At the End of the Day

When I woke up this morning, I wasn’t planning to clean behind the washing machine. I mean, my elder daughter plus hubby are arriving here for a week from tomorrow, but my paternal devotion doesn’t stretch to quite this level of hygiene obsession. However, it’s been an odd sort of day, and as it is now drawing to a close, I thought I’d share it with you.

Truth be told, my main thought on awakening from a dream about forcing a candle up Ed Miliband’s nose was the need to go out and buy a hammock, the previous one (the hammock, not the nose) having died a death and been torn from its tree anchors last year during 70 mph gales. (No 1 Daughter and highly respectful son-in-law very keen on hammocks). I also envisaged a bit of shoe-buying, as there is no country like France for effecting the good value purchase of stylish informal shoes.

The first obstacle in the way of this unreal expectation was the task of preparing the spare bedroom. I’ve never been good at putting duvets into their covers, but I’m usually OK at opening cupboards where the duvet covers are. Today however I was clearly performing below par, as the door literally came off in my hand. The resultant wrestling match with the duvet seemed a small matter by comparison, and so all that remained was to cope with washing that needed doing before my wife’s enforced departure tomorrow.

I put the wash into the machine, and then opened the dishwasher to empty it. But the soap container had jammed shut, and so what I found inside there was a motley collection of perfectly clean but disgustingly greasy crocks and cutlery. I poured soap liberally in all directions inside the machine and started it again. Then I went out to do the necessary shopping.

This part of the day started wonderfully. I found two perfect hammocks almost immediately, and then breezed around the LeClerc hypermarket picking up everything I needed. Sadly, at the end of the shop, I found the sort of crowd that probably greeted Louis XVI as he stepped from the tumbril in order to have his head surgically removed from the rest of him by Madame la Guillotine.

By the time I exited the store, it was midday and hot enough to boil an egg on your head, should you be fed up of having it all over your face. I drove home, put all the produce in various fridge and freezer compartments, and went straight to the washing machine to empty it and get that urgent washing on the line.

I tugged at the door, and it wouldn’t open. A little frazzled by now, I yanked at it, pretty much at the same moment I remembered that the door was programmed not to open if something was wrong.

The seriously wrong thing was that the washing machine was full of water. It poured across the kitchen in every direction in that profoundly iritating way that liquid has. I would’ve dealt with this emergency immediately had it not been for the fact that for around five minutes beforehand, I’d been getting that wobbly feeling in the backside that often accompanies me on visits abroad. A dash to the downstairs lavatory was rapidly becoming the only option, so I waded through the floodwaters and effected the necessary relief. But the flush wouldn’t work, so I took the top off the cistern (this is the third cistern mechanism we’ve replaced in the last two years) and pulled the fully-automatic device upwards manually. It flushed (= good) but then snapped (= bad) and continued to flush. It would still be flushing now had I not ripped out the entire daft innards of the cistern in a frenzy of self-pity. Soon afterwards, I began using the sponge-brush to push water out of the kitchen and over the back door step into the garden.

Wringing out the soaked washing, I hung it on the line and walked over to the swimming pool. I probably did this because I couldn’t face the sloshing kitchen and the unflushing loo. Having started the filtration and surface-cleaning Polaris before I left for the shops, I was over-optimistically expecting the pool to look crystal clear and generally like something out of a David Hockney painting on my return. But the Polaris was floating about in the manner of a not properly working Polaris, and all the muck at the bottom of the pool was still there.

Now I am more than well aware that anyone wanting to start a global charity based on funds for blokes whose pool cleaner isn’t working is doomed to fail. Sympathy stretches only so far, and it doesn’t stretch to that. So I dived into water and performed an odd dance that involved stepping on the cleaning machine in an attempt to make it focus. I am that man here to tell you I rode a waterborne bronco in vain.

So to summarise then, the cupboard door hangeth off, the washing machine refuses to empty, the dishwasher refuses to soap, the downstairs loo is without a flushing facility, and the pool’s cleaning lady is suffering from dust non-removal disorder. But having pulled out the washing machine the better to examine, curse, and then kick it, I did notice the appalling Fourth World filth that lay behind it.

It has often struck me that the hierarchy of worlds on our planet runs only to three. That makes little or no sense, as anyone who has ever flown with the Portuguese airline TAP will understand. A flight on TAP is far worse than anything the Third World could ever throw at a person, and each and every member of the cabin staff is surely vying to create a Fifth World at the earliest opportunity.

Anyway, I didn’t wake up today with the ambition of cleaning behind the washing machine, but I have done so. As the Buddhists say, every day do something you don’t want to do. This has been an exemplary Buddhist day.

Führerurn in Berlin

ANGELA’S ASHES

But another question to ask is: is it also Cameron’s Conflagration?

After the passage of the UK’s 1832 Reform Bill, Prime Minister the Duke of Wellington was collared by a Tory diehard who asked him why he had ‘betrayed’ his Party. The Duke replied:

“Well sir, as a sound commander sir, I listen to the latest dispatches. And they suggested that the situation had changed, and without heeding them we would lose the battle. Pray tell me sir, when fighting for survival, what strategy do you apply?”

The problem with Angela Merkel is that she ignored the dispatches for far too long, and and has now wound up fighting for her survival. She ignored Joachim Gauck’s shot across her ample bows, she ignored Karlsruhe’s concerns, and she ignored the fact that the wind was blowing in Francois Hollande’s direction.

Thus has the Bundestag vote on ESM this afternoon gone from being a formality to a fight – if indeed it happens at all. Carsten Schneider, a senior SPD Party member, told reporters this morning, “Now it is a completely open question whether we will be able to ratify the ESM today or not…the Chancellor [Merkel] has, by caving in to Spanish and Italian demands at the summit, suffered a stinging defeat and effected a complete turnaround on her previous positions in Brussels”.

It’s pretty hard to argue with any of that really. But such is the fate of all those politicians who do not listen. And for me, the same fate may well await David Cameron. In ruling out the IN/OUT referendum sought by Tory MEP Dan Hannan, Scameron really has cut himself off from majority UK public opinion. In his head, he may well have a million machiavellian reasons for doing so, but none of them matter a jot to those who trusted him.

I suspect we are about to find out whether Graham Brady’s 1922 has grown a pair over the last few weeks. What has been very noticeable in the last few hours is the almost complete lack of Tory MPs coming out to lick Dave’s backside on his decision. This does not bode well for our Beloved Leader. As I write, it seems, Draper Osborne is plotting.

Cameron would do well to take the Iron Duke’s advice. The Coalition policy of the eurozone being “an imponderable” was always daft. To continue holding that view would be suicidal for the entire population of Camerlot.

Don’t lose sight of the developing LIBOR scandal

GREEK DEBT HISTORY: How Papandreou and Troika turned down a SECOND lifeboat

New Greek Finance Minister: he devised a way to get Papandreou off the hook, he steered Greece into the Euro in 2001. The plot thickens.

Yannis Stournaris

How a top German consultancy fed the Greeks a lifeline…to no avail.

Yannis Stournaras, the new Minister of Finance in Greece, has landed himself a pole-position job. Stournaras is something of a thoroughbred old-Establishment Greek politician: he emerged as a force in the old days of Kostas Simitis, the former Prime Minister of Greece, who – as one source put it earlier this week – “was the master builder of the greek tragedy right at the outset”. It isn’t meant as a compliment.

The facts bear this out: one way and another, Simitis schemed to disguise the chronic problems of the Greek economy and get Greece into the Eurozone. During the period of his governance, official data presented inflation as having decreased from 15% to 3%, public deficits diminished from 14% to 3%, with GDP allegedly increasing at an annual average of 4% – and actual labour incomes increasing at a rate of 3% per year. It was largely a tissue of lies that Eurostat had caught onto by 2006: whenever any Sprout or Europol tells you the Greek collapse came as a shock to Berlin-am-Brussels after Papandreou came to power, you know you are in the presence of a fool or a liar. The eurozoners knew from Day One that Greece was a potential liability….but it suited theur hubris-fuelled ambition to have them in.

Stournaras’s nickname in Greece is ‘Mr Euro’. Frequently described as ‘the man who steered Greece into the eurozone’, he was chief economic adviser and a very close aide to former Prime Minister Costas Simitis when Greece was negotiating euro entry up until 2001.

In October 2011, Yannis Stournaras proposed and formed a Greek sovereign debt reduction scheme called KAPPA (Initiative for Protection and Exploitation of Govermental Real Estate ).

The proposal envisaged the establishment of a public company to offer a diversified portfolio of real estate and movable assets, which will then be sold to a European body (European Investment Bank or EFSF), and be disbursed immediately as  €75 billion to massively reduce Greek public debt.

Codenamed “Archimedes”, it was in reality the brainchild of multinational consultancy giant Roland Berger – by far the biggest management consultancy in Germany, it turns over a whopping  €0.8 billion per annum…and is based in Frankfurt. In September 2011, it had presented an ingenious plan in that City of Bankers to a Greek delegation led by Stournaras. In full, its recommendations suggested bundling Greek state assets worth  €125 bn into a holding company, and selling it to the EU. This company would issue bonds, and the Greek State would be allowed to use these.

Had it gone ahead, Roland Berger predicted it would reduce Greek debt from 145% to 88% of GDP.

Enthusiastic about the idea, Stournaras submitted RB’s plan to the Papandreou goverment and the Troika together a month later. They r ejected it, and instead,  Papandreou, the IMF, and the ECB chose the far more risky (and, as it turned out, damaging) option of private bondholder haircuts and a second bailout.

It’s hard not to make two simple empirical observations at this point: as  the Slogpost of three days ago demonstrated, Berlin conspired with Greece eighteen months before these events to exaggerate the Greek deficit (in order to ensure full eurozone contributions to the bailout). Now here the Troika was, looking a relative gift horse in the mouth….and turning it down.

One can only suspect that, had a smaller deficit in 2009 and a sale of assets to Brussels rather than a depressed open market in 2011 gone forward, Greece would’ve got back a great deal of its independent sovereignty and access to the markets than subsequently occurred. And the extrapolation from that in turn is that Merkel, Schäuble, Brussels and Lagarde have done everything in their power to reduce the chances of Greece retaining its independence.

So we can reasonably assume that this is more or less what the unlucky members answering directly to Obersturmbannführer Schäuble under the Faskal Union can expect…..more of the same.

And while we’re down here, another little afterthought: Roland Berger is at present actively involved in a scheme to create a eurozone ratings agency….the €300 million start-up cost to be funded by a consortium of German banks in Frankfurt. Just fancy that.

If you read this and enjoyed it, you may have missed this piece from yesterday: WHY THE GLOBAL PLOTICAL CLASS FEARS WHERE LIBOR WILL LEAD

Although this exclusive story achieved reasonably high hits, it ought to have gone viral: we are looking here at a cordinated sovereign State/Central Bank plot during 2008 to manipulate LIBOR rates….yet again, to save the banks. If anyone wants to comment thread on this at high-circulation sites (especially in the States) I would deem that a great favour. The US public needs to be reminded just how totally it has been raped in myriad ways by these monsters.

 

EXCLUSIVE: Why the global political class lies in fear of the LIBOR scandal

Is Bob Diamond being forced to apologise for something hatched way above his level?

A couple of Torygraph journalists were exchanging tweets this morning about Bob Diamond’s cockup being “only the start” of the LIBOR scandal. It could well be that the time has come for some noisy skeletons to walk out of the Westminster cupboard.

An international investigation into the alleged 2008 Libor manipulation scandal has been necessary pretty much right from the start. Without wishing to seem too obvious here, that’s because what happened was internationally arranged. On April 12th 2011, The Slog reported that Vienna-based asset management concern FTC Capital GmbH – and two funds it operates in Luxembourg and Gibraltar – announced their intention to sue twelve major investment banks. FTC accused the banks of conspiring to artificially depress Libor, and limit trade in Libor-based derivatives from 2006 to 2009. The defendants as listed in the suit were Bank of America Corp, Barclays Plc, Citigroup Inc, Credit Suisse Group AG, Deutsche Bank AG, HSBC Holdings Plc, JPMorgan Chase & Co, Lloyds Banking Group Plc, Norinchukin Bank, Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc, UBS AG and WestLB AG.

Since then, federal agencies in the US have become intimately involved in what was soon being described as ‘a criminal investigation’. And quickly thereafter, French Establishment paper Le Figaro claimed ‘the [British] authorities suspect that key traders [at Barcap] used [UK] Treasury information via the main branch dealing with the UK Treasury’. At the time, the Barcap investment division was headed by the Barclays CEO today, Bob Diamond.

However, much as I would love to lump every last kilo of smelly silage on the Diamond Geezer for this, it looks like even he was, on this occasion, merely a cog in a much bigger wheel. By time 2011 got under way, the LIBOR manipulation scam was being investigated by every major bourse regulatory body on the planet. And it may well be that the Treasury was willingly providing Barcap with the data it craved as a means of survival.

During the 2008 financial crisis, overnight LIBOR spiked – a sure sign banks were having trouble borrowing money, and didn’t trust each other: there is, after all, no honour among thieves. But the markets heaved a sigh of relief later on, when its rates began to drop. Even the ever pro-Establishment but generally trustworthy Wall Street Journal had doubts about the veracity of that fall at the time. The 2011 FTC suit against umpteen banks around the globe raised the possibility that LIBOR’s decline was simple, coordinated market manipulation: a naked attempt to falsify lending rates in order to save the banks from ruin – and (very much a poor second) boost liquidity in order to help the struggling Western economies.

In short, that it must have been a concerted effort involving several central banks.

Following this morning’s Slogpost, this email content from an as yet uncorroborated but well-connected source:

‘During 2008/9 I worked at a major investment bank which was advising the office of the PM [Gordon Brown] with regard to the developing banking crisis. I was told that No.10 had been calling the UK banks and demanding that they manipulate LIBOR down, as his economics department had determined that if it rose too much it would trigger a recession and he was looking at re-election.”

As ever with McCavity, his concerns (if that account is true) were entirely driven by the tumescent dick in his brain. At the time, however, the British Bankers’ Association (BBA) denied any of it, stating that the BBA ‘observes rigorous standards in our scrutiny and governance of the Libor mechanism, and works with the industry to ensure their continued full confidence in one of its most accurate and reliable benchmarks.’

But in the four years since, the world at large has grown up bigtime about this kind of denial bollocks: it’s heard how the Met Police ‘has nothing to hide’, how Newscorp ‘has a zero tolerance policy towards hacking phones’, and how Piers Morgan can’t remember anything about hacking Heather Mills-McCartney’s phone at all. It’s listened to serial liar Tony Blair tell Parliament he had given them ‘the balanced case’ for war in Iraq, how Gordon Brown ‘hand on heart never contemplated an election in 2008′, and more recently how Jeremy *unt had given ‘full and frank disclosure’ to Parliament in relation to his communications about the Newscorp bid for BSkyB.

FTC Capital’s original 2011 suit alleged that the 12 banks “colluded to suppress LIBOR to make them appear healthier than they were, and take advantage of trading opportunities not available to outside investors……During the most significant financial crisis since the Great Depression, U.S. dollar LIBOR rates submitted by contributor banks did not vary markedly, nor did they increase or decrease sharply. In a market not artificially suppressed, LIBOR rates should have increased significantly during this period. In addition, because different banks were experiencing different levels of severe stress, the banks should have been receiving markedly different borrowing rates.”

OK, now here’s another comment, this time from a former senior Treasury officer, since retired but well known to me for over thirty years:

“There’s no question that on taking office, Cameron and Clegg were briefed fully about [Brown's intervention]. He’d been screaming at every banker he could find, and not least Mervyn King. Cameron at first saw this as the way to bury Brown and Labour forever, but the people in Threadneedle Street quickly disabused the Coalition of there being any wisdom in that approach”.

Now, it seems to me highly unlikely that, without collusion, a senior investment banker and a former Treasury mandarin would come up with a similar sequence of events, and the better informed of the two (undoubtedly the latter Treasury source) would add the global dimension purely on a whim. That latter is a source I knew as a close client in a previous existence, and with whom I’ve regularly worked since 2006.

Why was the ConDemned Coalition warned off destroying the last vestiges of Brown’s reputation for honesty and probity? The answer probably lies as much in the Foreign Office as it does in the Treasury.

But for me, the case raises two massive questions:

1. Where did the LIBOR manipulation scam start?

2. Is this why Bob Daiamond feels able to tell David Cameron and George Osborne to f**k off with such impunity?

Stay tuned: this is a developing story.

 

SKETCH: Bob Diamond, a LIBOR fine, and a tale of two cities.

Long-term Slog suspicions about Diamond have been borne out by this disgraceful admission. However, the case has set a precedent – as a result of which, welfare scroungers may well find they face writing obligatory letters of apology.

“What, you mean I’m Bob Diamond?”

Regular Sloggers will know that I’ve been on Bob Diamond’s case for some time now. Here’s a selection of Slog observations about the Diamond Geezer over the last two years:

‘Bob Diamond’s accession to the post of blue touch-paper igniter [CEO of Barclays] is a done deal. And another nail in the Coalition’s coffin.’

‘While he is seen as the bold raider who captured Lehman Brothers investment division (now folded into Barcap) it’s clear that he didn’t do enough due diligence before buying it. At the 2010 Manhattan inquiry into the acquisition, several Barcap executives testified that Barclays Plc had no real idea how big Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.’s futures-and-options trading business was. In particular, Elizabeth James, a director of Barclays’ futures business, described Lehman’s books as “a mess”. She said she received an e-mail from former Barclays trading executive Stephen King saying Lehman had “absolutely no idea” if it had sold $2 billion more options than it had bought, or whether it owned $4 billion more than it had sold.’

‘In 2009, [Barclays] bank reported a profit of £11.6bn, but the 2010 figure reported earlier this week was £6bn. So: profits fell by nearly half, then. Er…no, this year’s reported results changed last year’s profit of £11.6bn down  to £4.6bn, so this meant the bank could report a rise of one third in profits….Diamond explained away the ‘correction’ by saying this was the result of taking out the gain the bank made on its sale of BGI, and of comparing the performance of “continuing operations”. No, I’ve no idea what that means either: but the bottom line is that in 2009, it suited the bank to post big profits, and this year it suits the bank to shrink those past profits. It’s a three-card trick, pure and simple.Equally shifty was Diamond’s attempt to show that, despite profits having gone ‘up’, pay and bonuses had gone ‘down’. Here, it is even easier to show that his claims are complete bollocks…’

‘As you may have noticed, Barclays CEO Bob Diamond spent a two hour stretch last month looking down his nose at an MPs Committee (he was right to – their performance was awful to behold) before deciding to cut out the monkeys and simply threaten the organ-grinder in Downing Street…’

‘Three weeks ago, French Establishment paper Le Figaro claimed ‘the authorities suspect that key traders [at Barcap] used Treasury information via the main branch dealing with the UK Treasury[to manipulate the LIBOR rate]’. At the time, the Barcap investment division was headed by the Barclays CEO today, Bob Diamond. Diamond last appeared in Court last February, when the Lehman estate accused Barcap of having undervalued the broken company. Judge James Peck referred to Diamond’s evidence at the time as ‘devious’. Peck even advised Lehman’s lawyer, “This is a witness that needs to have the leash held tight.”’

The loveliness of the Diamond Geezer goes on and on, but there he is still walking about free as a bird after his bank was fined a record £290 million for repeatedly distorting basic financial data which are used to set interest rates on millions of loans and other transactions around the world…aka, manipulating the rate in their favour to avoid the Bank going order. He was the CEO of Barcap then, he’s the CEO of the whole shooting match now, but he ain’t facing trial. Because he’s foregone his bonus. Bless.

However, he is facing “calls to resign”. Not calls to attend Bow Street nick, “calls to resign”. And in unrelated news, 4,000 demonstrators in Croydon faced calls for their resignation this afternoon. They apologised for torching three streets and said they would forego their welfare dosh this month, on account of having been banged up in the Scrubbs so fast squire, their feet didn’t touch.

Money is no longer just power: money gives you immunity from the law. It always did, but not in quite the brazen way that Diamond seems to pull it off. His pep-talk to the staff via intranet, mind you, was a Lulu: Slog mole Pedro Recent listen in to it, and has given me the full match report…the highlights go like this:

“Mah fellow Barclayans, it is sort of a Goddamm shame what some people will get up to putting the company at risk an’ all, but mainly it’s real kinda disappointin’ that the CEO of this company is a crook, and let me tell you that when we find this son of a …oh, wait a minute, I’m Bob Diamond. Aw shucks.”

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If you’re Bulgarian and you live in Varna, yesterday was a disappointment. There you were, having a quiet class of Suindhal Merlot in anticipation of a ratings upgrade from S&P, and all they did was confirm you at BB. What a bbbbummer.

But then, worse news: the good burghers of rival city Stara Zagora (“We spit on Stara Zagora, it is full of idiots and ne’er-do-wells”) got upgraded to BB+. This is like watching Wayne Rooney get upgraded to First Class: both mystifying, irritating, and unjustifiable under the circumstances.

Moody’s last week confirmed Russia and declared it to be in great shape. Which is funny really, because I did a survey around the back streets of Zaragossa last week, and it’s very clear to me that Spain is in terrific shape and merely the unfortunate target of international speculators. I’d rate them AA+ on the beggar count, AAA on nobody jumping off buildings, and AAb(b+) on taking penalties. If anyone right now thinks Russia is ‘safe’ then they clearly haven’t noticed an economy massively overdependent on oil with a global depression almost upon us, the increasing influence of the mafia, the breakdown of democracy there, and property borrowers with name like Donald Duck owing money to RBS, the unfortunate recipients of a glitch caused by Indian incompetence. Those Indians, eh? Typical.

Stick with it, it can only get worse.

 

Anecdotage

As the unconvicted murderer Martin McGuinness and Queen Elizabeth II shook hands today, I was reminded of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. This is why.

Many years ago – along with six other blokes – I sold our communications agency Aspect to a Boston group known as HHCC – Hill Holliday Connors Cosmopulous. My main contact there was one of the remaining founders, Jack Connors. Boston has a thriving business sector known as the Marketing Mix (Micks): it’s all about a touch of the Blarney, for sure and good luck.

I liked Jack. If I’m honest, he was a bit of a bandit, but he had a keen sense of humour about himself. I wouldn’t say we became friends, but we both told a good story, and there was a mutual respect.  I loved Boston, and still do: apart from the John Hancock building, it’s generally low-rise, and compact. You can walk round it in two hours at the perimeter, and be out of the place into stunning New England scenery in under fifteen minutes outside rush-hour. Just a spit and throw down the road is Cambridge Mass, and it was in a restaurant there called Harvest – doubtless now long gone – where my partner Chris, Jack, HHCC’s FD and I scoped out the deal one Sunday evening in 1986. The payout enabled me to start a pension (somewhat late at the age of 38) that was looking quite good until Ben Bernanke and Mario Draghi got hold of it. But who’s complaining?

After a few months of working together, one afternoon Jack invited me out to dinner a deux – a great honour I’m told, only otherwise bestowed upon massive clients, or his faithful mistress and personal assistant. So I dropped the invitation to an intimate supper at the White House, and joined him. During the meal, we fell to talking about backgrounds, and discovered we actually had lots of genes in common. Then out of left-field, Jack asked, “Are you a royalist?” I told him I was. He shrugged.

“She is one tough lady,” he replied. I asked him in turn why he thought that, and he recounted a fascinating story to me.

A few years previously, the Queen had toured America, and come to hear a performance by the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Lest we forget, not too long before that the IRA had unceremoniously blown up (and killed) the Queen’s cousin Dickie Mountbatten. So being sensitive to the end in such matters, the IRA decided to blockade the BSO performance, and not let anyone out afterwards. This was in the days before 9/11, when Irish Boston’s donations to the IRA were still disgracefully enormous.

Stuck inside the concert arena, Jack found himself standing within a few feet of the British monarch. And never one to stand on ceremony, he ambled over to QE2 to apologise for the behaviour of his fellow Bostonians. The Queen turned to face him, offered a thin smile, and said, “Well, what can you expect from the bloody Irish?”

Jack said to me, “I had two choices: get on the front page of Time magazine, or retreat. I chose the latter.”

I note that today, when the Royals/McGuinness conversations were taking place, all the microphones were switched off. Remembering this anecdote now, I can sort of understand why.

 

NHS sell-off strategy: Slog prediction confirmed as South London Healthcare goes into administration.

On 27th June 2012, the Press Association wrote:

‘South London Healthcare NHS Trust will be the first in the country to be put under the control of a special administrator tasked with putting it on a viable footing. A further 20 trusts are facing serious financial difficulties which could ultimately see them in the same situation….Mr Lansley sent a letter as the first step in the legal process towards installing a special administrator using the powers. The administrator will take over the board and recommend measures to the Health Secretary to put the trust’s finances on a sustainable basis.’

Here in Slogger’s Roost, none of this came as a surprise: Mr Lansley may wish to suggest that he was surprised, but that’s the last thing he is.

On September 10th 2011, The Slog wrote:

‘The NHS proposals offered by Andrew Lansley were a dog’s dinner in terms of the service’s real needs because Andrew Lansley had been heavily lobbied by pharmcos, GP associations, and private medical insurance companies.’

On May 19th 2012, The Slog wrote:

‘Since May 2010, the 23 private companies working with the NHS have made £1.4 billion in profit. Next year they will make even more, because the monies that should’ve gone into hospital updates and hardware budgets have been diverted towards primary care practitioners preparing to work with and/or hand over to big suppliers in the private sector. It’s perfectly obvious that, starved of funds, within the next eighteen months many local hospital Trusts will either go bust, or require increased private sector services which in turn point to the need for some form of private sector merger, takeover or joint venture.’

On June 16th 2012, The Slog wrote :

‘Two years into his mealy-mouthed plan to simply suck all the NHS’s hospital money out and then sell that infrastructure off, Andrew Lansley is on the verge of letting every Hank, Richard and Henri bid to take over larger group-practice primary care. Give it another year, and almost every Foundation Trust hospital-service provider will be in financial trouble…at which point the private sector will get what it wants – the massive taxpayer investment in hitech equipment and buildings – in a fire sale.’

So if The Slog saw through the plan, it seems almost surreally unlikely that Lansley didn’t see his scam coming to fruition.

There is in fact a wider issue to be debated here…one that’s primarily about the viability or otherwise of Friedmanite bollocks in a world whose growth is going backwards.

On May 2nd 2012, The Slog wrote:

‘How on earth does the Establishment think those on lower incomes are going to survive? Who does it think, among the better-off Silvers, is going to do the consuming? And WTF is Andrew Lansley on if he thinks that the result of Health privatisation is going to be anything other than a return to the 1920s?

The people at The Top are protected from this crap, but most people aren’t. This has nothing to do with Leftwingism, and everything to do with the current economic model not providing (a) enough employment and (b) the wealth required to run a reformed public health service. Attacking sick, old and debt-free consumers with pro-bank policies, frozen pensions, and increased taxes is just another form of Troikaism – viz, an excuse for ignoring the fact that the model is broken.’

Twas ever thus. But there is no reason why we have to put up with it now. We get the governance we deserve. If we plonk down onto the sofa and watch sanitised MSM news without doing anything, then we have only ourselves to blame.

Dr Conan Fuller-Bollix

First out of the starting blocks today is Redfrontnowsmashbanks who asks:

“What do you think about Google launching a tablet to beat off Ipad?”

I think it’s a tremendous breakthrough. Ipaditis (an obsession with wittering on about how IPad changed one’s life) is one of the great unexplained neurological diseases of our time. Until now, the only cure was to kill the witterer, but now that Google has moved into the medical sphere, launching a tablet to ward off this crippling illness is surely a sign that everything is possible.

I understand that Mr Lansley is in discussions with this well-known philanthropic brand to take over South London Healthcare, and I welcome this giant leap into a future where we can cut waiting times in half, and use the savings to double the cost. The NHS is yesterday, it is history. The future’s bright, and the darkest hour is just before dawn breaks the mould. Hurrah!

And a question today from Pansykiller in Norwich:

“When did homosexuals first appear in our midst?”

That’s an easy one, Pansykiller. It was around the time gardening first became fashionable. This appears to have happened during the earlier Greek Republics, when the first semi-detached suburban gardens began to appear. Many wives deserted their totally heterosexual men and began to plant silly nancy flowers that we real men have no interest in whatsoever….to the extent that it became an obsession greater than sex. Thus denied their conjugal rights, some weaker men took to emulating their wives, and became flower arrangers.

It was but a small step from such nonsense for flower-arranging men to form clubs and begin doing illegal things with vegetables, fists, and  bottoms. Later still, the women of Troy made things even worse by denying their war-making men regular and strange filth. Not only did this lower the birthrate, it increased the raging screamer rate.

The major turning point, however, was the invention of air travel and feminism, each of which together created a pressing need for skinny young men with anally short hair mincing up and down the aisles of 747s with pursed lips. This probably explains the derivation of the word ‘purser’.

Since then, homosexuals have become an ever-increasing blight in our lives. In my opinion, the only answer is to send them all to Russia, whose homoerotic leader seems to be exactly the kind of chap they’re after.

And this from Makethemsweepchimneyswhilethefire’salight:

“Why did the Daily Telegraph choose to undergo commenting maintenance during the day?”

This is the sort of thing I know a thing or two about, and it’s a terrible thing to see such things being done. But the thing is, it’s all a Labour plot to stop any more people slagging off that perfectly good Labour leader and all-round adenoidista Ed Miliband. Publish and be damned, that’s what I say.

It is a well known fact that there are at least 27 million unemployed people in Britain, most of whom are IT nerds who would work through the night for nothing, or as galley slaves in the Queen’s barge, and then sleep under the perfectly adequate cover of trees – just for the chance of a job interview with Microsoft or, at a pinch, Alan Sugar. So the idea that the Sarkograph can’t get itself together to sort things out when we’re all asleep is ridiculous. I see the evil hand of UNITE in all this. I suspect they are going bust, and did this to distract attention from, um, the fact that Harriet Harman is a word that the lawyers just told me I can’t use.

In the meantime, eurofilofax has demanded to know:

“What do you make of Angela Merkel saying there will be no eurobonds in her lifetime?”

Goodness me, has she really said that? If she has, then I suspect this is a sprat to catch two birds in the bush. Or possibly yet another sign that it’s always darkest under the lighthouse.

After all, such a threat could be viewed as a hostage to misfortune.

To be honest, I haven’t a clue on this one, you’ll have to ask someone else.

OK, moving swiftly on now, Toryscumdeservegarrotting wonders:

“What should be done with the House of Lords?”

Now this is much more like it. Nick Clegg has rightly pointed at that he expects the Conservatives to do a lot, and I think that’s fair. Lords reform isn’t a tickling contest, you can’t do a little: only a lot will get the right result. More is also good. Going that extra mile through the concentric circles of genetic inheritance and contributions to Party funds needs a broad brushstroke sweeping clean that bit more than, say, sitting and thinking about even more radical ways of doing it, and entertaining silly ideas like not electing any of them. Let’s be clear about this: more is better than less, but even more must be avoided at all costs.

I think that’s what Mr Clegg is saying, and for my money he’s hit the nail right on the head. Or mised the nail, hit his thumbnail, and is yelling his head off. One of the two.

More from Dr Fuller-Bollix soon.

At the End of the Day

We had a misty start here this morning. But above the mist was the pale blue of a fresh sky, and a new weather front. It was wonderfully quiet. Some dew was dropping from a conifer onto the palm tree beneath, tap-tapping on the branch-spines as it did so. The sister conifers’ cones were busy cracking open as the morning sun began peeping through the tall hedge at the eastern end of our land. There wasn’t so much as a whisper of wind. It seemed impossible to imagine that beyond this region, beginning roughly 300 miles to the north, people were yelling across large trading rooms and staring like startled rabbits at the pc screens….watching the financial omnivore that is the planetary banking system first try to eat the rest of us, and then – inevitably – itself.

Yet whether one likes it or not, that world outside this small paradise impinges all the time. Life can be taken up at times by nothing more than the chore of replacing things that break. And today, everything breaks…usually about three days after the warranty runs out. It’s an interesting verb/preposition thing that one, ‘runs out’: it runs out on the customer, like an errant partner. Somehow it makes me think that the warranty is integral to the sales-scam these days: the McGuffin programmed to wake up and quietly scuttle away into the distance before the customer can enforce the guarantee. Thus unable so to do, the customer goes out and does what we all do: buys another one.

Just over half a century ago, the phrase ‘planned obsolescence’ first made an appearance. It was in the 1950s that Clifford Brooks Stevens (usually he dropped the Clifford part) first coined the phrase. Stevens was  an American industrial designer of home furnishings, appliances, cars and motorcycles, but early on he recognised that the Western capitalist system was largely based on one model: production volume. There are three ways to increase volume: expand the market, increase rate of consumable purchases, and increase rate of durable replacement.

Planned obsolescence – or built-in obsolescence as he first called it – represents the last of those three, but Stevens (being a designer) meant to say that, as tastes change, a design becomes old-fashioned, and replacement sales can be brought forward by introducing ‘this year’s new model’. As you might imagine, the US automotive business was the first sector to go completely ape for this idea. My early fascination with advertising was built by two things: the first commercials on UK independent television (“the ITV”) and the car ads in American magazines.

‘Get down to your showroom TODAY and view the new 1956 Ford Fairlane’. And boy was it a corker:

Two-tone body, whitewall tyres, column gear-shift, drop-down facility…here was the future, now. All the blokes in these ads had natty, small Sinatra-style hats and sharp Italian suits, their wives flicked-up Barbie hair and dresses that swirled effortlessly. Everyone was smiling. In the mid background was a line-sketch of open-topped families driving along massive freeways. This was America: a tomorrowland where even the ice creams were too big to finish, and everyone felt good all the time.

What Brooks Stevens would never have approved of, however, is the obsolescence applied by today’s manufacturers. This consists of poor build quality ensuring breakage, cheap product formulations ensuring early wear-out, and a new electronic must-have gizzmo edition every three months. Over the last three decades, that has guaranteed every home in the UK in 2012 has to have a very large cupboard somewhere; when you gingerly open the doors, out pours an unfathomable spaghetti of wires, mobile phones, CD Walkmen, and floppy disks that belong to yesterday. But chiefly it ensures that the volumes stay up, the share price stays up, the options are worth more, the shareholder institutions can keep offering pensions that mean something, and the entire bonkers train will keep rattling along on its rackety track leading inevitably to the brick wall of saturation, and zero-sum global mercantilism.

What Asia has largely done in this context is copy the Western capitalist model, minus only the high price-tag. I have a Godson who, when at University, used to go down to his local market in Manchester, buy seven pairs of socks, and chuck them all in the bin the following Sunday. And let’s face it, cheap socks are somehow oddly irresitible, aren’t they? They sit there bound together on a stall and ask only a fiver for sixty pairs, and one thinks, “Why would one not buy them?” And you can never have too many teeshirts. Or solar garden lights, jockey shorts, knock-off watches, and nail clippers.

What the West has done is pat Asia condescendingly on the head (because as you know, yellow people are very small) and say “Good show, keep it up”, on the grounds that anything is better than either the rigid command economies they used to have, or no economy except that of appearing in Oxfam ads. Put simply, the West has failed to adapt.

It is brutally obvious what we Brits need to do: go back at least partly to small-scale workshops turning out genuinely craftsman-made articles. Margins would be high and volumes modest, but profits would be enormous – and the demand for this kind of stuff insatiable. I have, for instance, a chum who manufactures and markets hunting guns. Over 70% of the volume goes to China, India and Russia. Now that is facing reality and doing something about it.

“Aha,” say the Leftie trolls, “typical – a Tory’s idea of niche bollocks when what we need is jobs for the workers”. Well Troll chummy, first of all I’m not a Tory and never will be. Second, every Chinese niche is massive (see earlier). And third, we don’t need “Yer workazz”. What we need is skilled craftsmen in place of all those unemployable dickheads who did Media Studies because Teflon Tone told them it was A Good Thing.

I’m fed up of consuming. It’s time-consuming but never all-consuming. I’d rather pay a premium for something that carries on working until long after I’ve gone. I’m tired of being told by people one third my age that I can get a replacement battery on the internet, and it’ll only cost 40% of the entire unit I bought in the first place. I am well and truly pissed off to buggery with the replacement-driven capitalist model, and I want to get retro in favour of Britain being wealthy again among every class – by being smart: well-educated, entrepreneurial, responsible and mutual.

Globalist free-market economics has nothing to offer the West in the 21st century. If we try to take on the Asians at their own game of exporting low-cost supplier crap, then we will surely die: and frankly, we will deserve to. Let them sell us cheap socks, and we will flog them gold-rimmed teapots, with membership of the Earl Grey Tea Appreciation Society thrown in. That’s the way the world should work for us from now on. Sorry, I meant ‘going forward’.

GREEK DEFICIT: How Berlin encouraged Papandreou to big-up the 2009 Greek deficit

Defence of German banks a key factor

Schäuble and Merkel….implicated in an incredible scam

How Venizelos fired ELSTAT moles to cover up the truth

Spanish European Commissioner backs story of international fraud

The Western MSM have never questioned the ‘received truth’ that Athens understated its liability and obligations for several years following the launch of the euro. But few if any outside observers know the truth behind what happened when Papandreou took over the Premiership in Greece….and for Machiavellian reasons, the debt was suddenly overstated.

In October 2009, George Papandreou stepped into what one Athens source has called ‘the shitfilled shoes of Kostas Karamanlis’, and discovered that the two previous administrations had lied about both the size of the National Debt, and the ongoing level of government spending. In Greece, the folks you go to see to find out this kind of stuff hang out in an organisation called ELSTAT – the Hellenic Statistical Authority.

What happened in the weeks following was quite bizarre – and pretty fully documented. Somewhat panicked by the degree of mendacity he’d discovered, Papandreou confided to key Cabinet cronies that the real fiscal situation involved not balanced books, but a 7.8% deficit…well beyond the limits allowed by Brussels  – although Brussels had, from Day One, been something of a paper tiger when it came to enforcing the currency rules. An insider from that time comments:

“Papandreou thought there was a serious chance he’d be thrown out of the eurozone. Unbelievable I know, but he did. But then things went rapidly from bad to awful. He really did have no idea what was coming.”

Rather like an Olympics Budget, the deficit figure kept rising  with each week, as the new government opened more and more worm-cans. First ELSTAT said 7.8%, then 9.8%, then it went to 11%, before finally settling at 13.6%. Only then – some time shortly before Christmas 2009 – did Papandreou talk to Brussels, Paris and Berlin about the possible need for a bailout.

In fact, through her Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble, Angela Merkel already know about the Greek deficit lies.  Schäuble became Finance Minister shortly after Papandreou came to power. Although Angela Merkel had shafted the wheelchair-bound assassin’s victim on at least two previous occasions, she wanted him now for three reasons: first, as Minister of the Interior, he had an excellent head for secrecy and covert operations. Second, he was hugely in favour of EU political union. And third, he didn’t have the scruples of his SPD predecessor, Peer Steinbrück. A lack of scruple was going to be crucial: for Merkel also knew that German banks were heavily exposed to the Athens deception.

Thus, if the eurozone members didn’t put their hands in thir pockets bigtime, Germany could be facing a severe financial crisis. (Sarkozy, says a Parisian diplomatic source, was even more terrified, in that all his exposed banks were completely guaranteed by the State).

Somewhere in the midst of these talks, Berlin requested a smaller meeting with the Greeks. At this meeting, three sources (two Greek and one German) allege, the small German delegation made an astonishing observation: the situation would “have to look more desperate” in order to justify a bailout to the other eurozone members. That is to say, only widespread fear of the entire eurozone being damaged would get the member States to pile in with bailout monies.

What Berlin was really worried about, of course, was that the Franco-German banking system might collapse if Greece wasn’t saved. And at that stage, little or nothing had been done to make the sector better able to withstand a derivatives wave.

The European Commission had in fact already issued a warning in July 2009 that Greece’s deficit was likely to reach 10% of GDP – if no counter-measures were taken to curb public spending – and that Commissioners regarded the official 6% GDP forecast as “over-optimistic”. But, Berlin argued, only something, say, 50% or more above that potential second figure would frighten eurozoners enough to get them to part with their cash.

Without assuming much, one has to observe that this plan does have Schäuble written all over it. And sure enough, in due course (November 2010) the eurozone learned that the Greek deficit was ‘currently running at 15.8%’. George Papandreou had meanwhile announced his first austerity package in January 2010, and in May of that year EU leaders unveiled a €110bn bailout with money from the European Union (EU), the European Central Bank (ECB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF)….the so-called Troika. So clearly, the crisis was real enough….and the bailout fully justified. It seemed.

Fast forward now to 2011. Enter from left field former Hellenic Statistical Authority (ELSTAT) board member Zoi Georganta (pictured) who caused a sensation by alleging that the declared deficit for 2009 had been been massaged upwards in November 2010 by her boss Andreas Georgiou.

And lest any nasty male chauvinists out there want to dismiss Zoi Georganta as a lone madwoman, I should point out that six Elstat board members had been dismissed in June 2011 after clashing with Elstat chairman Georgiou. They too had spotted the Tippex liberally applied to the ‘revised’ data.

Says one Athenian source, “She was trying to tell everyone forever that she knew Pasok purposely sabotaged Greece at Germany’s request, to ensure our cooperation”. Zoi was off the money with her motive guesswork, but she was in no doubt that the figures had been got at and inflated. Investigators visited her, after which everything died down. It was said that she had changed her statement.

But now comes our old friend Evangelo Venizelos – author of the legislation to grant legal indemnity to all Greek Ministers: and in September, he orders the entire ELSTAT board (including Georganta) to resign….except the key villain, Andreas Georgiou. Just fancy that. And when Evangelo gets involved in the mire, you know a sh*tload of mire is being covered over with carefully planted (and watered) roses.

But given that Ms Georganta was not the only whistleblower at ELSTAT, the rumour persisted…albeit (as usual) without any awareness of this spreading scandal in the Western MSM.  It persisted, in fact, throughout the eurozone. And in March this year, Zoi found an unlikely ally.

Joachin Almunia Amann is a former left-wing Spanish politician, and now a prominent European Commissioner. Currently responsible for Competition, in February 2010 – a crucial moment in the debt-inflation plot – he was the European Comissioner for Economic & Monetary affairs…the role now owned by Olli Rehn. Amann was thus in an unparalleled position to watch Greco-EU-German affairs unfold between the austerity announcement and then bailout agreement of 2010.

In a letter to the parliamentary committee of inquiry concerning allegations of deliberate deficit inflation of March 2012, Amman crucially stated that, ‘there was no obligation on each national statistical authority in the EU to follow Eurostat’s ESA 95 code on the inclusion of public utility accounts in the deficit’. But for some reason – suddenly – ELSTAT had decided to add it into the pot. In remarking upon this, Joachin defended the six resignees from 2011. (And thus, by implication, Zoi Georganta as well).

Highly significantly, Amann also observed that had the 2009 warnings from his Commission been been enacted even as late as Papandreou’s arrival, ‘the measures would have succeeded if they had been properly and promptly implemented without any need for a bailout’.

So it was that last Monday (June 25th 2012) Zoi appeared before the deficit Enquiry in Parliament. Having been the unhappy subject of quite a bit of interior ministry ‘attention’ over the last year, Ms Georganta decided to be more circumspect. She dumped on 2009 finance minister Giorgos Papaconstantinou, observing, “I have investigated the matter and found that he does not have any great experience with statistics, with economic issues. In my view, you cannot appoint such an inexperienced minister at such a crucial time.” Unless you don’t want any trouble, in which case you do. But she stuck to her guns about the debt being inflated, telling the Enquiry that the deficit for 2009 should have been 12.5% of GDP – and could have easily been brought to below 10 percent with immediate measures.

Crucially, Georganta, a professor of econometrics, confirmed to Greek media representatives that ELSTAT intentionally, and after being pressured by Eurostat (the EU’s tame body), inflated the 2009 revised deficit from roughly 12-13% to 15.8% using “non-scientific methods in order to justify the adoption of more and tougher fiscal measures in Greece.”

What conclusions should we draw?

Three years ago, I wouldn’t have touched a story like this with a bargepole. But since studying both the EU and the Greek tragedy in more detail in recent times, I’ve realised that a well-documented and sourced account, without collusion and based on trusted informants and mainstream Greek media reports, is more likely to be true than invention. Of course, a great many players on the geopolitical and european stages have agendas, axes to grind, and scores to settle. But when something fits, makes sense, and is in line with other discoveries made along the way….well, all I can say is that absolutely nothing surprises me any more.

So the conclusion I draw is that we have here opportunity, motive, testimony, media reports, personal ‘form’ and a jigsaw piece that fits very well with others upon which The Slog has reported over the last two years. In order to illustrate that assertion, let me introduce as a quartet four people I believe to have been pivotal in recent-history world affairs: Tim Geithner, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Angela Merkel, and George Papandreou.

I will start by relaying this email content received from a heavyweight player in Greek affairs and a student of geopolitics. I’m sure he wouldn’t mind the tiny changes I’ve made here and there to improve his English grammar. He observes:

‘One very important person, I believe, is Strauss-Kahn. His connection with Papandreou is well known, and verified by his interview where he admitted that he had discussions with Papandreou a lot before the Greek door opening to the IMF [in 2010]. The point here is not the connection of S-K with Papandreou, but the timing of the dalliance which he was accused. I believe that S-K was at that point an ally of Merkel.

‘By the end of 2009, the international economic balance seemed to have permanently changed, and a new scene brought to being in which Europe was in a better position than the U.S. At the hub of the wheel there is Germany, asserting the role of economic power model, which could assure international monetary and financial stability.

‘The dramatic announcement by the Greek government of the imminent danger of bankruptcy [January 2010] opened the bag of Aeolus, revealing the weak and until then, unseen side of the euro. The Director of the International Monetary Fund, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Minister of Commerce of France in the critical years of the early 90s when they entered the foundation for the creation of the euro, and Finance Minister of Germany, Schäuble, interior minister of Germany during secret agreements of the same period,  realized that the U.S.would not let the window of opportunity that had opened be wasted – and that Greece would become the bridge for an attack on the Eurozone.’

The source is not a million miles away from where I am on this one. That is, DSK was taken out of the game for geopolitical reasons, and replaced with “our gal” (as Geithner calls her) Christine Lagarde. You can read several pieces related to this shift in my dedicated page here, The Strauss-Kahn Waltz. Left without an ally in establishing the hegemony of Europe at America’s expense, both Merkel and Schäuble now became deeply (and rightly) suspicious of the Geithner ‘amputation plot’ hatched in New York between late 2011 and early 2012 by a combo of Wall Street, Pentagon and Fed Treasury appointees. You can read more on this at US Bankers given a timetable for Greek Default  and also at  Greek default planners falling out over firewall.

The Americans hoped to gain a firewall, military bases and access to precious raw materials by befriending a post-euro Greece. That ambition still remains, but what the story unveiled above shows is that Angela Merkel and Wolfgang Schäuble are more than worthy opponents in the murky world of geopolitical jockeying.

I would like to thank all the American, French, German, British, Canadian and Greek sources who contributed so generously to helping my feeble brain understand at least some of the above events and allegations. I would also like to offer special thanks to one credit dealer and two journalists, without whose refereeing skills it would’ve remained a mystifying case of underwater rugby without the ball.

What what you see with David Cameron really is what you get.

Who am I again?

There are some moments in history when I wonder if it’s just me. Yesterday, a bit of files-snooping by the snappers outside No 10 managed to establish that the boss of Standard Chartered Bank had been briefing David Cameron on ‘the perils of leaving the euro’.

It’s not just the crazy idea that Cameron still thinks any banker anywhere might have something useful (or even accurate) to say about anything. It’s the weird back-to-front way this banker is warning against leaving the EU. Outside in the slightly broader and quotation-strewn planet where Dan Hannan lives, the key debate going on is should we have a referendum about when we leave the EU.

Throughout its long and largely fortunate history, Britain has, I realise, been late for everything; but this is ridiculous. Perhaps it’s time for me to go into full Scameron cliche mode and say “Look, let’s be clear about this – what we need is a wake-up call”.

We are not in the eurozone. This means we are on the outside, Third Division track of a piss-ant fifth-rate muddled and anti-democratic lunatic asylum being rapidly run into the ground by a mixture of failed poets, former Communists, rejected national politicians, and one-trick austerity sadists. Basically, we get strangled by all the daft rules, ignored on all the big decisions, and then sent a bill to help bail out a project we warned was doomed from Day One. What does David Cameron need to give him a vision of all this, the Palomar Observatory telescope?

Now OK, I know there is a sector of Sloggers who are going to pile in here and tell me that Dave is (a) thick, (b) part of a secret coven designed to enslave us all and/or (c) being secretly paid vast sums by Manuelo Barroso to shut up and go with the flow. But none of that will wash. Sorry, but it won’t.

David Cameron has a good First from Oxford. He is, let’s not beat about the bush here, filthy rich and an Old Etonian who, by some odd electoral quirk, has wound up occupying Ten Downing Street. Both now and in the future (after the memoirs and lecture tours start) Scameron is going to have all the money anyone could ever need – or spend. Becoming a billionaire is not what motivates this man.

The problem is, I’m at a loss to know WTF does. He knows British bankers are greedy and dysfunctional. He knows ordinary people can’t afford the healthcare model to which Lansley is dragging us. He knows the EU is a disaster area. And he must – surely – know that what remains unsayable is nevertheless true: take the euro out of the EU, and the whole idea is knackered. That eventuality means either going back to being a genuinely free-trade area, or joining Merkel’s panzers on the way to the promised land of FiskalPakt. Which one of those would Dave rather go for? Search me, squire. Apart from his predeliction for The Leg Up, we know nothing at all about the real views of this Prime Minister.

Out there – far beyond this mess called the European Union – there is a voracious appetite for British goods. Of course it can’t be built overnight, and of course it can’t be based purely on cuddling up to our former colonies. But think on this: with a 5% share of Chinese consumers at the luxury/craftsman goods end of the market, Britain would be – by a country mile – the richest State in Europe.

David Cameron’s idea of building trade with India is to take half the civil service with him, several deadbeats from The British Council, and offer a lot of promises to let millions more migrants into Britain. Add to this a judicious dollop of patronising grovel – a thinly-disguised display of arrogant subservience – and you have what the classic State-led socialist would do. The PM’s India junket of two years ago was pure Denis Healey.

We will only break into the high-margin luxury end of emerging Asia by doing the following:

1. Making multinational fat cats based in Britain pay a fair rate of tax.

2. Reducing the national tax, local tax and bureaucracy of entrepreneurial creative businesses.

3. Abolishing the British Council and telling the Mandarins to butt out.

4. Offering massive tax rebates to any business exporting more than 50% of its output.

5. Turning up with the right product with the right brand personality to be snapped up by newly rich Asians and South Americans.

Does Dave want to do any of these things? I haven’t a clue.

David Cameron’s behaviour, oddly, does mirror his attitudes perfectly. With most politicians, what they do and what they say are strangers to each other. But on the whole – excepting Newscorp and Jeremy *unt – our Prime Minister’s actions perfectly reflect his statements: they are both all over the place.

That’s why the Conservative Party is losing ground. That’s why nobody knows what he stands for. That’s why foreigners don’t know what to make of him. With Dave, what you see is what you get: lots of conflicting signals thrown into a blender.

We cannot go on like this, we really mustn’t. The time has come for the Malcolm Bradys of this world to grow a pair and take back the Conservative Party from the crypto-Blairites of Tooting Norton.

The time has not yet come for those of us who want rid of all of them in favour of genuinely fresh thinking and courage: the courage to face a world that is never going to be the same, and the honesty to stop lying fifty times a day about the depth of doo-doo we’re in. That time won’t come until things get desperate enough for people to pull themselves away from Simon Cowell, love-rats, houses in the sun, double-lard pizzas and Murdoch’s tit parade.

But the big question still remains: how is that going to be achieved if the only thing Britain can summon up any more is lethargy? I’ve suggested a dozen ways at least I think this could be done. I’ve also said many times I don’t think it involves being a political Party. And if you want to know what I’ve written about this over the years, go to the Search button and press in radical realism, accountable leadership, internet as opposition and so forth – or read things here marked ‘About’, ‘mutuality’. ‘getting by’, ‘crash 2′ and so forth. Just doesn’t leave smart-assed bollocks saying trollist things like “And just how do you propose to do that clever-dick?”.

Because if you do, it’ll be the last thread you make here. Cheers.

Later today: the truth about the Greek deficit.

SPAIN’S €100bn banking bailout: tracing the Slog’s road map to the inevitable.

At The Slog ten days ago:

SPAIN CRISIS EXCLUSIVE: Dash for banking consolidation “a recipe for worse disaster” – Insiders

‘Says my usual source in Madrid (not himself a banker, but employed by various US institutions in an advisory capacity), “As I commented last year, the idea that critical mass makes collapses less likely is completely erroneous. Sure, there’ll be fewer of them – but so damn big that, when they happen, everyone panics. And of course, if you just buy anything regardless of quality because there’s a politician kicking your ass, well, it’s like accelerating when you see the rocks. Crazy, just crazy.”’

At Daily Telegraph Finance this afternoon:

Debt crisis: Markets slide as Spain’s banks face downgrade

At The Slog a week ago:

ACTION….Spanish bailout “imminent….unavoidable”.

‘My usual source in Madrid comments:

“Spain can only wait another two weeks, unless Rajoy gets some under-the-table money from the [European] Central Bank. That’s possible of course, you never know any more.”

It seems hard to imagine that any money coming from that direction will be real: given that Greece was bailed out with some paper signed by Mario Draghi, the best Madrid could hope for would be some used Frankfurt bus tickets.’

At Daily Telegraph finance this morning:

Spain formally asks for EU bailout money

The chances are you’re going to read it first in The Slog.