REVIEW: A tale of two books

A stinker from Tom Sharpe, and a hoot from Sue Townsend.

As the heat of August tails off down here, I’ve been getting some hammock reading in. While briefly in Wales two weeks back, I went into an excellent independent bookshop and purchased five titles – all of them on my list of must-reads. Had I stayed an hour longer there, I could’ve found another twenty; in W H Smiths these days, I can never find anything worthwhile at all.

The first book I started was a belated novel from the now ageing Tom Sharpe, The Gropes. It seems that after a near-death experience a couple of years ago, Sharpe decided he had one more novel in him. It’s a pity it didn’t stay there.

In his mid 1970s heyday, Sharpe wrote the funniest socio-political farces on the market. Riotous Assembly, Wilt and Blott on the Landscape were all laugh-out-loud books. Then – as suddenly as he had appeared – Tom went quiet. The Gropes is a very sad epilogue to his glittering career.

What can I tell you? The jokes are leaden, the characterisations dated, the writing sloppy, and the plot plain daft. Not funny daft – or even better, surreal satirical daft like they used to be – just daft.

Contrast this disappointment with the ever-fresh series of Adrian Mole books churned out by Sue Townsend. By definition contemporary, they are marvelously observed, ironically mordant statements on pc hypocrisy, and the failed aspirations of so many children of Thatcher who thought themselves Steve Jobs, but turned out to be just more bitter Del Boys.

My own view is that the series gets funnier with every book, and her latest – Adrian Mole: the Prostrate Years – is sheer comic genius from start to finish. It starts with the Brown coronation in 2007 and follows the further disillusionment of Adrian with all the ghastly elements of Cool Britannia become Cruel Britannia. Trust me, you’ll be rationing this book after just a few pages, and giggling on every page. The description of a gay funeral for Graham the Dog is, I fancy, destined to become a classic literary snippet.

SKETCH: The Labour wannabes gear up to be not New.

It’s time the Labour wannabes had their collars felt.

So strong is the Labour Party continuity in the Lady Leebership bunfight, David Miliband has had to ‘shrug off’ an endorsement by Lord Mandelson. I understand his campaign chaps were paranoid that Blair would give his former ‘Wayne Rooney’ a ringing endorsement while launching The Book of the Film of the War today: but as far as I know, he didn’t.

BBCNews called Moral Tone’s book ‘the political memoir of the century’ this afternoon. Judging from the leadership contest, he and his best friend Mandy are Joint Lepers of the Century. I keep expecting D. Miliband to deny once more that he was ever New Labour, so that Our Saviour can enter Stage Left as a ghost and confirm the prophecy of being denied thrice.

It really is totally bizarre. The Labour voting franchise among the tattered PLP and the grassroots nutters (now joined by the LibDem Fluffies) has three forms of leader locomotion from which to choose: three reverse gears (Balls), two reverse gears (Ed) or neutral (David). I suppose it all depends on whether you want an Italian or Swiss tank to drive things forward.

Anyway, as none of the wannabes in this charade want to be New Labour any more, all of them need some clearer branding about which Labour they are.

I suspect David M has to be New Improved Labour, although as yet nobody knows what the miracle ingredient might be. Andy Burnham has come out from somewhere in obscurity this afternoon to declare that he represents True Labour, so that’s him sorted – although with Lying Labour in the great majority, the bookies are probably right in predicting he will struggle for support. Ed Balls is definitely going for Whippet Labour: the only thing he hasn’t done thus far is don cloth cap and neck scarf, and he dashes so quickly from one studio to another in search of people to condemn, it’s possible he is a racing dog – as opposed to just rabid. Dianne Abbott is spoilt for choice, as she could be Double-Standards Labour, Mad Labour, or Tokenist Labour. And finally, Ed M is Harriet Labour By Proxy – a ghastly syndrome via which sufferers become convinced that Cabinet gender quotas are the solution to all Britain’s problems.

Alternatively, the competing candidates could give us a much clearer clue by attaching their bids to what class of Labour voter they’re aiming at. Burnham dubbing himself true Labour would have to be Blue Collar Candidate. Ed Balls – you can probably see this coming – is dog collar Labour, a doubly-appropriate soubriquet given the sanctimonious tone he adopts about almost everything. In his appeal to older women desperate to mother him, Ed Miliband must be grey collar man – another apt colour given his personality, and the mystery surrounding what on earth it is he does stand for. And Mr Middle Class careerist personified David Miliband couldn’t be anything other than representative of the white collar wing of the Party: white as the driven snow and utterly innocent of any torture, unethical foreign policies or putsches. As for Dianne Abbott, all I can say in these Correct times is that we should all be collar blind and treat her bid entirely on merit.

Breaking: Gold breakthrough forecast as slump signs fall into place

CRASH 2: NOW IT’S JUST A MATTER OF TIME

Stock markets, oil, IPOs, index futures all down.

Acceptance of ‘very long recovery’ spreads globally.

Gold options at $1500, Swiss Franc rises as safe havens sought by investors.

With the Yen gaining yet more value and the Nikkei crashing by 3% overnight, the Japanese Government is in array today as a leadership struggle threatens to split the governing Party. All around the world, stock markets took their lead from this – and of course the widespread expectation that the US recovery has blown itself out. The Chicago purchasing managers’ index slumped from 62.3 to 57, August versus July.

For the first time in living memory, as at 2.30pm BST today, all 26 European and the other 9 major global markets continued to fall. In the last 20 days, $2 trillion have been wiped off the value of shares worldwide. The Global share index is 4.5% adrift for the month of August.

In concert with this, oil prices fell sharply in Asia, as did the US futures index. And as one would now expect, the Swiss Franc rose against all its competitors, while analysts in all markets were optioning gold for December 2010 at a price of around $1500. As I write, that metal is sitting steady at $1237 per ounce.

Other signs represent very big writing on crumbling walls. More than half the European IPO listings are currently trading at below the issue price. Overpricing is causing investor anger towards the investment banks busy talking up average issues.“Investors are sick to the back teeth of being treated like idiots,” Dan Nickols, head of mid- and small-cap equities at Old Mutual Asset Managers told the FT, “Companies have been too greedy – or misunderstood what the right price for their float is.” But the reality is that investor confidence is weak heading towards shattered.

Bullishness about gold has spread to some major players in the investment Establishment. One of the biggest buyers has been Soros Fund Management LLC, which oversees about $25 billion. Soros made $1 billion breaking the Bank of England’s defence of the pound in 1992. Yesterday he described gold as “the ultimate asset bubble” but added enthusiastically, “buying at the start of a bubble is rational”. And Deutsche Bank analyst in London Dan Brebner (the most accurate forecaster of gold so far this year – after The Slog) says the metal may reach $1,550 over the next six months.

Crude oil supplies rose 1.55 million barrels, or 0.4 percent, in the seven days ending August 27th. This reflect lower ordering in expectation of an output slump – and actual falling consumption during manufacturing processes. The data have only one meaning: expectations are poor,and the reality isn’t much different.

The Wall St Journal’s Marketwatch supplement carries large feature today, quoting markets guru Jeremy Grantham as saying that, “…it is unrealistic to expect to overcome the several problems facing most developed countries, including the U.S., in fewer than several years….You’d be a fool to trust your money with Wall Street during the lean years till 2016 because another 20% of your investment will vanish.”

Earlier forecasts from Grantham have been spot on. He called Wall Street’s 2008 meltdown in late 2006….oddly enough, two months before The Slog’s predecessor nby said the same thing.

Respected ABC financial journalist Satyjit Das concurs. In a devastating piece entitled Delusions of Safety on ABC’s website yesterday, he wrote:

‘In truth, there was no choice but to pass the [the eurobanks in the stress test] as money must be made available to enable Greece to continue to function. Despite progress, that economy is slipping into a deep recession, impeding the recovery plan. Similar scenarios, albeit less urgent, are playing out in Spain, Portugal and Ireland. Slowing growth in North America and China also complicate the problems.

Negative or low growth, savage budget cuts and economic restructuring will need to continue for years. The plan requires these countries to run a four-minute mile over and over again for years on a lower than subsistence calorie intake. It remains to be seen whether this is feasible. The willingness of government to impose and citizens to bear the decline in living standards necessary to avoid a debt restructuring remains uncertain.

The bank stress tests proved that the EU and ECB believe in Father Christmas, the Easter Bunny and other munificent deities’.

Stay tuned.

OFFICIAL: BRITAIN’S EXPORTING FIASCO NOT BEING HELPED BY 4 OUTOF 5 OF US NOT DOING ANY.

New ONS data also reveals how and where Labour’s dependency government has disadvantaged Britain.

We tend to think of the ‘unemployment rate’ as in single figures (it’s currently 7.6%) but in actual fact this masks a much higher real figure – those described as ‘economically inactive’. As an average across the UK among adults of working age (these days defined as 16-64, both genders) for every ten people in the UK, seven are working and three aren’t. Or put another way, almost a third of the working-age population do nothing productive for the economy. With just over 5% of the working-age group disabled, that leaves a quarter of Britons doing nothing for some other reason beyond physical or mental incapacity.

The truly disturbing part involves adding to these numbers the total employed by the public sector, quangos and the Government. Opinions vary on this, but few realists put the figure below 38%. Subtracting these from the 16-64 universe turns the situation on its head: under a third are doing work that makes Britons money at any given time. (Even among those in private sector jobs, one in ten are doing drudge unassociated with production – just over 10% of the workforce are in these so-called ‘elementary occupations’).

Now factor in all those working in the domestic distribution, retail, construction and banking sectors – ie, occupations where almost 100% of their activity is nothing to do with exports of either goods or services. It leaves us with an estimate (nowhere to be found in any Government stats I came across) of 18% employed largely or solely in exports….just one in five of us.

Of course, outside of the lunatic asylum formerly known as banking, it helps with the exporting thing if you’re actually making something. Endless sneering articles in the Guardian refute the ‘myth’ of falling manufacturing output, but they are wrong: in 1978 there were 6.9 million people employed in UK manufacturing; today the figure is 2.6 million. Regardless of whether outsourcing has changed the reliability of that number, the vast majority of objective folks roughly halfway between Jeremy Clarkson and Will Hutton are prepared to accept that genuine UK manufacturing has declined by around 60%.

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) is the best source for all of this sort of information. While the true picture of those (a) doing anything useful and (b) closely connected to earning UK plc money is hidden by Governments of every hue, the ONS can usually tell you what’s actually happening at the sharp end beyond the limits of Westminster and Whitehall.

Today it updates the regional figures on real employment rates by area of Britain; the figures are nothing new….but they do underline how cock-eyed dependency-based social policy has made our economic balance by geography as much as age and occupation.

In the familiarly depressed areas where Labour has reigned since Ramsay MacDonald was a boy – places like Durham, Nottingham, Liverpool, Glasgow and Newham – around 40% of people are unemployed. Most of Wales is in a similar state. But even in the Tory shires of Hampshire and Wiltshire, we’re still looking at one in five of all the workforce being economically inactive.

How much of that inactivity is down to disablement? Well here, the figures really are rather telling. In well-heeled Conservative Hampshire, 91.2% of the disabled have a job. In Tory Rutland the figure is 81.2%. But in Newham, that figure is just 27.1%. In Haringey, it’s 24.6%. In Burnley, it’s 26.9%. Any of these names strike you as familiar?

Yes, quite: are we really being asked to believe that disabled people who live in deprived areas are less inclined genetically to do a job than physically challenged Tories? Because if so, that really would be bigoted 19th century high-Toryism of the daftest kind.

No: the far more obvious and likely explanation is that the services available to help disabled people find gainful employment (and thus more life-fulfilment) tend to exist in Tory controlled regions: this is an issue of local policy, not some fictitious layabout gene.

While it might be as well to remember these facts the next time some derisive fluffy collars you over a supper somewhere, the data I’ve covered in this piece also show how important the Slog’s persistent cry for a massive restructuring of industrial focus is.

Who knows, with 25% less people pushing forms around and 50% more people merchandising our export potential, we might even double our exports – once we can get the quality, innovation and prices back to where they were in the 1950s. That is largely a question of educational change and retraining: a much bigger issue, and one for another day.

What research shows

A new survey this week shows that 3 in 5 Brits think the Post Office should remain in public ownership.

59% of Americans think Sarah Palin would not make an effective president – compared to only 26% who said that she could be. (Who are those people?)

In a recent study of Chinese consumer behavior, McKinsey found that women tend to shop more frequently than men, and spend more on personal-care products and food. Men, by contrast, tend to spend more of their income on gadgets, beverages and alcohol, dining out, and socialising.

Authors Eminegul Karababa (University of Exeter, Exeter, UK) and Güliz Ger (Bilkent University, Ankara) dug wide and deep into the history of coffeehouses in the early modern Ottoman Empire. They found that patrons engaged in gambling, taking drugs, and meeting with “young beautiful people”.

So it’s not just me then.

WILDLIFE: Summer’s end.

Not many people like snakes. As it happens, my elder daughter does: as a kid, she had a pet python, and she’s now a real estate negotiator. On the whole, you shouldn’t mess with my firstborn – and as it also happens, she and her husband are staying with us at the moment. And as it even further happens, having seen no snakes at all since April, we’ve seen two in three days.

The first was a small thing – not much bigger than a garden worm – but it got into our swimming pool and, like most reptiles, had no problem with swimming. Problem is, these little silver things are dangerous enough to require hospitalisation if they bite you – so it had to go. This was not a pleasant episode. Even less pleasant was the discovery of a harmless but very large snake in our hallway this afternoon: while my daughter drooled on about how cute it was, my wife was ready to check into a hotel. So it too had to go. You will be unsurprised to learn that I was elected Lord High Executioner.

For some reason I don’t understand, late summer brings out the worst in all the nasty things here. The wasps become a bit dopey and make nests in silly places. So you stumble onto them, and the little sods sting you four or five at a time. The flies drone around like old 78rpm records playing at 33: they sit on your nose and ears, and hum around the bedroom in the early hours. The harvest mites bite your scrotum and other sweaty bits, while green shield bugs sit on the rim of a beer glass, like so many daredevils psyching themselves up to dive off a cliff.

Every year here, there is a catastrophe for one species or another. This year it was Hoopos, the charming crested birds that flop and swoop around the the skies in a delightfully drunken manner. Normally we see at least a dozen a day; this year we’ve seen two, maybe three in six months. For moles, on the other hand, either there has been a post-war baby boom or the death of their predators – we don’t know, except that they’ve been a mountain-building pest all year.

As for our red squirrel pair, they’ve had young – and been showing them over the last few weeks how to access our biggest walnut tree. But as we’ve changed the roof from ageing wood tiles to immaculate slate, there’s been a great deal of sliding about. Red squirrels are (as most people know) much smaller than greys. But what’s less known is how many sub-species of red there are. We have the dark red plus brown tailed variety at our place, and the bushiness of the tails is something to marvel at: their undulating movement really is poetry in motion. Also, while greys are in-yer-face, reds are a bit cheeky but fundamentally timid. How anyone could shoot one is quite beyond me.

And as ever, there are Monsieur Morgue’s goats. They wander, their bells heralding the arrival of interlopers at some point in the day. When they stray onto our land, Foxie and Tiggy terrorise them: although a fifth of their size, our two terriers chase the growing herd back to Morgue’s ramshackle farm with minimal difficulty and maximum enthusiasm.

Our dogs’ other main interest is the gecko population, swollen at this time of year by the spawning of minute lizards who hide easily but have yet to learn the strict rules of survival. At least once a week, Tiggy catches one and is then traumatised by the wriggling tails they leave behind after having made good their escape. Foxie watches quietly, having long ago grown out of chasing the uncatchable. At the sound of scraping plates and opening dishwashers, she’s always the first to arrive – and being the dominant bitch, still terrorises her younger, distant relative. But it’s Tiggy who stands guard against rabbits, barks at cars on the horizon, and chases the post-lady’s van every day. Foxie would rather catch the chicken leg tossed over Henry VIII’s shoulder than pelt after a hare. Some days I see her as a victim of welfare dependence, and on others as just a shrewd servant easing into dignified middle-age.

The first yellow, red and brown leaves are appearing now, and there’s a steady fall of them fluttering on the cooler breeze. One can sit in the sun after four pm, as opposed to staying in the shade until six. We sleep with a sheet over us at night; in a week or two it’ll be time for the light duvet to go on again. The glut of walnuts will arrive just before we leave – and for the first time this year, we have grapes on our two vines: we hope to pack these away in the car and eat them when we get back to England.

We may not be wild and crazy people any more, but we like the wildlife here.

OPINION: Obama has painted himself into a corner.

The Obamites suffer from the same naivety and ineptitude as the Blairites. To start blaming everyone else now is simply not good enough.

There are times when one is left wondering whether every ‘Progressive’ politician is nothing more than a passing snake-oil salesman who accidentally got elected Mayor. Wherever they pop up in leadership positions, the same tell-tale signs are there of things not working on the ground, easily discerned consequences surprising the policy practitioners, and turning on demonised enemies in order to blame them for Paradise Lost. To the list of Blair and Sarkozy can now be added Barack Obama.

A good example is the Obama Health Bill: greatly trumpeted – but drawn up with too little cognisance of the existing infrastructure. Thus, faced with mounting debt and mushrooming costs from the new federal health-care law, many local governments are leaving the hospital business, shedding public facilities that are often the care provider of last resort.

In fact, over 20% of the America’s hospitals are owned by State governments. But many are drowning in debt caused by rising health-care costs, a spike in uninsured patients, cuts in Medicare and Medicaid – and payments on construction bonds sold in fatter times.

Local officials also predict an expensive future as new requirements—for technology, quality accounting and care coordination—start under the Bill, which became law in March. (This is an exact parallel of Health & Safety costs killing off small businesses in Britain: it represents – yet again – the dead, uncommercial hand of bureaucrats writing themselves a watchdog job for life).

As for increased watchdog powers over banks in general and Wall Street in particular, the President has been run ragged at every turn. Under Bush and the Friedmanite madness,
government regulation and oversight became heresy – but policymakers came to ignore the key difference between financial and other markets. Perhaps the market for groundnuts must decide, but Bourse-based markets have always been far too neurotic to leave entirely to themselves.

But once let off the leash, US finance dominated the real economy: not a dog at all in fact, but the frantic tale wagging the overexcited hounds of corporate America. Smart ways of financing new business ideas evolved into complex derivatives deals such as subprime-mortgage-backed securities and credit default swaps that were often little more than scams.

All of these challenges required a fundamental rethinking of the U.S. and global economy. Yet those who were most aligned with the reform side of Wall Street remained, for the most part, outside the Obamites’ tent. It was the pro-greed lobby like Summers and Geithner – acolytes of Bob Rubin, the former Clinton Treasury secretary who, along with former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan, had presided over many of the key deregulatory changes in the ’90s -who convinced Obama that the financial system they themselves had done so much to nurture was, on the whole, fine. As long as there were greater capital reserves, leverage limits, and more regulatory oversight, Wall Street could remain intact.

Obama allowed these old regime people to continue in office, and for this he must carry the can. He is left in the position in 2010 of obviously needing a lot more QE if he is to be re-elected (Bernanke as good as promised this at Jackson Hole) but after engendering Tea Party and centrist Democratic resistance to more government spending by pushing his health-care plan, the question is whether he has the actual or political capital required to deliver that. My view is most emphatically that he doesn’t: by the end of the process, Barack Obama has managed to alienate everyone from Blankfein to the US blue-collar classes.

Foreign policy remains a shambles not just of direction, but also tactics. Only yesterday it was revealed, for instance, that Iran has transferred assets out of European banks in order to defend itself against the effects of sanctions that are part of what Iranian officials have called an “economic war” against the country by the United States. Critics of the Administration continue to insist that sequestering those assets – vital for Iran’s ability to finance both the nuclear programme and its terrorist links – could have been achieved with minimal difficulty. It just seems not to have occurred to the President’s advisors to do it.

Even the initially much-hailed mortgage relief plan has turned sour. It’s hard to cock up a policy that involves giving people in arrears money so they can keep going – but the Obama White House managed that with ease. Millions of dollars were wasted giving support to cases whose indebtedness was beyond help. And now of course, the property sales figures for July are dire. Sales were down 27 percent from the previous month, and 26 percent from a year ago – and remember, only two US recessions in history have ever ended without a property boom.

Having disappointed his supporters and angered his opponents, Obama has sought out whipping boys wherever they could be found – to both distract attention, and suggest he might have cojones after all. BP had its ass kicked (and the action was deeply offensive to America’s most reliable ally), Wall St was promised a fight (but emerged almost unscathed), China has been accused of currency-market rigging (and thus real rapprochement with Beijing damaged), the EU for poor US trade figures (after US company Goldman Sachs had ‘advised’ Greece about how to defraud Brussels) and now today condemnation is being heaped upon China because it is restricting the export of rare New Century technology metals. What would the US do in their position – donate it to the Red Cross?

Obama’s 2008 has rapidly become Blair’s 1997: a tragically wasted opportunity to do some real good with the solid backing of the People. And Barack Obama really did promise so much: change we could believe in, a more outward-looking America, a reform of the financial system, and a clean sweep of all the idiots who said self-regulating markets and trickle-down wealth would eventually sort out the poor.

Nothing has changed, nothing has been reformed, liberal measures have been bungled, and the old Wall Street cronies retained. The President has betrayed those to whom he gave hope at home, and his real allies abroad. And in doing so, he has in turn betrayed his race.

ANALYSIS: France & Lagarde are far closer to the cliff than they care to admit.

It’s thumbs up for France, says Lagarde.

Over the last two months, The Slog has occasionally given readers the benefit of personal observations about France’s willingness (or ability) to take the strain and pain of austerity. My general argument over that time has been to the effect that there are no signs at all of that intention – in fact, few signs as yet that the Sarkozy Government has anything but the vaguest idea of the mess it is in.

So far, the one verifiable fact – issued by Christine Lagarde’s Finance Ministry – is that not a single French public sector worker has been forcibly removed from employment. There have been a small number of unreplaced retirees and a couple of voluntary redundancies, but that’s it. And while we must remember that Mme Lagarde is not an A* maths student, the figures weren’t compiled by her and so are probably reliable. What I’d like to do now is take you through some equally cast-iron numbers. Those of a French disposition should look away now.

Lagarde predicts the French economy will chalk up growth of 2.0% next year, and reduce the budget deficit from 8% of GDP to 6%. Her optimism is based on the Bernanke Wyoming principle of ‘It must, because otherwise we all drown’. But real life is different: senior Natixis economist Jean-Christophe Caffet forecasts that France will grow in 2011 at only a 1% rate. Or exactly half of Christine’s guesstimate…and under a third of her original prediction in February of a 3.2% rate of expansion.

It could be the growth is going to come from upping efficiency. GDP per capita in France runs at under two-thirds the US level, so there’s room for what the house agents call potential. However, the per capita output is a direct result of Union power – and that shows no signs at all of going away: Sarkozy has only to suggest a cut in State pensions for les syndicats to start talking blocked autoroutes and blockaded ports.

Mme Lagarde’s forecast will certainly need to be realised – and more – if the country’s deficit is to be controlled. Currently running at a compound increase of 3 billion Euros a month, there is much talk at Finance and in the Elysees Palace of bold steps to get the deficit down. But as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) caustically observes, “France has a poor track record in meeting the deficit targets in its stability programs”. In the 10 post-euro launch years for which data are available, France’s budget deficits averaged 3.25% of GDP.

In short – as The Slog has been recording since its inception – France has been outside the limits allowed by the Single Currency Act every single year.

The truth is that, as Nicolas Sarkozy has gained a proper whiff of the increasingly truculent French mood, he has reverted to ‘France First’ type. Of late it’s becoming obvious that his policy of choice will be protectionism – the diametric opposite of that free trade which is supposed to be the economic point of the EU.

The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) notes how the French President continues to set up and protect ‘national champion’ companies. He is also voluble on the subject of encouraging “Franco-French” mergers – to prevent foreigners from acquiring French companies.

France wants what it always wanted from the EU: freebies, not free trade. Free trade is great when Germany is buying all the farming output (with Brussels throwing the rest away) but once Germany gets antsy about the debt and the Rosbifs kick up rough about the Common Agricultural Policy, France will be the first to end the game by taking its ball home.

It’s been 55 years of stitch-up, corruption, bureaucratic hubris and unwritten German war reparations in the gradual emergence of the EU caterpillar from the EEC butterfly. But it is now revealed for what it is: an insolvent farce to which there is little balance and zero rationale.

People often write to me of an alleged ‘gloating desire to see the EU fail’, but they miss the point. A loose Europe with retained State’s rights and a desire to learn mutually remains a great idea – and precisely what the bloated, controlling and mendacious EU can never be. And anyway, such critics don’t read the data enough. For example, 16 out of the 18 members of the eurozone contribute nothing at all to growth. The primary sources of ‘profit’ for the Union are France and Germany inside the zone – and the UK outside it.

Anyone keen on that shambolic confection as a primary trading partner must, I would contend, be a bailout short of a brain.

SKETCH: Miliband D Major nails his colours to the idea of moving on to somewhere.

Minigland…staying right here in, um, er….

There is something about the elder one of the Miliband brace that makes one think he should’ve been a software designer. Or rather, to be more exact there are umpteen things about the bloke that would lead one to such a conclusion: the inability to speak plain English, the geeky voice, his confusion about idea and point of idea, the occasional eyebrow knitting to suggest confusion, the insistence that he’s done the right thing by everyone….it’s a long list. I watch him being interviewed and read his speeches, but both remind me of endless hours sitting with pointy-heads in front of an ailing pc trying to explain what I want: the result is exactly the same – one’s request for a solution to the £ sign problem is met with an upgraded version of Wordcount.

So I have every sympathy with the Indie’s John Rentoul, who spent quite a bit of his weekend interviewing the former Foreign Secretary – who is now, of course, the leading contender in a race to inherit the Chancellery Bunker, aka the Labour leadership.

Miliband opened the encounter with the words “I will tell you what I think, very openly and very clearly” in relation to his policy ideas, and the general direction in which he wants the now Second Hand Labour Party to go.

‘Let us be clear about this’ has to be the most done to death precursor of a lie in the history of British politics. But David Miliband still says it, and part of me really does want to believe him: there is a time and place for clarity, and for me it’s right now as quickly as possible please.

“I’ve got a very clear of where I think the country needs to go” he continued – or at least that’s what the IoS printed. Could be there’s a gagmeister in the bowels of the paper, or perhaps a former Guardian proof-reader taken on out of sympathy. Either way, the claim that David has a very clear is particularly apt. For we’re no wiser after the interview what it is that’s clear than we were before. Here’s how The Candidate finished that opener:

“I’ve got a very clear of where I think the country needs to go, and where the party needs to go in order to take the country there”.

It sounds like a grand invasion plan of some kind: we put Britain in Germany, take the Party to Alsace-Lorraine, and then swarm across the Rhine to sort out those useless Frogs and their mediaeval farming system. It sounds good to me, but unfortunately it’s not what Miliband went on to say. What Miliband said was nothing beyond The Future. Forward not Back, as it were -not an entirely original idea (See photo at top). But fair do’s – let’s see how the next Labour leader gets down to the nitty-gritty on the future:

“The case that I’m making is about the argument I am making about the future of the country and how we meet its challenges and how the Labour party is part of the country’s future”.

Now, the bit about wanting the Labour Party to be part of the future I understand completely, because it if isn’t going to be there then Mr Miliband won’t have a job. But his promise to neither abolish nor disband the Party is the sum total of detail we’re given. We just know that DM is arguing the case for the future, and very much in favour of tackling its challenges….as opposed to ignoring them. And this represents, let’s face it, a massive departure from the modus operandi of Blair and Brown.

But where will all this slaying of challenges take place, given that future is a time-based thing of great inexactitude? At this point, the challenger blows away any mists of confusion remaining:

“I have been talking moving on, and I have stuck to talking about moving on.”

You have to accept that there’s logic to all this, because without moving on it’s unlikely Labour MPs would arrive anywhere else. But we still don’t have any details beyond ‘anywhere else’. Maybe that’s what he means: anywhere but here.

We are promised one specific: there will be a big, big shift in Britain’s foreign policy, which must be honest-to-God ethical. David runs us through the bones of this one:

“The alternative to an ethical foreign policy is an unethical foreign policy, and I don’t believe in an unethical foreign policy…you [must] never ever have anything to do with torture. You never do. Under any circumstances. Because it is wrong.”

I wonder what went through Rentoul’s mind when his interviewee made those assertions. Did he, perhaps, worry in case he had turned into a door-jamb without noticing? Faced with a patronising apparatchik explaining the opposite of ethical and the downside of pulling fingernails out, speaking for myself I would’ve feared that I’d transmuted into a cricket bat. And then hit him very hard with myself.

Desperate by now for some kind of substance, Rentoul switched his attention to reassurance. After all, Miliband had just proclaimed a switch away from unethical and very wrong torture, but had – as it happens – been the Foreign Secretary while all that completely unacceptable behaviour was going on.

“Consistency between the private and the public [spoken word] is very important,” David averred. It is indeed chummy – and we all know where you stand on that one: lots of private assurances of wielding the dagger followed by lots of public assurances of unswerving loyalty to Gordon.

“Politics,” the wannabe Leader concluded, “is about action not just press releases.” Correct. And character assessment is about watching what people do rather than what they say.

My next virtual venue after the interview was an Aussie news site, where I read the following:

“The important thing to remember if you see a snake is to give it a wide berth and not threaten or provoke it,” Queensland Climate Change and Sustainability Minister Kate Jones said.

I couldn’t have put it better myself.

ANALYSIS: Google close to Hollywood movie deal for Youtube movies

Google’s predicted deal with Hollywood is both good and bad news.

Google staffers may well have been wondering since 2006 what they would eventually do with YouTube. It’s huge, it’s eclectic and a great way to get famous for five minutes. But when it comes to content, the YouTube user has to kiss a lot of frogs before meeting a prince. Now sources close to things are saying that a deal with Hollywood to screen new features on YouTube is close.

The deal is to be a global one, and will use pay-per-view as the business model. The service is scheduled to be up and running by the end of 2010. Hopes and excitement are high in the world’s movie capital, where the studios are desperate for new revenues to replace DVD sales, which have seen sharp falls recently.

Viewers will stream rather than download the films and pay around £4 for newer titles. The movie YouTube launches would be syncronised with their DVD release.

There are three interesting points to this deal. The first is that it puts Google nose to nose with Apple in the digital film distribution sector. With competition between the two on this and myriad other fronts, you have to ask now who is going to win out: the software/social/info/entertainment appeal of Google, or the hardware/gadget/design/pro/entertainment whiz-kid that Apple has always been. The Slog suspects that the medium term result will be one of complementary domination. By the time the dust has settled on the modernisation of moving-image entertainment, these two groups plus Microsoft and Amazon will control the virtual and hardware world of infotainment and networking. I don’t see this as a welcome prospect.

Switching to purely commercial considerations, while advertising has never played much of a role in the Video/DVD sectors, a streamed product may well be entirely different: it gives the viewer less flexibility – and potentially a lower ability to avoid commercial messages. The ad agency business should be eyeing the opportunity with great interest: after all, the global numbers involved are astronomical.

Finally, the upside; yes, there may well be one. Taught a pain-free lesson by the grisly demise of the music business as we knew it, the studios are wisely opting for streaming. But for home-garage movies, the same opportunities apply to break into a decent-sized audience without a Hollywood deal as those grasped by young music bands ten years ago at the dawn of downloading. This could be an exciting time for indie movie-makers…and as content quality must now become central to what YouTube is about, I’d be surprised if the Googlies don’t have plans to encourage – perhaps even sponsor – this: the company’s strapline is, after all, ‘Broadcast Yourself’.

Following last week’s rare blunder about the US growth rate, I’d like to reassure loyal Sloggers that this story emanates from the same axis which allowed us to scoop the Verizon deal.

Related: Google turns bad to do deal with Verizon.

There has been an error in producing your error message.

‘This message could not be sent because of an error’.

It was just another of those messages that the AOL silo sadists leave for one. It cannot possibly be of any help to you or anyone else, but they send the mother anyway. Why? Search me – apart from the sadist hypothesis. All I’d say is remember: these people manufacture viruses.

Yet still I’m left wondering: what kind of error? Was it an unforced error – careless and stupid administration from AOL? Or was it my mistake – an attempt to use the Reply All button that represented the triumph of wild optimism over bitter experience?

Here’s a clue from Dutch News:

‘Google launched its internet based telephone service in the Netherlands on Wednesday night, but withdrew it a few hours later because the launch had been a mistake’.

There it is again: the undefined cock-up. Was it a mistake to offer the cynical Dutch something for free? An error of judgement to launch in Holland before, say, Italy – where people are more talkative? Or has the whole concept of a free phone service been seen as an error by the bean-counting Googlies? We will never know.

Meanwhile, political and business opponents tonight said that former Polly Peck CEO Asil Nadir was mistaken in his belief that British justice would prevail in his case. Perhaps Asil has seen the error of his ways, and doesn’t care either way. Perhaps he doesn’t need justice, because he has already obtained agreement to a judicial stitch-up in his favour.

In which case, this would be a mistake by British foreign policy. Judge for yourself….

Related article: Why Asil Nadir picked a Polly Peck of political pepper.

Life’s a pain and then you die.

I was very much a part of My Generation, the baby-boomer naifs who thought they were going to die before they grew old. As we moved from teenage years to twenties and and finally hit forty, first The Bomb, then drugs and finally AIDS were designed to kill us. But none of them did – not even alcohol – and so now we have to accept the fact that we’re all going to mooch about moaning about the same things our parents did.

My wife already tells me on a daily basis that I’m grumpy. I’m so grumpy, even watching the programme Grumpy Old Men makes me grumpy, because being almost all younger than me, they don’t get grumpy about the things I get grumpy about. But Jan also tells me I shuffle my feet, and that really hurts. (The remark, not the shuffling). When a dentist told me in 1983 that I had receding gums, it was like the end of the world. The observation gave me visions of a wearing a permanent rictus grin because my gums had receded down my throat or up my nose or wherever the hell it is they go.

But the real turning point – perhaps tipping point would be more appropriate – is when you and only you observe the faltering march of decrepitude from close quarters. That inability to get into a pair of swimming trunks without falling over. The daily tally of forgotten beers petrified in the freezer. The desire to sit down in order to put on even slip-on shoes. Constantly forgetting things, then making lists. Then losing the lists. A pair of spectacles in every room and the car. The road to cremation is paved with irritating experiences.

After a certain age – and if you’re uncertain, it’s about sixty – a whole tedious variety of things from micturation to gardening become painful, until life is an uninterrupted repetitive strain injury. Last week I used a pair of secateurs to prune some roses (My God, I prune roses even) and my right thumb has been reminding me of it ever since.

For two months now, I’ve been creating an area at the far end of our plot here: a special place – a den – where a chap might write in peace, soak up the first gentle sun of the day, and put his feet up without facing a Nuremburg Court. The project was going to take a week when I scoped it out on the drawing board, but now I’m fairly sure I’ll be dead before it’s finished: like Sagrada Familia stands as a testimony to the vision and drug abuse of Antoni Gaudi, so too this little epic of recycling unwanted bits will be my legacy. It’s not quite in the Tony Blair league, but I can at least claim that no lives were lost in the building of it. Except mine.

It’s hard to describe every douleur associated with The Den, but I shall try. To hammering in seventy-three nails: twanging wrist ligaments and one hugely inflated finger. To raising the resultant wind-break: ripped bicep and inability to turn body in order to reverse car. To digging three terraces where once there was a slope, and unearthing a complex root system along the way: Axeman’s shoulder blade and Navvy’s elbow. Going to sleep now is a complex process of deep-brain Buddhist meditation in order to sever the many pain synapses working overtime to warn me, “Stop this now or I will make you mad”.

Over supper with chums last month, a morbid discussion ensued about which would be worse – the loss of marbles or mobility. It’s a toughie this one, as I’ve always fancied myself one of the Hemingway breed: 8,000 words before breakfast, and a blue marlin beached by teatime….wordsmith as man of action and all that. But as a patient I am the most terrible wimp, whereas the scribbling comes naturally. So for me, writer’s block would be easier to live with than spinal lock.

Talking of which, even lying face down to catch some rays has become an exercise fraught with danger. Last year – while Mrs Slog was out picking up some haute cuisine for the dogs – I heard the house phone, and jerked upwards as the prelude to running indoors. My wife arrived back to find The Bowman, a U-shaped thing resting on its groin. It was me, although she later testified that the wailing noise sounded more like an old door with rusty hinges. Which was how I felt.

Perhaps the time has come to rest on my laurels. And I would, if only I knew where in my body they were – and how to fall upon them without it hurting like hell.