'Where does it go?', I asked at lunch, 'All the wealth that is wiped off the value of stocks and shares every day?'
Here is the response, punctuated by drainings of glasses, more roast potatoes etc., and irrelevant bits of bickering and disagreement which have been edited silently:
'Out of the heads of world investors (actual and potential) into thin air. In physical terms world wealth remains the same every day - give or take the small net effects of accretions obsolescence and collapse. In value terms world wealth is nothing but the capitalised flow of net cash revenues expected of the physical assets capitalised, that is, at the current and expected interest rates.'
"Expected" is the operational word. Future net revenue and future interest rates change, not only from day to day but from second to second, according to what Keynes labelled "the state of the news". It was indeed Keynes who stressed the importance of expectations - expected quantities and prices - instead of actual current quantities and prices.'
Today's world is not just the ultimate keynesian world, it's a hyper-keynesian world with a vengeance.
(one of these days I shall deserve a BSc Econ.)
Sunday, 20 January 2008
London Calling
The militant entryist policy was supposedly broken in the Labour movement - unions, constituency Labour party, affiliated organisations, and the youth movement - during Kinnock's years as Leader of the Labour party. Nothing of the kind happened of course, and many that were members of the International Marxist Group and its descendent splinter groups are now high up in the Labour regime's power elites, particularly those associated with Socialist Action, whose modus operandi is to target a particular political figure and support that figure into power and maintain him there.
Of these ultra-loyalist grouplet members, some of the most successful examples are John Ross and Redmond O'Neill, Ken Livingstone's incredibly highly-paid loyalists in the London Mayor's office.
Beneath each of these loyalists grouplets is a network of organised connection into universities, Labour party sections, and various socio-cultural movements and pressure groups such as anti -abortion, anti Iraq-war, multicultural foundations, the teaching unions, and the public service unions; as well as financial structures and privatised public service providers
And if this sounds conspiratorial - it is and they are.
But they are not really the problem any longer. The problem is what has been done and the clientele spawned, as access to resources and power has enabled emphasis on the 'Action' part of this conspiracy.
The clientele, too, and much more extensively, extends into the Labour party power elites, less tightly disciplined, indeed often unaware that it is reflecting the 'vision' of of the bourgeois democratic revolution but, in its self-seeking and power-seeking, embodying and effecting its aims. Aims which are very much part of the Third Sector economic model. The conspiratorial closeness has opened into a received correctness subscribed to much more widely.
The transfer of £60 billion to the North East via the Third Sector, with Northern Rock as a principal financial, economic and socio-cultural actor, has been acknowledged, albeit under duress of external economic and financial normality asserting itself, by the Labour Executive. The share of all UK business in the north east of England was 3%, but the share in Third Sector business was 4% in 2004;in comparison for the West Midlands the shares are all UK business 9% Third Sector 6%; for the East Midlands 7% and 3%. (These figures are numbers of enterprises, not capital, employment or output; but the relative weight of the Third Sector by Northern Rock standards, could be much higher than these ratios suggest.) It might be thought that the North East, then, was such a basket case it was especially vulnerable to Third Sector imposition and experimentation; after all, the rest of the UK was always going to have to transfer wealth to help the people there after the collapse of heavy industry and mining in the UK. Although it could have been done more effectively, and without the power transfers to within Labour regime nomenklaturas, and hidden agendas for regionalisation.
That London has even higher, much higher ratios of Third Sector business to all business 22% Third Sector to 14% all business, is quite a shock. And these are 2004 returns; since then the Office of the Third Sector has moved into the Cabinet Office and has been centrally concerned with increasing Third Sector size.
The antics of The Mayor of London's Office and some of his advisers have been widely described in the press; local tax-raised wealth has been allocated, not indiscriminately, for there has been considerable discrimination, but irresponsibly, to typically Third Sector recipients.
While what has happened in the North East with Northern Rock and the Third Sector has damaged immensely the United Kingdom's reputation for financial sense and reliability, what could happen in London, with the advance of the Third Sector resulting from a shared ideology between the London Mayor's Executive and that in Downing Street, is a wholesale downgrading of London as a world financial centre. And all that that enjoins for the wealth and well being of the UK economy.
Of these ultra-loyalist grouplet members, some of the most successful examples are John Ross and Redmond O'Neill, Ken Livingstone's incredibly highly-paid loyalists in the London Mayor's office.
Beneath each of these loyalists grouplets is a network of organised connection into universities, Labour party sections, and various socio-cultural movements and pressure groups such as anti -abortion, anti Iraq-war, multicultural foundations, the teaching unions, and the public service unions; as well as financial structures and privatised public service providers
And if this sounds conspiratorial - it is and they are.
But they are not really the problem any longer. The problem is what has been done and the clientele spawned, as access to resources and power has enabled emphasis on the 'Action' part of this conspiracy.
The clientele, too, and much more extensively, extends into the Labour party power elites, less tightly disciplined, indeed often unaware that it is reflecting the 'vision' of of the bourgeois democratic revolution but, in its self-seeking and power-seeking, embodying and effecting its aims. Aims which are very much part of the Third Sector economic model. The conspiratorial closeness has opened into a received correctness subscribed to much more widely.
The transfer of £60 billion to the North East via the Third Sector, with Northern Rock as a principal financial, economic and socio-cultural actor, has been acknowledged, albeit under duress of external economic and financial normality asserting itself, by the Labour Executive. The share of all UK business in the north east of England was 3%, but the share in Third Sector business was 4% in 2004;in comparison for the West Midlands the shares are all UK business 9% Third Sector 6%; for the East Midlands 7% and 3%. (These figures are numbers of enterprises, not capital, employment or output; but the relative weight of the Third Sector by Northern Rock standards, could be much higher than these ratios suggest.) It might be thought that the North East, then, was such a basket case it was especially vulnerable to Third Sector imposition and experimentation; after all, the rest of the UK was always going to have to transfer wealth to help the people there after the collapse of heavy industry and mining in the UK. Although it could have been done more effectively, and without the power transfers to within Labour regime nomenklaturas, and hidden agendas for regionalisation.
That London has even higher, much higher ratios of Third Sector business to all business 22% Third Sector to 14% all business, is quite a shock. And these are 2004 returns; since then the Office of the Third Sector has moved into the Cabinet Office and has been centrally concerned with increasing Third Sector size.
The antics of The Mayor of London's Office and some of his advisers have been widely described in the press; local tax-raised wealth has been allocated, not indiscriminately, for there has been considerable discrimination, but irresponsibly, to typically Third Sector recipients.
While what has happened in the North East with Northern Rock and the Third Sector has damaged immensely the United Kingdom's reputation for financial sense and reliability, what could happen in London, with the advance of the Third Sector resulting from a shared ideology between the London Mayor's Executive and that in Downing Street, is a wholesale downgrading of London as a world financial centre. And all that that enjoins for the wealth and well being of the UK economy.
Friday, 18 January 2008
Jonah
Jonah has done it (again). Floods, (again), pestilence, (again) war, (again), now he brings down an aircraft and Heathrow to a standstill; there will be disruption until his charter returns and he has cleared the surrounding area.
Use another airport until Brown is back in the shielded bunker.
The Chinese are brave letting him anywhere near them.
Use another airport until Brown is back in the shielded bunker.
The Chinese are brave letting him anywhere near them.
Thursday, 17 January 2008
The Third Sector
The traditional view of the economy, in terms of theory and policy, is of a two-sector economy made up of private or public ownership and control; the private sector - corporations, firms, and entrepreneurs -seeks to maximise profit or shareholder value; the public sector provides goods and services for consumption by society - public goods - and merit goods for those underprovided for, or unable to access private sector suppliers. The New Labour project of placing the Third Sector at the heart of economic activity and policy was imported into government by Brown and Balls over a decade ago.
The institutional heterogeneity of the Third Sector is reflected in the diversity of 'visions, ideologies, theories and philosophies' held by the organisations within it which cover from small community groups, through the voluntary sector, to national charities, reaching the social enterprise sector which includes large, non governmental organisations, credit unions, banks etc.
Major government support has been offered to the Third Sector since 1997 to increase its role in economic, political and social life and increase, too, the number of social enterprises. The Office of the Third Sector defines social enterprise as:
a business with primarily social objectives whose surpluses are principally reinvested for that purpose in the business or community.
The OECD speaks more clearly:
any private activity conducted in the public interest organised with entrepreneurial strategy but whose main purpose is not the maximisation of profit but the attainment of certain economic and social goals and which has the capacity of bringing innovative solutions to the problems of social exclusion and unemployment.
Petty examples of this economic model are the Eden Project or the Big Issue, 'charitable' think tanks like the Smith Institute; medium sized examples are the private provision of outsourced local services by specially founded companies with Third Sector mission statements, and state-guaranteed contracts
Major examples are Northern Rock and the Northern Rock Foundation, where an entire area of England, suffering from very high levels of economic failure measured by any index you care to use has been provided with a Third Sector financial, economic and sociocultural system whose failure can be measured in the £60 billion of tax-funded transfers made in the last 3 months. The abysmal collapse of this undemocratic and unsung economic and social experiment has impoverished the chances of any proper recovery of the north east for another generation, and burdened the rest of the United Kingdom with taxation levels that have limited their enjoyment of their lives and stunted opportunities for themselves and for their families.
The Office of the Third Sector, now established in the Cabinet Office and not in the DTI, so as to remain under Brown's eye, is exemplary of incorporation of Third Sector thinking into Treaury policy since New Labour came to power. Brown has stated that the government is now:
stepping up efforts to pioneer decentralised public service delivery, and empowering private and voluntary sectors to deliver services in innovative ways which meet local needs. The Leader has called for:
more investment in the UK in social enterprises - projects which have social objectives and are not simply profit oriented. And:
The truth is that much of the best work in communities takes place through Third Sector organisations and their alliances...social enterprise, a term not widely recognised 5 years ago... 55,000 social enterprises founded for a social purpose, united by a commitment to social innovation....a major role to play in the environment, jobs and investment.
I am optimistic...because of the dynamism and power of what I see as these great forces of change ...in British society; the growing role of social enterprise, the expanding of corporate social responsibility of companies.'
Brown is not just variously odd, he and Balls have indulged a fantasy economic world where even Keynes recognised the 'tunnel of economic necessity.'
And now Brown is in China to beg for the £60 billion he needs to prevent his world from collapsing and the real world intruding on his vision.
The institutional heterogeneity of the Third Sector is reflected in the diversity of 'visions, ideologies, theories and philosophies' held by the organisations within it which cover from small community groups, through the voluntary sector, to national charities, reaching the social enterprise sector which includes large, non governmental organisations, credit unions, banks etc.
Major government support has been offered to the Third Sector since 1997 to increase its role in economic, political and social life and increase, too, the number of social enterprises. The Office of the Third Sector defines social enterprise as:
a business with primarily social objectives whose surpluses are principally reinvested for that purpose in the business or community.
The OECD speaks more clearly:
any private activity conducted in the public interest organised with entrepreneurial strategy but whose main purpose is not the maximisation of profit but the attainment of certain economic and social goals and which has the capacity of bringing innovative solutions to the problems of social exclusion and unemployment.
Petty examples of this economic model are the Eden Project or the Big Issue, 'charitable' think tanks like the Smith Institute; medium sized examples are the private provision of outsourced local services by specially founded companies with Third Sector mission statements, and state-guaranteed contracts
Major examples are Northern Rock and the Northern Rock Foundation, where an entire area of England, suffering from very high levels of economic failure measured by any index you care to use has been provided with a Third Sector financial, economic and sociocultural system whose failure can be measured in the £60 billion of tax-funded transfers made in the last 3 months. The abysmal collapse of this undemocratic and unsung economic and social experiment has impoverished the chances of any proper recovery of the north east for another generation, and burdened the rest of the United Kingdom with taxation levels that have limited their enjoyment of their lives and stunted opportunities for themselves and for their families.
The Office of the Third Sector, now established in the Cabinet Office and not in the DTI, so as to remain under Brown's eye, is exemplary of incorporation of Third Sector thinking into Treaury policy since New Labour came to power. Brown has stated that the government is now:
stepping up efforts to pioneer decentralised public service delivery, and empowering private and voluntary sectors to deliver services in innovative ways which meet local needs. The Leader has called for:
more investment in the UK in social enterprises - projects which have social objectives and are not simply profit oriented. And:
The truth is that much of the best work in communities takes place through Third Sector organisations and their alliances...social enterprise, a term not widely recognised 5 years ago... 55,000 social enterprises founded for a social purpose, united by a commitment to social innovation....a major role to play in the environment, jobs and investment.
I am optimistic...because of the dynamism and power of what I see as these great forces of change ...in British society; the growing role of social enterprise, the expanding of corporate social responsibility of companies.'
Brown is not just variously odd, he and Balls have indulged a fantasy economic world where even Keynes recognised the 'tunnel of economic necessity.'
And now Brown is in China to beg for the £60 billion he needs to prevent his world from collapsing and the real world intruding on his vision.
False Economy
Gordon Brown and Richard Branson are flying off to China today to try and persuade the Chinese sovereign wealth funds to bail out the United Kingdom government from its disastrous exposure to Northern Rock. The Chinese government has been very severe about investing in banks exposed by sub prime lending and dubious business plans, and denied a similar request from Citibank.
Their journey had an inauspicious beginning when an incoming flight from China missed the runway and passengers had to be evacuated down the emergency chutes, closing the southern runway and causing even more chaos than usual at Heathrow; the Leader's chartered plane was delayed. He should have flown business class.
Their journey had an inauspicious beginning when an incoming flight from China missed the runway and passengers had to be evacuated down the emergency chutes, closing the southern runway and causing even more chaos than usual at Heathrow; the Leader's chartered plane was delayed. He should have flown business class.
Tuesday, 15 January 2008
A Parcel of Rogues
Wendy Alexander, Annabel Goldie and Nicol Stephen, the respective leaders of the Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties at Holyrood, are meeting at Westminster today to consult with their London-based parties on how to undermine the SNP Scottish government. Its highly successful rule in Scotland since Labour lost the last Scottish elections has led to repeated defeats of the Labour regime's Westminster policies - the latest being the prevention of the siting of nuclear power stations anywhere in Scotland.
The Scottish government has set in motion large sections of the Devolution legislation which had never been made operative during the decade of Labour rule, and has initiated policies for the further devolution of areas of government policy, that had been held back under earlier legislation, on fiscal policy, environment and future resources-exploitation, and the future of naval bases in Scotland. The possibility of a referendum on the European Union Constitution has not been ruled out by Scotland's rulers.
"It's critical at the moment for the Unionist parties to work together to demonstrate the fact that the settled will of the Scottish people is for devolution", said a mouthpiece for Des Browne, the part time Defence minister and Westminster Scottish Secretary. It is hoped by pretending to undertake 'constitutional discussions' on devolution, Scotland's resources and its people can continue to be placed at the service of the Labour state and it maintenance in power in England. Gordon Brown continues to regard Scotland as a fiefdom temporarily mislaid, in the province of North Britain.
Fareweel to a' our Scottish fame,
Fareweel our ancient glory!
Fareweel ev'n to the Scottish name.
Sae famed in martial story!
Now Sark rins over Salway sands,
An' Tweed rins to the ocean,
To mark where England's province stands --
Such a parcel of rogues in a nation!
What force or guile could not subdue
Thro' many warlike ages
Is wrought now by a coward few
For hireling traitor's wages.
The English steel we could disdain,
Secure in valour's station;
But English gold has been our bane --
Such a parcel of rogues in a nation!
O, would, or I had seen the day
That Treason thus could sell us,
My auld grey head had lien in clay
Wi' Bruce and loyal Wallace!
But pith and power, till my last hour
I'll mak this declaration :-
'We're bought and sold for English gold'--
Such a parcel of rogues in a nation!
The Scottish government has set in motion large sections of the Devolution legislation which had never been made operative during the decade of Labour rule, and has initiated policies for the further devolution of areas of government policy, that had been held back under earlier legislation, on fiscal policy, environment and future resources-exploitation, and the future of naval bases in Scotland. The possibility of a referendum on the European Union Constitution has not been ruled out by Scotland's rulers.
"It's critical at the moment for the Unionist parties to work together to demonstrate the fact that the settled will of the Scottish people is for devolution", said a mouthpiece for Des Browne, the part time Defence minister and Westminster Scottish Secretary. It is hoped by pretending to undertake 'constitutional discussions' on devolution, Scotland's resources and its people can continue to be placed at the service of the Labour state and it maintenance in power in England. Gordon Brown continues to regard Scotland as a fiefdom temporarily mislaid, in the province of North Britain.
Fareweel to a' our Scottish fame,
Fareweel our ancient glory!
Fareweel ev'n to the Scottish name.
Sae famed in martial story!
Now Sark rins over Salway sands,
An' Tweed rins to the ocean,
To mark where England's province stands --
Such a parcel of rogues in a nation!
What force or guile could not subdue
Thro' many warlike ages
Is wrought now by a coward few
For hireling traitor's wages.
The English steel we could disdain,
Secure in valour's station;
But English gold has been our bane --
Such a parcel of rogues in a nation!
O, would, or I had seen the day
That Treason thus could sell us,
My auld grey head had lien in clay
Wi' Bruce and loyal Wallace!
But pith and power, till my last hour
I'll mak this declaration :-
'We're bought and sold for English gold'--
Such a parcel of rogues in a nation!
Monday, 14 January 2008
Everybody Out!
The model of economic activity that has labour, capital, entrepreneurship and infrastructure both general and specific to the enterprise, exchanging in return for the creation of wealth, variously divided between the actors, now yields some very out of date political attitudes and institutions. Labour, particularly, which persistently argues for a greater share of the 'surplus' it creates, is the least willing to dismantle its attitudes and institutional defence systems, or its political structures.
The trade unions derive everything they are from their foundation threat - the organized withdrawal of labour until a satisfactory new contract is established between themselves and their interlocutors. Levels of economic and social interdependence are now so high that it is arguably impossible to separate immediate interlocutors from society at large. If the train drivers strike for higher pay, or better conditions they strike at more than the railway employers, and they create utter misery for unfortunate members of society caught up on the field. (The mention of train drivers particularly is because E-K might have time to say something).
No other European state has a political party that is so dominated by trade unions - indeed is the trade unions - as is the British Labour party, and here they are in government; not the Executive elected to power at the last election (and the UK electoral system is such that we do elect the Executive, not the party) but an executive depending from a wholly different balance of power between social democracy and organised labour.
As stagflation envelops our economy attempts to maintain living standards are certain to include devastating strikes. A new means of resolving social and economic dispute and a new pluralist party of the centre left is needed urgently.
The trade unions derive everything they are from their foundation threat - the organized withdrawal of labour until a satisfactory new contract is established between themselves and their interlocutors. Levels of economic and social interdependence are now so high that it is arguably impossible to separate immediate interlocutors from society at large. If the train drivers strike for higher pay, or better conditions they strike at more than the railway employers, and they create utter misery for unfortunate members of society caught up on the field. (The mention of train drivers particularly is because E-K might have time to say something).
No other European state has a political party that is so dominated by trade unions - indeed is the trade unions - as is the British Labour party, and here they are in government; not the Executive elected to power at the last election (and the UK electoral system is such that we do elect the Executive, not the party) but an executive depending from a wholly different balance of power between social democracy and organised labour.
As stagflation envelops our economy attempts to maintain living standards are certain to include devastating strikes. A new means of resolving social and economic dispute and a new pluralist party of the centre left is needed urgently.
United Kingdom Sovereign Wealth Investment
Other countries buy into mineral resources, major solvent financial institutions, port and transport infrastructures, cutting edge manufacturing.... sort of nationalisation of other states' assets.
We, or rather the Labour regime, puts up £55 billion for Northern Rock.
As the Telegraph remarks, we will be watching a United Kingdom government repossessing people's houses for failing to keep up with their mortgage payments under pressure from interest rate rises next - and a Labour government at that.
Now Norway's Sovereign Wealth Fund, built on oil and gas resources exploitation, is a pension joy to behold.
We, or rather the Labour regime, puts up £55 billion for Northern Rock.
As the Telegraph remarks, we will be watching a United Kingdom government repossessing people's houses for failing to keep up with their mortgage payments under pressure from interest rate rises next - and a Labour government at that.
Now Norway's Sovereign Wealth Fund, built on oil and gas resources exploitation, is a pension joy to behold.
Sunday, 13 January 2008
Fiscal Arithmetic
'A minor Civil Servant accepted early retirement on an annual pension worth, from April 2008, £8515.
The tax free allowance for 2008/9 is £5435 - leaving £3080 as taxable income.
Under the previous regime, £2320 of this would have been taxed at 10% (£232) and the remainder, £760, at 22% (£167) - a total tax bill of £399.
Under the new improved Gordon Brown engineered tax cut, ALL of the £3080 will be taxed at 20% - a total of £616. That’s £216 - over four quid a week - more! Four quid taken from the mouth of a poor pensioner!
Gee, thanks, Gordon - of course I’ll vote for you.'
(comment from Mirthios on Politicalbetting)
The doubling of the rate of tax on the lowest income tranche, from 10% to 20% comes into effect this year.
The tax free allowance for 2008/9 is £5435 - leaving £3080 as taxable income.
Under the previous regime, £2320 of this would have been taxed at 10% (£232) and the remainder, £760, at 22% (£167) - a total tax bill of £399.
Under the new improved Gordon Brown engineered tax cut, ALL of the £3080 will be taxed at 20% - a total of £616. That’s £216 - over four quid a week - more! Four quid taken from the mouth of a poor pensioner!
Gee, thanks, Gordon - of course I’ll vote for you.'
(comment from Mirthios on Politicalbetting)
The doubling of the rate of tax on the lowest income tranche, from 10% to 20% comes into effect this year.
Friday, 11 January 2008
Take Your Money and Go
There is a quite unfounded belief in the stability and veracity of government and its assurances. Reports that retail depositors in Northern Rock have left some £9 billion in their accounts and that withdrawals have ceased demonstrate a death wish - and the hope, at this point, that they lose every last penny.
They have had long enough to get the money out; Labour's camp followers should have left the battlefield.
FURTHER
A letter to senior staff on December 20, from chief executive Andy Kuipers said the bank's board of directors had agreed "an enhanced remuneration package" for employees deemed "essential to our continuing excellent operational performance".
'He said they will receive a bonus amounting to a quarter of their gross annual salary every three months – effectively doubling their pay if they are paid the bonus for a year.
The arrangement can be withdrawn only with three months' written notice, so the employees are guaranteed at least six months' extra pay.' ( Mail on Sunday)
Now will these retail depositors take their life savings out?
They have had long enough to get the money out; Labour's camp followers should have left the battlefield.
FURTHER
A letter to senior staff on December 20, from chief executive Andy Kuipers said the bank's board of directors had agreed "an enhanced remuneration package" for employees deemed "essential to our continuing excellent operational performance".
'He said they will receive a bonus amounting to a quarter of their gross annual salary every three months – effectively doubling their pay if they are paid the bonus for a year.
The arrangement can be withdrawn only with three months' written notice, so the employees are guaranteed at least six months' extra pay.' ( Mail on Sunday)
Now will these retail depositors take their life savings out?
Weather Forecast
Manufacturing output and industrial production in the United Kingdom both weakened at the end of the year, figures released today showed, as the pound today fell further against the euro and the dollar.
Inflation, defined as the experience of not having enough money in the face of unchanged consumption patterns, what might be called 'suffered inflation', which is nastier than all the technical inflation definitions and has an unmistakeable in your face smack to it, rampages on and on.
And yes, we can keep lowering the quality of where we live, how warm we keep it, what we eat and drink, what we wear, how we get from place to place, and what we amuse ourselves with when not working. We do.
But all this is not the result of uncontrollable forces described in distancing statistics. It's not some sort of global weather system we must endure until it passes and be grateful to our Leader for giving us warning it is coming, indeed, is here. We are not protected from global economic and financial forces by the Labour regime; we are rendered utterly vulnerable by the mix of gross wealth transfers to non-productive parts of the population and the country to maintain the Labour regime in power, and the indulgence of financial excess, unregulated and untaxed to generate an economic and social environment for the rich which gives a wealth overflow for the political class and further protection for their maintenance of power.
But if you work in a productive job for your living, if you make and sustain the dwindling private economic sector, if you honestly try to sell your entrepreneurship, your skills, your labour to pay your way and meet your costs of living, now and for the future, there is no government creation of favourable environments for your efforts, there is no tax regime that encourages the wealth and job creation you might achieve; you will struggle against a stony-faced, latter day pseudo socialism that expresses itself through authoritarian controls on resources including most particularly the people trapped in Labour's dystopia. You are the milch cow, fair game, the deservedly ripped off for your unwillingness to subscribe to the post- democratic state and its economy managed for the herded, unionised, right-thinking many, and unbridled for the few.
And when the remnants of the rule of law, the independent media, the sense of propriety that is all but stifled, points at particularly distasteful breaches of common honesty, there is now, and always, corruption in the form of weasel words, false apology and if needed, the big knout of the state.
Inflation, defined as the experience of not having enough money in the face of unchanged consumption patterns, what might be called 'suffered inflation', which is nastier than all the technical inflation definitions and has an unmistakeable in your face smack to it, rampages on and on.
And yes, we can keep lowering the quality of where we live, how warm we keep it, what we eat and drink, what we wear, how we get from place to place, and what we amuse ourselves with when not working. We do.
But all this is not the result of uncontrollable forces described in distancing statistics. It's not some sort of global weather system we must endure until it passes and be grateful to our Leader for giving us warning it is coming, indeed, is here. We are not protected from global economic and financial forces by the Labour regime; we are rendered utterly vulnerable by the mix of gross wealth transfers to non-productive parts of the population and the country to maintain the Labour regime in power, and the indulgence of financial excess, unregulated and untaxed to generate an economic and social environment for the rich which gives a wealth overflow for the political class and further protection for their maintenance of power.
But if you work in a productive job for your living, if you make and sustain the dwindling private economic sector, if you honestly try to sell your entrepreneurship, your skills, your labour to pay your way and meet your costs of living, now and for the future, there is no government creation of favourable environments for your efforts, there is no tax regime that encourages the wealth and job creation you might achieve; you will struggle against a stony-faced, latter day pseudo socialism that expresses itself through authoritarian controls on resources including most particularly the people trapped in Labour's dystopia. You are the milch cow, fair game, the deservedly ripped off for your unwillingness to subscribe to the post- democratic state and its economy managed for the herded, unionised, right-thinking many, and unbridled for the few.
And when the remnants of the rule of law, the independent media, the sense of propriety that is all but stifled, points at particularly distasteful breaches of common honesty, there is now, and always, corruption in the form of weasel words, false apology and if needed, the big knout of the state.
Wednesday, 9 January 2008
Undemocratic Disunity
Declaring 2008 would be an "important year for the Union", the unelected Leader of the Labour Party, '..when forced into a significant concession in accepting that the debate on more powers for Holyrood is under way.' (SNP spokesman ), had the brass neck to try arguing:
"It's important to remember that two-thirds of the people of Scotland voted in the last elections for the Scottish Parliament for parties that oppose separation; for parties that support the maintenance of the Union."
As a commenter in the Herald noted:
'It's important to remember that two-thirds of the people of Britain voted in the last elections for the Westminster Parliament for parties that oppose the Labour Party.'
Labour received 35.3% of the popular vote, equating to approximately 22% of the electorate on a 61.3% turnout. Labour's vote declined to 35.3%, the lowest share of the popular vote to form a government with a majority in the UK House of Commons in history.
You don't do democracy, Brown; just as, in Alastair Campbell's words, "We don't do God".
You don't do morality either, not when running a close second to the Prince of Lies.
"It's important to remember that two-thirds of the people of Scotland voted in the last elections for the Scottish Parliament for parties that oppose separation; for parties that support the maintenance of the Union."
As a commenter in the Herald noted:
'It's important to remember that two-thirds of the people of Britain voted in the last elections for the Westminster Parliament for parties that oppose the Labour Party.'
Labour received 35.3% of the popular vote, equating to approximately 22% of the electorate on a 61.3% turnout. Labour's vote declined to 35.3%, the lowest share of the popular vote to form a government with a majority in the UK House of Commons in history.
You don't do democracy, Brown; just as, in Alastair Campbell's words, "We don't do God".
You don't do morality either, not when running a close second to the Prince of Lies.
Tuesday, 8 January 2008
Savaged by a Dead Sheep
The Scottish government has informed the part time Defence Secretary in Westminster, who expends most of his efforts on trying to cover up the fact that Scotland is running its own affairs rather than on war in two theatres, that there will be no further nuclear power stations, or nuclear waste dumping, in its territory.
On being told they are politically immature, they fell about laughing.
Building nuclear power stations is one of those big, important, longterm decisions for the future of Britain and its security, to paraphrase the Leader from one of his recent diatribes.
The United Kingdom's grotesque prime minister is still in denial that Scotland itself is not in the future of Britain, not for big, important, longterm plans for security of any kind.
On being told they are politically immature, they fell about laughing.
Building nuclear power stations is one of those big, important, longterm decisions for the future of Britain and its security, to paraphrase the Leader from one of his recent diatribes.
The United Kingdom's grotesque prime minister is still in denial that Scotland itself is not in the future of Britain, not for big, important, longterm plans for security of any kind.
Monday, 7 January 2008
Humboldt, Humboldt
The unnerving promise from the Labour Regime and its 'Minister of Justice', to provide a new constitution for the one we have watched them trash is enough to make the wary turn to Humboldt.
'...in every attempt to frame or reorganize a political constitution, there are two main objects...neither of which can be overlooked or made subordinate without serious injury to the general purposes;
first, to determine...who shall govern, who shall be governed, and to arrange the actual working of the administration; and secondly,
to prescribe the exact sphere to which the government, once constructed, should extend or confine its operations. The latter object, which more immediately affects the private life of the citizen, and more especially determines the limits of his free, spontaneous activity, is, strictly speaking, the true ultimate purpose; the former is only a necessary means for arriving at this end.'
He adds gloomily, 'And yet, ... it is to the attainment of the first of these ends that man directs his most earnest attention;'.
Then it is up to us all to direct our earnest attention to the limits of state action when the horrid proposals are thrust at us.
'...in every attempt to frame or reorganize a political constitution, there are two main objects...neither of which can be overlooked or made subordinate without serious injury to the general purposes;
first, to determine...who shall govern, who shall be governed, and to arrange the actual working of the administration; and secondly,
to prescribe the exact sphere to which the government, once constructed, should extend or confine its operations. The latter object, which more immediately affects the private life of the citizen, and more especially determines the limits of his free, spontaneous activity, is, strictly speaking, the true ultimate purpose; the former is only a necessary means for arriving at this end.'
He adds gloomily, 'And yet, ... it is to the attainment of the first of these ends that man directs his most earnest attention;'.
Then it is up to us all to direct our earnest attention to the limits of state action when the horrid proposals are thrust at us.
Saturday, 5 January 2008
Messieurs, faites vos jeux...
"..the days of waiting for Westminster to do things for Scotland - those days are over...We need to make our own initiatives now, solve our own problems, take our own opportunities.
There is a growing realisation that this country has the talent and ability to stand on its own two feet - and we have got to find the democratic structure that will allow us to do that. That is what 2008 is going to be all about."
(the Prime Minister of Scotland).
"With firm conviction and resolve, we will make the case for the United Kingdom - standing up for the cause of the Union and against secession, showing people in all parts of the country that for so many of the challenges our country faces - from climate change to terrorism - there are no Wales-only, Scotland-only or England-only solutions."
(the Scottish Prime Minister of England and Wales).
Les jeux sont faits. Rien ne va plus.
There is a growing realisation that this country has the talent and ability to stand on its own two feet - and we have got to find the democratic structure that will allow us to do that. That is what 2008 is going to be all about."
(the Prime Minister of Scotland).
"With firm conviction and resolve, we will make the case for the United Kingdom - standing up for the cause of the Union and against secession, showing people in all parts of the country that for so many of the challenges our country faces - from climate change to terrorism - there are no Wales-only, Scotland-only or England-only solutions."
(the Scottish Prime Minister of England and Wales).
Les jeux sont faits. Rien ne va plus.
Friday, 4 January 2008
Elastic Band
Oil at over 100 dollars a barrel is not a record price. Not only are dollars worth much less than they used to be in terms of other currencies including ours, they are worth even less in terms of the real goods that would have to be given up in order to afford oil. It is not just oil prices that threaten recession and inflation for, further, if price were the issue governments could well reduce their tax on oil, which exceeds producers' monopoly profit.
Over the price band of 100-120 dollars our demand is utterly inelastic and, quite possibly, beyond that band, although sooner or later there is a negative income effect impact, but we would be prepared to pay more as long as supply was there.
Only with competitive supply, with a lot more oil available at the going price, would supply be more elastic, but monopolist suppliers restrict output.
It is the security of supply, manipulated not just by geopolitical interests but real supplier fears, that should worry governments.
'Oil in the ground is better than money in the bank', said Sheik Yamani in the mid-'70s. The behaviour of banks and financial institutions resulting in the collapsing faith in the banking system isn't helping either.
Over the price band of 100-120 dollars our demand is utterly inelastic and, quite possibly, beyond that band, although sooner or later there is a negative income effect impact, but we would be prepared to pay more as long as supply was there.
Only with competitive supply, with a lot more oil available at the going price, would supply be more elastic, but monopolist suppliers restrict output.
It is the security of supply, manipulated not just by geopolitical interests but real supplier fears, that should worry governments.
'Oil in the ground is better than money in the bank', said Sheik Yamani in the mid-'70s. The behaviour of banks and financial institutions resulting in the collapsing faith in the banking system isn't helping either.
Thursday, 3 January 2008
Trouble in the Wind
Reports (the Herald) that 200 returning soldiers were required to change from their uniforms into civilian clothes while standing on the runway at Birmingham Airport, rather than being offered showers and a changing room inside the terminal, will fill most Brummies with engulfing rage.
Birmingham must be the heartland of patriotic commitment, regardless of differing views on the wars into which the Labour regime has sent our grotesquely under funded and under equipped army.
While it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Tommy, fall be'ind,"
But it's "Please to walk in front, sir," when there's trouble in the wind,
There's trouble in the wind, my boys, there's trouble in the wind,
O it's "Please to walk in front, sir," when there's trouble in the wind.
Birmingham must be the heartland of patriotic commitment, regardless of differing views on the wars into which the Labour regime has sent our grotesquely under funded and under equipped army.
While it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Tommy, fall be'ind,"
But it's "Please to walk in front, sir," when there's trouble in the wind,
There's trouble in the wind, my boys, there's trouble in the wind,
O it's "Please to walk in front, sir," when there's trouble in the wind.
The Defence of Sterling
The economy in England outside of the London City State is beginning to look very Rocky. While an unforeseen side effect of Northern Rock's swallowing £30 billion of tax payers' money has been to make the sums gulped down by the Regional Development Agencies look less gluttonous, their tens of billions still have done nothing more than provide makework for the Regime's growing nomenklatura infrastructure.
There has been no use of these billions to provide favourable entrepreneurial environments that would encourage manufacturing growth and general employment; nothing but outreach, and empowering, and entitlement, and subsidy to 'players, buffoons, musicians, opera-singers, opera-dancers' - a kind of Northern Rock Foundation spread thickly across non- London with elsewhere, small, embattled encampments of the capitalist economy encircled by the realised socialist heath.
The Wastes of Longbridge, the Former Potteries, the Silent Looms, the Blasted Furnaces of Sheffield, the Pits of the North East, the Empty Harbours, Hull Down - the country could be part of some deadland Tolkien fantasy geography, and the failures of oxymoronic socialist enterprise might well cause more than just the first run on a bank for 150 years. The run on sterling is underway and, while it will be paused this time, the Leader's business plan is just as inadequate and exposed.
London needs to remove this sick regime before it is so damaged by its systemically subprime hinterland that the rest of the world leaves it for safer havens.
There has been no use of these billions to provide favourable entrepreneurial environments that would encourage manufacturing growth and general employment; nothing but outreach, and empowering, and entitlement, and subsidy to 'players, buffoons, musicians, opera-singers, opera-dancers' - a kind of Northern Rock Foundation spread thickly across non- London with elsewhere, small, embattled encampments of the capitalist economy encircled by the realised socialist heath.
The Wastes of Longbridge, the Former Potteries, the Silent Looms, the Blasted Furnaces of Sheffield, the Pits of the North East, the Empty Harbours, Hull Down - the country could be part of some deadland Tolkien fantasy geography, and the failures of oxymoronic socialist enterprise might well cause more than just the first run on a bank for 150 years. The run on sterling is underway and, while it will be paused this time, the Leader's business plan is just as inadequate and exposed.
London needs to remove this sick regime before it is so damaged by its systemically subprime hinterland that the rest of the world leaves it for safer havens.
Wednesday, 2 January 2008
Recessional
Consolidation is the watchword of political activity in 2008.
All the unholy work of the last decade has been completed: the rule of law has been uprooted from its centrality in Parliament, literally, physically uprooted to a tidied-up municipal office space off Parliament Square; the Constitution has been distanced as a present force for control of the Executive and enters the realm of political and institutional history, with the exclusion of the head of state in any role as defender of the nature of our consent to government, while the House of Lords sits polluted by a membership of placemen who have bought into the exercise of power, and the Commons is whipped, cowed into submission by self interest expressed either as dull-minded commitment to dead ideologies and tribal allegiances, or straightforward cash in hand.
The established Church has lost its way in the morass of Executive interference in what should have been its pastoral care, and is undermined by fundamentalist, incomparably inferior, belief systems, both Christian and non-Christian. At all levels of public life lying has become more acceptable than acceptance of responsibility or even admission of fallibility. The Seven Deadly sins hold sway throughout their realms in unthinkable ways - from the crossing of human genetic material with that of other species, to young people so lost to all self respect as they parade in drunkenness and undress in the public street, and children kill one another in complete unawareness of the finality of wielding death both for their victims and for themselves.
The instigation of a rejection of the importance of individual human worth, perpetrated by social atomisation - the denigration of status derived from family ties, community good-standing, achievement, self-sufficiency, credit worthiness, cooperation with others, and high value attached to cultural norms, is well advanced.
So high are tax culls that application for subvention, and resultant conformity, to Executive norms is extended to most of the working age group, and to all of those too young to escape it.
The young are the object of particular indoctrination and perversion by the Executive: their biometric data is already delivered, they are numbered, weighed, and will be divided when rule requires it.
The people are among the most highly surveilled on the planet and this is promised to grow worse. What is available to eat is provided for many by supermarket systems deeply integrated into this authoritarian governance; the health provision is, of itself, an enormous area of Executive planning and control within the ostensibly capitalist economic system, as is the state education system and other aspects of regional government removed from local elected authority control.
This year is to be wholly devoted to entrenching post democratic governance systems. Systems impervious to any window dressing votes taken whilst votes are still a civic tranquillizer that will disappear into a controlled irrelevance before 2010.
The division of our society into castes is almost complete. Different tax regimes, travel regimes, health and education regimes, opportunity regimes are open to elites. The pathways between the mass of the children and the children of the upper castes have been more or less closed, and are closely watched for inadmissible intrusions either in terms of numbers that might threaten privileged castes, or in terms of ideologies, or belief systems. The war on terror serves far more than merely containing economically and culturally instigated threats to all of us; its primary purpose is to contain threats from most of us to our power caste.
This year will be devoted to bedding-in, tidying up, beating down; to a new, written infinitely diminished portrayal of what we might be, and were, that will be foisted upon us as a substitute for our destroyed Constitution. Corruption and its occasional emergence doesn't matter, that can be contained primarily by denial, ignoring and, in the end, the unavailability any longer of any kind of redress. Our Parliament is disarmed, our state defeated and overrun from Lisbon of all places, our armies abandoned in far off countries dying for nothing or parked on long-abandoned battlefields.
Far-called, our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet.
Lest we forget—lest we forget!
All the unholy work of the last decade has been completed: the rule of law has been uprooted from its centrality in Parliament, literally, physically uprooted to a tidied-up municipal office space off Parliament Square; the Constitution has been distanced as a present force for control of the Executive and enters the realm of political and institutional history, with the exclusion of the head of state in any role as defender of the nature of our consent to government, while the House of Lords sits polluted by a membership of placemen who have bought into the exercise of power, and the Commons is whipped, cowed into submission by self interest expressed either as dull-minded commitment to dead ideologies and tribal allegiances, or straightforward cash in hand.
The established Church has lost its way in the morass of Executive interference in what should have been its pastoral care, and is undermined by fundamentalist, incomparably inferior, belief systems, both Christian and non-Christian. At all levels of public life lying has become more acceptable than acceptance of responsibility or even admission of fallibility. The Seven Deadly sins hold sway throughout their realms in unthinkable ways - from the crossing of human genetic material with that of other species, to young people so lost to all self respect as they parade in drunkenness and undress in the public street, and children kill one another in complete unawareness of the finality of wielding death both for their victims and for themselves.
The instigation of a rejection of the importance of individual human worth, perpetrated by social atomisation - the denigration of status derived from family ties, community good-standing, achievement, self-sufficiency, credit worthiness, cooperation with others, and high value attached to cultural norms, is well advanced.
So high are tax culls that application for subvention, and resultant conformity, to Executive norms is extended to most of the working age group, and to all of those too young to escape it.
The young are the object of particular indoctrination and perversion by the Executive: their biometric data is already delivered, they are numbered, weighed, and will be divided when rule requires it.
The people are among the most highly surveilled on the planet and this is promised to grow worse. What is available to eat is provided for many by supermarket systems deeply integrated into this authoritarian governance; the health provision is, of itself, an enormous area of Executive planning and control within the ostensibly capitalist economic system, as is the state education system and other aspects of regional government removed from local elected authority control.
This year is to be wholly devoted to entrenching post democratic governance systems. Systems impervious to any window dressing votes taken whilst votes are still a civic tranquillizer that will disappear into a controlled irrelevance before 2010.
The division of our society into castes is almost complete. Different tax regimes, travel regimes, health and education regimes, opportunity regimes are open to elites. The pathways between the mass of the children and the children of the upper castes have been more or less closed, and are closely watched for inadmissible intrusions either in terms of numbers that might threaten privileged castes, or in terms of ideologies, or belief systems. The war on terror serves far more than merely containing economically and culturally instigated threats to all of us; its primary purpose is to contain threats from most of us to our power caste.
This year will be devoted to bedding-in, tidying up, beating down; to a new, written infinitely diminished portrayal of what we might be, and were, that will be foisted upon us as a substitute for our destroyed Constitution. Corruption and its occasional emergence doesn't matter, that can be contained primarily by denial, ignoring and, in the end, the unavailability any longer of any kind of redress. Our Parliament is disarmed, our state defeated and overrun from Lisbon of all places, our armies abandoned in far off countries dying for nothing or parked on long-abandoned battlefields.
Far-called, our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet.
Lest we forget—lest we forget!
Sunday, 30 December 2007
Red Skye Thinking
Ending PFI by setting up a Futures Trust to finance big public-sector projects by bond issues; replacing Council Tax with a local income tax and, in the meantime, freezing Council Tax; making prescriptions free and widening the scope of remedies available; providing home care freely so that elderly people can be helped to live out their lives at home; reducing class sizes to 20; abolishing university tuition fees and ending the practice of subsidising those defined as disadvantaged by those equally disadvantaged but failing to qualify (almost all eighteen year olds are poor and discrimination on the achievements and failures of the generation above is grotesque); providing a Home Civil Service appointed without fear or favour on open competition and by merit; effective governmental opposition to dumping nuclear waste out of sight and out of mind, but not out of effect, in natural and so conveniently deep holes in the countryside; opposition to making the country a target for nuclear missiles by removing the launch sites of nuclear missiles entirely outside of the country's control; enhancing relations with the islands large and small of the north western European archipelago (which provides a powerful grouping to front its interests within the European Union, just as is being set up currently and for similar purposes by the countries fronting the Mediterranean); all this is being organized by a Scottish Prime Minister.
Unfortunately not the Scottish prime minister we are landed with, he's trying desperately to stop all this. All of this is coming from the Scottish Prime Minister of Scotland.
Unfortunately not the Scottish prime minister we are landed with, he's trying desperately to stop all this. All of this is coming from the Scottish Prime Minister of Scotland.
Wednesday, 26 December 2007
Effrontery
The Leader's inability to cope is highlighted by reports from senior allies of Brown that there is need for '.. a new 'go-to man,' a chief executive-type figure... that will free Gordon to concentrate only on the things that he should be concentrating on. The problem has been the flat structure. Below Gordon are about six people who all need to go to him about things. That really takes too much time, so a better filter is needed.'
Brown can continue to micro-manage the Labour party to maintain himself in power - that needs merely his particular and peculiar talents of grubbing like a half-blind mole through the dirt of fixing deals and remembering the minutiae of past compromises and sell-outs. What he has so publicly failed to cope with, is being the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and answering to the pledges on which his predecessor gained power, as well as dealing with other parts of the power elites which are not his to control. As he has sunk into wholesale incapacity and subsequent fury followed by depression, his capability even to control his claim to power - the zombie Labour party - has begun to slip from him.
'It was astonishing that no one close to Gordon was able to sort the Abrahams problem out earlier. And more importantly sound very loud alarm bells about the trouble that was being stored up. ', the Telegraph reports a senior Labour party figure remarking.
A shortlist that includes Wilf Stevenson, long-standing friend of the Leader, and director of the Smith Institute, which is currently being investigated by the Charities Commission for inappropriate activity (it has seemingly acted as a means of running a private office for Brown, making available large sums under guise of research funds, used 11 Downing Street for political meetings, and his henchmen have profited from sinecures there among other things) will be under consideration by Brown after Christmas.
The prospect is that the country will have an unelected Prime Minister, unable to cope, fronted by one of his 'old friends', whose charity Smith Institute is under investigation by the charities' controlling body, who is without even the democratic fig leaf of representing a small group of Scottish voters.
Saturday, 22 December 2007
Halls Decked
'Poets are the trumpets which sing to battle..
Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world'.
Christmas time is here, by golly,
Disapproval would be folly.
Deck the halls with hunks of holly,
Fill the cup and don't say when.
Kill the turkeys, ducks and chickens,
Mix the punch, drag out the Dickens.
Even though the prospect sickens,
Brother, here we go again.
And -
O come, Thou Rod of Jesse, free
thine own from Satan’s tyranny;
from depths of hell Thy people save,
and give them victory o’er the grave.
Rejoice, rejoice, Emmanuel
shall come to thee, O Israel.
Have a merry Christmas, everybody, and thank you for the posts on your blogs and your comments here. The bloggers give a new meaning to the toast 'Absent Friends!'
Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world'.
Christmas time is here, by golly,
Disapproval would be folly.
Deck the halls with hunks of holly,
Fill the cup and don't say when.
Kill the turkeys, ducks and chickens,
Mix the punch, drag out the Dickens.
Even though the prospect sickens,
Brother, here we go again.
And -
O come, Thou Rod of Jesse, free
thine own from Satan’s tyranny;
from depths of hell Thy people save,
and give them victory o’er the grave.
Rejoice, rejoice, Emmanuel
shall come to thee, O Israel.
Have a merry Christmas, everybody, and thank you for the posts on your blogs and your comments here. The bloggers give a new meaning to the toast 'Absent Friends!'
Thursday, 20 December 2007
In the Long Run We Are All Dead
The Labour regime's banging on about the long term and its transcendent importance over all and any other issue - illegal funding, tax rises on the poor, endemic widespread unemployment disguised as invalidity, commonplace violence on the streets, democratic curtailment, cronyism, real inflation cutting into every life choice, cultural degredation, - demonstrates their wholesale state of denial.
They and the socialist corpse they have been animating for the last ten years should get back into their 20th century coffin and close the lid behind them.
They and the socialist corpse they have been animating for the last ten years should get back into their 20th century coffin and close the lid behind them.
Brain Waves
Confidence is often considered a nebulous but crucial aspect of the functioning of markets, particularly financial markets. Feeling is another such concept. Considering financial markets as many neural networks interacting, confidence could be thought of as the emotional state in which they are operating, and feeling as the intuitive grab at what myriad inter-relating factors, too complex in their diversity of level, detail, and certainty to be open to formal, superficial analysis, are presenting every moment.
Advances in neural imaging have demonstrated the profound effects emotional state can have upon intuitive understanding and expressed preferences. Confidence leads to different behaviours from those generated by its absence, depression. Operating with depressed emotions alters the 'grab' of understanding offered by feeling. And actions then ensue that reinforce the pattern.
Most economic analysis treats risk preferences, time preferences and social preferences as separate kinds of preferences, but what if all three share common neural circuitry for controlling automatic emotional impulses - fear, temptation , and selfishness respectively, - by integrating all the costs and benefits of choices.
Standard analysis in game theory assumes players are in equilibrium; yet one study showed the more skilled using different parts of the brain in making choices while the less skilled showed brain activity elsewhere as if strategic uncertainty was causing the feeling of discomfort.
The social neuroeconomists Fehr and Camerer posit that eventually there might be a biological basis 'for a mathematical characterization of social exchange that is rooted in neural details but can also make predictions about activity in strategic interaction and market trading ... 'and, they add darkly, '...about how behaviour can change when causally manipulated by pharmacology, TMS, and other tools .'
Advances in neural imaging have demonstrated the profound effects emotional state can have upon intuitive understanding and expressed preferences. Confidence leads to different behaviours from those generated by its absence, depression. Operating with depressed emotions alters the 'grab' of understanding offered by feeling. And actions then ensue that reinforce the pattern.
Most economic analysis treats risk preferences, time preferences and social preferences as separate kinds of preferences, but what if all three share common neural circuitry for controlling automatic emotional impulses - fear, temptation , and selfishness respectively, - by integrating all the costs and benefits of choices.
Standard analysis in game theory assumes players are in equilibrium; yet one study showed the more skilled using different parts of the brain in making choices while the less skilled showed brain activity elsewhere as if strategic uncertainty was causing the feeling of discomfort.
The social neuroeconomists Fehr and Camerer posit that eventually there might be a biological basis 'for a mathematical characterization of social exchange that is rooted in neural details but can also make predictions about activity in strategic interaction and market trading ... 'and, they add darkly, '...about how behaviour can change when causally manipulated by pharmacology, TMS, and other tools .'
Wednesday, 19 December 2007
The Pits
The relentless rise in energy prices has been attributed to the profit-seeking of oil producers, to politically-motivated energy bullying by Russia, and to the effects of the ending of easily accessible oil deposits. The need for an energy source less vulnerable to all or any of these factors has produced weird plans for: wind farms encircling the British coast, huge investment in nuclear power (with all the problems of siting, waste disposal, large public resistance to nuclear energy production, not to mention a wholesale lack of experience and competence in such technology in British industry now), micro-provision at individual level, wholly unsuited to the management of energy demand and the national grid, and other greenish solutions.
Underneath the north east of England is lots of coal. On top of the north east of England are lots of failed bank workers. Presumably their much vaunted cultural traditions still hold; the pouring of tax-raised cash into the region should be directed towards establishing a modern energy industry and everyone can get back to their roots and back into productive employment.
Underneath the north east of England is lots of coal. On top of the north east of England are lots of failed bank workers. Presumably their much vaunted cultural traditions still hold; the pouring of tax-raised cash into the region should be directed towards establishing a modern energy industry and everyone can get back to their roots and back into productive employment.
Tuesday, 18 December 2007
Lost
5000 troops hunkered down outside Basra airport are all that remains of New Labour's war in Iraq. The devastating pictures of the British Commander in Iraq signing the hand-over papers under cover for fear of mortar attacks, without ceremony, to the Iraquis, and the contrast with Iraqui troops parading through the city of Basra was intensely distressing. The BBC poll report that as a result of the removal of the British Army:
So perhaps the worst defeat of a west European army in a non-European theatre since Dien Bien Phu is played out. It isn't as bad as the helicopters taking off from the embassy roof in Saigon but then the commitment was, to say the least, much less whole-hearted.
Since the Labour election win in 1997 the Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer, now the unelected prime minister of the United Kingdom, has actively and vehemently denied funding to the United Kingdom Armed Forces. He is reported to have refused even to attend meetings at the Ministry of Defence, the first holder of the office ever to do so. He has equally vehemently declared his dislike of the Armed Forces - in keeping with the attitudes of his Party, its supporters, and his and their, political creed.
Which makes the sending to war of British troops on at least three fronts, two of them concurrent, by his alter ego Blair, utterly disgraceful. Lying to Parliament is overshadowed by sending men and women to fight under-equipped and grossly under-funded ; they went without the support of years of the defence commitment needed to fight an effective war, and it was the Chancellor of the Exchequer Brown who denied the funding.
The pretence that Brown invariably sought Blair's discomfiture is convenient, but the truth is that both sought, together, the defeat of all and every part of the United Kingdom establishment that might undermine Labour's permanent hold on power. The Armed Forces must have been a primary target, then the Constitution (currently devastated and about to be re-presented in all his vulgarity of thought by Jack Straw), the office of Head of State, ( destroy the Upper House of the Parliament in its independent revising role and it is so much easier to pass that tendentious but essential authoritarian regulation and European Union acceptance and, inter alia, deprive the monarchy of any channel of influence), politicise the Civil Service and extend the nomenklatura of appointees rather than elected officials at local levels; but first, denigrate and weaken those who might impose another order, by their millitary humiliation fighting with both hands tied behind their backs.
Then send a man with a peculiar moustache to sign away foreign and every other kind of policy independence for the United Kingdom and there is a clear field of fire for managing the next post democratic election.
'Two-thirds felt security would improve in the short term, while 72% said it would improve in the long term. Only 5% said security would deteriorate following the withdrawal',suggests everything has gone badly wrong, and the British assistance to the Iraqi authorities of southern Iraq in establishing democratic rule, the New Labour justification for our presence there, (let's forget the weapons of mass destruction lies), has been non- existent.
So perhaps the worst defeat of a west European army in a non-European theatre since Dien Bien Phu is played out. It isn't as bad as the helicopters taking off from the embassy roof in Saigon but then the commitment was, to say the least, much less whole-hearted.
Since the Labour election win in 1997 the Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer, now the unelected prime minister of the United Kingdom, has actively and vehemently denied funding to the United Kingdom Armed Forces. He is reported to have refused even to attend meetings at the Ministry of Defence, the first holder of the office ever to do so. He has equally vehemently declared his dislike of the Armed Forces - in keeping with the attitudes of his Party, its supporters, and his and their, political creed.
Which makes the sending to war of British troops on at least three fronts, two of them concurrent, by his alter ego Blair, utterly disgraceful. Lying to Parliament is overshadowed by sending men and women to fight under-equipped and grossly under-funded ; they went without the support of years of the defence commitment needed to fight an effective war, and it was the Chancellor of the Exchequer Brown who denied the funding.
The pretence that Brown invariably sought Blair's discomfiture is convenient, but the truth is that both sought, together, the defeat of all and every part of the United Kingdom establishment that might undermine Labour's permanent hold on power. The Armed Forces must have been a primary target, then the Constitution (currently devastated and about to be re-presented in all his vulgarity of thought by Jack Straw), the office of Head of State, ( destroy the Upper House of the Parliament in its independent revising role and it is so much easier to pass that tendentious but essential authoritarian regulation and European Union acceptance and, inter alia, deprive the monarchy of any channel of influence), politicise the Civil Service and extend the nomenklatura of appointees rather than elected officials at local levels; but first, denigrate and weaken those who might impose another order, by their millitary humiliation fighting with both hands tied behind their backs.
Then send a man with a peculiar moustache to sign away foreign and every other kind of policy independence for the United Kingdom and there is a clear field of fire for managing the next post democratic election.
The Unelected Leader Versus the Market
HM Treasury today confirms that the guarantee arrangements for Northern Rock plc
described in HM Treasury's announcements dated 20 and 21 September 2007 and 9
October 2007 are being extended, at the request of Northern Rock plc, to the
following unsubordinated wholesale obligations, whether now existing or arising
in the future:
1. all uncollateralised and unsubordinated wholesale deposits and other
borrowings which are outside the guarantee arrangements previously announced by
HM Treasury;
2. all payment obligations of Northern Rock plc under any uncollateralised
derivative transactions;
3. in respect of all collateralised derivatives, and all wholesale
borrowings which are collateralised (including, without limitation, covered
bonds of Northern Rock plc), the payment obligations of Northern Rock plc to the
extent that those obligations exceed the available proceeds of the realised
collateral for the relevant derivative or borrowing; and
4. all obligations of Northern Rock plc to make payments on the repurchase
of mortgages under the documentation for the 'Granite' securitisation programme.
described in HM Treasury's announcements dated 20 and 21 September 2007 and 9
October 2007 are being extended, at the request of Northern Rock plc, to the
following unsubordinated wholesale obligations, whether now existing or arising
in the future:
1. all uncollateralised and unsubordinated wholesale deposits and other
borrowings which are outside the guarantee arrangements previously announced by
HM Treasury;
2. all payment obligations of Northern Rock plc under any uncollateralised
derivative transactions;
3. in respect of all collateralised derivatives, and all wholesale
borrowings which are collateralised (including, without limitation, covered
bonds of Northern Rock plc), the payment obligations of Northern Rock plc to the
extent that those obligations exceed the available proceeds of the realised
collateral for the relevant derivative or borrowing; and
4. all obligations of Northern Rock plc to make payments on the repurchase
of mortgages under the documentation for the 'Granite' securitisation programme.
Wednesday, 12 December 2007
Simply Unfit
Einstein's view that “Everything should be made as as simple as possible — but not simpler.”, is quoted in the Times this morning. The regime's new scientific adviser has an uphill struggle against the brain dead Labour ministers who choose simpler self aggrandisement coupled with force in response to socio -cultural complexity that offends their authoritarianism.
Yet once a monopoly of power has been gained, by whatever means, no regime can just keep smacking the people into line, and politics becomes largely the science and craft of words; rarely and memorably it becomes the art of words. Schiller's:
Freude, schöner Götterfunken,
Tochter aus Elysium!
Wir betreten feuertrunken,
Himmlische, Dein Heiligtum.
Deine Zauber binden wieder,
Was die Mode streng geteilt,
Alle Menschen werden Brüder,
Wo Dein sanfter Flügel weilt.
seems appropriate currently.
Angels are in Berlin till Monday; the German philosophers' Christmas shindig at the Humboldt on experimental pragmatics, which is considering syntax- semantics mismatch and the neural bases of semantic composition, and how pragmatic differences between affirmative and negative sentences are captured in the processes and representations of language comprehension, (and other hot topics), might seem irrelevant to the Leader of the Labour party; not simple enough.
But, speaking with the simplicity necessarily embraced by Gordon Brown: his brain is unable to function at the levels of complexity and emotional responsiveness that are regarded and required as neuro-typical. His unfortunate physical and psychic incapacities have led to death and misery, particularly within our country and in the Middle East. Being Prime Minister , an office for which he is literally not fit, is not his achievement, it is his permanent and public disgrace.
Yet once a monopoly of power has been gained, by whatever means, no regime can just keep smacking the people into line, and politics becomes largely the science and craft of words; rarely and memorably it becomes the art of words. Schiller's:
Freude, schöner Götterfunken,
Tochter aus Elysium!
Wir betreten feuertrunken,
Himmlische, Dein Heiligtum.
Deine Zauber binden wieder,
Was die Mode streng geteilt,
Alle Menschen werden Brüder,
Wo Dein sanfter Flügel weilt.
seems appropriate currently.
Angels are in Berlin till Monday; the German philosophers' Christmas shindig at the Humboldt on experimental pragmatics, which is considering syntax- semantics mismatch and the neural bases of semantic composition, and how pragmatic differences between affirmative and negative sentences are captured in the processes and representations of language comprehension, (and other hot topics), might seem irrelevant to the Leader of the Labour party; not simple enough.
But, speaking with the simplicity necessarily embraced by Gordon Brown: his brain is unable to function at the levels of complexity and emotional responsiveness that are regarded and required as neuro-typical. His unfortunate physical and psychic incapacities have led to death and misery, particularly within our country and in the Middle East. Being Prime Minister , an office for which he is literally not fit, is not his achievement, it is his permanent and public disgrace.
Tuesday, 11 December 2007
Let the Leader Go to the Signing!
The Commons Liaison Committee must sacrifice itself to the greater good. We all wish to see the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland, Leader of the Labour Party, the Right Honourable (giggle) Gordon Brown sign away the sovereignty of our country. This is not a moment to be lost to history for a Commons committee that can be readily rescheduled.
Come on:
Rt Hon Alan Williams, Labour
Rt Hon James Arbuthnot, Conservative
Rt Hon Kevin Barron, Labour
Rt Hon Alan Beith, Liberal Democrats
Sir Stuart Bell, Labour
Rt Hon Malcolm Bruce, Liberal Democrats
Michael Connarty, Labour
Sir Patrick Cormack, Conservative
Mr Andrew Dismore, Labour
Mr Frank Doran, Labour
Hon Gwyneth Dunwoody, Labour
Dr Hywel Francis, Labour
Mike Gapes,Labour/Co-op
Rt Hon Michael Jack,Conservative
Rt Hon Greg Knight, Conservative
Mr Edward Leigh, Conservative
Peter Luff, Conservative
Rt Hon John McFall, Labour/Co-op
Rosemary McKenna, Labour
Rt Hon David Maclean, Conservative
Andrew Miller, Labour
Mr Terry Rooney, Labour
Mr Mohammad Sarwar, Labour
Mr Barry Sheerman, Labour/Co-op
Dr Phyllis Starkey, Labour
Rt Hon Keith Vaz, Labour
Mr John Whittingdale, Conservative
Mr Phil Willis, Liberal Democrats
Dr Tony Wright, Labour
Mr Tim Yeo, Conservative
Rt Hon Sir George Young, Conservative
you know where your duty lies.
Cancel! Let the Leader go!
Come on:
Rt Hon Alan Williams, Labour
Rt Hon James Arbuthnot, Conservative
Rt Hon Kevin Barron, Labour
Rt Hon Alan Beith, Liberal Democrats
Sir Stuart Bell, Labour
Rt Hon Malcolm Bruce, Liberal Democrats
Michael Connarty, Labour
Sir Patrick Cormack, Conservative
Mr Andrew Dismore, Labour
Mr Frank Doran, Labour
Hon Gwyneth Dunwoody, Labour
Dr Hywel Francis, Labour
Mike Gapes,Labour/Co-op
Rt Hon Michael Jack,Conservative
Rt Hon Greg Knight, Conservative
Mr Edward Leigh, Conservative
Peter Luff, Conservative
Rt Hon John McFall, Labour/Co-op
Rosemary McKenna, Labour
Rt Hon David Maclean, Conservative
Andrew Miller, Labour
Mr Terry Rooney, Labour
Mr Mohammad Sarwar, Labour
Mr Barry Sheerman, Labour/Co-op
Dr Phyllis Starkey, Labour
Rt Hon Keith Vaz, Labour
Mr John Whittingdale, Conservative
Mr Phil Willis, Liberal Democrats
Dr Tony Wright, Labour
Mr Tim Yeo, Conservative
Rt Hon Sir George Young, Conservative
you know where your duty lies.
Cancel! Let the Leader go!
Monday, 10 December 2007
To the Finland Station
A ticket to create the Revolution and in 10 days shake the world cost 15 million ReichsMarks.
The German Emperor remarked "If the Swedes won't let him through, we'll let him through the German lines ourselves."
The German archives held in Berlin have been opened, rather like the Heavens.
The German Emperor remarked "If the Swedes won't let him through, we'll let him through the German lines ourselves."
The German archives held in Berlin have been opened, rather like the Heavens.
This Is a Far Better Place
The Leader of the Labour regime was in Basra to tell British troops that while they would not be home for Christmas as he had stated previously, it was possible they would be back by next March. He told forces, who have withdrawn to an encampment outside Basra airport, that the city and thus the entire province will be handed over to Iraqi government control in the next two weeks and, according to the Telegraph, 'hinted at an end to Britain's involvement in the country.'
Meanwhile, (reports Juan Cole on Informed Comment), Major General Jalil Khalaf, speaking in the city of Basra, said sectarian groups imposing a strict interpretation of Islam, dispatch patrols of motorbikes or unlicensed cars with tinted windows to accost women not wearing traditional dress and head scarves: the Major General added,
Meanwhile, (reports Juan Cole on Informed Comment), Major General Jalil Khalaf, speaking in the city of Basra, said sectarian groups imposing a strict interpretation of Islam, dispatch patrols of motorbikes or unlicensed cars with tinted windows to accost women not wearing traditional dress and head scarves: the Major General added,
"The women of Basra are being horrifically murdered and then dumped in the garbage with notes saying they were killed for un-Islamic behavior ". Khalaf told Associated Press that as well men with Western clothes or haircuts are also being attacked in Basra.
Since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and the installation of a Shiite-dominated
government, armed men in some parts of the country have been forcing women to cover their heads or face punishment. In some areas of the heavily Shiite south, even Christian women have been forced to wear headscarves.
"Your makeup and your decision to forgo the headscarf will bring you death." say posters throughout the formerly British sector Basra region.
Khalaf said the bodies of women have been found in garbage dumps with bullet holes, decapitated or otherwise mutilated, with a sheet of paper nearby saying, "she was killed for adultery," or "she was killed for violating Islamic teachings." In September, he added, the headless bodies of a woman and her 6-year-old son were among those found. A total of 40 deaths were reported this year. But:
"We believe the number of murdered women is much higher, as cases go unreported by their families who fear reprisal from extremists,"
Gordon Brown, the British Prime Minister, ended his peroration to the British army with the declaration:
"We have managed now to get Iraq into a far better place " .
Today ( from Informed Comment)
Police found an anonymous body of a woman on Hamdan street south of Basra city. Police said that the woman was shot in different areas of her body. '
Sunday, 9 December 2007
English Schoolteachers No Longer Know Enough Poetry For Its Teaching In English Schools
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of "Spiritus Mundi"
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of "Spiritus Mundi"
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Irregular conjugation
I made an adminstrative error; you acted within the spirit of the law; he accepted an illegal donation contrary to the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000.
(quoted from http://www.scottishpolitics.org.uk/ which is a fine read for a Sunday morning).
(quoted from http://www.scottishpolitics.org.uk/ which is a fine read for a Sunday morning).
Saturday, 8 December 2007
No Ball
The delegation of the signing of the new European Constitution in Lisbon to the Foreign Secretary is a curious act. These jamborees are the occasion usually for face to face, one on one, discussions between heads of state and government. Yet Brown pleads a prior and very minor engagement. Clearly this is an excuse not to go.
Cowardice at being seen signing away United Kingdom sovereignty doesn't really cover it; the Leader denies he is doing anything of the kind and must feel intense relief and a glow of political success at delivering the United Kingdom still intact into the maw of the European Union.
Sherpas organize these meetings in advance to the last minute of a country's leader's presence; weeks of negotiation on agendas, consultations and the levels of participants, in matters of concern to particular member-states, take place.
The intervention of the EU Competition Commissioner in the state support being given to Northern Rock must have been pre-eminent on any UK prime minister's agenda, but permission to blunder on until March was flicked uninterestedly to Brown last week. It looks as if no one wants to talk about anything with the UK government.
The Labour regime Leader certainly has nothing to offer the European Union and the Union might think most reasonably that nothing more can be offered to him except his coat.
So the Foreign Secretary will be there, uncomfortably low in diplomatic status and with nothing to say to anyone, while the United Kingdom Prime Minister sits at home alone, picking his nose and biting his nails.
Cowardice at being seen signing away United Kingdom sovereignty doesn't really cover it; the Leader denies he is doing anything of the kind and must feel intense relief and a glow of political success at delivering the United Kingdom still intact into the maw of the European Union.
Sherpas organize these meetings in advance to the last minute of a country's leader's presence; weeks of negotiation on agendas, consultations and the levels of participants, in matters of concern to particular member-states, take place.
The intervention of the EU Competition Commissioner in the state support being given to Northern Rock must have been pre-eminent on any UK prime minister's agenda, but permission to blunder on until March was flicked uninterestedly to Brown last week. It looks as if no one wants to talk about anything with the UK government.
The Labour regime Leader certainly has nothing to offer the European Union and the Union might think most reasonably that nothing more can be offered to him except his coat.
So the Foreign Secretary will be there, uncomfortably low in diplomatic status and with nothing to say to anyone, while the United Kingdom Prime Minister sits at home alone, picking his nose and biting his nails.
Thursday, 6 December 2007
Holding the Foe in Play
'Strong activity in the aircraft and shipbuilding industries boosted output in Britain's manufacturing sector by more than expected in October, official figures showed today.'
Well it would, wouldn't it? The glorious Leader has ordered two aircraft carriers from the British (note the 'British' )shipyards, the most important of which is in his electoral backyard in Scotland . So a lot of staff are being taken on, no doubt most of them from Gdansk, but let it pass, let it pass.
The ship building industry in the United Kingdom would be at a total loss as to how to build an aircraft carrier even if you gave them the balsa wood and a stanley knife. The last serious order for a large ship went to Italy, as did the one before that which has just been launched - on time and on budget. Even the ferries are being bought from Poland.
The RAF is flying adapted Comets which ignite in midair.
The Bank of England has one man standing, like Horatius, trying to hold at least the financial and monetary probity of the economy.
Even the statistics and official manufacturing figures are a lie.
Well it would, wouldn't it? The glorious Leader has ordered two aircraft carriers from the British (note the 'British' )shipyards, the most important of which is in his electoral backyard in Scotland . So a lot of staff are being taken on, no doubt most of them from Gdansk, but let it pass, let it pass.
The ship building industry in the United Kingdom would be at a total loss as to how to build an aircraft carrier even if you gave them the balsa wood and a stanley knife. The last serious order for a large ship went to Italy, as did the one before that which has just been launched - on time and on budget. Even the ferries are being bought from Poland.
The RAF is flying adapted Comets which ignite in midair.
The Bank of England has one man standing, like Horatius, trying to hold at least the financial and monetary probity of the economy.
Even the statistics and official manufacturing figures are a lie.
Bowing the Head but not Bending the Knee
The Bank should not have cut the rate; an imperceptible alteration in fundamentals offers no compensation for the wrong message.
Virtuous or Vicious
Raising the interest rate will narrow the gap between bank rate and Libor, provide anti-inflationary pressure, sustain the pound , encourage saving and show up Brown's economic and financial policies for the unaffordable debt and mispriced risk they consist in.
Lowering the interest rate will diminish the central bank's credibility as banks do not respond with an alteration in their assessment of risk and continue to lend at rates even more widely detatched from bank rate, encourage inflation, cause a flight from sterling, reward reckless lending and borrowing, and sustain Brown's discreditable economic and financial regime.
Lowering the interest rate will diminish the central bank's credibility as banks do not respond with an alteration in their assessment of risk and continue to lend at rates even more widely detatched from bank rate, encourage inflation, cause a flight from sterling, reward reckless lending and borrowing, and sustain Brown's discreditable economic and financial regime.
Wednesday, 5 December 2007
No Exit
In the proposals for a common rule book, and required sharing of financial information between member-states in the provision of a financial supervisory authority for the whole European Union, not just the euro area, can be seen the the disastrous results for United Kingdom wealth creation the Labour regime is bringing about.
There will be no veto after the Lisbon Constitutional Treaty is ratified; the Labour regime Leader Brown goes to the formal signing on 13 December, making a nonsense of his puppet's opposition to the Padoa Schioppa proposals yesterday. After Lisbon the United Kingdom can do as it's told, and it isn't told much because of its constant opting out; there will be no opt-out on this.
There will be no veto after the Lisbon Constitutional Treaty is ratified; the Labour regime Leader Brown goes to the formal signing on 13 December, making a nonsense of his puppet's opposition to the Padoa Schioppa proposals yesterday. After Lisbon the United Kingdom can do as it's told, and it isn't told much because of its constant opting out; there will be no opt-out on this.
Tuesday, 4 December 2007
Losing Control
The Leader's control freakery must be causing him near apoplexy as the finance ministers of the European Union meet in Brussels to discuss financial services regulation and appropriate institutional arrangements and authority.
Il Ministro dell'Economia e delle Finanze, Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa, has voiced the consolidated views of the member-states' concerns after the management of the subprime crisis in the last few months in Europe and, while there is agreement that the Central Bank 'acted quickly and decisively in the monetary field.....' and that Ecofin and the Commission fulfilled their regulatory roles, 'the supervisory function appears to have been absent at the European level..' He accepts the IMF's judgement that in a crisis the member- states act on a national basis, 'from a narrow, national perspective..' and exchange minimal crucial information. Also there is a heavy regulatory burden and, at the same time, insufficient safeguarding of financial stability and investors.
He wants a single European rule book and he wants integrated supervision over cross-border market players. '... an enhanced exchange of information and an extended degree of consultation..' under tweaked extant EU powers should do the trick.
An analysis of the problems of European Union financial supervisory powers and actions, and a proposal so fully formed and elegant in its solutions, has not come uniquely from the Italian Ministry of Finance; and it beggars belief that Brown's puppet chancellor or toy Treasury was involved in preparing it.
Further:
A full report with reform recommendations is to be readied for April discussions on the lines of the Padoa Schioppa proposals. The current interchange of information between member- state financial institutions is to be increased now, the common rule book will have to wait until the April report and discussions. The proposals were welcomed by all but the German Socialists (who split from the German Christian Democrats' support for the measures ) and Gordon Brown's British Labour regime, which bitterly opposed the whole idea.
Il Ministro dell'Economia e delle Finanze, Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa, has voiced the consolidated views of the member-states' concerns after the management of the subprime crisis in the last few months in Europe and, while there is agreement that the Central Bank 'acted quickly and decisively in the monetary field.....' and that Ecofin and the Commission fulfilled their regulatory roles, 'the supervisory function appears to have been absent at the European level..' He accepts the IMF's judgement that in a crisis the member- states act on a national basis, 'from a narrow, national perspective..' and exchange minimal crucial information. Also there is a heavy regulatory burden and, at the same time, insufficient safeguarding of financial stability and investors.
He wants a single European rule book and he wants integrated supervision over cross-border market players. '... an enhanced exchange of information and an extended degree of consultation..' under tweaked extant EU powers should do the trick.
An analysis of the problems of European Union financial supervisory powers and actions, and a proposal so fully formed and elegant in its solutions, has not come uniquely from the Italian Ministry of Finance; and it beggars belief that Brown's puppet chancellor or toy Treasury was involved in preparing it.
Further:
A full report with reform recommendations is to be readied for April discussions on the lines of the Padoa Schioppa proposals. The current interchange of information between member- state financial institutions is to be increased now, the common rule book will have to wait until the April report and discussions. The proposals were welcomed by all but the German Socialists (who split from the German Christian Democrats' support for the measures ) and Gordon Brown's British Labour regime, which bitterly opposed the whole idea.
Monday, 3 December 2007
Ten Days To Shake Europe
The collapse of Gordon Brown’s personal authority after his fragility as a public politician, answering to the electorate’s representatives, has been exposed in the House of Commons, and the collapse of the Labour party into a miasma of corruptly and illegally sought and obtained money, thus depriving the Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath of what little democratic validity he had, now threatens the Labour regime policy of forcing the United Kingdom into the penultimate manifestation of the United States of Europe.
On 13 December this imposed, failure of a political leader intends to sign the Lisbon Treaty and betray: his own tiny, Scottish electorate; his party’s manifesto on which the defenestrated, democratically elected Labour Leader obtained a majority; his country, whose government under the SNP wishes to hold a consultative referendum on the Treaty; and our country.
The new Polish prime minister, elected after the Lisbon negotiations and with ratification of the Lisbon Constitutional Treaty as part of his platform, has stated that the commitments of the previous elected Polish government on the Treaty will be honoured; the unelected United Kingdom prime minister is unable to offer any such assurance, for his regime cannot evaluate the worth or validity of ‘opt-outs’ that are supposed to render the Treaty not a Constitution, and he is unwilling to proffer any election.
Brown’s formally secure position on driving the ratification of the Lisbon Constitutional Treaty through Parliament, using Blair’s electoral majority in the Commons, could well be undermined in the reality of open politics rather than Labour party secretive factionalism, bullying, and subservience to the trading of special interests and ‘stakeholding’.
NewLabourNewDawn had thought to pen political discourse permanently within Labour’s sordid confines, but open politics and the unfolding results of this unworthy goal of installing permanent statist governance have chosen otherwise.
Undoubtedly, on a formal vote of confidence in the Commons, Blair’s majority would hold for Brown; but how many times can this be used to prop up government failure to carry the House? Westminster is not the Italian House of Deputies and even there the persistent recourse to confidence votes to drive through government policy was criticized as bullying not governing. And on such an issue as the surrender of the United Kingdom’s sovereignty to a federal Europe, whipping could well not hold on substantive votes. The threat of facing the electorate has lost its sting when the electorate will reward those who oppose the swallowing up of the country by the continent.
Blair could carry his policies with cross party support; no such option exists for Brown in his dislikeability, barely constitutional status, lapped by the visible corruption of his party, driving a policy objectionable to much of the electorate he failed to consult.
Should Labour try for a third leader without a general election then even our Head of State might feel obliged to act as such, rather than just a procedural validator, and advise a general election.
On 13 December this imposed, failure of a political leader intends to sign the Lisbon Treaty and betray: his own tiny, Scottish electorate; his party’s manifesto on which the defenestrated, democratically elected Labour Leader obtained a majority; his country, whose government under the SNP wishes to hold a consultative referendum on the Treaty; and our country.
The new Polish prime minister, elected after the Lisbon negotiations and with ratification of the Lisbon Constitutional Treaty as part of his platform, has stated that the commitments of the previous elected Polish government on the Treaty will be honoured; the unelected United Kingdom prime minister is unable to offer any such assurance, for his regime cannot evaluate the worth or validity of ‘opt-outs’ that are supposed to render the Treaty not a Constitution, and he is unwilling to proffer any election.
Brown’s formally secure position on driving the ratification of the Lisbon Constitutional Treaty through Parliament, using Blair’s electoral majority in the Commons, could well be undermined in the reality of open politics rather than Labour party secretive factionalism, bullying, and subservience to the trading of special interests and ‘stakeholding’.
NewLabourNewDawn had thought to pen political discourse permanently within Labour’s sordid confines, but open politics and the unfolding results of this unworthy goal of installing permanent statist governance have chosen otherwise.
Undoubtedly, on a formal vote of confidence in the Commons, Blair’s majority would hold for Brown; but how many times can this be used to prop up government failure to carry the House? Westminster is not the Italian House of Deputies and even there the persistent recourse to confidence votes to drive through government policy was criticized as bullying not governing. And on such an issue as the surrender of the United Kingdom’s sovereignty to a federal Europe, whipping could well not hold on substantive votes. The threat of facing the electorate has lost its sting when the electorate will reward those who oppose the swallowing up of the country by the continent.
Blair could carry his policies with cross party support; no such option exists for Brown in his dislikeability, barely constitutional status, lapped by the visible corruption of his party, driving a policy objectionable to much of the electorate he failed to consult.
Should Labour try for a third leader without a general election then even our Head of State might feel obliged to act as such, rather than just a procedural validator, and advise a general election.
Credit Where It's Due
The American banks' exposure to credit card loans is $900 billion . It is to be discovered how much of this unsecured loan is subprime or worse. At least home loans are partially collateralised.
Northern Rock has put those in Granite; the Bank of England 's $60 billion is collateralised with what's left.
Northern Rock has put those in Granite; the Bank of England 's $60 billion is collateralised with what's left.
Saturday, 1 December 2007
Volare
Tomorrow morning Angels flies (wings discreetly folded under Sander tailleur) courtesy of Lufthansa Regional Airways, from Warsaw to Rome.
Clearly the Europe of the Regions is up and running (well, flying).
Clearly the Europe of the Regions is up and running (well, flying).
Tuesday, 27 November 2007
Dangerous Moonlight
Angels are in Warsaw till Sunday to spy on the
VIII Kongres Polskich Hidrauliko'w
where the future of Poland will be settled.
VIII Kongres Polskich Hidrauliko'w
where the future of Poland will be settled.
Single Source of Truth
That would be God .
It is harder to grasp the size of the Leader's ego than could ever have been imagined.
It is harder to grasp the size of the Leader's ego than could ever have been imagined.
Sunday, 25 November 2007
Out
No more opt-outs. Either the United Kingdom should be in the European Union and within the eurozone, or it should not be in the European Union at all.
Prime Minister of Denmark Rasmussen is to give Danes a say 'in joining the euro and ending Denmark’s opt-outs from Brussels', because staying outside the single currency and retaining opt-outs on defence, justice and home affairs are damaging Denmark's relationship with the European Union.
The Danish referendum will be 'the sixth time that the country has held a popular vote on an EU issue since Denmark joined in 1973. Although Britain joined the same year, the British Government has held only one referendum, in 1975.', notes today's Sunday Times.
"It is the Government’s view that the people in this parliamentary term should have the opportunity to take a stance on the Danish EU opt-outs. We have always said that the Danish exemptions are a hindrance for Denmark. It is the right time to take a decision.” Mr Rasmussen said.
And well said, as we are bundled, hurly burly, into accepting the new European Union constitution; it is simply silly to go on pretending that there exists a whole-hearted support for the UK's membership of the European Union or, as a fallback, that UK reserve can be met by 'opt-outs' that suit the control freakery of the Labour Leader and his regime for micro-managing the United Kingdom in their own interest. And, insofar as referendums are only ever advisory under our dying constitution, an election is needed on the issue.
Scotland's prime minister may yet put this whole mess to the Scottish people, and there is no foregone conclusion; Scotland has excellent economic and institutional reasons to reject continued EU membership and adopt a Norwegian relationship with the EU.
That would be one in the eye for England's Scottish prime minister.
Prime Minister of Denmark Rasmussen is to give Danes a say 'in joining the euro and ending Denmark’s opt-outs from Brussels', because staying outside the single currency and retaining opt-outs on defence, justice and home affairs are damaging Denmark's relationship with the European Union.
The Danish referendum will be 'the sixth time that the country has held a popular vote on an EU issue since Denmark joined in 1973. Although Britain joined the same year, the British Government has held only one referendum, in 1975.', notes today's Sunday Times.
"It is the Government’s view that the people in this parliamentary term should have the opportunity to take a stance on the Danish EU opt-outs. We have always said that the Danish exemptions are a hindrance for Denmark. It is the right time to take a decision.” Mr Rasmussen said.
And well said, as we are bundled, hurly burly, into accepting the new European Union constitution; it is simply silly to go on pretending that there exists a whole-hearted support for the UK's membership of the European Union or, as a fallback, that UK reserve can be met by 'opt-outs' that suit the control freakery of the Labour Leader and his regime for micro-managing the United Kingdom in their own interest. And, insofar as referendums are only ever advisory under our dying constitution, an election is needed on the issue.
Scotland's prime minister may yet put this whole mess to the Scottish people, and there is no foregone conclusion; Scotland has excellent economic and institutional reasons to reject continued EU membership and adopt a Norwegian relationship with the EU.
That would be one in the eye for England's Scottish prime minister.
Saturday, 24 November 2007
Jonah
Australian forces will be leaving Iraq as a priority of the new Australian government. As each government that committed troops to the invasion is defeated, with that commitment a large part of the reasons for their defeat, the disgraced 'coalition of the willing' falls apart.
Except in England; not because the pulling down of the elected Prime Minister was not justified, by the usurpers of power, on the grounds of Blair's support for the United States' Iraq war, for it was a major part of their claim that they represented the true Labour majority. But because, despite these claims, their Leader has lost the courage, and the opportunity, to withdraw Britain's army.
Over 5000 British troops encamped outside Basra airport have been doing nothing in recent months but be ready to defend themselves from attack. Southern Iraq is not just wholly beyond their control, it is wholly out of bounds. After politically imposed, dangerous delay for weeks, under US order, the British troops besieged in the city of Basra were allowed to join the main force at the airport.
The improper accession to power by Brown and his regime was not accompanied by the decision to withdraw the army; it was accompanied by a dishonest pretence that troops who had already left Iraq would be leaving in time for Christmas, and that further numbers would be withdrawn who were never there at all.
No courage; not the courage to risk US disapproval fully faced up to by Mr Zapatero and Mr Prodi as they were democratically chosen for office to replace Aznar and Berlusconi; not the courage of Poland's prime minister, Mr Tusk, as he orders the return of the Polish soldiers and rejects missiles on Polish soil. Not the courage of the Danish government, and certainly not the courage of the French and the German governments who refused to invade at all.
And yet, for all the falsity of the flags under which Brown seized power, for all the pretence that he was doing something to meet the demands of Labour voters who had abandoned their party because of Iraq, for all the fearful refusal to withdraw British troops or even allow the relocation of those 500 in such terrible exposure when he had the political strength and opportunity to do so at the beginning of the summer, any of which is utterly distasteful, the Leader is on worse terms with America than are Spain, Italy, Poland, and Denmark, than are France, Germany and, doubtless, Australia.
Brown's persistent and consistent contempt and underfunding for the armed forces of the United Kingdom over the decade of his Chancellorship has not just been exposed in these last days, but has been exposed as having led directly to the detriment of the armed forces' effectiveness in Iraq and Afghanistan; which has led, in turn, to the public deriding of Britain's role in southern Iraq by American generals.
And the speeches, remarks and displayed attitudes offered by Douglas Alexander and 'Lord' Malloch-Brown towards the United Kingdom's major ally have grossly disturbed the UK's relations with the US.
The new Australian government will withdraw its troops safely, and safeguard its relations with the United States. The United Kingdom's troops remain transfixed outside of Basra, and relations with the United States are at an abysmal low.
Jonah does not begin to cover it.
Except in England; not because the pulling down of the elected Prime Minister was not justified, by the usurpers of power, on the grounds of Blair's support for the United States' Iraq war, for it was a major part of their claim that they represented the true Labour majority. But because, despite these claims, their Leader has lost the courage, and the opportunity, to withdraw Britain's army.
Over 5000 British troops encamped outside Basra airport have been doing nothing in recent months but be ready to defend themselves from attack. Southern Iraq is not just wholly beyond their control, it is wholly out of bounds. After politically imposed, dangerous delay for weeks, under US order, the British troops besieged in the city of Basra were allowed to join the main force at the airport.
The improper accession to power by Brown and his regime was not accompanied by the decision to withdraw the army; it was accompanied by a dishonest pretence that troops who had already left Iraq would be leaving in time for Christmas, and that further numbers would be withdrawn who were never there at all.
No courage; not the courage to risk US disapproval fully faced up to by Mr Zapatero and Mr Prodi as they were democratically chosen for office to replace Aznar and Berlusconi; not the courage of Poland's prime minister, Mr Tusk, as he orders the return of the Polish soldiers and rejects missiles on Polish soil. Not the courage of the Danish government, and certainly not the courage of the French and the German governments who refused to invade at all.
And yet, for all the falsity of the flags under which Brown seized power, for all the pretence that he was doing something to meet the demands of Labour voters who had abandoned their party because of Iraq, for all the fearful refusal to withdraw British troops or even allow the relocation of those 500 in such terrible exposure when he had the political strength and opportunity to do so at the beginning of the summer, any of which is utterly distasteful, the Leader is on worse terms with America than are Spain, Italy, Poland, and Denmark, than are France, Germany and, doubtless, Australia.
Brown's persistent and consistent contempt and underfunding for the armed forces of the United Kingdom over the decade of his Chancellorship has not just been exposed in these last days, but has been exposed as having led directly to the detriment of the armed forces' effectiveness in Iraq and Afghanistan; which has led, in turn, to the public deriding of Britain's role in southern Iraq by American generals.
And the speeches, remarks and displayed attitudes offered by Douglas Alexander and 'Lord' Malloch-Brown towards the United Kingdom's major ally have grossly disturbed the UK's relations with the US.
The new Australian government will withdraw its troops safely, and safeguard its relations with the United States. The United Kingdom's troops remain transfixed outside of Basra, and relations with the United States are at an abysmal low.
Jonah does not begin to cover it.
Wednesday, 21 November 2007
Brown Government or Whited Sepulchre
As the Labour regime and its under-governance is exposed in the North East of England, the true nature of Gordon Brown’s grasp upon the office of Prime Minister and the executive powers conferred by achieving that office, is revealed by his former mouth, in this morning’s Telegraph.
“Gordon will also know that his real friends remain steadfastly loyal. I don't just mean Labour MPs. [no, that would be unwise, the PLP had no chance to vote on the Leader, a condition they share with all other sections of the Labour party electoral college, the Constituency Labour Parties and the individual, mass membership], I am talking about the trade unions. This group of nearly seven million people is much-maligned and often derided, but its support for full employment, the minimum wage and parental rights has benefited the whole country... They are not about to give up on their party and see their members and their families suffer under a Tory government.
Actually there are almost 6 million people of working age living on various forms of state benefit, and millions more in work relying on state support as their wages are so low, under the Labour regime .
And with the exposure of every family in the country to the theft of their identity and the raiding of their bank accounts we are looking at a social, no longer just a political, meltdown .
With the exposure of the nation’s children on the mountainside of the Labour regime's politically degraded civil service, we are facing danger from organized criminality entering any home in the United Kingdom.
He carries on, “These are also the people who, together with Gordon Brown, supported democratic change in the Labour Party;” Well, some might think they sought to maintain their own power structures against trotskyite splinter group entryists. This is not ‘supporting democracy’ as it is commonly understood in pluralist democratic societies in advanced capitalist countries. This is the repressive behaviour of the Party in large authoritarian states.
Gordon’s ‘real friends’ in the public sector trades unions and the few, so very few that remain in the once representative manufacturing and heavy industry unions, in all their ‘steadfast loyalty’ , pretending to the role, the reputation, and the honour of long -dead working people, deserve Matthew’s bitter denunciation:
Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men's bones, and of all uncleanness.
“Gordon will also know that his real friends remain steadfastly loyal. I don't just mean Labour MPs. [no, that would be unwise, the PLP had no chance to vote on the Leader, a condition they share with all other sections of the Labour party electoral college, the Constituency Labour Parties and the individual, mass membership], I am talking about the trade unions. This group of nearly seven million people is much-maligned and often derided, but its support for full employment, the minimum wage and parental rights has benefited the whole country... They are not about to give up on their party and see their members and their families suffer under a Tory government.
Actually there are almost 6 million people of working age living on various forms of state benefit, and millions more in work relying on state support as their wages are so low, under the Labour regime .
And with the exposure of every family in the country to the theft of their identity and the raiding of their bank accounts we are looking at a social, no longer just a political, meltdown .
With the exposure of the nation’s children on the mountainside of the Labour regime's politically degraded civil service, we are facing danger from organized criminality entering any home in the United Kingdom.
He carries on, “These are also the people who, together with Gordon Brown, supported democratic change in the Labour Party;” Well, some might think they sought to maintain their own power structures against trotskyite splinter group entryists. This is not ‘supporting democracy’ as it is commonly understood in pluralist democratic societies in advanced capitalist countries. This is the repressive behaviour of the Party in large authoritarian states.
Gordon’s ‘real friends’ in the public sector trades unions and the few, so very few that remain in the once representative manufacturing and heavy industry unions, in all their ‘steadfast loyalty’ , pretending to the role, the reputation, and the honour of long -dead working people, deserve Matthew’s bitter denunciation:
Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men's bones, and of all uncleanness.
Monday, 19 November 2007
Who Are These People?
Any fall in Northern Rock's credit rating would give some of its creditors 'the right to ask for an immediate refund of part of their loans under the terms of the loan deals.'
Up to now the loans and guarantees provided to Northern Rock by the Labour regime and, at its insistence, the Bank of England, approach the UK annual Defence budget.
They are now threatening to mount to half the GDP of Ireland.
Up to now the loans and guarantees provided to Northern Rock by the Labour regime and, at its insistence, the Bank of England, approach the UK annual Defence budget.
They are now threatening to mount to half the GDP of Ireland.
Sunday, 18 November 2007
Passport to Pimlico
The border between the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom lies within the island of Ireland. The Labour regime has redrawn it to extend to the whole island.
Those travelling between the mainland UK and Northern Ireland (reports the Mail) will be treated as if they are coming and going to a foreign country. A Statutory Instrument under general, non-specific empowering legislation will make its so, without discussion in Parliament.
Travel between the six counties of Ulster that make up Northern Ireland and the rest of Ulster and the Republic of Ireland will require no such formalities.
So it's not just Scotland that will be leaving the Union.
Those travelling between the mainland UK and Northern Ireland (reports the Mail) will be treated as if they are coming and going to a foreign country. A Statutory Instrument under general, non-specific empowering legislation will make its so, without discussion in Parliament.
Travel between the six counties of Ulster that make up Northern Ireland and the rest of Ulster and the Republic of Ireland will require no such formalities.
So it's not just Scotland that will be leaving the Union.
Saturday, 17 November 2007
Sub-Prime Minister
The Leader's net approval rating is in free fall: 48% in the summer; 30% last month; minus 10% now, according to YouGov.
Last month 59% thought he was doing a good job while 29% knew better.
Now 43% have learned and the deluded have fallen to 33%.
Last month 59% thought he was doing a good job while 29% knew better.
Now 43% have learned and the deluded have fallen to 33%.
Friday, 16 November 2007
Cheap Food Policy
By Christmas the weekly family food bill will have risen by as much as a quarter.
In the meantime Northern Rock 'borrowed' another £2 thousand million from the Bank of England in the past week alone.
The Labour regime's Lending Front to the Loyal Heartlands financing from the Bank of England has risen dramatically from 'only' £500 million last week. Northern Rock has grabbed close to £25 thousand million since it first got the chance on September 14.
The estimate is based on the "other assets" category in the Bank of England's weekly accounts, which quantifies the central bank's lender of last resort support.
Lowering fuel taxes instead of directing such a grotesquely high level of tax payers' money at such an undeserving object would reduce food-price rises and spread tax-funded largesse to the whole country rather than nationalizing the northeast in its entirety, never mind just its Labour bank.
In the meantime Northern Rock 'borrowed' another £2 thousand million from the Bank of England in the past week alone.
The Labour regime's Lending Front to the Loyal Heartlands financing from the Bank of England has risen dramatically from 'only' £500 million last week. Northern Rock has grabbed close to £25 thousand million since it first got the chance on September 14.
The estimate is based on the "other assets" category in the Bank of England's weekly accounts, which quantifies the central bank's lender of last resort support.
Lowering fuel taxes instead of directing such a grotesquely high level of tax payers' money at such an undeserving object would reduce food-price rises and spread tax-funded largesse to the whole country rather than nationalizing the northeast in its entirety, never mind just its Labour bank.
Wednesday, 14 November 2007
Giovinezza, Giovinezza!
"This is a generational challenge which requires sustained work over the long term and by a range of actions in schools, colleges, universities, faith groups and youth clubs," Mr Brown said.
A new forum of headteachers will be convened to find ways to protect pupils from extremist propaganda.
A police and security intelligence and research unit will be set up to identify, analyse and assess youngsters at risk of falling under the influence of extremists.
"There is no greater priority than the safety and security of our people.."
Giovinezza, Giovinezza!
Primavera di bellezza
Nel Fascismo la salvezza
Della nostra liberta.
A new forum of headteachers will be convened to find ways to protect pupils from extremist propaganda.
A police and security intelligence and research unit will be set up to identify, analyse and assess youngsters at risk of falling under the influence of extremists.
"There is no greater priority than the safety and security of our people.."
Giovinezza, Giovinezza!
Primavera di bellezza
Nel Fascismo la salvezza
Della nostra liberta.
Tuesday, 13 November 2007
Cri de Coeur
Read Beppe Grillo ( linked on Angels) as he reports on his address today at the European Union. What is said here applies just as much to Brown's regime. This is just a lightly edited extract - read it all.
We top Europe. First in football. First in fraud. Italy is fraudulent in agricultural funding. It is fraudulent in structural funds for the development of areas that are getting left behind. And I’m just referring to fraud that has been proved.
Billions of Euros arrive every year from the European Community to Italy. Where do they end up? Italian citizens don’t know. To get information they can only turn to the magistrates. But the magistrates, when they take action, are always blocked by the Government, by the Parties. ...
The financing from the European Community is our money at the end of the day. Italy participates with other countries to create the common fund that is then redistributed. Money goes out and then comes back. Rather like uncontrolled laundering of dirty money. Our taxes are financing European funding whose use the Italian citizens know nothing about. If it is useful, if it is not useful, what benefits it brings, when it ends.
The Vice President of the Community, Frattini,and the Minister of Community Policies, Bonino are very private people. They did not tell Prodi that Barroso had put up 275 million Euro for the integration of the Roma community. Spain got 52 million, Poland got 8.5 million. Poland? Have the Roma people gone to Poland as well? I thought they were all in Italy. For once when we could have used the funding for a good purpose we haven’t asked for it.
And that's strange. Because even our Regions have opened luxurious community offices in Brussels, that we pay for, to get to the funding. They have more office workers than all the other member -states.
The billions of Euro that come into Italy are devoted to useless works: roundabouts, theme supermarkets, the TAV tunnel in Val di Susa and Mediapolis in Piedmont. They finance projects that never serve any useful purpose, like alternative energy. They ended up in the pockets of that grey governance that connects the parties to the companies to criminal groupings.
It is better for Italy to contribute no longer to the common European Fund and in return receive no funding. Then the contributions money can be used by our government in other ways. To reduce our Public Debt, the biggest in Europe, one of the most impressive in the world.
A debt that risks taking us under. The money could be used to reduce taxes. To give incentives to companies to invest in Italy instead of encouraging Italian companies to transfer abroad. ...
It is well worth reading on; he speaks for England too.
We top Europe. First in football. First in fraud. Italy is fraudulent in agricultural funding. It is fraudulent in structural funds for the development of areas that are getting left behind. And I’m just referring to fraud that has been proved.
Billions of Euros arrive every year from the European Community to Italy. Where do they end up? Italian citizens don’t know. To get information they can only turn to the magistrates. But the magistrates, when they take action, are always blocked by the Government, by the Parties. ...
The financing from the European Community is our money at the end of the day. Italy participates with other countries to create the common fund that is then redistributed. Money goes out and then comes back. Rather like uncontrolled laundering of dirty money. Our taxes are financing European funding whose use the Italian citizens know nothing about. If it is useful, if it is not useful, what benefits it brings, when it ends.
The Vice President of the Community, Frattini,and the Minister of Community Policies, Bonino are very private people. They did not tell Prodi that Barroso had put up 275 million Euro for the integration of the Roma community. Spain got 52 million, Poland got 8.5 million. Poland? Have the Roma people gone to Poland as well? I thought they were all in Italy. For once when we could have used the funding for a good purpose we haven’t asked for it.
And that's strange. Because even our Regions have opened luxurious community offices in Brussels, that we pay for, to get to the funding. They have more office workers than all the other member -states.
The billions of Euro that come into Italy are devoted to useless works: roundabouts, theme supermarkets, the TAV tunnel in Val di Susa and Mediapolis in Piedmont. They finance projects that never serve any useful purpose, like alternative energy. They ended up in the pockets of that grey governance that connects the parties to the companies to criminal groupings.
It is better for Italy to contribute no longer to the common European Fund and in return receive no funding. Then the contributions money can be used by our government in other ways. To reduce our Public Debt, the biggest in Europe, one of the most impressive in the world.
A debt that risks taking us under. The money could be used to reduce taxes. To give incentives to companies to invest in Italy instead of encouraging Italian companies to transfer abroad. ...
It is well worth reading on; he speaks for England too.
Sunday, 11 November 2007
Sinking Funds
"Spending on flood and coastal erosion risk management has nearly doubled in cash terms, from £307 million in 1996-97 to an estimated £600 million in 2007-08. The Government will further increase spending to £800 million in 2010-11." DEFRA.
The government has thrown £24 billion - 24 thousand million pounds sterling - at a demutualised north -eastern building society posing as a responsible bank over the last two months.
Presumably the people of Norfolk and Suffolk are not "ours"; nor the land, settlements, infrastructure, culture, history, nor 'entitlement'.
The government has thrown £24 billion - 24 thousand million pounds sterling - at a demutualised north -eastern building society posing as a responsible bank over the last two months.
Presumably the people of Norfolk and Suffolk are not "ours"; nor the land, settlements, infrastructure, culture, history, nor 'entitlement'.
Saturday, 10 November 2007
Driving Oil Prices
The well to do's insistence on joining the rich in the hedge fund bonanza has led to the subprime difficulties. Modelling counter-intuitive and ostensibly but not necessarily high risk/high return investment for the few has ended in the running of really high risk for the many. The gaderene rush of the middle classes to desirable positions has, as usual, ruined the place and created a bridge to the masses. A little bit of subpriming and smearing of the indigent and feckless over the financial good behaviour of the rest of us is profitable. Do it on a scale sufficient to satisfy the new hedgers and we're all in the ditch.
Those subprime losses need to be recovered : where to turn? A low dollar invariably means high oil prices, and high other- commodity prices too. So now there is a rock bottom dollar exporting inflation to the world, resulting high oil and commodity prices, and the transmission of wealth-seeking in financial markets to rising prices in basic household goods and the disruption of the budgets of us all.
As the distinguished banker and academic Marcello de Cecco states in a complex and detailed argument in La Repubblica, there is no more evidence of demand in India and China, problems in the Gulf of Mexico, or the war in Iraq and threats further afield in the Middle East, causing these high prices than there is for a driven low dollar /high oil and commodity prices scenario.
But while that is nasty for our people, it is the difference between life and death when it comes to kerosene for cooking, bread, and enough warmth to stay alive for the poorest of the earth.
In all the drivelled words from the Leader about Africa and our responsibility to the dispossessed, nothing has been heard on how those who have been beyond accountability must now be held to account.
Those subprime losses need to be recovered : where to turn? A low dollar invariably means high oil prices, and high other- commodity prices too. So now there is a rock bottom dollar exporting inflation to the world, resulting high oil and commodity prices, and the transmission of wealth-seeking in financial markets to rising prices in basic household goods and the disruption of the budgets of us all.
As the distinguished banker and academic Marcello de Cecco states in a complex and detailed argument in La Repubblica, there is no more evidence of demand in India and China, problems in the Gulf of Mexico, or the war in Iraq and threats further afield in the Middle East, causing these high prices than there is for a driven low dollar /high oil and commodity prices scenario.
But while that is nasty for our people, it is the difference between life and death when it comes to kerosene for cooking, bread, and enough warmth to stay alive for the poorest of the earth.
In all the drivelled words from the Leader about Africa and our responsibility to the dispossessed, nothing has been heard on how those who have been beyond accountability must now be held to account.
Thursday, 8 November 2007
Oil Shock Price Warning (or any other order you like for those words)
$100 dollars a barrel is as nothing to what you will have to pay for a litre of organic first pressing oil.
The mosca olearia has struck and Al Quaida pales into insignificance beside The Fly. Not being able to drive your car is much more bearable than not being able to dress your food.
Don't buy cheap olive oil this year, you won't like what has been pressed into it. Buy walnut.
Later
It couldn't be worse. The olives lie, like heaps of hail, beneath their trees, melting into the ground , skidding beneath boots. Nothing. There will be no work for all the pickers, no work for the mills, for the commercial distributers and for the farming outlets.
So it was duck stuffed with fennel and roasted with all the kitchen garden had to offer; it was wine from Mr HG's father's cellar, red-brown and tasting of violets (though how do they know the taste of violets? Perhaps something is being lost in inner translation here) and, reminded by Elby's delicious menus, apple crumble with quinces from the garden, though we couldn't match the cream.
And then it felt much better and there is to be a bounteous harvest next year, we feel it in our bones.
The mosca olearia has struck and Al Quaida pales into insignificance beside The Fly. Not being able to drive your car is much more bearable than not being able to dress your food.
Don't buy cheap olive oil this year, you won't like what has been pressed into it. Buy walnut.
Later
It couldn't be worse. The olives lie, like heaps of hail, beneath their trees, melting into the ground , skidding beneath boots. Nothing. There will be no work for all the pickers, no work for the mills, for the commercial distributers and for the farming outlets.
So it was duck stuffed with fennel and roasted with all the kitchen garden had to offer; it was wine from Mr HG's father's cellar, red-brown and tasting of violets (though how do they know the taste of violets? Perhaps something is being lost in inner translation here) and, reminded by Elby's delicious menus, apple crumble with quinces from the garden, though we couldn't match the cream.
And then it felt much better and there is to be a bounteous harvest next year, we feel it in our bones.
Chinese Boxes
'May you live in exciting times', is supposed to be a Chinese malediction but current times are so interesting it's hard not to read goodwill into the words.
The downgrading of the Bank of England's powers in 1997 under the guise of making it independent, so long sung as a paean to the Leader's financial savvy, is at the bottom of the simmering , smelly mess that is polluting the United Kingdom's reputation in financial and banking competence and regulation.
After the Governor's explanation of Northern Rock's descent into not one but, effectively, two runs - the first more discreetly in August when its borrowings were not renewed, the second on the public street - it is clear that none of this specifically nor systemically would have happened but for Gordon Brown trying to cleave power to his horrid bosom.
And still there is no legislation in place, as there is all over Europe, to protect retail depositors, nor a proper reconciliation of the control structures and the reinstatement of a unitary authority where bucks might stop, to deal with the further unrolling of bad risk pricing.
It isn't just Northern Rock, and rockalike other banks; it is to be hoped they are just iffy mortgages. We're onwards and upwards to municipal bonds and their insurance. Mr Draghi, more properly and correctly empowered than Mr King, has acted against those banks he doesn't care to leave to their own devices in these matters - but then he has supervisory powers over the behaviour of financial institutions, and unlike the FSA, arms' length relations with the Treasury.
And if municipal bonds and their insurance don't seem particularly important in the UK context, consider that troubles reported in the US (Evans-Pritchard in the Telegraph) 'could force pension funds, mutual funds, and institutions to liquidate holdings on a vast scale, causing the credit crisis to spread into areas that have remained unscathed until now.'
The downgrading of the Bank of England's powers in 1997 under the guise of making it independent, so long sung as a paean to the Leader's financial savvy, is at the bottom of the simmering , smelly mess that is polluting the United Kingdom's reputation in financial and banking competence and regulation.
After the Governor's explanation of Northern Rock's descent into not one but, effectively, two runs - the first more discreetly in August when its borrowings were not renewed, the second on the public street - it is clear that none of this specifically nor systemically would have happened but for Gordon Brown trying to cleave power to his horrid bosom.
And still there is no legislation in place, as there is all over Europe, to protect retail depositors, nor a proper reconciliation of the control structures and the reinstatement of a unitary authority where bucks might stop, to deal with the further unrolling of bad risk pricing.
It isn't just Northern Rock, and rockalike other banks; it is to be hoped they are just iffy mortgages. We're onwards and upwards to municipal bonds and their insurance. Mr Draghi, more properly and correctly empowered than Mr King, has acted against those banks he doesn't care to leave to their own devices in these matters - but then he has supervisory powers over the behaviour of financial institutions, and unlike the FSA, arms' length relations with the Treasury.
And if municipal bonds and their insurance don't seem particularly important in the UK context, consider that troubles reported in the US (Evans-Pritchard in the Telegraph) 'could force pension funds, mutual funds, and institutions to liquidate holdings on a vast scale, causing the credit crisis to spread into areas that have remained unscathed until now.'
Tuesday, 6 November 2007
Visionary Leadership
Gordon Brown to launch house-building boom - headline in the Telegraph.
Here is the financial world in crisis because of people with poor credit records, low wages, difficulties various - the subprime mortgage market clientele to whom the woes of the world are being attributed - failing to keep up with their mortgage payments; here we are with falling house prices, just to add to the hurt.
And the Leader announces his vision: building 3 million houses for people with low wages (probably made even lower by his confiscatory tax regimes), difficulties various, possibly damaged credit records . Where is the funding coming from then? If he has an idea perhaps he'd like to whisper it to Northern Rock.
Lowering transaction costs and imposts on the current housing stock would do more, faster and less environmentally damagingly, to meet housing demand; and ending death taxes on main homes passing between family generations.
Here is the financial world in crisis because of people with poor credit records, low wages, difficulties various - the subprime mortgage market clientele to whom the woes of the world are being attributed - failing to keep up with their mortgage payments; here we are with falling house prices, just to add to the hurt.
And the Leader announces his vision: building 3 million houses for people with low wages (probably made even lower by his confiscatory tax regimes), difficulties various, possibly damaged credit records . Where is the funding coming from then? If he has an idea perhaps he'd like to whisper it to Northern Rock.
Lowering transaction costs and imposts on the current housing stock would do more, faster and less environmentally damagingly, to meet housing demand; and ending death taxes on main homes passing between family generations.
Economics 101
"I think most people expect that we have several more months to get through before the banks have revealed all the losses that have occurred, and we have taken measures to finance their obligations that result from that, but we are going in the right direction." Yes, indeed, but no thanks to the behaviour of the Labour regime.
As lender of last resort any central bank provides liquidity at a penal interest rate to commercial banks against good quality collateral; doubtless the Bank of England, under its estimable Governor, is doing just that right now.
The Bank of England does not lend on commercial terms for commercial purposes, in the kind of operation typical of a soviet-type banking system, where the regime requires the Central Bank, the mono bank, (as was the case with Northern Quicksands as no other bank would go anywhere near it), to lend to undercapitalised enterprises; and even then, loans to those enterprises would be to state enterprises, not to a quasi-fiscal Treasury asset of dubious value.
That Mervyn King had to explain,
"I said to the Chancellor, ''This is not something which a central bank can do ... They don't normally finance takeovers by one company for another, let alone to the tune of £30 billion, which is rather a large amount of money.",
means either the First Lord of the Treasury and the Chancellor of the Exchequer need to repeat Economics 101, or they have mistaken their country and their century.
Furthermore:
The Governor praised the Chancellor, saying,
"And I don't think it took the Chancellor very long to recognise that not only was this something which central banks don't do, it's also something that governments don't do."
As lender of last resort any central bank provides liquidity at a penal interest rate to commercial banks against good quality collateral; doubtless the Bank of England, under its estimable Governor, is doing just that right now.
The Bank of England does not lend on commercial terms for commercial purposes, in the kind of operation typical of a soviet-type banking system, where the regime requires the Central Bank, the mono bank, (as was the case with Northern Quicksands as no other bank would go anywhere near it), to lend to undercapitalised enterprises; and even then, loans to those enterprises would be to state enterprises, not to a quasi-fiscal Treasury asset of dubious value.
That Mervyn King had to explain,
"I said to the Chancellor, ''This is not something which a central bank can do ... They don't normally finance takeovers by one company for another, let alone to the tune of £30 billion, which is rather a large amount of money.",
means either the First Lord of the Treasury and the Chancellor of the Exchequer need to repeat Economics 101, or they have mistaken their country and their century.
Furthermore:
The Governor praised the Chancellor, saying,
"And I don't think it took the Chancellor very long to recognise that not only was this something which central banks don't do, it's also something that governments don't do."
Monday, 5 November 2007
Real Racism
"The DNA database has become a national disgrace, stuffed with innocent children and a disproportionate number of black people.
"It is time it was limited to those who are guilty or under investigation for sexual or violent crime."
(Shami Chakrabarti, director of civil rights group Liberty)
'There are now 150,000 children aged 16 or under on the system, with another 334,000 aged between 16 and 18. In one case, the DNA of a seven-month-old girl was added. Children can be added to the register only with their parents' agreement' writes the Daily Mail; but only if the child is under ten is written consent needed. Some 50 under-tens are on the database.
Once a DNA profile has been uploaded onto the data base there are difficult and narrow routes to achieving its removal. It is expected that 10 million profiles will have been uploaded by 2011. Unpleasant and unethical experiments, without the DNA profile owners' permission having even been sought, are being carried out to determine the 'ethnic profile' of any particular DNA donor.
The Nuffield Council on Bioethics demand that only the profiles of convicted criminals be retained has got nowhere.
"It is time it was limited to those who are guilty or under investigation for sexual or violent crime."
(Shami Chakrabarti, director of civil rights group Liberty)
'There are now 150,000 children aged 16 or under on the system, with another 334,000 aged between 16 and 18. In one case, the DNA of a seven-month-old girl was added. Children can be added to the register only with their parents' agreement' writes the Daily Mail; but only if the child is under ten is written consent needed. Some 50 under-tens are on the database.
Once a DNA profile has been uploaded onto the data base there are difficult and narrow routes to achieving its removal. It is expected that 10 million profiles will have been uploaded by 2011. Unpleasant and unethical experiments, without the DNA profile owners' permission having even been sought, are being carried out to determine the 'ethnic profile' of any particular DNA donor.
The Nuffield Council on Bioethics demand that only the profiles of convicted criminals be retained has got nowhere.
About the woodlands I will go...
There was a saying, not heard today so often as formerly . .
"What do they know of England who only England know?"
It is a saying which dates. It has a period aroma, like Kipling's "Recessional" or the state rooms at Osborne. That phase is ended, so plainly ended, that even the generation born at its zenith, for whom the realisation is the hardest, no longer deceive themselves as to the fact. That power and that glory have vanished, as surely, if not as tracelessly, as the imperial fleet from the waters of Spithead.
And yet England is not as Nineveh and Tyre, nor as Rome, nor as Spain. Herodotus relates how the Athenians, returning to their city after it had been sacked and burnt by Xerxes and the Persian army, were astonished to find, alive and flourishing in the blackened ruins, the sacred olive tree, the native symbol of their country.
So we today, at the heart of a vanished empire, amid the fragments of demolished glory, seem to find, like one of her own oak trees, standing and growing, the sap still rising from her ancient roots to meet the spring, England herself.
Perhaps, after all, we know most of England "who only England know".
So the continuity of her existence was unbroken when the looser connections which had linked her with distant continents and strange races fell away. Thus our generation is one which comes home again from years of distant wandering. We discover affinities with earlier generations of English who felt no country but this to be their own. We discover affinities with earlier generations of English who felt there was this deep this providential difference between our empire and those others, that the nationhood of the mother country remained unaltered through it all, almost unconscious of the strange fantastic structure built around her - in modern parlance "uninvolved".
Backward travels our gaze, beyond the grenadiers and the philosophers of the 18th century, beyond the pikemen and the preachers of the 17th, back through the brash adventurous days of the first Elizabeth and the hard materialism of the Tudors and there at last we find them, or seem to find them, in many a village church, beneath the tall tracery of a perpendicular East window and the coffered ceiling of the chantry chapel.
From brass and stone, from line and effigy, their eyes look out at us, and we gaze into them, as if we would win some answer from their silence."Tell us what it is that binds us together; show us the clue that leads through a thousand years; whisper to us the secret of this charmed life of England, that we in our time may know how to hold it fast.
"What would they say"?
They would speak to us in our own English tongue, the tongue made for telling truth in, tuned already to songs that haunt the hearer like the sadness of spring. They would tell us of that marvellous land, so sweetly mixed of opposites in climate that all the seasons of the year appear there in their greatest perfection; of the fields amid which they built their halls, their cottages, their churches, and where the same blackthorn showered its petals upon them as upon us; they would tell us, surely of the rivers the hills and of the island coasts of England.
One thing above all they assuredly would not forget; Lancastrian or Yorkist, squire or lord, priest or layman; they would point to the kingship of England, and its emblems everywhere visible.
They would tell us too of a palace near the great city which the Romans built at a ford of the River Thames, to which men resorted out of all England to speak on behalf of their fellows, a thing called 'Parliament'; and from that hall went out their fellows with fur trimmed gowns and strange caps on their heads, to judge the same judgments, and dispense the same justice, to all the people of England.
Symbol, yet source of power; person of flesh and blood, yet incarnation of an idea; the kingship would have seemed to them, as it seems to us, to express the qualities that are peculiarly England's: the unity of England, effortless and unconstrained, which accepts the unlimited supremacy of Crown in Parliament so naturally as not to be aware of it; the homogeneity of England, so profound and embracing that the counties and the regions make it a hobby to discover their differences and assert their peculiarities; the continuity of England, which has brought this unity and this homogeneity about by the slow alchemy of centuries.
For the unbroken life of the English nation over a thousand years and more is a phenomenon unique in history, the product of a specific set of circumstances like those which in biology are supposed to start by chance a new line of evolution. Institutions which elsewhere are recent and artificial creations appear in England almost as works of nature, spontaneous and unquestioned.
From this continuous life of a united people in its island home spring, as from the soil of England, all that is peculiar in the gifts and the achievements of the English nation. All its impact on the outer world in earlier colonies, in the later Pax Britannica, in government and lawgiving, in commerce and in thought has flowed from impulses generated here. And this continuing life of England is symbolised and expressed, as by nothing else, by the English kingship. English it is, for all the leeks and thistles grafted upon it here and elsewhere. The stock that received all these grafts is English, the sap that rises through it to the extremities rises from roots in English earth, the earth of England's history.
We in our day ought well to guard, as highly to honour, the parent stem of England, and its royal talisman; for we know not what branches yet that wonderful tree will have the power to put forth.
The danger is not always violence and force; them we have withstood before and can again.
The peril can also be indifference and humbug, which might squander the accumulated wealth of tradition and devalue our sacred symbolism to achieve some cheap compromise or some evanescent purpose.
"We must recognise that we have a great inheritance in our possession,
which represents the prolonged achievement of the centuries;
that there is not one of our simple uncounted rights today
for which better men than we are have not died on the scaffold or the battlefield.
We have not only a great treasure; we have a great cause.
Are we taking every measure within our power to defend that cause?"
(Winston Churchill Paris September 1936).
Enoch Powell: Speech, 1961.
"What do they know of England who only England know?"
It is a saying which dates. It has a period aroma, like Kipling's "Recessional" or the state rooms at Osborne. That phase is ended, so plainly ended, that even the generation born at its zenith, for whom the realisation is the hardest, no longer deceive themselves as to the fact. That power and that glory have vanished, as surely, if not as tracelessly, as the imperial fleet from the waters of Spithead.
And yet England is not as Nineveh and Tyre, nor as Rome, nor as Spain. Herodotus relates how the Athenians, returning to their city after it had been sacked and burnt by Xerxes and the Persian army, were astonished to find, alive and flourishing in the blackened ruins, the sacred olive tree, the native symbol of their country.
So we today, at the heart of a vanished empire, amid the fragments of demolished glory, seem to find, like one of her own oak trees, standing and growing, the sap still rising from her ancient roots to meet the spring, England herself.
Perhaps, after all, we know most of England "who only England know".
So the continuity of her existence was unbroken when the looser connections which had linked her with distant continents and strange races fell away. Thus our generation is one which comes home again from years of distant wandering. We discover affinities with earlier generations of English who felt no country but this to be their own. We discover affinities with earlier generations of English who felt there was this deep this providential difference between our empire and those others, that the nationhood of the mother country remained unaltered through it all, almost unconscious of the strange fantastic structure built around her - in modern parlance "uninvolved".
Backward travels our gaze, beyond the grenadiers and the philosophers of the 18th century, beyond the pikemen and the preachers of the 17th, back through the brash adventurous days of the first Elizabeth and the hard materialism of the Tudors and there at last we find them, or seem to find them, in many a village church, beneath the tall tracery of a perpendicular East window and the coffered ceiling of the chantry chapel.
From brass and stone, from line and effigy, their eyes look out at us, and we gaze into them, as if we would win some answer from their silence."Tell us what it is that binds us together; show us the clue that leads through a thousand years; whisper to us the secret of this charmed life of England, that we in our time may know how to hold it fast.
"What would they say"?
They would speak to us in our own English tongue, the tongue made for telling truth in, tuned already to songs that haunt the hearer like the sadness of spring. They would tell us of that marvellous land, so sweetly mixed of opposites in climate that all the seasons of the year appear there in their greatest perfection; of the fields amid which they built their halls, their cottages, their churches, and where the same blackthorn showered its petals upon them as upon us; they would tell us, surely of the rivers the hills and of the island coasts of England.
One thing above all they assuredly would not forget; Lancastrian or Yorkist, squire or lord, priest or layman; they would point to the kingship of England, and its emblems everywhere visible.
They would tell us too of a palace near the great city which the Romans built at a ford of the River Thames, to which men resorted out of all England to speak on behalf of their fellows, a thing called 'Parliament'; and from that hall went out their fellows with fur trimmed gowns and strange caps on their heads, to judge the same judgments, and dispense the same justice, to all the people of England.
Symbol, yet source of power; person of flesh and blood, yet incarnation of an idea; the kingship would have seemed to them, as it seems to us, to express the qualities that are peculiarly England's: the unity of England, effortless and unconstrained, which accepts the unlimited supremacy of Crown in Parliament so naturally as not to be aware of it; the homogeneity of England, so profound and embracing that the counties and the regions make it a hobby to discover their differences and assert their peculiarities; the continuity of England, which has brought this unity and this homogeneity about by the slow alchemy of centuries.
For the unbroken life of the English nation over a thousand years and more is a phenomenon unique in history, the product of a specific set of circumstances like those which in biology are supposed to start by chance a new line of evolution. Institutions which elsewhere are recent and artificial creations appear in England almost as works of nature, spontaneous and unquestioned.
From this continuous life of a united people in its island home spring, as from the soil of England, all that is peculiar in the gifts and the achievements of the English nation. All its impact on the outer world in earlier colonies, in the later Pax Britannica, in government and lawgiving, in commerce and in thought has flowed from impulses generated here. And this continuing life of England is symbolised and expressed, as by nothing else, by the English kingship. English it is, for all the leeks and thistles grafted upon it here and elsewhere. The stock that received all these grafts is English, the sap that rises through it to the extremities rises from roots in English earth, the earth of England's history.
We in our day ought well to guard, as highly to honour, the parent stem of England, and its royal talisman; for we know not what branches yet that wonderful tree will have the power to put forth.
The danger is not always violence and force; them we have withstood before and can again.
The peril can also be indifference and humbug, which might squander the accumulated wealth of tradition and devalue our sacred symbolism to achieve some cheap compromise or some evanescent purpose.
"We must recognise that we have a great inheritance in our possession,
which represents the prolonged achievement of the centuries;
that there is not one of our simple uncounted rights today
for which better men than we are have not died on the scaffold or the battlefield.
We have not only a great treasure; we have a great cause.
Are we taking every measure within our power to defend that cause?"
(Winston Churchill Paris September 1936).
Enoch Powell: Speech, 1961.
Friday, 2 November 2007
The Poet's Response to Taking Liberties
Poetry invariably has the upper hand in laying meaning and feeling bare; here is Nick Drew on the Leader's most recent public display.
Between the Lines of Gordon Brown’s Liberty
I want to talk today of liberty
(just as I talk of courage, in the hope
that, by association, I’ll be thought
to be their perfect representative)
We are all citizens of our country
With shared and common history, destiny
(unless we’re not ... but let’s not dwell on that.
So - “British jobs for British workers”, eh ?)
It’s not just tolerance; liberty means
Due process against arbitrary power
(which means, in turn, review by a commission
- the Great and Good. Appointed by Myself)
Freedom is only fully realized
When barriers are by society
O’ercome, that stop men being what they may
(and for society, read Gordon Brown:
I’ll be the arbiter of barriers,
and smash all in My path that holds Me back)
But liberty is not the only prize.
The test for any government will be
How it makes choices, weighs priorities
(and I’ve decided ID cards for all)
Now five times fifty are the powers We hold
To enter homes upon authorities’ whim
So We shall bring together all these powers,
For clarity, into a single code
(the better to coordinate Our raids)
The great prize of the information age
Is sharing data ’cross the public sphere
And using biometrics to new ends
Thus We deliver personalized services
(and other ‘personal’ schemes I have in mind)
Clear trends in recent terrorism show
That 28 days may not be enough
(what am I bid? fifty? sixty? yet more?
one hundred ? that sounds round and fair to Me)
To each new generation falls the task
Of redefining British liberty
(and you can safely leave this task to Me.
Yes, safely sleep, and leave this task to Me.)
Between the Lines of Gordon Brown’s Liberty
I want to talk today of liberty
(just as I talk of courage, in the hope
that, by association, I’ll be thought
to be their perfect representative)
We are all citizens of our country
With shared and common history, destiny
(unless we’re not ... but let’s not dwell on that.
So - “British jobs for British workers”, eh ?)
It’s not just tolerance; liberty means
Due process against arbitrary power
(which means, in turn, review by a commission
- the Great and Good. Appointed by Myself)
Freedom is only fully realized
When barriers are by society
O’ercome, that stop men being what they may
(and for society, read Gordon Brown:
I’ll be the arbiter of barriers,
and smash all in My path that holds Me back)
But liberty is not the only prize.
The test for any government will be
How it makes choices, weighs priorities
(and I’ve decided ID cards for all)
Now five times fifty are the powers We hold
To enter homes upon authorities’ whim
So We shall bring together all these powers,
For clarity, into a single code
(the better to coordinate Our raids)
The great prize of the information age
Is sharing data ’cross the public sphere
And using biometrics to new ends
Thus We deliver personalized services
(and other ‘personal’ schemes I have in mind)
Clear trends in recent terrorism show
That 28 days may not be enough
(what am I bid? fifty? sixty? yet more?
one hundred ? that sounds round and fair to Me)
To each new generation falls the task
Of redefining British liberty
(and you can safely leave this task to Me.
Yes, safely sleep, and leave this task to Me.)
Walking on Air
There must be a presumption that Northern Rock's gross assets are worth less than £24 billion, and certainly less than the £30 billion or even £40 billion some reports are wondering if the Bank of England might print for them.
So why are the shares of Northern Rock trading at a positive, though much reduced, price?
Either the Bank of England (that's you, the taxpayer) will not be repaid in full for the liquidity it has provided; or Northern Rock shareholders are cartoon characters paddling air long after the cliff edge. Tertium non datur.
Who are these shareholders to command such allegiance from the Labour regime?
So why are the shares of Northern Rock trading at a positive, though much reduced, price?
Either the Bank of England (that's you, the taxpayer) will not be repaid in full for the liquidity it has provided; or Northern Rock shareholders are cartoon characters paddling air long after the cliff edge. Tertium non datur.
Who are these shareholders to command such allegiance from the Labour regime?
Immigration, Immigration, Immigration
I write as an immigrant. The country I choose to live in cannot keep me out, nor deny me all the welfare resources paid for by indigenous taxpayers. I pay tax here, of course I do, but nothing like on the scale needed to meet the costs I might, though fortunately don't, impose. Off-setting my appearance here is the appearance of nationals from this country in England. So when the costs of immigrants are counted there should be an allowance for citizen exchange. But that would imply some notion of like for like: well-educated; speaking the language; self-supporting; employed;bringing wealth to invest; of working age, is very different from destitute, unskilled, unemployable, dependent, and determinedly unassimilable.
In seeking a high level of welfare benefit, immigrants have been shown, in various academic and research studies, to be extremely selective of their destination. Where benefits for maternity care, general, (but particularly chronic and old-age), healthcare, education sevices, lack -of- economic -activity benefits, subsidized or even free housing, and poor fraudulent -claims controls coupled with transferability of benefits to country of origin - such as child welfare benefits - are high, these destinations attract the highest immigrant numbers. As is apparent in the United Kingdom.
James Meade, Nobel Prize-winning economist, offered the simplest and most elegant of solutions to all of this: make available to any would -be immigrant the same level of welfare benefits as would be offered to the target country's citizens in the immigrant's country of origin.
If that would not be enough to provide a living then refuse entry.
No admittance merely to enjoy the often high and universally available social wage. And here lies the crux of the immigration problem. Highly developed, advanced capitalist countries have a better standard of living, even without targetted benefits, than many ex-socialist sinks.
In seeking a high level of welfare benefit, immigrants have been shown, in various academic and research studies, to be extremely selective of their destination. Where benefits for maternity care, general, (but particularly chronic and old-age), healthcare, education sevices, lack -of- economic -activity benefits, subsidized or even free housing, and poor fraudulent -claims controls coupled with transferability of benefits to country of origin - such as child welfare benefits - are high, these destinations attract the highest immigrant numbers. As is apparent in the United Kingdom.
James Meade, Nobel Prize-winning economist, offered the simplest and most elegant of solutions to all of this: make available to any would -be immigrant the same level of welfare benefits as would be offered to the target country's citizens in the immigrant's country of origin.
If that would not be enough to provide a living then refuse entry.
No admittance merely to enjoy the often high and universally available social wage. And here lies the crux of the immigration problem. Highly developed, advanced capitalist countries have a better standard of living, even without targetted benefits, than many ex-socialist sinks.
Wednesday, 31 October 2007
Go Home
How inappropriate that the representative of a Scottish constituency who has no say in the education provided to his constituents is setting out standards for, and condemning, the education provided in England, where he represents no-one at all. And calling for interference by the state in the provision of apprenticeships in other people's companies.
The Leader, and everything he stands for, belongs in the past and in another country.
The Leader, and everything he stands for, belongs in the past and in another country.
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