Truer Word

Cowards afraid of democracy.

That would be the Labour regime.

Red Skye Thinking

Ending PFI by setting up a Futures Trust to finance big public-sector projects by bond issues; replacing Council Tax with a local income tax and, in the meantime, freezing Council Tax; making prescriptions free and widening the scope of remedies available; providing home care freely so that elderly people can be helped to live out their lives at home; reducing class sizes to 20; abolishing university tuition fees and ending the practice of subsidising those defined as disadvantaged by those equally disadvantaged but failing to qualify (almost all eighteen year olds are poor and discrimination on the achievements and failures of the generation above is grotesque); providing a Home Civil Service appointed without fear or favour on open competition and by merit; effective governmental opposition to dumping nuclear waste out of sight and out of mind, but not out of effect, in natural and so conveniently deep holes in the countryside; opposition to making the country a target for nuclear missiles by removing the launch sites of nuclear missiles entirely outside of the country's control; enhancing relations with the islands large and small of the north western European archipelago (which provides a powerful grouping to front its interests within the European Union, just as is being set up currently and for similar purposes by the countries fronting the Mediterranean); all this is being organized by a Scottish Prime Minister.

Unfortunately not the Scottish prime minister we are landed with, he's trying desperately to stop all this. All of this is coming from the Scottish Prime Minister of Scotland.

Effrontery

The Leader's inability to cope is highlighted by reports from  senior  allies of Brown that there is need for  '.. a new 'go-to man,' a chief executive-type figure... that will free Gordon to concentrate only on the things that he should be concentrating on. The problem has been the flat structure. Below Gordon are about six people who all need to go to him about things. That really takes too much time, so a better filter is needed.'

Brown can continue to micro-manage the Labour party to maintain himself in power - that needs merely his particular and peculiar talents of grubbing like a half-blind mole through the  dirt of fixing deals and remembering the minutiae of past compromises and  sell-outs.  What he has so publicly failed to cope with, is being the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and answering to  the pledges on which his predecessor gained power, as well as dealing with other parts of the power elites which are not his to control.  As he has sunk into wholesale incapacity and subsequent fury followed by depression, his capability even to control his claim to power - the zombie Labour party - has begun to slip from him. 

 'It was astonishing that no one close to Gordon was able to sort the Abrahams problem out earlier. And more importantly sound very loud alarm bells about the trouble that was being stored up. ', the Telegraph reports a senior Labour party figure remarking.   

A shortlist that includes Wilf Stevenson, long-standing friend of the Leader, and director of the Smith Institute, which is currently being investigated by the Charities Commission for inappropriate activity (it has seemingly acted as a means of running a private office for Brown, making available large sums under guise of research funds, used 11 Downing Street for political meetings,  and his henchmen have profited from sinecures there among other things) will be under consideration by Brown after Christmas.

The prospect is that the country will have an unelected Prime Minister, unable to cope,  fronted by one of his 'old friends', whose charity Smith Institute is under investigation by the charities' controlling body, who is without even the democratic fig leaf of representing a small group of Scottish voters. 

     

Halls Decked

'Poets are the trumpets which sing to battle..
Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world'.


Christmas time is here, by golly,
Disapproval would be folly.
Deck the halls with hunks of holly,
Fill the cup and don't say when.

Kill the turkeys, ducks and chickens,
Mix the punch, drag out the Dickens.
Even though the prospect sickens,
Brother, here we go again.

And -

O come, Thou Rod of Jesse, free
thine own from Satan’s tyranny;
from depths of hell Thy people save,
and give them victory o’er the grave.
Rejoice, rejoice, Emmanuel
shall come to thee, O Israel.


Have a merry Christmas, everybody, and thank you for the posts on your blogs and your comments here. The bloggers give a new meaning to the toast 'Absent Friends!'

In the Long Run We Are All Dead

The Labour regime's banging on about the long term and its transcendent importance over all and any other issue - illegal funding, tax rises on the poor, endemic widespread unemployment disguised as invalidity, commonplace violence on the streets, democratic curtailment, cronyism, real inflation cutting into every life choice, cultural degredation, - demonstrates their wholesale state of denial.

They and the socialist corpse they have been animating for the last ten years should get back into their 20th century coffin and close the lid behind them.

Brain Waves

Confidence is often considered a nebulous but crucial aspect of the functioning of markets, particularly financial markets. Feeling is another such concept. Considering financial markets as many neural networks interacting, confidence could be thought of as the emotional state in which they are operating, and feeling as the intuitive grab at what myriad inter-relating factors, too complex in their diversity of level, detail, and certainty to be open to formal, superficial analysis, are presenting every moment.

Advances in neural imaging have demonstrated the profound effects emotional state can have upon intuitive understanding and expressed preferences. Confidence leads to different behaviours from those generated by its absence, depression. Operating with depressed emotions alters the 'grab' of understanding offered by feeling. And actions then ensue that reinforce the pattern.

Most economic analysis treats risk preferences, time preferences and social preferences as separate kinds of preferences, but what if all three share common neural circuitry for controlling automatic emotional impulses - fear, temptation , and selfishness respectively, - by integrating all the costs and benefits of choices.

Standard analysis in game theory assumes players are in equilibrium; yet one study showed the more skilled using different parts of the brain in making choices while the less skilled showed brain activity elsewhere as if strategic uncertainty was causing the feeling of discomfort.

The social neuroeconomists Fehr and Camerer posit that eventually there might be a biological basis 'for a mathematical characterization of social exchange that is rooted in neural details but can also make predictions about activity in strategic interaction and market trading ... 'and, they add darkly, '...about how behaviour can change when causally manipulated by pharmacology, TMS, and other tools .'

The Pits

The relentless rise in energy prices has been attributed to the profit-seeking of oil producers, to politically-motivated energy bullying by Russia, and to the effects of the ending of easily accessible oil deposits. The need for an energy source less vulnerable to all or any of these factors has produced weird plans for: wind farms encircling the British coast, huge investment in nuclear power (with all the problems of siting, waste disposal, large public resistance to nuclear energy production, not to mention a wholesale lack of experience and competence in such technology in British industry now), micro-provision at individual level, wholly unsuited to the management of energy demand and the national grid, and other greenish solutions.

Underneath the north east of England is lots of coal. On top of the north east of England are lots of failed bank workers. Presumably their much vaunted cultural traditions still hold; the pouring of tax-raised cash into the region should be directed towards establishing a modern energy industry and everyone can get back to their roots and back into productive employment.

Lost

5000 troops hunkered down outside Basra airport are all that remains of New Labour's war in Iraq. The devastating pictures of the British Commander in Iraq signing the hand-over papers under cover for fear of mortar attacks, without ceremony, to the Iraquis, and the contrast with Iraqui troops parading through the city of Basra was intensely distressing. The BBC poll report that as a result of the removal of the British Army:

'Two-thirds felt security would improve in the short term, while 72% said it would improve in the long term. Only 5% said security would deteriorate following the withdrawal',

suggests everything has gone badly wrong, and the British assistance to the Iraqi authorities of southern Iraq in establishing democratic rule, the New Labour justification for our presence there, (let's forget the weapons of mass destruction lies), has been non- existent.

So perhaps the worst defeat of a west European army in a non-European theatre since Dien Bien Phu is played out. It isn't as bad as the helicopters taking off from the embassy roof in Saigon but then the commitment was, to say the least, much less whole-hearted.

Since the Labour election win in 1997 the Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer, now the unelected prime minister of the United Kingdom, has actively and vehemently denied funding to the United Kingdom Armed Forces. He is reported to have refused even to attend meetings at the Ministry of Defence, the first holder of the office ever to do so. He has equally vehemently declared his dislike of the Armed Forces - in keeping with the attitudes of his Party, its supporters, and his and their, political creed.

Which makes the sending to war of British troops on at least three fronts, two of them concurrent, by his alter ego Blair, utterly disgraceful. Lying to Parliament is overshadowed by sending men and women to fight under-equipped and grossly under-funded ; they went without the support of years of the defence commitment needed to fight an effective war, and it was the Chancellor of the Exchequer Brown who denied the funding.

The pretence that Brown invariably sought Blair's discomfiture is convenient, but the truth is that both sought, together, the defeat of all and every part of the United Kingdom establishment that might undermine Labour's permanent hold on power. The Armed Forces must have been a primary target, then the Constitution (currently devastated and about to be re-presented in all his vulgarity of thought by Jack Straw), the office of Head of State, ( destroy the Upper House of the Parliament in its independent revising role and it is so much easier to pass that tendentious but essential authoritarian regulation and European Union acceptance and, inter alia, deprive the monarchy of any channel of influence), politicise the Civil Service and extend the nomenklatura of appointees rather than elected officials at local levels; but first, denigrate and weaken those who might impose another order, by their millitary humiliation fighting with both hands tied behind their backs.

Then send a man with a peculiar moustache to sign away foreign and every other kind of policy independence for the United Kingdom and there is a clear field of fire for managing the next post democratic election.

The Unelected Leader Versus the Market

HM Treasury today confirms that the guarantee arrangements for Northern Rock plc
described in HM Treasury's announcements dated 20 and 21 September 2007 and 9
October 2007 are being extended, at the request of Northern Rock plc, to the
following unsubordinated wholesale obligations, whether now existing or arising
in the future:
1. all uncollateralised and unsubordinated wholesale deposits and other
borrowings which are outside the guarantee arrangements previously announced by
HM Treasury;
2. all payment obligations of Northern Rock plc under any uncollateralised
derivative transactions;
3. in respect of all collateralised derivatives, and all wholesale
borrowings which are collateralised (including, without limitation, covered
bonds of Northern Rock plc), the payment obligations of Northern Rock plc to the
extent that those obligations exceed the available proceeds of the realised
collateral for the relevant derivative or borrowing; and
4. all obligations of Northern Rock plc to make payments on the repurchase
of mortgages under the documentation for the 'Granite' securitisation programme.

Simply Unfit

Einstein's view that “Everything should be made as as simple as possible — but not simpler.”, is quoted in the Times this morning. The regime's new scientific adviser has an uphill struggle against the brain dead Labour ministers who choose simpler self aggrandisement coupled with force in response to socio -cultural complexity that offends their authoritarianism.

Yet once a monopoly of power has been gained, by whatever means, no regime can just keep smacking the people into line, and politics becomes largely the science and craft of words; rarely and memorably it becomes the art of words. Schiller's:

Freude, schöner Götterfunken,
Tochter aus Elysium!
Wir betreten feuertrunken,
Himmlische, Dein Heiligtum.
Deine Zauber binden wieder,
Was die Mode streng geteilt,
Alle Menschen werden Brüder,
Wo Dein sanfter Flügel weilt.

seems appropriate currently.

Angels are in Berlin till Monday; the German philosophers' Christmas shindig at the Humboldt on experimental pragmatics, which is considering syntax- semantics mismatch and the neural bases of semantic composition, and how pragmatic differences between affirmative and negative sentences are captured in the processes and representations of language comprehension, (and other hot topics), might seem irrelevant to the Leader of the Labour party; not simple enough.

But, speaking with the simplicity necessarily embraced by Gordon Brown: his brain is unable to function at the levels of complexity and emotional responsiveness that are regarded and required as neuro-typical. His unfortunate physical and psychic incapacities have led to death and misery, particularly within our country and in the Middle East. Being Prime Minister , an office for which he is literally not fit, is not his achievement, it is his permanent and public disgrace.

Let the Leader Go to the Signing!

The Commons Liaison Committee must sacrifice itself to the greater good. We all wish to see the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland, Leader of the Labour Party, the Right Honourable (giggle) Gordon Brown sign away the sovereignty of our country. This is not a moment to be lost to history for a Commons committee that can be readily rescheduled.

Come on:

Rt Hon Alan Williams, Labour
Rt Hon James Arbuthnot, Conservative
Rt Hon Kevin Barron, Labour
Rt Hon Alan Beith, Liberal Democrats
Sir Stuart Bell, Labour
Rt Hon Malcolm Bruce, Liberal Democrats
Michael Connarty, Labour
Sir Patrick Cormack, Conservative
Mr Andrew Dismore, Labour
Mr Frank Doran, Labour
Hon Gwyneth Dunwoody, Labour
Dr Hywel Francis, Labour
Mike Gapes,Labour/Co-op
Rt Hon Michael Jack,Conservative
Rt Hon Greg Knight, Conservative
Mr Edward Leigh, Conservative
Peter Luff, Conservative
Rt Hon John McFall, Labour/Co-op
Rosemary McKenna, Labour
Rt Hon David Maclean, Conservative
Andrew Miller, Labour
Mr Terry Rooney, Labour
Mr Mohammad Sarwar, Labour
Mr Barry Sheerman, Labour/Co-op
Dr Phyllis Starkey, Labour
Rt Hon Keith Vaz, Labour
Mr John Whittingdale, Conservative
Mr Phil Willis, Liberal Democrats
Dr Tony Wright, Labour
Mr Tim Yeo, Conservative
Rt Hon Sir George Young, Conservative

you know where your duty lies.

Cancel! Let the Leader go!

To the Finland Station

A ticket to create the Revolution and in 10 days shake the world cost 15 million ReichsMarks.
The German Emperor remarked "If the Swedes won't let him through, we'll let him through the German lines ourselves."

The German archives held in Berlin have been opened, rather like the Heavens.

This Is a Far Better Place

The Leader of the Labour regime was in Basra to tell British troops that while they would not be home for Christmas as he had stated previously, it was possible they would be back by next March. He told forces, who have withdrawn to an encampment outside Basra airport, that the city and thus the entire province will be handed over to Iraqi government control in the next two weeks and, according to the Telegraph, 'hinted at an end to Britain's involvement in the country.'

Meanwhile, (reports Juan Cole on Informed Comment), Major General Jalil Khalaf, speaking in the city of Basra, said sectarian groups imposing a strict interpretation of Islam, dispatch patrols of motorbikes or unlicensed cars with tinted windows to accost women not wearing traditional dress and head scarves: the Major General added,

"The women of Basra are being horrifically murdered and then dumped in the garbage with notes saying they were killed for un-Islamic behavior ". Khalaf told Associated Press that as well men with Western clothes or haircuts are also being attacked in Basra.

Since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and the installation of a Shiite-dominated
government, armed men in some parts of the country have been forcing women to cover their heads or face punishment. In some areas of the heavily Shiite south, even Christian women have been forced to wear headscarves.

"Your makeup and your decision to forgo the headscarf will bring you death." say posters throughout the formerly British sector Basra region.

Khalaf said the bodies of women have been found in garbage dumps with bullet holes, decapitated or otherwise mutilated, with a sheet of paper nearby saying, "she was killed for adultery," or "she was killed for violating Islamic teachings." In September, he added, the headless bodies of a woman and her 6-year-old son were among those found. A total of 40 deaths were reported this year. But:

"We believe the number of murdered women is much higher, as cases go unreported by their families who fear reprisal from extremists,"

Gordon Brown, the British Prime Minister, ended his peroration to the British army with the declaration:

"We have managed now to get Iraq into a far better place " .

Today ( from Informed Comment)

Police found an anonymous body of a woman on Hamdan street south of Basra city. Police said that the woman was shot in different areas of her body. '

English Schoolteachers No Longer Know Enough Poetry For Its Teaching In English Schools

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of "Spiritus Mundi"
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Irregular conjugation

I made an adminstrative error; you acted within the spirit of the law; he accepted an illegal donation contrary to the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000.

(quoted from http://www.scottishpolitics.org.uk/ which is a fine read for a Sunday morning).

No Ball

The delegation of the signing of the new European Constitution in Lisbon to the Foreign Secretary is a curious act. These jamborees are the occasion usually for face to face, one on one, discussions between heads of state and government. Yet Brown pleads a prior and very minor engagement. Clearly this is an excuse not to go.

Cowardice at being seen signing away United Kingdom sovereignty doesn't really cover it; the Leader denies he is doing anything of the kind and must feel intense relief and a glow of political success at delivering the United Kingdom still intact into the maw of the European Union.

Sherpas organize these meetings in advance to the last minute of a country's leader's presence; weeks of negotiation on agendas, consultations and the levels of participants, in matters of concern to particular member-states, take place.

The intervention of the EU Competition Commissioner in the state support being given to Northern Rock must have been pre-eminent on any UK prime minister's agenda, but permission to blunder on until March was flicked uninterestedly to Brown last week. It looks as if no one wants to talk about anything with the UK government.

The Labour regime Leader certainly has nothing to offer the European Union and the Union might think most reasonably that nothing more can be offered to him except his coat.

So the Foreign Secretary will be there, uncomfortably low in diplomatic status and with nothing to say to anyone, while the United Kingdom Prime Minister sits at home alone, picking his nose and biting his nails.

Holding the Foe in Play

'Strong activity in the aircraft and shipbuilding industries boosted output in Britain's manufacturing sector by more than expected in October, official figures showed today.'

Well it would, wouldn't it? The glorious Leader has ordered two aircraft carriers from the British (note the 'British' )shipyards, the most important of which is in his electoral backyard in Scotland . So a lot of staff are being taken on, no doubt most of them from Gdansk, but let it pass, let it pass.

The ship building industry in the United Kingdom would be at a total loss as to how to build an aircraft carrier even if you gave them the balsa wood and a stanley knife. The last serious order for a large ship went to Italy, as did the one before that which has just been launched - on time and on budget. Even the ferries are being bought from Poland.

The RAF is flying adapted Comets which ignite in midair.

The Bank of England has one man standing, like Horatius, trying to hold at least the financial and monetary probity of the economy.

Even the statistics and official manufacturing figures are a lie.

Bowing the Head but not Bending the Knee

The Bank should not have cut the rate; an imperceptible alteration in fundamentals offers no compensation for the wrong message.

Virtuous or Vicious

Raising the interest rate will narrow the gap between bank rate and Libor, provide anti-inflationary pressure, sustain the pound , encourage saving and show up Brown's economic and financial policies for the unaffordable debt and mispriced risk they consist in.

Lowering the interest rate will diminish the central bank's credibility as banks do not respond with an alteration in their assessment of risk and continue to lend at rates even more widely detatched from bank rate, encourage inflation, cause a flight from sterling, reward reckless lending and borrowing, and sustain Brown's discreditable economic and financial regime.

No Exit

In the proposals for a common rule book, and required sharing of financial information between member-states in the provision of a financial supervisory authority for the whole European Union, not just the euro area, can be seen the the disastrous results for United Kingdom wealth creation the Labour regime is bringing about.

There will be no veto after the Lisbon Constitutional Treaty is ratified; the Labour regime Leader Brown goes to the formal signing on 13 December, making a nonsense of his puppet's opposition to the Padoa Schioppa proposals yesterday. After Lisbon the United Kingdom can do as it's told, and it isn't told much because of its constant opting out; there will be no opt-out on this.

Losing Control

The Leader's control freakery must be causing him near apoplexy as the finance ministers of the European Union meet in Brussels to discuss financial services regulation and appropriate institutional arrangements and authority.

Il Ministro dell'Economia e delle Finanze, Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa, has voiced the consolidated views of the member-states' concerns after the management of the subprime crisis in the last few months in Europe and, while there is agreement that the Central Bank 'acted quickly and decisively in the monetary field.....' and that Ecofin and the Commission fulfilled their regulatory roles, 'the supervisory function appears to have been absent at the European level..' He accepts the IMF's judgement that in a crisis the member- states act on a national basis, 'from a narrow, national perspective..' and exchange minimal crucial information. Also there is a heavy regulatory burden and, at the same time, insufficient safeguarding of financial stability and investors.

He wants a single European rule book and he wants integrated supervision over cross-border market players. '... an enhanced exchange of information and an extended degree of consultation..' under tweaked extant EU powers should do the trick.

An analysis of the problems of European Union financial supervisory powers and actions, and a proposal so fully formed and elegant in its solutions, has not come uniquely from the Italian Ministry of Finance; and it beggars belief that Brown's puppet chancellor or toy Treasury was involved in preparing it.

Further:
A full report with reform recommendations is to be readied for April discussions on the lines of the Padoa Schioppa proposals. The current interchange of information between member- state financial institutions is to be increased now, the common rule book will have to wait until the April report and discussions. The proposals were welcomed by all but the German Socialists (who split from the German Christian Democrats' support for the measures ) and Gordon Brown's British Labour regime, which bitterly opposed the whole idea.

Ten Days To Shake Europe

The collapse of Gordon Brown’s personal authority after his fragility as a public politician, answering to the electorate’s representatives, has been exposed in the House of Commons, and the collapse of the Labour party into a miasma of corruptly and illegally sought and obtained money, thus depriving the Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath of what little democratic validity he had, now threatens the Labour regime policy of forcing the United Kingdom into the penultimate manifestation of the United States of Europe.

On 13 December this imposed, failure of a political leader intends to sign the Lisbon Treaty and betray: his own tiny, Scottish electorate; his party’s manifesto on which the defenestrated, democratically elected Labour Leader obtained a majority; his country, whose government under the SNP wishes to hold a consultative referendum on the Treaty; and our country.

The new Polish prime minister, elected after the Lisbon negotiations and with ratification of the Lisbon Constitutional Treaty as part of his platform, has stated that the commitments of the previous elected Polish government on the Treaty will be honoured; the unelected United Kingdom prime minister is unable to offer any such assurance, for his regime cannot evaluate the worth or validity of ‘opt-outs’ that are supposed to render the Treaty not a Constitution, and he is unwilling to proffer any election.

Brown’s formally secure position on driving the ratification of the Lisbon Constitutional Treaty through Parliament, using Blair’s electoral majority in the Commons, could well be undermined in the reality of open politics rather than Labour party secretive factionalism, bullying, and subservience to the trading of special interests and ‘stakeholding’.
NewLabourNewDawn had thought to pen political discourse permanently within Labour’s sordid confines, but open politics and the unfolding results of this unworthy goal of installing permanent statist governance have chosen otherwise.

Undoubtedly, on a formal vote of confidence in the Commons, Blair’s majority would hold for Brown; but how many times can this be used to prop up government failure to carry the House? Westminster is not the Italian House of Deputies and even there the persistent recourse to confidence votes to drive through government policy was criticized as bullying not governing. And on such an issue as the surrender of the United Kingdom’s sovereignty to a federal Europe, whipping could well not hold on substantive votes. The threat of facing the electorate has lost its sting when the electorate will reward those who oppose the swallowing up of the country by the continent.

Blair could carry his policies with cross party support; no such option exists for Brown in his dislikeability, barely constitutional status, lapped by the visible corruption of his party, driving a policy objectionable to much of the electorate he failed to consult.

Should Labour try for a third leader without a general election then even our Head of State might feel obliged to act as such, rather than just a procedural validator, and advise a general election.

Credit Where It's Due

The American banks' exposure to credit card loans is $900 billion . It is to be discovered how much of this unsecured loan is subprime or worse. At least home loans are partially collateralised.

Northern Rock has put those in Granite; the Bank of England 's $60 billion is collateralised with what's left.

Volare

Tomorrow morning Angels flies (wings discreetly folded under Sander tailleur) courtesy of Lufthansa Regional Airways, from Warsaw to Rome.

Clearly the Europe of the Regions is up and running (well, flying).