Green Misunderstandings

Door bell rings. Put head out of window (can't be bothered to go all the way to the citofono) and look down at a man and a woman surrounded by brown plastic bins.  They have come to change my life and save the planet.

All the community wheeled rubbish bins in which we can pop stuff at any time but  are emptied every morning before 7am are to be removed.  Instead we are to place our rubbish, properly separated into sacks of organic, sacks of paper, and sacks of whatever else is left, on the doorstep  every day.

"There's only one bin" I remark. 
"Each kind of rubbish has a different day.  You need only one bin.  Just remember which rubbish goes out on which day. Organic has three days and the other two a day each.  Before 8am."

I can hear the light tap of claws in festa as the rats and other vermin celebrate the leaving of dinner every night outside  doors throughout the village.  But they celebrate too soon.  No bin is to be out before 6am.  Gulp.  It's all right in the summer and I suppose if I get it ready every night before bedtime it's just a matter of taking it down the stairs first thing, unbarring the doors, and putting it outside -but  in the main street opposite the town hall?  Or I could choose the turning into the piazza della Chiesa, or put it all out in the back lane and hope the men don't miss it.

"Who lives here?" they asked. "Why are there three of you? And in different streets?"
"Think of it as a block of flats with lots of HGs inside and hand over the bins!"  (With three bins I can manage this separation stuff much better.)
"No. We're taking these two to the piazza Chiesa and the via del F..." they  decide.  "Where is the piazza della Chiesa?" Where are these people from?  I'm not good at local accents and these two are from far away.  "There," I point, "That piazza with the large church in it, at the corner." "And the via del F...?" 
"Backdoor.   Go down to the other end, turn left and first left and there you are.  There's a Landrover parked outside.  Can't miss it.  I'll race you from inside the building. Uno, due, tre -  via ."

They handed over the three bins where we stood at the main door.   "Is your husband in?" the man asked hopefully.  I could see it written all over their faces:  English - they're very strange, the English.

In May

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau  died on Friday at his home in Bavaria. He was 86.

Sob

It Takes a Village

The verbal noun 'parenting' repels instantly.  The small HGs were not 'parented' but brought up.  As were their parents. And their grandparents before them.  They were involved in  kinship constellations  engaged in myriad exchanges, large and small, that provided the background against which their formal instruction in school was set - and judged, and adjusted or refuted, as well as accepted.

The notion 'parenting' deliberately confounds the meeting of immediate physical needs with the provision of an upbringing.  A hundred pounds the state is offering to reduce (or traduce) a child's birthright into advice on how to change a nappy.

Even Hilary Clinton knows that to bring up a child it takes a village.

Debt Kills Growth

The massive overhang of public and private debt in advanced capitalist countries (public debt to GDP levels exceeds the critical 90% threshold while "private debt is showing a marked upward trend and remains near pre-crisis levels") and its damaging effect on growth are analysed in this paper by Reinhart and Rogoff   (referenced in the Irish Economy blog).

The impairment of growth by debt overhang is both marked and long-term.  It is  made clear too that causality does not run from  growth to debt "the multi-decade long duration of past public debt overhang episodes suggests that at very least the association is not due to recessions at business cycle frequencies."

Unnervingly, even continued ability to access  capital markets at relatively low interest rates by debtor countries does not ameliorate the growth-killing capacities of large debt overhangs.   Consoling thoughts that at least the UK took a Euro-use opt out are ill-founded insofar as  "growth-reducing effects of high public debt are apparently not transmitted exclusively through high real interest rates."

The Wrong Men for the Job

London was there for the taking by Labour.  That's twice Labour has thrown away power by allowing tightly-knit groups of politically motivated men to manipulate the choice of Labour champions in crucially important contests for social democracy in England.

 First they couldn't summon the will to rid themselves of Brown as an inappropriate Leader (inappropriate Chancellor of the Exchequer did the more damage to us all but that's another matter) and he lost them the UK election.  Now they've failed to gain London (Livingstone's previous term in office was not a Labour term but a last fling for other left forces) because another inappropriate candidate imposed himself.  The comrades in Europe must be aghast (social democracy being what it is, the ultimate internationalist movement).  All their hopes for re-taking widespread positions of authority and influence in a post modern political elitey way  now rest on Hollande,  and future co-operation and reinforcing support is compromised.

Of the two losses -  the UK and London -  it is London that is the greater.  Power, like culture, goes where the money is.  London ( devolved in the same manner as were Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland  but with many of the powers suppressed by the Blair administration when Livingstone took it in 2000)  could recover those powers over some forms of  taxation, health, education, infrastructural investment,  relations  with other devolved regions both within and outside the UK.

New Labour - the UK's local  social democratic elites  - intended devolution to be the permanent denial of power to the centre right ( the Conservatives here); they must  bitterly regret the regionalisation and other mechanisms  they put in place to safeguard themselves against democracy that have now fallen to the centre right.  Pity they failed to safeguard themselves against putting up wrong'uns and throwing away the loyalty, conviction and hard work of social democracy's supporters.

Welwyn Hatfield Council Results in Affirmation of Aspiration

Election Results - 3 May 2012

The Conservatives retained their control with a [slightly] decreased majority.
The political composition of the council is now:

• Conservative 34 seats
• Labour 11 seats
• Liberal Democrat 2 seats
• Independent 1 seat

There was Labour gains [So? So? Sometimes our grammar slips but aspirational doesn't mean perfect. It means there's no stopping us because we'll get it right next time.  Ed.] in Haldens and Hatfield West wards, and an Independent gain in Welwyn West ward.

Hollande vs Sarkozy

So did you watch the great debate?  And what did you think?  Has Sarkozy adopted the right tone to pull in the le Pen votes?  Is Hollande a deceitful liar?

Why should the hardworking of Europe fund eurobonds for the corrupt, the special interest lobbies, and the workshy?

Can a France  be taken seriously as an ally if led by Hollande, who wants to pull out of Afghanistan unilaterally when French troops are there as part of a NATO command?

What kind of to-be-taken-seriously energy policy could end France's commitment to nuclear power or is Hollande dog-whistling the Greenies?

Should there be a muslim commuity in France or a muslim community of France?

Is the presidency of France not in the least a 'normal' undertaking or is it just an apparatchik's job?

Should the President be stripped of legal invulnerabilities or is that a politically childish refusal to recognize the vulnerabilities of the exercise of power and that  the real, and proper,  containment of presidential power is undertaken by the Constitution?

Is former official contact with Berlusconi as a fellow European leader ethically equivalent to being Strauss Kahn's Party's substitute candidate after he was found out?

I thought Hollande was like Harold Wilson but without the political and high office experience, skills or charm.  He also shares with Wilson the need for an answer to the "Are you, or have you ever been..." question.

I thought Sarkozy was violent at times and contemptuous throughout, which didn't appeal to the English behavioural norms in me but might appeal to the voters he's after.

Come and Join Us!

There are lots of Americans permanently resident in Europe.  After all, it's the best place on Earth to live.  But their exodus is so irritating to the United States that our fellow European residents have started handing in their United States passports and renouncing their citizenship.

They're queueing up in various countries.  Bloomberg's report suggests the reasons are principally for tax evasion and avoidance but numerous readers' comments make it clear that what is objectionable au fond is the attitude of their fellow-Americans to those who prefer elsewhere: that they are tax cheats; that they are rich and disloyal; that they need to be made to pay.....

Idly, I looked up how to renounce UK citizenship.  No bullet-proof booth (shades of the confessional), interviews with embassy officials, long-term left-over tax liabilities,  huge fees, or other general big brother nastiness.  You just do it online.  And if you want to take up being a UK citizen again you can do that online as well - once certainly and, at the Home Secretary's discretion, repeatedly.

Hollande's Party is as Bad as Berlusconi's

Dominique Strauss Kahn is not alone in facing accusations and investigations about his sexual affairs and attitudes.  Silvio Berlusconi's trial is advancing steadily in Milan and is reported daily in the media. 

For those with their Devoto-Oli to hand the recordings and transcripts of telephone conversations between 'Papi' (Berlusconi, not the Libyan Papi, he's dead) and the Olgettine, and among the Olgettine themselves (the collective noun refers to the block of flats in Milan in which the papi-girls were housed) can be wondered at here (from La Repubblica).

The wonder exists, too, in the way in which  while Berlusconi's Party fell with him on the growing public awareness of his sexual mores,  Hollande's Party has pretended that the sexual mores of their disgraced champion were unknown to Party apparatchiks, to political elites and insiders, to knowledgeable observers in the media. And there is no moral or ethical fault admitted among the Left in France for permitting such people to lead them.  But DSK was their leader, their hero, their man. 

And they knew.  And they pretend they didn't. 

At least the Italians have put  Berlusconi's Party  out of office and out for the count.  In France there is the unedifying spectacle of the entire centre left in denial about who and what they were willing to have stand for them until they couldn't hide it from the electorate.  Then they ditched the man. But his Party remains as disgraced as ever for their association with,  their acceptance, their lionising, of him.

No voter in France should accept any claim by Hollande's Party to hold high office - not even holding their noses. 

Certainly no woman should be voting for their own betrayal, their own degradation. 

Turkey May not be European but Europe is not a State

All the fuss about the European Union dragging proud nation states of Europe into its maw looks somewhat exaggerated as the two European Union presidents wait hopefully for their invitation to the Chicago NATO summit at the end of the month.

The Secretary General of NATO Rasmussen has done his round of European and other NATO capitals for preliminary discussions, views have been taken and exchanged, but Turkey has objected to any European Union presence.  Not a NATO country, the Turks argue; shouldn't be invited.

Turkey 1: 'Baroness' Ashton scores her standard 0.

Staying Close to Your Oil and Gas Supplies

The Prime Minister has been in talks with the Secretary General of NATO Rasmussen, who is in Rome for a number of meetings prior to the NATO summit in Chicago in late May.  Senator Monti noted:

"Italy assures a financial and manpower undertaking committed to the training of Afghan forces...until now taken on by Italy in helping the security of that country...in accordance with the agreement signed by me with President Karzai on 26 January last."

It is no surprise that the Italian forces in Afghanistan are centred on Herat.  Where else?  The lovely city, the best carpets...

 
What is surprising (or perhaps more interesting than surprising) is their determination to stay after 2014.

It must be the proximity to all that  oil and gas.
 

Still On the Rocks

The Costa Concordia, now almost wholly submerged and lying on her side off the island of Giglio, is to be removed by a firm from Ravenna.  Tuscany is outraged. 

Not only has the removal contract gone to Emilia-Romagna but the port where repairs will be made after the gash in her side has been closed, the water removed  and  the ship made towable in situ, will not be Livorno but Civitavecchia.  There she will be refloated and will then be taken to Sicily where Fincantieri will sort her out  - probably by dismantling her - in the Palermo shipyards.

Chances are the numbers of  holidaymakers in Giglio will  rise.  There's so much advice to be offered to the salvage workers from the serried ranks of watchers on the quay, so much to discuss about how not to hit a large island with a large boat on a moonlit night with calm seas - Elba must be wondering what attractions it can offer to compete.

Rules of the Game

Rome. Half past five in the morning.  Two jewellers get into their car with the new collection they are taking to Munich for a jewellery fair.  These are the entrepreneurs, the kind of Italian family firm that makes up so much of the Italian economy through thick and thin.  The brothers are armed - as they should be carrying 75 million euros-worth of preziosi.

They note a white van as they drive up the ramp from the garage and are ready when it is rammed into the side of their car.  Before the pistol-waving robbers can wrench open the car doors the brother in the passenger seat has shot two of them - one dead and  another wounded. 

That  jewellers and gold couriers go armed is widely known and wholly accepted; the brothers have not been detained or charged.   The third robber is being hunted by Carabinieri throughout the neighbourhood -  they are even using helicopters over nearby open countryside.  There has merely been an official announcement that the dead robber was a Roman and had a long criminal record.

"Speak as you eat." is the Roman saying.  So they did.

End the Public Funding of Political Parties

Morphing into full vamp-face is as  nothing in effect when compared with the visceral distaste induced by watching Italian political parties justifying their continued drawing upon tax-payer funding.  The last tranche of the more than 2 billion euro payout for this legislature is due.

Without it the Partito Democratico - centre-left, ie. left-over communists and socialists, mixed with triangulating centre opportunists,  will become insolvent.  They seem to have spent their share of our money on travel, hotels, conferences in various more desirable parts of Italy and the world; a steady stream of petty upgradings of their politicians' and apparatchiks' living standards.  The Northern Leagues went for gold ingots, diamonds, villas, central city appartments and supporting the Bossi family and friends with handouts, business start-ups, and jobs all round.  The Partito della Liberta' have a more bunga bunga approach to spending our money.

The Prime Minister now stands accused of running not a 'technical' government backed by a grand coalition in Parliament to straighten out the economy and deal with welfare debt, but a full blown political administration that is taking on the real problems of  the country: an enormous submerged black and grey economy; organised criminality embracing the judiciary and local governance (towns and cities are having their administrations suspended from Ventimiglia to Palermo for mafia involvement); what looks like an entire programme of arrests for clan and family heads of organised criminality - they're hauled up into the daylight from their underground hidey holes at least once a week on the Eight O'Clock News with Carabinieri officers wearing 'at last' expressions and toting submachine guns; bemused-looking diners, shoppers, yacht owners, Ferrari drivers looking for their receipts under the gaze of Financial police (with golden wings on their hats!); and night after night enraged trade union special interest groups join various professional  -well, guilds, I suppose - spitting various kinds of moral high ground venom and demands that their particular interest group's ends and means should continue to deny the rest of the potential workforce a chance of a reasonable job, pension, health service, business start-up.

The population is cheering him on.  He's committed to no more austerity and the use of all his Executive power - which is considerable - to lower taxes once the evaders' revenues are in the kitty, lose the regulations designed to keep economic activity for the privileged and connected, bring Italy's highly-skilled, and largely maintained in functioning groups during the recession, workforce into  productive contact with the European economy (indeed the international economy, given the high propensity to export to the rest of the world).

The trouble is he's determined not to continue past this year.  The disgraced political parties have been warned to clean themselves up and sort out their relationship with the institutions of the state - you know, Parliament, the Judiciary,  the Constitution, the Law, the People - and stop  setting themselves up as all those things if not more.

So now we can see them as they really are, fighting for their kind of Italy; our country that they nearly bankrupted in their incompetence and corruption; their incorrigible, self-seeking pursuit of personal gain.  By next May there will be elections for the new Legislature  and for the new Head of State.  Both the Prime Minister and the President have stated they are not available again.  And we, the people, will not put up with political parties as they were (and still are trying to remain).

It took four months for the present Prime Minister to pull the economy and public finances into some semblance of order, to get the rules of the game sorted out, to vanquish the vicious vested interests.  But the minute the politicians saw a little room for themselves they are rushing to fill it with their usual poison.  In the end their funding must be cut off.  It's the only way to kill them so we can have parties that depend upon public support and answer to our political choices.

The Colonial Archives and the Art of Concealment

The dismantling of empire is never a pretty sight.  Today the Foreign Office has begun to release some of the files held secretly in Buckinghamshire (where else but Le Carre country?) and the Guardian is up in arms.  So it should be.  Much of what is extant from the files that were held in former colonies is as disgraceful as might be expected.  And much that is worse has been destroyed.

Except that these seem to be just the files from the colonies - those not destroyed in situ.  Savingrams poured into London day after day recounting, analysing, warning, seeking decisions, recording, panicking even; diplomatic bags and deliveries of copies of material arrived by slower routes.  Allies, most particularly the United States, and other decolonising European states, were fully embedded in matters of interest to them.   The destroyed data were not unique documents - merely those copies kept in local archives and offices.

Yet we are led to believe that they are lost, evidence of colonial wrongdoing gone forever.  They are not.  They are merely in another place (another part of Bucks?) and all the more secure because of the misleading emphasis on local destruction.

And if you ever wondered where the arrogance and enormity of the British secret state derived, start by looking at these damaged, partial, redacted archives that have been wrung from your ruling classes.

Lenin's Question Again

Generalised austerity is producing recession; and structural reforms alone are not going to make it better.  Not least because some structural reforms are not necessarily for the better.  Furthermore they are effective over the long term - ten to twenty years.  In the meantime the absolute requirement for fiscal consolidation reinforces lack of demand.  Which is made worse by taxation levels that render the financially competent poor.

Europeans are suffering from social and political parasitism.  Certainly today's economic environment  is competitive, but parasitism as a concept  can be borrowed from Lenin.  Indeed, for our economies too, much can be learned from the experiences of state planning and the centrally planned economy that failed the moment its objectives were not the creation of basic development but the creation of a modern consumer-driven economy.

For our capitalist societies to fail because of income inequality and mal-distribution of wealth is as miserable an end for us as the destruction of the dream of realised socialism.    However, even though the failures of state planning are well-known and well-documented,  the failures of market capitalism are, unfortunately,  in part the result of the economically naive and unaware attempting to use the failed techniques and ideologies of  realised socialism through an antidemocratic take-over of the state, and its enlargement beyond any local, democratic control.

Yet the hyper-liberal response to the ills of market capitalism is creating the gross increases in inequality that are at the root of our recession.  What is to be done?

Happy Easter!

We've made it once more.

Lenin Makes it Through Siberian Winter Cold

The tortoise is eating flowers in the garden.  There were great fears for survival after the February temperatures and deep snow.

When is a Dove Not a Dove?

Imagine calling an Airbus 319 a dove.  No matter what colour you paint it, it's an ugly Airbus. 
(And artists are supposed to have some sense of beauty.  And history.  Aren't they?)

This is a Dove.  From de Havilland.

The UK Needs More Than 'Privacy From State Snooping'

Fresh legislation on surveillance of individual's communications is a red herring when considering what needs to be done or undone or not done to end the United Kingdom's democratic deficit.  This deficit is nothing to do with the UK's membership of the European Union although the EU democratic deficit interacts malignantly with that of the United Kingdom to produce a peculiarly authoritarian and surveillance-ridden European state in the UK.

First to be reformed must be the institution of an hereditary head of state. The feudal governance structures carried in the train of an hereditary monarchy have no rightful place in an advanced capitalist European democratic state.  Crown prerogative and Crown privilege (or Public interest immunity these days) are democratically uncontrolled and their distribution between the Executive, Judiciary, and the Head of State in person are unsettled and shifting to the advantage of secrecy and the manipulation of those parts of the state that are accessible by democratic means.

Which leads to the lack of a codified constitution.  The UK has no constitution.  A constitution that is capable of taking on almost any form under guise of being 'unwritten' but to be found in many sources accessed by specialist knowledge and interpretation, and whose content is undefined and without criteria for inclusion and which, further, can be wholly altered by legislative or Executive act, is no constitution at all.

There is no readily accessible route to any resolution of conflict between the individual and this monstrously over-powered and ill-defined state.  Without a constitutional court, defined as such and sitting as such any party to a conflict finds themselves without straightforward redress, lost in a fog of interpretation and application of unclear rules and precedents.  Which is precisely how sovereign, Executive and Judiciary want it.

Redress, for UK subjects, sought through the Court of Human Rights is grossly inadequate and it is here that some of the the worst aspects of the malign inter-relationship of European structures and UK structures occur.  If domestic remedies must be exhausted first and there are none or are defective UK subjects are further disadvantaged by the nebulousness of hard to realise possibilities dressed as real opportunities or even rights.  Other European states' citizens know precisely where they stand and how to get from there to somewhere else (so to speak).

It is long past the time that this pernicious, mutually reinforcing State in the UK was reformed to make all of it,  not just parts of legislature and parts of local government, open to democratic vote, scrutiny and  control.  If all the other member-states of the European Union can produce forms of democracy enabled through institutions and constitutions open to democratic control, so can the United Kingdom. 

The UK needs:  an elected head of state; an elected second chamber of Parliament; a codified constitution; a constitutional court; and local level tribunals readily accessible to the population  for early resolution of abuses of power by state officials.

Perhaps then the Union itself will no longer be so noxious to the United Kingdom through the over-zealous and selective application of its practices and policies, which are held in check in other member-states by the proper functioning of their democracies.  

Bradford Goes West

Respect taking more than 55% of the vote in a bog-standard safe Labour seat is bad news for all the main political parties.  Electorates are voting tactically with remarkable outcomes. It takes a long time to convince voters that in first-past-the-post systems the vote should be cast against the target candidate, not for the preferred Party necessarily.  To have a charismatic and highly communicative candidate set against the target candidate is a bonus.

Thoughts turn at once to the elections for the London mayor but this is a very different election; not first-past-the-post, with inner city  and outer suburban electorates voting  markedly differently, and with both parties represented by non-standard candidates who, each in their own way, can be seen as a maverick.  Except the qualities that make Boris a maverick are very much more attractive than the maverick qualities of Ken Livingstone.  Indeed so unpleasant has Livingstone so amply shown himself to be, he has succeeded in losing many of the Party votes that might have accrued to him on party loyalty grounds.

It is the relatively safe seats in constituencies everywhere that are going to be touched by the Bolton West effect.  Harriet Harman has said Labour will be working out what happened and why.  So should the other mainstream parties - hurriedly.  Labour was the first to get the vote-savvy effect in the neck, by 2015 it will  be everywhere.

Unless minds change in a hurry over single constituency, first-past-the-post voting.  It wouldn't be a bit surprising if a brief, all-party supported bill nipped through Parliament in the next 18 months and we had a proportional, party-list system after all for our next expression of 'democracy' .

Eating Ice Cream

Offered an ice cream cornet:  remove your gloves; take one of those teeny, multi-coloured plastic spoons from the assistant and use it to attack your ice cream, do not use your tongue or any other part of your anatomy; help yourself generously to paper napkins from the dispenser, and  stand still.  Do not walk about,  trying to eat ice cream;  least of all leave the ice cream shop and eat your ice cream in the street.

Should there be concern about the Prince of Wales's fingers?

Second Thoughts on the Budget and Showing a Bit of Egalitarian Ankle

"The failure of a disastrous model of economic growth" is the Chancellor's succinct account in his budget speech of what happened to the UK under Labour.  It was matched in Ed Miliband's equally revelatory response that the United States economy was growing under that model, growing under stimulation and 'investment' policies that should have been persisted in by the UK,  even as it was brought down by unsustainable state debt.

The United States is the World power.  It cannot go bankrupt.  It is an enormous economy beside which it is pointless to place the economy of the United Kingdom.  As the government copes with the devastating results of  hubris,  Atlanticist intellectual fawning, and failed policies aimed at the disruption of European integration rather than at the withdrawal of the UK from the Union, Labour displays poverty of understanding, poverty of personnel, poverty of proposals for the sensible pursuit of debt-reduction and economic growth.

All they offer is those worn-out faces with their worn-out policies.  "Be like America.  The economists we cite have won Nobel prizes."  While all around them the people of the UK are hanging on like grim death to their housing and their jobs  and their shrinking public services because of vile experiments practised on their economy by those incompetent, bamboozled, economic idiots with a nasty line in state and Party control.

And as for the poor pensioners: pensioners are not a homogenous group.  Of course  the final salary, comfy house bought for small multiples of annual income on endowment mortgages that actually returned a profit,  university free-at-the-point-of-use, free travel pass toting generation should cough up.  They  are the 'rich' and many are 'rich' on state employee unfunded pension payments.  We are all in this together, particularly those who retired at 60 or even earlier and have quarter of a century of largesse yet to finish consuming.  If a pensioner hasn't a large enough income they won't be paying more tax.  There is a certain schadenfreude in reading of their shock at discovering that this time the gate came down in front of them, and not behind their cohort.   

What pension 'raid'?  Income is income and tax is tax.  Everyone should be handing over for agreed outgoings - the wider the tax base the more government expenditure can be controlled by interested tax-payers.  Something on the lines of that old, progressive chestnut 'everyone should use state educational and health services so that they benefit from the sharp elbows of the middle classes'.

Pity there wasn't a wealth tax introduced; inter-generational inequalities are far too embedded.

First Budget Reaction

It had been said many times that Ed Miliband is more than inadequate, he is nuts, but I had assumed it was a weakish expression of distaste for a fratricidal, union puppet.

On the evidence of Miliband's response to the Chancellor of Exchequer's budget speech it can be considered a kind evaluation.   There was no response to the 2012 budget; most of the detailed response was to what had been announced in the 2011 budget.  It was a response that displayed no intellectual capacity to speak to the arguments and information just laid out in the Chancellor's speech. 

It had the kind of refrain that occurs in  dreadful English folk songs - a sort of hey nonny no about same old wicked Tories - which he chanted every couple of sentences.

The man is stupid. 

Cameron Gets It

"... our post-war predecessors had the right idea, embodied in the visionary plan prepared by Patrick Abercrombie in 1944.  His plan underpinned the Southeast’s economic success by proposing well planned and well located new towns, which would in time become new engines of economic growth.  And he twinned that vision with proposals for a new London green belt to prevent sprawl. Now, while everyone celebrates the success of the green belt, far fewer people celebrate the contribution that the new towns made to maintaining it intact.  Some people feel we’ve lost the art of creating great places with the right social and environmental infrastructure.   .... in the last century private and social enterprises also created places like Hampstead Garden Suburb, Letchworth, Welwyn Garden City, not perfect, but popular, green,...."

And there are schools like this too:

 

At this time of year we would be singing, 

'There  is a green hill far away'  in Assembly.

Not so grandly as these chaps 30 miles up the road perhaps;  we did  'enthusiastic attack' in our Hall.

Narrowing the Field for the Presidency of the World Bank

Under the pretence of widening the field for the presidency of the World Bank the usual pseudo-keynesian, 'progressive'  suspects are pushing for choice to be narrowed.  The FT publishes what is effectively a letter posing as a multi-authored article  calling for a President who is: not necessarily American; not necessarily from the developing economies; is a proponent of a particular economic (read political) ideology; and their arguments are made with the usual holier-than-thou moral and ethical stance that only the 'left' is capable of achieving the Good.

Let us thank Goodness, then, that 'diplomatic and managerial skills' make the criteria cut.
 
A  'distinguished record as an economic policymaker, outstanding professional background, familiarity with banking and finance, ... [and] solid knowledge and experience of development policy' might be claimed by some lacking self-awareness, repentance, intellectual humility, and currently seeking a new World role.    Be afraid.
     

Drought

Widespread reports that south and southeast England are suffering a drought of 1976 proportions raise interesting problems, not least: who owns the water delivered to a consumer?  Quite draconian limitations upon water  use have been published: no garden-watering, car-washing etc;  even our windows are to maintain a steadily increasing layer of dirt.  But are there unspoken limitations on what we do with our water after we have used it?

In a country with hot, dry summers, not to mention a reasonable if needs-driven level of eco-consciousness,   everyone has installed, or will instal at the next refurbishment,   means to collect the acque chiare - rain water, kitchen run-off, shower and basin waste.  This water is theirs to use as they choose.  Bought and paid for at an ever higher price the greater the consumption.  In an eco-house the water system is almost enclosed; much of the water coming in stays.  It does not set off down the drains to be recycled by the water company and resold.

Is that the case in England? Or are we paying our bills to rent the use of water which is then mostly returned to the companies for re-renting after clean-up?   It's difficult to tell from the media announcements but they do take the form of specific prohibitions  - 'banned'  activities rather than banned mains water usage (you can leave your kitchen tap running and there's no  penalty).

Somehow it is all reminiscent of the television license fee:pay to own the set even if  BBC-watching enters the 'cruel and unusual punishment' category.  Pay for the water but you can't do what you like with it and you might as well hand it back as all the activities you would use recycled water for are banned.

Get Your Glad Rags On.....

Or at least your desert, cover-up garb.

'International politicans have thrown their weight behind Kuwait’s bid to move its economy forward, with former British prime minister Gordon Brown giving the country his backing to host the World Economic Forum in 2013, according to the Kuwait News Agency.

Perhaps they don't know; but Angels could have sworn  that the concept of  jettatore is carried,  is profoundly understood,  in Arab cultures.

World Bank Race

And they're off...names (cf the FT) are circulating,  opinions are being given on who may or may not stand, rules - spoken and unspoken - are being dusted off, while that old local authority recruitment injunction 'canvassing will disqualify' might never have existed.

Angels are for Condoleeza Rice.

Such a clever woman:  civilised, pragmatic, competent, successful yet discreet.  Ideally qualified as a political scientist with a profound understanding of the former Soviet Union  (more underdeveloped than that is hard to beat);  there are enough economists in the World Bank to sink a battleship and it's politics that matter in the world right now, not economics when we all know what needs to be done and where.   It's the doing  it that needs outstanding expertise.

Condoleeza for President of the World Bank!

UPDATE
The Bloomberg editorialist is calling for non-Americans to be in the running:

 "... it should go without saying that many extremely able candidates are available for the World Bank  job [Job?  This isn't a job - it's the presidency  of an institution wielding American power.  Why on Earth (seeing as we're coming over all global) should America have to find and nurture a suitable poodle?  Go for the real thing.]   who don’t happen to be American. To exclude them at the outset is indefensible. Obama should see this as an opportunity not just to appoint an excellent new leader of the World Bank but also to start a new chapter in global economic governance."

And  'a new chapter in global economic governance' wouldn't start from the World Bank now, would it?  And if it could then America is not going to have a non-American in charge, are they?

Further Update

The Observer seriously puts forward the candidacy of Geoffrey Sachs.

It doesn't happen often, but words fail me.  Conceited, superficial, boastful, intellectually under-powered....... as I said - words fail me.  

Moody Judges

Florence has been down-graded by Moody's.    The city, its citizens, its region of Tuscany have been found guilty of spending that which does not belong to them: guilty of spending on beauty, truth, history, politics, the Renaissance; guilty of banking  offences.

Their representatives, appearing before the Moody judges, caused instant protest.

"The guy over there is naked,  and the boy in the little boots with the tip of his hat-feather up his ass is little better.  Actually the women are half-naked, at best, too - Cover them up!  Officer".

"Tried that, Sir.  The clothes make them look- well, more suggestive - They go about like this all the time, everyone knows what they look like, so covering-up makes people  kind of look more."

"They're part of this PIGS movement I expect.  OK. Moving along - Is that a lion they've brought in?"

"Listen up.  You are here for sentencing.  (Can they understand? Speak American? We need translators here?)".

"Couldn't say, Sir.   The one in the long skirt with the dark curly hair - he's a man, Sir,  name of Machiavelli, - he's told them to be realistic and to lie to advantage  when asked anything by the court."

"Don't want to get into questions of gender, or ethnicity or morals here - they wouldn't grasp it anyway.  We'll just go straight to the sentencing.  Are these the ones who burned our agent Savanorola   after he tried to get them to cut their spending? Those terrorists? There's no statute of limitations on terrorism, 1498 or no.  Right.

You will be taken from here to a place where your children will receive a good, moral American  education.  There they will learn to wear clothes and sing the national anthem with their hands on their hearts. 

(Do they sing?  Can they hold a tune?) 

There you will learn that you must give to the world as well as take; that you must balance the books; and you will learn the meaning of debt.

You are condemned to spend the rest of your lives in Florence, Oregon.

And may God have mercy on your souls."

Golden Zlotys

Within the eurozone countries it is relatively easy to assess risk and gauge it against return.   Yields and spreads are  constantly available, a real time ready reckoner.   It may be uncomfortable but it's certainly transparent, and effective in causing  policy adjustment.

However, rating agencies are always behind the curve  (as was noted in the FT yesterday) and 'vanno prese cum grano salis'  (as the Prime Minister remarked on the telly last night); a sentiment echoed with considerably more vehemence in the Telegraph today by Jeremy Warner.

Interestingly, Warner went on to make a a point made by the Governor of the Austrian Central Bank ("Mervyn King buys 80% of new government issues") last year:

 "Bond yields are close to historic lows almost anywhere with its own currency and central bank; while in the UK, benign gilt markets are as much the result of the Bank of England’s printing presses as the Government’s fiscal strategy."

So what is a Girl to do when our Italian bond holdings have come bleating home like little lambs and  fresh investment decisions must be made?   If Eurozone sovereign bonds are bought at least I know where they stand, all the time, and have been standing, and why they moved, and can take a view rather than rely on undergraduate economics essays by ratings agency staff.

What of the safe havens?   German bonds are safe alright -  but paying to hold them?   And as for the United Kingdom sovereign debt,  how do I rate  Osborne and  King in comparison with, say,   Monti and Draghi?  Mervyn King is a fine economist but is subservient to George Osborne (oh yes he is, there is no independent Bank of England, remember who set it up) who is not.   Nope.  Not England.  I can't 'see' England.

What's needed is a sovereign with a growing economy, high employment levels,  highly educated population, entrepreneurial,  technologically sophisticated, stable and competent political leadership: resilient, multi-lingual, god-fearing Europeans.

Poland rides to the rescue.   Again.  [Nice wings.]

Valentines

A bit heavy-going but makes for a smile.

(from Leiter Reports)

Ecco

Representing the United Kingdom in Christendom

These remarks from Baroness Warsi are an embarrassment.  It is not just the jejeune language she hopes will:

'ring out beyond the Vatican walls', 

it is the incomprehension displayed with such artlessness:

'It seems astonishing to me that those who wrote the European Constitution made no mention of God or Christianity.'

and the arrogance in all its ignorance:

'I will be arguing for Europe to become more confident and more comfortable in its Christianity.'

She will  lead a rag tag and bobtail delegation of junior and peripheral ministers which will be shepherded by the Archbishop of Westminster.  She goes to discuss the importance of  faith
with the former Prefect of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith  - an office he held for quarter of a century;   an office formerly known as Grand Inquisitor of the Inquisition.

Let us hope he doesn't have her put through her paces but gives her the comfy chair, with a cushion.

We Must Not Abandon Greece

Here is a map of the European Union and surrounding countries.

Bearing in mind that the EU is the politico-economic expression of  a defensive organisation -  NATO- which countries would you be loathe to lose?  And which would you not mind about if they stayed, went, or joined?

Angels would be loathe to lose Greece,  Romania, Bulgaria, Finland, Sweden, and the Iberian peninsula; would like to add Ukraine, Belarus, the Balkans, Norway and Switzerland; doesn't mind about the United Kingdom and Iceland.

Of course this Europe,  core Europe and its surrounding states, is Christendom.

This Christendom

 

not the 'Jesus wants me for a sunbeam' with tambourine accompaniment Christianity so dear to other parts of the world.

Greece is not only or even primarily an economic problem.  Greece is one of us and, as such, has an absolute claim on our solidarity through its political distress and false turnings: the exploitation of its people and the illegal export of its wealth,  poor leadership,  and all the violence of lost causes making their last stand.

Snow on Snow on Snow

For those closed in by the cold and ice here you can gaze at the Rome of the early 18th century portrayed in prints and water colours.  A piece of the  grand tour for a winter's day.

The Extent of the Threat of Scottish Independence

The reverberations (if not first indications of volcanic upheavals) from a vote on Scottish independence are being felt in Ireland.  Calls for a referendum in 2016 [no need to explain the significance of that date, Ed.] on the uniting of the six counties of Ulster with the rest of Ireland are being resisted by the UK government.

Under the Good Friday accords such a referendum will be called by the secretary of state for northern Ireland if there is clear evidence of a majority of the people in northern Ireland supporting Irish unity.

Owen Paterson ['Owen'? Is he Welsh? Ed.] has stated that recent polls show no such inclinations.  They might after a successful referendum in Scotland though, and with four years of campaigning.  No wonder the Westminster government wants any Scottish referendum sooner rather than later; and is even more keen on yes/no rather than a devomax evolution that is implicit in the devolution models used by parliamentary draftsmen when Labour so unwisely tried to divide-up the UK into Conservative-proof chunks. 

The people of the north-east of England voted 5 to 1 against a regional 'parliament' there. But even that cry is being taken up again by the 'the North has no voice under the wicked English Tories' sections of the Labour party.

If Scotland chooses independence the fragility of the rest of the federal United Kingdom will be wholly exposed.  

Munich

The Munich Security Conference is so much more fun than Davos.  Saturday's sessions were particularly interesting - or at least they sound it;  but where are all the rolling blogs, the bated-breath, excited reporting, the WEForum style hype?

In the discussions of power, who's got it, and what they intend to do next  with it, Munich has not just the edge but the entire battleground.   US troops withdrawing  at last  from central Europe ( though unfortunately settling in Australia);  discussions of tactical nuclear weapons in the European theatre [surely not, there must be some mistake, we're not using Europe as a battlefield ever again, much too beautiful and valuable, Ed.];  war expressed as a euro crisis; transatlantic arrangements (not necessarily friendly after that assault on our currency, I imagine).

Best of all no re-hashing of dull economics 101 by has-been politicians with delusions of economic and financial genius.  All the attendees are very much in power right now.   And are discussing the need to get their act together on the European defence/war front just as much as on the welfare/social spending/ labour costs too high per unit of output and the left-over-institutional-defences-of-that -situation front,  which has resulted in such naughty levels of peripheral sovereign debt.

Europe has lines to assert, instal and defend both within its societies and around its borders, as well as the protection of its interests and resources elsewhere.   We can do global - in the European  interest -  and it really wasn't nice to try and bring down the currency and the Union.

Atrocities of the Second World War

The court at the Hague has ruled; and individual citizens of Italy cannot act against the German State.  The ruling re-asserts the status quo and does more than reject the ruling of Italian courts: it requires that Italy should reinstate the law and prevent any further attempts, by these means, to recompense Italians for War  crimes.

Less coverage has been given to the statements of the Foreign Ministers of Italy and Germany who emphasize that further efforts are underway to ameliorate and expiate the brutal acts giving rise to the legal actions.

Civitella in Val di Chiana - the words release a roar of emotion and distress.  Even now.  But what happened there happened the length of Italy as Kesselring's armies retreated, betrayed from Berlin and suddenly in enemy territory as, during the Italian civil war,  Mussolini was overthrown and the Italian army fought with the Allies.  Unfortunately the long-term bitter opposition to Fascism, the partisans, rose too, behind German lines and, encouraged by Badoglio (who had changed sides without warning Italian forces, leaving them unready when German forces sought to disarm them)  attempted to assert their control over local territories.  Inevitably civilian populations paid the price of guerilla actions.

Worse, local fascists did not give up lightly and, using German punitive actions, pinpointed those for execution.  There was bitter anger against 'partisan' activity that resulted in the slaughter of whole villages, and the destruction of infrastructure and communities in larger settlements.   The assaults on retreating German troops were used to precipitate executions of political, class and personal enemies.

Nothing could sort out the morass of vicious score-settling after more than 20 years of violently authoritarian rule that went on then -  not now, not ever.   Of all the uses of religious belief and its rituals, perhaps ceremonies for the repose of the souls of victims, and of reconciliation between descendants of actors in the violence,  at least  these should be recognised.

Certainly the law  gives cold comfort and no respite.

The Member for Eastleigh

There's something about the Liberal Democrats and their precursors that yields titillating evidential puzzles.   This time the Director of Public Prosecutions, Keir Starmer, said that having reviewed the evidence, the Crown Prosecution Service believed there was enough to bring charges:

"The essence of the charges is that, between March and May 2003, Mr Huhne, having allegedly committed a speeding offence, falsely informed the investigating authorities that Ms Pryce had been the driver of the vehicle in question, and she falsely accepted that she was the driver."

So we have an alleged speeding offence;  false information offered on the driver's identity; and a false acceptance of that false information on the identity of the driver.

She drove.  Yes, I drove.   Both assertions are stated to be false.

Who drove?

Rarely is attracting police attention a good idea.  If caught doing something that would be far worse if all the circumstances were discovered, take the lower penalty and shut up.   The car having been caught speeding Huhne should have coughed up, including for taxis and drivers for a bit, and let well alone.  Now he says:

"I am innocent of these charges and I intend to fight this in the courts and I am confident that a jury will agree."

It is difficult to imagine any outcome to this trial that is good news for Huhne if he succeeds in showing he was not the driver of the car.  At the very least he hasn't got the sense he was born with and isn't going to be invited back into any serious political role.

The voters of Eastleigh seem most unfortunate in their elected representatives.

Your Vote on Scottish Freedom

To obtain your ballot paper please go to  Subrosa.

A Hoon....

or a Nabarro de nos jours?

And what sort of person asks their spouse to join them in a conspiracy that perverts the course of justice?

One in the Eye for the Globalistas

Christine Bortenlänger, the CEO of Munich Stock Exchange, was in a right paddy when she wrote (reported in Der Spiegel )

"The commissioners' decision is a decision in favor of a provincial and anachronistic isolation of Europe from the world. That's something that an export-oriented country like Germany can not support. It's time that the EU thought beyond its own borders, and thinks of itself as an important region on the global scale -- and also acts in a way that is open to the world."

Angels are against Europe being thought of   "as an important region on the global scale" just as much as being against the United Kingdom being thought of as an important region on the European (or indeed global) scale.

Particularly as 'global' has a nasty after-taste of 'American ' about it.  It isn't the American century after all; and what's left of their politico-economic debacle wrought in its assertion in the last twenty years is taking a great deal of cleaning up.

Who Votes?

Here is a fine piece of writing on why a new decision must be taken in the British Isles on whether to leave, or stay within,  the European Union. 

The use of referendums to capture wishes on major political issues is unattractive given the United Kingdom's  parliamentary democracy system.  But the referendum has become the rallying cry of the dissenters to continued membership of the EU, and arguably must be accepted as the best understood and, therefore, probably the most efficient way of reaching a national decision.

So it is with the issue of Scottish independence.

So who votes in these referendums?  Forceful arguments have been made for the whole of the electorate of the current United Kingdom to vote on Scottish separation from the Union.  The English have been particularly vociferous in declaring their wish to end the union with Scotland.

Mutatis mutandis, when the referendum is held on separation from the European Union of whatever remains of the United Kingdom,  the European Union member-states, too, should have a voice in deciding whether the UK stays or goes.

Looking at the Democratic Spread

European nation states that are facing financial tensions are those who most recently have had authoritarian regimes. Greece, the country in the worst position, has the weakest of democratic arrangements and was the most recently under the control of a military junta;  then Portugal, still feeling the after-effects of Salazar; Spain is coping better with its Franco hangover.

Italy has a rather different problem of central state weakness: it never has been able to fully assert its control of the criminal alternative governance that has held power in the South for so long and is now deeply entrenched in some northern regions.   Criminal governance is by definition authoritarian and outside the rule of law.  It doesn't have its own rule of law either, despite all the mystical novelettishness about rules of honour and shame and clan allegiances;  it is violence and arbitrary revenge that maintains criminal, authoritarian rule.

Risk, expressed through spreads and yields, is not measured by economic fundamentals alone, but by an inchoate response to democratic fundamentals - democratic representation, rule of law, constitutional arrangements and the institutions of their enforcement,  capacity to assert the will of the sovereign throughout the state.  In part this explains why Italy's yields and spread continue to fall less fast than those of Spain, despite the greater economic strength of Italy. 

Senator Monti has democratic consent to govern and enjoys constitutional propriety, but the rule of law is weak and under determined assault by criminals.  Moreover the consent of the political parties represented in Parliament is fragile.  Neither left nor right have competent or even charismatic leadership, nor sufficiently united objectives among coalitions of parties,  to wish to precipitate early elections.   Spain was fortunate that elections were due when they were, and the electorate was clear in its democratic delivery of a mandate.

The  suggestion that Greece should be commissariata is a crude response to Greece's post-colonels' political underdevelopment.  No-one could risk taking on Greek fiscal governance: apart from  the unlikelihood of being any more successful than the elected Parliament at imposing fiscal restraint measures,  there are no means to assert sovereign control for Greeks, never mind Germans.

It isn't just economic diversity and maturity  that makes the European Union - and specifically that more important part, the 24 nations of the eurozone -   a handful.   Our nation states have their own histories and political inheritances to integrate.     

What a Schwab

'Davos' Schwab is given to presenting personally the most important speakers at the WEF in Switzerland.  Introducing one , if not the, of the most powerful bankers on the planet he went on and on:

"Italy is known for its cuisine, its fashion, " he maundered (in a week of all-round maundering that has bored everyone half to death with this failed 'meeting of the world's elite') "but not for its central bankers."

"Thank you, Klaus, for your kind words," said our hero crisply, with his usual impassivity of expression: and went on to deal with the financial crisis without further comment on the almost interminable drivel that was supposed to cover the discourtesy of  such stereotyping of Italian history and culture.

Italy does bankers really rather well, not to mention accountants, financial institutions, and money-lenders and manipulators various.

5.4 Richter. Liguria Trembles With the Northern Cities

Again the earthquakes have threatened the north of Italy.  (Milano, Parma, Venezia, Genova, Verona, Livorno, Bolzano, Torino, Perugia.)

It takes very little to fracture and shed the affreschi, to down the angels and the saints, the facades in marble and travertino, the stucco in all its elaborations and designs,   the physical expression of the Italian soul.

That soul has lent itself as the image of western culture. 

For some of us.

60-point Suicide Note by French Socialist Outstrips Even Michael Foot

Francois Hollande, socialist Leader, is gonna tax the rich until they squeak, he's gonna tax the banks and financial institutions till they flee France, he's gonna re-negotiate everything with Germany, possibly right back to ooooh - the nineteenth century, he's gonna make a lotta jobs for people -  young people - in the education system, he's gonna give everyone over 50 their pensions back, he's gonna tell the European Central Bank and Mario Draghi what's what and have European bonds, he's gonna stop austerity and usher in investment for growth and prosperity..... he says he's gonna 

..."do such things,
What they are yet I know not: but they shall be
The terrors of the earth".

PS  It was like old times seeing photos of Gordon Brown at Davos with a strange, very wide, blue tie about his neck (rather than his collar) hanging down to below his knees.

Carnival Should Face the Music

"The US owner of the passenger liner wrecked off the Italian coast 12 days ago with the loss of up to 32 lives was accused last night of failing to take responsibility for the tragedy, as prosecutors shone a light on failed safety procedures.

Angry consumer groups are demanding to know why Micky Arison, the billionaire head of Costa Cruise's Miami-based parent company, Carnival Corporation, has failed to make an appearance on the island of Giglio, where passengers' bodies are still being dragged out of the wrecked Costa Concordia."
(Independent)

Chances are the Italian magistrates might drag him in front of them, and keep him safe until a lot of the questions about safety procedures, not to mention chains of command and responsibility have been answered.  Israeli-American citizens don't leave their hidey-holes  when lots of dead passengers, identified and unidentified, are filling the mortuaries of a country with a robust investigative and legal system, or floating in the polluted water inside a sunken ship.

On the Adriatic Plate

Most of northern Italy has been experiencing earthquakes since last night.  The strongest  so far was 4.9 on the Richter scale at 9 o'clock this morning, near Parma.  They're still going on.  The northern citta' d'arte (that's just about every northern city) have all been shaken; even Florence has been waving the upper floors of its taller buildings  today.

It's much more worrying than threats to the economy and the euro.

To Lose Musicians is to Lose Part of Music Itself

Gustav Leonhardt, harpsichordist, organist and conductor, born 30 May 1928; died 16 January 2012

How to Speak Italian

  Capitano Gregorio de Falco telling the captain of the Concordia the difference between honour and dishonour  as he orders him back to his duty is exraordinary to listen to.

A Musician comments on the  previous post:

Dramatic text, eloquence of speech, impeccable pronounciation, force of delivery, variety in the speed of delivery to underline important moments, even beauty of tone: Capitain de Falco's call to Schettino contains all the ideals so dear to Count Bardi and the Florentine Camerata who aimed to restore the supremacy of speech over music, as in Greek tragedy, at the beginning of the 17th century.

Monteverdi developed the Genere Rappresentativo, more specifically recitar cantando (although there was not much variety in Capt. de Falco's tone so cannot really be called singing, still), taking it to great heights; there are moments when Capt. de Falco is reminiscent of Testo in the Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda ("Salga a bordo..."), although of course he doesn't have the continuo instruments backing him.

Capitain de Falco gave the performance of a lifetime and he knew it ("Schettino sto registrando...").

For those who still haven't seen it this is the link with subtitles:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2012/jan/17/costa-concordia-captain-phone-call-video

The text and interpretation are improvised, as is fitting with the style. His extraordinary performance has moved the whole of Italy: he is now being  hailed as a national hero.

18 January 2012 09:26

Who Commands?

A ship at sea is commanded by its captain who has absolute power over those on board.  At least that's what underlies so many stories and adventures and, presumably, the concept of mutiny.  It is that absolute power and hence absolute responsibility that enables a dangerous environment to be effectively mastered.

That is what I'd always thought, if I thought about it at all.  But the reports of the shipwreck of the Concordia give another account of who commands.   There seems to have been a complete breakdown of responsibilities.   Having hit the Island of Giglio at 28 kilometres an hour, bringing the ship's speed instantly to 6 kilometres an hour (imagine being inside with no warning, not wearing your  seatbelt would take on forceful meaning) the captain is reported to have got on the phone to the director of marine operations of the company that owned the boat.  And stayed on the phone for three calls-worth plus a call from a retired former captain in Grosseto.  The Second Officer has gone down to the engine room and found it full of water - and all electrical power sources flooded - the only power was a small emergency generator elsewhere in the ship.  He tells the bridge that the ship is without any means of control.  And the captain gets on the phone again.

Time passes: the ship is still upright, it will remain so for nearly an hour, time enough to lower all the life boats.  After 40 minutes of drifting it is driven further onto  rocks and starts to tilt.  The other officers start the evacuation procedures although the captain is still   on the telephone, now denying to the Capitaneria di Livorno that the ship needs help.  He then leaves the ship with another (Greek) officer.

By this time the Carabinieri of Prato!!  (Prato is a few kilometres west of Florence, you couldn't get further from the sea in Italy if you tried) have declared the emergency.    The Capitaneria, having asserted their acquisition of authority over the ship, calls the captain of the Concordia  who is  now safely on the shore and orders him back onto the Concordia to take charge of the evacuation of the people on board.  He takes the first ferry to Porto Santo Stefano.

There seem to have  been two mutinies:  of the officers against the captain, and  of the captain against the Capitaneria.  And a ceding of authority to a commercial organisation, far from the shipwreck,  which was not helping with the timely provision of plans of the ship or accurate lists of those on board.  This is not just a matter of acts of bravado or cowardice or stupidity or  criminality.

Who commands a vessel in Italian waters, or any other waters, and to what laws are they answering?

AND (for those who understand Italian) here is the phone call asserting command (it starts a short way in).  The furious voice speaking in beautiful Tuscan is from the Capitaneria , the Neapolitan voice ordered to put its mouth in front of the telephone and speak up, is that of the captain of the Concordia. 

The Next Transition

Vienna can be regarded as the heart of 'old Europe'. The remarks made there by Vaclav Klaus, president of the Czech Republic, seem to come with even greater weight, spoken in Vienna.    And when he is speaking of the political economy of introducing free markets, citizens of new and old Europe  pay attention.

The non-economic factors of economic reforms, as experienced in fundamental systemic change, create a multidimensional process.

"Politicians like me, who were actively involved in the Transition ...understood quickly that sophisticated theories of the optimal sequencing of reform measures prepared in the communist era both in our countries and in the West were practically of no use. ...complex systemic change couldn't be organised by a philosopher-king (nor by a group of academic economists)."

"...millions of finally free people... wanted to live without being planned and controlled by anyone and there was no way of stopping them doing so."

"...it was relatively easy to build a negative consensus..., to agree upon what we did not want, such as continue living under communism,... it was much more difficult to find a ...positive vision... where to go and how to get there. The genuine conflict of visions, a healthy process in a democracy...led to inconsistent, controversial and contradictory steps and measures ... overall systemic change is not an exercise in applied economics.
...changes started whether we wanted them or not, whether ... highly needed preconditions had been met or not... it was not possible to stop the spontaneous behaviour of millions of people... even had we wanted to.

...Our critics did not see that there were transformation measures with objectively different time requirements...The institutional framework and the rule of law have to evolve, they can't be "introduced". ... [Yet, at the same time] It was necessary to put forward at one moment a critical mass of reform measures in order to send a strong signal to the citizens of our countries that were ... determined to transform the country.   ...the rule was: whenever there was an opportunity -  to implement any measure ... [that was] prepared.

"...economic transitions of the 1990s vintage are neither repeatable, nor necessary now ... There is however, another inevitable transition ...in Europe: the transition from die soziale Marktwirtschaft to free markets.  To achieve it would require similarly deep and radical changes, similar courage and risk-taking."

"... die soziale Marktwirtschaft  prefers social policy based on income redistribution to productive work.  It prefers free time and long holidays to hard work.  It prefers consumption to investments, debts to savings, security to risk-taking.  All of it is part of a broader civilizational and cultural problem, deeply rooted in the European continent or in most of its countries.  It cannot be exterminated overnight, it can't be changed as a result of one or another EU summit, it can't be changed by painless cosmetic changes.  It requires a deep systemic change, something structurally similar to the task we had to accomplish two decades ago in the moment of the fall of communism."

Sailing Close to the Wind - or 150 Metres from the Shore

If you wake at midnight, and hear a horse's feet,
Don't go drawing back the blind, or looking in the street.
Them that ask no questions isn't told a lie.
Watch the wall, my darling, while the Gentlemen go by!
Five and twenty ponies,
Trotting through the dark -
Brandy for the Parson,
'Baccy for the Clerk;
Laces for a lady, letters for a spy,
And watch the wall, my darling, while the Gentlemen go by!
Running round the woodlump if you chance to find
Little barrels, roped and tarred, all full of brandy-wine,
Don't you shout to come and look, nor use 'em for your play.
Put the brishwood back again - and they'll be gone next day!
If you see the stable-door setting open wide;
If you see a tired horse lying down inside;
If your mother mends a coat cut about and tore;
If the lining's wet and warm - don't you ask no more!
If you meet King George's men, dressed in blue and red,
You be careful what you say, and mindful what is said.
If they call you "pretty maid," and chuck you 'neath the chin,
Don't you tell where no one is, nor yet where no one's been!
Knocks and footsteps round the house - whistles after dark -
You've no call for running out till the house-dogs bark.
Trusty's here, and Pincher's here, and see how dumb they lie -
They don't fret to follow when the Gentlemen go by!
If you do as you've been told, 'likely there's a chance,
You'll be given a dainty doll, all the way from France,
With a cap of Valenciennes, and a velvet hood -
A present from the Gentlemen, along o' being good!
Five and twenty ponies,
Trotting through the dark -
Brandy for the Parson,
'Baccy for the Clerk;
Them that asks no questions isn't told a lie -
Watch the wall, my darling, while the Gentlemen go by.

BBB is the New Black

Any country flaunting themselves in last year's AAAs and even AAs is not looking good.  Lit up like the Ponte Vecchio (as the Florentines say of the over-dressed and over be-jewelled) these countries are most unattractive for long term investment.  You wouldn't, for instance, marry one, would you?

Printing money and buying your own bonds is not hard, but future generations won't like to be descended from such flash profligates.

Monti in Berlin

The Chancellor of Germany welcomed the Prime Minister of Italy to Berlin this morning.  (There's something echoic in those words but the past is another country).  Italy's prime minister, in office for fewer than 60 days, is taking up Italy's place in European Union deliberations that was lost by Silvio Berlusconi until he, in turn, lost his parliamentary majority.

Senator Monti  has raised pensionable age and removed the indexation of pensions that are above 1,500 euros a month, and reduced access to pensions before  a pensionable age rising to 67; raised valuations for land and buildings taxes and reinstated first home taxation; raised VAT;  there are other, less extensive measures.   The  fall in the Italian deficit currently being registered results from his predecessor Tremonti's measures, senator Monti is piling on even more pain.

Under discussion in Berlin is growth; no further cuts will be inflicted in Italy, though he is busy, even as he inspects soaking wet German soldiers in front of the German Chancery, removing ring-fenced privilege from trades unionists, professionals, and service providers of all sorts.

A maestro of the art of waffling,  (German speakers may prefer to go to Die Welt) senator Monti has been  unspecific on Italy's requirements from Germany but there must be on the agenda: 
 
 - Raising the capitalisation of the EFSF (European Financial Stability Fund)
 - Agreement to the issue at least on a limited scale and for special public investment purposes of European Union bonds
 - To allow formally or informally a greater role to the ECB (European Central Bank) in the financing of euro sovereign debt
 - Measures to reflate the German economy
 - A slowing in the rate of reduction of the Italian debt/GDP ratio
 - Soliciting more generous support for the financial transactions tax (he is Tobin's pupil, after all)

They have a lot to discuss - they were still talking when the One O'clock News finished. 



 

If Not Now, When?

Cries that a financial transaction tax can only function when it is a global tax are correct in economic terms but the ascendency of politics over economics is increasing.  The politics of a financial transactions tax imposed within the European Monetary Union (both full and candidate members) is compelling, particularly when it is combined with the requirement that clearing-houses handling euro-denominated derivatives are based in a euro country; politically compelling for the European Union, anyway, 

It may not be economically ideal but it drives the UK and its globalist rather than European agenda further from European decision-taking.

Never has it been more urgent for the UK to re-cast its relationships and obligations to the European Union. For while the threats to UK stability - grotesque debt levels, constitutional instability, European isolation, and reduction in the attractiveness of it financial activity climate are still just that - threats, the real bringing into being of uncertainty brings, as well, its fellows, low investment and lack of confidence.

Forget the arguments about nation statehood, links with the rest of the world, atlanticist  and Commonwealth ties.  Europe is not good for an off-shore state dependent upon its financial services industry and the UK government should be abandoning its dated attempts to influence European policy and doing far more to build a road to the exit.

Another European Union Threat: Scottish Independence

The fragmentation of federalised member-states is not acceptable to European Union policy.  Certainly there is a regional policy that breaks nation-state borders: bits of England subsumed into northern France; bits of north-eastern Europe grouped together regardless of borders....

Until more stable political union, though, individual member-states may not, ever, be encouraged in break-up into their constituent parts and thus thwarting the regionalisation policies of the EU.

Scotland is an enormous threat to all this.  The UK is unique in having proper countries as its regions; and Scotland presents the most challenging and realistic advance towards independent statehood (and might even seek independent EU membership).  This is not what the European Union is for.  The EU is for administratively convenient and historically destructive zones - not the re-affirmation of local identities, unapproved policy goals, and  democratic responsiveness.

As the dead Labour Party marshalls its House of Lords zombies to disrupt Scottish expressions of individuality (finding themselves without the mass of Scottish Westminster MPs is to be dead and buried for Labour), the Conservatives conform to their EU directives - no nationalist-rooted fragmentation - and to their own EU sustenance rules - no referendums of any kind, ever, in case an example is established for all of the UK voting to leave their noxious relationship with the European Union, and as the Liberal Democrats wonder how to stop losing the very few seats they have managed to retain on the edges of the UK, we have temporary  common cause.

A cross-party consensus, no less,  using the undemocratic and brownian-Labour  stuffed House Of Lords (sniggers, Lords indeed) has risen from the stagnant pond of political after-life that is the UK democracy's Upper House of Parliament, to take the high ground (more sniggers) against  Scottish freedom to choose how it is ruled and settles its affairs democratically.    The EU wants none of it; the Labour party wants none of it; the Conservative and Liberal coalition wants none of it; doubtless the hereditary (this is 2012 but feudal structures reign) monarchy wants none of it.  But the greatest of these is the European Union.  There will be no encouragement to Catalonia, Corsica, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, Brittany, the Basques or any other, least of all Northern Ireland, attempt to set up alone or rejoin a lost future.

It will all be cast in the language of UK constitutional practice  but Scotland is not going to get away with disturbing ever-closer union.

Hungary: the Real Threat to Europe

Angels  refers readers to the horror that is developing in Hungary.

Returning to Vienna, on 13 January, it will certainly be worth asking also about the effects of Hungary's moral meltdown (which is causing its economic disaster) upon the Polish and Czech economies.   Because the governance of Europe is expressed through the nation states of which it is made, necessarily regional cultural and historical links cause the 'contagion' that has dominated the media over the Mediterranean member states in the  run up to Christmas.  Now it is the turn of eastern Europe and, once again, without justification of economic fundamentals in some of the affected states.   Investors are afraid of some kinds of politico/cultural and historical identities.

Which only goes to show that Marx is again - sigh - wrong.  Politics is not a superstructure generated by the economic base.  Politics is the public face of private morality.  And as Hungarians have demonstrated so horribly, democracy springing from a vile cultural mindset can instal quite evil regimes.

Fortunately democracy's means of expression range further than just  voting: from the withholding of civil consent to civil  war, with every stage in between.   Currently  Hungary is enjoying the democratic expressions of media outrage, letters of protest, mass demonstration, hunger strike, appeals to external democratic support from other European democratic states, and international economic pressure.  Nevertheless,  from Hungary rises a terrible miasma of  the central European  past that we had thought to bury in the cataclysm of 1945.

Primarily the European Union is not the imposition of a single European order: more importantly it is a bulwark against the atavistic European racialism that led to the Holocaust.  England, by the grace of God and its own determined morality,  is free of guilt for what was done to millions and millions of fellow citizens in the countries of continental Europe; but in the English rejection of the Union into which they have been tricked by their own politicians for their politicians' gain, they should have the greater grace to be aware of what that Union  stands firm against, and which in Hungary  is trying to rise again.