions Secretary.

 

He plans to reduce the welfare budget by £10 billion. Fair enough, but he disdained to tell IDS about it, and it is not a targeted reduction against benefit cheats but a below-inflation cap on the deserving also.

 

He tried to get IDS fired in the last reshuffle, to be replaced with his own understrapper. He briefed his pal the Executive Editor of the Times, to rubbish IDS on ‘Newsnight’.

 

And what of IDS himself?

 

Educated at HMS Conway, devout Roman Catholic, son of a Battle of Britain Station Commander, 6 years in the Scots Guards, a spell on benefit after becoming unemployed on leaving the army, then to board level in business before becoming an MP 20 years ago. All his money comes from his own efforts, but he is not wealthy in today’s terms. He has always been a fierce Eurosceptic and opponent of the Afghan war.

 

In Opposition, he founded the Centre for Social Justice, and, together with the equally admirable Frank Field, probably knows more about welfare than anyone in Britain.

 

Here is what Oborne says about him:

‘A committed Christian, he ultimately understands his task in terms of human redemption. He does not believe that people are out of work because of their own fault. He believes that the vast majority are victims of a cruel system, partly created by Gordon Brown, which creates perverse incentives that encourage men and women to stay away from the job market. Mr Duncan Smith believes it is his life’s work to end this monumental tragedy, and to provide the best environment for the unemployed to find work and obtain the human dignity that a job brings with it.

Who would you prefer to remain in the Cabinet?