GETTING BY: Cheap, excellent wine alert

I’m not a huge fan of most Aussie wines. I find the vast majority overpriced and too high in alcohol. However, there’s a McGuigan 2010 Bin 736 red at Tesco right now, and it’s terrific.

And more importantly, it’s on offer.

Shiraz Viognier is not a blend with which I’m familiar. But unlike Merlot, what you gain in smoothness you don’t lose in character. And at 13% abv, it’s still a sane wine.

It’s down from £9.99 to £4.99 until 19th June, so Big T must be losing money on it. All the more reason to stock up.

At the End of the Day

Most people tend to associate the phrase ‘thinking about the needs of others’ with vaguely charitable, religious, nursing or neighbourly applications. But in today’s world, not thinking about the needs of others is one of the root causes of our econo-cultural crisis. And in the end, it is ruinously expensive.

If you’re employed in marketing, and all you want is to enact a spectacular, newsworthy change to the main brand – in order to make a name for yourself and move on to a more senior position elsewhere – customers will probably lose something they genuinely value in the product, and the employees will eventually lose their jobs as a result of falling sales.

If you’re an investment banker keen to exceed targets for intra-bank sales – without much thought for the needs of the economy you serve – sooner or later millions of people will lose their jobs, and whole nations will lose their pride.

If you’re an accountant interested only in maximising bottom line to the Shareholders (and big bonuses for yourself and other Board directors) jobs will move offshore, indigenous unemployment will rise, and workless young people will at best become institutionalised to welfare, and at worst wreck the neighbourhood through rioting and crime.

If you’re a lawyer out to develop new markets to increase fees without thought for society, the culture will become more litigious, idiotic notices will appear everywhere, packaging will be covered in pointless warnings, surgeons will become wary of even picking up a scalpel, and everyone will feel at times frustrated, and at other times become worried, by warnings that are complete fantasy.

If you’re a copywriter or TV programme commissioner desperate to impress your mates rather than study the market thoroughly, sales will fall, ratings will fall, programmers and admen will become desperate to attract ratings at any price, programme and advertising quality will nosedive, jobs will disappear, and the highpoint of the week will be Simon Cowell.

If you’re a policemen putting personal career before social stability, crime will get out of control, the police reputation will be damaged, you will take bribes, fiddle target numbers, bang up innocent people, redouble the loss of respect for the Force, become politicised, and eventually turn into a glorified Gestapo.

If you’re a journalist for whom nothing matters beyond circulation, readership will fall, phones will be hacked, emails blagged, MPs threatened, policemen bribed, and Government policy compromised totally.

If you’re a senior civil servant whose only concern is a cosy retirement and avoiding decisions, the National Debt will double, the armed forces will be poorly prepared, soldiers will die, privatisations will be nonsensical, millions of pointless jobs will be created, the employees in those jobs will strike when somebody realises their pointlessness, Government will become distracted, the export deficit will balloon, and the Nation will find itself facing an unscaleable skyscraper of debt.

If you’re a politician in thrall to bankers, media gargoyles and mandarin civil servants – interested only in votes, power and Party success – then the needs of all those groups will come before the concerns of ordinary citizens. You will hire criminal liars, creep up backsides and thus be in the dark, offer your own bottom to the rich, sell irreplaceable national assets to profit-fixated insurers, and believe partisan politics to be more important than principle in every last instance.

People sometimes talk about all the institutional employees listed above as having “lost the plot”, but the reality is that they know perfectly well what the plot is – they simply choose to ignore it in favour of sectional, monied needs, personal gratification, and egomania. Brussels, Berlin, Greece, Westminster: the location is of no importance, and the end product is always the same: chaos, anarchy, suffering and – one day – collapse.

The bottom line on uncaring, selfish megalomania is that it costs. In some periods of history – and the current era may well turn out to be one – the egomaniacs and plot-ignorers pay for it with their lives…..and everyone else with their livelihoods.

EUROBLOWN: My my, what odd children Mr Friedman had.

There was a crackerjack piece by enfant terrible Ed West in the Sarkograph this morning, pointing out with much insight that while the Irish fought with weapons to get rid of the British (and wouldn’t take 1% of the crap Brussels is giving them were the imperial power Britain) only a low turnout will deliver a No vote today. It’s a sort of ‘go figure’ piece, but makes enormous sense about how and why culture is central to the issue…and how Britain is the only true bastion of euroscepticism in Europe.

While absolutely on the money this new bit of Westiness, I will offer a dimension I think needs adding. In 1916, the Irish knew that freedom was more important than money. In 2012, they just don’t want the money turned off. It’s the same in Greece, and that’s both supported and reflected by something else I read today.

Pour encourager les voteurs, the international creditors and Troikanauts associated with (aka in pursuit of) Greece were laying it on with a trowel again yesterday – along with the National Bank of Greece. But as always, the threat was the same: ‘…the Troika putting up $325 billion in two bailouts to prop up the country’s essentially-dead economy, said the next Greek government must pursue budget cuts with “determination” to be eligible for emergency aid…’

Or put another way, don’t vote for that nasty Alexis Tsipras, or we’ll cut the munneeee off. (Tsipras wants to stay in the ezone, but to have the austerity rescheduled).

Picture the scene that misty morning in 1916 on O’Connell Street. As the Irish patriots exchange sporadic fire with the imperialist British either side of the main Post Office, Paddy comes down the street carrying a large white flag, and yells at Sean just as he’s about to launch a grenade, “Put de fecking ting down Sean, Downun Street’s gonna cut off de munneee.”

This is as much down to Reagan, Thatcher, Friedman, and their follower clowns who’ve been insisting on trickly wealth, decisive markets and the rest of the bollocks for the last thirty years. Neo-liberalist economics has but one criterion: de munneeeee.

How ironic it is, therefore, to see the values of the High Priest of Laissez-faire free markets propping up perhaps the most illiberal, protectionist, social-democratic crock in history.

Greek scare-tactics continue as Berlin remorselessly plans a future Fiscal Union dominated by Wolfgang Schäuble

Schäuble’s outline plan for FU is a totalitarian accident waiting to happen

One man’s poison….

There was more Domesday scariness from the National Bank of Greece on Tuesday. If Greece exits the euro, its latest report suggested, the events would lead to a devaluation of the new currency by 65%,  a GDP nosediving by 22%, 34% unemployment, and income per capita nearly halving to 55%.

But you ain’t heard the half of it: Sovereign finance will be impossible to find, initial inflation will therefore (?) be at 30% – and keep rising until any and all advantages of the drachma’s reinstatement have been wiped out.

But on the other hand, here’s some news about what’s likely to happen while there is even a risk of Greece leaving the eurozone: this morning, two of the world’s biggest trade credit insurers stopped providing cover for exporters to Greece “on concern that the country might leave the eurozone.” Brokers said the decisions by Euler Hermes and Coface were the only instances they could recall of trade credit insurers pulling out altogether from a European country. As none of them are 168 years old, I’d imagine that’s true.

But one is left wondering how, if that’s the case, things could be any worse without the euro….which isn’t going to exist in a year’s time anyway.

Greece doesn’t want to leave the euro, and Berlin-am-Brussels doesn’t want the country to go. I keep on saying this, and it seems to make remarkably little impression. This does not, of course, mean that a departure won’t take place, as the entire eurozone and its EU parent are based on the madness of bad science anyway.

But think on this as well: ClubMeds staying in the euro and dragging down its value can be good for business…especially German business.

…is another man’s meat.

Currency devaluation can be fun.  After EURUSD and German CDS had been tightly coupled for months, said Zero Hedge yesterday in another eurocalypse episode, the CDS market changed exchange-rates markedly between the euro and the Buck – as in, a 6% devaluation of the former. 

In Berlin – some in Frankfurt think – a cold calculation is going on in Schäuble’s Finance Ministry about the cost of megabailout versus the long-term business gains to be had from a weak exporting currency. The Frankfurters however – and they are dead right – see the calculation as not so much cold, more braindead: it would simply lead to aggressive devaluations elsewhere, and start a full-scale currency war. But a few of the more radical FinMin Berliners say that inflation is what the financial MoUs want anyway – as part and parcel of the monetisation of paper madness – so when rape is inevitable, try to enjoy it.

It strikes me on the whole as unlikely, but now he is slated for the TopFinMin job in the EU, Wolfgang Schäuble’s delusions of grandeur may be overriding his incipient paranoia about inflation. Certainly, he is very much on the case of his new job task – discipline, discipline, and more discipline. The following draft is a leak (and an intentional one) from the Berlin Finance Ministry scoping out how life in the Fiskal Union will work. And as we all know, work makes free:

The portion of a  FU nation’s debt exceeding 60% of GDP will be transferred into a new European Redemption Fund. (Very Merkelian, that one: sinners will be redeemed)

The 17 countries will be liable for their own portion of the debt transferred to the ERF. But they will face a maximum term of 20-25 years to pay it off. But here comes the double-think:

In a legal ‘redeemable pref shares’ sense (as per standard takeover contracts in business) all 17 nations will be jointly liable for the debt placed in the fund. This locks everyone in forever: you can run, but you can’t hide. As the more observant among you will have spotted, the original eurozone lock-in caused most of the problems the ezone faces today. Good to see that Berlin learns from its mistakes, nicht?

But it also means that nobody (for example – pulling a name out at random – Germany) can ever get lumbered with the entire debt mountain: because the word ‘severally’ is missing from the definition used (‘jointly’),  creditors can’t come after one debt guarantor like they could in business.

Deutschland über alles – naturlich. And – to be fair here – Brussels off the hook yet again…it not being a sovereign nation an’ all. “Don’t let’s be beastly to the Germans, or in any way horrid to the Hun” as Noel Coward sang in 1939.

One final thing of course – because Berlin never misses anything in the detail: if countries fall behind in their repayment of debt in the European Redemption Fund, some of their national tax revenue would be earmarked for repayments. They would also have to commit to fixing national finances to free up money for debt service.

Und all ziss vill be offaseen by little Volfy in dem Veelchair. You haff been varned.

Before any new readers write me off as an anti-German headcase, let me just reiterate what I’ve written a hundred times before: these problems are chiefly CDU-Merkelian, not German. The SPD would be opposed to these tactics, if not the overall goal, of eurostability. And, like UKIP’s Nigel Average, being married into a German family, I’m hardly likely to be a Germaphobic Mossad agent, now am I?

What I am doing here is dramatising and sharpening the focus on some facts to wake people up. Wolfgang Schäuble is a ruthless and slippery man found suspicious by most German politicians. Angela Merkel is a former Osti Stalinist who insists on taking a hard line in support of whatever she is promoting….usually herself. The Brussels eurocrats are all unelected functionaries who have shown themselves to be autocratic and pathetically unimaginative. Schäuble is already approved as the man who will be running the finances of the Fiscal Union. His idea of Germany is clearly going to dominate it. This is only ever going to end in tears.ä

 

CYPRUS: Erdoganism on the march yet again.

Recep Erdogan…cuddling up to the military

If Recep Erdogan’s expansionist aims are to be realised, then he can’t alienate the military completely. Over the last three weeks he has been dropping hints and giving signals that show-trials and purges in the army should now come to an end. He’s the best person to decide such a thing, as he’s run it since Day One.

But of course if you want sabres to rattle at Israel, then you need committed officers to hold them. And it’s hard to invade Cyprus without officers to lead the troops.

Seven days ago, the north Cyprus Cabinet changed the name of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (unrecognised by almost every UN nation except Turkey)  to the Turkish Republic of Cyprus – ie, dropping the all important ‘northern’ descriptor. The decision was issued on May 23, and is to befollowed by the issuance of new biometric passports for all the citizens of what remains, in reality, a rogue State.

The north-Cypriot Government decision hopes to neutralise and undermine the current UN Security Council Resolution, which states clearly that the international community does not recognize the TRNC (now the TRC) as an official state.The Turkish-Cypriot citizens will be identified as “Cypriot Turks” in their new passports, something which is expected to allow them to travel more easily in different European and Islamic countries, such as Pakistan.

The problem remains, however, that the whole of  Cypus is, technically, an EU member. So if Edogetyergun decides to award himself the Turkish Republic of Cyprus, in order to remain a member and comply with its rules he will have no alternative, poor chap, but to invade the entire island. And if he then makes the TRC a province of Turkey, why, then of course the Sprouts will be forced to recognise Turkey as a whole.

They could get together an invasion force and chuck Erdogan out of Cyprus, but there are two problems with that scenario. One, it would take them about thirty years to raise the army, and another thirty to organise the invasion; and two, they don’t want to annoy Mr Erdogan any more than David Cameron does.

This is all academic anyway, as within five years at most, there won’t be an EU. All I can say is, thank goodness the Greeks bought €150bn of arms from EU founders Francogermany. Otherwise, where would we be now?

 

Under starter’s orders

Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt tells us that his main aim was to “reach a fair and unbiased decision” on News Corp’s bid for broadcaster BSkyB. Today he hopes to convince the Leveson enquiry of this. Time to start up the White Time Van again….

Jay: Could you just explain for us Mr Hunt the mian steps you took to ensure everyone had faith in your principled lack of bias?

Hunt: Of course I will, and then when this is over and all seen to be a horrid plot, I shall sue everyone who has has maligned my reputation, and become even more fabulously and entrepreneurially rich than I am now.

Jay: Do proceed Mr Hunt.

Hunt: Thank you. Well first of all, I joined the Newscorp Glee Club and became a Cheerleader for the greatest living multiple nationality Mr Rupert Murdoch…using my constituency website to make this abundantly clear. There is no way any observer could have thought my intentions in any way underhand or open to misinterpretation.

Jay: I see. And then what did you do?

Hunt: Well, I was already a busines partner of the Newscorp group, and so in order to create public faith in the completely above-board nature of my role as arbiter on the BSkyB bid, I didn’t tell anyone about it. Sometimes the needs of the Nation must come before one’s very strict personal principles, and this was one occasion when that golden rule had to apply, whatever the cost to myself.

Jay: Quite. And how did this arbitrary, I’m sorry, arbitration role work in practice?

Hunt: Well, as always I put fairness first. I felt that, as News International might be worried that my principles would get in the way of their bid, I sent thousands of texts to all the people involved in helping them, and wrote lots of encouraging emails in order to pretend that I was really on their side when in reality of course I had to be scrupulously fair in finding the company to be an ideal candidate to take over BkyB in the end.

Jay. Yes. And, um, did you tell Parliament about this?

Hunt: Of course. That was my duty. I told them I was releasing all the correspondence totally and in full.

Jay: But you didn’t, did you?

Hunt: Of course not. The ruse to persuade James Murdoch that I was being fair to his side would have been misunderstood. As indeed it was when it came out. So I feel fully vindicated by the decision. I have done nothing wrong.

Jay: Have you ever done anything wrong before your period as Culture Secretary Mr Hunt?

Hunt: Oh I see, you’re going to drag up all that old stuff about the British Council and how I created lots of little companies in order to compete with myself fully. Well that’s all been raked through and found to be perfectly innocent. There was a Freedom of Information query and the British Council answered it.

Jay: With a lie.

Hunt: Not my lie, though. I wasn’t involved, as by this time I had decided to dedicate my life to public service…

Jay: Yes, that’s right. You were elected MP for SW Surrey?

Hunt: I was, that’s right, where I replaced the fragrant Virginia Bottomley.

Jay: Who also happened to be an active member of the British Council?

Hunt: Yes, that was a lucky bounce. Everyone needs a little luck now and then, even me.

Jay: And then you loaned your brother some money, is that correct?

Hunt: Correct. A purely fraternal thing. To help his company expand.

Jay: But it had already gone bust, hadn’t it? And you were the Company Secretary weren’t you?

Hunt: Well, yes – I went the extra mile for my brother. That’s always been my style.

Jay: And you did the same for your own business partner, explaining how to avoid £100,000 of tax last year just before the Government of which you are a member closed the loophole, is that right?

Hunt: Absolutely. It is very important in this time of austerity and job cuts not to give the Inland Revenue extra work that is completely unnecessary. Everyone must pay their taxes, but the more people who avoid unnecessary payments, the more lean the tax offices will be, so we can then privatise them.

Jay: Privatise them?

Hunt: Absolutely. One day I will be Chancellor of the Exchequer, and when that day comes I will put before Parliament a bill to sell the Inland Revenue functions to the tax accountancy sector.

Jay: I see. Why them?

Hunt: Well obviously, because they have the most experience in how to help companies avoid tax, and thus the tax system will become yet more efficient because tax avoidance will be maximised.

Jay. Right. And tax receipts will fall?

Hunt: Yes. And so tax rates will have to go up where there are the most taxpayers, at the bottom end, in order to maximise tax intake. So you see we shall have profitable industries, more jobs in the tax avoidance sector, and a privatised Revenue service maximising receipts on minimal staff. Sadly, this sort of logic is alien to the Socialists, who know only how to spend.

Jay: Thank you very much Mr Hunt. So given your long expereience as both arbiter and partner to Newscorp, how would you sum up the standards in British media today?

Hunt: Oh without doubt, very high. I mean, look at the case of phone-hacking: it was the media that revealed all that. It wasn’t the politicians or the police, it was the media.

Jay: But not Newscorp, obviously?

Hunt: Not in that instance no, but later the company’s newspapers revealed all sorts of things going on. For example the genius of Boris Johnson and how, even if the Brooks-Coulson cases lead all the way back to Mr Cameron, there’s a dynamic, radical Conservative waiting in the wings, whose Glee Club I recently joined, and for whom I am now very much a cheerleader.

Jay: Thank you so much once again, Mr Hunt, for being so honest about yourself.

Hunt: Not at all. With me, what you see is what you get.

Jay: Exactly.

For the unexpurgated heads-up on Hunt Balls, go here.

EUROBLOWN: Syriza leaps into opinion poll lead as Greek President has talks with the military.

A new poll by VPRC tonight has Syriza as the biggest Greek Party with 30% of voting intentions, followed by New Democracy on 26.5%, while Pasok continues to languish at 12.5%. But there were disturbing reports of military discussions with the caretaker government.

Opinion polls in Greece are about as stable as flies in a hurricane, but there is now a real possibility that the Left in Greece could put together a majority Coalition. With the Democratic Left at 7.5%, and the Communist Party at 5.5%, those together with Syriza would add up to 43%. And Louka Katseli – a former PASOK minister who now leads the small leftist party Social Pact – today threw her weight behind Alexis Tsipras.

If this critical mass can be hyped by Syriza, then Tsipras really could be the next Greek Prime Minister. As he supports the idea of Greece remaining in the eurozone, the markets might well view his accession positively. But whether they do or not, a Syriza victory would be certain to put the moral and commercial onus back onto the Troika.

However, it became clear today that President Karolos Papoulias had received the caretaker government’s Defence Minister Frangos Frangoulis, along with the leadership of the country’s armed forces, for talks at 2.30 p.m. No details of the discussions have as yet come to light, but in an obvious move to make his position clear, Alexis Tsipras visited the Defence Ministry headquarters, where he condemned previous governments for spending excessively on arms – and expressed solidarity with armed forces employees who have seen their salaries and pensions cut due to the Troika austerity measures.

HACKGATE DAY 506: Noose tightens on Camerlot as Sheridan cops nab Coulson

Andy Coulson

The 44-year-old former Number Ten mediacomms boss reporting direct to Prime Minister David Cameron was detained in London this morning by officers from Strathclyde Police. He will shortly be arriving in Glasgow to undergo interrogation on suspicion of committing perjury during the infamous Tommy Sheridan trial. The case relates to allegedly false accusations made by Andy Coulson against the Scottish MP while he (Coulson) was editor of now defunct Murdoch newspaper The News of the World.

This is not exclusive news, but as ever The Slog’s interpretation adds value: just 24 hours before a Minister appointed by Cameron to handle the Newscorp bid for BSkyB faces his accusers in front of the Leveson enquiry, another paid Camerlot liar is up before the Beak….with the same media mogul Murdoch involved.

And things couldn’t be worse for David Cameron in this specific case: Coulson is known to be bitter about the way both Newscorp and Number Ten have hung him out to dry. Allegedly, he is depressed – and drinking heavily.

There are very few substances more likely to make a man sing than alcoholic drink.

Stay tuned.

 

 

SPANISH BANKIA RUSE: Draghi bats the stinky ball back to Madrid

“But eeth oonly leetle beet of thyeet, Mario…”

I’m amazed it’s taken this long to be honest, but Mario Draghi’s ECB yesterday told the chaps at Bankia thanks but no thanks in relation to their planned sh*t-for euros exchange via the ‘recapitalised’ Spanish bank. As I posted earlier this week, he had no choice: otherwise every bank from Arnhem to Zaragossa would’ve been at it.

There is of course the slight problem that what he’s done breaks the ECB Support pledge, but that’s never held the Italian back before. Meanwhile, the much bigger problem is what the Band of Hope and Rajoy do now. To which the answer is probaby eat a lot of words such as “We do not need an EU bailout”.

The markets have reacted quickly, with almost every bourse down: now that the Bankia wheeze has been shot down by the European Central Bank, Spain’s borrowing difficulties must become even more intractable. 10-year Spanish bond yields are up 9 basis points to 6.53%, now something of a Bailout benchmark in the light of Ireland, Portugal and Greece’s fate. Draghi’s ECB immediately bought zillions of euros, as a result of which obvious manipulation the Pound weakened slightly against the currency. I can’t believe that rally will last, and I can’t believe Mario has unlimited amounts of money without starting to print bigtime. This is what Zero Hedge was expecting him to do last night, as what the site now calls ‘Eurocalypse’ had Tyler Hurden  chewing the Xanax once more.

The markets were also disappointed that Beijing didn’t pile in with any money after all. Well, you read it here first: The Slog never expected them to. Why put dead money into a scam fund when in six months time you’ll be able to buy every port in the Med for a dime? Anyway, the Spanish Government, Madrid sources claim, will have to inject another €100 billion into its banks because (as we’ve all known for months) Bankia’s problem is merely the uber-cloud peak of an Everest of porkies.  Although Bankia is Spain’s second biggest bank by deposits and fourth biggest by loans, it now has nowhere else to go….and the Rajoy Government simply doesn’t have a hundred billion lying around looking for a usage occasion.

One can’t help wondering how much longer it’ll be before Berlin makes its euromove. I am on the case – but as yet, getting nowhere.

Some Slog soothsaying from two years ago

About The Slog

EUROBLOWN BREAKING….Greece heading for second stalemate as prisons run out of food

Obese man’s lift stuck

New opinion polls in this morning’s Greek press have New Democracy and Syriza still way ahead, and Pasok stuck at slightly above its vote last time.

The figures look like this:

5 ND 23,4%, SYRIZA 22,1%, PASOK 13,5%, INDGR 7,4%, ΚΚΕ 5,9%, DEMLEFT 5,1%, Neo Nazis 4,2%.

Still, Berlin-am-Brussels can take some cold comfort in that 54,2% of respondents say the country should ‘accept implementation of the bailout schedules’ as a precondition in order to stay in the eurozone. This does, however, give the lie to German tabloid hysterics insisting that the Greeks want it every which way.

But the obvious news in bold black type is that Athens will be without any clear sight of a ruling Coalition on June 18th. Although the way things are going, byt then the whole exercise might by academic anyway: I’m not usually a great supporter of non-political prisoners’ rights, but amidst the deepening Greek crisis, the State budget for many prisons has shrunk to a bare minimum. Hundreds of detainees are malnourished, the Greek newspaper Proto Thema reveals this morning.

At the prison in Corinth, food supplies have stopped completely, so their charges are about to starve say prison staff,…who themselves haven’t received any state funds for the last three months. The response of some Corinth citizens has been a food collection for the prison inmates to support the prisoners, since all protests to the Justice Ministry have proved fruitless.

So, apart from the health service collapsing, pharmacies having no medication, the University budgets having been robbed, the economy shrinking at a record rate and tax intake falling off a cliff, the Berlin-am-Brussels austerity strategy is going really well.

Well Gods, we’ve reached the mad stage. Could we have a little destroying now please?

Warped factor Seven in the German tabloids

Under starter’s orders

Order, order….today is PMQs (Pointless Meandering Quarrels) and thanks to my new Ward-factor 7 white time van, The Slog is able to bring you this exclusive preview….

Speaker: Mr Ed Miliband…

Ed: Could the Prime Minister tell the House why his Chancellor is looking rather pastey-faced?

Miller Band: Horr horr haa ahaha

Dave: The same reason your Shadow Chancellor is called Balls, I’d imagine.

Scamerons: Orrr horr horr heeee hhaaar arrhaaar

Ed: Does the Prime Minister believe this House should pass a new Hunting Law?

Miller Band: Harr harr heee hoohooharr

Dave: You’d have to be a cunning stuntman to pull that one off….

Scamerons: Ehhhhhuuurha Hiyeehahaha

Speaker: Order, ORDER! The cameras are live so please can we have more noise so I can shout order, ORDER!

Ed: The Prime Minister arrived late today. Warsi signing off some expenses?

Miller Band: Resign! Shame! Boooo! Eton! Out of touch!

Dave: Calm down Ed, at least she’s not my sister.

Scamerons: Brilliant! Genius! Irreplaceable! Magic! Hurrah!

Dave: Ithangyoo playmates, it’s turned out nice again, ‘ere, no, listen missus…he’s fallen in the water, stupid boy….

Spanish banking problems overtake worries about Greece, focus on rising Spanish debt yields, Aussie slips on weak retail sales data, Syria at tipping point, Gatwick in chaos, Doctors close to strike action, euro and bank shares plummet, Asian Markets collapse on Spain/ECB row news.

If you enjoyed this, you’ll probably like The Antics Road Show.

At the End of the Day

For a while I thought it was just me, but now I’m reasonably sure (on the basis of a recent straw poll of those aged 40-75) that while the problems of government are becoming more complex, the soundbites are increasingly superficial. They’re not scratching the surface nowadays so much as gliding over it gently – in the fear that the ice might crack, and thus envelope the user in the poisonous cauldron below.

Societies have always been complex things. If you’ve ever watched baboons for any length of time, even there the hierarchies, challenges, signals and clips around the ear range from impenetrable via subtle to violent. But once societies got bigger, discovered remote media, and were melted together by easy long-distance travel, the issues became ever more complicated. The problem went from being one of understanding the social anthropology of brutes, to grasping the urban anthropology of neurotic lost souls.

Into this highly dangerous den have stumped the thick and unyielding jackboots of polemic bigotry. It has many shades across its vivid spectrum, but the main ones are a type of midnight blue insisting that no-holds-barred competition is the only answer, and a bright red that in turn demands allegiance to the idea of Big-State job cooperatives. Just as the problem/soundbite gap gets bigger, so too does the distance between bright and midnight. We in the West are rapidly turning into extreme, divided cultures.

For a social anthropologist, the very idea that each route is mutually exclusive represents patently bad science. The success of every higher quadruped in general and ape in particular has been based on competition for the best genes, and cooperation both among and between the brightest packs. But talk to the pc Left/East Coast Democrat these days about genetic competition, and you might as well fess up to being Dr Mengele. Argue the case with the 1922 Right/GOP Friedmanite about a vital need for community weal, and there’ll be a bit of blather about charitable donation, followed by mutterings of unsound fluffiness or gardayum comnisum.

This blinkered denial forms the basis of much satire, and would indeed be extremely funny were it not for the fact that these damaged goblins are ruining the Britain I love, the America I admired in the late 1950s, and the multivariate Europe I’ve spent forty years greedily discovering. But as I’ve already hinted twice above, the more disastrously everything valuable sinks without trace , the further and further apart the two polemically well-armed camps get.

While the high-profile politicians of recent years have tended to be those without either the idealism or intellect to debate social aims, I have to report to everyone not paying full attention here that a whole new breed is coming up with two unshakeable items of faith: ‘I must have total belief, and your belief is totally wrong’. As Robert Redford remarked on a CNN chatshow recently, “I’m getting tired of so-called debates that consist of two groups of people trashing each other”.

If you think this to be ex cathedra assertion, then I suggest you think again. Dubya Bush is an easy target, but I doubt very much if any genuine alternative to a world run by American oil and Wall Street diktats has ever occurred to him. Ed Miliband too is a bungling twerp, but my real problem with the bloke is that he has neither commercial perspective nor true understanding of what it means to be at the bottom of the heap.

Churchill and Bevan curried a mutual hate relationship over high heat for three decades, but they had far more in common than they realised. Bevan believed in the small community’s healing powers, while Churchill had more belief than any of his Tory peers in the decency of the ordinary Britisher. Both men despised fascism. Both men had faith in the electorate’s wisdom. Both men shared the best debating wit of their generation. But more to the point than any of that, both men are massive heroes of mine. I really do take exception to the Believers who say that makes me mad. Bollocks: it makes me an open-minded admirer of folks who can tell sh*t from putty.

I don’t doubt that a lot of readers will regard my argument on this, but not see it reflected in contemporary politics: surely, they will say, the hallmark of 21st century politicians is a belief in nothing beyond themselves. And yes, if you look at Blair and Obama and Cameron and Gillard and Miliband and Medvedev and Sarkozy and Uncle Tom Cobbleigh this time around, it’s hard to see a scintilla of belief at all – let alone intolerant belief.

But behind Blair was Brown, and behind Medvedev was Putin. Behind Miliband is the Harman/Balls melange, and behind Cameron is Boris Johnson. I suspect that behind Sarkozy was (and will be) Marine Le Pen, and some pretty nasty Australian mining gargoyles are right behind Gillard. More urgently, behind Papandreou was Venizelos, and behind him – in an odd kind of way – Alexis Tsipras. God alone knows who might come after Antonis Samaras, but there’s no shortage of neo-Nazis in Hellenica.

I have a great deal of time for Dr Eoin Clarke and his forensic journalism on the NHS and other Camerlot scandals, but behind and around him is this thing called Labour Left. Among the NEC candidates being touted today on Twitter was Ken Livingstone – a good administrator, but a Stalinist putsch-merchant with serial form when it comes to spitting on the electorate. Why should a Party be called Labour (let alone Left Labour) thirty years after the mass labourforce model of UK capitalism died? Why is a Stalinist a shoe-in for the NEC fifty-eight years after his mass-murdering hero died? Hovering around the good intentions of Graham Brady on the Conservative Right is the spectre of Boris Johnson – equally a politician of sound governance, but yet another man whose bullying disrespect for voters makes him a serious danger to liberal democracy…and a man looking at contemporary issues through the parallax view of an antediluvian education based on privilege.

It seems to me tonight that the coming politicians are all looking in the rear-view mirror of their vintage cars. Be they the Zil of Merkel, the Trabant of Tsipras, the Bentley of Boris, the Citroen of Hollande, or the British Leyland Maxi of Ed Balls, none of them are equipped for the next generation of socio-economic travel. The last thing people like me want is for the road ahead to be a crash-ridden Stock Car race that just goes round in virulent, vacuous circles. And I remain optimistic enough to think that the vast majority of all British citizens are with me, not the kamikaze Believers.

We have to find a new kind of forward-looking tendency that can unite every democrat who knows the difference between good and bad, rather than Left and Right. Not a wooly-wishy-washy-flim-flam-Lefty-Righty LibDem confection, but rather a radical realism that challenges the Establishments of both progressive and conservative. We need the tolerance and wisdom to make the citizen First Among Equals such as the economy, fiscal management, financial services, politics and The State.

But above all, what we need is the guts to put the citizen first…miles ahead of the dated obsessions of Thatcherites, trade unionists, Islamists, blind europhiles, bankers, bureaucrats, and those who see themselves as ‘Hard’ Right or Left. Being ‘Hard’ anything is about wanting power – and to Hell with responsibility for the consequences of any and all extreme policies.

“The insatiable lust for power is only equalled by an incurable impotence in exercising it” said Winston Churchill. “The purpose of power is to give it back” said Aneurin Bevan. We should – all of us tonight – remember how close the aspirations of these two great men were.