Author: Alexander Boot

The House of Lords is more than just the upper house of Parliament. It’s the watershed separating the intelligent and knowledgeable from the stupid and ignorant.

Mary Riddell’s article in today’s Telegraph firmly places her into one of those categories, and it isn’t the first. Yet she’s reassured by the exalted company she keeps in the second group: ‘The House of Lords must change. On that, all three party leaders are agreed.’

I’m sure she’s right about that. ‘All three party leaders’ will agree to anything that will perpetuate the spivocracy of which they are both spawns and pawns. If they were told that the slaughter of every first-born male child would ensure their lasting power, they’d come out in favour. However, that wouldn’t make such an act any less monstrous. Nor does their accord on the Lords reform make it any less destructive.

Before even contemplating any constitutional reform, our three stooges and their champion Mary should try to understand the constitution. Specifically, if such an exertion wouldn’t overtax their restless minds, they ought to ponder what the House of Lords is, and what it’s for.

From the time words like ‘state’ and ‘government’ first crossed people’s lips, the best minds have tried to figure out ways of delivering strength without tyranny, liberty without anarchy and justice without oppression. Step by step, said minds realised that the best, probably only, way of achieving such ends is to have a balance of power wherein diverse interests are held in equilibrium, and no one political arrangement dominates.

No political system can exist in its pure form without degenerating into something unsavoury. Following Aristotle, Machiavelli argued in his Discourses that, when their purity is intransigently maintained, a principality turns into a tyranny, an aristocracy into an oligarchy and a democracy into anarchy. For a political arrangement to last, and for liberty to thrive, a state must combine the elements of all three known forms of government. A division of power, in which none of the estates feels the need to usurp it all, is a precondition of justice and liberty.

In modern times, it has been the English constitution that has best reflected the thinking of the greatest constitutional minds, from Plato to Aristotle, from Machiavelli to Montesquieu, from Burke to de Maistre. The hereditary upper house was there to balance the unelected power of the king with the elected power of the Commons, making sure the former didn’t degenerate into despotism and the latter into what Tocqueville called ‘the tyranny of the majority’.

The assumption was that hereditary peers would not by definition be beholden to political pressures – owing no favours to any politicians, they would act on their conscience, honed by England’s entire history of which they were an essential part. This assumption has been vindicated: our finely balanced constitution has produced perhaps the most effective, lasting and just government in modernity. And this is the constitution that the precursors of Riddell and her esteemed ‘three party leaders’ have destroyed by either championing or effecting the dictatorship of the Commons.

In the process they’ve shown that Tocqueville got it wrong: it’s not the majority that has dictatorial powers in an unchecked democracy, but the bureaucratic elite that rules in its name. It’s not the demos that governs, but manipulative self-servers who know how to trick votes out of the demos.

This situation suits Riddell just fine: ‘A nation that aspires to exemplify democratic standards cannot justify having hundreds of lawmakers selected by ministers or ordained by birthright.’ One begins to feel that IQ testing ought to be mandatory for anyone with access to a public forum.

A nation should aspire not to ‘exemplifying democratic standards’ but to justice, security from internal or external enemies, and equitable representation of people’s interests. ‘Exemplifying democratic standards’ at the expense of such desiderata results not in democracy but in spivocracy, but then of course Riddell can’t understand even something as obvious as this. To prove her intellectual failings she lumps together ‘lawmakers selected by ministers or ordained by birthright’.

To be selected by ministers, lawmakers have to curry their favour. Since our ministers are spivocrats, only other spivocrats can be appointed by them – that’s basic. ‘Birthright’, on the other hand, isn’t owed to anyone’s fickle affections – those put by virtue of their birth in a position to judge laws can do so freely and without careerist fears.

However, the hereditary House of Lords has already been destroyed, and with it the constitution that made it essential. It doesn’t matter one iota whether the Lords is an elected or appointed house: in either case, it falls victim to constitutional sabotage. Perhaps an argument can be made that an appointment for life, or a fixed long term, may enable a member to disengage himself gradually from his original patrons. One suspects this unproven argument reflects the thinking of the 100-odd Tory MPs set to vote against the current bill – the right vote for the wrong reasons, in my view.

Still, Mary Riddell must be complimented on her enviable consistency. Having floated from the leftwing Observer to the supposedly conservative Telegraph, she hasn’t changed her views one bit. In all fairness, she hasn’t had to: her boundless commitment to ‘democracy’ is the cross-party flavour of the century. I think next she ought to give serious thought to the desirability of extending voting rights to babes-in-arms and also possibly to members of other species. That’ll keep her busy.

Meanwhile, strain your memory to remember the last time you were oppressed by aristocrats. Then recall the latest act of oppression perpetrated by our ‘democratic’ government, so beloved of Mary Riddell. Then write to TheTelegraph suggesting that she be kicked back where she comes from: The Observer and TheGuardian. Species should thrive in their natural habitat.

In that largely forgotten book, erecting the Tower of Babel with the subsequent disintegration of language was severe punishment: ‘Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.’

It’s a safe assumption that most of our ‘educators’ are unfamiliar with scriptural texts. It’s an even safer one that they haven’t set out to re-enact Biblical disasters. Yet something inside them prompts them to do just that.

Witness the fact that for more than a million British schoolchildren English is now only a second language, and native speakers are a minority in one out of 13 schools. In our financially strained times, one ought to point out that a pupil for whom English is second language costs six times more to educate. Yet this is the least of our problems.

For in the absence of a unifying religion and shared culture, language looms even larger as social adhesive. And society needs some kind of glue to be, well, a society, rather than an aggregate of atomised individuals who happen to inhabit the same geographical space.

Back in the 1930s the Texas legislature first passed the bill making bilingualism mandatory in both politics and education. However, Governor Miriam Ferguson  vetoed it, saying ‘If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it ought to be good enough for the children of Texas.’ This goes to show that even somewhat ill-informed Texans may understand things British ‘educators’ don’t.

Mercifully, English in Britain is spared a single powerful linguistic rival, as is the case in Texas or Canada. Competing with English here are dozens of tongues, falling into numerous language groups. The opposition is thus fractured: there’s little danger that Polish, Urdu and Portuguese will form a united front against English in our schools. Nor are foreign children likely to do any more damage to English than native speakers aren’t already inflicting so successfully. Why, even our Education Secretary’s rallying cries for better learning are full of most unfortunate solecisms.

The problem then isn’t so much linguistic as social: a shared first language makes children of both Polish and Pakistani ancestry British – it’s what can bring a smile of recognition on their faces when they bump into each other in, say, Paris. It doesn’t even matter that for the first few years of their lives they spoke something else. What matters is what they become, not what they used to be.

It’s important to realise that one’s native language doesn’t necessarily remain one’s first. I’ve observed numerous examples (including, at close quarters, my own) of people who grow up speaking one language and then relegate it to a lower status when English takes over. For grown-ups such a shift requires more effort and aptitude than for children. But neither will effect the shift unless the desire to do so is strong.

It’s this desire that’s aggressively discouraged in Britain by our ruling multiculti omnivores. It takes self-confidence for a society to declare unequivocally that it stands for certain things, and won’t be budged. No society can survive without believing, with what outsiders may regard as pigheaded obtuseness, that its ways aren’t just the best but the only ones possible. Differences ought to be respected, but such respect must not turn into a suicide pact.

This doesn’t presuppose intolerance of other cultures or religions. On the contrary, they should be welcomed, for as long as they don’t present a direct threat. A well-rounded culture can’t be monocentric, but a society has to be just that in order to persevere. It’s a big bonus for a British child, provided he reads anything at all, to be able to read Hafiz, Camões or Pushkin in the original. But he won’t be a British child if his response to Shakespeare is less immediate and intimate. And nor will our society remain British if the number of such children goes beyond a certain critical mass.

Alas, the requisite self-belief, a sine qua non of survival, is now in short supply. Yet history provides ample proof that when this belief is eroded, societies crumble and civilisations disappear. No one has understood this better than R.G. Collingwood, one of Britain’s finest minds:

‘Civilisations sometimes perish because they are forcibly broken up by the armed attack of enemies without or revolutionaries within; but never from this cause alone. Such attacks never succeed unless the thing that is attacked is weakened by doubt as to whether the end which it sets before itself, the form of life which it tries to realise, is worth achieving. On the other hand, this doubt is quite capable of destroying a civilisation without any help whatever. If the people who share a civilisation are no longer on the whole convinced that the form of life which it tries to realise is worth realising, nothing can save it.’

The Babel being inflicted upon Britain is therefore not the disease; it’s a symptom. And symptoms are the most reliable diagnostic tool – they tell us that something is wrong. Doctors don’t ignore such telltale signs. Too bad our ‘educators’ do.

 

 

 

 

 

 

One becomes tired of pointing out the breathtaking effrontery of our politicians, but Nick does take the bicky. For this alumnus of Westminster School to attack even pre-castrated proposals on improving secondary education is a bit like Jamie Oliver finding meat-eating morally objectionable.

The British do pay too much attention to the type of school one attends. Actually, as long as the school isn’t actively subversive (Shirley Williams, ring your office), any one will do. Of the highly educated Englishmen I know, three went to grammar schools, three to minor public schools, one to a major public school and one, incredible as it may sound, to a comprehensive.

Without pretending to have a representative sample on my hands, I may still suggest that one doesn’t have to go to Westminster School to become truly educated. For, contrary to a popular misapprehension, education doesn’t equate the gathering of so much information, though that’s an important part. It’s what happens as a result of such gathering: a qualitative shift from ignorance to culture, from barbarism to civilisation, from base to high feelings, from primitive to refined tastes.

As any neurophysiologist will tell you, most people are capable of picking up and storing a practically infinite amount of information – why, even crossing Park Lane in rush hour probably overloads one’s synapses with a surfeit of data. Yet as any teacher will tell you, far from most people are capable of becoming educated in the true sense of the word, regardless of the kind of school they attend.

Teachers would be reluctant to put a number on those so capable, but if you held a gun to their head, most would probably say about 25 percent. Another 25 percent are still capable of succeeding in most practical fields, while the remainder will have to settle for a life of intellectually undemanding careers. They could, for example, become Deputy Prime Ministers. 

An effective educational system should then be made up of schools that educate the top third, instruct the second one and train the rest. Such a system would reflect the way God made people, and what he did can’t be undone. It can, however, be subverted – first by failing to recognise, or refusing to accept, that people are differently able and then creating single-tier schools that fail everybody equally. Enter the brainchild of the more pernicious lefties: British comprehensives.

‘Intelligent socialist’ is an oxymoron to begin with, but even the limited brainpower that socialists are born with tends to dwindle away to nothing when their smallish minds are overridden by a giant ideological bias. As a result of their efforts, the overall literacy levels in Britain are considerably below what they were at the height of the Industrial Revolution, when our masses were supposed to be oppressed and downtrodden.

A child of socialists this system may be, but even reasonably conservative politicians have fostered it. Margaret Thatcher, when she was still Education Secretary, closed down more grammar schools than any of her Labour counterparts ever did, although she might not have been an entirely free agent in that endeavour. On the other hand, though her brand of conservatism eschews economic egalitarianism, it’s not invariably averse to the social and cultural kind.

As a result of the wanton destruction of British education from 1965 onwards, the country has suffered much damage – not just culturally, but also socially and economically. The damage may not be irreparable, but it’s certainly not repairable quickly. Still, one has to start somewhere, and this is what our present Education Secretary is attempting to do, however timidly.

Having noticed that the GCSE exams presuppose the level of education that would have been expected in a kindergarten at the height of the Industrial Revolution, Michael Gove thinks they must be scrapped. In their stead we should go back to ‘world-class’ O-Levels for the abler pupils and have simpler CSE exams for the rest.

Being a politician, Mr Gove won’t find it in his vote-chasing heart to propose what really needs to be done: the scrapping of comprehensive ‘education’. But even the utterly modest and sensible first step he has found the courage to propose has created an outcry. The principal jeer-leader is Gove’s coalition partner Nick, ably assisted by the assorted Milibandits in opposition.

‘I’m not in favour of anything that would lead to a two-tier system where children at quite a young age are somehow cast on a scrapheap,’ declared Nick, with the bleating from the Milibandits providing the background noise. ‘What you want is an exam system which is fit for the future, doesn’t turn the clock back to the past and works for the many and not just for the few.’

In the past, Britain had one of the highest literacy levels in the world. She was in the top five in most academic disciplines, and top 10 in all. She’s now 16^th in science, 25^th in literacy and 28^th in maths. Methinks a bit of clock-turning wouldn’t be such a bad thing, don’t you? And I don’t know how many scrapheaps Nick has rummaged through lately, but if he looked at the metaphorical one he mentioned, he’d find it full of little savages extruded from the bowels of the single-tier education he favours.

Having myself gone to the kind of school where most boys carry knives, I don’t know what sort of curriculum Westminster School teaches. But if it produces alumni like Nick, perhaps another look at the syllabus is in order. Then again, not everyone can be educated in the true meaning of the word. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At my venerable age I ought to have lost any capacity for being astounded by politicians’ effrontery. And so I have, except that Dave Cameron manages to restore some of it with metronomic regularity.

This time he has launched a moral crusade against tax avoidance, using the comedian Jimmy Carr as his whipping boy. Now my understanding is that there exists a valid distinction between tax avoidance and tax evasion. The former is legal; the latter isn’t. And it’s legality rather than morality that politicians are supposed to uphold. For them to comment on the morality of legal tax shelters is akin to Dr Shipman enlarging on the fine points of care for the elderly.

Now in the moral gospel according to Dave, our money doesn’t belong to us. It belongs to the government, which decides how much of it we can keep for our families. At present, middle-class people are expected to keep less than half of what they earn in the sweat of their brow. The state confiscates the rest and wastes most of it on schemes ranging from unnecessary to ill-advised to idiotic to downright subversive.

It’s hardly surprising that most taxpayers don’t share this concept of morality. The more savvy among them explore, with the help of their accountants, every possible way of resisting state extortion as best they can. According to Dave, this is ‘quite frankly morally wrong’.

Dave is willing to admit under duress that ‘there is nothing wrong with people planning their tax affairs to invest in their pension and plan for their retirement – that sort of tax management is fine.’ That is, it’s fine now, when focus groups have told Dave that his original plan to tighten the pension loophole wouldn’t be well received. Alas, because those bloody wrinklies now tend to live longer, they are too numerous to ignore. Their vote can make or break even such an impeccably moral politician as Dave.

Other than that, rest assured that this self-described ‘heir to Blair’ feels about private pensions the same as his role model does. Blair’s first act was to launch a five-billion-pound assault on pension funds. Given half the chance, Dave will live up to Tony’s legacy, but not just yet. For the time being he has to count on his general economic policy, rather than specific raids, to reduce private pensions and other savings to dust.

I’m not going to comment on the specifics of the particular offshore shelter from which Jimmy Carr has benefited. Nor will I compare it to other shelters collectively described by Dave as ‘very dodgy tax avoiding schemes’. As far as I’m concerned, if they are legal they aren’t dodgy. And if they are illegal, they are the business of the CPO, not of our morally crusading Prime Minister.

He and other politicians correctly see every pound left in our pockets as a threat to their power. Economic independence isn’t the same as political liberty, but they largely overlap. Since our state isn’t so much a democracy as a spivocracy, taxation is for it more than just a means of sustaining its solvency. It’s a weapon for the spivocrats to increase their power in relation to private individuals. Regarded in that light, every man who’s clever enough to shield his income from Dave’s grubby hands is committing a moral act.

My hat’s off to Mr Carr, and more power to him. But there is a way for Dave to give his flaming moral sense a rest, at least on this issue. It’s called flat tax.

Charge everybody a flat rate of about 20 percent on any income above a £10,000 personal allowance, permit only legitimate business deductions, and no problem, moral or otherwise, with tax avoidance will ever arise. I can’t calculate the precise effect of such an arrangement on the Exchequer, but people who can, Nobel-winning economists among them, assure us that, at worst, the state will break even on the revenue thus derived. That means it’ll come out ahead, as the need for costly tax-collection efforts will be vastly reduced. Even more important, Dave won’t be tossing and turning at night, kept awake as he is now by affronts to his morality.

If the purpose of taxation were strictly economic this would work famously. But since extortionist taxes are there to send what Vince Cable calls ‘an important message’, that is who’s boss, and to whom our money really belongs, a flat rate will never happen. Never mind that progressive taxation violates the founding principle of Western justice, that of equality before the law. We’re not about legality here, are we? We’re about morality, as defined by Dave and his jolly friends.

The American writer HL Mencken once said that ‘the state remains, as it was in the beginning, the common enemy of all well-disposed, industrious and decent men.’ Dave must be a Mencken fan – he does his level best to prove him right.

 

 

French elections are coming in thick and fast, and only the thick will fail to get out fast.

For, in a world where even Darwinism is but a theory, there exists one immutable law of nature: when socialists take over, people flee. Admittedly, some run away even from reasonably laissez-faire governments as well, but there’s a difference.

Most economic escapees from decent lands are guilty of some impropriety, usually of the tax variety. However, those who run away from socialists tend to be honest, decent people who all suffer from the same phobia: they hate being robbed by their government.

Britain taxes middle-class people at over 50 percent, and over 40 percent of our economy (closer to 75 percent in the Celtic fringe and the North) is socialist – or public-sector if this is the term you prefer. It says a lot for France that so many of her citizens regard as an oasis of freedom even our overtaxed, overregulated land run by self-serving politicians with learning difficulties.

London is already the seventh largest French city in the world, what with approximately 300,000 Gauls making it their home. Ashford, comfortably sitting on the Eurostar line between London and Folkestone boasts a large French population as well. Most of them work across the Channel, which they obtusely call La Manche, ignoring the waterway’s real name. The Channel to them isn’t English; good job their taxes are.

I don’t know if London can accommodate a million Frenchmen, but if it can it’ll have to, soon. For Hollande’s socialists have just won a 300-seat majority in the National Assembly, thereby finding themselves in total control of both the executive and legislative power. More important, they’ll now grab control of people’s money, which, in common with all socialists, they regard as their own.

It’s a mistake to think that economic and military disasters are some kind of force majeure, a confluence of historical circumstances rendering any human agency helpless. Taxing circumstances do arise periodically, and they do create critical situations. But such situations only become national and international catastrophes when the wrong people are in charge at the time.

Had Louis XIV, rather than Louis XVI, been in charge in 1789, the French revolution wouldn’t have happened. Nicholas I wouldn’t have suffered the fate of his grandson Nicholas II in 1917. Bismarck wouldn’t have let Weimar disintegrate into a breeding ground for Nazism. Unlike Blair, Churchill wouldn’t have acted as America’s poodle in Iraq. And if today’s Western governments were run by statesmen rather than spivs, the world in general and Europe in particular wouldn’t be running the risk of implosion.

In any self-respecting country someone like François Hollande would be satisfying his political ambitions by ranting off a soapbox somewhere in the Bois de Boulogne, with half a dozen derelicts in attendance. The rants would be regularly interrupted by either les flics or by muscular chaps wearing white coats and bearing straightjackets.

It takes a madman even to conceive the policies Hollande is about to implement, especially at present. An economy groaning under the weight of debt, taxation and regulation needs a breath of fresh air. It needs to get rid of the suffocating yoke around its neck by getting the government off its back.

What does François propose instead? A top tax bracket of 75 percent (in fact, closer to 100 percent when all taxes are taken into account), the lowering of the pension age from 62 to 60 and introducing a tax on all financial transactions. This in a country that’s on the verge of needing a bailout, Greek style.

Last Friday, Angela Merkel gave François a piece of her mind, chapter and verse. But France isn’t Greece, not yet anyway. Merkel can’t even try to whip her into shape to the same extent, though I must admit to having a persistent fantasy of Angela in a shiny PVC outfit, brandishing a cat-o’-nine-tails: ‘You’ve been a bad boy, François, but I have just ze remedy…’

That means Hollande will try to put his policies into effect, grabbing a catastrophe out of the jaws of a crisis. Anticipating such an outcome, the French began overworking London estate agents the moment François was elected president. What then was a vigorous trickle will now become a stampede. The French will be competing for London properties against Russian Mafiosi and Arab Springers. They’ll put their educated minds to work in the City. French will become the dominant language on the 22 Bus. And I for one am rubbing my hands gleefully.

For I share the French national obsession with food, and whenever the French move into a neighbourhood the food improves. There’s a superb butcher not far from where I live, listing Gordon Ramsey among the regular patrons. Unfortunately, I’ve never seen Gordon there, but each time I join the queue, two thirds of those in it are French. But for them, the butcher might not have survived. Now he’s thriving. The same goes for our local bakery, which is becoming indistinguishable from a boulangerie somewhere in the Sixth.

This, I realise, is a shamefully narrow, not to say solipsistic, perspective. We could broaden it though, if you insist. If the French blackmail the Germans into introducing a tax on financial transactions, where do you think most of those transactions will be made? I’ll give you a multiple choice: A) Frankfurt, B) Paris, C) the moon, D) London. You got it in one. And if their top tax bracket is twice as high as ours, it’s a safe bet that most economically virile Frenchmen will end up in the Royal Borough.

Will the last one of them leaving Paris please turn off all the lights? Before long France won’t be able to afford the electricity bill.

For the first time since 323 BC, Greece finds herself at the centre of European politics. That was the year Alexander of Macedon died, leaving behind him a legacy of conquest and reasonably benevolent rule. Neither is in store for the country today.

Admittedly Greece had some news value in 1821-1832 when she fought for her independence from the Ottoman Turks. But even though that cause attracted all sorts of Romantic layabouts, such as Byron, the war wasn’t seen as one on which the future of Europe hinged.

Suddenly, yet another round of elections has turned the country into the earth-moving fulcrum that Archimedes craved so forlornly. For if you believe the press, the elections are supposed to have saved Europe from an otherwise inevitable demise. The earth has been moved.

It’s not that anyone thinks that some unknown tectonic fault was about to break the continent off from Asia, casting it adrift into the ocean where it would then do an Atlantis. You see, Europe is no longer a continent. It’s shorthand.

The name has always had metaphorical uses. At various times in the past it stood for Christendom, with its civilisation and culture reflecting the metaphysical foundations on which it rested. Now it means the European Union or, more narrow still, its defunct single currency.

Anyone staggered by the craven, anti-historical, ideological idiocy that begat that abortion of an experiment is immediately accused of hating ‘Europe’. Never mind that the accused may be a cultured, well-travelled, multi-lingual person, while the accuser may not know the difference between Emily Dickinson and Emile Durkheim, or even between Sweden and Switzerland. The accused is a Europhobe, the accuser a Europhile. He’s the one rejoicing in the triumph of the New Democracy (ND) party that, according to him, has won a ringing mandate from the Greek electorate to ‘stay in Europe’ and keep the euro. The continent has been saved. It’ll remain firmly attached to Asia.

When ideology runs riot, reason is never in the race. Thus our Europhile has no qualms about regarding as a mandate ND’s 29.6 percent of the vote, well short of the absolute majority. Even if this ‘centre-right’ party, which is directly responsible for having run up the criminal deficit in the first place, were to form a coalition with the socialists, which at the time of writing isn’t exactly a foregone conclusion, it would then have only about 160 out of the 300 parliamentary seats on offer.

It’s good to see though that the country is reviving the tradition of highly limited democracy for which it, or more specifically Athens, is so justly famous. Only about 30,000 or so fully enfranchised citizens (out of Attica’s population of about a quarter of a million) could vote in Athens on either side of Alexander, with 5,000-6,000 constituting the quorum.

Or perhaps the tradition animating today’s Greeks is of more recent provenance: after all, Tony Blair’s party chose to regard the 35.2 percent of the popular vote it won in 2005 as a mandate to wreak constitutional mayhem. Tocqueville needn’t have worried about the dictatorship of a majority. A minority dictatorship is the order of the day, all perfectly democratic of course.

But do let’s accept the Greek elections as they are portrayed in the press: the pivot of European politics. What did the Greeks actually vote for and against?

Well, if you really must know, they voted for austerity as a precondition for receiving another €160 billion handout, on top of the €240 billion they’ve received already. At least that’s today’s line we’re expected to swallow. But it’ll take a lot of ouzo to help it go down.

If the Greeks read European papers attentively, they know that ‘austerity’, just as ‘Europe’, isn’t used in its true meaning. What it means nowadays is that the government undertakes to slow down its orgy of public spending designed to corrupt the populace into voting the right way. Not to reverse it, God forbid. We’re talking, to use Britain as one example, about a small reduction in the rate of increase – not about an overall reduction in the amounts spent.

Yet even in Britain one nevertheless hears the growling, rumbling noise among the people used to getting something for nothing, which is to say the majority. In time the noise will be turned into a rallying cry by the Milibandits, the folk who are already talking about creating a pan-European anti-austerity alliance of all true-red socialists.

Now if you think, correctly, that the British have been corrupted too much to accept any meaningful austerity, then multiply our corruption by 100 and you’ll know where the Greeks stand in relation to fiscal rigour.

Of course they want to get their €160 billion, wouldn’t you? But only the naïve think for a second that whoever ends up forming a coalition will abide by the preconditions Angela has imposed. And she knows it, bright girl that she is.

The Greeks will pretend to have found the fiscal God, and Angela will pretend to believe them. She needs the euro as the tether that binds the EU together, suffocating every urge for political and economic independence from Germany. So she and her likeminded eurosupremacists will hail the Greek election as the saviour of the euro.

The euro can’t be saved, Angie. Whether the Greeks stay in or out for the moment doesn’t matter one drachma. Everyone will be out before long, and all talk about contagion is so much tosh. The euro is doomed not because of any potential infection being passed on from one country to another, but because it’s genetically unsound. Every member of it has structural problems for which there are no solutions.

People can be fooled for days, perhaps weeks. But the markets can only be fooled for hours, nay minutes. Witness the original modest rally after ND swept all before it, only followed by a massive dip when Spain delivered the next batch of rotten news. The markets know that this giant Ponzi scheme will go the way of all such undertakings sooner, rather than later. Except that this time no Bernie Madoff will conveniently be there to take the rap.

Rather than seeking scapegoats, we should slaughter the sacred cow of ‘Europe’. Let the word revert to its original meanings rooted in geography and culture. It’s been abused enough. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dave and George, ably assisted by Mervyn, have cooked up a great scheme: they’ll pump £140 billion into our banks on condition that about 60 percent of the money will then be used for mortgage and business loans.

The amount is positively mean compared to the £325 billion already injected into the banks to keep them from a richly deserved demise. That programme achieved its dubious purpose in that most banks do indeed continue trading even as we speak. What they don’t continue is lending, opting instead to use the money as chips in the computer games banks play with one another. Such newly found frugality has two obvious effects, one bad, the other good.

Since the money is being used merely as a life-support system for the banks, it circulates within their bodies only, doing nothing to drip-feed financial plasma into the veins of the economy. The economy then becomes exsanguinated, leaving our private finances anaemic and moribund. That’s bad – and this is the situation we have at the moment.

On the other hand, if all those billions, trillions and zillions were dumped into general circulation, we’d have not so much an economic Eden as inflation from hell. And inflation, as anyone familiar with the history of the Weimar Republic will tell you, spells disasters of all sorts, not just in the economy. Thus tucking the money under the banks’ mattresses at least keeps inflation down. That’s good – but it won’t last if the banks are forced to release the funds into the economy, as sooner or later they will be.

If we strip the Exchequer’s proposal of the usual PR effluvia, we’ll see that in essence they’ve reversed the long-standing policy of preferring recession to inflation. This goes to show yet again that, when it comes to the economy, the government can only ever give us the choice between a rock and a hard place. Occasionally both. Never neither.

Simple homespun logic would suggest that, if governments are constantly damned if they do and damned if they don’t, perhaps they – and, more important, we – would be better off if they stayed out of the economy altogether. One shouldn’t play if one can’t win seems to be the conclusion, but I find this so shocking that I have to seek outside help.

Hence I’ve interviewed a few experts (identified by their initials only), trying to find out what they think. Here’s what they said in response.

What do you think of the active role our government likes to play in the economy?

EB: The moment that government appears at market, the principles of the market will be subverted.

But surely making it easier for people and small businesses to borrow will stimulate the economy?

AL: You cannot establish sound security on borrowed money.

Yes, the events of 2008 seem to bear this out. But we’re in big trouble now, and some excess spending will offer an immediate solution, won’t it?

AL: You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than you earn.

Well, every good housewife could tell you that. But aren’t governments run on different principles?

AS: What is prudence in the conduct of every private family, can scarce be folly in that of a great kingdom.

In that case, let’s extend the parallel. By definition, all family members are economically equal. Shouldn’t we try to achieve the same conditions in society at large, by taxing the rich more?

AL: You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich.

EB: Compulsory equalisations can only mean equal want, equal wretchedness, equal beggary.

It sounds to me as if you’re advocating less government interference, not more. But can individuals be trusted with their own economic well-being?

AS. Every individual can judge much better than any statesman or lawgiver can do for him. The statesman, who should attempt to direct private people in what manner they ought to employ their capitals, would assume an authority which could safely be trusted to no council or state, and which nowhere be so dangerous as in the hands of a man who had folly and presumption enough to fancy himself fit to exercise it.

But doesn’t this individualism border on selfishness, naked pursuit of self-interest?

AS. It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their self-love.

At that point there was nothing left for me to do but thank Messrs Edmund Burke, Adam Smith and Abraham Lincoln for their time. Their views, I thought, have antiquarian value, but no other. One can only shudder to think of the kind of havoc they’d wreak on Western economies if given the chance.

We’re so much better off with Dave and George, especially now that they have Mervyn King on their side. Count your blessings – but please, please don’t count your money. You’d only get depressed.

 

Our illustrious Prime Minister has been espied – and photographed, naturally – in a Bucks pub last Sunday, sitting on a fence and drinking Guinness.

Now that’s a sight for sore eyes. If you ever doubted Dave is ‘a genuine guy’, as described by the pub’s landlord, then you ought to be ashamed of yourself. If you ever regarded Dave as posh just because he’s related to the Queen, this photo opportunity ought to disabuse you of such notions. Bet you thought Dave was the kind of toffee-nosed bloke who drank nothing but Krug and Château Margaux. Well, you thought wrong.

There he was, pint of the black stuff in hand, shirt hanging loose, feet shod in trainers. Not only has Dave preached love for hoodies, he’s but half a step removed from being a hoody himself. Well, perhaps that’s going a bit too far. ‘Genuine guy’ is just right – you know, the kind who leaves the pub and drives home without realising he has left his little daughter behind.

Add to this karaoke, the computer game Fruit Ninja (which, according to a close adviser, he spends ‘a crazy, scary amount of time playing’), and affection for watching Danish TV dramas as his chosen ways of ‘chillaxing’, and there you have it: an eminently electable chap, slightly on the prole side of middle class.

Really, if focus groups show that a suspicion of poshness still lingers, one hesitates to suggest what else Dave could do. Perhaps beating Sam occasionally would be a properly populist thing to do. And then amusing his mates, policy consultants and a couple of hand-picked reporters, who just happen to have dropped by, with this one:

‘What do you tell Sam when she sports two black eyes? Nothing. She’s already been told twice.’

Laughter all around. Never mind the policies, feel the common touch.

And speaking of policies, Dave is as good at sitting on the metaphorical fence as he is at sitting on a literal one down the pub. I can’t tell you how many fences he has sat on in his policies and pronouncements, nor how many about-faces he and his mate George have performed with the agility of Torvill and Dean. Frankly I’ve lost count. And so have all those commentators who raise a hue and cry every time Dave spins a double Axel.

But as an ex-PR man, if a PR man can ever be an ex, Dave knows how to counter accusations of an excessive propensity to emulate weathervanes, or figure skaters if you’d rather. The first thing one learns in that profession is how to turn a negative into a positive. Thus, if a toothpaste tastes foul, that’s because it contains chemicals that are good for your gums. If a car is too slow, that’s because it’s designed for economy and ecology. And when Dave and George toss key policies aside like a wad of used Kleenex, that proves they ‘listen’.

To whom, if one may ask? To you and me? Well, I don’t know about you, but I’ve never met Dave, so he hasn’t had the chance to listen to me. Nor has he listened to millions of others. What he has listened to is focus groups and opinion polls. The ability to do so, and then obey with a dog’s fidelity, is a sine qua non of modern politicians, and they don’t come any more modern than Dave. Why, in the modernity stakes he could give even Tony a good run for his money, and that takes some doing.

I have news for our politicians: their job isn’t to listen. It’s to govern. And the great theoreticians and practitioners of England’s ancient constitution, Edmund Burke prime among them, knew the difference.

Burke’s ‘representatives, not delegates’ was a sublime understanding of our MPs’ true role. Every Englishman must have his interests represented – but not necessarily his wishes. We elect those people because presumably they know our interests and are capable of doing whatever is necessary to uphold them. Government by modern plebiscite or post-modern focus group is a constitutional abomination, and it is a constitution, not democracy, that’s the true antithesis of tyranny.

How things have changed; how the constitution has been abused. Dave isn’t solely or even primarily to blame for that of course. Many pre-war and most post-war governments have done their bit – to a point where the previous paragraph would sound heretical to most politicians and their flock. Their individual intelligence and attainment don’t even matter any longer.

For it’s not they who speak and act, it’s the Zeitgeist. Even if today’s front benches were filled with Burkes (they are, but the word is spelled differently), they wouldn’t be able to change much. Several generations of focus-group politicians have corrupted the public, and the public has retaliated by corrupting them back even more.

In light of all this, perhaps it would be a good idea if Dave and his fellow listeners spent more time down the pub than up in Westminster. They’d govern less that way, which has to mean they’d govern better.

 

  

 

A vague impression is wafting in off British newspaper pages that the Germans have had it with the EU project. Supposedly, they are so exasperated with the less frugal and industrious nations that they are prepared to tell them to shape up or ship out. There’s also a feeling that Angela Merkel is so at odds with her electorate that her position is becoming precarious.

Nothing can be further from the truth, and French papers seem to grasp the issues better, but then of course they have more at stake. Also, the French in general are more likely than the Brits to see the big picture without getting overly bogged down in small-print nitty-gritty.

The big picture has a photographic clarity so rare in modern political art. The purpose of the EU, as far as Germany is concerned, is to put Europe under German management. Political power, not money, is the ultimate prize, just as a gold medal, not money, is the immediate goal of any Olympic athlete. Every such athlete takes it for granted that, once the medal is over his neck, millions in endorsements will follow. But first things first: the original goal is primary, everything else is derivative.

It would be odd if other EU members, even France, felt as positive about the possibility of Germany’s political domination. They don’t. But they desperately need German money to stay afloat, and the money – whatever our papers are saying – is on offer. However, the offer comes with strings attached: by way of interest and finance charge, France is expected to do a Vichy. Déjà vu all over again, as Yogi Berra, American baseball coach and cracker-barrel philosopher, once said.

This is it in a nutshell, pure and simple. But the language of politics and diplomacy is seldom simple and never pure. And the European dialect of that language would make even Aesop sound too forthright. A translation from European into human is always necessary, and this is a service I’ll try to provide to the best of my modest ability.

Angela, as quoted in Le Figaro: ‘We need more Europe…’ [Since the geographic size of Europe, from the Atlantic to the Urals, is immutable, this has to mean a more German Europe.] ‘…more budgetary union…’ [A German finance minister ruling the roost.] … ‘and, above all, we need more political union.’ [Like the one between Berlin and Vichy.] ‘We must, step by step, cede power to Europe.’ [Does this mean Germany ceding some of her power to Portugal, or Portugal all of hers to Germany? No translation needed there.]

In his response, Bernard Cazeneuve, France’s Minister for European Affairs, proved he is a fluent speaker of European too. France ‘favours the deepening of European integration. But institutional reform can’t take priority over the urgent need to respond to the crisis…’ [Just give us the dosh, Angie, and never mind your boche megalomania.] ‘Closer long-term integration of European nations will be impossible unless the EU demonstrates its ability to respond to the crisis.’ [It’s cash on the nail, Angie, or the deal’s off.]

‘Eurobonds must make a contribution to overcoming the crisis.’ [Germany must pay for everyone.] ‘The bonds will help catalyse the process of institutional integration.’ [No bonds, no integration.]

And then came the clincher: ‘We continue our discussions of this issue with our German friends and other partners to arrive, by the European summit at the end of June, at a ‘road map’, which is to say a method… of acquiring a clear perspective.’

What can be clearer than this? Pay up or shut up, Angie. If by 28 June your signature, preferably in blood, isn’t on the bottom line, might as well not bother with the summit. Then, and only then, your electorate will really land you dans la merde profonde. They know and you know what Germany really wants. Fine with us, but don’t think for a second you’ll get it for free.

Can’t you just see Angie squirming, ‘What’s this dummkopf on about?’ But deep down she knows exactly what François, the ventriloquist speaking through his dummy, wants. She knows what they all want – they want Germany to pay for what she has always craved: political domination. The method of payment is up to her.

A couple of times in the last hundred years Germany tried to pay for it in the currency of blood, but the price wasn’t right. Now she must pay for it in legal tender, and that just might do the trick. But pay she must, and pay she will. The question is, are we going to chip in?     

 

 

The news of Putin owning a collection of wristwatches worth about £500,000 made a brief splash in the British press. Much joy was found in drawing comparisons between that little treasure and Col. Putin’s official salary of £72,000 a year.

The comparison is spurious: it’s like comparing apples and condominiums. Since Soviet times the worst curse known to Russians has been ‘May you live on your salary only!’ In light of that folk wisdom, half a million quid in Swiss and German timepieces should be weighed not against Putin’s salary but against his reported 4.5% holding in the world’s largest gas producer Gazprom, his 37% of Surgutneftegaz and, by proxy, 50% of Russia’s largest oil trader Guvnor.

Do some quick sums, and Col. Putin’s combined wealth nears £100 billion, comfortably making him the world’s richest man. Suddenly, his timepieces begin to look the way a £10 genuine imitation Swatch would look to you and me.

Commenting on the good colonel’s affection for flaunting his wealth on his wrist, British reporters left out some local colour, a lacuna I shall now try to fill. The Russians, you see, are given to extremes, and this applies to the behaviour of their nouveaux riches. Everywhere people who fall into this category tend to live by the first commandment of poor taste: if you got it, flaunt it. But the Russians outdo Western nouveaux, and Westerners in general, in this character trait, as they do in most others. They swing within a much wider emotional and behavioural amplitude than any Westerners, and any quirk is in them multiplied by 10.

So how would a Russian nouveau flaunt it? He may own any number of gaudy palaces, but he can’t take them with him when shopping in Sloane Street or, for that matter, Red Square. He may have garages filled to the gunwales with Ferraris and Bentleys, but he can’t drive them into a party. How can he then scream at the world that he has just made it?

Women have it easy. They can wrap themselves in sable or lynx, but not so tight as to conceal millions’ worth of jewels hanging off them like baubles off a Christmas tree. Thus no matter where they go, everyone will see they’ve arrived. But what are their poor rich husbands supposed to do?

In the past, rich Russian merchants solved the problem in all sorts of baroque ways. They’d light their cigars with 100-rouble notes (about £3,000 in today’s inflated cash), bust up restaurants and pay 10 times the damage, give a waiter a small fortune for the privilege of smearing his face with mustard, defecate into grand pianos. Some or most of these excesses are still practised by the oligarchic small fry, but the really big fish, and certainly leaders of the world’s second largest nuclear power, have to be a tad more temperate.

Nor can they emulate their women and wear emerald necklaces, diamond tiaras and ruby rings, at least not in public. Now you understand that a £100,000 watch, tastefully half-covered by a cuff with competing, but not clashing, cufflinks of similar value, emerges as the only option.

Half a social step down from Putin you may see such messages of human worth as prison tattoos and two-inch-long fingernails, proving to all interested parties that their proud possessor doesn’t demean himself by physical toil. But that is a matter of style only: in substance, today all of Russian society is widely and deeply criminalised, which affects not just its morality but also its aesthetics.

Yet I can say one thing for Col. Putin: unsavoury he is, but at least he has never taken monastic vows. So if he wishes to amass untold riches and display their tiny particle on his wrist, more power to him – though it’s unclear how he can grab more power, at least not until he has rebuilt the old Soviet Union de jure, not just de facto.

Alas, even some Russians who have taken such vows can’t resist wearing a fortune under their cassock cuffs. Enter Patriarch Kiril, head of the Russian Church, who was recently photographed sporting a £30,000 Breguet at a press conference. Since all Russian senior clergy have to be monks, an outcry followed, and the Patriarch’s PR men came out fighting. They accused everyone who had commented on the timepiece of Russophobia, atheism and lies. The Patriarch, they claimed, had never worn the offensive item – and as proof they showed a doctored version of the same photograph, with no watch anywhere in sight.

Alas, meticulousness not being the dominant Russian virtue, their Photoshop artist overlooked an important detail: the reflection of the watch on the tabletop in front of His Beatitude. The picture became supernatural, as befits a prelate: only the shadow of an object, not the object itself, was in evidence.

The scandal became more virulent, and juicier details came to light. It turned out the monastic gentleman shares his palatial apartment with a woman first identified as his sister, then his cousin, then his distant relation, a progression that was bound to lead to salacious speculation.

Moreover, the Patriarch and his sister-cousin-relation recently filed, and won, a lawsuit against their downstairs neighbour. The chap had had some renovations done to his flat, and the resulting dust allegedly caused $1.7-million worth of damage to the Patriarch’s quarters. The lawsuit raised many questions, but one was particularly pointed: how could a monk who has taken a vow of poverty have amassed so much property that even a small damage to it is estimated in seven digits?

As I drew a distinction between the Patriarch and Col. Putin, it would now be only fair to point out a similarity. Putin’s rank was earned in the KGB, of which Kiril has been a lifelong agent, complete with a codename. That criminal organisation has converged with the criminal underworld to rule Russia in its own image. And power always cries out for its symbols, those communicating unassailable authority. In the past, that function was performed by raspberry-coloured stripes on KGB officers’ epaulettes. Not it’s watches.

So if you bump into an obviously well-heeled Russian at a party, ask him the time. He’ll be only too happy to oblige.