After a day spent agape at the cheek of Tony Blair and aghast at the hypocrisy of Camerlot, it’s slightly comforting at this hour to do some totting up of the Black Hats v White Hats score. And it seems to me that, albeit temporarily, White Hat thinking is currently in the ascendancy.
The London School of Economics prof John Kay has just published a paper on City tactics commissioned by Vince Cable. The terms Cable and LSE together will, I’m sure, horrify that segment of Sloggers who persist in seeing me as a Zionist Communist agent, but that’s their problem, not mine: the reality is that Cable talks enormous sense about Murdoch, spivs, and the short-termism of British investment policy.
Anyway, it’s no surprise that Kay is calling for an end to quarterly reporting, and more organic growth/less M&A greedy profit-seeking. And as The Slog has been in favour of this for over a decade (in 2005, The Economist published figures showing that 60% of M&A ventures knackered shareholder value) I’m chalking this one up as a victory for right-headedness. I once spent twenty tortuous months fronting up quarterly results meetings, and it confirmed my sense that immediate greed not sustained growth was ruling the Bourse roost. All we have to do now is pray that somebody in the Tooting Norton set has enough brain matter to turn this into legislative reform. If nothing else, it will be one up the bum for David ‘Muppet Features’ Buik.
The Arc de triumph of Bradley Wiggins in Paris at the weekend has been falsely dubbed a victory for Britain, but it wasn’t: rather, it was a victory for zero-bollocks, anti-media training individuality as typified by Mr Wiggins. What a fine man he is, for a Yorkshire tyke. How wise the French are to admire him. How much I would dearly love to make him Minister for Sport, one day to oust bright-eyed, bushy-brained Jeremy Hunt as overall Culture Minister.
This too is getting the chalk stripe on our blackboard here in Sloggers’ Roost.
Moving on, John Longworth of the British Chambers of Commerce records (with, I suspect, a degree of relish) that his SME members are “sick to death of political short termism, calculated political gestures, and the triumph of presentation over substance”. Far be it from me to suggest such a thing, but my water tells me Mr Longworth had messrs Blair and Cameron in mind when he said this. But either way, he is clearly a top-notch egg and deserving of our support. It is yet another sign that, ever so slowly – like the cliched supertanker – the turnaround reaction is beginning.
And there are other signs too: Brussels is no longer even bothering to concoct false dawns and virtual firewalls. One suspects the Sprouts know the game is up at last. Murdoch has resigned from his British operations: he may have succeeding in holing our culture amidships, but he knows he is hated and must take his leave. The Met cops have charged Redtop Becky and Cool Hand Coulson. The Feds are in hot pursuit (and about to charge) some two dozen Libor criminals. The truth about gold-market manipulation – a Slog obsession stretching back half a decade – is now there for all to examine.
And more still. Obama’s fake recovery has been rumbled. The bankers and constitutional judges of Germany have stopped the Merkeschäuble in its tracks. Today, the HMRC threw out an aggressive ‘cowboy’ tax avoidance scam from Price ‘Hopalong’ Waterhouse . The crooks at Lloyds have sold 632 branches to the multualised Coop bank at a bargain-basement price. And last but not least, Tesco-Terry Leahy wrote this in the Telegraph today:
‘Business, just like politics, does not exist in a moral vacuum. Doing the right thing means not simply obeying the law, but doing the right thing for those who work with you, those whom you serve, and those whose lives you touch. That might mean taking a passing financial hit but if the decision is based on truth and if it reflects common, decent values, then the benefits will outlive the pain.’
So much for Milt Friedman’s “only the shareholders count” bollocks.
Naturally, the global Islamic/Islamist con is going to take longer to unravel. But at least, some MSM hacks have finally grasped the truth of three-dimensional North African Arabism, rather than wallowing in two-dimensional Springs of liberal democracy. Suddenly, it is dawning on deskbound analysts that there is Sunni, Shia, Islamist, secular, Ba-athist, Alawite, Iranian, Gulf and a hundred other schisms to take into account, and that simplistically talking about the Muslim Brotherhood as if it spoke for all defenders of that faith is rather like saying “Black people”.
As to when the media cotton on to the fact that the Camerlot elite is steeped in market cheating and the Olympics is a dangerously insecure sellout to Mammon, well….Rome wasn’t built in a day. But the brickies are on site, and things are looking up.
The Slog 