OPINION: The strange logic of Abroad.

One way and another, it’s been a week for contemplation, assessment and reality checks. And my conclusion from all of it is that I like Abroad: mainly because it’s funny – but I’ve always liked it because it’s a change, they do things differently there, and we can benefit by adopting some of the innovations they have which we still lack in Britain.

However, as I don’t expect Abroad to grovel to me, I’m unclear as to why the Prime Minister is grovelling to them. No, that ‘s not entirely accurate: I understand his motive, I just don’t understand why he thinks doing that will get us anywhere. For his tactics are based on the idea that they’re as logical as we are – and the evidence on this matter is against him.

Because I like Abroad so much, I voted for staying in what was then the EEC in whenever it was. I was still the young side of middle-aged then, and I thought my ideals could be realised. I wanted us to cook like the Italians, live life at the pace of the French, adopt the German attitude to industrial relations, and generally learn from others….just as they could appreciate our ability to queue, have a well-mannered police force, and laugh at silly things.

The EEC became the EC and begat the EU, a monster entirely unforeseen by either Konrad Adenauer, Charles de Gaulle or even Ted Heath. What I had hoped might be a learning vehicle via which to celebrate diversity and create solidarity became the means by which to manufacture uniformity and create anarchy. This outcome – grey, fascist mayhem – may be an impossible nightmare, but it is as nothing compared to what the rest of Abroad has become.

In the Middle East, the Persia of cultured scholars and beautiful women is a Dark Age of mediaeval fundamentalism and black bin-bags renamed Iran. Next door, an Iraq where all religions muddled along once upon a time transmuted into a B’aathist alchemy and (when patience ran out) an ill-advised invasion followed by lawless insurgency. On the edge of this shocked and awed desert sits Turkey, a nation once renowned for its prison brutality and sexual decadence. Somehow, with no stage in between, it has emerged as the sponsor of terrorism, mad propaganda and Islamism. The modernism founded by Kemal Ataturk is gradually being eroded by an AK Government with ambitions to join the EU.

At the southern end of Africa, a costly World Cup is being hailed as a victory for the ANC, an increasingly intolerant, left-leaning Party lauded by the Guardian, and dominated by two murderously corrupt veterans, Winnie Mandela and Jacob Zuma. The country’s administrative infrastructure is gradually melting down, public order is such that all cars and houses have to be fitted with cutting-edge security, unemployment and poor housing have yet to be tackled, and the familiar African tribal corruption has everything from the police to the health service in its grip. Unsurprisingly, Chinese involvement and investment in the banking and gold sectors is encouraged by other ANC old-timers, in an act of worship somewhere between naivety and self-protection.

Further to the East lies India, a country which ejected the British Crown over six decades ago, and seems to have largely replaced it with the Gandhi dynasty. Rahul Gandhi is reputedly not the sharpest card in the pack – and something of a speed-junkie playboy as well as being pro the poor and virulently anti-British. An economic boom seems if anything to be widening the yawning gap between rich and poor rather than fulfilling the Congress Party’s long-stated ambition to create a more egalitarian State. David Cameron wants India to buy our exports, and India wants us to take in their human exports as the quid pro quo. Yes, I’m baffled by supposed logic of this too.

Further north lies the Russian Federation, a huge land-mass with rotting weaponry and a crumbling economy. It’s started borrowing heavily again, and getting ideas about invading people. The mafia has enormous influence, the debt is largely based on a covered-up property bust, and a sort of two-tone dictatorship seems to have been established. The RF wants to use energy with which to blackmail the rest of us, but energy needs are about to plunge; so you can expect the wheat crop to fail at some point next year, after which all bets are off.

And so on to China, where ‘managed laissez-faire’ is the latest oxymoron in a long series of failed Third Ways adopted by the more dull thinkers of the world. In China, stop-go fiscal economics has been turned into goforit-screeching brakes zoomonomcs. I think there must be two blokes in charge there: one called Gung Ho, and the other Hell No. And yes I know its childish to make fun of foreign names, but we the British laugh at foreigners and nobody ever dies of it. Laugh at the leadership in China, and your head will be detached with a blunt instrument. Chinese names are funny: get over it.

On the whole, it’s worse almost everywhere else but here. In the eurozone they have a currency nobody takes seriously, whereas we have one that is already being talked about as an interim second currency to the Yuan. We may have been paying ourselves too much and borrowing far too much for thirty years, but we have diagnosed the illness; in the States, they’re still at the “Why am I ill?” stage…and even we don’t have county councils going bust.

The one place where I strongly suspect the outlook is far better than here is Australia. So we’re off there to have a look around in October. But before anyone gets too excited about Oz, it’s vital to heed Bill Bryson’s advice: there are more things that can kill you in that island continent than all the rest of the world put together. And remember – this is the nation that gave us Neighbours. And their new Prime Minister strikes me as not very nice.

The point remains this: we very nearly lost the plot over here after 1990ish – for a while after 1979 we completely lost it – but there is a growing realisation among thinkers that things won’t get better until we grow up, face the music and start being impressively creative again. Such logic is increasingly absent abroad, where a weirdly eclectic cast of beliefs are in play:

‘Earthquakes are caused by female nakedness, prosperity lies down the road of moving the wealth around and ignoring the borrowing, women want to dress like a black pillar box, Europe needs more Islamists, America never polluted anywhere in its entire history, Aids can be prevented by washing your willy, you can tell a true radical by the power boats he owns, Vodka palaces are a sign of economic health, foreigners smell of milk, it is a French right that someone else will pay, and mining companies are really very nice when you get to know them.’

Under the Blair-Brown hegemony, we were heading with all speed towards joining the Band of Illogic that is Abroad: vetting eleven million people to catch 200 paedophiles, making the police a subsidiary of social services, basing 68% of the economy on financial services, spending £21 billion to enable gps to talk to hospitals, and insisting that half the Cabinet must be women – even if the only ones left were dead.

This Wutism (the Wishful Unthinking Tendency) is not as yet in the lead-lined coffin full of silver bullets: with 44% of the electorate paid by them, it’s hard to get an outright majority in favour of ending the madness, as self-interest tends to intervene. But once the fluffiness has been extracted from Coalition policies – and the rebel LibDems decide to shaft Slick Nick – I have little doubt that the Tories will romp home in their next exposure to the People’s verdict.

There’s a lot more waking up that Britain needs to do – and the remaining need to destroy the political Party Establishment at the ballot box one day – but at last I sense a corner being turned. Sooner or later, this Sceptred Isle will once again be that place where the slightest hint of bollocks is treated in the sort of correct manner that is not at all political: splutters, giggling, vomiting impressions, and the phrase, “Pull the other one, chummy”. Then, at last, I can retire completely.

EDUCATION AS PROPAGANDA

Many years ago, my O-level physics teacher LesLumley told us one day that he had been an exchange teacher posted to Nazi Germany in 1938. He explained how he had been horrified to see exam papers being used for obvious brainwashing purposes, and mentioned two horrific examples:

‘If a stuka carries x bombs and each bomb can kill y civilians, what formula denotes the number of civilians who will be killed by a bombing raid involving 50 Stukas?’

‘If a Jew lends money at an illegal monthly rate 5% above the maximum annual rate allowed at 7%, what will the illegal cost to an Aryan borrower be?”

We could scarcely believe him. But Les was a quiet and warm-hearted man, not given to bollocks.

Yesterday, the Slog’s resident New Labour education mole emailed us with a recent Physics paper for GCSE students. The degree of pc glaring out from the paper is no less scary than the Nazi ideology being poked into the brains of the Hitlerjugend seventy years earlier.

Here’s the link……all I can tell you is that Question 9 is a belter for all those assailed by wind turbines.

OPINION: Dull, directionless Britain is the victim of crowd cover.

Somewhere among the last 48 hours, I read an interesting article within which a particular phrase resonated: ‘teaching children to think for themselves’. When I was at Grammar School in the early and mid 1960s, there was what seemed to me at the time a kind of oil-and-water mix of fairly harsh discipline and lessons in initiative. Being a precocious know-all at the time, it became part of my stock line in satire that this was contradictory and hypocritical.

It wasn’t of course: Stand Grammar School – and yes, it did have Headmaster-driven pretensions of public schoolness – was in many ways a model of how to teach self-respect – from which would come high self-esteem, and thus the confidence to challenge shibboleths. And although the school had some quite appalling sadists among its teaching staff, the vast majority of the ‘screws’ (as we came to call them) had that thing so obviously missing from social professions today: a Calling.

Failing to think for yourself was, looking back, the thing most severely punished. The ‘beak’ Austin Williamson cracked down hard on ‘drainpipe’ trousers, long hair and crowd indiscipline because his goal was to create leaders, not collaborators and followers. Seen from the perspective of 2010, it is curious that while the rebellious students he helped create would have earned his disapproval, he would I suspect have disapproved of – and been horrified by – the unwise crowd consensus that has dominated our culture since the start of the 1980s.

The weekend Hippies we all became rebelled against discipline….only later to discover that those reserves of self-discipline upon which we had to call had been created by school lessons – many of which took place outside the formality of the classroom. As the 1970s progressed, the desire to do something original in the advertising profession led me away from the more conformist JWT Establishment agency, and towards the rule-breakers at CDP. By the beginning of the 1990s, the ability to think beyond peer-pressure had enabled me to reject both distributionist socialism and naively greedy Thatcherism.

Myself and millions of others refused to sign up, in turn, for most or all of Foot, Thatcher, Blair, Brown or Clegg. As time has gone on (and on and on and on) we also look on horrified at the mob madness of everything from pc to Britain’s Got Talent. Does this make us cynics? I think not: it makes us people capable of thinking for ourselves.

Over the last thirty years, kids have had to get this capability from their parents and wider family, from the odd exceptional teacher – or from the genetically-wired individual will that seeks always to observe, “No amount of pressure will convince me that this turd is putty – and thus good for the stability of my windows”. But as parenting too has become either clueless or itself infected by crowd correctness, the positive values of self-formed opinion and discernment of character have been increasingly watered down. Without this process, if I’m being honest here, Lord Mandelson would never have got beyond a backroom job at Labour HQ.

The crushing pressure of tightly-packed crowds, plus an inability to spot phoneys and false conclusions, are the two base requirements for the ultimate success of fascism. At present, the UK shows symptoms of it that are relatively benign: the odd process of being beguiled by a twister like Blair, the bizarre belief that an obese faker might be bulimic, misplaced sympathy for a disabled gargoyle, and the inability to say to a talent-show contestant, “You can’t sing – go away now and get a proper job”.

But in the economic sphere for one, the signs are rather more worrying: the inability to interrogate drivel, the constant driving need to believe good news, and the neurotic daily changes of opinion by commentators and consumers…..these are doomed to lead to misfortune for rather more people than should be the case.

In the media for another, credence is given to tramline thinking and dangerously censorious ideas about debate. A whole programme, Question Time, is taken over by clones and drones lacking all the necessary skills to unmask Nick Griffiths in a democratically convincing manner. The BBC’s business news slavishly follows Downing Street fantasies about bank stability and economic growth. A documentary about the formation of the current Coalition allows half a dozen provably mendacious statements to stand unopposed on the grounds of ‘objectivity’. And the attempts of both myself and many others to draw attention to the takeover of a once great newspaper by the Goon dragoons of Balls, Hamas and Harman fall on very stony ground.

Superficial and narrowly administered education is by far the biggest culprit in this creeping progress of acquiescence in the face of polemic bullying. Some on the Right see this as conspiracy, but I don’t: as usual for me, it’s simply a clear case of fluffy incompetence. Some kids rise above it, but most don’t. The teacher-quality fudge remains the Slog’s biggest criticism of Gove’s education proposals, but it may well be that some toning down has been required in the light of LibDem sensibilities. Either way, if we are to survive as a creative nation, this must change – and change quickly. Without that, our survival must be severely in doubt.

What do I mean by ‘survival’? Just this: the retention of enough liberties to ensure that any and all Sun-round-the-Earth dogma is opposed by enough individuals to stop it dead; and willingness to accept radical econo-fiscal change in the face of controlling criticism right across the spectrum from academic rigidity to free-market self interest.

Thinking for yourself rather than of yourself is the only way the Briton will get back to genuine tolerance, breakthrough creativity, and crystal-clear reality. We need these qualities now more than at any time since 1940. And to get it, we need an education system that encourages those who stand out from the crowd.

OFFICIAL: Mars not colonized

Slog not ahead of pack as nobody naughty and nothing important makes news.

Apologies for the slogging deficit today: other people’s children, a degree of deep thinking, and some corroboratory phone calls got in the way – all of which were, I have to say, a welcome relief. I hope that – with some good fortune – much of today’s effort will repay readers over the next few days.

My doing this is usually the signal for the Moon to explode or similar, but today has been almost bereft of real news…..we’ve had a certainty of inevitabilities rather than a party-bag of surprises: the US gdp slowed in Q2 ; there was an Arab pow-wow in Beirut to stop Muslims squabbling among themselves; the markets have been calmed by early getaways for August holidays; Hollywood’s summer movies are trying to sell pointless sequels and lame remakes; Sarah Palin was rude about Barack Obama (she’s trying to move more mainstream); Berlusconi’s government is in trouble; and Blue Chip America Minting Money as Bigger Dividends Must Bow to Investment.

That last one is not a surprise either, because it’s a headline from the Bloomberg website. It’s a great site if you really want to get informed opinion about why some short-term things are taking place; it’s just a struggle to get past the increasingly surreal syntax they use on the summary page.

I thought Campaign magazine was bad enough (‘BBH scoops slice of Nestle drive’) but Bloomberg’s lines are beyond parody. Anyway, pass me the blue-chip & mint ice cream somebody, I must bow to the inevitable dividend of weekend rest – and invest some time in the garden.

CITIGROUP: Buying your own kind of justice

So that’s settled, then.

Citigroup Inc will pay $75 million to settle U.S. regulatory claims that it misled investors by understating holdings linked to subprime mortgages by billions of dollars as the housing crisis unfolded in 2007.

Former Chief Financial Officer Gary Crittenden agreed to pay $100,000 to settle allegations that he didn’t disclose the bank’s exposure despite receiving internal briefings.

Citigroup’s former head of investor relations Arthur Tildesley will pay $80,000 to settle claims he helped draft disclosures that misled investors, the SEC said.

The congressionally appointed panel released documents showing Citigroup publicly told investors in October 2007 that its exposure was $13 billion.

The same day, the Citigroup Board was briefed to the effect that the exposure was in fact four times higher.

I’m glad that’s all settled and behind us: there’s one law for the rich, and another for the poor.

CAMERON IN INDIA: Rahul Gandhi in London

Gandhi…..confidant of David Miliband

Rahul Gandhi’s absence during the Cameron visit is a genuine snub – and leaves observers with more doubts about the competence and contacts of the Foreign Office.

A nameless Sir Humphrey was busy working various rooms in New Delhi earlier today, trying to convince a largely unimpressed group of journalists and other hangers-on that Rahul Gandhi hadn’t snubbed David Cameron. He is, I’m afraid, fighting a losing battle: everyone of influence there confirms that a trade trip to India without meeting the shoe-in next Prime Minister is akin to visiting Hyannis Port without meeting a single Kennedy.

Although his mother Sonia Gandhi seems to have been genuinely engaged in wrestling with an emergency (she also missed a vital Parliamentary ceremony earlier in the week), Rahul’s decision to get on a plane and visit London for no reason was a very obvious snub. Writing in The Spectator earlier this week, Tory MP Jo Johnson had written that Rahul was ‘the preeminent figure with whom to establish a rapport’.

The truth is that Rahul Gandhi is (by image at least) a radical politician who has allied himself very closely with India’s young and poor, even saying openly that he would like to see an end to the caste system. He is a close friend of David Miliband, with whom he speaks and corresponds on a regular basis. Allegedly, the youngest Gandhi was bitterly disappointed when Labour lost the UK election: he met Cameron once in 2006 and didn’t take to him. Plus, as a rich Old Etonian, The British PM is the antithesis of a Britain he seems to despise. Rahul is on the record as saying that one thing above all making him proud of his heritage is that “the Gandhis kicked the British out of India”.

In the short term, however, my information is that the FCO made a huge gaffe by spending more time firming up a meeting with existing Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Singh is seen by most as yesterday’s man, and has been under pressure to name his retirement date so that Rahul can take over the reins. There is a history of enmity between Singh and Sonia Gandhi similar to that between Brown and Blair – both deny it, but everyone knows about it. Equally, it is alleged that Rahul finds the Indian PM patronising, and Singh in turn calls Gandhi “a playboy” in private.

Just two months ago – in a thinly veiled reference to Rahul’s love of speed machines – Manmohan Singh told a press conference, “Rahul is very qualified to hold a cabinet post. I have discussed it with him on a number of occasions. He has always been reluctant to give a positive answer. I sometimes feel that young people should take over. When Congress Party makes that judgement, I will be very happy. I have been given a work and it is incomplete yet; and till I complete it, there is no question of my retirement.”

A carefully phrased endorsement with little or nothing ringing about it. Yet another sign that the FCO seems to have missed….and what a chance to miss: this is Britain’s biggest State visit to India since Independence 63 years ago.

A junior member of the Tory Right was less than pleased with the trip in general and Rahul Gandhi’s behaviour in particular. He told the Slog at lunchtime (BST) today:

“There have been any number of curious incidents during this selling trip. Here is a country from whom we have accepted hundreds of thousands of immigrants, yet they demand that trade deals be dependent on more of that. We give a billion Pounds in aid to India every year, and yet the Gandhi family goes out of its way to make us feel unwelcome. Our Prime Minister declares himself willing to engage in a special relationship, and they more or less tell him to piss off. It’s not very edifiying. Cameron has been made to look silly.”

EUROZONE breaking….new data confirms the ship is sinking.

Total bank exposure to toxicity enormous
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Eurobanks get ducks in a row ready for sovereign default
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Too much collateral based on soon-to-plunge assets

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Overcrowded Bond issue market predicted by Slog already a reality

It is hard (even for somebody who dismisses ‘decisive markets’ with the disdain I do) to credit that mugs are still piling in to buy bonds in the eurozone. Spain has, in the last week, borrowed more successfully than even the most optimistic Bull might’ve imagined. The usual idiots are popping heads above sniper-infested trenches and saying “I think it’s going to be alright”.

Greece’s borrowing now costs it 745 basis points more than Germany’s. It is still heading for a debt-to-GDP ratio of nearly 150 per cent by 2013, and its economy is not growing. €20bn in customer withdrawals alone have shot out the back door of its banks as quickly as new funds arrived.

Yesterday, twelve lending organisations (The Slog understands that one of them was PIMCO) were approached formally by the EU authorities, with a view to preparations for a national default. When even the loopy-loos know what’s coming down the road, it really is time to worry.

But while the layman still thinks of this as a sovereign debt crisis, it really isn’t the main crap-game in town…in both the British and American senses of ‘crap’. S&P issued a damning report yesterday pointing out that the eurobank exposure to bad debt all up totals 30 trillion euros.

To put that number into perspective, the total global banking bailout in 2008 is estimated to have cost only $23 trillion.

Now Holland has ended State debt guarantees, forcing its banks to go the market as bonds fall due. These bonds must compete with a trebling of Russian debt issues, massive sales of same in Spain, and the UK’s remaining requirement to borrow in the light of our own £6 trillion bad-debt exposure. In the UK, the banks actually own an unhealthy proportion of those gilts, while being the institutions facing the write-offs. The madness of this is hard to express other than in terms of the infamous South Sea Bubble.

Most observers hear or read about these endless numbers, and go glazed within seconds. The endless rows of three-pack zeros seem meaningless….but they aren’t: the EU’s self-styled ‘shock and awe’ fund has €750 billion in it. That’s less than 2.5% of the potential exposure.

A large proportion of the debt is collateralised by property, commercial and domestic. Both are set to collapse along with most other Western asset prices once deflation takes hold. A great many pension providers actually hold massive portfolios of commercial property as an investment – although the reason why is beyond me. The Slog interviewed Full Circle guru John Robson over the weekend, and he commented as follows:

“The Government bond market as we’ve known it over the decades is over, and the outlook for asset prices is truly terrible. If one takes into account the dearth of credit at the moment, and then look at 1971 salary-to-mortgage relativities versus today, you’re looking at a house-price correction of well over 30%. As for the commercial property market, the sheer size of the problem is yet to be understood“.

The Titanic took just under three hours to sink – but from first rising out of the water to submersion was six minutes. It’s end was inevitable the second it hit the iceberg laterally: the engineers informed the captain of its fate after just forty minutes. With just ten minutes to go, however, most passengers remained convinced it couldn’t sink.

The Germans sighted SS Eurozone’s iceberg the day France demanded a single currency without EU-wide, consistent and obligatory fiscal surveillance. The Union hit the iceberg when corrupt horse-trading let nations like Portugal and Greece get on board. For added certainty, the ECB fired torpedoes at it by offering cheap loans at standardised prices to all eurozone States, as did Goldman Sachs by persuading the Greeks to hide their degree of indebtedness.

Like everyone else, I have no idea when the SS Eurozone’s stern will start to rise ominously. But that it will sink is no longer a matter for debate. And the salvage operation will be more expensive than raising a million Titanics.

RUSSIAN ASSET SALES: PRIVATISATION OR FIRE SALE?

George Osborne is not going to find the Russian meltdown entertaining.

In our idiotically interconnected Globalist world, no country of any size should be off the investor’s radar. A collapse there means at least a wobble here, and vice-versa. You may not be interested in the land of samovars, but you can bet the farm that the Chancellor is….thanks to the legacy of RBS.

The Russian State last night announced its target to sell over £20 billion of stock in the numerous companies it still owns. There’s nothing new in this – they’ve been dithering over how to do it for nearly two years – but the pace has very clearly quickened over the last fortnight. There is an air of kick-and-scramble about the sell-off now….Russia tends to be like that in anything to do with economics and fiscal matters. Some of the more aggressive reformers wanted only a bare majority holding to be retained by the Kremlin, and last Monday the State railways were still in the grab-bag. But now they’ve been kept to one side (under military pressure, I’m led to understand) and no company will now go below 75% government ownership.

The acceleration to market and high retention levels of ownership are begging two questions that must soon collide: is this really a privatisation, or is it flogging household effects to the pawnbroker; and will anyone want to buy into companies with that much dead bureaucracy left in them?

The Slog has run two stories since April about the state of Russian finances – the first about the poor state of bank loan collateral (fully 70% of which is owned by dear old RBS) and the second just over a week ago about the State’s sudden decision to treble its bond sales. Added to the equally sudden desire to get off the pot about selling big State companies, it has to suggest a whiff of insolvency in the air.

We said then that Russian debt was one to watch. The Slog’s view is that this news makes the investment one to studiously avoid. It’s crowded enough already on the default radar: adding the Russian bear is the last thing we (or George Osborne) needs.

COALITION SKETCH: So far, it’s been a bumpy-humpy ride.

I realise it’s still early in the game for this Government, but I’d like to offer everyone an insight now about Coalition legislative content – and see if it keeps on happening. With a bit of luck, it might turn into a self-denying prophecy.

The reason why, I suspect, the policy White Papers we’ve seen to date are such a bugger’s muddle of old polemics and fluffy new nonsense is a direct result of trying to please everyone from Norman Tebbit to Simon Hughes. A few steps further down the ladder, it’s an attempt to mollify ToryHome and LibDemVoice. It’s at this point that it gets silly – and pointless, because one winds up pleasing nobody.

Lansley’s health reforms are a dog’s dinner of ‘everyone’s an entrepreneur under the surface’, alongside keeping Big State bureaucrat-riddled hospitals….but starved of money. GPs are not entrepreneurs, and as service businesses they are and always have been execrable. And starving hospitals of cash will result in ward closures, not bureaucrats getting the push.

Gove’s education proposals are better, but similarly confused: take the schools away from local authorities and give the parents more choice….but do not attack curricular pc, or the fact that most teachers appear to have no calling beyond insisting that same-sex parenting is normal.

Theresa May’s attempt to elect people to police the police authorities already policing the police is perhaps the most bewildering oil-and-water job of the lot so far. Local power to elect commissioners and deselect Chief Constables (can anyone really see that happening?) sits side by side with getting everyone back on the beat in order to keep a beady on all those volunteer constables just gagging to restore the 1950s rough justice we all remember so well. I see no sign in any of this that pc careerist cynics and real criminals will be brought to book…..but I do detect right-on LibDem localism trying hard to shake hands with bobbies busy giving scrumpers a clip around the ear.

Economic policy as elucidated so far has wannabe nationaliser Vince Cable standing shoulder to shoulder with arch-austeritist George Osborne. But he is also standing nose-to-nose with David Cameron on the subject of economic immigration. There was the prospect of a graduate tax, and before that the concept of everyone not living in a dustbin paying a property wealth tax. Both these have disappeared, perhaps on the plane to India.

Talking of foreign policy, LibDem support for all things Islamic has collided with slavish Tory devotion to all things American. Thus we are pro Turkey, anti Pakistan, and on message in Afghanistan. The Tory Right wants to sell lots of things to India and the Cleggies want a liberal immigration policy, so this at least has culminated in an attempt to reduce doctor overcrowding in Delhi.

But the oddest policy area of all is at Energy, where nothing at all is emerging owing to the impasse between Chris Huhne’s desire for 230,000 wave pedallos, and implacable Conservative backbencher support for tree-fuelled nuclear reactors. Only the more surreal imagination can see any output from this, but even if we wind up with coal-fired wind farms, this will at least represent a policy decision.

There is a serious intent behind all this feeble satire, and it is this: only ten weeks in or not, the Coalition is producing legislation that is neither fish nor fowl – and more to the point, highly likely to be entirely ineffective in the real world.

A much better approach would be to give all the social posts to the Tories, and all the commercial posts to the Libdems. This would, at a stroke, solve the problem all real people recognised years ago: that social policy is far too fluffy and inclusive, while economic policy is much too elitist and greedy.

However, I cannot help feeling that in the current circumstances, what we really need before too long is another election, following which an extremely nasty Tory Government would be returned to power with a majority of 140. The voters now instinctively when things have gone too far for fluffiness, and I will once again – against my better judgement – put my trust in them.

TURKEY: Government uses Kurdish rebellion as excuse to further tighten security laws.

Hundreds of Government opponents in Turkey are in prison without trial. The AK ruling Party is demonising the Opposition. This is the pro-Islamist State David Cameron is keen to have in the EU.

Every wannabe Nazi regime needs its Reichstag fire. Turkey’s Islamist ruling party AK has been looking for one for a while now. In the last year alone, AK has accused the army of plotting revolution, YouTube of showing disrespect to Allah, and the Judiciary of standing in the way of ‘democratisation’.

Now it’s accusing the Opposition of fomenting Kurdish violence.

AK has hijacked democratisation – as so many extremist organisations and States do. Communist hard-line states were always Peoples’ republics. Gaza flotillas are about Humanitarian Rights and Freedom. Turkey’s Government Party initials are themselves the abbreviation for ‘Justice and Development Party’. The idea is to make it impossible to argue with the stated ideals. Hitler chose ‘National Socialist’ for exactly this reason: both Left and Right could go with it, and only the treasonous could oppose it.

New Kurdish disturbances have broken out at either end of the country. Predictably, yesterday the Government alleged that ‘the opponents of democratic change have triggered these ethnic riots’.

“In both cases we have to take into account the probability of provocations, and the intelligence services are investigating these probabilities,” Security Minister Sadullah Ergin told a group of reporters in Istanbul. Not possibilities, mind you: probabilities.

What Sadullah Ergin was less forthcoming about is the certainty that lots of AK’s opponents are languishing in jails throughout Turkey while awaiting trial: hundreds of Turkish bureaucrats, journalists and military officers are currently waiting to be tried as alleged ‘deep-state’ conspirators. Understandably, the Opposition parties across the Parliament’s debating aisle from AK see these charges as trumped-up – more signals that the Government is leaning further and further towards the dictatorship of Islam.

While Mr Ergin was ‘briefing’ journalists yesterday, in that very same Parliament building the British Prime Minister David Cameron told Turkish MPs how ‘angry’ he felt that Turkey is being kept out of Europe…and how he admired the steps being taken to secularise the country in preparation for an EU membership he wholeheartedly supports.

There’s no point having a go at Cameron; he doesn’t know any better. But the FCO (which throughout the 1930s saw Hitler as an ally to throw against Bolshevism) is of the view that it is better to have Turkey inside the EU tent, rather than outside pissing in. It doesn’t seem to occur to the Foreign Office that, once inside the EU, they will start pissing all over our democratic secular values….in much the same way as Britain’s Islamists are already doing.

THE INTERNET IS FOR OPPOSITION

How the mighty haven’t fallen.

The Editor argues that cynical, scheming twits will carry on at their task with impunity unless something more effective than old media and screaming bloggers emerges.

David Cameron continues on his merry way, aimlessly grovelling and accusing. Yesterday the Turks were good (to keep Islam happy), today Pakistan is bad (to keep the Americans happy). Now he’s in Delhi, and under pressure from Vince Cable to do a cash-for-immigrants swap with India. It seems we owe them at least this, and according to most of the press I read today, the moral and commercial logic of the scheme is obvious. I’m obviously thick, because it sounds to me like blackmail of the worst kind – and odd that this newly rich nation thinks we owe its doctors a living. Haven’t their skilled people got things they could be doing over there, in the most densely populated sub-continent on the planet?

You see, if nobody’s paying attention, this is the sort of bollocks our leaders can get away with. You have to like Stephanie Flanders at the Beeb’s business pages, because she is very bright and intensely insightful – but with a delightful bluestocking amazement on finding something that doesn’t add up. She wrote an excellent post last Monday about corporate cash hoarding, and the banks not lending money. It just didn’t make sense, pleaded our Stef: if the big corporates are awash with cash and most of the tiny businesses don’t use external credit, what is Vince Cable on about?

She may well ask, but was probably disallowed by the arm-biting Mark Thompson from making the obvious point about which the Slog has been flaying extinct horses for the last year: if nobody in business wants any credit anyway, why the blithering bluebottles do we have 0% interest rates? And the answer – also revealed previously here – is so banks can rebuild their balance sheets by effortlessly investing in UK gilts at 3% clear profit.

There are tons and tons of this murky stuff slithering under a million doors unnoticed every day of the year. Regulars will know my contempt for most conspiracy theory, but this is only because the theories are about astronauts hiding in a Leeds bedsit while the moon landings were all faked in a studio down Burbank way. Life is a conspiracy these days, but because there is always a technical explanation with which to bamboozle people cheeky enough to ask the questions, they rarely if ever come to light. And as often as not, the jargonised explanation is used to cover up not evil, but stupidity.

Pakistan has been cooperating with various Islamist groups since Allah was a nipper. Secretary Geithner conspired with Bernanke to mis-sell the Congress AIG bonds. Barack Obama really has no idea what he’s doing. Hank Paulson stole $700 billion of taxpayer funds to bail out the banks, and then bought bank stock with it without asking anyone. The major German banks are so adrift on capital adequacy, finance ministers all over Europe are losing sleep about it. Tony Blair earned a six-figure sum from J P Morgan for helping to steer Northern Rock’s investment book their way. Australia’s new PM Julia Gillard and her No 2 Wayne Swan were up to no good with the mining companies – and used these contacts to topple Kevin Rudd, do a deal and then call a snap election. Margaret Thatcher knew perfectly well that the Belgrano was outside the exclusion zone and sailing away when she ordered the attack on it. The war started in the first place thanks to FCO incompetence in failing to read the obvious signals coming from the Galtieri regime.

I’ll bet you a pound to piece of Kendal mint-cake that nobody sues me for any of those accusations, and the reasons are simple: they’re true – and while perhaps impossible to defend in Court, would cause more trouble than the exposure is worth; and ‘they’ don’t care if the accounts are in circulation anyway, because nobody’s paying attention.

What’s the point I’m making here? Just this: corrupt incompetence is near-universal on Planet Earth. This used to be mainly true in war theatres (‘SNAFU’) but applies today to almost everything impacting on our lives. Thus:

* The Prime Minister is a dingbat
* The EU is an illogical four-winged concrete aeroplane without engines
* The financial system is an almost complete waste of time
* The soccer Premiership makes the Dutch Tulip boom look tentative
* Obama has not a clue what to do about debt and economic restructuring in the US
* Half of Britain is affected by alcohol after 7 pm most weekdays and all weekends
* The NHS is on the brink of collapse for no good reason
* The internet is a goldmine, but nearly every UK newspaper is in dire straits
* £2 in every £5 of income tax paid are wasted
* UK Governments have done next to nothing of any use since 1956 (The Clean Air Act)

They are therefore not worthy of our respect, and will get none from this site until they prove otherwise. Screaming foul-mouthed bloggers do us all a disservice, because they provide an easy and distracting target for the Mandelsons of this world; and deadly dull and dry social tracts may gain applause for their quiet objectivity, but serve only to encourage the Establishment that as nobody reads such things, they’re free to continue Snafuing their way through our money without the remotest chance of detection.

It will carry on into eternity unless the Slogs and Open Europes of this world become part of Bigger Things to replace the tired old men and women of the Fourth Estate. I make this plea about once a week, and I wish for crying out loud someone would take me up on it.

EUROZONE CRISIS: Germans want Basle III diluted still further…

German banks accused of capital adequacy cover-up

A senior Slog credit management source revealed last night that at least three German banks are ‘frantic’ about the failure of their lobbying of the Swiss to relax still further the Basle III agreements.

After heavy pressure applied late the week before last, German officials continued to balk at the compromise rules aimed at shoring up the eurobanking system. Their main bitch – that the rules would unfairly penalise the thousands of saving and cooperative banks financing small and medium-size businesses in Germany – was not taken seriously by the Slog’s informant:

“It’s the same old same old. This process has been going on since early Spring. The larger banks have a very serious capital adequacy problem and a hugely toxic lending book from the ClubMed boom days. The Germans love to be sanctimonious about how thrifty they are, but this is an obvious attempt to cover up former profligacy.”

The Basle Committee has already relaxed some of the more stringent rules, but the key German banks remain intransigent about wanting further relaxations. Last week, these same banks were the worst stress-test offenders for not declaring sovereign debt realistically.

One can’t contain a cover-up of this magnitude for long. The banks no doubt hope to restore their capital by effortless investment in German bonds. If they restrict lending to business, however, then this plus the imminent crash awaiting Germany’s neighbours will do for them. But probably well before then, the Spanish or Portuguese solids will start hitting the fan.