Three Hail Marys, and Go in Peace My Child

The Italian newspapers estimate that there are three hundred billion euros owned by Italian companies and private citizens illegally constituted abroad. This figure has 'emerged' as the result of the Italian government offering an amnesty for capital return. While in the United Kingdom amnesty terms are the loss of 50% of your stake, in Italy they're offering 5% if only Italians will reveal where all the money is, and how much of it there is. Bringing it back is a secondary consideration.

The macro economics of public and private debt are fairly interchangeable. The Maastricht Treaty has emphasized public debt exclusively - wrongly - because the financial crisis has been triggered by private as well as public debt. From Southeast Asia in 1997 to Latvia today.

Mr Tremonti is mounting an essentially propaganda exercise after growing tired of false claims that Italy is going under a debt tsunami - that, in truth, would be the United Kingdom. The three hundred billion is the stash of only the little people - the small to medium companies, the professionals, the furbetti del quartierino and their friends revealed by the Fazio disgrace. The serious money will not just stay where it is or where its owners would like it to be next, it is not for the state to even consider, as Mr Tremonti recognised when he denied that the amnesty favoured mafia money.

The Irish Referendum Must Confirm the Rejection of an Outdated Lisbon Treaty and Trigger a Fresh Agreement on European Union Government

Ireland is next on the agenda, Germany having safely shuffled off the socialist coil. Germany will be reconsidering its position now that it has shed the 'centre left' print money, expand debt, spend our way out of the crisis economic babyishness espoused unfortunately by the UK government. The electorate have chosen reducing and flattening taxes to increase demand and rejected attempts to render its manufacturing industry more inefficient by imposing unaffordable social and state 'investment' costs.

The German national elections' example will offer support, in Ireland's second, imposed, referendum on Lisbon, to the view that the Lisbon version of the European Union is unacceptable, not just in its democratic deficit but in its espousing of jejeune economic and financial interference in member states' policies . It should be remembered that the rejected Treaty was redrafted (to say exactly the same thing) by Giuliano Amato who was the socialist sidekick to disgraced socialist leader Bettino Craxi, and continues to seek to embed a 'left of centre' permanent governance over the Union. The collapse of support for 'centre left' progressive governance in member states needs to be drafted into any Union-wide agreements to embody and reflect the majority political and ideological stance of member states' electorates now.

Ireland does not want to find itself on the wrong side of the sea change in the political and economic stances of the European Union at a time when it needs to keep as much control over choices in confronting the crisis for itself and, at the same time have as much input into collective choices as it can command.

Further, to reject again the Lisbon Treaty will trigger a new approach to European-wide government and its form. To change their vote now, and accept a Treaty that has been outrun by events would be the worst of all worlds.

Merkel to Have a Comfortable Centre Right Majority According to German Election Exit Polls

The first exit polls in the German elections are giving an absolute majority for the centre right tripartite coalition. The CDU seems to have lost some votes but the FDP is polling its highest ever (15%) which confirms the suggestion that votes were being lost by the CDU to the FDP because of voters' dissatisfaction with the compromises to the left that the Chancellor was having to make under the grand coalition.

The shift in European politics is going to be marked now, both within member states and internationally; with German distaste for interference in its responses to the financial collapse (experienced so much more sharply in the United States and the United Kingdom) and the rejection of so-called 'global governance' solutions that were pushed at the Detroit G20 registering significantly. There will be a marked lack of interest in any G20-rules-the-world solutions or permanent secretariats either.

The German elections have just slapped down post democratic governance quite hard. And half-baked new keynesian economics.

Agony Auntie Responds - from Global to Universal Powers

Agony Auntie has received a further note:

"He told me the other day that he was 'over it' and that he was now calling on a German Catholic of his acquaintance to holiday with him next year. My colleague has no real connection to this person. They have not the same religion or age, or politics. This person, who resides in Rome, is frail and elderly and does not like strenuous travel, but is very respected throughout the world.
It seems a feeble rebound attempt and is doomed to failure. Even my 'friend' was half hearted in his approach."

Mr Quango, your colleague is moving quickly into dangerous waters. He has abandoned his love for a global, temporally powerful object only to substitute for it a universal and eternal beloved.

At least the latter wears a skirt.

This driven friend has substituted age for youth as well, which suggests an unbalanced relationship with his parents and especially with his father. It is significant that his new desired is identified with certain well known prayers.

His state has moved well beyond Agony Auntie's role as advisor to those in temporary psychic pain. This is a display of identification with statuses of power and authority - ie the father - rather than an expression of love. It would be best to seek professional advice and possibly asylum or at least the undertaking of a Retreat.

It is difficult to emphasize strongly enough the dangers of dealing with his elderly German invitee from any position of weakness - moral, intellectual or emotional - all of which the 'friend' is displaying.

Leaving Home - Some Tips

There are more people leaving the United Kingdom than at any time since the First World War, which is quite something when you think of the numbers who set off for Australia and Canada in the 1950s. Why they are going is variously explained, but can be grouped mostly under perceived poor quality of life in the UK in comparison with other advanced capitalist countries. If your fancy is a European country there are some important boxes to tick.

Have you got a job in your country of choice? If not, have they got jobs you might be able to take?

Do not try to set up a business. If there were a business opportunity, the locals will have developed it. You can buy a business particularly where there is lots of tax farming to be done.

Do not imagine that having English as your mother tongue has the slightest advantage attached to it. Every educated person in Europe under 50 can speak international English.

Indeed, do not imagine that being English has the slightest advantage attached to it. A european culture has engulfed the workplace, and people come from all over the Union.

Learn the local language. Learn the local attitude to the history of the last 100 years while you are about it. Millennia may have passed but Italians still have a decidedly imperial take on the rest of the world, for instance. And France's history of Africa is not the one you know. Nor did England win the War.

If you can, marry into your new community. If already married, send your children to the local school and ensure they do their homework and have all the correct textbooks, exercise books, rough books, pens, pencils plain and assorted, and geometry sets required.

Do not buy a house in the back of beyond. The reasons why no-one seems to have noticed the summer beauty is because they have fled the winter storms, and the timeless boredom of that timeless landscape. Live in a provincial or regional capital, as close to the centre as you can get, and drive out to the timeless countryside to stay in a hotel.

Remember the shopping hours, or you will go hungry, particularly in Germany. Shop early and shop often; it is good for your language skills and your fellows notice what you buy and how good your housekeeping skills are.

Go to church, or live in a large city, or recognise you will be classed as anti-clerical and as such, of the Left.

Do not go outside in house clothes unless you are obviously trimming or tidying just outside your boundaries. Do not wear tights or socks with sandals unless you are in Germany. Get your hair done at the hairdressers regularly or, if female, pull it back tightly into a well-formed knot.

Never ignore an official communication, and never disrespect a public official. Objections to what you consider unfair or improper are taken to the Tribunal and often set right, but there is not a do-it-yourself option.

Carefully measure social distance, and keep yours. No matter how charming, your local friends will drop everything for self and family interest, and this should not cause you resentment. Do the same.

Should you fall ill or be run over you will receive at least the same level of intervention and care as in England but you may not understand what is going on. This is no reason to assume the worst and discrimination.

Never think you can always go home. You are at home. And if you are not quite your children will be, very fast, and will not like to be taken from an excellent formal education with clear standards and admirable goals to what you ran away from in the first place. It is a mistake to believe that their first degree should not be taken at their local university (subject to you not living in the back of beyond, of course). They can do their post graduate work at Cambridge, which is much easier to enter at that level.

Do not overdraw your bank account or your credit card. Both will be removed and in many countries you will be prosecuted. This is, of course, why continental Europe is not in financial collapse.

Buy gold, along with everyone else. Never flaunt your well being, never expose your poverty.

Finally, prevent your guests from visiting the fascist bar and drinking too much grappa.

Agony Auntie

Bill Quango, Esq., MP, has sought advice for 'a friend' whose love object resists every advance. The friend has openly, publicly, perhaps foolishly allowed his desire to be on display in all its unnatural strength. Despite a courteous but firm rejection of overtures, the friend insisted on crossing oceans to attempt a chance meeting. Met by mere kindness and a cup of tea, he insisted on the offering of inappropriate gifts which led to all gifts being returned, no matter how small, forth with. After a period of quiescence the 'friend' renewed his assault upon the object of his affections this week, using the opportunity offered by both being required to work briefly in the same building. Five times intermediaries of various statuses were employed, outside of their proper work and duties, to press the friend's unwelcome suit. Five times repulsed, despite being offered fire power and drugs that really don't belong to the 'friend' and are not his to offer.

Let me say straight away that humbling your love object by driving them through the kitchens of your mutual, if temporary, workplace and pinning them up against the prep tables and cold stores is a no-no. Any number of films and novels in which the kitchens are the escape route of choice should warn you that if you are there, you are not in the right place for a walk and talk.

Walking and talking takes place in rose gardens.

What can be done? Your 'friend', Mr Quango, must recognise that cultural difference puts an ocean between them. The gifts he can offer are those of an elderly, married man with a mean and tainted past, with an uncertain but probably ignominious future. He has literally thrown away the possibility of friendship and the pleasures of occasional meeting with his object, who will undoubtedly take measures to ensure their social circles no longer intertwine.

To be so inappropriately in love is, of course, the stuff of many tragicomedies. Is your friend all right in the head?

German Ratification of the Lisbon Treaty Challenged by Interference in Opel

"Socialists and communists must not be allowed to rule Germany" is a declaration that extends to Europe in its entirety, and should be extended too, to "Nor corporatist fascist 'new progressive governance either". At the Free Democrats' party conference in Potsdam, the head of the FDP spoke for us all in rejecting any coalition with the centre 'left'.

'Currently the FDP is the preferred coalition partner for Merkel and the CDU. The two parties are sitting on around 14 and 35 percent of the German vote respectively. Which means that together they could rule by a slight margin.' The FDP has also been poaching conservatively inclined voters from the CDU, stealing away supporters upset by compromises the CDU has made in their four-year coalition with the Social Democrats. The FDP has always been the CDU's preferred partner for government.' (Der Spiegel)

The steady decline in support for the socialists and communists of the centre 'left' across Europe has struck in Germany. For they may have shed their old party names and made their peace across old divisions on how to realise socialism, but they are the same dreary, dirigiste authoritarians, aiming for permanent powers in the interests of 'progressive' governance. They had thought that with Lisbon they could embed themselves for good in all our lives, no matter how we voted, democratic control at last removed from any influence on the permanent, self-renewing, centre left administration of the European Union. But democratic referendums have delayed them too long and despite the present avoidance of democratic process in most countries, they have been delayed again by constitutional and legal safeguards to democracy.

Apart from the retreating tide of 'social democracy', and its identification by the majority of European voters with socialism, a fresh, constitutional, challenge to Lisbon that could delay Berlin’s ratification has been lodged in Germany's Constitutional Court. It argues that laws created to allow ratification of the Lisbon treaty in Germany, rushed through before the elections under the old grand coalition regime with strong centre 'left' representation, leave the Bundestag ill-equipped on controlling further European integration, and that these new laws do not guarantee sufficiently the pre eminence of the German Constitution and its court over the powers that may be ceded to the European Union.

In asking the Constitutional Court to issue an injunction, until they deliver their final verdict, halting ratification by president Horst Köhler (a spokesman said yesterday that the President's legal experts were examining the new challenge and could not say if or when they would act.), the constitutional challenge points up the level of the clash between German, constitutionally protected interests, and EU attempts to interfere in what is happening over Opel.

To say that Germany was not pleased with the behaviour of GM, or of the American government, over the Opel negotiations is both an understatement and another story. But when Peter Mandelson thinks to try and stick his nose in, it causes serious rethinking of the effects of Lisbon on a Germany that is solidly centre right, and equally solidly convinced that it should not pay even a euro to condone a fellow member state's economic and financial debacle brought about by socialist folly.

The Times says that:

'Lord Mandelson’s letter to Ms Kroes [EU Competition Commissioner, ed.] sends a signal to Magna that it does not have a free rein in decisions over redundancies [at Opel and Vauxhall, ed.] if it wants state aid', and that, ' funds already handed over by Berlin to secure German jobs are subject to European approval. Brussels can veto the money if competition regulators believe that the state aid serves as a political fix rather than being aimed at securing the long-term viability of a business.'

And the German Constitutional Court can veto any external interference in the economic or other well being of German citizens - and if these newly-passed, social democratically inspired laws that supposedly permit the ratification of the Lisbon treaty fail to reinforce that, the constitutional challenge to the German ratification of Lisbon will succeed.

It is not just the Czechs, the Poles, and the Irish standing firm. The dead hand of socialism embodied by Mandelson, through New Labour, to European progressive post democratic rule has the Germans looking askance too.

Going Down Like a Cup of Cold Sick in Berlin

The Saviour of the World and economic Colossus is proposing that:

'net exporters like Germany should introduce state stimulus programs to boost domestic demand. The idea is that increased public spending and higher wages will encourage consumers to buy more. This would raise imports while at the same time decreasing Germany's competitiveness on the international level, thus lowering the country's trade surplus. London has even made this a "key issue" for Pittsburgh, and put forward its own paper to this end. It wants the IMF to step in and provide countries with economic advice whenever a trade imbalance exceeds certain set parameters.' (Der Speigel)

Taxing Our Psychic Income

Psychic income is the satisfaction that derives not from monetary income but from possession or ownership or the exercise of an activity that gives pleasure comparable, indeed equivalent, to a given amount of money. In deciding what work to undertake for what wage people will take into account that work's psychic income. The response to "What are you going to do when you leave school?" "I'm going to be famous, Miss" is neither irrational nor unresponsive to economic understanding.

The move by the regime to tax psychic income, beginning with housing, steps into unknown territory. It raises the questions of detecting and measuring the capacity to enjoy; the criteria for determing that which is enjoyable; the measurement of enjoyment. Should we all be socially engineered to enjoy things that are in large supply? What penlties should be applied to the contrary, the dissenters who persist in liking other, untaxed, stuff. Should they not be rewarded for stubbornly consuming that which nobody else enjoys?

Well, we are, of course. A tutored aesthetic (doubtless the product of a privileged education that should be taxed regardless of any income it yields) facilitates the consumption of positional goods undervalued by the hoi polloi, who have unfortunately actualy been taught to wish to consume that which is in ready supply.

Angels, by definition, inhabit beautiful mansions. But in truth we have beggared ourselves buying lovely houses no one wanted to levels far below official poverty lines that yield such large government subvention. We never took the state dole but we demand a higher tax threshold in consideration.

If we are to tax beauty then why not virtue? Faith, Hope, and Charity?

Self satisfaction and self righteousness levies on the Brown regime would repay the public debt.

Those who derive satisfaction from 'doing good' can pay for it, or leave the rest of us alone.

Exits and Lies

One thing that should not worry us at all is the lack of exit strategies coordination. That the stimuli should be coordinated simultaneously on a global scale in order to enhance their effectiveness is Economics 101, widely known and understood, but the problem of an exit strategy is precisely the opposite: a simultaneous global exit raises the danger of a cumulative recessionary drive. As long as the exit is not premature and does not turn into a stampede, it is much better if every country goes its own way, staggering their respective exits. The only desirable coordination would be a coordinated staggering of exits to simulate a random process, instead of an uncoordinated early exit by precisely those countries that have been running the stronger stimuli.

The United Kingdom regime is terrified it's going to be left with its gigantic deficit, (which it pretends to have deliberately run in an anti-recession fit of good heartedness towards the rest of the world), mass unemployment, collapsed manufacturing base, devaluing currency, and recovery delayed for a generation, while other, properly and sanely run economies contain the inflationary threat from their anti-recession stimulus measures and return to financial and fiscal orthodoxy. Even grooming and redefining the IMF and its interventions as nothing shameful (Mandelson), and a readymade institution that can be funded and used to implement co-ordinated global management of the global recession (Brown) does not hide the enormity and uniqueness of the economic disaster that the Labour regime has brought upon our country.

London Fashion Week Wash out

Angels had hoped to look at London Fashion Week but, honestly, you'd have to wash your eyes out with soap. And what's with all the big, fat legs on the models?

Asking Favours of Those That We Served Poorly

There are still Gemany, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Ireland who have not deposited the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty in Rome. Presumably Germany, whose highest court ruled that the Treaty was compatible with the German Constitution provided any changes in European law and regulation that infringed German sovereignty were referred to the German parliament for specific acceptance or rejection, (precipitating law changes that have now passed in both houses of the German parliament), is getting ready to deposit the ratification. The German President has signed, the national Parliament has passed the law changes.

But then, so has Poland fulfilled every stage of the ratification process except for depositing the papers in Rome. And they haven't taken the final, depositing in Rome step either. Poland has been waiting for some time, declaring that if Ireland hasn't agreed there is no point in taking the final step. Has Germany discreetly taken a similar stance?

The Czech Republic has followed Germany's lead and is to refer the effects of the Treaty on Czech sovereignty again to the Czech Constitutional court. This has infuriated the European federalists, and led President Sarkozy to blatant threats against the Czech Republic if it doesn't get in line. The Czech ratification still requires the Czech President's signature, apart from the Rome depositing of the papers. President Klaus wishes to wait until after general elections in the United Kingdom have taken place and the UK depositing of its ratification in Rome has been affirmed by a referendum in the UK. The almost certainly incoming Conservative administration after any UK general election has stated a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty will be held if it has not already come into force. Preventing a general election in the United Kingdom has now become a policy goal of the European federalists.

The interests of the United Kindom peoples and their worsening situation under the corrupt and undemocratic governance of a regime led by a deluded unelected prime minister and a corrupt and unelected front man for post democratic EU rule is of no concern to European federalists. Mass unemplyment worsening since 2007? Irrelevant. Grotesque levels of public debt? Irrelevant. Advancing socioeconomic inequality? Irrelevant. Destruction of quite basic civil liberties? Irrelevant.

Yet every moment in which our country is being degraded, which creates indifference if not amusement among the European federalists as they watch Brown and his vainglorious claims being fed by their minions and by their leaders, raises the stakes. It won't be renegotiating the terms of the UK's relations with the EU if their propping-up of Brown and his regime overwhelms the resistance to Lisbon. Lisbon itself dictates that after Lisbon there will be no more treaties, no more terms to be negotiated. After Lisbon it is with us or against us. In or out.

For the Conservatives 'Out' provides them with opportunity to recast the United Kingdom - as it must be recast after the last dozen years of economic, social, cultural and constitutional vandalism - afresh. A proper Constitution, secure borders, a financial regime appropriate for the country's strengths and needs, entrenched liberties, self-determined relations with the rest of the world and particularly with the Commonwealth, and with affable and constructive relations with the rest of Europe. People want to vote against Labour, and they want to vote against European federalism too.

Suffering the death throes of the disgraceful Brown regime, inflicted upon us to enhance the chances of making permanent the horrors of New Labour rule, we must hope the Czechs do not think of us as a far-away country about whose inhabitants they know little, as once we did of them.

Nice One , Gordon

Vera Baird is the deputy to the Attorney General and has been the MP for Redcar, (Mo Mowlem's former seat) since 2001. The Independent suggests she will take over as Attorney General next week.

The Telegraph's expenses report on her states:

'In order to claim Additional Costs Allowance she designates a flat in Crouch End, north London, as her main home and nominates a four-bedroom house in her constituency as her second residence.

In 2004-5 she claimed £4,309.20 in mortgage interest payments, but spent £7,916.30 on repairs, decoration and furnishings.... Her £4,570 bill for furniture was also cut down because the items were deemed too "luxurious", and she was told she could not claim £349 for a metal wall sculpture. However she did manage to get tens of thousands of pounds of public money to pay for a new roof, flooring, windows and a porch at her second home.

In subsequent years she claimed many thousands of pounds for various repairs and renovations. But in 2007-08, her expenses bill for Christmas decorations was rejected. The receipts show that she spent £29.97 in early December 2006 at her local branch of Woolworths on 24 baubles, 20 "snowflake" lights and an extension lead.

At another shop she spent £5.48 on decorations, and, at a third, £214.97 on what appear to be 48in and 72in artificial Christmas trees.

Ms Baird has said: "I used my allowances claim to furnish and maintain my house."

Respect at Least is Owed to Murdered Police Officers

The Foreign Office said the deal had been sealed in an exchange of ambassadors’ letters in 2006:

“The Fletcher family know all this and have not considered it to be a big issue.”

The family of Police Officer Yvonne Fletcher deny any knowledge of any of this.

And what kind of guttersnipes now speak for the Foreign Office in the disrespectful language of the streets?

Are Labour Already Talking to the IMF?

'The Institute for Fiscal Studies, a non-partisan research group, said the leaked Treasury projections imply departmental spending falling by 2.9 percent a year between 2011 and 2014, the sharpest squeeze since James Callaghan’s Labour government was negotiating its budget plans with the IMF in 1976. ' (WSJ).

It does cross the mind that negotiations with the IMF may have been underway for some time and are the real reason - not the expectation of a sane government taking over in the next year - that there has not been an even worse collapse in the pound and a devastating loss in the UK's credit rating.

The United Nations Global Policy Model and Gordon Brown's Visions

A United Nations source (World Economic and Social Prospects-Update as of Mid-2009) estimates that, since September 2008, Governments worldwide have made available massive public funding (amounting to $18 trillion, or almost 30 per cent of WGP [World Gross Product]) to recapitalize banks, to acquire ownership stakes in ailing financial institutions, and to provide ample guarantees on bank deposits and other financial assets. The inadequacy of these monetary and financial measures to stave off a recession has led some countries to adopt fiscal stimulus plans, totalling about $2.6 trillion (about 4 per cent of WGP), to be spent over 2009-2011. ”While significant, this may still fall somewhat short of the stimulus of 2 to 3 per cent of WGP per year that would be required to make up for the estimated decline in global aggregate demand. “

The UN notes preconditions affecting fiscal stimulus effectiveness: the adequate recapitalisation of banks; the “fundamental reforms of the international financial system… to overcome the systemic flaws which caused this crisis” (a “macro-prudential regulatory system”, “counter-cyclical capital provisioning”, supervision of all financial market segments in which systemic risk is concentrated, including hedge funds and cross-border flows); “a new framework for global economic governance”, attributing to the IMF the role taken until now by the “Group of 7, the Group of 8, the Group of 20 or other ad hoc forums, lacking the participation or representation of important parts of the international community, especially from developing countries.”

The most important UN policy recommendation is, “with global sustainable development objectives” involving more than just co-ordination, but including an increase and redistribution of the stimulus, 80% of which is coming at present from developed, deficit countries. Greater efforts are required of surplus countries to reduce global imbalances and to contribute “about $500 billion extra over 2009-2012, compared with the uncoordinated scenario” to middle and low-income developing countries, strengthening their social protection systems and making long-term investments in sustainable development. “The additional resource transfers needed would include about $50 billion for the least developed countries.”

Global coordination should also eliminate unfair trading practices associated with many stimulus packages that provide subsidies to domestic firms, to benefit through trade those countries that cannot afford domestic subsidies and fiscal stimulus and “concerted efforts to provide countries with greater access to developed country markets as envisaged in a truly developmental Doha round of multilateral trade negotiations.”

The WESP-Update reports that the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs has made simulations with their global policy model. The proposed larger, more balanced and coordinated global macroeconomic stimulus would yield significant gains in terms of global growth, compared with uncoordinated fiscal stimulus individually undertaken by national Governments. The simulations are summarised in the figures below.


The figures illustrate economic recovery under coordinated and uncoordinated global stimulus, 2009-2015. Source: United Nations/Department of Economic and Social Affairs, based on policy simulation within the UN Global Policy Model. From: UN WESP-World Economic Situation and Prospects, Update as of Mid-2009, New York.

In such a coordinated, development-oriented policy scenario, the world economy would recover at an annual growth rate of around 4 to 5 per cent in 2010-2015, led by robust growth of about 7 per cent per year in developing countries. In the uncoordinated scenario, developing countries - including transition economies - would recover at only 3 to 4 per cent per year.

Developed countries would also gain from the proposed policy broadening and coordination, with their GDP growth accelerating to about 4 per cent per year, up from 2 to 3 per cent in the uncoordinated scenario. “Furthermore, the simulation results for the coordinated policy scenario predict a benign unwinding of global imbalances, keeping external asset and liability positions of major economies in check, which would, in turn, support greater exchange-rate stability.” Coordination would require monitoring mechanisms. There would be net gains all round. Well, there would be if the model is right, and we are all happy to accept the political implications of progressive global governance rather than democracy.

It looks as if the 'leadership, vision and courage' Brown calls for (inter alia, it is a recognised symptom of certain mental conditions that there is an obsessive return to particular words and phrases) in this morning's Telegraph, is drawing wholly upon his inner world and the United Nations World Economic and Social Prospects Update for 2009.

Why Give a Cleaner's Job to Someone Unqualified to Work Here?

The more interesting question about the Attorney General's employment of a cleaner unqualified to work in the United Kingdom is why she was given the job. It is an absolute offence for an employer not to inspect and keep copies of documentation that validates a non-European Union citizen taking up employment in the UK. So why was she, reported to have been found from an advertisement on the internet, given a job for which there are plentiful valid candidates?

The 'one law for us and another for New Labour ministers' doesn't really cover it. After the red hot chili pepper cleaner and the immigration judges any public servant might have been expected to check carefully that the work statuses of their domestic assistants were in order.

What Further Damage Can Brown Inflict?

U.S. officials have declared that many of Mr. Obama's aides are put off by Mr. Brown's hectoring tone. President Obama has used words such as 'depressing' ' lacklustre' 'dour'. Brown's role in the release of the man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing is regarded as duplicitous; his attempts to distance himself from responsibility in the decisions taken as irresponsible of themselves - if he wasn't involved he should have made it his business to be involved in a matter so important to the United Kingdom's foreign relations. (this morning's WSJ).

Yet the UK has put up 1.3 trillion pounds in the multinational effort to avert the collapse of the banking system. We are indebted for generations to buy this man a place at G20 meetings and indulge his delusions about his role in the world. In contrast, for example, Italy has put up only between .05% and .08% of GDP depending on whether automatic stabilisers are included in the calculation and Italy is doing far better in the recession -at least FIAT took over Chrysler rather than sat and watched as the future of their car industry was disposed of between the German government and GM, as the Vauxhall workers have had to do.

Brown is unfit to go to the G20 in Pittsburgh. What will he be bamboozled into handing over next by the other countries who only accept his boorishness and hubris because they have him down as a mark ?

The Falsity of Brown's Claims to a Moral Status for his Political 'Vision'

It has been a characteristic of New Labour, and particularly of their visionary and Leader, to claim a moral and ethical status for their acts while holding, howsowever gained, political power. Reading the illiterate drivel posing as a political speech to the TUC, Angels turned to civilised and educated discourse which calls to account the underlying falsities of much of New Labour's dishonest claim to economic and social propriety and widespread moral beliefs , particularly in the notion of the Third Sector and its unification with the welfare state.

"Charity is essentially the act of a person. The commandment of perfection, ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself, turns upon the verb ‘love’, which is meaningful only when applied to an individual human (or divine) being. It is a personal emotion; and self-sacrifice in which it results is something peculiar to individual persons: ‘Greater love than this hath no man, that he lay down his life for his friends’. Only a creature capable of dying individually can exhibit this love, and that is true of the lesser acts of self-sacrifice. Morality, religious or ethical, is about persons. Wherever the terms of morality are applied to collective or inanimate entities, they are either being used metaphorically, or they apply in fact to the individuals underlying the collective or inanimate entity.
Of course, persons can perform acts of charity in company. A group of people or the members of a religious order may each decide to give up his possessions and his career in order to heal the sick and teach the ignorant for no material or worldly reward. But the charity is still that of the individuals, and when we refer to the order or the institution as charitable, that is no more than an abbreviated mode of speaking. However widespread a voluntary charity may be, it retains always the characteristic that every individual who participates in it does so as a personal and deliberate act, which to that extent involves a personal deprivation for him.
The question is whether charity or altruism can have any meaning when applied to the act of a public authority, decided on and executed by an organ of that authority and financed with money raised by compulsion. Clearly a charitable act is not performed by the Cabinet Minister who resolves to make a present of public money to the government of India or the administration of St. Helena. So far from imposing a deprivation on himself (or herself) for the benefit of others, it appears that electoral advantage and party and personal credit is sought thereby. It might become an altruistic act perhaps if the Minister believed that the result would be to endanger his seat in the Cabinet or in Parliament. Meanwhile it will be necessary for the Minister concerned to give part of his salary or private means secretly to an underdeveloped country in order to qualify as charitable.
However, it may be said: ‘Surely we, the electorate, who have voted for a government which undertook to give away a lot of our money for no advantage to us – surely we are performing a charitable act?’ But in the first place, none of us had any choice, because in this respect there was no material difference between the prospectuses put before us. In any case our vote notoriously cannot convey affirmation of any specific item of policy; there was not a separate referendum: ‘Do you want £150 million of aid and an extra 6d. on your income tax standard rate, or not?’ Even if there had been such a referendum and it had been carried – otherwise than unanimously on a 100 per cent poll of those only who pay income tax at the standard rate or higher – it would still not have been a charitable act, except on the part of the ‘Ayes’ in respect of their own individual one contributions. Thus the act has to be converted back into an individual and voluntary one in order to acquire a charitable character.
Probably it is familiarity with what we call the Welfare State that has shielded us from perceiving the inherent absurdity and contradiction of a state or government purporting to behave charitably. The Welfare State does indeed perform some of the acts which are also, or would otherwise be, performed charitably; but that does not make its acts charitable, any more than the fact that some are also performed by entrepreneurs or companies makes the acts of the latter charitable. From the most rudimentary forms of society onwards, government has performed functions which the members of that society conceived it as performing on their behalf. It did so because the members of that society believed that upon the whole it was better for them that it should do so – better that it should make and enforce certain laws, better that it should arm and lead them against their enemies, better that it should make and keep promises to other governments. In our own society we have believed it better that the Government, directly or indirectly, should organize the education of the young, the care of the sick and the maintenance of the old. In all these activities it is possible to identify groups who are net losers in consequence but it is a collective advantage which, rightly or wrongly, is anticipated: we believe it will be better for us upon the whole, that ours will be a better society generally, if there is state education, a national health service, and a national insurance and assistance scheme. This is why we accept the reasonableness of arriving at these decisions by majority, the weight of numbers prevailing and enforcing their will upon the minority, who in turn accept it. There is no analogy here with a government deliberately incurring a public loss in order to perform a moral act of which the essence is to be voluntary and individual."

Brown and his henchmen can't even think straight, never mind act straight, as he demonstrates every time he is required to appear before the electorate, even an electorate as corrupted as the Labour TUC sycophancy, and open his mouth.

Language and its Inadvertent Communications

What's with the weird use of English?

'And so today I say to you...

'Hanging in the balance...

'Freefall in the economy...

'Road towards recovery...

And all the outside human nature and behaviour words: foaming, savage, slashing, triggering...
while Labour is: wise, empowering, innovative, maintaining, nurturing...

Perhaps Labour's speech drafters have flashcards with good words and phrases printed on them and they throw them up in the air then string them together as they fall. Ditto for bad words to describe those who will eat their babies and tear apart the human condition.

Remarkably uninformative about what must be done, though unintentionally informative about Labour's vapidity and lies.

Shades of the Prison House

The Committee on Climate Change is a quango that advises the Regime on how to meet climate change targets. The Regime has committed the United Kingdom to reducing greenhouse gases by 34 per cent by 2020 and 80 per cent by 2050. (this is post democratic administrative governance, settled in for the long term, you understand).

Lord Turner, the chairman of the climate change quango, said that people should be given personal flight limits. At the same time a Regime-favoured and funded think tank, the Institute of Policy Research, is calling for everyone in the country to have their flight and car use rationed (in the interests of meeting the Regime's green house emission targets of course). Carbon credits that limit the amount individuals can spend on 'luxuries' like air travel should be allocated.

How long before priorities are set for air travel allocations, acceptable destinations listed, full lodging of travel plans required before journeys? With e borders the gates began to close. Soon having the cash and the papers and the destination will not be enough to permit leaving.

Bread and Circuses

How exciting. The Unions are going to bring the unemployed out on the streets (it'll be an afternoon phenomenon owing to the getting out of bed in the morning problems of the economically inactive.). They are going to riot, we are promised, unless middle class people give up their winter fuel allowances and child benefits, which they don't need. And the middle classes must pay higher taxes so that the 'stimulus' can continue and not drive the UK economy into a double dip now that Brown has led us all safely into economic recovery - fragile, though, and vulnerable to evil middle class tax avoiders and their child benefit greed.

It's the best solution, or at least the most entertaining. The unemployed can be joined by the public 'service' workers (threatened with unemployment by the middle classes consuming their own tax payments), and fight the police, on the telly, watched by those unemployed too lazy to be out there fighting.

That'll be the circuses bit. As for bread, there's still a bit more money-printing room before confidence collapses completely and we start on the Weimar re-run.

C'mon

I Warn You: Don't Be Young, Don't Be Happy, Don't Be Carefree...

WC1 might be seen as fully studented up. The University of London, University College, Birkbeck, LSE, KCL (oh all right, they're WC2) big teaching hospitals, the Institute of Education, the School of Pharmacy, endlessly the list goes on. Major halls of residence, Hughes-Parry, Commonwealth... bedsits and student houses the length of Gower Street, Mallet Street, throughout Fitrovia, through Brunswick and Marchmont, even across the Gray's Inn Road.

It's a wonderful place to live. Guess what?

The Communities Department has just completed a consultation exercise (how much did that cost and to whom was it paid?) examining ways of 'tackling the problem' (of having a university near you) and will give its response later in the year. Ministers are considering several options.

Curfews? Tagging - red for philosophy, blue for science, green and white bands, one band for first years, two for second years, etc? Registering with a new National Student Authority with deposits held against behaviour reports kept on a national database? There's real opportunity for Capita to make gains here. Control mechanisms to be put in place.

New Labour New Killjoys.

Brown is Lined Up for Long Term Dissection

Should the Conservatives ever get the chance to come to power the humiliation of Gordon Brown is going to be monumental. Not the losing of ill-gotten office but the steady dismantling and correction of everything he has done in the last destructive dozen years. Beginning with the deliberate opening of the gates to lack of financial regulation and opportunity for Kasino-Kapitalismus he ushered in as his first act as Chancellor of the Exchequer.

'The U.K. opposition Conservative party will soon appoint a panel of City experts and former regulators as they look to push their plan to transfer regulatory powers from the U.K's financial services regulator to the Bank of England, a senior party official said Thursday. The panel, which would form before the year's end, underscores the party's determination to counter concerns about the disruption the abolition of the Financial Services Authority could cause.' (Wall Street Journal).

The Brown regime's concerns are well-founded. Just wait until the Bank gets its hands on all the goings on that have led us to our present situation; disruption is the kindest word that could be used.

We're-just-getting-on-with-the-job-and-the-agenda Margaret Cole, the FSA's director of enforcement said,

"We start on the basis that we will prosecute criminal conduct unless there is a reason not to do so. We are determined to make full use of our criminal prosecution tool in the interests of gaining maximum deterrent effect,".

It's so to be hoped that the 'criminal prosecution tool' is to be handed to the Bank as well.

And imagine the undoing of all those morally hazardous, client state-building welfare and tax policies, as Frank Field's welfare reforms, so vulgarly trashed all those years ago, are put into place.

Sneaking in the North East

What sort of person takes a job as a state sneak? What is their age, their gender, their ethnicity, their educational achievement, their political allegiance, their culture, their zeitgeist?

And if all of that is questionable there remains the final incomprehensibility. Why do they want to be a state sneak in Darlington.

Festering and Figleaves

Nothing has moved since the summer began, which does not mean that nothing has changed during the six weeks of villeggiatura. Festering requires stillness to develop florid fullness (and foulness). The extent of corruption in our democracy is now breathtaking. What began with the sequestration of a sitting prime minister's parliamentary majority by coup, and continued with a refusal to face any kind of electoral validation either of Party or national electorate, produced a wholly improper Executive as well as Prime Minister. Appointed to ministerial power by an invalid holder of office, all of the current government have been acting outside of formerly accepted practice when exercising the powers of their office.

Only in an underdetermined constitutional system, blighted further by lack of any system of validation other than the purely ceremonial, and offering no system of redress against the arbitrary seizure and use of state power, could such a democratic demolition have taken place without a democratic outcry. It doesn't look, superficially, as if anything bad, other than a slipshod attitude within a political party to the transfer of Leadership, and an act of cowardice in gaining democratic consent to the Leader's assumption of the prime ministership, has really taken place. And, anyway, if it has it will all be put right in the next few months. It is frightening that assent to what has happened, even its denial - though this is now less widespread, and the manner of Brown's accession to power has been widely dissected and condemned - or, most prevalent of all, lack of awareness or of interest, that this assent has been guaranteed by the assurance of its very temporariness. The assent is vaunted even, by New Labour apologists, as an indication that there has been no impropriety. In truth the whole Executive, which is now on its second renewal and remote from any contact with democratic choice, is irremovable from office, and, more importantly, opaque in its agenda while it is answerable to no one.

The perception that Brown is superceded, already far from power but sustained, stumbling and incoherent, through the results of his years of Treasury incompetence, is widespread also. We are now at the third generation of dictatorial governance (for Blair could not have been forced to concede office without his connivance in the ushering-in of administrative, post-democratic rule, even if that connivance was extracted by threat as much as by promise of high office elsewhere). There are few in England who are not recipients of some income administered by the government; over a third of those employed are employed on government wages. That is a large vested interest in not being interested.

The greatest shift in the way we are governed (regardless of the interference from European Union membership) has now been effected. There remains the removal of the last constitutional provision that has been used, up to now, as a tranquilizer for the unease of any not bought and paid for. For those who subscribe actively to post democratic ideologies (and they are always with us as they have been since the 19th century democratic embrace of all advanced capitalist countries, we've fought wars against them) all of this is to be applauded and assisted. How, then, is the expectation of a general election in the coming months that will remove the head of the Project from the shoulders of its support systems, to be avoided or subverted?

First is the preservation of the status quo, what might be thought of as the festering: bad as things are throughout the world the job is being got on with to preserve things as they are and restore gross consumerism. Second is threat and example of what happens to any kind of public or private protest: go out on the streets andd face incredible levels of peacetime violence; withdraw affermation of the current regime, particularly in its local and regional expression, and lose promotion, and then your job. Third is the partial withdrawal or denial of monopoly public services, and most people are not well to do enough to pay for what they have been forced to pay for already, but just watch if a public service dispenser is challenged. Fourth, as final days grow close, will be manufactured crisis; not as some have feared, a violent or life-threatening crisis, but a crisis that is part of the ending of democracy. A constitutional crisis that requires resolution before plunging the country into the political 'turmoil' of a general election. A crisis that is part of what has already happened. The best bet is a crisis over the propriety of an hereditary head of state.

There are attractions in this: all the festering arrangements apply - lack of interest bolstered by self interest; incomprehension; relative passivity in political activity accessible to general response. This coupled with a sharply divided attitude on the centre left to the monarchy that can be exploited to offer those who care what they would like, the abolition of the monarchy's role in government, at the cost of abandoning opposition to other constitutional vandalism.

We can hear it now. Should Charles be allowed to take over effectively or even formally as head of state? While this question is answered, temporarily the current regime must remain in place, possibly under a caretaker prime minister, until this crucial constitutional matter is resolved. It is not good for the country to have both Executive and Constitution in disarray. We should have a referendum, (non-binding of course), on whether or no the Head of State should be elected, (indirectly of course) by a reformed Parliament. During the caretaker interregnum a Commission will sit and when it has reported, then we will have the general election, under the new constitutional aegis. You can just hear them can't you, as the discussion piles into irrelevant bye ways and the 'caretaker' regime proceeds in its unscrutinised, unspeakable pursuits.

Yes, we hear of Conservative shadow ministers being briefed by civil servants. We hear of their, and their aides' attendance at advanced seminars on pensions at the LSE and, doubtless at SOAS and Chatham House for foreign affairs, being coached in the arcane problems of health care provision, frequenting the Institute of Education, and the run down former stately homes where conferences on government are held. But that is not enough, it's almost a reassurance that contributes to the festering. Nor is waiting for the end of these illicit years since 2007 to arrive naturally enough. These years are, from their inauguration, unnatural, and will not readily reach a natural end.

The Conservatives must push New Labour off its perch before the impropriety of their hold on power, so settled and steady informally now, is realised formally by whatever means or combination of means, adopted when their constitutional figleaf is removed next year.

Terrorism and its Import

The centre of Birmingham, New Street and Bennett's Hill, Mr Brown, is indeed somewhere from which "we cannot walk away."


'fascists and racists'




'anti-fascists'



While you blether on about "denying the territory of Afghanistan as a base for terrorists." and how it is essential to defend the United Kingdom (that will be 'Britain' to you, so that you can be a North Briton, won't it), from "a new crucible of terrorism" in the Pakistan-Afghanistan border area (the Afghan war has slipped permanently into being referred to as Pakistan/Afghan, note) the fighting is breaking out in the centre of the UK's second city.

You're not using drones on Brummies - not yet - wiping out shoppers, wedding parties, people out for a family celebration, as you do in your currrent chosen battleground. But Birmingham has bitter experience of being in the front line of post imperial wars indulged in by overweeningly presumptuous UK political elites.

New Labour, your policies, are creating the base for terrorists; not in remote areas of the East but in central England. The clumsily put together and delivered apologia, masqueraded as a major explication of your Executive's assent to a U.K. role as part of an 'overall international strategy', confessed that your concerns are no longer, if they ever were, the security and peaceful well being of our country. You and your puppet master Blair have imported gross levels of threat and realised destruction not just to Iraq and Afghanistan, but into the United Kingdom. No wonder you cannot find supporters for your misbegotten policies and actions among more civilised European countries to whom you are so invariably discourteous.

There is little point in 'urging other countries to "take their share of responsibility" for security.' England has become, of our corrupted government's choice, the sump of Europe for every last problem and problem people who enter the EU. It all ends up here. Here because you kowtow to what President Eisenhower named and warned so plainly against - the military industrial complex. So-called global policies and development is nothing more than the propaganda arm of that complex, to which New Labour has made the United Kingdom wholly subservient.

'Britain's military will stay in Afghanistan until the country's own security forces can fight the Taliban and al Qaeda without assistance,' will they? And then presumably they will return home to help remove the the terrible threat that has been planted by Labour in our own country. Repeatedly the army has reported they are facing an enemy of whom at least some are from England. Perhaps it would be best of they faced them here, at source, and dealt with the terrorism wilfully created here before doing so in Afghanistan.

Calling people names, like racist and fascist, and anointing others with titles like anit-fascist organisations, doesn't alter the real nature of what was, this time, a violent but non-lethal confrontation between forces of everyday modern European life, and values and aims, infuriated by military provocation, imported from countries in which our army has no business except for the arms business.

The peoples of the UK can get on with each other with remarkable displays of tolerance, provided we have a government who practice a foreign policy that excludes attacking the countries of origin of many of our citizens, and domestic policies that recognize that England is not the back of beyond.

Thighs and the Relaunch

Sarah Brown's thighs are one of her major characteristics. In every photograph the eye is drawn irresistibly to the too short skirt, the painfully high heels that cause the overbalanced forward-leaning walk.

The finding that those big thighs are better than legs-up-to-the-armpits for avoiding heart attacks provides at last a reason for their flaunting. The inappropriateness of dress is not an underlining of consciousness, leading to attempts at achieving some amelioration of the departure from received leg-aesthetic norms - it is an expression of thigh pride. Wearing the heart on the chafing tight rather than the sleeve, so to speak.

In just-published guidelines there is even a suggestion of exercising the legs and lower body to increase thigh size; the authors of the research say that it is "worrying" that half of the men and the women in the study aged between 35 and 65 have a thigh circumference that is lower than the 60cm 'threshold'. Fortunately an editorial in the BMJ remarks that the study raises several questions on the link between thigh size and health risks being a real not spurious finding.

"Is this association biologically plausible? It would seem logical that having bigger thighs would be a reflection of greater adiposity, and that this would increase the risk of heart disease,". Imagine - actually trying to give yourself big fat legs by mistake, and giving yourself a heart attack. Well, it would give anyone a heart attack if your thighs suddenly swelled to above 'threshold' proportions.

A taxpayer funded assault upon inappropriate attitude to large thighs (room for a small piece of legislation there, too) and led by Sarah is clearly part of the relaunch.