Smoke Signals

Can you guess who it is yet? The word from Plod in the Know is that the 80 year old Beeb performer in police custody is an animal lover with antipodean origins.

Will we soon learn that McAlpine’s case is a bit Aunt Sally?After The Slog’s mild panic earlier this week, word reaches me that La Bercow remains steadfast in her resolve to repel the builders.

North of the Border. Scottish Law Journalists are currently investigating the secretive Scottish judiciary. I understand they have turned up a host of criminal charges: irregular activities such as tax dodging via offshore trusts, allegations of associations between judges & members of criminal gangs, regular liaisons with male & female prostitutes, membership of secret societies, and allegations of “bungs” taken in criminal trials appear to have turned up. Oh dear.

 

GREECE FLEECED: How the Athens ‘elite’ has been taken for a ride

Twelve years of hard times…to get precisely nowhere

The Government of Antonis Samaras has signed up to a debt bailout plan that ensures it will have a bigger debt in 2022 than it had in 2009. This process has already cost the country billions, and is set to cost it even more – not to mention the socio-political cost of acute shortages, loss of services, unemployment, and the rise of extreme Parties. In this special essay, The Slog lays out the full hypocrisy of this futile attempt by the EU’s leaders to keep the single currency afloat. 

The devious practices involved in saving the euro by raping Greece become ever-more complex and Machiavellian. The International Monetary Fund said yesterday that it would not disburse funds in the proposed EU-IMF package for Greece unless the eurozone delivers on a bond “buy-back” scheme, which is deemed ‘crucial for restoring long-term viability in the country’.

The precedent being sought by the IMF/Washington is that the eurozone members will step up to the plate bigtime, and European Central Bank will become the de facto sovereign for all practical purposes. This has been coming for a while now, but the proposition that Greece is ‘viable’ without massive debt forgiveness is a cynical sham.

The point isn’t to make Greece viable, it is to use Greece as a sovereign, human debt cork.

To put this into context, the eurozone’s Emergency Liquidity Assistance (ELA) scheme is a lifeline without which the Greek banks would collapse within a fortnight at the most. During October, those banks borrowed an eye-watering €123bn. That’s 30% of the entire debt Athens fessed up to three years ago….in one month. Put another way, Greek banks are borrowing a sum over three times what the original debt was every year.

There may be a few inhabitants of cloud-cuckoo land who think the ECB’s Mario Draghi is dispensing that money without printing new stuff, but as usual they’d be wrong. Just to add to the complication, by the way, Draghi is refusing to take Greek bonds at the moment, and thus the rate of growth of that ELA borrowing is rising at 20% per month compound.

Now, while for Mario this is called printing compromised paper without getting lumbered with worthless paper, it isn’t viable for Greece to carry on like this. It’s more what you’d call a seriously deranged thing to do. Yet everyone is getting excited about €48bn supposedly arriving in mid-December thanks to Samaras the Wizard…IMF willing. So let’s look at what the IMF wants to be sure is going to happen.

The ‘deal’ Samaras was mad (aka desperate) enough to accept would’ve been at home with the rates being charged by moneylenders in the Warsaw ghetto during 1942. But it’s possible the Greek Prime Minister just may – literally – not have understood the 3-card trick he’d just been conned by. The deal was announced last Tuesday: it’s taken me until now to feel even half-confident in posting about it.

In the foggy exhaustion of last Tuesday morning, Wolfgang Schäuble said that there would be no new loans for Greece to help it buy back bonds sold to its own heavily-borrowing banks. He said that Greece could raise the funds from a combination of reduced interest rates on existing loans (part of the package) and profits that Greece would “make from the European Central Bank’s bond-buying programme”. Um, except that the ECB isn’t buying bonds from Greece right now…and the interest rate reductions over say one year of the repayment are piddling.

The bottom line is this: already insolvent Greek commercial banks are to take a haircut at the level of 11% of outstanding debt, and the grand total of State debt reduction by 2022 will be just…..€11.6bn. But even this is based on Troika projections: and they are off with the fairies.

The numbers simply don’t tumble. A banking system borrowing 123 bn a month is being asked to give 11% of the debt it is owed back for nothing, to reduce the country’s debt burden by under 10% over ten years. This is March Hare meets Mad Hatter through the medium of a Dali dream landscape.

Except of course that it isn’t: it’s ‘do whatever it takes to keep the Titanic afloat…up to and including plugging the hole with steerage passengers’.

But this isn’t the first time Athens has been skewered and then roasted by the folks up North allegedly trying to help them.

Earlier this year, the Berlin-driven bondholder haircut (the pSI) was launched with the claim that it would achieve a Greek sovereign debt reduction of €110 Billion. However, the reality in practice looked considerably less philanthropic.

Greek bank assets were plundered to the tune of 55bn, followed by another 25bn of Greek social security/pension fund assets, and 30bn of assets held by foreign banks and financial institutions. That and that alone is how the debt was reduced. Basically, the Troika ran rings round the Athens Government: it cut Greece’s own debts by handing over real Hellenic assets.

But of course, because the debt reduction calculations were based on badly-forecast market rates and insane Greek gdp growth projections, the debt mountain wasn’t reduced at all. The total Greek sovereign debt at the end of 2011 stood at 356bn. The debt today stands at 304bn and, if one then adds the new tranche of 48bn, the total debt going into 2013 is about the same as it was in 2011.

As The Slog posted in May, ‘Under the terms of the 2012 Brussels Accord, Greece is doomed to sink deeper into debt even if the economy picks up….which it isn’t doing: every month, it contracts further….’

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

When Papandreou pitched up in Brussels during 2009 to give his masters the heads-up on Greek borrowing incontinence, the country’s debt was 127% of gdp. By the end of 2011 it was 170.6% of gdp. Now, even accepting that brainless Berlin’s ‘inspired’ austerity has shrunk the economy, the physical amount of wonga owed by Athens is pretty much the same.

The target debt level under the latest Troika fantasy for 2022 is 133% of gdp. By then, the People of Greece will have been suffering scorched-earth austerity for twelve years. The net result of their sacrifice will be a shattered economy and a bigger debt. And trust me, it won’t be 133% of gdp: there isn’t an official from Paris to Milan who believes that bollocks. Continuing austerity will take that number to at least 170%.

The situation in Greece isn’t a sideshow to its increasingly put-upon citizens, but it is only the warm-up act for what’s coming down the road. The analogy I find myself using to people is of the 1936 Spanish Civil War versus the Second World War. Weapons are being tested and reactions gauged, but the nastiness on show is merely a taster.

As long as we have a media set in thrall to immediate events and melodramatic midnight announcements, the asylum inmates will continue on their way until everything civilised is destroyed. We do not need a regulated press in the UK, we need a responsible one. All they are responsible for at the moment is working alongside the Establishments on the smoke-screen pump – be that half-baked communiques or tabloid celeb cobblers.

The internet needs to take on the MSM’s former responsibility, but as yet we are far from ready. Sorry to keep harping on this point, but unless the blogosphere organises to cooperate, we are heading for Churchill’s New Dark Age.

 

 

THE $67 TRILLION SHADOW BANKING SYSTEM (The Fiat Currency Control Block)

The Global Economy is approximately $70 Trillion. According to a just released report by the
Financial Stability Authority (FSA), charged with investigating it globally, the Global Shadow
Banking System was $67T in 2011.

the $637 Trillion SWAP market (also unregulated and offshore
trading currency, interest & credit default swaps)

 

 

OFFICIAL: Goldman Sachs role in eurozone debt fraud to be kept secret

Just fancy that

The European Central Bank has won a ruling to refuse access to secret files showing how Greece used derivatives to hide its debt. They were guided in this scam by Goldman Sachs.

“Disclosure of those documents would have undermined the protection of the public interest so far as concerns the economic policy of the EU and Greece,” the European Union general court in Luxembourg said, rejecting a challenge by Bloomberg News brought under the EU’s freedom of information rules.

The ECB is of course headed by a former Goldman banker, Mario Draghi. Although comment about this was sparse, the new Bank of England Governor Mark Carney is also ex Goldman Sachs. The Prime Minister of Italy Mario Monti is ex Goldman Sachs. Hank Paulson – architect of the 2009 US bailout – was ex Goldman Sachs. Greece’s interim technocrat government in 2011 was headed by Lucas Papademos – also ex Goldman Sachs.

The privatisation of public money in the West is thus more or less complete.

German chancellor Angela Merkel said in February 2010: “It’d be a scandal if it turned out that the same banks that brought us to the brink of the abyss helped to fake the statistics.”

But she isn’t showing any signs of concern about two european central bankers and one PM being graduates of that very same bank.

Anyway, bent EU Court finds in favour of depraved Wall Street bank, and against freedom of the press. Protection of the public interest, nothing to see here, move along please….that means you too, Mr Leveson…

ROTHERHAM: A case of mass abstention

UKip shows once again that it lacks the killer instinct

One could be forgiven (reading the Telegraph website at 6 am today) for thinking that perhaps the Rotherham by-election had been abandoned due to a waterlogged local council. Labour win all three of last night’s by-elections, and yet somehow the Sarkists didn’t think this worth reporting. I must ask Justice Leveson why when next we meet.

No doubt Nigel Barrage will be out and about today trumpeting another gallant failure by the UKippers: Dan Hannan is already in the blogs saying that UKip is now the main opposition to Labour in the North. Both of these versions offer a melodramatic version of last night’s events in Rotherham.

If you look at the turnout in Rotherham, it’s immediately apparent that turnout halved compared to the General Election. With a scandal-profile this high (and a UKip supposedly on the verge of a great victory) low turnout is unusual even for a by-election. Past results suggest that when a newcomer is in with a chance – and the incumbent is clearly corrupt – turnout can be very high indeed.

On the night, Labour’s share of the vote stayed fairly steady, falling only 3.4%. So ‘Labour majority halved’ is a meaningless screamer when turnout halved as well. This does of course mean that – yet again – a parachuted Head Office clone is going to be returned to Westminster with under a quarter of the votes cast – and under 15% of the support of the electorate. But what it doesn’t represent is a breakthrough for UKip: rather, it’s a case of same old same old for the Faragistas.

Rather than shifting to UKip, Tory voters abstained – pushing their Party back into 5th place. Given the obvious chance for tactical voting to create a damaging defeat for the Ed Miller Band, this is very bad news for Farage: it suggests, in fact, that UKip is on the whole an unpalateable tactical vote for Conservatives.

Labour voters couldn’t be bothered to turn up. Whether this was due to disgust and alienation (or the alternative of another X-Factor behind-the-scenes repeat on ITV 17i) remains uncertain. What they didn’t do is move over to UKip in droves.

For once, David Cameron has shown political shrewdness in ridiculing UKip. His arrogance in doing so infuriates people, but it does seem to be taken at face value by traditional Tories. For Nigel Garage, meanwhile, it’s a massive missed opportunity. I know UKippers don’t like me saying it, but the evidence just keeps on piling up: on the ground, the Party’s get-the-vote-out organisation is hackneyed and shambolic.

However, as I blogged last Monday, the main story of this election has been lost, and thus yet another merry band of child abusers remains free to continue its work of promoting the full rainbow of sexual experience.

Finally, I cannot resist sharing this with you. After this poor turnout in Rotherham, the news is confirmed that the Government is concerned about the 14.5% turnout at the PCC elections . So there’s going to be……an enquiry.

Aaaaaaarg.

At the End of the Day

How can you spend 2000 pages failing to report that our media no longer report the news?

I never stop being amazed by the media’s ability to latch onto a story somewhat late, but then change it with all speed to a story about something completely different. It’s almost like they have a three dimensional gearbox in the newsroom, which has one gear forwards and seven capable of lateral movement.

The reason is nearly always pretty obvious. For example, neither the Guardian nor the Telegraph really want to focus on the obvious paedophile circles they come across in Unite and the 1922 Committee, because that way nasty things might pop out of the jackinabox.

So too, Rotherham has ceased to be a story about endemic abuse and corrupt policing, becoming instead a cliffhanger about whether UKIP will take the seat. While a peer and his bullying low-rent lawyer threatening people with legal action unless they cough up is presented as the triumph of justice over smears. It isn’t about systemic Welsh care home paedophilia any more, not least because Lord McAlpine is threatening to sue anyone who uses the word within a hundred light years of his name.

Now today, even that story has become one about Sally Bercow. Not one of the disturbing aspects of Rotherham, Bryn Estyn or the validity of McAlpine’s case is being addressed.

Abroad, the fiasco of hypocrisy played out between Brussels, Berlin and Athens during 2009-11 soon stopped being a story about unbridled banking corruption, Greeks being groomed to lie about debt by Wall Street, and cynical bondholders buying debt purely in the hope of triggering default insurance. Within weeks it turned into Greek Crisis Live, endless meetings, men inside cars being driven about, new dawns being proclaimed, and complete bollocks about Greece being on the road to recovery.

About thirteen months ago, a tale of insanity about braindead German austerity economics and dodgy arms deals with Greeks quietly shifted scenes, and became Will Greece Be Kicked Out of the eurozone. Briefly six months ago, reality surfaced in the shape of respected debt dealers and economists saying Greek debt was unrepayable, and it was an obscenity to pauperise innocent Greek citizens while the bad guys got off scot-free. But within days that was pushed offstage in favour of yet more shuttle diplomacy, more all-night meetings in Brussels, more calls for Greece to face its responsibilities, north European politicians with their own unassailable debt mountains calling for yet more austerity, and a fantasy Fiskalunion being depicted as the Promised Land.

Today, the EU story is very obviously one about the eurozone being doomed, France being hopelessly exposed to Greek debt, Germany et al being hopelessly exposed to Spanish debt, the entire zone’s economy heading for the sewers, Greek politics becoming extreme, and the need for a total rethink on political Union between European nations.

But for the UK press, it has become a surreal saga about David Cameron ‘getting tough’ with Brussels, and his Party Rightists being jolly delighted about that. (Even this is a perversion of the real story, viz, WTF is Britain still doing in a corrupt club that has been draining our resources pointlessly for almost a decade).

The media has been gone over with a fine tooth-comb by Justice Leveson in recent months. This bloke has now produced a 2,000 page report – does it really take that amount of verbiage to deal with the issues to hand? – but nowhere in his conclusions does it say that unelected media proprietors avoiding UK taxes wield enormous and unaccountable power to pervert the course of justice, policy, Cabinet responsibility, civic ethics, and our police forces.

Leveson points out that the media ‘have behaved disgracefully”, but then blows 100% of his credibility with one phrase: ‘Former Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt was not biased in his handling of the BSkyB bid’. I suggest in all humility that both recent and long-term Sloggers go to the dedicated page Hunt Balls on this site, peruse the contents, and then write to Leveson asking if he might be confused as to the sky/wall/ground/Marble Arch equation.

No longer do genuine investigative reporters in our Land make enquiries. Instead, counterfeit leaders hold enquiries that deliver spiked reports.

More and more, the baton of real Opposition in the United Kingdom is passing to the internet in general, and the best bloggers in particular. Unlike many in that sphere, I deplore this trend. My community isn’t ready for the responsibility: it is hopelessly splintered and riddled with egomania. There are far too many amateur clowns peddling nonsense about elders of Zion and Jimmy Savile being an alien. And one day – you can be sure – GCHQ will flex its muscles to create a Kafkaesque zone in which sites disappear, the charge against them is unknown, and there is no redress.

The UK mainstream media set is complicit in the maintenance of a rotten State, and much of this stems directly from the ownership structures within which it operates. I do not see anything in the Leveson Report recognising that reality. I see only a hair-splitting dullard insisting that a regulatory system enshrined in statute is not statutory regulation.

In a nutshell, tonight the Conservative Party is opposed to statutory legislation to control press illegality, because Camerlot fears a yet more damaging backlash from Rupert Murdoch’s Newscorp machine. Whereas the Labour Party embraces the idea of such statutory instruments, because it hopes one day in the future to amend these to its own politically correct advantage.

Oh dear. The more time goes on, the more risibly bent and broken the whole thing looks.

Eurozone solidarity is an example to us all

“Tomorrow a new day begins for all Greeks,” Antonis Samaras told Hellenic television viewers last Tuesday. He was quite right, of course: the next day dawned, and it was Wednesday. Today has dawned new again, and has been Thursday. At last, Greece has a politician with the foresight to sort this mess out. The People have shown solidarity, and now they shall reap the rewards of it.

Prime Minister Samaras also had the prescience to spot that Greece’s tax officers and inspectors would launch a 48-hour strike today and tomorrow, having been told in advance that their union POE-DOY would react badly to “any plans for privatisation, or tax office mergers without criteria, or the abolition of tax offices on the islands, or any wages cuts.” This didn’t leave the Unions much else to be unhappy about; but in the end, solidarity with one’s members is vital above any other consideration. And this ethic is spreading like wildfire through the Hellenic Republic…even unto the tax collectors.

You see, the tax collectors have no objection to collecting iniquitous taxes off their less fortunate citizens, because they are tax collectors: it’s their job, and they must defend it. And by going on strike, they are alleviating their fellow citizens by putting off the evil day of collection.

Further, their unions are implacably opposed to any attempt to reduce the number of taxes to be collected off poor workers, because this would be an unpalateable attack on the livelihood of their members.

What can Samaras possibly do in the face of this united front being presented by the Left? If Trade Unions are about anything, then they are about solidarity. It can only be a matter of days before half-starved Greek citizens sitting in the darkness of heat-free apartments demand yet more taxes in order to show unqualified support for their fellow workers in the POE-DOY axis of social fairness. The overtaxed will then employ increasingly cunning methods to evade the taxes, thus creating yet more employment until the entire economy of Greece consists of dedicated patriots dodging and collecting taxes.

What fun it is to jest…and yet how depressing it is to see that Berlin-am-Brussels follows policies no less hilariously committed to solidarity  – in all Teutonic seriousness.

Naturally, the Berliners are blocking any debt forgiveness for Greece because they don’t want Athens to leave the eurozone in disgrace: Chancellor Merkel would rather the Greeks stayed put, regained their pride, and went on to play a full part in the future of a united Europe.

She is also showing solidarity with her German voters, who are of course passionate supporters of a eurozone that has made their exports cheap. But she is also displaying solidarity with those sensible Greeks about to sign up for the European Union Front in Athens.

Finally, Frau Merkel is expressing solidarity with France by forever denying the default of Greece, and thus saving the Parisian banking construct from instant vapourisation.

The only cloud raining on this parade of solidarity is that, to meet the terms of this ‘deal’ for new financial support, Greek gdp will have to increase by €50bn per annum, and its own banking system will have to accept a debt haircut of €31bn on the money it is owed by the State.

I suspect the idea here might be to force the Greek bankers to show solidarity with its citizens by uniting with them in a show of rock-bottom poverty.

Surely, this would be an example for other nations to follow.

 

SALLY BERCOW’S SURRENDER: What in God’s name is going on here?

Breaking at The Telegraph (with no comments allowed) is a piece with Sally Bercow grovelling about having learnt (sic) her lesson: (my emphasis)

‘Mrs Bercow, a prolific user of Twitter, closed her account after she wrongly linked Lord McAlpine to false child abuse allegations. She now faces legal action and a pay-out to the Peer.’

No she didn’t, and no she doesn’t. Note that no hack in the Telegraph has the spine to sign their name to this blatant propaganda.

This is such a brazen attempt to rescue the Case of the McAlpine Smears that never became a case anywhere, as such, that I’m seriously considering giving up completely on the Torygraph. It’s becoming as blinkered as The Guardian at the other end of the bollocks-spectrum.

I’m going to tweet La Bercow and see what’s what.

Earlier: Controversial Plymouth paedophile sentencing Judge gets top Exeter job

EXCLUSIVE: Judge with long track-record of bizarre paedophile verdicts becomes resident Judge in Exeter.

Seven years bad luck for abuse victims in the West Country

Astonishing decision to promote controversial ‘paedophile-soft’ Judge

On 2nd August 2012, Judge Francis Gilbert QC (left) was appointed resident judge at Exeter. He has a long – and  to me, inexplicable – history in the West Country of handing out light sentences to, giving bail to, and overturning verdicts against, paedophiles – primarily in Plymouth. The Slog lays out this judge’s history of odd decisions over the last seven years.

On 13th July 2011, six footballers imprisoned for raping 12 year old girls were released, after a ruling that their 2-year sentences were “excessive”. The six men all admitted various charges of rape against two 12 year old girls in a park late at night. Mr Judge Francis Gilbert QC ruled that being imprisoned was inappropriate as it was a ‘difficult’ case. The men were released, their sentences cut to one year…and suspended.

Just 16 days later, Gilbert was at it again. Try to absorb this logic: Anthony Milsom – described by the trial judge as a “manipulative and predatory” sex offender, was jailed indefinitely for public protection. Milsom admitted a series of offences dating back to the early 1990s including 16 counts of possessing indecent images of children, 21 charges of making indecent images, and five charges of indecent assault on a little girl when she was aged between four and eight.

At the original trial, the court also heard that Milsom had newspaper cuttings relating to high-profile child murder inquiries including Milly Dowler, Sophie Hook, Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, as well as the disappearance of Madeleine McCann.

His sentence was effectively life…but appeal court Judges (of whom one was Francis Gilbert QC) cut it to three and a half years. 

Two years earlier, Gilbert gave serious paedophile downloader John Squance a seven-month jail sentence for downloading 6,919 paedoporn images. This staggeringly light sentence is hard to understand, especially given that Squance had already failed to turn up for the first attempt at a hearing. But Mr Gilbert’s leniency towards paedophiles appears to be potentially infinite.

In November 2007, Anthony Davies also found himself lucky enough to be before Judge Gilbert. He’d broken a Sexual Offences Prevention Order by persuading four underage children to go with him on a fishing trip without their parents’ knowledge. Davies acquired the SOPO by being caught with 1,200 indecent images of children. But despite warnings from experts about Davies representing a danger to children, the judge eschewed the route available to him of banging the paedophile up for five years, and chose instead to let him get help. “Being a danger to children is not an offence” Gilbert mysteriously concluded.

In April 2007, Justice Francis Gilbert was that man refusing to jail the Plymouth paedo-girlies who forced two toddlers to fight for the cameras.

And in 2005, he granted the request of the two paedophile defendants Palmer & Tapper to take a holiday during their trial. The reason for a holiday, they told Francis Gilbert, was stress. The couple, who ran a landlord and letting agency, assaulted their young victims after finding them homes when they came out of social services care. The two chums legged it to Turkey (nice place if you’re into little boys). Palmer was finally caught after an Interpol operation in late 2009, but by 2011 Tapper was still at large. I’ve lost track of him…as indeed has Plod.

♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦

While I await the usual bleating blather about rumour and innuendo, let me make it clear that in this instance, I am doing nothing beyond laying before an ever-more mystified public whether a Judge presiding over a town with a known paedophile issue (stretching from nursery school scandals to gagging orders on care home abuse cases) feels at ease, in the light of recent events, with these, his past ‘judgements’ about paedophilia as a crime.

However, in a spirit of commonsense and decency, I would also like to ask anyone to give me a straight answer to these questions:

1. Why should any former child abuse victim in the Care Home system have any faith at all in a judiciary handing out sentences like these?

2. Why has none of Justice Gilbert’s eccentric behaviour in these instances been the subject of an investigation?

3. Could it be that those in positions of power in Plymouth, and the Devon & Cornwall constabulary, are not taking the blight on their patch seriously enough?

There have been other judges based in Exeter – and Bristol – in the past. In cases relating to those, I can neither rume nor innuend, as to even mention the subject matter would get me banged up. If you think it’s only Family Courts that are secret, then think again.

I’m sure that Justice Francis Gilbert’s only handicap in being a judge is that, like many people, he is very bright and liberal, but something of a stranger to the concept of common sense and life on the streets in 2012. However, with every week that passes it is becoming increasingly clear to British citizens who are vaguely awake, and in possession of a conscience, that the Establishment should be condemned: not only for its recurrent sociopathic actions, but also because it is so riddled with rotten and dead wood, one day soon it will fall down and thus represent a danger to innocent passers by.

Here is the Readers’ Digest support for that contention: McAlpine bullying the media, Cameron’s relationship with Newscorp, Murdoch’s obvious perjury in front of the Leveson Enquiry, Labour’s continuing cover-up of local government sex abuse, manipulation of the gold price, manipulation of the Libor rate, Bob Diamond perjuring himself before the Treasury Select Committee, Lord Green claiming zero knowledge of money-laundering, Jeremy Hunt lying to the House of Commons, the continuing lack of progress on Hackgate criminality, 18,000 caes of vile paedophilia in the care system – with just 1,600 convictions, the devious softening-up of NHS Trusts for private takeover, the fact that over 60% of all Commons visitors are commercial lobbyists, raiding the future pensions of savers, spending taxpayers’ money to bail out banker criminality, Boris Johnson inviting Murdoch to the Olympics, the Treasury colluding in fraud at RBS, the Met Police dining with Newscorp during a serious crime investigation, blind politically correct eyes turned away from paedophiles in Rotherham, glib spin on the situation inside Syria, Brown’s fraud over the PFI fiasco, Blair perverting the course of justice in relation to the BaE scandal, Campbell sexing up the Iraq dossier, and Lord Mandelson becoming the Chief Ethics Officer at Lazard’s Bank, and perhaps above all, the UK media’s unique ability to report what isn’t happening.

Rumour and innuendo? Get a life. Get a moral compass.

See also: What Leveson should’ve given the British People

Can I just make it absolutely clear that the educationalist Francis Gilbert is NOT the subject of this article

EU SOURCE: Samaras ‘only got Greek deal because of pro-EU Party promise’.

EXCLUSIVE FROM BRUSSELS: WHY THE DEAL THAT NEVER WAS MIGHT NEVER HAVE BEEN

The Slog’s trusted Brussels mole informed me last night that Chief Greek nailbiter Atonis Samaras (left) was forced by Berlin-am-Brussels to give a firm promise of forming his new ‘European Party’ last weekend – or Athens would be hung out to dry.

We can only hope that Samaras agreed with a wry smile, because that would have to have been the emptiest threat since Dad’s Army pointed its pitchforks at Hitler.

Tuesday’s ‘deal’ is indeed a deal, but very little of it involves a realistic future for the Greeks. It is a very complex subject I’ve been battling to get my head round for two days. I will post about it specifically in due course.

However, that Samaras is going ahead with his plan isn’t in doubt: the latest working title is European Union Front, in itself a Freudian brand name…the Greek elite being an obvious front for the technocrats of Brussels.

I do recognise that many Sloggers think this Greek fiasco can go on forever, but it can’t. And it certainly can’t wait until the German elections next year. The tension between high taxes and high unemployment is now affecting all classes in Greece. Winter is coming, electricity is being cut off because people simply can’t afford the bills, and the economy is all but ruined.

This is happening because blinkered eurocrats are giving out orders, on behalf of ruthless Nordeurop politicians, to blind ClubMed politicians. And the whole thing is being allowed to happen because most Greeks are proud people who do not wish to be seen as “the lazy buggers who screwed up the EU”.

They aren’t that and they never were. Unfortunately, we no longer have the mass media with the diligence and objectivity to report what has really happened in the eurozone. And quite why anyone thinks Leveson can tackle that in the UK is beyond satire.

Stay tuned.

See also: What Leveson should’ve done

LEVESON FOR DUMMIES: what tomorrow ought to bring, but probably won’t

Tom Watson has sent a round-robin email to his mates. In it is this phrase:

‘the campaign for a free and accountable press’

The two most important words in the Leveson media debate are ‘free’ and ‘accountable’. Both sides are dodging the one they don’t want.

The Leftist, minority Guardianista clique around Rusbridger have the Rotherham illness, in that for them the issue is simple: Left is right and Right is wrong. Many of us would be happier with an analysis that concluded ‘Left is old and arcane, and Right is older still and archaic’. Too long for the Blairite soundbite culture that mantra, but either way, my point is this: the Guardian NUJ position is a deliberate attempt to fudge the line between ‘social fairness’ and Stalinist State thought-control.

The Rightist, Barclay Brothers Torygraph view from Sark is summed up by an atypically potty piece from Ben Brogan this week, in which he asserts that the UK press pack is now ‘at the mercy of the Left’. Given the Left are (a) the Opposition, and (b) have 1.5 newspapers supporting them compared to 5.5 generally on the anti-Cameron 1922 Committee side, for once I’m unable to agree with Mr Brogan. Again, this is a different flavour of fudge, but it seeks to blur the line separating depraved thro-letterbox-yelling Newscorp grubs from genuine campaigning journalism.

To rephrase the famous TV jingle, “A finger of fudge is just enough to give your hacks a leak”.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

As an alternative,  here’s my simple requirement from the Leveson recommendations – before we plebs know what they are, because for some unexplained reason an implicated Old Estonian with an obvious conflict of interest has a right to know before we do:

1. There will be no ownership of press titles by nondoms and foreigners. If they want to take part in the debate, then press barons will be required to pay for their representation like everyone else.

2. If the media get something factually wrong, there will be no bullying libel-case threats, just a grovelling front-page-lead retraction. There will be no recourse to the Law, because the Law is for the rich alone. Any and all retractions will head all non-press UK media bulletins that same day.

3. The decision system for this process will be non-judicial. Instead, it will consist of a constantly changing quota sample of newspaper readers casting votes as to the validity or otherwise of the complaint at issue. In the result of a tie, the Monarch will have the casting vote. In the event of the Monarch having a conflict of interest, the Archbishop of Canterbury will have the casting vote. (I cannot think of a better antidote to gratuitous complaining)

4. There will be no  super-injunctions allowed (beyond the security services) prior to publication, purely on the grounds that 1 and 2 above represent all the safeguards any reasonable citizen outside of MI5/6 might expect.

5. Any official State security officer found to have abused the super-injunction option will be publicly pelted with unripe melons, and forced to listen to the Twenty Golden Greats of Tiny Tim in perpetuity.

6. Apart from putting in place the statutes required to make all this happen, the State will not be allowed – in any shape or form, directly or indirectly – anywhere near any of the recommended process, because the State is nothing more than an alias for ‘unruly mob of controlling, incompetent sociopaths’.

Maximum media freedom alongside democratic punishment: in the Tabloid Age, who could ask for more?

Related: On forcing the pols to make a choice

EXCLUSIVE: Privatised job-finding fiddles rife, says agency source.

Private job-finder intermediaries are ripping off the DWP

Through being ill-informed generally (and specifically distracted by political point-scoring) the Ed Miller Band missed an open goal at PMQs today.

Not that many people will be surprised by a headline about intermediary fiddles; but anyway, this is just to confirm what we have all come to expect from private suppliers to government in the 21st century: those providing ‘services’ to The Work Programme (and other departments in the process of finding people jobs) are scamming the system.

Three weeks ago I received information from a Slogger with family experience of what’s happening. On Monday, an insider finally confirmed some elements of the allegations. Bizarrely, yesterday the original source wrote to me again with an update. This concurred almost exactly with what I had learned the day before. Here’s the bottom line:

Employers and intermediaries are paid by results to get people into work, and providers can earn between £3,700 and £13,700 per person, depending how hard it is to help an individual. The DWP says the scheme so far has cost just over £2,097 for every participant.

A relation of my original source went to an agency for help and got risible service. He subsequently found a job himself.

“They rang me up today to check how I was doing,” he wrote, “and when I told him I had a job he seemed to perk up a bit. He said he’d give me £100 “petrol money” if I signed some paperwork to let him contact the DWP.”

In fact, the agency was after the credit for finding the job. The £100 bribe to the job-seeker gave the company a £2000 clear profit for claiming responsibility for success.

“This kind of fraud is probably quite widespread,” said my industry source, “but is almost impossible to prove either way.”

The reality on the ground (according to the latest ONS data) is that long term unemployed (LTU) Brits have nearly doubled in incidence since the Coalition scheme began…their numbers are up by 96%. The same source also reveals that three million British citizens are now underemployed: that is, they’d rather work full-time, but can only get part-time jobs.

I’ve been saying for some time that the economic model we are following in the UK simply cannot employ the huge population we now have, thanks to the immigration floods encouraged by New Labour between 1999 and 2009. As the model is down to the Tories, and the population down to Labour, we are led – as usual – to the obvious conclusion: neither major Party has a clue what it is doing to our country.

Related: Stand by for the next ill-conceived policy failure

BOOZE PRICING: binge-taxing as proposed by Camerlot is a cynical policy doomed to failure

Why politicians are addicted to denial about the causes of boozy Britain

“Observe closely…I have a turkey up my sleeve..”

Wherever you are and whatever you’re doing, the sociological braindeath of our political élite goes with you. I awoke this morning and turned on the bedroom telly to discover a debate going on between four people about the new Coalition ‘policy’ of raising the price of alcohol in Britain.

There is but one strategy employed by the pols in relation to controlling our national drinking habit: to look at some research from somewhere else on the planet, and then conclude that their policy must be the one for us. “It worked in Borneo, so let’s go for it” seems to be the guiding principle.

There are three possible reasons why they do this. One, cost. Two, profound stupidity. Or three, a desperate search to find something – anything – that supports what they’ve already made their minds up to do. Trust me: it’s the last of these, with just a subtle hint of the second one.

A full-on qualitative study of the social anthropology, cultural mores and community quality influences upon drinking behaviour would cost, tops, around £350,000 from a good UK research agency. This being a government-sponsored project, you can double that (suppliers always do) and then add on a little for ‘subsistence’ while doing the fieldwork. Call it a round million. For a problem that has direct socio-economic costs of many billions of Pounds per year, it still represents a minute investment in tackling the problem. The hard bit would come when the research was debriefed, and everyone in the room started trying to promote their own policy hobby-horse. The only answer to this issue is the appointment of a Cabinet-level Big Beast independent of the Health, Treasury, Employment, Home Office, Family and Community ministries…as well as all the health, alcohol, busybody and police lobbies. God alone knows how one could ever arrange that within our current governmental model, but it would be fun trying.

Profound stupidity was the inordinately heavy cross Tessa Jowell brought to the table when she was Labour Minister of Culture. Well, that and a greedy husband with shares in the brewery business. So it was that Ms Jowell decided to extend both drink licenses and drinking hours as the best means of controlling anti-social drinking. She also had the hots for opening casinos everywhere, with drink readily available to fuel the gambling habit. Her sole rationale for doing this was that it worked in Belgium, and the Irish experiment was, so far, working quite well.

The Irish ‘working well’ myth was soon exposed, but Tessa ploughed on to produce the redoubled disaster we face today in the A&E departments and pub-blighted centres of our cities.

Now the Conservative-dominated Coalition (for the sake of brevity, I’ll just use the major Party name from here on, as the LibDems are clearly unimportant to this and many other issues) has alighted upon price as the determining factor that outweighs all others. Reflecting the general sloppiness associated with all ‘ideas’ that emerge from behind the high walls of Camerlot, the research stage has been eschewed in favour quoting the experiences of Canada.

I’ve never met a Canadian I didn’t like, although I suspect Mark Carney may be about to break that rule. However, I’d like if I may to summarise the minor differences between Canada and the UK. These are, in no particular order, that its culture, urban population density, drink-ordering model, retail structures, size, location, financial system, economic performance, unemployment level and climate are the chalk to Britain’s cheese. As a valid comparison to aid the evolution of alcohol consumption policy in the UK, its potential contribution to any sane debate is around that of a teetotal badger.

This didn’t stop the guest on the BBC sofa this morning (he was very pro the policy) from simply saying, over and over, “it worked in Canada”. I could sit on the same sofa and argue for the annihilation of the British Royal Family by saying “it worked in Russia”, adding weight to my argument by observing that Nicholas II and George V were cousins with a striking physical resemblance to each other.

In the background on a large screen was another bloke (he was very anti the policy) who had done quite a lot of research  involving the tedious and time-consuming process of talking to British people and observing communities – rather than crunching Canuck numbers. He said it wouldn’t work, the problem was a cultural one, it would hit those without a drinking problem hardest, and it was a tax on the poor and increasingly desperate folks at the bottom. “It worked in Canada,” said the van Rompuy lookalike in the studio.

My vote went to the remote contributor because he appeared to have done his homework, as opposed to staring at a Maple Leaf over his navel. But he’d have got my vote thirty years ago, his views reflecting those I drew from the last research project I did on the topic myself for the Whitbread Brewery client: that heavy drinking is a cultural cancer the Tories propose to cure by using the anti-homoaeopathic strategy of doubling the price of the disease-catalyst.

It’s odd the way in which, as supposed members of the European Union, the policy-fakers never go to France, Spain, Italy or Greece. There, all booze is cheap, and binge drinking a rarity. Life there (despite the best intentions of Berlin-am-Brussels) is less challenging than in the UK, the climate more cheerful, and the cultural drinking rules more firmly embedded in a supportive family model. In Britain – where the climate sucks, life gets harder every year, and families are coming unglued from Perth to Penzance – poor, young and older people get pissed all the time.

Anyone can join up those dots and – allowing for the standard level of human error – work out roughly how to solve Britain’s drink problem…which didn’t exist at all in the 1950s, when the pace of life here was roughly on a par with that of Southern France today. It wouldn’t tackle every problem: our overlaying of a wine fashion onto a session-drinking beer culture, for example, has been a major factor, in that the British tend to favour bottle-slurping plonk gulping, rather than a quiet glass of wine spritzer with a, say, French midday family meal.

In short, we drink far too much because the cultural milieu is overwhelmingly accepting of it; and because profound social and economic changes have brought us more misery not less. This is relative – it could be a massive mortgage being fed by a stressful job, or a trapped underclass desperation being calmed by the escape into oblivion – but alcohol’s success in retaining a trendy and largely positive image in our culture makes it the mind alteration of choice for most people.

The difficult, longer-term factors will therefore not be addressed by our political Party structures and processes. This is because first, the credit won’t be given to the person and Party that kick off the bullet-biting; second, the drinking lobby is treated with kid-gloves by all governments because it is a powerful pressure group; third, changing the propensity for mind-numbing booze sessions would mean rejecting the entire target-driven, globalist, deregulated employment, home-ownership, media-content, neocon construct upon which our hopelessly failing economy is based; but above all, the Government needs more money – and fast.

Do not underestimate the last point there as a motivator for classic superficial and cynical Camerlot policy-making. Taxing alcohol has three advantages, if you’re a short-termist idiot: it can be spun as responsible social policy, it brings in half a billion quid in HMRC revenue a year, and the potential for more tax on it is enormous – if your criterion is the fact that it represents only 2% of government receipts currently.

Keeping it simple, a 30% increase in alcohol duty would, if introduced gradually over three years on top of inflation, cover the cost of the NHS. Doing that over a five year period would wipe out the entire burden of the Welfare State. At first glance, it sounds like an ironically neat way of getting a fat booze industry to pay for the social damage it inflicts. In fact, it solves nothing: the problem won’t go away, the percentage of household income spent on alcohol will go back up again (it’s been falling for over a decade thanks to discounting), the adverse effect on inflation will be notable, it will fuel illegal grey import crime, domestic violence will continue as is, familial structures will remain weak, days lost to the economy will rise, and the brewers will both lay off workers and build in their own extra profit-fudge in order to maintain profitability.

If you want to truly comprehend the hypocrisy involved in political alcohol-control policies, then go to any off-licence point of sale material, any bottle, any can or any wine-box. Big and bold will be the brand name, alcohol type and strength; very small indeed will be the units warning and the by now robotic ‘drink responsibly’ lip service paid by the industry to the need for ‘social awareness’ about the dangers of drinking.

The worst binge-drinking in the world takes place in Russia -  a country whose Wild West Friedman-on-steroids ways and previous command-economy greyness have, over time, made for a strong argument in favour of being blotto much of the time. When given access to the laughing-liquid, the Swedes aren’t far behind: this and their high suicide-rate in turn reflect a climate, wildlife and geography that consists largely of elks wandering about in freezing cold pine forests and near-perpetual darkness for much of the year. I once spent a Saturday evening in Gothenburg during which, after 6.45 pm, I didn’t meet a single sober person beyond the restaurant staff and the cab drivers. The same dark, cold and moralising socio-climatic mix of Scotland goes a long way to explaining its never-ending love affair with the whisky bottle.

Northern ‘protestant’, miserably-driven cultures create binge drinking. Southern ‘Catholic’ warmer and more laid-back cultures don’t. The booze prices in the former are far higher than in the latter; but the truth is, decades of research have shown that using price as a social policy to tackle addiction is useless. The correlation between consumption and price is there among moderate drinkers at the margins: among the unhappy pissheads, the correlation between the two is zero.

As long is there is universal Establishment denial that we are an unhappy culture, we will get tax-rises disguised as social policy…with a little time off immediately before every election. I did a reasonable calculation during the last election suggesting perfectly credibly that 12% of all those who voted after 5 pm were anything from tipsy to legless. Now that is a correlation….and it sums up the irony of cynical idiocy better than anything else I can offer.

See also The anti-meritocracy of the Masons and Common Purpose